The Thomas Berryman Number (3 page)

The room
was
tiny.

It had gunboat metal screens and red bars on small, mud-spattered windows. A half-eaten bowl of cereal and milk was on the windowsill. Outside was the stockade wall and an exercise yard.

Ben Toy was seated on the room’s only furniture, a narrow blue pinstriped mattress. He was wearing a black cowboy Stetson, but when he saw my face in the window he took it off.

“Come on the hell in,” I heard a friendly, muffled voice. “The door’s only triple-locked.”

Just then Asher opened it.

Ben Toy was a tall, thin man, about thirty, with a fast, easy, hustler’s smile. His blond hair was oily, unwashed. He was Jon Voight on the skids.

Toy was wearing white pajama bottoms with no top. His ribs were sticking out to be counted. His chest was covered with curly, auburn hair, however, and he was basically rugged-looking.

According to Asher, Toy had tried to starve himself when he’d first come in the hospital. Asher said he’d been burly back then.

When Toy spoke his voice was soft. He seemed to be trying to sound hip. N.Y.-L.A. dope world sounds.

“You look like a Christian monk, man,” he drawled pleasantly.

“No shit,” I laughed, and he laughed too. He seemed pretty normal. Either that, or the black-bearded aide was a snake charmer.

After a little bit of measuring each other up, Toy and I went right into Jimmie Horn.

Actually, I started on the subject, but Toy did most of the talking.

He knew what Horn looked like; where Horn had lived; precisely where his campaign headquarters had been. He knew the names of Jimmie Horn’s two children; his parents’ names; all sorts of impossible trivia nobody outside of Tennessee would have any interest in.

At that point, I found myself talking rapidly and listening very closely. The Sony was burning up tape.

“You think you know who shot Horn up?” Toy said to me.

“I think I do, yes. A man named Bert Poole shot him. A chronic bumbler who lived in Nashville all his life. A fuck-up.”

“This
bumbler,”
Toy asked. “How did you figure out he did it?”

His question was very serious; forensic, in a country pool hall way. He was slowly turning the black Stetson around on his fist.

“For one thing,” I said, “I saw it on television. For another thing, I’ve talked to a shitload of people who were there.”

Toy frowned at me. “Guess you talked to the wrong shitload of people,” he said. He was acting very sure of himself.

It was just after that when Toy spoke of the contact, or bagman, involved with Jimmie Horn.

It was then also that I heard the name Thomas Berryman for the first time.

Provincetown, June 6

The time Toy spoke of was early June of that year; the place was Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Young Harley John Wynn parked in the shadows behind the Provincetown City Hall and started off toward Commercial Street with visions of power and money dancing in his head. Wynn was handsome, fair and baby-faced like the early F. Scott Fitzgerald photographs. His car was a Lincoln Mark IV. In some ways he was like Thomas Berryman. Both men were thoroughly modern, coldly sober, distressingly sure of themselves.

For over three weeks, Harley Wynn had been making enquiries about Berryman. He’d finally been contacted the Tuesday before that weekend.

The meeting had been set up for Provincetown. Wynn was asked to be reading a
Boston Globe
on one of the benches in front of the City Hall at 9:45 p.m.

It was almost 9:30, and cool, even for Cape Cod in June.

The grass was freshly mown, and it had a good smell for Wynn: it reminded him of college quadrangles in the deep South. Cape Cod itself reminded him of poliomyelitis.

Careful of his shoeshine, he stayed in tree shadows just off the edge of the lawn. He sidestepped a snake, which turned out to be a tangle of electrician’s tape.

He was startled by some green willow fingers, and realized he was still in a driving fog.

It wasn’t night on Commercial Street, and as Wynn came into the amber lights he began to smell light cologne instead of sod.

He sat on one of the freshly painted benches—bone white, like the City Hall—and he saw that he was among male and female homosexuals.

There were several tall blonds in scarlet and powder blue halter suits. Small, bushy-haired men in white bucks and thongs, and bright sailor-style pants. There were tank-shirts and flapping sandals and New York
Times
magazine models posing under street-lamps.

Wynn lighted a Marlboro, noticed uneasiness in his big hands, and took a long, deep breath.

He looked up and down the street for Ben Toy.

Up on the porch of the City Hall, his eyes stopped to watch flour-white gargoyles and witchy teenagers parading to and from the public toilets.

