The Thomas Berryman Number Read online

He rapped on the door three or four times and called out Bert Poole’s name in a loud, clear voice. Then, when there was no answer, he pulled the hook out of the rotting door frame and walked inside to investigate for himself.

  The back shed held the odor of a cellar full of bad apples. It got worse as Berryman passed into the kitchen. It was as if a horse was dead somewhere. Maybe mice behind the stove, Berryman thought.

  There was no one in the apartment. In fact, there was hardly anything there. There were unpaid bills in the kitchen: Southern Bell; Electric; Cain-Sloan Department Stores. Cain-Sloan was threatening to repossess furniture from Poole.

  A blackseated toilet was clogged, and the bathroom smelled like an outhouse.

  A brownstained, blue-striped mattress was the main living room furniture. That and a chintzy brown vinyl recliner stood out in the room. One tall lamp with a picture of Martin Luther King safety-pinned to its shade was standing next to the front door.

  There were looseleaf papers scattered all over the floor, and there was a leather traveling bag, the kind of expensive carryall that athletes bring to basketball games.

  Berryman made himself comfortable against the wall. He sat on the gritty mattress, and held the leather bag in his lap.

  It was filled with balled striped shirts and Ivy League–style ties; there were some boxer shorts and crusty socks. There was a stenciled T-shirt that said UNCLE BERT LOVES YOU. At the bottom of the bag, folded in a pair of chinos, he found a long .44 magnum pistol. Berryman set it out on the mattress.

  As he waited for Poole, he read what had been written on some of the looseleaf papers.

  One neatly handwritten page started:

  My name is Bertram Poole. I was born in Memphis in 1948. My parents are Southern Baptist. Very good Xtians. Very good people…

  Other papers were litanies of sentimental observations about different types of Americans. There were also passages about life in what Poole called the South of America.

  One curious juxtaposition read:

  My dad is a professor at Vanderbilt University. Once, he sent me to Baylor University. I was really too slow to keep up with the fast, mathematical people there. I think Dad pulled strings to get me accepted. He didn’t want me to miss out on my puberty rites.

  In 1966 Time magazine named me Man of the Year. I was the “25 and under generation.”

  Another page started:

  I would not like to die of loneliness. I think people may have done that. But no thank you.

  Sometimes, I feel I am unconnected with the world. I’ve either dreamed or read of people bumping into other people in crowds. To make certain they were connected. I’ve never actually done this. But I’ve thought about it enough times.

  Berryman read the next paper several times.

  I am obsessed with the idea of killing an important man.

  I am also preoccupied with getting even with Mayor Horn. He turns out to be another heartless thug. People deserve better than that phony. That carbon copy.

  He has life by the tail People by the tail, too.

  I talked to Dad about obsession. Not about specifics of course, just in general.

  He says that all great men are, what you might call, obsessed. He doesn’t say that I’m a great man. He tells me not to worry about it.

  We went to the Divinity School cafeteria one time and ate with a very famous man in the economics department. “Yes, young Bert,” he said to me, “I am very obsessed with statistics.”

  If Poole had come back while Berryman was sitting there reading, Berryman thought that he probably would have killed him. He’d come to the apartment to learn if the crazy-looking hippie was dangerous; now he felt that he was.

  He considered shooting the saccharine maniac with his own .44 magnum.

  But Poole didn’t come back, and as Thomas Berryman sat reading and smoking at his leisure, he started to make more considered plans for the young southerner. Far from being an unexpected liability, he began to feel that Poole might be very useful, a godsend.

  White Geese, July 2

  The famous Chub L. Moss and Sons; Gunsmiths, is a gray gas station and red barn in White Geese, Kentucky. Moss specializes in legal fireworks, and also in tools for the extermination of black males. Berryman took the two-lane blacktop up to White Geese after he left Poole’s apartment.

  The fireworks store was full of hangdog hillbillies. Human clown faces. It took Berryman a good half hour to get to see Chub Moss, Jr.

  He found the man extraordinary to look at. Moss had been shot through his head as a teenager and his eyes wandered around like pinballs.

