The Thomas Berryman Number Read online

  A sound man crept up alongside the makeup man and started to whisper to the mayor. “I need a level on you, Mayor.”

  “I cannot stand this confusion and noise,” the mayor said to him.

  “Thank you.”

  Massimino entertained a woman caller on the station telephone line. She was Betsy Ribbin calling from Clarksville, Tennessee. She was fifty-seven years old, married, with six grown-up children. She was undecided about Mayor Horn, but she welcomed the opportunity to question him on the special TV program.

  Massimino had already decided to open the show with this sweet-voiced woman.

  On the other side of a gold, sequined curtain, a small live audience was listening to the mc of the “Noon” television show. He was warming them up for the broadcast, not so much telling funny stories, as telling stories funny. Sometimes he’d disappear behind the curtain and two guitars and a drum would play songs like “The beer that made Milwaukee famous, made a loser out of me.” Everybody liked that.

  Thomas Berryman sat near the rear in the far left aisle.

  He tapped his shoes to the music, laughed at the country corn, and made friendseeking small talk with the people around him.

  Berryman also watched the audience for the appearance of the long-haired man. One nicely dressed boy of about twelve wore a button, Where Are You Lee Harvey Oswald, Now That We Need You?

  Horn came on without fanfare. He was wearing a light gray suit. A light blue shirt. A dark blue tie. His stomach was queasy, as if he’d stayed up all night.

  Sitting down by the interview phone, Horn remembered a time in his freshman year in the state legislature. He had been talking through his hat, practicing his public speaking more or less, and then he’d noticed that Estes Kefauver was watching him from the balcony. After the session, Kefauver had approached him in the hallway. “Young man,” he’d said in the most low-key manner, “you are one of the finest public speakers I have ever had the privilege of watching. In the future, try not to talk, when you don’t have anything to say.”

  The telephone rang. Jimmie Horn picked it up in a businesslike way.

  “Helloo. Helloo. Is this really Mayor Horn?” Betsy Ribbin asked in her sweet drawl.

  “It sure is,” Jimmie Horn smiled at the lens of the TV camera. “Now who is this?”

  Betsy Ribbin gave her name and city, and then she brought up the subject she’d just been talking about with Santo Massimino. The subject was law and order.

  “Why I just used to talk with anyone who was in need of help or even a little smile,” she said by way of explaining the current situation in Clarksville, Tennessee. “I used to start up a conversation with anyone,” she said. “But now, many of my friends have been robbed and hit over the head. I am afraid of people now … Moral statistics,” she concluded, “are very low in Clarksville, Tennessee.”

  “When you hear the two beeps,” Santo Massimino instructed a caller who identified himself as a divinity student, “take a beat, count to three, and then tell Jimmie your name and hometown. OK?”

  “Er, um, my name and my hometown,” Bert Poole said.

  His phone beeped twice, he counted three and he took a deep breath.

  “Er, Mister Horn?” he said.

  “Yes, it is,” Jimmie Horn nodded to the Conrac camera. “Who is this?”

  “Um, um,” Poole said.

  “Before you start. Could you just tell us who you are,” Jimmie Horn asked. “Who you are, and where you’re from?”

  “My name uh, doesn’t matter.”

  “We just like each caller to identify himself. It just makes it a little easier for me.”

  “You already know me, sort of. Anyway, it’s Bert, OK. What’s important, um, um, er um, is that I tell you why I’m going to kill you.”

  Santo Massimino waved his arms over his head and screamed something that no one understood or remembered later on. The phone call was cut off in the studio.

  A roar, a roar or a groan, went up from the live audience.

  The television audience heard a prearranged chorus of “Yesterday.” It was the music used on the “Noon” show. There was a ten-second delay on broadcast, so they never heard Poole.

  Horn was back on with a Pi Delta from the University of Tennessee.

  When the half-hour show ended, Massimino quickly detoured Horn through a back room full of videotape machines.

  They walked through a room full of coughing generators. Then down a light flight of gray stairs.

