The Thomas Berryman Number (7 page)

The second picture was of the same blond man turned toward a street hustler this time. The second man wore bluejean biballs with no shirt, and a bluejean cap with a peak. The blond man’s eyes were half-closed and his mouth was open in a capital O. It looked like a candid comedy picture.

The final shot was the blond man again, but standing beside Ben Toy. This Ben Toy weighed twenty to thirty pounds more than when I’d seen him at the hospital. He was physically impressive to look at. Behind the two men was a white municipal building, a library or courthouse. The blond man seemed to be pointing right at the camera.

I was certain that he was Harley John Wynn.

Soon after I looked at the pictures, I heard a loud creaking noise inside the apartment. I looked across the room, and saw that the front door was slowly opening. I was helpless to do anything but watch it.

First a hat, then Leroy Cooper’s face appeared in a foot-wide crack. “How long you gonna be?” he complained. “Damn, man, you’re, taking too long for this.”

I said nothing to Cooper. I felt as though my skull had been shattered by someone swinging a heavy metal bar. Somehow, the experience had translated into nausea too.

Getting no answer from me, Cooper slowly shook his head. He shut the door again. I heard him swearing outside. Very slowly, I was getting an emotional grasp of the situation I was involved in: I was starting to understand genuine fear of being hurt; the ability to take lives; fast, unexpected death.

Eventually I regrouped and left the building. I sent the three photographs to Lewis Rosten in Nashville. Then I spent the rest of the day visiting psychiatrists and psychologists who’d worked with Ben Toy.

I also ate a pork chop sandwich in a lunch shop run by some Greek men. The chop was silver-dollar size with the bone still in it. Because of the bone, the Greek men couldn’t cut the sandwich. I ate around it, not completely understanding how or why people live in New York City.

That night, after dinner with Alan Shulman, I called home.

My wife Nan said she was missing me, and I was missing her too. Nan knows how to put me on an even keel, and I’d been flying just a little too high in New York.

We talked about the Berryman story, and talking with her I began to feel that I’d accomplished some things.

After we finished, Nan put on my daughters for two minutes each.

Janie Bug said almost nothing. Then she started to cry because her time was up.

Little Cat said she’d pray for me at Trinity Episcopal if I promised to bring her back one of those miniature Empire State Buildings.

That kind of thing (attitude) upsets me, but I don’t know what to do about it.

I tried to go to sleep, but I couldn’t quite get there.

Amagansett, July 13

Random Observation
: I’d been handed a ticket on the fast rail, and I was well on my way to God knew where. It was Tom Wickerdom or bust.

Or was it? I began to remember strange, sad stories about men called “assassination buffs.” I remembered people laughing at the expense of an ex-newsman from Memphis who was still dredging up facts about Martin Luther King’s murder.

My body was trying to accept another northern morning. It was agreeably warm outside, but springwarm.

It was 8
A.M.
and I was badly in need of a caffeine fix. I had to settle for nicotine, American-tobacco style.

Cigarette in hand, I surveyed a big, gray Victorian-style house bordering the yard of William Seward Junior High in Amagansett. I was fingering a rash under my new beard. In retrospect, I think the lack of sleep had caught up with me.

The big house had four white gables and a black Fleetwood sticking out of the garage. The house number told me it was Miss Ettie Hatfield’s place, and I was properly impressed with the living style of the Bowditch nurse.

Miss Hatfield had been night charge nurse on Bowditch for over thirty-five years. Both Shulman and Ronald Asher said she was the only person on Bowditch Ben Toy might have opened up to. Miss Hatfield was a magical old lady, they said. She was the one who’d originally alerted Shulman to the Jimmie Horn references in Toy’s ramblings.

I could distinguish a bald head reading a newspaper inside the house’s darkened living room. Steam was drifting up from a coffee cup on the windowsill.

I slogged up the spongy-wet front lawn, stood on a wet, bristle mat, and tried to get a brass lionhead to make noise for me. The knocker would stick on the downswing—then it would make a sound like
ttthummm.
Stick, then
ttthummm.

“Doesn’t work right.” A man’s voice finally came from inside. “I’m coming around. I’m coming around.”

He of the bald head, an ancient fellow in a plaid shirt with black string tie, finally opened up the front door.