  “So how you?” He greeted Berryman with the upraised hand of a court clerk. “Bet you lookin for some Foaff of Ju-ly fah-works.” He swung his hand down toward crates of bombs and hanging strips of red poppers. “Feast your eyes, stranger.”

  Thomas Berryman was into playacting again. He looked at his shoetips and grinned like a boy come in to buy his first Trojan. “Also lookin for a gun, Mister Moss.”

  Moss Jr. exposed several blackened teeth in an unhappy smile. He lowered his voice. “Wah you lookin in the exact right place man fren. Jes keep at little cigar to you’sef. Get you face blow out yo asshole if you don’t.”

  Moss turned on his heels and led the way to a smaller room to one side of the main fireworks emporium. Only a few men had ventured into the smaller room. It was filled with rifles and revolvers. Every kind of rifle from a Winchester .22 for rat exterminating to an M-16 smuggled out of Fort Campbell.

  Moss held up one of the M-16s. “This here is more of a weapon, sportsman. Course? …” He sighted the long rifle at two young women gassing up a VW out front. His eyes flew around behind the barrel like stirred bats.

  “Dreamin’ of nook,” Moss said, “shooting the gook.” He clicked the trigger and simulated a blunderbuss recoil.

  He google-eyed Berryman’s sunglasses. “Hope you not thinkin a huntin rabbit?”

  Berryman hooted. “Not going to eat’m if I do.”

  “You sure as hell ain’t. No way.”

  Moss Jr. tried to sell Berryman a Colt .38 with an ankle holster. He tried several different M-12s and M-16s. Some twenty-two-caliber dum-dums. A handmade Creek Indian blanket.

  Berryman hemmed and hawed, toed the wooden floor like a skittish colt, finally picked up one of the Smith & Wesson pistols. A .44 magnum like Bert Poole’s. Plus a silencer.

  He signed for it American Express: care of Mr. Brewster Greene of Louisville.

  As he bagged the gun, silencer and ammunition, one of Moss Jr.’s eyes disappeared into his forehead. In his mind he was participating. “Hey, whachu goan do with all this fahpow?”

  Berryman held an Indian blanket up to a hanging Coleman lamp. “Targetshoot,” he said. “Kill beer cans and watermelons.”

  Moss’s eye returned. “You know that .44 was developed for huntin,” he said.

  “I know that.”

  “All right then. All right,” Moss grinned. He handed over the gun. “You will be careful a your nigger weenies near my cherry bombs. On your way out, stranger.”

  Philadelphia, July 2

  It was on that same day, July 2nd, that the final piece was told about the puzzle.

  St. Joseph’s Place is a well-kept secret in the extreme northeast section of Philadelphia. It’s made up of two long rows of modest homes, most with owner-trimmed hedges and very old elms in their front yards. Most with swing sets or basketball hoops.

  The street deadends north at St. Joseph’s Church and elementary school. As Gothic cathedrals go, the church is small and unpretending. The elementary school is redbrick in color, probably large, but mostly hidden by elms.

  Directly across from the school, half-hidden in still more elm trees, sits Joe Cubbah’s candy store.

  The name on the yellow and brown Hershey’s sign says “Angie’s Magazines.” The candy store is called “Angie’s” after Joe Cubbah’s wife (who also happens to do all the work there), but in the vernacula
r it’s “Jockey Joe’s,” no relation to the saint.

  On that particular morning, Cubbah was minding the store for his wife.

  To be more precise, he was lounging in the back booth near the pay phones.

  He was equipped with steaming black coffee, cream doughnuts, Penthouse magazine, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. He was dressed in a raw silk shirt and Daks, but he smelled of bacon grease.

  “Scrambled eggs, coffee, burn the rye toast–and keep it coming.” A woman named Mrs. Riley was sitting at the counter giggling. Her comic material was a straight lift from a serious breakfast order the groundskeeper from St. Joe’s had given Cubbah. Knowing the way Joe Cubbah operated around the store, the order had broken the neighborhood woman up.

  Cubbah didn’t even hear her, though. He was in the store strictly as a favor to Angela. He cleared over twenty-five thousand dollars a year, and he figured he could take or leave the six grand the little store brought in. That went double for Mrs. Riley’s eighty cents a day.

