The Thomas Berryman Number Read online

Terrell watched as one of the teenagers lofted an iron shot high over two pine trees. The little white pellet dropped fifteen feet off the pin on hole number 2.

  He turned in his chair to face Mewman. “I thought you were smart, also,” he said. “A little smart and hungry yourself.”

  The veterinarian understood and he blushed a ripe, tomato red.

  “You see, I’m just checking on your availability, Reuven. Because as I said, John Fair, Jr., is the original horse’s ass–and Horn is vulnerable at this time.”

  Reuven answered the original question then. His answer came as a kind of oath. “My interest is high,” he spoke. “I’d be interested and honored, John. Even to be considered, I’m honored.”

  Terrell stood up on the porch and shook Mewman’s hand.

  He left his choice for senator numb and speechless, but with two double bourbons on the way. He made his way across the front lawn, tipping his Palm Beach hat to people who still called him Mr. Governor.

  PART V

  “Punk”

  Zebulon, November 17

  One nippy, leaf-splattered Saturday in November–a week or so after a Chattanooga dentist upset a Memphis quick-food genius for Tennessee’s available Senate seat–three bulging station wagons set out like Conestoga wagons in the general direction of Zebulon, Kentucky.

  The people driving the individual cars were myself, my father, and Moses Reed. I was embarking on a three month L.O.A. to shore up my domestic life, and to finish the Berryman book.

  The place Nan and I rented was a big, crumbling, Victorian-style farmhouse. It had its own private catfish pond, a possum hollow, and three kinds of cornfields. The owners were wintering in St. Petersburg, and the furnished, seven-bedroom house was costing us the princely sum of $105 a month to rent.

  It was located exactly six miles from where I was born, and where my parents still live.

  The family moved into three of the bedrooms (three of the four rooms facing down over an apple orchard and the catfish pond), and I set up two of the other rooms for my book work.

  At this point I’d collected one hundred and twenty interview tapes. I had hundreds of photographs showing the story’s important people as well as its key locations. There were also over a thousand pages of mimeographed notes and transcriptions from the Citizen-Reporter.

  That winter we all took up serious ice skating and ice fishing.

  I mounted a 1952 Chevy on blocks and we learned about V-8 car engines inside the barn.

  Cat and Janie Bug went off to school with “a lot of creeps and hillbillies” who had become “all our friends we can’t leave” by the following spring.

  In general, working began to take its place in the grand scheme of eating, playing, loving, carpentering, catfishing, and card-playing at the V.F.W.

  I felt I was in the right frame of mind to sit back and write something for people to read. I felt my location in Poland County gave me some pretty good perspective.

  Now here’s exactly what happened that first week in July.

  Philadelphia, July 3

  It was one o’clock in the afternoon, and as usual, Joe Cubbah was sweating like a pitcher of ice water.

  Cubbah was wearing a gray sweatshirt cut off at the shoulders, and a gray fedora with what looked like a bite out of its crown.

  He went into Tiny’s Under the Bridge with grease all over his hands–he’d just changed the plugs and points on his Buick Electra–and he laid one hand on the shiny white rump of a twenty-year-old waitress named Josephine Cichoski.

  The blond wheeled around, but when she saw it was Cubbah she only winced. She had sooty black eyelashes and thick red angel wings for a mouth.

  “Your mother around?” Cubbah grinned at her. His dimples were showing and he looked kind of friendly.

  “You know where.” The girl pointed toward the swinging doors to the kitchen. Her big white teeth had lipstick on them.

  “Hey, look who it is.” Tiny Lemans blinked awake at the sound of swinging doors.

  “Hey yourself,” Cubbah smiled.

  “Restin’ my eyes here, Joey.” Tiny yawned so that his mouth got big enough to fit in a grapefruit. “You’re some piece of work.” His eyes focused on Cubbah’s sweatshirt and torn hat.

  “I had to fix the Buick today,” Cubbah said. “What’s your excuse?”

  Just then the waitress hit Cubbah in the ass with the swinging doors. Her pie-face appeared in the galley-hole, and she was sticking out her tongue.

  Cubbah walked away from the door. “What’s she got, a bug up her ass?”

