“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.