Wearing Purple

Chapter 40

I was still steaming mad when I drew up in the GWA car park. In the next bay, Sally Crockett had just started her little yellow sports coupe. She was facing out and I had parked nose in, so our faces were only a few feet apart.

She wound down her window, and I wound down mine. ‘Hey Oz,’ she said, with a cheery sympathetic smile. ‘How are you doing? You look a bit down today.’

‘Sorry, Sal,’ I replied. ‘I was lost in thought there — thoughts of killing a lawyer.’

She laughed. ‘Need any help?’

There was something about the Ladies’ Champ which always brightened me up. ‘You, on the other hand,’ I told her, ‘look as sunny as that flying banana you’re about to drive. What’s made your day?’

‘The boss has just given me next weekend off, that’s what. So I’m just going down to see my mum, then tomorrow I’m catching a flight to Barcelona. Jerry got out of hospital yesterday, so he and I are having a few days in a place called the Hotel Aiguablava, just a bit up the coast.’

She chuckled. ‘I’ve planned out some new moves for my match with the Heckler at the pay-per-view. I may try them out on him.’

‘I reckon he might like that.’

‘What he’d also like to do while we’re there, he told me, is to visit that friend of yours, the girl who treated him in the ring. I was going to phone you tomorrow morning to get her address.’

‘No problem.’ I scribbled Prim’s address and phone number on a page of my notebook, tore it out and handed it across to her. ‘There you are. Tell the big fella I was asking for him.’ I paused. ‘Does he know about Jan, by the way?’

‘Not yet.’

‘If you visit Primavera, you’d better tell him first.’

She nodded. Feeling a lot calmer than when I’d arrived, I waved her goodbye, watched as she drove off, then climbed out of the Ozmobile and walked into the building.

Everett was in his office, waiting for me, with Sonny Leonard’s phone bill lying on his glass-topped desk. As I walked in he poured me a mug of coffee from his filter and handed it to me, together with a coaster from which Tommy Rutherford’s professional face grinned up at me.

‘How we going to play this thing?’ he asked.

‘By ear seems like the best way.’ I picked up the invoice from the desk and found the St Louis number. ‘Show me how to switch your phone to hands free.’ He pressed a button and the dialling tone sounded into the room. I sat on the edge of the table and keyed in the number.

We waited for several seconds as the US ringing tone sounded, insistently. Then it stopped as we heard the call answered. The line was as clear as a bell. ‘Yaiss?’ It was an old woman’s voice, quavery and nervous.

‘Hello,’ I said, speaking more slowly than normal. ‘Would that be Mrs Leonard?’

‘Not any more,’ she answered. ‘Mr Leonard died ’bout twenty-three years ago. It’s Mrs Zabrynski now. ’Course Mr Zabrynski’s dead now too.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ And of course, I really was. ‘You are Sonny Leonard’s mother, though?’

‘Oh yaiss,’ she chirped, brighter at once. ‘He’s my boy. Fine son, too.’

‘I can imagine. My name’s Oz Blackstone, Mrs Zabrynski. I’m calling from GWA in Scotland. Is Sonny there, by any chance?’

‘No, Ah’m afraid not. Sonny’s in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, right now. But he’ll be back here on Thursday,’ she added, helpfully.

I did some quick thinking, and took a chance that Sonny didn’t confide in his dear old Mom. ‘Listen, Mrs Zabrynski. Sonny decided to leave GWA very quickly. He has a lot of friends here, and we didn’t have a chance to wish him a proper goodbye. We’d like to send him a surprise gift from all of us. Could we deliver it to him personally, at your home on Thursday?’ Everett, who was watching me intently, nodded vigorously.

We could almost hear her beam on the other end of the line. ‘Why how naice of you all,’ she exclaimed. ‘Of course you can do that. I’m expecting him back by twelve midday. Let me give you the address: it’s thirty-four seventy, Andrew Hamilton Drive, Saint Louis, Missouri.’

I wrote it down on my notebook. ‘That’s great, Mrs Zabrynski,’ I told her. ‘There’s just one thing, though. We really do want this to be a surprise. You won’t say anything about it to Sonny, will you; not even if he calls you before Thursday?’

‘Mr Blackstone, Ah love surprises. Ah won’t breathe a word.’

‘Thank you very much, Mrs Zabrynski. Till Thursday then.’

‘Yaiss. Goodbye, and thank you for calling.’ I hit the stop button and the phone went dead.

I stood up from the edge of Everett’s desk and looked at him. ‘There you are, sunshine. On a plate.’

‘Sure,’ he said, ‘but what do we do now?’

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Simple. You hire a couple of Pinkertons, or whatever, they go to see Leonard at his Mom’s on Thursday, apply the thumbscrews and get a statement out of him implicating Reilly.’

‘I can’t do that,’ he growled. ‘Hire a PI in the States and he’s almost bound to have a connection with the cops, or worse, the DA’s office.’

‘In that case send him a kiss-a-gram with a note that says, “Hello Sonny, I know where you live. Don’t let me hear from you again, ever. Love Daze.” He’ll get the message.’

‘No,’ said the giant, vehemently. ‘Leonard’s a loose end. He has to be tied off. You go to St Louis. You go visit him Thursday.’

‘Bloody hell, I can’t do that! I don’t have a licence over there; I can’t just roll up and start interviewing people.’

‘What you need a licence for? You’re just delivering a message for me, and I’m a US citizen. You go talk to him, deliver my message, then get a reply in the form of a signed statement.’

‘I still couldn’t do that, not on my own. What if he cuts up rough?’

He looked at me. ‘You’re not scared of Sonny, are you?’

‘I’m not scared of anyone, pal, not any more. But if he and I get into a rammy — that’s Scottish for ruckus, by the way — in his old lady’s house, she could call the cops, then what? No, I couldn’t do it, not without back-up.

‘Why don’t you go?’ I asked him, forgetting for a moment how bad an idea that could be.

‘I’d love to,’ he answered, ‘but I got next weekend to take care of, plus the final preparations and television promos for the pay-per-view. I can’t go. Look, you want back-up, you find someone. Cost ain’t a problem.’

‘It’s not that easy,’ I protested. ‘I can’t just grab someone off the street. Whatever you say this is dodgy, so I could only take someone I trusted absolutely. There’s my ex-partner Jimmy, who does the odd interview for me, but he runs a pub these days. No way could he get away. There’s mad Ali, but he’s got an open all hours shop.

‘There’s my dad, but even if he didn’t tell me I was a bloody loony and wanted to come, his patients can’t be postponed just like that.’

‘Jesus Oz,’ Everett grumbled. ‘There has to be one person in the world you know and trust, and who’s got the balls for this job.’

Of course, when I really thought about it, there was.