  “Fuck her,” Tiny Lemans said. Fingers that were three-link sausages each tried to tie black soldier-style boots. Tiny was well over three hundred pounds.

  Cubbah dipped his greasy finger in a pot of cake icing. “Goin on a trip tonight.” He tasted the icing. “Oooo la, la, Tiny.” He smiled at the sweetness of the icing. “Anyways … I could use a piece. You get hold of one this quick?”

  Tiny Lemans pulled out a clattering drawer of silverware.

  “Just got in a very nice little .38,” he said. “Oooo la la.” He pulled a waxed-paper package from the back of the drawer. He handed it to Cubbah intact.

  “Never been fired,” he said. “Airweight.”

  Cubbah took off the waxed paper, then held the small black revolver up to his nose. He smelled cosmo-line oil. The gun was brand new. “Just like you said it, Tiny. Very nice. Very nice.”

  “Tiny says a grasshopper can pull a fucking plow,” the fat man grinned. “Hitch up that little motherfucker.”

  “By the way,” Cubbah set down the .38. “How much is the little motherfucker costing me?”

  The restaurateur yawned. “Oooo … fuck me.” His mouth opened wide again. “One hundred fifty,” he said as his mouth closed.

  “Too much,” Cubbah said without hesitation. “Shit, I only want to scare somebody with this thing. You can have it back if you want.”

  “Look, I’m not going to fuck around with you. One thirty-five,” Lemans said.

  This time Cubbah took out his billfold.

  Tiny waved the money away. “Put it on the Pi-rets for me. Pi-rets 7 to 8 over Yogi Berra. An’ that fuck pitches Seaver you got a job from me. You waste Yogi Berra.”

  Joe Cubbah put the .38 into a brown lunch bag. He took another lick of icing and grinned.

  “OK, I gotta split, Tiny. I really got to get out of state tonight,” he said.

  “Stick around a while,” the fat man frowned. “You just got here. Have a fucking tongue sandwich. I just made some out-of-this-fucking-world tongue.”

  “I really have to split,” Joe Cubbah said. “I really got to catch this plane tonight.”

  “Yeah, you gotta scare somebody,” Tiny Lemans said.

  “That’s right.” Cubbah held up the brown paper bag. “Right between the eyes.”

  Nashville, July 3

  Oona Quinn was traveling south to meet Berryman.

  It was a serious time for her; almost a religious time, and she didn’t want it mucked up by the soldier riding beside her.

  He was a baby-faced P.F.C. From Fort Campbell, Kentucky, he’d already told her. With Beetle Oil in his hair he’d told her. She’d just watched him chug a Jim Crow and Coca-Cola, and the mash whiskey and caffeine had glazed over his baby-blue mama’s-boy eyes.

  The two of them were seated together on an Eastern 707 flight into Nashville.

  Oona had a copy of the Jimmie Horn autobiography in her lap, but she hadn’t read a word since the flight started. She’d read the book halfway through the night before on Long Island. A day earlier she’d seen Ben Toy at the William Pound Institute.

  Two days earlier, on the first, Berryman had called and told her to meet him in Nashville on the fourth. He’d refused to tell her why, except that he needed her there. He’d given her a place and a time, and he’d told her to dress as if she was the wife of Tennessee Ernie Ford. Then he’d hung up before she said she would or she wouldn’t.

  Oon
a was imagining Horn and Berryman meeting somewhere in the story, Jiminy. It would be a good chapter.

  It seemed to her that Horn should win out. There had already been two attempts made on his life. A diner chef had shot at him from point-blank range and missed. Another time he’d been beaten lifeless, but had lived.

  If Tom Berryman succeeded, it seemed to her, it would have to be totally unfair. Some mysterious bush-whacking. Jimmie Horn would have to end up as a martyr. She found that neither possibility bothered her. Berryman had already convinced her that the Horn shooting was inevitable. In Jiminy, Horn seemed to feel the same way.

  She thought that she still didn’t know Berryman the way she wanted to. Their relationship was too heady. All his relationships were. Maybe that was what was drawing her to him, though?

  The soldier put his empty cup on her tray. “Were you all vis’tin’ in New York, honey? Or are you vis’tin’ in Music City? Or goin’ on to Dallas maybe?”