  “You don’t have to run,” Horn said.

  Massimino didn’t answer. He was frightened.

  The stairs led to a small, private parking lot. It was drizzling outside, and quite muggy.

  A crowd of fifteen to twenty people had already gathered for a close-up look at Horn. In his rain-spattered pea-green suit, Thomas Berryman was among them.

  Less than fifteen yards away his Ford was throwing smoke in the night like a factory. It was pointed out toward the state highway. This was a fairly dark country road. It went nowhere–north; and toward a maze of drive-ins and gas stations–south.

  The crowd was predominately children. There were some women. And two hillbilly fathers.

  Horn’s chauffeur, a short, bulldog black, stepped out of the Cadillac. It too was blowing smoke.

  Berryman tightened his grip on a four-inch .38. He glanced back to make sure his car was still clear to the road. He looked around for police or more adults. Then he pushed his way to the rear fins of the Cadillac. Horn would have to pass right by him.

  Massimino wasn’t letting the mayor shake any hands. He had him tightly by the elbow. He was marching him straight for the Cadillac.

  Jimmie Horn was using his finger to windshield-wipe his dark glasses. Walking together, he and Massimino looked like businessmen on a hurried lunch hour.

  Jap Quarry suddenly ran into the rain out the back door. He corraled Horn in a big friendly arm. He laughed and shook hands on the run, and quickly had Horn inside the car.

  Berryman backed away. He stood nearby and clapped as the gray Cadillac slowly pulled out of the lot.

  As Jap Quarry closed the electric back window, and Horn opened it a crack, Berryman was already conjecturing that the next time might be a little harder. At any rate, the Horn number had begun.

  Life was understated inside the big gray El Dorado. The windshield wipers swished gently, never thunked. The air conditioner hummed pleasantly, like the machines some people use as sleep aids. The soft leather seats never creaked, just inhaled, exhaled.

  No one in the car was talking and Santo Massimino nervously switched on the radio.

  The song was “Stand by Your Man,” and it seemed ridiculous to be playing Tammy Wynette in a car full of blackmen. For once in his life the young dissimulator was at a loss for the proper covering gesture.

  He pressed the button on the radio’s far left and it was the one for the station that was already playing.

  Horn’s little bulldog driver snorted through his nose; he switched road lanes with one hand.

  “Don’t touch that dii-ll,” Jap Quarry put on a country and western voice in the back seat. “You don’t never switch the dii-ll on Tammy, San-to”

  The dog-faced driver thought that was quite funny too. Quarry reached up front and tousled Massimino’s hair to let him know the joke wasn’t purposely on him.

  A lighter flared in the back and Massimino saw Jimmie Horn in the rearview mirror. In the brief light the mayor had seemed dazed.

  “I don’t think I mentioned it, Jimmie,” Massimino finally came up with something to talk about, “but we worked out a deal with Luby Cadillac today. With his son.”

  “Myron,” Horn said from his rear corner. “Myron’s all right.”

  “Yeah, he really is. He’s giving us a car until November.”

  Horn glanced over at Jap Quarry, then leaned forward, closer to Massimino. “No Cadillacs,” he said in a soft voice, softer than usual, a dazed voice. “I feel like Willie Stark or someth
ing in a Cadillac. It embarrasses my people.”

  “We don’t agree,” Massimino said.

  “Oh, OK, what do I feel like then, Santo?”

  “That’s not what I mean. We think it’s a bad move.”

  “Why is it a bad move?” Horn asked. “Jap, now why would it be a bad move if I didn’t drive around in a Cadillac?”

  Massimino swiveled around in the front seat. Cars coming up from the rear backlit his hair like an old psychedelic poster. “You want me to speak plain?” he said.

  “Of course I want you to speak plain.”

  “All right men, we–myself, Jap Quarry, everybody down here who gives a shit about you–we all feel that you shouldn’t turn down this particular Cadillac.” Massimino was suddenly sounding very intelligent and convincing. “And the reason we feel that way is that this Cadillac is coming in special from Detroit. It has bulletproof glass in all the windows.”