  “Scrambled eggs,” the woman gagged on a mouthful of bialy, “coffee, burn the rye toast … Where’s your sense of humor, Joe?”

  “Shove it up your can,” Joe Cubbah muttered. He looked over at the back of the woman’s dirty white wedgies; he wondered how Angela could stand it all day in the store… But then he was watching a young priest play basketball, H-O-R-S-E, in the schoolyard; and he was back having generally good thoughts about the world.

  A little after nine o’clock the day’s first real customer arrived in the store. This was a rich old dentist who drilled in the neighborhood, but who lived out on the Main Line. His name was Dr. Martin McDonough.

  “Hello Mister Cubbah,” he called back to the pay phones. “How are you doing today?”

  “Eatin,” Cubbah smiled. He hitched up his trousers and started toward the front.

  He leaned over the gum and cigars to talk with the dentist. “Angela tells me you’re screwin around with one of those lay teachers over the school…”

  The dentist chuckled, but he was already lost in the Inquirer’s sports section.

  “What do you think of the Phils?” he asked.

  Joe Cubbah, “Jockey Joe,” didn’t think of the Phils. “Seven gets you six over the Expos,” he said. “Fucking Expos,” he added for the fun of it. “Assholes are losing me my underwear this year.”

  The dentist laughed. Cubbah laughed with him. At least the old gentleman had fun losing his money.

  The first bet of the day was for ten units on the Philadelphia Phillies, and “the strong right arm of Gentleman Jim Lonborg.”

  Coca-Cola and Wonderbread delivered their wares during the morning, and that was all that kept Cubbah from sacking out and letting Mrs. Riley run things for a while.

  Wonderbread bet ten on the Philadelphia Bells over Chicago, and Coca-Cola told Cubbah that Angie was fooling around with Seven-Up. He also dropped off twelve nickel-and-dime bets from his plant.

  At lunchtime Cubbah’s twelve-year-old, Bennie, showed up from St. Joseph’s. Bennie was supposed to help his father with the lunch crowd. This started by taking all the three-ounce hamburger patties out of the fridge, and stacking them on the counter.

  “How’d you do on your big math test?” Joe Cubbah asked as they worked.

  The boy bit off some Boarshead liverwurst. “Ninety-three,” he said.

  “Ninety-three your ass.” Cubbah’s face showed some pain. “What’d you get, a fucking thirty-nine, Bennie?”

  The boy shrugged, smiled, talked with brown meat all over his teeth. “Sister d’in finish correcting them. Sister Dominica had a heart attack or sum’n. So Sister Marie d’in finish correcting the math.”

  “So now you’re all happy poor Sister Dominica had a heart attack, huh?”

  “Nah … Well, a little bit.”

  Joe Cubbah laughed. Bennie was fat and funny, and sometimes he liked the little chublet better than anybody else.

  Just then Cubbah looked up and saw a police detective he knew named Michael Shea. Shea was a nothing plainclothesman, but he dressed better than the mayor of Philadelphia. He was wearing a neat gray plaid suit with patent leather loafers. He was standing by the screen door, looking around like he owned the place. He nodded to Cubbah, then started to walk back toward the kitchen.

  Cubbah poured two cups of coffee, then went back himself.

  “Hey, sweets.” Shea gave him smiling Irish eyes. “How you makin it?”

  “Little of this, little of that,” Cubbah said. “How’s it with you?”

  “Can’t complain,” the nattily dressed policeman said. “That your boy?” he pointed a finger and a signet ring out to the main store.

  “That’s Bennie,” Cubbah said. He was trying to be nice. “He’s failin’ out of grammar school, the chooch.”

  Shea grinned effectively. “Listen Joey.” He sat down on the edge of the stove. “I have a possible for you…”

  “Yeah, I know,” Cubbah said. “Tell me about it, Mikey.”

  Shea told Cubbah all that he knew–which was basically that another hired gun, a tricky, expensive guy, was being set up somewhere down South. He said someone else would be around with all the details if Cubbah took the job. They’d give him the place, and the exact time schedule he’d need to work under.

  “They’re offering ten plus expenses.” Shea took a Danish to go with his coffee. “Somebody thought you might be the perfect guy for it.”

