Dead Men's s Boots

The next seven years of her life were very sparsely documented, and Sumner got through them in a couple of pages. Tucker Kale died in a car crash when Myriam was twenty-two, and she headed north to try out a different kind of life in the big city, pausing only to say a last fond farewell to her family.

The big city in question was Chicago, which was almost seven hundred miles away – a long way to go even with money in your pocket and a place to stay at the other end. Myriam Kale didn’t have either of those things: she just packed a suitcase one day and jumped into the wild blue yonder – hitching all the way up Interstate 65 with no idea of where she was going or what she’d do when she got there.

Along the way, it was pretty well documented now, she met up with a man named Luke Poulson, who Sumner described as a travelling salesman; and one of two things happened. Either, as Kale herself would later tell some of her Mob friends, Poulson tried to rape her and earned himself a short, eventful and terminal encounter with a tyre iron, or else Kale lured him to his death with an offer of sex, intending all along to kill and rob him as soon as they were out on the open road.

Either way, she beat Poulson to death with thoroughness and enthusiasm, and stole his car. But before she left, she heated up the dashboard cigarette lighter and used it to burn the dead man on his cheek as though she were a rancher branding a steer. Every man she killed would be burned in a similar way, usually – once she took up smoking them – with the lit end of a Padre Gigli cheroot.

She would come to be known in the Chicago underworld, in the last year or so before her death, as the Hot Tomato. This was partly a tribute to her physical charms, but it was also a wry reference to the fact that if you picked her up you were likely to get burned.

Arriving in Chicago Kale ditched Poulson’s car and hit the streets – literally. She worked as a hooker for a couple of years on the meat markets of South State Street, working briefly for a pimp named Lauder Capp before going solo (Capp is supposed to have sworn to cut her throat for her disloyalty).

Then she met Jackie Cerone at the Red Feather club and took him up to a room in a hotel probably not much different from the Paragon for a night of passion which turned into a new job opportunity.

She knew who Cerone was. She’d seen his picture in the papers, and she made the connection.