Harley Wynn’s hand kept slipping inside his suitjacket and touching a thick, brown envelope.

Across the street, Ben Toy, thirty, and Thomas Berryman, twenty-nine, were sitting together drinking beer and Taylor Cream in a rear alcove of the A. J. Fogarty bar.

Rough-hewn men with expensive sunglasses, they brought to mind tennis bums.

They were talking about Texas with two Irish girls they’d discovered in Hyannis. One girl wore a tartan skirt and top; the other was wearing a pea-coat, rolled-up jeans, and striped baseball-player socks.

Toy and Berryman told old Texas stories back and forth, and listened to less-polished but promising Boston tales.

Oona, the taller, prettier girl, was telling how she sometimes walked Massachusetts Avenue in Boston, pretending she was a paraplegic. “Like all these business types from the Pru,” she said, “they get too embarrassed to ogle. I can be by myself if I want to.”

Thomas Berryman stared at her boozily with great red eyes. “That’s a very funny bit,” he smiled slightly. Then he was tilting his head back and forth with the pendulum of a Miller beer clock.

It was ten o’clock. Miller’s was still the champagne of bottled beers. Bette Midler was singing boogie on the jukebox.

A handsome blond man was talking to Oona from a stool at the bar. “You know who you remind me of,” he smiled brightly, “you remind me of Lauren Hutton.”

“Excuse me,” the tall girl smiled back innocently, “but you’ve obviously mistaken me for someone who gives a shit.”

This time Berryman laughed out loud. All of them did.

Then Berryman spoke quietly to Ben Toy. “Don’t you think he’s been waiting long enough now?”

Toy licked beer foam off his upper lip. “No,” he said. “Hell no.”

“You’re sure about that, Ben? Got it buttoned up for me? …”

“The man’s just getting uncomfortable about now. Taking an occasional deep breath. Getting real p.o.’d at me. I want him good and squirmy when I go talk to him … Besides though, I don’t need this paranoia shit.”

Berryman grinned at him. “Just checking,” he said. “So long as you deliver, you do it any way you want to.”

At 10:30, forty-five minutes after the arranged time, Ben Toy got up and slowly walked up to A. J. Fogarty’s front window.

He was later to remember watching Wynn through the Calligraphia window lettering. Wynn in an expensive blue suit with gray pinstripes. Wynn in brown Florsheim tie shoes and a matching brown belt. Southern macho, Toy thought.

For his part, Ben Toy was wearing a blue muslin shirt with a red butterfly design on the back. With pearl snaps. He was a big, blue-eyed man; Berryman’s back-up; Berryman’s old friend from Texas; a Texas rake.

Among boys in Amarillo, Ben Toy had once been known as “the funniest man in America.”

He smiled now as Wynn started to read the
Boston Globe
again. The money was apparently in his left side jacket pocket. He kept rubbing his elbow up against it.

Harley John Wynn couldn’t have helped noticing Toy as he left Fogarty’s bar. Toy looked like a drunken lord: he had long blond hair, and an untroubled face.

He walked slowly behind a college boy in a mauve Boston College sweatshirt. He waded through various kinds of Volkswagens on the street; then he calmly sat down on Harley Wynn’s bench.

In his own right, southern lawyer Harley Wynn was a cool, collected, and moderately successful young man. He knew himself to be clearheaded and analytical. He identified with men like Bernie Cornfeld and Robert Yablans—the brash, bootleg quarterback types in the business world. Now he was making a big play of his own.

Wynn’s generally
together
appearance didn’t fool Ben Toy, however. The southern man’s hands had given him away. They were sweaty, and had taken newspaper print up off the
Boston Globe.
Telltale smudges were on his forehead and right on the tip of his nose.

“I was just thinking about all of this,” Wynn gestured around the street and environs. “The fact that you’re nearly an hour late. The faggots … You’re trying very hard to put me at a disadvantage.” The southerner smiled boyishly. He held out an athletic-looking hand. “I approve of that,” he said.

Ben Toy ignored the outstretched hand. He grunted indifferently and looked down at his boottips.

Harley Wynn laughed at the way nervous men try to condescend.

Toy still said nothing.

“All right then,” Wynn’s southern twang stiffened. “… Horn’s a fairly intelligent nigger … Very intelligent, matter of fact.”

Toy looked up and established eye contact with the man.