  “Yeah, that’s real nice of somebody,” Cubbah said. “Does this other guy have any idea somebody might be out after him?” Cubbah asked.

  “My people say no. What the hell, I’d tell you something like that first thing out of the box.”

  Shea took out a thick envelope that looked like an unbelievably huge phone bill. “Half now, half later,” he said. “You want it?”

  Joe Cubbah shook his head slowly from side to side. “No owsies,” he said.

  Shea then took out a second envelope and set it down on the first. “I forgot,” he grinned. “Sorry about that, sweets.”

  “OK,” Cubbah said. He put both envelopes under his apron. “I’ll think about it,” he said.

  He left Shea and walked out in the main part of the store again.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Shea called after him. “What’s this think about it shit?”

  But Joe Cubbah had no more to say to the detective.

  Whitehaven, July 2

  Magnolias and azalias wave like high and low flags along the long, straight, whitestone drive leading up to the Powelton Country Club in the southwestern corner of Tennessee. The trees and bushes eventually open onto a grand antebellum plantation house with a great flagstone porch and thirty-foot-high Doric pillars. The ponderous building dwarfs people, motorcars, the realities of the twentieth century.

  Short-haired blackmen in white coats shuffle around with silver trays holding mint julep, Jack Daniels, even Budweiser and a little Falstaff these days. Boys and girls ride and swim, play golf and tennis; and they fuck in the abandoned slaves’ cabins still standing around the grounds.

  For five thousand dollars annual dues, the residents of western Tennessee can enjoy the South of their daddies and mammies at the Powelton Club.

  On one end of the long, flagstone porch, Johnboy Terrell sits with silver-headed Dr. Reuven Mewman, a famous veterinarian with enough cotton money to paper both ends of all the Q-tips sold in America.

  People watch the two men from respectable distances. Even the black waiters watch. They all try to guess what Johnboy wants with the Silver Fox.

  Terrell was puffing on a satisfying, but dangerously dark Corona. “I have recently read a very outstandin’ book on vet’narians,” he was saying.

  “Herriot, or something on that order. All Creatures Beautiful and Pretty.” Dr. Mewman shrugged. “I received three copies of the damn thing last Christmas. But hell John, I see enough horseshit without reading about it.”

  Terrell, who in addition to having an immediate use for the silver-
maned animal doctor, liked him well enough, laughed heartily. Reuven Mewman, he considered, had the good timing and sense of folkiness that either made or broke orators in the South.

  “Esther donated the books to a rummage sale at our church.” Mewman was not one to surrender a captive audience. “They had me autograph the damn things, and charged near full price for them.”

  “Then,” Mewman took bourbon and swished it around his gums, “uh woman–whose thor-uh-bred springer spaniel I saved from a overdose of Alpo last spring–presented me with a copy of one of the books I had signed, sealed, and given away to my church … And I still haven’t read page one.”

  “Well, you ought to.” Johnboy chewed and grinned. “Herriot’s prob’ly the finest livin’ vet’narian writin’ today.”

  Both men laughed again and Dr. Mewman called for more drinks.

  A black man who looked like Asbestos came and went, taking their reorders for double bourbons. As Mewman ordered, Johnboy watched two saddle-shoed teenagers teeing up their golf balls in front of the porch. He thought the game of golf a terrible waste of their precious youth.

  “I understand,” he spoke while looking out over the golf course, “that you’ve expressed interest in spendin a few years in Washington, District of Columbia.”

  “I did speak around about my availability,” the veterinarian admitted. “But that was earlier this year.”

  “I advise against it.” Terrell made a face by misshaping his lips. “Northern winters rust you … But I do believe,” he went on, “that there’s an opportunity coming up in this Senate race.”

  “That’s because? …”

  “That’s because the one candidate, John Fair the second, is a horse’s ass. Ridin high on his daddy’s money plus a set of brass testicles … And that’s because Horn … I understand Jimmie Horn has been seein’ a white woman.”

  Reuven Mewman’s head shook in a short arc.

  “That nigger is far too smart for that, John. Too smart. Too hungry. I’m sure it’ll happen one day, but not just yet … Where did you hear that bullshit from, John?”