The Thomas Berryman Number (11 page)

He was ministering to the sick, too. Fluffing feather pillows. Opening old singed shades to bright ocean sunlight.

He carried Oona a pewter pot of coffee and honey cakes in a different bedroom from the one she’d thrown up in. The two of them didn’t have much to say, and only slowly did she realize he’d moved her, and changed her clothes sometime between night and morning. Put her in black tights.

“If you don’t want to stay,” he said, “you ought to go pretty soon. I had to find out, you know. You don’t have to be afraid to leave.” He continued to break bags of natural sugar into her coffee. “I’ve never harmed any friend. Not even anyone I liked. Don’t be afraid.”

She sipped the steamy coffee and watched him over the cup’s rim. Her eyes were slow and sad. Berryman had already figured that if she’d wanted to go, she would have tried to sneak away earlier.

“Coffee all right?”

He frowned at the dumbness of his question.

Oona refused to pout, however, “S’all right,” she said. She was drinking it.

“Scumbag,” she added after another sip.

Berryman felt obliged to offer her some explanation. “It just gives me too much freedom to stop now,” he offered first. “I don’t even think I want to.

“I remember when I was … some teenage year. Eighteen. Seventeen, nineteen … I drew up this philosophy. Ben and I did … I suppose it was more me than Ben…

“It was more complicated, but it really boiled down to—fuck it all. Somebody named me the pleasure king. At least I made a choice,” he said.

“Let me put it another way. Take an average person. Approach him with an offer to do what I do. Bad stuff, right? All kinds of immoral. Imagine it, though.

“Say this man is offered fifty to kill a total stranger. Say he has the know-how to do it. That’s important for it to be a fair question.

“What do you think would happen? In most cases?”

Oona’s chin hadn’t moved from the coffee cup. “I don’t know,” she said.

“That’s no answer, babe.

“OK, that’s what you think. No, then. He’d call the police, OK?”

Berryman could see she was looking for some killer line. Some way to flush his toilet but good. He wouldn’t let her. “So you mean if I put fifty thousand dollars on this bed,” he asked her. “Better yet, if I’d left it at that little shop where you worked. Real money. Tens, twenties, fifties. And I’d told you—just to take a weak example—‘get rid of the manager of the Hyannis A&P’? No action, huh? …”

She said
scheis.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing.”

“You said something. Say it.”

“Nothing. It doesn’t matter.
Scheis
means shit in Russian.”

“Uh. I don’t think so.”

Oona Quinn didn’t say any more, but she didn’t go anywhere, either.

Revere, Massachusetts, July 22

Oona Quinn had grown up in one of a thousand similar claptrap houses in the amusement park town of Revere, Massachusetts. A pop singer named Freddie Cannon had grown up in Revere, too. Then he’d written a hit song about Palisades Park. It was that kind of uninspiring town.

The Quinn house had been bright white, then neutral green, then pale yellow, matching her parents’ diminishing regard for their 1955 purchase.

In some ways the house even resembled her father. The grass was cut short, but not trimmed. The Weatherbeater paint job looked passable from the street, but was peeling, scabbing, up close. The front porch was starting to sag; and the screen in the door was torn.

I went out of my way to stop at the Quinns’ on my way back from Provincetown that third week in July. I wanted to know what kind of a girl would take up with a young man like Thomas Berryman.

When I first met him, Oona’s father was as suspicious and closemouthed as she had been. He made me give him my wallet and we both stood out on the front lawn while he read all the press cards and matched signatures.

“My newspaper is willing to pay you for an interview,” I mentioned at one point.

He nodded, but didn’t indicate
yes
or
no.
“What do you know about Oona?” he asked me.

“I’ve met her and talked to her. She told me about you and her mother. She’s in some trouble.”

“Yeah, I figured that,” the man said. He gestured toward the house and I walked behind him to the front steps.

I sat out on the sagging porch with Frankie Quinn for nearly two hours that afternoon. He was a forty-three-year-old man with graying muttonchop sideburns, a flattened pug nose, a considerable two-pillow pouch.

He didn’t look like he could possibly be Oona’s father.

