The Thomas Berryman Number Read online

For a very few moments outside, Berryman had a nervous tic in one eye. His mind was flooded with memories that portended (if one believed, in one way or another) big trouble for two reverse ass-kissers who had gone against near everything and everybody. Who had stoned girls and fucked Texas boys and cows.

  Hampton Bays, June 23

  It rained for several days straight near the end of June. It got muddy all around Berryman’s home, with the sea smelling extra salty, and all the cloth furniture cool and damp to the touch.

  Berryman took the occasion to relax. He needed to relax totally before starting for Tennessee.

  Now and then he caught a fish in the ocean; ate it, or threw it back. He thought that the ocean was profoundly intelligent, but that bluefish were not. He kept expecting Ben Toy to pop up, dirty and long-whiskered like some male dog on the bum.

  One morning he sat sipping a mug of Yuban and munching honey cakes on the back (beach) porch. It was 9 A.M., but dark, and the house lights were on. He rocked on the love seat (cool on the back of his legs and against his arms), and he read Jimmie Horn’s fat autobiography: it was called Jiminy.

  He read every word, and enjoyed each sentence, each little vignette, immensely. Finishing one page, he would think about what had been described so adroitly, feel bad that it was over, then only slowly move on and start another page.

  Over his head the rain sounded as if it was falling on soggy paper. The sky was steamy and cardboard-colored. All vertical noise was the ocean, which seemed especially wet because of the rain and wind.

  It was his last pleasant memory of the sea captain’s house.

  While he sat rocking, reading, humming, Oona came out in a boy’s yellow slicker and matching hat.

  “What object–that is now sitting in the village of Hampton Bays–would make your day a little brighter?”

  Berryman could think of nothing but the newspaper.

  Oona told him that she was going to get wine; beef; com on the cob (did he like com on the cob? yes, about half a dozen at a sitting); mushrooms; clams (did he like Little Neck clams? yes, about a dozen at a sitting).

  She waded off through the mud in high, open-heeled sandals. Chose the best mudder, the Cadillac. Waved in the arc cleared by swish-swash windshield wipers. Rolled away into the stew.

  Berryman drifted back into his book. It was going to be a terrific day, he thought. He was extremely comfortable, content, and Oona was getting to be a genuine delight to be with.

  He read. Peacefully inhaled and exhaled the slightly mildew air. Until he was distracted by a sudden loud whacking in the house. It was a cracking whack. Then a pause. Then a whack. A pause.

  Berryman slowly walked back through the long hall. The noise got louder. He went through the living room, stopped, switched off a lamp. He took a revolver from the desk. Put it down as a gesture connected with incipient craziness. Picked it up again and slipped it under his T-shirt. He went on to the still-breakfast-warm kitchen. More honey buns were sitting out. More coffee.

  The screen door suddenly swung all the way to the outside wall. Hit it. Then swung back with a cracking whack.

  As Berryman went to latch the door against the wind, he found a note. The door’s hook had been pierced through it.

  TomTom

  Garden spot of the world. You’re crazier.

  Can’t go killing–killing Jimmie Horn.

  Bigben

  Oona came home singing Carly Simon hits–“Anticipation” and “Mockingbird.” She was carrying too much groceries for two people. Too many newspapers for five Berrymans.

  She found a rained-on copy of Jiminy left out on the porch. She called inside and there was no answer.

  Without looking further, she sensed that Berryman was gone on business again. This time she thought she knew what the business was.

  Oona stalked around the sea captain’s house for the rest of the day.

  In a fit of pouting anger she threw the corn, clams and steak out on the lawn.

  She broke a living room window that looked out on the empty shore highway. Rain came in on the rug. Wind blew things around the room.

  She called up a friend on Cape Cod and another in California. Whenever she hung up the phone, Ben Toy seemed to be calling for Berryman. Finally, she told him to go fuck himself.

  The ocean was unseasonably cold that day, fifties, with scary five- and six-foot breakers throwing assorted garbage up on the beach. She sat on driftwood from a big house, boat, big something. Cold foamy water ran around her legs and wet her bottom.