  Nashville, October 17, 18

  Nathanial Brown, Jr., twenty-three, a black American, an assistant cameraman with the WNET-TV affiliate in Nashville, had filmed the shooting of Jimmie Horn in grainy 16mm color–home movie quality.

  Within six hours of the shooting, that washed-out clip was picked up by every major TV station in America. It was viewed with morbid fascination in more than forty other countries. Print-quality photographs were made off the film, and they appeared in newspapers as well as the national newsmagazines.

  The Citizen-Reporter received a black and white dup of Brown’s film the day of the shooting. It wasn’t until I returned from the North, however, that anybody studied the footage in detail.

  First one of our art men snipped out the individual frames and had them mounted on slides. Then Lewis Rosten, Reed, and myself spent the better part of two days projecting Kodak slide after slide onto a plaster wall in Reed’s darkened office.

  It was a curious, nauseating experience for all three of us.

  Each of us took turns standing at the wall with a school-teacher’s wooden pointer, moving from face to shadowy face on the black and white slides.

  First we looked for Thomas Berryman. We examined every face on every frame, even sending out for super blowups of distorted or partially hidden men.

  We found Berryman on none of the slides, however.

  Our next step was to examine the footage of the shooting itself. Either because Nathanial Brown had to pan his camera too rapidly, or because the people around him were bumping the camera, this footage was partially blurred.

  Bert Poole was visible in two short sequences just prior to the shooting. Though two minutes apart on the film, both pieces showed Poole in precisely the same pose: he was huddled against restraining ropes, both of his arms inside a khaki, army-style jacket. He seemed to be sick; possibly he was frightened, though.

  The man from Philadelphia, Joe Cubbah, was shown clearly in one seven-second sequence.

  But no Thomas Berryman.

  Both Bert Poole and Jimmie Horn were on camera when the pistol was drawn.

  The distance between them was about ten feet; the first shot seemed to strike Horn somewhere at the top of his chest. The impact of the bullet knocked him backward and Reed said a .44 would do that.

  The first shot was followed by a blurry sequence in which both Horn and Poole were on camera. There were a lot of inappropriate lights and shadows here. (The sequence lasted seventy frames, or just under three seconds.)

  Seconds after that (another ninety frames to look at), both Poole and Jimmie Horn had fallen and were out of the camera shot.

  After studying the film for two days (Rosten and I had been looking at it for four days), our opinion was that Poole had definitely shot Horn, and that Berryman had probably been planning the shooting later–if at all that day.

  Our opinion, however, was completely wrong.

  Nashville, Late October

  An equally bad mistake (for me at least) came in our investigation of Bert Poole.

  By the end of the summer, tons of material had already been gathered on Poole.

  Poole, the educators said, had a low, but certainly not a defective intellect. Poole, the psychologists said, was under strong pressures to realize himself in some way. Poole had an ambiguous and inconsistent attitude toward Jimmie Horn. Poole had been addicted to adventure comic books as a boy. Poole had been in homosexual panic at the time of the shooting.

  But Moses Reed felt that we needed more information. Life-style material. In Cold Blood detail. “Poole was fucked up,” Reed said, “but I’m convinced that Poole wasn’t simply a nut.”

  So I spent nearly two weeks contacting Bert Poole’s relatives and his friends.

  His mother and father had already refused interviews to the major magazines and other newspapers, but Lewis felt I ought to approach them anyway. He reasoned that I was the only one working under the assumption that their son might not be a murderer.

  During one week in October I reached Mrs. Helen Poole several times on the telephone.

  She was courteous and cooperative, but she always ended up telling me the same thing: “Doctor Poole is making all the decisions about Bert. But Doctor Poole isn’t at home right now.”

  At 8 A.M., 12 noon, 7 P.M., 10 P.M.–Doctor Poole was never home.

