“I’m working on it.”
“I know. You’re in the home of one of Philip Horvecki’s few friends.”
I looked at Zo who, with pursed lips, appeared to be deciding if a burp were in order.
“My eye aches,” said Augustine.
“I’m sorry. You should take something for it.”
“I am. I’ve got a container of painkillers that begin with the letter B. Make my life easier. Tell Corkle you can’t find anything so I can go back to simply taking care of his nuttiness. I’m in pain and may never have three-dimensional vision again. I’m in desperate need of a Corkle Pocket Fishing Machine.”
“You are?”
“No, but I still seem to have something resembling a sense of humor.”
“I don’t have a sense of humor,” I said.
“It’s my turn to be sorry. Do we understand each other? Do we share the common language of English? Corkle wants to protect his grandson from anyone who might be unhappy about his paying you to look for an alternative to jolly Ronnie Gerall. We’ve been over this.”
“We have. Can I buy you a cup of coffee or a sandwich?” I asked. “The Hob Nob is five minutes away. Great sandwiches.”
“I’m supposed to be threatening you,” Augustine said. “I can’t do it if you feel sorry for me and offer me coffee and sandwiches. Tell the little man I’m sorry.”
“For what?” I asked.
“Playing the role,” he said.
Augustine turned off his phone before I could ask him what he meant. I turned back to Zo Hirsch. It couldn’t have been more than ten seconds later that a rock came through the window, showering the room with glass. I turned to the window again and watched Augustine drive out of sight to the metallic clank of a piece of dragging undercarriage.
I handed the phone back to the stunned Zo Hirsch who seemed to be baffled by the gift. Then he hung it up.
“What did he do that for?” Zo asked.
“His job,” I said. “Sorry.”
“His job is to throw … forget it. It’s just another piece of crap thrown at me.”
“Want another beer?” Hirsch asked, looking at the rock near his feet.
“No thanks, but I do have a question.”
“Ask.”
“You were a friend of Philip Horvecki?” I said.
“Phil the Pill, Phil the Eel,” he said, sitting down in what appeared to be his favorite chair. “Much beloved by all who knew him. He was almost a saint.”
He looked at me and waited.
“I’m lying,” he said.
“I know,” I said.
“Phil Horvecki was an asshole.”
“You weren’t friends?”
“He was on the bowling team I manage,” said Zo. “Zo’s Foes. Phil Horvecki was a man of many alibis, always ready to criticize the play of others. He will be easily replaced. I wish he had had a funeral so I could stand up and say it. Rest in peace you A-number-one asshole. I did have an occasional beer with him and some of the other bowlers. Small group got together at Bennigan’s on Monday nights after our league games.”
“Was he friendly with any of the bowlers?”
Zo was smiling now.
“The cost of further information is your forgetting to deliver your papers till the end of the week.”
“What papers?” I said.
“Just me,” said Zo. “But I wouldn’t call the relationship friendly. We shmoozled.”
“Shmoozled?”
“Talked.”
“About?”
“Who knows? We have a deal?”
“Not yet,” I said.
“He told me about people he had cheated out of property. He didn’t think it was cheating. He went after old people, mostly.”
“Old people who might want to kill him?”
“Old people who have sons or daughters who might be mad enough to do some killing. Phil the Pill had a restraining order against two such offspring who threatened to kill him.”
“You know their names?”
“No,” he said. “I’ve been dreaming about my wife. Bad dreams.”
I moved toward the door.
“Ever meet Horvecki’s daughter?” I asked.
“Once,” he said. “She stopped by the bowling alley and just sat there watching. Skinny thing. Big scared eyes. I didn’t talk to her. Horvecki didn’t even introduce her, just said, ‘My daughter,’ once when he saw me looking.”
“How did he say it?”
“Say what? ‘My daughter’? I don’t know. Almost as if he were apologizing or something.”
I had no response, so he continued as I opened the door.
“I’ve been thinking about killing Vezquez, but there are too many damned Vesquezes out there and too much killing.”
“The phone book probably has a couple of columns of Vezquezes,” I said.
“I don’t mean people named … forget it. Leave me with my thoughts of Roberto Clemente.”
I offered to help him clean up the mess, but Zo just looked at it and said, “I’ll take care of it.”
“Can I … ?”
“No one can,” he said.
I left him. I had another appointment, maybe another client.
I sat on my bike and called Dixie Cruise at the coffee bar on Main Street where she served espresso and kept the Internet-connected patrons happy and their electronics running. Dixie was slim and trim, with very black hair in a short style. Dixie lived in a two-room apartment in a slightly run-down twelve-flat apartment building on Ringling Boulevard, a block from the main post office. The apartment was almost laboratory clean, neat, and filled with computers and electronic gear.
“Working on it, Mr. L.F.,” Dixie said in her down-home Florida accent. “Lady knows her stuff. Horvecki’s daughter Rachel seems to have migrated to an alternate universe. Since her father’s murder, she hasn’t used a credit card, written a check, flown on an airplane, booked a room at a motel or hotel, or rented a car, at least not in her own name. She’s running on cash and another name. Every Sarasota business, from dry cleaners to Red Lobster, has no record of her having been there.”
“Keep looking,” I said.
“You keep paying in cash, I keep looking. I’ve got bills to pay and things to buy for my wedding.”
“You’re getting married?”
“Didn’t I tell you?”
“No.”
“Wedding’ll be in June. First Baptist. Reception after at Cafe Bacci. You and the cowboy are invited. You’ll get an invitation.”
“New address,” I said, and gave her the address.
“My beau’s name is Dan Rosenfeld. He’s an airplane mechanic at Dolphin.”
“Congratulations,” I said.
“Thanks. I’ll keep looking for her. Today, I check on unidentified bodies found from North Carolina to Key West.”
6
*
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 cr
ossed 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 und
erage 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.
Bright Futures: A Lew Fonesca Mystery (Lew Fonesca Novels) Page 7