The Thomas Berryman Number Read online

  Jimmie Horn flicked the car’s noisy directionals on, then waited his turn to go into the parking lot flanking Nashville Police Headquarters.

  Police Interrogation Room #3 had a small square window up too high to be reached without a stepladder. There were three orange plastic chairs. A copper doorknob.

  Everything else was white.

  Two very black blackmen, Marshall “Cottontail” Hayes and Vernon Hudson, sat facing each other in two of the chairs.

  Hudson, thirty-seven years old, wore a short-collar white shirt, blue bus-driver’s tie, gray pants. He also had a brown shoulder holster setup over his arm. Hayes, aged twenty, was dressed in dark burgundy and gold: a feathered burgundy hat, silk jumpsuit, calfskin boots, a variety of gold bracelets, rings, and earrings.

  One thing was obvious in the small room: Cottontail Hayes hadn’t learned how to dress in his hometown of Gray Hawk, Mississippi.

  Jimmie Horn was standing in the room, directly behind Hayes. Occasionally the twenty-year-old would look over his shoulder at the mayor, but Horn never returned the look.

  “I understand you murdered a man name of Freddie Tucker.” Vernon Hudson spoke in a surprisingly soft voice.

  Silence.

  “I also understand you the big new dope man around town,” Hudson said.

  Silence. This time Hayes slowly stroked his long goatee.

  Jimmie Horn sat down in the third chair. He looked into Hayes’ face.

  Hayes examined what he thought to be an imperfection in one of his rings.

  Horn lighted up a Kool and handed it across to the boy.

  “I’d like to explain something to you,” he said.

  Cottontail Hayes accepted the cigarette. He touched it to his lips and took small, feminine puffs. His bracelets jingled.

  “There’s a trick for a black man being mayor,” Horn said.

  “Of course,” Hayes nodded. He smiled like he was hip to the whole situation.

  “The trick to a black man being mayor,” Jimmie Horn continued, “is that you cannot afford a single fuck-up blackman in the community. Because white people will only blow up what they do, blow it way out of proportion. They’ll talk about a murder, or a mishandled welfare case, like it’s the rule rather than the exception.”

  Hayes shook out his bracelets at Jimmie Horn. “Listen, I don’ have time for this shit, you know. Where’s my fucking lawyer at?”

  After Hayes spoke his line, Jimmie Horn stood up again. He walked across the room and left it.

  “Jackass,” he said to himself outside. He started down a long pale green corridor with cork bulletin boards covered with official and unofficial public notices. The corridor emptied into a small waiting room with a lot of plastic chairs lined up by a table surface completely covered by magazines. Not an inch of the tabletop was visible, Horn noticed. He was trying to calm himself down.

  An attractive black girl was sitting alone in the room.

  She had on expensive green velvet pants, hoop earrings, platform shoes. She was smoking like a 1950s movie queen, and Horn was tempted to tell her to stop it. She was Marshall Hayes’ woman. Eighteen years old.

  Then she was talking to him in a loud voice. “Where is the Cottontail?” she asked. “We got to go.”

  Horn sat down in one of the plastic chairs. He had a Kool. “If you don’t go away from that man,” he found himself saying to the girl, “you’ll be dead before you’re twenty-five years old.”

  That was all. Then he was walking back to Room #3 again.

  Hayes was down on the white floor; he was clutching his stomach as though something was going to fall out if he let it go. Vernon Hudson was holding the feathered burgundy hat.

  “You’ve been selling cocaine, and you’ve been selling heroin here,” Horn began to talk before the door “was closed. “You’ve sold heroin to freshmen and sophomores at Pearl High School.”

  “I never sol’ no fuckin heh-rehn in my fuckin life.”

  Horn bent over so that his face was only a foot above that of Hayes.

  “Listen brother, you have sold heroin. You’ve sold plenty of heroin. People sell heroin for you. If there was the slightest doubt about that I would not be here. I don’t play games.”

  “So how come you here?” Hayes’ voice shot an octave higher than he’d wanted.

  “I’m here to throw you out of this town. Plain and simple.”

  “What, man, you can’t do shit like that.”