He was Miss Hatfield’s father, and he appeared to be well into his nineties. He shook from Parkinson’s disease, he told me, but other than that, everything was shipshape.

“She’s sleepin’ now,” he said after we’d gotten our autobiographies in order. “Works nights up the hospital. I just picked her up seven-fifteen.”

The old man looked down at a handsome gold watch, searched the dial for arms, looked back up at me.

“Made my fortune sellin’ these Benruses,” he remarked. “You’re about six foot six, aren’t you?” he went on.

“Six foot seven,” I blushed, then slouched out of an old,
no, I don’t play basketball
habit.

Mr. Hatfield shook his head and made a clucking noise with his cheek. “Seventy-nine fuckin’ inches,” he said. “Here I stand sixty-one and a half. Used to be sixty-four. Hell, Ettie’s near sixty-three herself.”

I couldn’t help laughing at the way he’d said it, and the old man chortled along with me. I asked what time I should come back to talk with his daughter.

“Aw hell, I’m goin’ to wake her now.”

He gave me a little hand signal to follow him inside. “She’s been expectin’ you all yesterday. Ever since Ben Toy told her you come. I ever let you get away, she’d cut me off my cream of wheat.”

He went up the stairs chucking to himself. He was a country boy, in his own quaint Long Island, N.Y., way.

I met Miss Hatfield in a parlor room
already
smelling strongly of musk.

The nurse was a smily, white-haired lady with a little hitch in her walk. She was a fast-walking limper though, a female Walter Brennan.

“How’re you this fine morning?” She shook my hand with some of the friendliness I’d been missing since coming up North. “I’m Ettie. Be more than happy to help you all I can … Alan Shulman already said it’d be fine.” She grinned perfect shiny false teeth. “Heard about your mess-up with young Asher. Tsk. Tsk.”

The little nurse had completely taken over the room. Her big smile was everywhere. Ettie shit, I was thinking, this was my Great-Aunt Mary Elizabeth Collins Jones—the one who had me pegged.

“Sit down. Sit down,” she said to me. “Daddy, why don’t you take a nice walk?” She turned to her father.

The old fellow had just settled into a cushiony velvet love seat. It took him a while to get up, and to hobble across the room. “Why don’t she take a nice flyin’ crap for herself?” he loud-whispered as he passed my chair.

“Not while this nice young man is here,” Ettie Hatfield said without missing a beat.

She talked for as long as I wanted to listen. She was very thorough, very serious once she got going. She exhausted her memory for every last detail, cursing when one wouldn’t come back to her.

The nurse had heard a lot of anecdotes about the way Ben Toy and Berryman had grown up in Texas; but she also knew stories about several of the killings. Curiosities, which I filled my notebook with:

Thomas Berryman had been married in Mexico when he was fifteen.

Berryman’s mother died of lung cancer when he was eleven.

Both of them had apparently been well liked around Clyde, Texas. Berryman was called the “Pleasure King”; Ben Toy was called “the funniest man in America.”

Ben Toy had gone through a period where he’d worn his mother’s underwear whenever she left him alone in the house.

The first man Berryman ever shot was a priest from New Mexico.

Berryman had been wounded in a New York shooting in 1968.

Berryman had received one hundred thousand dollars in two payments to kill Jimmie Horn. The money was probably being held by a man named Michael Kittredge.

Ben Toy had advised Berryman not to take the Horn job. He didn’t want to be party to the assassination. Berryman had told him Horn was going to be shot whether he did it or not.

“Most patients have their little tales,” Miss Hatfield explained to me at one point. “You’ll hear about how they’ve had relations with these three hundred women—and then they’ll tell you how they think they may be impotent.” The old lady laughed. “Sometimes it’s not so funny. Sometimes it
is,
though.

“Now Ben Toy,” she went on, “he was sounding pretty authentic to me. No attempt to impress anybody. No big contradictions in things he said … That’s why I told Doctor Shulman.”

She stood up and stepped away from her easy chair. “I have something to show you,” she said. “This is my big contribution.”

She went over and got a brown schoolboy’s duffel bag sitting beside the velvet love seat. “Carry all my little gewgaws to work in this,” she laughed.

She unzippered the bag and reached around inside for a minute or so.

