I would have forgotten about the appointment if I hadn’t written it on one of the three-by-five index cards I carried in my back pocket. The call had come in early the day before. With everything going on, I had almost forgotten about it. The index cards got dog-eared quickly from my sitting on them, but I wrote my notes to myself in clear block letters and had no trouble reading them.
At the age of forty-three, I was having trouble remembering simple things like why I was going to the refrigerator or what I was planning to do when I opened the medicine cabinet in my bathroom.
The card read:
Bee Ridge Park softball field. 11 a.m.
Monday. Ferris Berrigan
The bike ride to Bee Ridge Park was long. It was made longer by my expecting that someone might pull alongside me, roll down a window, and take a few shots, or that someone would run me into oncoming traffic on Beneva Road. It would be fitting, to die the same way Catherine had, but I wasn’t really ready for that. Progress, Ann would say. I no longer welcomed accidental death.
Traffic wasn’t too heavy, but a pickup truck did pass by when I crossed Bee Ridge, and the passenger did throw something out the window in my general direction. The sight of a somewhat lean man in a Chicago Cubs cap riding a bicycle seemed to bring out the redneck in some people. Actually, this was better than the panic that the sight of me brought to ancient drivers who often came near losing control and running me down.
I made it to Bee Ridge Park just before 11 a.m. I was familiar with the place. There were two softball fields. No one was playing on or standing by the nearest field, the one next to Wilkinson Road. But on the more distant field, a group of men were playing ball. As I rode across the parking lot and down the narrow road that marked the west side of the park, I heard the cool aluminum-on-ball clack followed by the shouting of men.
“Take two, Hugo!”
“Take three! What do you mean, two?”
“Dick is coaching at first.”
“He took second easy, you dumb cluck.”
“Grow up, John.”
I parked my bike in a bike rack next to the field. I could see now that the players were all wearing uniforms, white ones with the words “Roberts Realty” on one and “Dunkin’ Donuts” on the other. All the players were men who looked like they were in their sixties or seventies or eighties.
A few of the players glanced in my direction. There was a lone spectator, a man in a black cloth on a dark wood folding director’s chair. Next to him there was an identical chair. I moved toward the man in the chair. He was sitting forward with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands. The pose of a bad boy who has been caught.
The man in the chair was even leaner than I am and a little older, maybe fifty. He wore brown slacks and a matching short-sleeve pullover shirt with what looked like a guitar etched on the lone pocket over his heart.
He sat back, waiting, and removed his glasses. He was clean shaven and nervous.
The empty chair next to him had “ Blue ” written on it in fading white paint.
I sat and looked at the game. Hugo scored.
“What’s the score?” I asked.
“The score?”
“What inning is it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t really understand baseball.”
“This is softball,” I said.
“That ball doesn’t look soft.”
“It isn’t,” I said.
Another ball was hit with that pleasant bat-kissing-ball sound.
“You know who I am, don’t you?”
“Ferris Berrigan?”
“Yes, but who else?” he asked.
“Who else are you?”
“Do you have any children?”
“No.”
“Still,” he said. “You should know who I am.”
“You’re the man who wants me to find out who is blackmailing him,” I said.
“Something like that. You know what he said he would do?”
“No,” I said.
“He’d go to the newspapers and television with a lie. You sure you don’t know who I am?”
“No. Did you lose your memory?”
He looked puzzled and reassessed whatever positive feelings he had drawn from a first impression of me.
“No, I did not lose my memory. Someone wants to take it from me.”
My fond wish at that moment was that whoever the good guys were out on the field full of battling voices and hoarse calls would win and go home.
“Okay, who are you and who is trying to take your memory?”
“Actually, it’s all my memories they wish to take. You are positive you don’t know who I am?”
“You’re King Solomon, Master of all the Aegeans.”
“If you can’t take this seriously…”
“I’ll take it seriously,” I promised.
“I’m Blue.”
“I’m sorry. I know how it feels.”
“No, I’m Blue Berrigan, Blue the Man for You, Blue with Songs Ever New. Blue. The one on television. Fourteen years on television. I’m syndicated all over the world. Two generations of children have grown up singing my songs. Go to YouTube. One-year-olds dancing to Mitchell and Snitchel, The Great Big Blue Starfish, Empty Bottles of Juice.”
“I’ve heard of-”
A clack, a shout of “Look Out!”, and a yellow softball whizzed past Blue’s head.
“You aren’t in a safe place,” the first baseman said as he ran after the ball.
“You’re telling me,” Blue said. “What was I saying?”
“Television.”
“Television,” he repeated, sitting back. “You want some walnuts?”
