Wearing Purple ob-3

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘Sounds exciting,’ I said; to please him as much as anything else. To be honest, I really wasn’t sold on the GWA to the extent that I could be as enthusiastic as him.

  ‘Yeah,’ Everett murmured, lost in his art. ‘Diane’s working on some new costumes to match the Black Angel’s rig. She says they’re slinky, but not as provocative as Barcelona; that went a bit far.’

  ‘And annoyed the locals.’ I told him of Prim’s comments about Catalan sensitivity when it comes to their flag.

  ‘Thanks. I’ll tell her to keep that in mind.’ He paused. ‘Say, she really is something, that friend of yours. I was in a complete panic back in that ring after Jerry was hit. If she hadn’t sailed in and taken charge, I don’t know what would have happened.’

  ‘I do,’ I whispered.

  ‘Yeah.’ He caught my meaning. ‘Look, I want to let her know how grateful I am. Should I send her flowers — orchids or something?’

  ‘Prim? No, I don’t think so. I’d say you should write to her, to thank her. Then you or Jerry send her a case of French wine; good stuff, mind, no crap.’

  ‘We’ll do that, Jerry and I.’ He smiled. ‘I was thinking, I might offer her a job as a GWA superstar too, after the way she got my attention back in that ring.’

  ‘Better not do that,’ I warned him. ‘She might accept.

  ‘By the way,’ I went on, ‘did you have that turn-buckle pad examined?’

  He nodded vigorously, then glanced over his shoulder to make sure that the people in the seats behind us were all engrossed in magazines. ‘I sure did,’ he said. ‘I took it apart myself, and I found a device inside, stitched right into the padding. I took it to a firm of private security consultants. They told me that it was one of those key-ring gun things, but that it had been adapted so that the cocking ring became the firing pin as well. Like we thought, the thing was triggered by a heavy blow, someone the size of Jerry being slammed against the pad, driving the firing ring against the turn-buckle and — bang.’

  ‘And Jerry and I watched that bastard Sonny Leonard strap the thing on,’ I muttered. ‘What have you done about tracing him?’

  ‘Nothing. Let him run back to Tony Reilly and tell him that his plan failed, and that I’m on to him. We won’t hear from them again. Leonard’s history; Gary O’Rourke is the new head honcho.

  ‘Anyhow,’ he added, ‘what could I do without bringing the police in on it?’

  ‘Let me think about that,’ I told him.

  We had an uneventful flight to Amsterdam, and, as it turned out, an uneventful weekend. Considering everything that had gone on in Newcastle and Barcelona, the show was top class. Sally Crockett’s audience ratings in Holland were very high, so Everett gave her the headline spot, after Tommy Rockette’s second showing in a tag team with Chris Manson, against the Rattlers. Watching them all through rehearsal, I thought that Rutherford looked the most relieved man in the team, knowing that he would not be facing Daze.

  The big man’s own slot was a handicap fight with the Choirboys, interrupted once again by a confrontation with Liam Matthews, who left his commentary chair to jump up on the ring apron and harangue the giant. This time he ran for his life up the ramp, pursued by a mock-serious Daze forfeiting his match with the Tag Team Champions.

  The plane was almost ready to land in rainy Glasgow on Sunday evening, when a possible answer to Everett’s two-day-old question came to me. He and I were in the same front row seats, and so I tapped him on the arm.

  ‘Hey, remember that phone bill of Sonny Leonard’s?’ He nodded. ‘The other American number; the one in St Louis. We reckoned that could have been his parents, right?’ He nodded again. ‘He looked a dutiful son, didn’t he. What’s the betting he’s been in touch with his folks again within the last two weeks?’

  The great dark face broke into a grin. ‘Could be, could be,’ he said, softly. ‘Why don’t you drop by the office tomorrow just after five and we’ll check it out.’

  Chapter 39

  I had finished my day’s work and was about to head for the GWA headquarters when the phone rang. It was Greg McPhillips, and I could tell as soon as he opened his mouth that he was not a happy boy. Inevitably, that meant that I wasn’t going to be happy either.

  ‘I’ll give you the bad news first,’ he began, ‘since there isn’t any good news.’

  ‘Greg, pal,’ I told him. ‘Right now there isn’t anything you could tell me that I’d class as good news, so don’t be bothered. What is it?’

  ‘Well,’ he said, as if he really didn’t fancy his job at that moment. ‘These German washing machine makers have moved very fast. I have just had a visit from their lawyer, who only happens to be a partner in the biggest firm of ambulance chasers in Scotland.’ I knew that lot. You never heard good news from them, unless you were their client.

  ‘The independent testers the Krauts employed turned out not to be very independent after all. They arrived in Glasgow on Friday, and they worked all weekend, taking the machine apart, looking at the wiring, scraping bits off, sending samples for lab analysis and so on.