  “Brother,” Horn was using the word to deride, “I can do anything I damn well please. This is my town. Not the east side, or the west side, or Church Street. The whole goddamn thing!”

  “And if you are seen in it after tonight,” Vernon Hudson spoke calmly from over near the door, “I will shoot you and swear before the judge that you had a gun … In case you hadn’t heard, boy, they shoot niggers down here.”

  Jimmie Horn started to leave the room, then he stopped in the open door.

  “Marshall Hayes,” he sighed, “I’m sorry to have to do this to you.” He started to say more, but then he just closed the door on the man.

  He left the building using a way that avoided the teenage girl waiting for Cottontail Hayes. Then, at 10:30 P.M., the mayor of Nashville headed home.

  His car was followed by a green Dodge Polara.

  New York, June 24, 25

  Thomas Berryman was meanwhile eating a special diet of spaghetti and draft beer.

  He did this for three consecutive days so that his face grew puffy. His stomach spread. He put on twenty pounds and ten years, and began to resemble the picture on M. Romains’ BankAmericard.

  One day in the last week in June he got a dollar crew cut in a subway station barber shop. He had his mustache shaved for another thirty-five cents. Then he purchased a baggy, pea green suit in Bond’s with the BankAmericard.

  To loosen himself up that same night, he traveled to Shea Stadium with a Soho artiste who used eye shadow and rouge to make herself look like Alice Cooper; who liked to do anything, everything, just something different, real.

  Berryman masqueraded as “the Pleasure King.” He wore dark glasses and a black muscle shirt with his crew cut. The two of them obliterated themselves in the right field bleachers. They ate hot franks, drank Schaeffer beer, and smoked pot as the Red Sox bombarded the Yanks three hundred thirty-one to a hundred-nineteen.

  In the morning, Thomas Berryman caught a businessman’s flight to Nashville. It was his thirtieth birthday and he was daydreaming about spending year thirty-one in retirement at Cuernavaca or San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. Strangely, it was near the kind of dream (dream/game plan/ambition) Harley Wynn had once nurtured.

  Berryman was aware of two strong inclinations regulating his entire life.

  The first was the work of his circuit judge father, and it involved doing things well. It was reflex, Pavlovian: when Thomas Berryman did something to perfection, he derived a satisfying pleasure from the action. Doing things well, anything at all, was compulsive with Berryman.

  The second inclination came from his mother’s part of the family. Berryman thought of it as his “country gentleman” side. He’d first taken this second urge seriously, as seriously as the first urge, in 1971. He was working in Mexico when it happened.

  SeŃor Jorge Amado Marquez’s hacienda was located some ninety miles west of Mexico City. It was a labyrinth of white stucco rooms, newer flamingo pink stables, and green-as-your-garden fences and railings. It was situated on a deep blue lake like Italy’s Como, looking straight up at a small volcano.

  Jorge Marquez was living alone on the huge estate in 1971.

  His wife had died mysteriously that year (a self-inflicted gunshot while out in a family motorboat). His daughter was living with a photographer in Mexico City, a handsome, high-pompadoured man who would have been perfect for Costa-Gavras movies.

  Jorge Marquez had invited Berryman to stay with him for the week before he would do his work. As the particular job was a simple one, automatic,
Berryman had entertained his whims for gracious living, and accepted the invitation.

  He’d slept in a third-floor suite equipped with a wraparound terrace some seventy-five feet over the lake. The front windows looked over at the volcano. A large back window looked out on bush country: brazil-wood and palms, streaming with parrots.

  In the early morning, dark-haired thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls would be out on his terrace from sometime before sunrise. They were pretty little girls with dusty brown legs. They played silent barefoot games until Berryman came to the door leading out onto the terrace. Then, giggling, blushing, curtsying like the maids in American movies, the pubescent seŃoritas would bring him bananas, papaya, mangos; bacon, whitefish from Lake Chapala.

  His afternoons could be peaceful sailing out and around the volcano; swimming in lake water clear enough to see bottom whenever it hadn’t rained; hunting deer with or without Marquez, who was gentleman enough to give Berryman his choice.