“No, thanks.”
“Suit yourself. I’m semiretired. I don’t need the money anymore, but it’s my money and I’m not giving it away to fake blackmailers.”
“They aren’t really blackmailers?”
“Extortionists. They have photographs of me in bed.”
“Yes.”
“With two naked people.”
“It happens,” I said.
“One of the naked people is a man; the other is a woman, a very young woman who could pass for sixteen or even fifteen, but she’s twenty-four and reasonably well known. Since you didn’t recognize me, you probably wouldn’t recognize her.”
“Show business,” I said.
“I work with kids. TV, tabloids, newspapers, magazines, blogs, they’ll all show it and say I’d been in bed with a minor. I’ll have to say it’s a lie and no one will believe me. Even the suggestion will end my career. I don’t want to end my career, but I can live with it. What I can’t live with is what it will do to my reputation, my reruns, as unsuccessful as they’ve been everywhere but Guam and Uganda. You know why I asked you to meet me here with the softball players rather than the playground where kids are playing? A man in his forties, alone. Pedophile. You get it?”
“We could have met someplace else.”
“I live right over there, across the street, on Wilkinson. This is convenient and, dammit, I don’t want to hide.”
Long pause. A skinny guy who couldn’t have weighed more than Ames’s broom hit a line drive out to shortstop.
“Come on,” said Berrigan.
The teams changed positions while we folded up the director’s chairs.
“I’ll take those,” he said.
I followed him to the road and a parked Mazda SUV. He opened it to put the chairs inside.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
“Find the blackmailers, expose them, tell me who they are, kill them, break their legs, feed them to the stingrays at Mote Marine Park. Find a way to blackmail them back.”
He reached into his pocket and with difficulty came up with a CD. He handed it to me. “Take the job. Don’t take the job. The CD is still yours.”
“Thanks,” I said, putting the CD into my back pocket.
“I signed it with a Magic Marker.”
“One more perk and you’ll have me.”
He slammed down the door.
“Do you have a note? A recorded message? How did they contact you?”
“A young woman came to the door of my house and told me they, whoever they were, had the photographs. She gave me some of the pictures, said there were more. She was perky, bright, pretty, dark, possibly Hispanic. She said they would call and would expect me to have an initial payment of fifteen thousand dollars ready when they did. She wished me a nice day and bounced away like a teen in a toilet bowl commercial.
“Did you do those things, the things in the photographs?”
“Does it make a difference? Consenting adults.”
“I think you should go to the police.”
“I think I should not. I live there.”
He pointed across the field and to the street a good hundred yards away.
“The yellow house. They put those photographs on the internet and I won’t work again, and then I’ll find pickets outside my house demanding that I move away from the playground.”
“None of the photographs were of you with underage children?”
“Not one,” he said. “Two generations. Two generations of people who grew up and are growing up with my music will have a childhood dream broken, a friend lost, a trust betrayed.”
“We don’t want to do that,” I said.
“We do not. So?”
“I’ll look into it. I’ll take the photographs and talk to some people. If you’re contacted, call me.”
“What will it cost?” he asked.
“Two hundred dollars flat fee for two days of work to see what I can find.”
He took out his wallet and paid the money in twenty-dollar bills.
“Want a receipt?”
“No,” he said.
I wrote my number on an index card and handed it to him.
“Call me when they get in touch with you again.”
“I will,” he said. “Want to put your bike in back and I’ll drive you home?”
“No, thanks,” I said.
“Looks like rain.”
“Let’s hope,” I said.
“Let’s hope,” he said.
He had lied. Not everything, but a lot of it. He was a nervous look-away liar, his act semirehearsed, his voice low. Lying didn’t mean he was guilty of what the blackmailer claimed. People lie for many reasons-because they are ashamed, because they like to seem to be more or less than they are, because they want to protect themselves or others, or because lying was automatic. I didn’t know what kind of liar Blue Berrigan was.
Throughout the ride home I was sitting on the CD in my back pocket and hearing its plastic cover crack. I took it out and drove with it in my hand. The photographs were tucked inside my shirt. It did rain, not hard at first but coming down in a heated, pelting shower by the time I hit Tamiami Trail and Webber.
No one tried to kill me, either intentionally or inadvertently.
When I hit Laurel, I did not look at the building that had replaced the Dairy Queen where, had it still been there, I would have stopped for a chocolate-cherry Blizzard and a few minutes of conversation with Dave, who had owned the place, about the call of the Gulf as we sat under a red and white umbrella. No more. Dave had been forced out by what passed for progress. Dave had also made over a million on the DQ’s death.
