The Thomas Berryman Number (2 page)

Random observation
: The other day, I showed Cat something Berryman’s girlfriend had given me: it was a Crossman air pistol. To demonstrate how it could put someone to sleep, I callously (stupidly) wounded Mrs. Mullhouse’s calico. It was too much for the old kitty, however, and she died.

Random observation
: Even Doc Fiddler’s Paradise Lounge, one of the top redneck gin mills in the state of Tennessee, has a fresh print of Jimmie Horn over the liquor these days. Horn’s strictly moral drama now, and people are partial to moral drama, no matter what.

One last observation
: In 1962, Thomas John Berryman graduated from Plains High School with one of the highest grade point averages ever recorded in Potter County, Texas. Some teachers said he had a photographic memory, and he had a measured I.Q. of one hundred sixty-six.

A little more digging revealed that he was known as the “Pleasure King,” and nicknamed “Pleasure.”

The women who’d been his girlfriends would only say that he made them feel inferior. Even the ones who’d liked him best never felt totally comfortable with him.

Most people around Clyde, Texas, thought he was a successful lawyer in the East now. At first I’d thought someone in the Berryman family started the rumor; later on, I’d learned it had been Berryman himself.

Berryman’s father was a retired circuit judge. Three weeks after he learned what his son had done in Tennessee, he died of a cerebrovascular accident.

Thomas Berryman is 6’1”, one hundred ninety-five pounds. He has black hair, hazel eyes. And extremely good concentration for a young man. He’s also charming. In fact, he just about says it all for American charm.

Background
: Four months ago, the thirty-seven-year-old mayor of our city, Jimmie Horn, was shot down under the saddest and most bizarre circumstances I can imagine.

Because of that, the
Nashville Citizen-Reporters
of last July 4th, 5th, and 6th are the three largest-selling editions the paper has ever had.

Maybe it’s because people are naturally curious when public figures are shot. They know casual facts out of their lives, and they regard these men almost as acquaintances. They want to know how, and where, and what time, and why it happened.

I believe it’s usually the same:
madman Bert Poole shoots Mayor Jimmie Horn, late in the day for no good reason.

That’s what I wrote, but only in pencil on foolscap. In the
Citizen,
I wrote a long filler about the state trooper who’d subsequently shot Poole.

It was real shit, and also crass … It was also incorrect.

Three days after the shooting, a story in the
Washington Post
reported that the man who’d shot Bert Poole hadn’t been a Tennessee state trooper as my story, and our other feature stories, had reported several times.

The man was an expensive professional killer from Philadelphia. His name was Joe Cubbah. Cubbah had been spotted in photographs of the Horn shooting; then he’d been picked up in Philadelphia.

The real Tennessee trooper, Martin Weesner, was finally found in the trunk of his own squad car. The car had been in a trooper barracks parking lot since July 3rd. Cubbah was called “an imaginative gunman” by the
Memphis Times-Scimitar.

Needless to say, this matter of a professional killer shooting down an assassin confused the hell out of everybody. It also depressed a good number of people, myself included. And it scared a lot of families into locking their doors at night.

Coincidentally, during the wake of the
Washington Post
story, the
Citizen-Reporter
received an hour-long phone call from a resident psychiatrist working at a Long Island, N.Y., hospital. The doctor explained to one of our editors how a patient of his had been talking about the Jimmie Horn shooting nearly a week before it happened. He gave out the patient’s name as Ben Toy, and he said it was fine if we wanted to send someone around to talk with him.

We wanted to send me, and that’s how I fit into the story.

As a consequence of that decision, I’m now sequestered away in a Victorian farmhouse outside of Zebulon, in Poland County. It’s November now as I mentioned.

I’d thought that I would enjoy hunting down the murderer of a friend—delicious revenge, they say—but I was wrong.

From 4
A.M.
until around eleven each day I try to collate, then make sense out of the over two thousand pages of notes, scraps, and interview transcripts that recreate the days leading up to the Horn shooting this past July.

I’ve already made an indecent amount of money from advances, magazine sales, and newspaper serials on Thomas Berryman stories. This is the book.

