Dead Men's s Boots

Paul Sumner blithely assumes that most of the murders attributed to Myriam Kale were bought and paid for, purely because the men concerned were known or thought to be mobsters. But after she was picked up by Jackie Cerone, most of the men she met were mobsters. It&#£ mouse8217;s a skewed sample.’

‘If not money,’ Juliet asked, ‘then what?’

Mallisham stroked the bridge of his nose again, this time leaving his glasses in situ. ‘Well,’ he said, studying the clutter on his desk, ‘I’m not claiming to be an expert. It’s just that if you look at how the story starts, you come to different conclusions. Or maybe you just hold off from conclusions. Are you going to take notes, Mister Castor?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not.’

‘Or a recording?’

‘No.’

‘Good. I’d like it best if all this stayed off the record. Use the information, by all means, but don’t use my words. And if by any chance you’ve lied to me and you belong to my own and Mister Sumner’s profession, I’ll deny any words you put into my mouth and collaterally sue your ass into a sling.’

‘Agreed.’

‘Okay.’ He settled down in his chair, as if he was hunkering down for what he knew was going to be a long haul. ‘First off, you ought to know that Myriam Seaforth – as she was then – was almost certainly abused by her father and one or more of her brothers. I can’t prove it, but it’s the damn truth all the same. It happened to her sister Ruth, and it happened to her. ’Course, all the Seaforth men are dead now, so there’s nobody left to give me the lie anyway, but people around here take reputation pretty seriously. None of this is ever going to make the front page of the Picayune. Nor yet the Sunday supplement.’

‘How can you be so sure she was abused?’ Juliet threw in. There was a stillness about her now – an intensity of attention that was almost intimidating. She’s got this thing about battered women: a kind of razor-edged sentimentality.

‘How can I be sure?’ Mallisham echoed her. ‘Well, let’s say I know people at the county hospital over in Sprott, and I know people in the sheriff’s office. Myriam was brought in for stitches once, in a place where she didn’t ought to have got torn, and Ruth said something at school another time about something a twelve-year-old girl doesn’t have any right to know. A lot of people got a piece of information and never tried to find out more. I’m a newsman, first and foremost. I collect up those pieces, looking for stories. But some stories I know better than to tell.’

‘You mean,’ Juliet said, with dangerous calm, ‘that you knew these girls were being hurt, and you did nothing to stop it.’

‘No,’ Mallisham said, neither angry nor defensive. ‘I knew later on – after they were all grown up – that someone had hurt them back when they were small. Don’t be so quick to judge, missy. I wouldn’t have sat by if blowing the whistle would have done any good. But like I said, the Seaforth line’s dead now. Lucas Seaforth died thirty years back, and the brothers all perished in various accidents and drunken brawls, so Myriam’s generation is the last there ever was.’

‘Ruth never married?’ I asked.

Mallisham pursed his lips. ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘She still lives out there, on the farm. The only Seaforth left. And she’s seventy years old, so she’s left it a little late to think about starting a family. But then, when you look at the kind of marriage Myriam made, you can understand her feeling a mite c£eellefhary about getting spliced herself.

‘Tucker Kale was a drunk, and a nasty drunk at that. There’s some people who say he bought Myriam off of Lucas Seaforth, cash down. I doubt it was that simple, but Lucas was a farmer and Kale ran the feed store, so I’d guess there was more of commerce than of love about the whole thing. I knew the man pretty well – my house is only half a mile from where the feed store used to be – and speaking personally, I wouldn’t have given him a kitten if my cat dropped a litter of ten. It’s certain that he beat Myriam, and he liked to show her up in front of people, too. He was the kind of polymorphous sadist who can take his recreation intellectually as well as physically.

‘So he was another brick in the wall, so to speak. But Myriam was damaged when he got her. Her own family had already given her more hurt than anyone should ever have to take.’

He spoke with a weary finality that made me ashamed my own interest in Myriam Kale was so tangential. ‘How long were they married?’ I asked, conscious of Juliet’s scary stillness on my left-hand side.

‘Seven years, give or take.’

‘And then he was killed in a car crash.’

Mallisham shrugged. ‘If you like.’

‘If I like?’

‘Well, I told you a person’s good name was kind of an issue around here.