I felt wet and was not filled with a sense of merriment as I went up the steps to my new rooms. My pants clung heavily to my legs and, not for the first time, I considered buying a cheap car, leaving a cheap note, and going to Key West to sit for a decade and look toward Cuba as I cheaply lived out my life.
When I opened the door, Flo and Adele were there with Catherine in Adele’s arms. Ames was there, too, and by the sound of the toilet flushing I figured Victor would soon make an appearance. The people in front of me were all reasons why I wanted to leave. They were also reasons I wanted to stay.
“Nice place you have here, Lewis,” said Flo, her silver earrings tinkling if you listened quietly.
“We’ve got a ride to take, Lewis,” Ames said.
Adele put Catherine down so I could see that she could now stand on her own with arms outstretched. I looked at Ames.
“Darrell,” he said. “Doing poorly. You’d best put on something dry.”
Catherine took a lone baby step toward me.
“Ain’t that something?” asked Flo in her best Western drawl, which decades ago had replaced the twang of Brooklyn.
Victor appeared and looked at Catherine, who looked up at him and smiled. Victor knew the baby was named for my dead wife, the woman he had run down while he was drunk. Victor tried to smile back.
“Lewis,” Ames said, “we’d best go.”
Darrell’s mother, dark and angry, came out of the intensive care unit at Sarasota Memorial Hospital. She said nothing to me or Ames. She didn’t have to.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
For an instant, her anger seemed about to turn to fury. I waited for the outburst. I would welcome it. But just before the anticipated attack, something changed. The tightness in the lean woman let go and her shoulders dropped. The anger turned to pure sorrow.
“You didn’t do it,” she said. “I know that. Fault’s mine for letting Ms. Porovsky talk me into letting Darrell spend time with you. I should have known what kind of business you were into. I should have asked. And then Darrell started liking you, talking ’bout you, changing, gettin’ better in school and such. You find the man who shot my only boy. You find him and shoot him back before you give him up to the police. You hear?”
“I hear,” I said, acknowledging that there was nothing wrong with my hearing but not that I was agreeing with her order for me to commit murder. I owned no gun and wanted none. As long as Ames was nearby, I wouldn’t need one.
“How is he?” asked Ames.
“Poorly,” she said. “Poorly. That BB or whatever it was infected him. Poorly.”
Victor had driven Ames and me to the hospital. It was not the car he had driven when he had killed my wife, but he was the driver. Once again I searched for anger. Ann Hurwitz had urged me to find the anger, to purge it, to deal with it. Though she couldn’t tell me, I had the distinct impression that she would have considered it a step forward if I suddenly attacked Victor in a bitter rage. It wasn’t in me. The hate button in my psyche didn’t seem to exist. I had witnessed much in my life that would put others into squinting anger. I should probably have felt that way about whoever had shot Darrell. Nothing came except a sad determination to confront the person who had put Darrell in that hospital bed.
It was still raining. Flo, Adele, and Catherine went home, and I promised to stop by the house and report.
Darrell’s mother went back into the intensive care unit with us. Darrell lay on his side, knees up near his chest, hands under his face on the pillow, eyes closed. Curled up, he looked like a dark, peaceful baby. The usual machines were blinking and beeping in the darkened room.
“She’s right,” Ames whispered. “We should shoot him when we catch up with him.”
Darrell’s mother couldn’t hear the whisper, and I chose not to respond.
The rain was down to a steady shower with a full bright sun shining round, red-orange, and happy when we got back to the place I was now expected to call home. Victor parked on the gravel path next to the stairs.
All three of us got out slowly, ignoring the rain. A clump of small white and yellow flowers yielded to rain drops and then popped up again for another gentle assault. Before I hit the first step, I heard her.
Parked on the street was a familiar car. When the window rolled down I saw Sally Porovsky looking at me. She didn’t call out or wave. She just looked at me.
“You’ve got work to do,” Ames said.
“I know.”
Victor stood silently, a thin trail of rain wending its way down his nose. Ames nodded at me and said no more. My door was open. Ames knew it. He led Victor upward, their shoes clapping on each wooden step.
I went to the street and moved around Sally’s car to the passenger door. It was open. I got in and sat.
“You’re wet,” she said.
I nodded.
“There’s a beach towel in the trunk. You want to get it?”
“No.”
Her hands were tight on the steering wheel as if she were about to peel into a drag race. She looked forward. The shadow of rain rolling down the front window danced against her face. She looked pretty. She was pretty. Her skin was clear and pale, her hair dark and cut short. She was slightly plump and normally totally in control of herself, but not at this moment.
“I was going to call you,” I said.
“I remember,” she said. “I decided not to wait. How is Darrell?”