He worked as a four-to-one
A.M.
bartender at the Mayflower in South Boston, he told me. But he handled none of the action there: no gambling, no drugs, no prostitutes. He brought home an honest one-sixty-one a week.

He said he’d remained a devout Roman Catholic until the 1960s when the English mass had come in. He’d felt personally betrayed by that, and by the
goom-bi-ya
folk singing.

His personal cross to bear, his family’s cross, was his extraordinary thirst for stout. He had what he called a “case a day habit.”

His wife, Margaret, and Oona were the two best things that had ever happened to him. He made no bones about it. He wanted to know everything I knew about her, and he wanted to talk about her himself.

So far, so good, I thought. I switched on the Sony.

“I could have been stricter with Oona,” Frankie Quinn admitted between sips of Guinness and plunges into a box of Ritz crackers. “She got her own way a little more than most. Because she was so pretty, you know. We may have been too good to her. I don’t know if we were or not.”

“She’s a good kid, a wonderful one. Until she stops hearing how pretty she is. Then she kinda falls apart. Then everything’s a downer for her. She never learned to cope if you know what I mean. Maybe she doesn’t have to, though. Some people never seem to have to.”

“I don’t remember that she had many girlfriends growing up. Too many boyfriends. I used to come home Saturday night it looked like a bachelor’s party here. All these gazuzus from Cathedral High School. Just waiting for her to tell them to go get her a pistachio ice cream down the store …”

“She talks a lot about you,” I told Frankie Quinn.

Quinn laughed. His voice went way up into the tenor range.

“We got along ok, me and her. Used to go on these long, long walks down the beach. People staring at me like I’m some Irish Mafioso with his young bird.

“It’s Margaret she’s got problems with these days. Margaret never got over she doesn’t go to church anymore. What the hell, now Margaret doesn’t go herself.”

Quinn stopped talking and looked hard at me for a moment. He had watery eyes that were always shiny.

“You’re Thomas Berryman, aren’t you?” he said quite seriously.

I was too startled to answer for a second. I thought he’d gotten tipsy. Then I told him that I wasn’t Berryman and went looking for more identification in my wallet.

“No, no.” He grabbed my arm and held it out of my pocket. “I knew you weren’t. Just had to make sure of it. I got nervous, I guess.”

He went on to tell me that Oona had mentioned Berryman to him during several phone calls over the past few months.

Then he brought up Jimmie Horn.

He said Oona had dropped the name during a phone call on July 3rd. Then on the 4th of July he’d read that Jimmie Horn had been murdered down South.

Quinn clarified further. He said that Oona had called him from Tennessee on July 2nd, 3rd, and 4th. He said that she was almost hysterical when she called on the 4th. He wanted me to tell him why, and I told him what I could.

Margaret Quinn came home just after five. Frankie and I were still out oh the porch.

Margaret was a slender; dark-haired woman who reminded me of her daughter. I agreed with Frank Quinn’s estimate that he was a lucky man.

I also got the feeling that neither one of them had any idea what their daughter had become. In their eyes she was still a high school girl, thought high school girl thoughts, wore plaid jumpers and blue blazers.

I liked the Quinns, but I also felt sorry for them. What was about to happen to them, especially if my story broke nationally, frightened me. Frank and Margaret Quinn were going to be totally unprepared to deal with it.

In general, I just wasn’t meeting the kind of bad people I’d expected to be connected with an assassination.

In the meantime, though, I had the problem that Oona Quinn wasn’t telling me everything I needed to know. At least maybe she wasn’t. And maybe she was lying to me altogether.

I didn’t like it at all, but then
it
wasn’t asking to be liked.

I drove back from Massachusetts to New York in a gray-blue rainstorm. It was Saturday night, nearly 6:30 when I began the trip.

The storm came on strong as I was winding away from the Revere amusement park area. The families-with-young-children crowd was just arriving on the opposite side of the street.

The first raindrops were half-dollar-sized, and I had to close up all the car windows in spite of the heat.

The downpour didn’t let up once until I was getting off the New London ferry back on Long Island. I began to feel like that L’il Abner character with the personal rain-cloud that follows him everywhere he goes.

Every light in Berryman’s house was burning. Floodlights on top of the garages showed up large patches of white dune grass.