  ‘They reported this morning. Essentially they agreed with the police guys and the Trading Standards people that the accident could have been caused in the way they said. However, they came up with an alternative solution.

  ‘They said that it would have been possible to rig a small incendiary device to the housing of the wiring that would have melted it and allowed the wiring to fall against the casing of the machine, rendering it live. It would be a very simple device, they said, triggered by a mercury-filled rocker thing, which would go off as soon as the machine started to spin. That’s an old terrorist and Special Forces trick, apparently. They use it to blow people up, but the principle’s exactly the same.

  ‘The mercury would vaporise with the heat, and the fuel element, which is similar to plastic explosive, would burn itself out too; the rest of the device would be identical to the casing of the wiring itself, i.e. rubber. So all you’d have left once the thing had done its business would be slightly more melted rubber than you’d expect to find.

  ‘They say that they found slightly more melted rubber than usual, so their scenario is a possibility.’ Greg paused, probably waiting for me to explode, but I held it together.

  ‘What our ambulance chaser friend had to say was that his clients were very interested by this. He pointed out that on the face of it, since there was no reported breakin to your place — indeed since the Scottish Power guys had to break in themselves — the only person who was in a position to lay such a device was you.

  ‘Now my professional colleague is clever. He told me that he wouldn’t dream of making this allegation to the Fiscal, because you would immediately sue for huge defamation damages, with at least a fifty per cent chance of success. However if you press ahead with a civil action, then under the privilege of the witness box, he will enter his experts’ theory as a defence, and invite the jury to reject your case.

  ‘In other words, Oz, he’s saying that if you sue his clients, you’ll be accused of murdering Jan.’

  That did it. I have never experienced such a red, howling, venomous rage in all my life. ‘I want his name, Greg,’ I roared. ‘I want to know who this bastard is, because I am personally going to tear his fucking heart out!’

  ‘I don’t blame you, Oz. That’s why I’ve no intention of telling you who he is. Anyway, there’s a whole queue of people waiting in line to do much the same thing to this guy.

  ‘I want you to calm down, and take time to think this over, rationally.’

  ‘Raise the action Greg,’ I shouted at him. ‘Sue the bastards until they bleed. I don’t care what it costs.’

  ‘Oz,’ he said, patiently. ‘My father and our partners are not ambulance chasers. I’m not going to accept that instruction from you, or any other, until you’ve had at least a week to think about it. Come and see me next Monday. We’ll discuss it then.’

  Chapter 40

  I was still steami
ng 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.

  Chapter 41

  ‘Can this be for real, d’you think? You and I, sat here in some bloody bar in Chicago, off on yet another daft mission. Honestly, what the hell made you call me?’

  ‘I told you before, I needed someone I could trust absolutely to back me up on this job. When I ran down the list, there was only one person — you.’

  ‘But would you have called me if Jan was alive?’

  ‘If Jan was alive, she’d be sat right where you are. But she isn’t. The point is that I needed you and you came. Thanks.’

  Prim had been a bit hard on our surroundings. ‘Some bloody bar,’ was in fact the cocktail lounge of a pretty decent restaurant on Michigan Avenue, not too far from our hotel, the Clarion Executive Plaza, on State Street — ‘that great street’, as The Man used to sing. We had jetted into O’Hare on separate flights that afternoon, she f
rom Spain, I from Glasgow, and had met up in the arrivals area.

  By US standards, St Louis isn’t all that far from Chicago, and so we faced only a short shuttle flight in the morning. It was evening and the light was going, but as I looked out of the window and up, I could still see the great needle that was the Sears Tower, now just one of many buildings that had once been the tallest in the world.

  I turned at the sound of a classically discreet cough. ‘Your table is ready, sir,’ said our waiter. He escorted us into the restaurant, where he placed us beside another window which looked along the great boulevard.

  ‘You’re looking very well,’ I said to Prim as he went off to fetch the wine and mineral water which I had ordered. ‘I didn’t get a chance to tell you that in Barcelona.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ she replied. ‘I wish I could say the same for you. You still look on the high side of forty. Haven’t you been sleeping?’

  ‘Fitfully, you might say. To tell you the truth, I’ve been feeling homesick for the last couple of days. I had planned to go up to Anstruther tomorrow night, to see my dad and Mary. They’re still pretty numb, according to Ellie.’

  ‘What about Noosh?’ Prim asked quietly. ‘Have you heard from her?’

  ‘I tried to get in touch with her,’ I replied. ‘Her firm told me that she’s running their Russian office in St Petersburg. I asked them to pass a message to her, but I haven’t heard anything since. I don’t really want to, truth be told.

  ‘Look, Prim, let’s talk about something else. How about business in hand? You got off work no problem?’

  ‘Easy. I’ve got a couple of weeks owing. I’ve changed my flight back, in fact. When you go to Manchester on Friday, I fly to Glasgow. I’m off to see the folks for a week.’