“I don’t really know.”
“His mother won’t answer my calls.”
I didn’t know what to say.
She went on. “I think she blames me for getting Darrell involved with you.”
“She does.”
“She told you that?”
“Yes.”
We went silent for about half a minute and then she said, “Let’s go someplace where we can talk.”
I could have said, “What’s wrong with right here,” but I sensed that she wanted to talk about something other than Darrell.
“FourGees?”
FourGees is a coffee shop, a decent place for lunch and late-night live music, at Beneva and Webber. It was dark in the daytime, with amber shadows and places to talk quietly.
“I can’t stay long,” she said as she drove. “I have to go back to the office.”
The office was children’s services, about ten minutes from FourGees.
I nodded. She drove. I like company when I drive alone. I’ll listen to conservative talk shows, ball games, religious evangelists, but not music. I want no music. I want company. When I’m with other people in a car, I like to listen to them talk, which they seem to do whether or not I’m doing the driving.
Look at your watch or the time on your cell phone and count off a minute, then two, then three. Minutes become interminable when you count them. Silences become an anticipation of bad news.
We said not a word as Sally drove to FourGees and found a space directly in front of the shop.
The rain had stopped.
Silently, we got out of the car and went inside. Only two of the tables in the front room were occupied, one by a man and a small boy, and the other by three older women. The boy was playing with the straw in his drink. The women were eating slices of cake and drinking coffee. They seemed happy with one another’s company.
Sally and I marched solemnly past the counter near the rear, where a tattooed girl in her twenties said, “I’ll be right with you.”
The second room was empty. Sally hesitated as if this wasn’t what she had had in mind, and then she decided to sit on a wooden chair as far from the window as she could get. I sat too. I sat, and I waited.
“I have to tell you something, Lewis.”
She leaned over and put a hand on mine.
“Your husband isn’t dead,” I guessed.
“He’s still dead,” she said.
“You have cancer.”
“No. I think you should stop guessing.”
The girl with the tattoos appeared and asked if we had made up our minds. I ordered a plain black coffee and a slice of the same kind of cake the women in the other room were having.
“Nothing for me,” Sally said. “No, wait. Tea. Hot. Mint if you have it.”
“We have it,” the girl said. “Two forks for the cake? It’s big.”
“Sure,” Sally said.
When she was gone, Sally looked down and said, “Lewis, I’m moving.”
“I’ll help.”
“No, I’m moving to Montpelier.”
“France?”
“Vermont.”
This time, the silence almost insisted that no one break it.
“For good?” I asked.
“For good.”
“People move here from Montpelier. They don’t move from Florida to Vermont. Why?”
“My family, cousins, brother, people I’ve known all my life, people I went to school with. Besides, I have a good job offer at a hospital as social services director. Double my present salary.”
“And?”
“And,” she said, “I’ve been doing what I do for more than twenty years. I’m burned out, Lewis. I can’t stand getting up in the morning and facing children who keep getting sent back to drug-addicted parents, kids who are hurt, abused, ignored, and dumped on the system, on me, with no resources other than whatever we can get by with off the books and paperwork. I don’t want to think about the pile of cases on my desk that keeps growing. I want to be with my kids more, come home without feeling the footsteps of those kids behind me, silently calling for attention.”
“I understand.”
All the things she said were true, but I felt that something was missing, another reason that haunted her, a reason she didn’t want to share.
“Do you? Do you understand without just feeling sorry for yourself because you’re going to have to deal with another loss?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Music started. It came down from a speaker mounted high on the wall. Lilly Allen was singing one of those songs that sways gently but carries lyrics as sharp as the edge of a sheet of newspaper.
“Lewis, how many times in the more than two years we’ve known each other have we made love or even had sex?”
“None,” I said.
“I’ve respected your memory of Catherine with you, but we both have to move on. How many times have we kissed, really kissed?”
“Seventeen.”
“I make it twenty, but you’re almost certainly right. You never forget anything.”
“My curse,” I said.
“It’s the way you want it,” she said.
“When are you leaving?”
“As soon as the school year ends, so the kids won’t be too disrupted.”
“Seven weeks,” I said.
“Seven weeks,” she repeated.
The girl with the tattoos came back and placed the drinks in front of us and the cake between.
“Two forks. Enjoy.”
I would not cry, but not because of pride. It just wasn’t in me, but I would feel it. I would feel it, alone, sitting on the toilet, lying on my bed, listening to someone speak or Rush Limbaugh rant. I would feel it.
“I’m sorry,” Sally said.
I handed her a fork and answered without saying that I was sorry, too.
“It’s banana-chocolate,” I said.