  Oona opened up her book. She pretended to read. What I’m doing, she thought. I’d like to find out … What? …

  The boy swung his face down and up into her view. “I’d say. I’d have to say. You’re vis’tin’ Music City.”

  Oona blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “Just makin’ small talk,” the soldier grinned. “You’re goin to Nashville, I said. First time? First time, I’d bet.”

  “First time,” she said.

  “You’re sure gonna like it.”

  The soldier grinned like the child of a brother and sister. “Country music capital of the world. Athens of the South. Home of the late President Andrew Jackson, I believe.”

  “Oh, did he die?” Oona said.

  The soldier smiled. Bright-faced already, he lit up one of the Tijuana Smalls he’d been smoking around Times Square in New York.

  “Smoke?” he asked. It was a joke. To show that, he hurriedly blew out his match. The smoke from the cigar was faintly chocolaty.

  The soldier then began to tell Oona his life story. He talked whether she looked at him, or out the window. He smoked more of the little cigars, and pestered the little stewardesses for more bourbon.

  “Mah, mah, mah!” they would giggle. Just “mah, mah, mah.”

  The jet finally began to circle over Nashville. A pencil pocket of glittering skyscrapers passed under the wing. There seemed to be a great wilderness around the main city. And Berryman was down there somewhere.

  Up in the very front row of the plane, a first class stewardess was waking Joe Cubbah. She asked him to put on his safety belt. He asked her not to be ridiculous.

  A green Dodge Polara was parked across the street from the American Legion Hall in Belle Meade. The car’s presence meant that Jimmie Horn couldn’t be far away.

  At 11:15, a black detective in a white hat and blue business suit, Horace Mossman, joined two white detectives, Jerry Ruocco and J.B. Montgomery, inside the Polara.

  The number of Nashville city detectives assigned to Jimmie Horn had always fluctuated between two and six, but when Horn announced his intention to run for the Senate, the number went up to eight … Eight detectives meant a 3-2-1 breakdown over each twenty-four hours, seven days a week. Usually, the single detective worked the eleven to seven shift.

  On July 3-4, the single detective was Horace Mossman, and he was late.

  “Mr. Mossman’s right on his schedule,” Ruocco flashed his gold-banded Timex at his partner. “Quarter hour late’s just about right for Horace.”

  Mossman, who was in his late twenties and just recently married, smiled broadly. “It’s my woman,” he grinned. “She cries when I leave the house.”

  “Excuse me while I go throw up.” Ruocco leaned over toward the young detective. Then he got out of the Polara to stretch.

  Mossman shrugged, tugged on the brim of his white hat, switched on a strong penlight. He began to read the day’s log on Horn.

  “Anything here?” he mumbled.

  J.B. Montgomery was finishing off the last of three homemade meatloaf sandwiches he’d started the night with. Montgomery’s nickname among the other detectives was “Dagwood.”

  “He’s gone to three dinners tonight,” Montgomery said. “Miz Horn at six. Ne-groes worryin’ about what the whites up to at eight. Whites worryin about the Ne-groes at nine. Same old shit, Horace.”

  Mossman grinned. He continued through the handwritten log with a red pencil ready to underline anything that struck him as abnormal.

  He underlined the name Lynch the second time he saw it. “Who’s Lynch?”

  “Five foot eight or so. White hair down over his collar. Wears movie star sunglasses. Some friend of Santo Massimino.”

  The red pencil stopped a second time.

  “And what’s this 4:35?” Mossman asked. “Hippie shakes hands with Mr. Horn. That mean something?”

  “Oh yeah … yeah. Add uh … add … unidentified long-haired man pretended to uh, jab Mr. Horn in stomach. A little fake punch, you know the kind …”

  Mossman had stopped writing. “Nut, J.B.?”

  “Nah … Jimmie just laughed. Seemed to know him from somewhere. He did one of those things off the boy’s chin. Chip off the old block things … We’ll check it with him tomorrow, though.”

  “I’ll make a note,” Mossman said.

  “You better make the note, Horace. I should’ve clarified that one better.”

  The young black detective rewrote the note and underlined it with his red pencil. He gave it to J.B. Montgomery and the detective initialed the change.

  The following evening the initialed note would appear in the Nashville Citizen-Reporter. So would the obituary of J.B. “Dagwood” Montgomery.

