Stuart Kaminsky - Bright Futures

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?”