  She walked in the ocean, and the first wave that came threw her face-down into the sand. She swallowed saltwater and ate sand.

  She walked up the lawn thinking her nose was broken. It wiggled in her fingers. Maybe it always had. She was noticing things. Sand in the spaces between her teeth. The shape of her legs.

  Late in the afternoon a peculiar orange sun finally broke through the black ceiling of clouds. A seagull sat on a post, waiting for the picture postcard photographer. Oona was both nauseated and hungry.

  She picked up one of the filets off the lawn and eventually cooked it. Then she fell asleep before eight. Her dreams were fast motion, then Richard Avedon-type shots of herself and Berryman in assorted cinematic disaster scenes.

  She had completely different ideas in the morning.

  She cleaned up what she’d broken and had the Jamaican fix whatever he could. She went around the house, each room, and examined things, possessions, in ways she never had before.

  She called Berryman’s New York number and got a message recorder. “This is uhm Oona,” she said. “I’m missing you in H. Ben Toy has been calling. And uh … No, that’s it,” was the recorded message.

  Oona Quinn had reasoned that by leaving her in the house, Berryman was making a commitment to her. She decided that she liked him, liked the way he lived. She decided she wanted to hold on to all of it for a while.

  But the girl was wrong on almost all counts.

  Quogue, June 24

  Paul Lasini was so conservative that at twenty-three he thought Frank Sinatra was the greatest singer in the history of the world. The St. John’s University law student, appointed to the Village of Quogue police force for the summer, was the last person to see the funniest man in America.

  Lasini was eating a Chinese-food dinner when Ben Toy walked into the Quogue police station talking to himself on June the 24th. Lasini laughed.

  The courtly blond man looked stoned to him. Stoned ridiculous or blind drunk and in either case, stumble-bumming around the station house in one tennis sneaker and one beach thong. His hair was unruly and tangled. He’d also pissed in his pants. There was a big dark stain covering one leg of his khaki shorts.

  “Oona Quinn is my left hand.” Ben Toy slobbered his chin as he spoke. “John Harley is my right hand.”

  “Better sit down before you fall down,” Lasini called over advice.

  The desk sergeant, a pink and pudgy veteran named Fall, slowly looked up from his Daily News. He kept his finger on his place in the baseball box scores, and he squinted a good look at Toy.

  “Here! Hey you!” the sergeant yelled without getting up.

  Ben Toy in turn spoke to him. “Which is which?” he asked. It was a serious question: like someone asking about the burial of a loved one in a strange country.

  Fall got slightly irritated and burped. “What is what?” He looked at Lasini. “What the fuck is this guy talking about? What is this shit right at dinnertime?”

  Lasini shook his head and whistled into his soda bottle. “Check the footwear,” he grinned.

  Fall begrudgingly came around in front of his desk. “Who dressed you this morning?” he asked with poker-faced sternness.

  “Oona Quinn is my left hand,” Ben Toy tried to explain once again. His face was getting panicky. “Harley John is my right hand.

  “Pow! Pow! Pow!” he said with a flourish of flailing arms. “Shot’m.” He winked with a sane sense of timing.

  He
began circling around the concrete block room. Trying to get out a cigarette, he proceeded to spill his entire pack in twos and threes. The cigarettes rolled around the linoleum and made letters with one another. “Which is which?” He gritted his teeth a foot from Pauly Lasini’s bug eyes. “I’m not fooling around.”

  The law student said nothing now.

  The pudgy sergeant backpedaled behind his desk. His supper got cold.

  “Which is which?” Ben Toy shouted. “Which is which? Which is which? Which is which? Which is which?”

  This time Lasini gave him his answer. Oona Quinn and Harley John. Left and right.

  Toy smiled at Lasini. He unsheathed a long-barreled Mauser from under his shirt. He handed the ass-heavy cannon to the law student, who held it loosely by the butt, like a wet diaper.