  Finally, the evenings would consist of large dinner parties or less formal cookouts. At those, Berryman would be introduced as an American businessman connected with Marquez’ tin and banana conglomerate. American women and wealthy, cosmopolitan seŃoritas would attend these parties, and in the mornings, the teenage Mexican girls would get to secretly examine these women from Berryman’s terrace.

  When the week ended, Thomas Berryman held the firm idea that he would soon try Mexican life again. For the moment though, Marquez’ business was on.

  Riding in a coughing, gasping native bus, he traversed Route 14 to Mexico City one afternoon. Some tinkling burros outside kept pace with the bus, but he was in no real hurry.

  Once inside Mexico City, he exchanged his country whites for dusty huaraches and bluejeans. He moved into a hostel for students and teachers, and began to wear silver wirerim eyeglasses.

  The first two evenings there were spent carousing with carefree students from the University of Wisconsin and their quiet, homosexual advisor. Berryman became known as a high school teacher from Westchester in New York.

  Late in his third afternoon in Mexico City, however, Berryman stole a gray pickup truck. The truck was full of goats, chickens, and a few squealing pigs. The truck was heavy of itself, yet Berryman found it could get up to seventy miles per hour with not too much strain.

  During that evening, the gray truck was seen several times parked in, and driving around, the Plaza de la Constitucion.

  Slightly before midnight, it struck the Costa-Gavras photographer head-on in a narrow, one-way street; it was moving at nearly fifty-five miles per hour at the time.

  The Marquez girl’s lover had had a high wet-looking pompadour and flashing white teeth that stood out in the dark. Even that was more than Thomas Berryman wanted to know about him. He preferred to store memories from his week with SeŃor Marquez. Dwelling on the other thing was self-defeating.

  An elderly woman, a southern woman, tapped at Berryman’s arm and he slowly removed his Braniff Airlines stereo earphones.

  She wanted her seat moved back, which was fine, but she also wanted to talk about her recently deceased son-in-law. “Michael was only fifty-eight,” she said. “Michael has two lovely daughters at Briarcliff. Michael had been planning to retire in just five years…”

  Berryman occasionally glanced away from the woman; he saw the beginnings of Nashville out the window.

  The fasten seatbelts order was given. The earphones were collected.

  Berryman found himself taking a deep breath. Examining his clothes in relation to the dress of the southern businessmen on board.

  When the front door stewardess welcomed crew-cut Thomas Berryman “home,” he smiled like a goat, and spoke perfect southern to her.

  Carrying his small, black leather bag across the airfield’s landing tarmac, Berryman thought of it this way: he was just making a stopover on his way back to Mexico.

  Nashville, June 26

  On the second Tuesday before the Fourth, Berryman came out the electric doors of the Farmer’s Market with a milkbottle quart of orange juice and a pound of Farmwife powdered doughnuts. He was wearing khaki pants, a wrinkled Coca-Cola shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his biceps; and he was a dead ringer for a Tennessee redneck. In his body, and in his mind.

  He sat down on the warm hood of his Hertz Ford Galaxie, fingered the milkbottle Braille, and admired Nashville women doing their thing: shopping. He ate several of the warm doughnuts, which were nice, even sitting on hot metal.

  As usual, his independence delighted him: it was 11 A.M. and his job for the day was easy, with high pay.

  Traffic was light through the early afternoon. It was a day of one-bag pickups.

  There were occasional gypsy bands, excellent wives nonetheless, in curlers, with their kerchiefs puffed high over their foreheads like birdcages. There were childlike old men, in aloha sport shirts, with baggy trousers belted high around their waists like mailbags.

  Sometimes Berryman would strike up conversation with one or the other. But in the main, he kept his eye on two Amos ’n’ Andy Negro carpenters handcrafting a platform stage in the middle of the parking lot. Jimmie Horn would speak from the platform.

  Berryman sat on the Ford. Then he walked the perimeter of the airfield-sized market lot.

  He visited a few Plaza shops. Bought a J.C. Penney olive shirt and tie to clash with his Bond’s suit. Watched a policeman reading a comic book in a patrol car.

  There was a thirty-gauge shotgun propped up facing the windshield in the front seat.

