Wearing Purple

Chapter 42

I don’t know why, but I’d expected St Louis to be bigger. As our 737 cruised alongside the convergence of the Missouri and Mississippi, the city — set on the western bank of the great united river — looked to be much smaller than Glasgow, or even Edinburgh.

Prim and I had retired to our respective rooms in the Carlton Executive Plaza — Why are American hotels obliged to have at least two and preferably three names? I had asked myself — almost immediately after dinner, but the time-shift had meant that neither of us slept much. We had been bleary-eyed when we met up in the lobby at seven thirty to take a cab to the airport.

We noticed as soon as we stepped out of the plane that without the cooling wind blowing down off Lake Michigan, St Louis was milder than Chicago. In fact for April, it was downright warm, and both of us felt over-dressed. From the look he gave us our taxi driver agreed with us.

‘Thirty-four seventy, Andrew Hamilton Drive,’ I told him as we climbed in, glancing at my watch as I did. It was just after midday; I hoped that Sonny Leonard’s mother’s patience would hold and that he still wouldn’t know that we were coming. We were lucky. Mrs Zabrynski’s home was in a suburb on the same side of the city as the airport, and so the taxi journey took us no longer than fifteen minutes.

Andrew Hamilton Drive was long and straight, one of many in the flat, grid-like community. As I paid the cabby and turned towards number thirty-four seventy, I saw that it was a single-storey house with a smart, white-painted wooden exterior, built on a raised deck which stood on stilts five feet tall, and with a railed terrace running all the way around.

‘Okay,’ I said to Prim. ‘Follow my lead.’ Together we trotted up the steps to the deck. I rang the bell.

The portly figure of Sonny Leonard opened the door. ‘Surprise!’ I said.

‘Oh shit!’ said he.

‘I don’t think you’re pleased to see us, Sonny,’ I went on, quickly, trying to keep the roadie on the back foot. ‘Now why would that be? We only want to talk to you. You might not remember my friend Prim, or maybe you do. She was in Barcelona; she jumped into the ring to give emergency aid to Jerry Gradi after he was shot.’

A look of terror flashed across his face.

‘Can we come in, Sonny?’ I asked. As I spoke, an old lady appeared behind him in the hallway. She looked like a really nice old dear, which didn’t make me feel too good about having deceived her.

‘Your surprise arrived, I see, son,’ she said.

‘Yes, Momma,’ Sonny replied. ‘It’s friends from Scotland. Listen, I’ll just talk to them out here on the deck for a bit. We’ll be in directly. You put some coffee on now.’ She waved and nodded. Leonard closed the door on her and pointed to four wooden seats off to the right.

‘Let’s sit down here.’

We followed him, and took seats on either side of him. ‘How is The Behemoth,’ he asked at once. ‘Did he make it?’

‘He’s making it even as we speak, Sonny,’ I told him. ‘With Sally Crockett in a nice hotel in the Costa Brava. He’ll be pleased you were concerned about him, but that won’t stop him from tearing your head off when he catches up with you.’

I took my small tape recorder from my pocket and switched it on. ‘Let’s get to it. Everett sent us across to see you, to have a talk and get a signed statement. He was going to come himself but I managed to persuade him that wasn’t a good idea. . for the moment.’ I paused, to let him consider that.

‘However, if we’re not happy when we leave here today, you will have a visit from him. Believe me, you really do not want that.’

Sonny Leonard shifted in his chair. I had got through to him. He looked at Prim, as if for relief. ‘What does he want?’ he asked her.

She smiled at him. ‘He wants you to tell him how Mr Reilly of CWI hired you to sabotage Global Wrestling Alliance events. .’

I leaned forward and tugged at his sleeve. ‘. . specifically how you rigged the barrier in Newcastle, the one that injured Liam Matthews, then placed a miniature firearm in a turn-buckle pad in Barcelona, almost killing Jerry Gradi.’

Sonny Leonard threw his head back and looked up at the eaves of his mother’s house. ‘Oh shit, I knew the boss would think that,’ he moaned. ‘Listen, Oz. I’ll tell you the gospel truth. I had nothing at all to do with those things. I never met Mr Reilly personally, and I never took any money from him.’ As he paused, beads of sweat formed on his forehead. ‘I guess I know why Everett thinks I did, though.’

‘Tell me,’ I said, not in the slightest convinced.