PART I

The First Trip North

West Hampton, July 9

In nineteen sixty-nine I won a George Polk prize for some life-style articles about black Mayor Jimmie Lee Horn of Nashville. The series was called “A Walker’s Guide to Shantytown,” but it ran in the
Citizen-Reporter
as “Black Lives.”

It wasn’t a bad writing job, but it was more a case of being in the right place at the right time: I’d written life-affirming stories about a black man in Tennessee, just a year after Martin Luther King had died there.

It felt right to people who judged things somewhere. They said the series was “vital.”

So I was lucky in ’69.

I figured things were beginning to even out the day I drove into the William Pound Institute in West Hampton, Long Island. On account of my assignment there I wouldn’t be writing any of the article about Horn’s murder. The good Horn assignments had already gone elsewhere. Higher up.

I parked my rent-a-car in a crowded yard marked
ALL HOSPITAL VISITORS ALL
. Then, armed with tape recorder, suitcoat over my arm too, I made my way along a broken flagstone path tunneling through bent old oak trees.

I didn’t really notice a lot about the hospital at first. I was busy feeling sorry for myself.

Random Observation
: The man looking most obviously lost and disturbed at the William Pound Institute—baggy white suit, torn panama hat, Monkey Ward dress shirt—must have been me.

Here was Ochs Jones, thirty-one-year-old cornpone savant, never before having been north of Washington D.C.

But the Brooks Brothers doctors, the nurses, the fire-haired patients walking around the hospital paid no attention.

Which isn’t easy—even at 9:30 on a drizzly, unfriendly morning.

Generally I’m noticed most places.

My blond hair is close-cropped, just a little seedy on the sides, already falling out on top—so that my head resembles a Franciscan monk’s. I’m slightly cross-eyed without my glasses (and because of the rain I had them off). Moreover, I’m 6’7”, and I stand out quite nicely without the aid of quirky clothes.

No one noticed, though. One doctory-looking woman said, “Hello, Michael.” “Ochs,” I told her. That was about it for introductions.

Less than 1% believing Ben Toy might have a story for me, I dutifully followed all the blue-arrowed signs marked
BOWDITCH
.

The grounds of the Pound Institute were clean and fresh-smelling and green as a state park. The hospital reminded me of an eastern university campus, someplace with a name like Ithaca, or Swarthmore, or Hobart.

It was nearly ten as I walked past huge red-brick houses along an equally red cobblestone road.

Occasionally a Cadillac or Mercedes crept by at the posted ten m.p.h. speed limit.

The federalist-style houses I passed were the different wards of the hospital.

One was for the elderly bedridden. Another was for the elderly who could still putter around—predominantly lobotomies.

One four-story building housed nothing but children aged over ten years. A little girl sat rocking in the window of one of the downstairs rooms. She reminded me of Anthony Perkins at the end of
Psycho.

I jotted down a few observations and felt silly making them. I kept one wandering eye peeled for Ben Toy’s ward: Bowditch: male maximum security.

A curious thing happened to me in front of the ward for young girls.

A round-shouldered girl was sitting on the wet front lawn close to the road where I was walking. She was playing a blond-wood guitar and singing.

There’s something goin’ on,
she just about talked the pop song.

But you don’t know what it is,

Do you, Mr. Jones?

I was Ochs Jones, thirty-one, father of two daughters … The only violent act I could recall in my life, was
hearing
—as a boy—that my great-uncle Ochs Jones had been hanged in Moon, Kentucky, as a horsethief … and
no,
I didn’t know what was going on.

As a matter of fact, I knew considerably less than I thought I did.

The last of the Federal-style houses was more rambling, less formal and kept-up than any of the others: It bordered on scrub pine woods with very green waist-high underbrush running through it. A high stockade fence had been built up as the ward’s backyard.

BOWDITCH
a fancy gold plaque by the front door said.

The man who’d contacted the
Citizen-Reporter,
Dr. Alan Shulman, met me on the front porch. Right off, Shulman informed me that this was an unusual and delicate situation for him. The hospital, he said, had only divulged information about patients a few times before—and that invariably had to do with court cases. “But an assassination,” he said, “is somewhat extraordinary. We
want
to help.”