  Around lunchtime he sat under a Cinzano umbrella outside of Lums, and he sipped Cinzano at the urging of a waitress named D. Dusty.

  (Afterward, she remembered him.)

  Across a narrow arcade, the Farmer’s Market roof was long, flat, pitch tar. It got hot and gooey by midafternoon. The tar oozed at the edges of the gutter.

  The building’s front facade, a red-on-royal-blue sign, rose about three feet higher than the roof itself. The roof’s backside was hanging in the woods. Magnolias. A thick green wall from the loading platform all the way out to Route 95 eastbound to Knoxville.

  Puffing on a cigarillo, Thomas Berryman took in every detail.

  As he was about to leave, Berryman saw a long-haired boy he’d noticed two or three times earlier that day.

  The boy was tall and skinny, wearing green army fatigues and smoked brown glasses. His hair was curly and he made Berryman think of Oliver Twist.

  He’d been sitting at a bus stop. He’d been trying to make time with a little black waitress in Lums. Now he was sadsacked on the whitestone sidewalk in front of the market itself. He was watching the two black carpenters.

  Berryman made a mental note of the boy, then called it a day. On a per diem basis he had made over twenty thousand dollars.

  Nashville, June 27

  “By the selected day,” Ben Toy had told me, “Berryman will have one plan he thinks is 100% foolproof. And if he doesn’t think his plan is 100%, he’ll walk away from the job. He did that with Jesse Jackson in Chicago. He likes challenges, but his challenges are in the figuring.”

  Sitting in my workroom, thinking about Ben Toy again, one thing struck me that should have been clear to me before. Toy had hated Thomas Berryman. I wasn’t so sure that he knew he did, but I was sure that he hated him.

  On the 27th day of June, Berryman shut himself in his hotel room, room 4H, from six to six; he studied Jimmie Horn’s known daily routines like a Talmudist.

  Berryman’s hotel was a double-building rooming house in the hospital district west of West End Avenue in Nashville. It was called the Claremont, and had a big sign on the porch: HOME COOKED MEALS FOR LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. Every afternoon at the Claremont the regular boarders could be viewed in the lobby, eating mint ice and Nabiscos, watching the soaps or a baseball game. A room there cost Berryman $26.50 for the week.

  For his efforts that first morning, Berryman learned that Jimmie Horn was careless, but that his aides were not.


  That night he actually followed Horn’s car from City Hall. The mayor rode with an armed chauffeur and lots of company that evening–a cadre of paranoid white men who were constantly glancing around each new landscape, checking it for danger signs like scared jackrabbits. Another car, probably police, a green Dodge, also followed the Horn vehicle.

  Horn’s little girl met the car at the head of the driveway, and he got out and walked with her to the main house. Their arm-in-arm walk was easily five hundred yards and Berryman wondered if they did it every night. The car went on ahead. The Dodge parked near the front gates.

  Looking on through roadside bramble and an eight-foot spiked fence, Berryman could hear their footsteps on gravel. He could also see another police patrolcar parked in the circular part of the driveway up near the house. Jesus Christ, he was thinking, they sure watch out for his ass.

  Directly behind him, very close, Berryman heard bushes crashing down. He turned around to face a tall state trooper with a mustache.

  “You cain’t park here,” the man stated in a matter-of-fact drawl. “You want your look at fancy ni-gras, you got to go to the movies. Move on now, buddy.”

  “Do that.” Berryman grinned as stupidly as he could. He got up from his knees and fled to his car in a fast duck waddle. “Yes sir, do that right now,” he stammered. “Damn idle curiosity anyhow.”

  Once back inside his car, driving down the asphalt road away from the mayor’s mansion, Berryman could feel blood pounding in his brain. Now Thomas, he was thinking, you have got to do a whole lot better than that.

  Which he did.

  Nashville, June 28

  Berryman concluded that the New South, the physical plant anyway, was a colossal mistake; it had no personality; it was living-boxes out of 1984 … The next morning he was back poring over city maps and other books about Nashville.

  He quickly memorized street names, routes, alternate routes, key locations; he tried to get a feel for the city; a basic feel for what happened when he went north, went west, went east.