With a couple of weeks in Las Vegas coming up, I wasn’t bothered about the heat, but Prim, ever the explorer, insisted that we take it. On the map it looked simple, but it wasn’t as easy as all that; we took a couple of wrong turns and found ourselves first in the Wells Fargo Museum, and then in the local version of Saks Fifth Avenue, before finally we reached our destination. There was a big sign over the entrance, which read, ‘The IDS Building’. ‘Look at that!’ I said. ‘In Britain they can barely remember his name; here they’ve named an office block after him.’
We studied the business directory and found HHH Asset, listed alphabetically. As we looked at the board, Prim asked the same question Susie had. ‘How are we going to play this?’
I’d been considering that all the way there, which was maybe why we got lost so often. ‘I think you should stay out of sight,’ I told her, ‘at first at any rate. We don’t want to spook this woman. Paul might well have warned her that you’re likely to show up looking for him, so if you go crashing in there, she might just clam up. Let me go up on my own, and see how I get on.’
‘What will you say to her?’
‘I’ll come up with something, don’t worry.’
She was reluctant to miss the moment, but she saw the sense in what I was saying, so I parked her in a Starbucks … How did people survive without them and McDonald’s? … and took the elevator.
HHH Asset seemed to occupy all of one floor; I walked through the glass double doors and into the reception area, where a very well-dressed Chinese girl welcomed me with a dazzling smile. A badge on her jacket said that her name was Mai Lee, and I guessed that she was trained to treat everybody who came through the door as a potential investor.
‘Good morning, sir,’ she said, in a voice that would have brightened anyone’s day, ‘and how can HHH be of service?’
‘I’m looking for a lady I was told works here.’ I have this thing that when I talk to Americans I sort of pick up their inflection. ‘Her name is Martha Wallinger.’
‘That would be me.’
I turned. An older woman, working at a big desk against a window, had risen and was approaching me. She was stocky, almost square built, heavily made-up and with jet-black hair that looked to be lacquered stiff. If her son looked like me, he must have taken after his father, for she didn’t look a bit like my mother.
She didn’t look hostile, though; in fact, she looked anything but.
‘Mrs Wallinger,’ I began, ‘I’m. .’
‘I know who you are,’ she drawled. ‘You’re an actor: I saw you in a movie last week. It was called Red Leather, wasn’t it? If you give me a minute I’ll recall your name.’
That was me put in my place, but I extended the hand of friendship nonetheless. ‘Oz Blackstone,’ I announced.
‘Of course, how silly of me not to know straight away. What brings you to Minneapolis, Mr Blackstone?’
‘Call me Oz, please. In five words: Mrs Blackstone, Mall of America.’
She laughed. That seems to answer everything in the twin cities. Mai Lee smiled too, even more sunnily than before. She really was very pretty; I glanced at her left hand. No jewellery: an unattached movie star might have had a chance there.
‘And what,’ Mrs Wallinger went on, ‘brings you to see me?’
‘A promise,’ I told her, and then switched back into lying mode. ‘I made it to your son Paul, two or three years back, when I met him in Los Angeles. We were working on different projects on the same sound-stage, and someone said that we looked a little alike, so we got talking. I told him a little about me, and he told me about himself, and how he’d got started in the business, through the University of Minnesota and everything. I told him that I’d never been there, and he said that if I ever went, I had to be sure to look up his mom. In my world, a promise is a promise, so here I am.’
She beamed, nearly as wide as Mai. ‘How very gallant.’ And then she paused. ‘The problem is, Oz, that we have a rule at HHH that employees do not have personal visits in working hours, and since I’m the office manager, I can’t be seen to break it.’
Oh, bugger, I thought. That’s cut me off short.
‘However,’ she continued, ‘I only work half the day on Wednesdays.’ She smirked. ‘I’m older than I look, you see. So I’ll be free from lunchtime.’
If she was angling for an invitation that wasn’t quite what I’d planned either. I wanted some time alone, no witnesses. ‘Damn it,’ I exclaimed. ‘I’d love to take you to lunch, but I have to meet Mrs Blackstone.’ I couldn’t make myself say, ‘my wife’.
Once again, Mrs W bailed me out. ‘In that case,’ she said, ‘why don’t you just call on me? If you have the time, that is. It’s not every day that a friend of my rascal son looks me up. In fact, it’s not any day. Now my other son, his friends pop in to see me all the time.’
She grabbed a pen and a pad from the reception desk. I watched her scribble down the same address that Jeff in the bookstore had given me, and took it from her. ‘That’s where I live. It’s not far from here, down in the Warehouse District.’
‘Okay, that would be fine. Would three o’clock be okay?’
‘Three o’clock would be perfect: and you must bring Mrs Blackstone. I insist.’
The two women smiled me out of the door and into the elevator. When I went back to the Starbucks where I’d left Prim, she wasn’t there, but that didn’t worry me. In all the time I’ve known her, she’s been incapable of sitting on her arse for more than fifteen minutes at a stretch. That’s something else that made her holing herself up in that flat of hers all the more out of character.
I allowed myself my one and only coffee of the day and waited for her. In ten minutes she was back, carrying a Saks bag. She showed me what was inside: a pair of pyjamas, men’s, XL. ‘A present for you,’ she announced, ‘to preserve your modesty.’
‘What did you get for yourself?’
‘It’s only the bottom half that’s the present. The top’s for me.’
‘Seems fair.’
‘How did you get on?’ she asked impatiently, as if the distraction had upset her.
I told her about our three o’clock appointment.
‘Do you think she knows anything?’
‘Prim, I haven’t a clue. I told her that I promised Paul in LA that I’d look her up, and she bought it. She didn’t say, “Didn’t your ex-wife have my son’s kid?” or anything else that might have tipped her hand.’
‘So will I go with you this afternoon?’
‘She’s expecting you. If Paul’s showed her a photograph of you, she’ll twig right away; that’ll tell us plenty.’
I ditched what was left of my coffee. . frothy gunge, mostly. . we took our joint nightwear back to the hotel, then spent the rest of the morning looking round the very compact city centre, mostly using the Skyway, but coming down to ground level occasionally and out into the relatively modest heat, to look at landmarks like the modest statue of Hubert Humphrey. . before he was a senator, and then Vice President, he was Mayor of Minneapolis, and if his statue is life-size he wasn’t very big. . the Federal Building, and the remarkable Marquette Plaza, all glass front and angled so that when you stand in front and look at it, all you see is a reflection of the sky, a bit scary when a jumbo out of MSP International flies across it.
By the time we’d done that, grabbed a couple of sandwiches, two root beers, then a coffee for Prim in a diner called Ike’s, it was time to head for the Warehouse District.
The map showed us that Mrs Wallinger lived only a few blocks from the Merchant’s, but her address was outside the zone of the Skyway, so we took a cab. The experience couldn’t have been further from London, in every respect. The driver seemed to be on another plane of existence, and I had to guide him street by street until he found the block we were after.