  “Like this, man.” Ben Toy illustrated a proper grip: two hands on the gun, both arms straight, knees bent slightly. Then he casually walked away to a bench and occupied himself with knotting his windbreaker around his waist.

  A second law student took two photographs of Ben Toy, and fingerprinted him on an ordinary ink pad.

  There was a scuffle in the back room, and Toy cold-cocked Lasini. It was a loud, cracking right fist that broke the law student’s jaw in two places.

  Toy was a good fighter, aggressive, unafraid of being hit in the face himself. Sergeant Fall clubbed him from behind with a soda bottle.

  As they rode with Ben Toy handcuffed between them, Fall and Lasini were all serious business. They conspired in whispers. Zim zim zim zim zim.

  “Which is which?” Ben Toy checked every five minutes or so.

  Pauly Lasini, his lip and cheek discolored, told him wrong answers in retribution for his wound.

  “I’d just like you to repeat these simple numbers.” The resident on admissions duty spoke to Toy in a semi-darkened examination room. The room was at the far end of a weird underground tunnel, and there was a network of old yellowed pipes over their heads.

  “This is a nuthouse.” Toy looked around at the walls and X-rays machines. “Good,” he said. “I have a chemical imbalance in my brain. You better write that down.”

  “Frontward and backward,” the resident was friendly, but firm. “Listen to the numbers now, Ben. Don’t stare at the walls. No numbers on the walls … Thank you … OK now. 328 … 4729.”

  Ben Toy slapped down his right hand on the meat wrapping paper which covered the examination table. “Which is my right hand?” he asked.

  “Forget about your hands,” the resident said. “I’ll repeat the number for you.”

  “Two nine,” Ben Toy said. “Which is which, you son of a bitch?”

  Aboveground, on rolling green lawns, Ben Toy was walked to the maximum security ward by a team of five aides and a doctor. He was put in a seclusion room and placed on constant two-to-one male supervision. For two hours he was put in wet packs; then he was given so much Thorazine he had trouble rolling over on his mattress.

  Nursing notes were written for the 11-7 shift:

  . . . Ben T. was admitted in agitated state this eve. Pt. slaps hand flat on mattress and says, “This is Oona Quinn” (or Shepherd, Berryman, Horn, something or other). Pt. then slaps other hand on mattress. Gives it another name (any of the above) … Pt. then tests staff on which hand is which. Pt. will stop on request. But starts again within minutes. His span of attention is about 30 sec. Pt. claims to have shot several people. But this is highly unlikely. Knows much about business, and he may be a flipped-out businessman. Pt. slept well.

  In the morning, all of the nursing reports were read and noted by Doctor Alan Shulman.

  Oona Quinn was reached that afternoon at Berryman’s telephone number. She explained that she hadn’t been shot by Ben Toy. She admitted knowing him and said she would like to come talk with him. He was her friend’s friend.

  She said that no, she didn’t know two other friends or business acquaintances of Toy’s–neither Harley Wynn nor James Horn. She didn’t know anything about them.

  Hampton Bays, July 24

  I couldn’t take my eyes off Oona Quinn.

  She was locking up Berryman’s house, pausing in front of the door. Then she dropped the keys in her big western saddlebag purse. She had on a navy skirt that day, puffy white blouse, makeup: it was the look of a New York career girl.

  I was on my way back to Tennessee for a while. She was going to New England. (To visit friends on Cape Cod, she said. Maybe to stop off at Revere.) We’d decided to go to the airport together.

  The Pinto was sputtering badly on the quiet country road that goes out to the Long Island Expressway.

  “How long do you plan to be up there?” I asked over the engine noise.

  “Dunno,” she said. “Haven’t figured it out yet. Dunno.”

  I hesitated before continuing. She was in one of her spacy moods. Continually brushing black hair back out of her face.

  “I just want to say one more thing. Serious thing,” I said. “I’ve got to follow through,” I started, then stopped. “This kind of reporting …”

  Oona stopped me. “I’m fine,” she said. “You were fine, Ochs. Just do your job.”

  I started combing my hair with my fingers again. I’m just too big and clumsy to finesse apologies, I was thinking. I don’t want to destroy this young woman’s life, I was thinking.