‘The Monday before the Barcelona gig, the day when normally there’s damn few people in the office, I went in to do some stock-checkin’ of our equipment and props. I reckoned we was a bit light on some things, and I knew Everett had been in, so I went to his office to talk to him about it.

‘He was gone, but there was this pile of mobile phone bills on his desk, with mine right on top, and lines drawn on it underneath this one number. Maybe you can guess what it was.’

‘I know what it was, Sonny.’

‘In that case,’ he said, ‘you’ll know how I felt. Like I told you on the plane, it ain’t no secret how the boss feels about CWI and Reilly. I guessed I was in trouble, but I couldn’t say anything till he did, case he fired me for rooting around in his office.’

He took a deep breath of the warm Missouri air. ‘Then that thing happened in Barcelona. I knew something was wrong as soon as Jerry hit the pad. Then I heard the boss yell in Spanish for the medics. I saw the blood, and I saw the busted pad — the one I had fixed on.

‘I was at ringside when Daze turned around and looked at me. It was like he was in a trance, and I tell you, Oz, looking at him I saw my own death.’ He turned to Prim. ‘Then you jumped into the ring, miss, and started yelling at him, till he forgot about me and looked at Jerry again.’

He stared down at his hands bunched together in his lap. ‘It was as clear as day; whatever had been done to that turn-buckle pad, I had fixed it on, I had been calling the CWI number, and I was taking the rap.

‘I ran for it, Oz, simple as that. I was scared shitless and I ran for it. I took a cab back to the hotel, picked up my passport and the rest of my gear and went to the bus depot. I got on the first bus out for anywhere. That happened to be Madrid. The next day, Sunday, I caught a plane to JFK. That’s the God’s truth.’

I have interviewed a fair few people over the years, and during that time I’ve learned to spot the difference between liars and those who are telling the truth. As I looked at Sonny Leonard, all my experience and instinct told me that he wasn’t lying; still, I couldn’t fly in the face of the evidence.

‘But what about those calls to CWI, man? And on a company phone, too.’

‘Yeah I know, that was stupid. But I wasn’t phoning Reilly.’ He paused and smiled faintly.

‘When I was at Triple W, I had a girlfriend there. Her name’s Sandra. She worked as a secretary, but she did all sorts of stuff. Now Reilly, he’d do anything to hurt Triple W. So when someone told him about Sandra, he made her an offer to come to work for CWI in his promotions department.

‘She should have asked me about it, but she didn’t; she just took the job. As soon as she got there, she knew she’d made a mistake and the longer she was there, the unhappier she got. All those calls were to her, just trying to give her a lift.’

‘So what were you doing in Philadelphia this week,’ I asked him, ‘when I called your mother on Monday?’

The smile became a grin. ‘Well, first I was getting her out of CWI,’ he replied. ‘And second, we was getting married.’ He stood, stepped over to the front door and threw it open. ‘Hey Sandy,’ he yelled into the house. ‘Come on out here and meet these guys.’

She stepped nervously into the door-frame. ‘Hello,’ she whispered.

‘Sandy, honey,’ said her new husband. ‘This is Oz, from GWA in Scotland. And this-’

Prim thrust out her hand towards the girl. ‘I’m Oz’s business associate,’ she explained.

‘I’m trying to persuade them,’ Leonard went on, ‘that I ain’t been sabotaging Everett’s operation in Britain for Mr Reilly.’

Her mouth fell open in horror. ‘Sonny wouldn’t do that, mister, honest,’ she burst out.

I looked at her. ‘Would it surprise you to learn that someone has been?’

She shook her head. ‘No. Nothing would surprise me about Tony Reilly,’ she said, in a light Eastern seaboard accent. ‘He’s a dangerous man, if ever I met one.

‘I wasn’t with CWI when Diane left him for Everett Davis, but those who were said he went ballistic. He said he’d kill them both. The story was, that was why Daze left the US.’ She paused. ‘I heard there was history between them before that, though.’

‘What sort of guy is Reilly?’ I asked her. ‘What does he look like?’

‘I can show you,’ she said. ‘I got a CWI marketing brochure inside.’ She stepped back into the house, reappearing a few seconds later, with a glossy folder. She opened it, took out a red-covered A4 booklet and handed it to me. ‘Page one,’ she said. ‘That’s him.’

I opened the brochure. It was my turn to be shocked. I know there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be the case, but given my Celtic roots, I just hadn’t expected someone called Reilly to be black.