I eased up the driveway, crunching gravel, fantasizing either a party or a suicide.

Oona was sitting all by herself in the front room. She was wrapped up in a red star quilt on the couch, bare feet and head showing, watching the TV.

“Ochs?” she looked at the dark screen door and called. “Is that Ochs?”

I stood on the porch, wondering who else it could be. Then I started to rap on the wood frame around the door. “Anybody home?” I called out. I was acting like I was fresh back from a ten-duck shoot. I was psyched up to talk with her about Tennessee.

She wasn’t in the mood for that, though.

“We can talk tomorrow,” she said. “Tomorrow’s soon enough. You’ve had enough for tonight, little man.”

I sat down in a musty easy chair. “Little man?” I laughed.

She sat across the width of the room wrapped up in her ball of red quilt. She was looking at me kind of funny. Boy-girl funny, I thought.

All scrunched up on the couch, she seemed to be freezing cold. She looked like she wanted someone to cuddle.

Both of us sat there not saying anything.
Easy Rider
was playing on TV, but it was already past the Jack Nicholson part. I was thinking that Oona reminded me of those high-paid and basically overwhelming photographic models … only this was the way they were behind the scenes: high-strung, and strung-out.

She watched me with a troubled look on her face. Then she smiled. “I’m going up now,” she said.

She made cocoa in the kitchen. Then she slipped up the creaky stairs with a pewter cup sticking out of her quilt like a candle. “Ochs,” she called from the top of the stairs, “Tom Berryman isn’t going to show up here.”

I sat downstairs trying to figure out what she had meant by that. Finally, after another ten minutes or so, I went upstairs to the room I was using.

I sprawled flat-out on a six-foot-long spring bed. My feet were sticking out the iron rungs.

I lay there in my white shirt and boxer shorts, smoking, watching the man in the moon, going a little crazy inside.

It’s not my favorite way to relax after a long day, but it’s a way.

I tried thinking about some of the things I had to ask her the next day. I couldn’t organize those thoughts, though.

I reached back and pulled the chain lamp over my bed.

I took off my shirt and brought a crinkly sheet up around my chin. Itchy new beard. Sandy sheets. Man in the moon looking puffy—like he’d been in a fistfight.

I heard bare feet padding out in the hall.

The bathroom door opened. Sound of the chain lamp in there. Bottles, Charlie and Pot Pourri, tinkling.

She ran herself a tub, and didn’t come out again until after I was asleep.

In the morning it was business as usual. The gardener out in the yard. Toes wiggling in wool socks. Her nervousness before the microphone. My nervousness with her.

Oona said she would tell me anything I wanted to know. She also said that she got a kick out of my 1930s Bible Belt morality. She wasn’t being mean, just truthful.

New York City, June 21

Lying around outside Berryman’s largest garage, just collecting seagull shit and other natural indignities, there is a black Porsche Targa, a Cadillac, and a mint-condition tan Mercedes 450SE convertible.

Early one morning in the last week of June, Berryman drove Oona into midtown Manhattan in the convertible. The air was thick, gauzy, which was good for hiding housing tracts and cigarette billboards.

The two of them jabbered and kidded for the entire two-hour commute. Hollering over wind and WABC, she told him that she’d become aware she was straightening her hair before mirrors some twenty or twenty-five times a day. But she told the story as a very funny joke.

He finally dropped her off to shop on Fifth Avenue. Watched her floppy yellow skimmer go through the waves of sleepy office workers like an umbrella. Disappear into Lord & Taylor.

Then Berryman used the sluggish blocking of a growling city bus to inch his way up to Central Park South, and (he was hoping) Ben Toy.

Ben Toy wasn’t at the Central Park apartment, so Berryman tried to call him at his own apartment. He tried to call him at the Flower & Toy, and at the apartments of lady friends.

He lighted a cigarillo and sat at his work desk, wondering what had happened to Toy. He couldn’t remember passing a month without seeing the funniest man in America.

After thinking about Toy for a while, getting as depressed as he allowed himself to get, he went to his wall safe. He took out fifteen fifty-dollar bills and he copied an address from a small red pad kept in with the cash. The address was 88 East End Avenue. Berryman was back in business. The business was Jimmie Horn.