  We eventually were approaching the one-story concrete building where the Eastern shuttle to Boston leaves.

  Oona stayed inside the car for an extra minute and all the N.Y. cabbies started honking at us. Some brutalized dispatcher rapped my window with his newspaper.

  When she did get out of the car, she was banging a big, clumsy portmanteau all over her ankles. I thought that the hard square box looked a lot closer to her parents’ style than Thomas Berryman’s.

  Oona disappeared inside the terminal without looking back.

  It seemed to me that she’d had enough. I was certain Frank and Margaret Quinn had … so I made an executive decision in front of the airways building. I decided to give the family a false name in any stories I’d write. I invented the “Quinn” for them.

  That’s what some people call protecting a source. It’s what I call common decency. And I think it’s what Walter and Edna Jones, way back in little, antiquated Zebulon, Kentucky, call “refined.”

  PART IV

  The First Southern Detective Story

  Nashville, Early September

  It was getting to be election time when I finally settled back into the South. Nashville was still green, and quite beautiful. Her skies were autumnal blue, filled with Kentucky bluebirds. It was what they used to call Indian Summer.

  I’d been to five states plus the District of Columbia since July 9th. I’d traveled to New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Texas.

  I felt I nearly had my story. I also had a frizzy honey-colored beard. The beard frightened old southern women, small children, and my editors.

  Small Problems:

  The old biddies on our street insisted I had run away from my family for the several weeks I’d been away. They ‘d hatched a spellbinding plot in which I’d been fired, then passed the summer bumming my way around the eastern racetrack circuit. One fat Letitia Mills asked me if I thought I was going to find my identity or some damn fool thing like that. I could only answer her in pig Latin. And she could only tip her little black-veiled hat at me. That’s their way of saying fuck you, Charlie!

  The Citizen-Reporter wanted my free time. All of it. They said I was up for a senior editor’s job because of my fine Berryman stories. My two-hundred-sixty-dollar-a-week salary was raised to three-twenty-five, and I immediately bought a silver Audi Fox.

  My lawn hadn’t been cut for months; leaves lay piled high under higher weeds.

  The screen windows were still up.

  The screen doors.

  The broken hammock.

  Larger Problems:

  My wife Nan was nervous and edgy.
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br />   She wanted to know if I was happy now and I told her no, but I was preoccupied. She read the New York notes and didn’t react as much as I needed her to. She was taking a karate class at Nashville Free University, and she kept threatening to break things. She liked the new Audi, however.

  The kids had forgotten exactly how I fit into the family. They didn’t know the man behind the red-blond beard very well. They kept singsonging for me to “take it all off,” and that “Gillette was one blade better than whatever I was using.” Sometimes I’d get one or both of them down on the floor, rub my beard on their bare bellies, and they’d laugh like hell.

  Cat was entering fourth grade and she was involved in the school-busing trouble. She wanted to know if I wanted her to ride for an hour and a half back and forth to school every day. She kept telling me about friends who were going to the Baptist Academy.

  My younger girl, Janie, was beginning to talk like southern boys. She said that segregation killed piss out of her.

  As things turned out, I had to set up an unusual schedule at the newspaper.

  I wrote early in the morning (like 5 until 9); and I took leisurely late-night drives to pivotal book locations. In between, I spent my time mending fences and relationships.

  Nashville was quiet those days. The election, especially, was subdued.

  Both The Banner and Tennessean were priming up for the investigation of ex-Governor Johnboy Terrell.

  I wrote occasional pretrial articles, but in the main– free of newspaper deadlines and space limitations–it was Thomas Berryman.

  At this point, I still didn’t know what had happened to Berryman after the shooting.

  I was to find out that Oona Quinn had misled me slightly. I was to find out quite a lot of nasty little things.

  According to Lewis Rosten, the real Dashiell Hammett/Frederick Forsyth detective story didn’t begin until I returned to Nashville.

  Six weeks of my life belie the absolute truth of that statement, but Lewis is partially correct.