“Horn has affronted sensibilities in the South, however. That’s neither here nor there. My interest in the matter, your interest, is purely monetary.” He looked for some nod of agreement from Ben Toy.

“I don’t have anything to say to that,” Toy finally spoke. He lighted a cigarette, spread his long, bluejeaned legs, sat back on the bench and watched traffic.

The young lawyer began to force smiles. He was capable of getting quick acceptance and he was overly used to it. He glanced to where Toy was looking, expecting someone else to join them.

“You’ll be provided with detailed information on Horn,” he said. “Daily routines and schedules if you like …” The lawyer spewed out information like a computer.

“All right, stop it now.” Toy finally swung around and looked at Wynn again. His teeth were clenched tight.

He jabbed the man in the stomach with his fist. “I could kill you, man,” he said. “Stop fucking around with me.”

The lawyer was pale, perspiring at the hairline. He wasn’t comprehending.

Toy cleared his throat before he spoke again. He spit up an impressive gob on the lawn. Headlights went across Harley Wynn’s eyes, then over his own.

“Berryman wants a reason,” he said. “He wants to know exactly why you’re offering all this money.”

Toy cautioned Harley Wynn with his finger before he let him answer. “Don’t fuck with me.”

“I haven’t been fucking with you,” Wynn said. “I understand the seriousness of this. The precautions … Infact, that’s the explanation you want … There can be no suspicions after this thing is over with. No loose ends. This isn’t a simple matter of killing Horn. My people are vulnerable to suspicion. They want no questions asked of them afterward.”

Ben Toy smiled at the lawyer’s answer. He slid over closer to Wynn. He put his arm around the pin-striped suit. This was where he earned all his pay.

“Then I think we’ve had enough Looney Tunes for tonight,” he said in a soft, Texas drawl. “You owe us half of our money as of right now. You have the money inside your jacket.”

Wynn tried to pull away, “I was told I’d get to talk with Berryman himself,” he protested.

“You just give me the money you’re supposed to have,” Toy said. “The money or I leave. No more talk.”

The southern man hesitated, but he finally took out the brown envelope. The contact was completed.

Ben Toy walked away with fifty thousand dollars stuffed around his dungarees. He was feeling very good about himself.

Over his head the City Hall clock sounded like it was floating in the sky.
Bongg. Bongg. Bongg.

Inside the pub window Thomas Berryman was clicking off important photographs of Harley John Wynn.

The Thomas Berryman Number had begun.

New York City, June 12

Six days after the first exchange of money, a white pigeon walked down Central Park South in New York City, stopped to taste a soggy wad of Kleenex, then flew up to the granite ledge surrounding the windows of Thomas Berryman’s apartment.

Berryman says there are always pathetic city pigeons perched on his ledge. And that they’ll never look in at him or anyone else.

There are also long cigarillo ends all over the ledge.

And there’s an old Texarkana trick of burning off bird feathers with cigars.

The window is up ten stories over Central Park South. The building is picturesque, a dark, towering graystone hotel.

A famous fascist banker once killed himself out of one of the nearby floor-to-ceiling windows. He tied a rope to a radiator, jumped, hanged himself.

Because his neck is thick and his hair so black, Berryman looks fierce from the back. Face-on it’s different. People trust him right away. Nearly everyone does.

Thomas Berryman says he’s a hard worker, a brooder when it comes to work. He says he’d read all of Charles Dickens by the time he was fourteen, but that he just did it to accomplish a task.

He’s a broad-shouldered man, with beautiful woolly hair, and a seemingly darker, bushy, Civil War mustache.

His look reminded me of Irish football players, or at least my limited sports-desk experience with their pictures. Also, he would be right for Tiparillo cigar ads.

On this particular June morning, he flicked on a Carousel projector’s fan and tugged on a customary wake-up cigar.

He pulled curtains on a full wall of glass, and Central Park’s lollipop trees and hansom cabs disappeared. The Plaza Hotel disappeared.

One lazy-bodied horse in a blue straw hat disappeared last and caused Berryman to laugh. He hadn’t worked for four months. He’d played in the sun at MazatlÁn and Caneel Bay. He was fresh as a rose.

Thomas Berryman sometimes spoke of his individual jobs as numbers. He would talk about getting ready for another little number; about having performed a number. In that respect, this would be the Horn number.