Shulman was very New Yorkerish, with curly, scraggly black hair. He wore the kind of black-frame eyeglasses with little silver arrows in the corners. He was probably in his mid-thirties, with some kind of Brooklyn or Queens accent that was odd to my ear.

Some men slouching inside behind steel-screened windows seemed to be finding us quite a curious combination to observe.

A steady flow of collected rainwater rattled the drainpipe on the porch.

It made it a little harder for Shulman and myself to hear one another’s side of the argument that was developing.

“I left my home around five, five-fifteen this morning,” I said in a quick, agitated bluegrass drawl.

“I took an awful Southern Airways flight up to Kennedy Airport … awful flight … stopped at places like Dohren, Alabama … Then I drove an Econo-Car out to God-knows-where-but-I-don’t, Long Island. And now, you’re not going to let me in to see Toy … Is that right Doctor Shulman? That’s right, isn’t it?”

Shulman just nodded the curly black head.

Then he said something like this to me: “Ben Toy had a very bad, piss-poor night last night. He’s been up and down since he got in here … I think he
wants
to get better now … I don’t think he wants to kill himself right now … So maybe you can talk with him tomorrow. Maybe even tonight. Not now, though.”

“Aw shit,” I shook my head. I loosened up my tie and a laugh snorted out through my nose. The laugh is a big flaw in my business style. I can’t really take myself too seriously, and it shows.

When Shulman laughed too I started to like him. He had a good way of laughing that was hard to stay pissed off at. I imagined he used it on all his patients.

“Well, at least invite me in for some damn coffee,” I grinned.

The doctor took me into a back door through Bowditch’s nurse’s station.

I caught a glimpse of nurses, some patients, and a lot of Plexiglas surrounding the station. We entered another room, a wood-paneled conference room, and Shulman personally mixed me some Sanka.

After some general small talk, he told me why he’d started to feel that Ben Toy was somehow involved in the murders of Jimmie Horn, Bert Poole, and Lieutenant Mart Weesner.

I told him why most of the people at the
Citizen
doubted it.

Our reasons had to do with motion pictures of the Horn shooting. The films clearly showed young Poole shooting Horn in the chest and face.

Alan Shulman’s reasons had to do with gut feelings. (And also with the nagging fact that the police would probably never remove Ben Toy from an institution to face trial.)

Like the man or not, I was not overly impressed with his theories.

“Don’t you worry,” he assured me, “this story will be worth your time and air fare … if you handle it right.”

As part of the idea of getting my money’s worth out of the trip, I drove about six miles south after leaving the hospital.

I slipped into a pair of cut-offs in my rent-a-car, then went for my first swim in an ocean.

If I’d known how little time I’d be having for the next five months, I would have squeezed even more out of the free afternoon.

The rainy day turned into beautiful, pink-and-blue-skied night.

I was wearing bluejeans and white shirttails, walking down the hospital’s cobblestone road again. It was 8:30 that same evening and I’d been asked to come back to Bowditch.

A bear-bearded, rabbinical-looking attendant was assigned to record and supervise my visit with Ben Toy. A ring of keys and metal badges jangled from the rope belt around his Levi’s. A plastic name pin said that he was
MR. RONALD ASHER, SENIOR MENTAL HEALTH WORKER
.

The two of us, both carrying pads and pencils, walked down a long, gray-carpeted hall with airy, white-curtained bedrooms on either side.

Something about being locked in the hall made me a little tense. I was combing my hair with my fingers as I walked along.

“Our quiet room’s about the size of a den,” Asher told me. “It’s a seclusion room. Seclusion room’s used for patients who act-out violently. Act-out against the staff, or other patients, or against themselves.”

“Which did Ben Toy do?” I asked the attendant.

“Oh shit.” Big white teeth showed in his beard. “He’s been in there for all three at one time or another. He can be a total jerk-off, and then again he can be a pretty nice guy.”

Asher stopped in front of the one closed door in the hallway. While he opened it with two different keys, I looked inside through a book-sized observation window.