  One night, though, I decided I had to camp out at the Pooles’ and find out some things for myself.

  Their home was a modest split-level on Whippland Road in Nashville’s Brentwood section. It was a very neat place, kept up, certainly in character for a divinity school professor.

  I parked across the street from the Pooles’, and I immediately got a lot of strange looks from the neighbors. One or two of them came by and gave me lectures on privacy.

  Then around eleven o’clock, with me just about to go under from an overdose of AM radio, Doctor Leland Poole finally turned into his driveway.

  The taillights of his Pontiac station wagon flashed red. The heavy car scraped bottom on the street’s drainage ditch. Then he eased it up in front of his porch.

  No lights were on outside the house, so I couldn’t get a good look at Doctor Poole. The only detail I caught was that he wore eyeglasses. It was difficult connecting the man and his house with Bert Poole or the shooting of Horn.

  Moments after he went inside I saw him in the living room window. He was tall, very tall, balding, still holding his briefcase. He was staring directly at my car.

  I opened the car door and let him see me. Then I got out of the car and walked over the dark lawn.

  At first I thought the Pooles weren’t going to answer the doorbell. They hadn’t turned on the porch light and I could feel water bugs crawling over my shoes.

  Then a dim yellow light popped on over my head. Mosquitoes went to it like candy. Leland Poole, still in his summer suit and tie, opened the front door.

  Poole’s father was slightly shorter than I am–maybe 6’4”–but he didn’t slouch. He was able to look me directly in the eyes.

  “Ah ah-sume you uh re-portah.” He spoke with a Deep South gentleman’s accent. He then listened politely as I told him my name and my mission.

  “Well, Mr. Jones,” he said then, “I have read your articles.”

  I waited for elaboration on that but only a long pause came. It was a silent time during which Doctor Poole kept his mouth opened slightly.

  “I should tell you,” he eventually spoke again, “that owah lawyer, Mr. Huddlestone, owah lawyer, has asked us not to give out any interviews. Neither Helen or myself, Mr. Jones.

  “It is Mr. Huddlestone’s position that interviews would not be in our best interest. Nor would they be best for Bert.

  “To be quite candid”–the professor took in a gasp of night air–“I uh … I don’t believe that I could.

  “To be candid … I uh, leave this house with my briefcase each morning. Uh, uh … and I kiss Helen goodbye … and Mr. Jones, without giving her any indication that I am going anyplace other than my office, or to the James Tate Library on the campus, I d
rive down to Murfreesboro, Tennessee. I sit around a farmhouse my father left me a few years back.”

  Doctor Poole then began to cry. His crying made no sound. He neither wiped away the tears, nor tried to shut me outside.

  “I just clockwatch,” he said.

  Nashville, July 2

  The morning sun was on his dark glasses and as he moved his head from side to side the sun danced across both black frames.

  Berryman slowed his car across from a small pink house on a north-numbered street in East Nashville. It was where he’d followed Bert Poole the night they’d been together in the Horn storefront. He let the car roll on, slowing cracking twigs and branches. He stopped it at the end of the street, where there is no more curb, just crabgrass.

  This is a black neighborhood bordering on Fisk University ground; it’s a shabby colony, chartered and owned by the First National Bank. On one corner, there is a Marlboro cigarette poster. It’s backlit so that the cowboy and his horse appear black.

  Thomas Berryman walked past a wooden shack laundry that reported how they harlemize clothes.

  He passed a stripped Imperial, its broken windshield caked with dead insects. A broken refrigerator was strapped into its open trunk.

  A lot of small children and old people and what the children call “nigger dogs” are usually outdoors in the early morning here. That was how it was the morning Berryman came to find out what Bert Poole had on his mind.

  The screen kitchen door to the pink shotgun house was in a littered alley. The door was warped, wormy wood, and it didn’t quite close. It was locked by a hook.

  An old air conditioner on the attic floor threw off water like an ice cube. The cold drops splashed down on Berryman’s crew cut.