Dead Men's s Boots

This man who was hiring her for the whole night was a big player in the Outfit, currently riding high after Sam Giancana had made his run for the border, leaving Battaglia (with Cerone as kingmaker) to pick up the pieces of the Chicago rackets.

Kale’s relationship with Cer knshingone was the turning point in her life, according to Sumner. She impressed him with her get-up-and-go and her entrepreneurial spirit, and after two more pay dates he employed her in a different capacity, as the bait for a surviving Giancana lieutenant who was high up on his shit list.

There was a photo of her from around this time, and I had the vague feeling that I’d seen it before: a smeary black-and-white image taken in a crowded nightclub, it showed Kale dangling on Jackie Cerone’s arm, both of them mugging for the camera with bottles of champagne in their mitts. Kale’s mouth was open in a laugh that looked like it must have been loud and indelicate, but her eyes weren’t closed or crinkled with laugh lines: they were wide and staring.

They looked to me like the eyes of a wild animal peering out at the world from behind the thickets of her own face, where she was either hiding or looking for prey. The only other figure in the picture, a blond man whose bodybuilder’s physique was encased in a double-breasted jacket that screamed ‘gangster’, was staring at her with a sort of covetous wonder.

Before long, Sumner assured his readers, this real-life femme fatale was undertaking hits on her own: Jackie provided the gun, and the training in how to use it.

Over the next five years Kale became something of a celebrity in Mob circles, without ever coming to the attention of the police. She made at least nine hits (Sumner argued passionately for the higher and more headline-grabbing score of thirteen) and was paid sums of up to eighty thousand dollars a time. At one point, Phil Alderisio reputedly kept her on retainer.

The cigarette-burn motif, meanwhile, had become a tabloid legend, and incorruptible police chief Art Bilek made a public commitment to bring in ‘the Mob killer who signs his work in this odious manner’.

In 1968 he caught up with her in yet another hotel room, on the top floor of the Salisbury: the trappings this time were opulent rather than sleazy, and Kale was a guest of Tony Accardo, but neither the exclusive surroundings nor the distinguished patronage saved her when Bilek’s men surrounded the building and moved in to arrest her.