‘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 from 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.’
‘I wondered why you had that bloody big suitcase.’ I grinned at her, and for the first time since Barcelona, I began to feel a sense of the guy I had once been. Okay, when it came to the crunch, it was Jan who had been for me all along, but I really liked Prim; she lifted my spirits.
‘What about this man Leonard?’ she asked, as the wine waiter opened our Turning Leaf, while another set two enormous prawn cocktails before us. ‘He is the guy, yes?’
‘Has to be.’ I explained the pattern of calls showing on the mobile phone statement, and told her about the way the barrier in Newcastle and the turn-buckle pad had been rigged. ‘We reckon that after Jerry was shot, Leonard was out of the arena before the ambulance.’
‘So what are you going to do with him tomorrow? And why do you need me there?’
‘I’ll decide how I’m going to play it when I see him. I want you there as a corroborating witness to whatever he tells us, but also I reckon you’ll put him more at his ease than if I went in alone, or with another guy.’
‘But if he’s made it back home, and he can’t be prosecuted, why should he tell you anything, other than to piss off?’
I smiled at her across the table. ‘Primavera, my dear, I realise that you haven’t seen the man at his best, but do not underestimate the persuasive power of Everett Davis — even from four thousand miles away.’