  The first time I saw the UP photographs of Joe Cubbah I thought of the book The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.

  In a close-up, Cubbah looks like the author James Breslin. He looks like he should be tending bar someplace. He has an impish grin.

  I bought a print of one of the UP photographs for $7.50. I’m just letting it stare up at me now. It’s a weird feeling, especially the glossy gagman smile.

  Cubbah got off the Eastern flight shortly after nine. A big man in a rodeo shirt met him at the gate and hand-delivered a manila envelope. Inside the envelope were sketches of Berryman that had come up from New Orleans. Cubbah examined the artwork as he rented a sports car from Avis. And because he was a cocky, foolhardy man–the antithesis of Berryman–Cubbah signed for the car with his own name.

  It’s incongruous, but under good circumstances, Joe Cubbah would crack up most people. He has a lot of comical stories about Mafia people, and he tells them in eight or nine different accents and voices. He does the Godfather very well, but he says everybody does the Godfather. He does Carlo Gambino, and he says nobody does Gambino.

  Lieutenant Mart Weesner met Cubbah under bad circumstances. At about midnight they had coffee and eggs together in a Nashville Burger Boy. Cubbah had followed the burly young trooper inside.

  Weesner was in town to work the Fourth of July parade and rallies the following morning. He told Cubbah he was having trouble sleeping at the Holiday.

  Joe Cubbah figured the trooper was actually out scouting up city women. Trying to score off some sympathetic waitress.

  “I saw that Holiday Inn sign myself,” Cubbah said. “Welcome, B.P.O.E., it said. Might just as well have said Goodbye, Joe Cubbah. No way I was going to stay there after seeing that. Those silly bastards be practicing trumpets when the maids show up.”

  Weesner laughed out loud.

  “What are they up to now?” Cubbah asked. “Breaking cocktail glasses in the swimming pool?”

  One of the Burger Boy waitresses remembered Cubbah afterward. She remembered seeing the hefty state trooper leading him outside to show him the way to Ireland’s Bar. Then she’d seen them both drive off together in the trooper’s patrol car.

  Ireland’s is an ersatz country roadhouse; a fancy britches watering hole for rich hillbilly singers. There’s a fat piano
player named Dave the Rave there who’s a better musician than half the millionaires in the place.

  Weesner and Joe Cubbah, both up around 230 pounds themselves, watched Fat Dave like he was a limited engagement concert. Sitting together at the bar they looked like tag-team wrestlers.

  Their conversation wove around two subjects: women, and the army.

  “I’m in the army, 1953, stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina,” Joe Cubbah was saying.

  “What’d you make?” Weesner said.

  “Didn’t make nothing. I was a boxer. No rank, just boxer. I boxed a guy name of Pepper something who later got his ass kicked by Marciano. I used to box all the top MPs in bars, too.”

  “I boxed oranges in the navy,” Weesner grinned.

  “Yeah, anyways, that fat pianaman does OK for himself with the local ladies was what I was getting to. I was wondering if your uniform works pretty good for you? Southern girls used to like a uniform, I remember. I used to wear it back to Philadelphia, the girls spit on me.”

  Weesner laughed.

  They ordered and drank another round, then Weesner slammed down a full glass of Budweiser on the bar.

  “I’m getting loaded.” He shook his head. “I’ve got to goddamn work tomorrow, do you know that?”

  “Yeah.” Cubbah wiped his mouth. “You got to march around with the mayor.” Cubbah took up a fistful of beer nuts. “Listen,” he said. “You ever eat squid? Hey, you ever heard of scungilli? … I’m in the mood for some squid,” he laughed. “I know, you’re in the mood to go back to your hotel and knock off.”

  “I’ve got to,” Martin Weesner said. He stood up at the bar and called for a check.

  Joe Cubbah took more nuts in his hand. He shook them around like dice.

  They’d parked Weesner’s police car on the side of a grocery called Scamps 400.

  As they got into the blue Plymouth, Weesner, bloated, burped. “Jesus Christ!” he said. “Excuse me.”

  Cubbah slammed the door on his side.

  “Listen,” he said when both doors were closed. “I’m going to have to ask you to take off your uniform.”