She took out a bent photograph and handed it over to me. Harley Wynn, I thought as I took it. But it was Berryman. The picture looked to be two or three years old, but it was definitely him. The curly black hair, the floppy mustache.

“It came in Ben Toy’s things from his apartment,” she said. “Kind of looks like a regular person, doesn’t he? Some man you see anyday in Manhattan. That kind of frightens me.” The old woman made a strange face by closing one eye tight. “I’d like to be able to look right at him and tell. Just by looking … like Lee Harvey Oswald. That one down in Alabama, too.”

“Yeah.” I agreed with what I thought she was saying. “And just like Bert Poole down in Tennessee,” I added.

Nashville, July 14

My black swivel chair at the
Nashville Citizen-Reporter
is ancient. The line
WHAT HAS HE DONE FOR US LATELY?
is a recent addition to it, chalked across the back in three bold lines. Something about the chair makes me think of black leather jackets.

I sit under a gold four-sided clock hanging at the center of a huge two-hundred-foot-by-one-hundred-and-fifty-foot city room. I doubt that anything other than the people inside the room has changed since the 1930s.

At noon, only one other typewriter was going in the whole place. Most of the writers and editors would come in around one or one-thirty.

At one exactly, I called my editor, Lewis Rosten, to let him know I was at my desk if he wanted to touch and see me.

Moments later, the diminutive Mississippian appeared, unsmiling, in front of my desk.

Lewis reminds me of Truman Capote either having gone straight, or never having gone at all. He was wearing striped suspenders, a polka-dot bow tie, Harry Truman eyeglasses.

“A beard!” he drawled thickly. “That’s
exactly
what you didn’t need.” He slipped away, back in the direction of his own office. “Come,” he called.

I went down to his office and he was already on the phone to our executive editor, Moses Reed.

Rosten’s office is cluttered with old newspapers and assorted antebellum memorabilia; it looks like the parlor of a Margaret Mitchell devotee. I sat down, noticing a new, or at least uncovered, sign over his desk.

What the Good Lord

lets happen,

I’m not afraid to

print in my paper.

—Mr. Charles A. Davis

That sign, notwithstanding Mr. Davis, was vintage Lewis Rosten.

“Ochs is back,” he was saying over the phone. He turned to catch me perusing a 1921
Citizen.
“Moses wants to know what you’ve turned up?”

“A lot of things.” I smiled.

“A lot of things,” he told Reed. “Yeah, don’t I know it,” he added. I winced.

Lewis hung up the phone and banged out a sentence on his old battered Royal. “The quick brown fox. You and me and Reed. The Honorable Francis Marion Parker. Arnold. Michael Cooder. Up on seven in twenty minutes,” he said. “Big strategy session. What have you got? Anything new?”

I took out the photograph of Thomas Berryman. “I have this.”

Lewis held the picture about three inches under his nose and eyeglasses. “Hmmm … Mr. Thomas Berryman, I presume.”

I nodded and stayed with my 1921 paper.

“I’d like to get some copies of this. What I’d like to do is run it around to all the hotels later. Look at these, will you.”

He handed me a telephone toll call check. Also some kind of credit card check through American Express.

The credit card slip showed that Thomas J. Berryman had charged seven flights on Amex number 041-220-160-1-100AX since January 1.

His flights had been to Port Antonio, Jamaica; Port-au-Prince; Amarillo, Texas; Caneel Bay; and London. None of the flights were to anywhere near Nashville.

“Fuck,” I muttered.

The phone check showed one call made to the Walter Scott Hotel in Nashville on June 9th.

“This is pretty interesting. He called here at least.”

Rosten didn’t comment. He was collecting paperwork for the big meeting.

“From the looks of that credit card thing, the man lives pretty damn well.” He finally spoke. “What do people up there think he does?”

“Some people seem to think he works as a lawyer. Not too many people know him.”

Rosten put the photograph up to his face again. “I s’pose he could be a lawyer, though?”

“No, Lewis … He’s a killer.”

Rosten rocked back and forth in his own swivel chair, smiling, puffing on his pipe. “Now this,” he said like some Old South storyteller, “is what we used to call a barnburner.”

“Barnburner’s for basketball,” I grinned. “You never went to a basketball game in your life.”