The Thomas Berryman Number Read online

  It wasn’t a bad writing job, but it was more a case of being in the right place at the right time: I’d written life-affirming stories about a black man in Tennessee, just a year after Martin Luther King had died there.

  It felt right to people who judged things somewhere. They said the series was “vital.”

  So I was lucky in ’69.

  I figured things were beginning to even out the day I drove into the William Pound Institute in West Hampton, Long Island. On account of my assignment there I wouldn’t be writing any of the article about Horn’s murder. The good Horn assignments had already gone elsewhere. Higher up.

  I parked my rent-a-car in a crowded yard marked ALL HOSPITAL VISITORS ALL. Then, armed with tape recorder, suitcoat over my arm too, I made my way along a broken flagstone path tunneling through bent old oak trees.

  I didn’t really notice a lot about the hospital at first. I was busy feeling sorry for myself.

  Random Observation: The man looking most obviously lost and disturbed at the William Pound Institute–baggy white suit, torn panama hat, Monkey Ward dress shirt–must have been me.

  Here was Ochs Jones, thirty-one-year-old cornpone savant, never before having been north of Washington D.C.

  But the Brooks Brothers doctors, the nurses, the fire-haired patients walking around the hospital paid no attention.

  Which isn’t easy–even at 9:30 on a drizzly, unfriendly morning.

  Generally I’m noticed most places.

  My blond hair is close-cropped, just a little seedy on the sides, already falling out on top–so that my head resembles a Franciscan monk’s. I’m slightly cross-eyed without my glasses (and because of the rain I had them off). Moreover, I’m 6’7”, and I stand out quite nicely without the aid of quirky clothes.

  No one noticed, though. One doctory-looking woman said, “Hello, Michael.” “Ochs,” I told her. That was about it for introductions.

  Less than 1% believing Ben Toy might have a story for me, I dutifully followed all the blue-arrowed signs marked BOWDITCH.

  The grounds of the Pound Institute were clean and fresh-smelling and green as a state park. The hospital reminded me of an eastern university campus, someplace with a name like Ithaca, or Swarthmore, or Hobart.

  It was nearly ten as I walked past huge red-brick houses along an equally red cobblestone road.

  Occasionally a Cadillac or Mercedes crept by at the posted ten m.p.h. speed limit.

  The federalist-style houses I passed were the different wards of the hospital.

  One was for the elderly bedridden. Another was for the elderly who could still putter around–predominantly lobotomies.

  One four-story building housed nothing but children aged over ten years. A little girl sat rocking in the window of one of the downstairs rooms. She reminded me of Anthony Perkins at the end of Psycho.

  I jotted down a few observations and felt silly making them. I kept one wandering eye peeled for Ben Toy’s ward: Bowditch: male maximum security.

  A curious thing happened to me in front of the ward for young girls.

  A round-shouldered girl was sitting on the wet front lawn close to the road where I was walking. She was playing a blond-wood guitar and singing.

  There’s something goin’ on, she just about talked the pop song.

  But you don’t know what it is,

  Do you, Mr. Jones?

  I was Ochs Jones, thirty-one, father of two daughters … The only violent act I could recall in my life, was hearing–as a boy–that my great-uncle Ochs Jones had been hanged in Moon, Kentucky, as a horsethief … and no, I didn’t know what was going on.

  As a matter of fact, I knew considerably less than I thought I did.

  The last of the Federal-style houses was more rambling, less formal and kept-up than any of the others: It bordered on scrub pine woods with very green waist-high underbrush running through it. A high stockade fence had been built up as the ward’s backyard.

  BOWDITCH a fancy gold plaque by the front door said.

  The man who’d contacted the Citizen-Reporter, Dr. Alan Shulman, met me on the front porch. Right off, Shulman informed me that this was an unusual and delicate situation for him. The hospital, he said, had only divulged information about patients a few times before–and that invariably had to do with court cases. “But an assassination,” he said, “is somewhat extraordinary. We want to help.”

  Shulman was very New Yorkerish, with curly, scraggly black hair. He wore the kind of black-frame eyeglasses with little silver arrows in the corners. He was probably in his mid-thirties, with some kind of Brooklyn or Queens accent that was odd to my ear.

  Some men slouching inside behind steel-screened windows seemed to be finding us quite a curious combination to observe.

  A steady flow of collected rainwater rattled the drainpipe on the porch.

  It made it a little harder for Shulman and myself to hear one another’s side of the argument that was developing.

  “I left my home around five, five-fifteen this morning,” I said in a quick, agitated bluegrass drawl.

  “I took an awful Southern Airways flight up to Kennedy Airport … awful flight … stopped at places like Dohren, Alabama … Then I drove an Econo-Car out to God-knows-where-but-I-don’t, Long Island. And now, you’re not going to let me in to see Toy … Is that right Doctor Shulman? That’s right, isn’t it?”

  Shulman just nodded the curly black head.

  Then he said something like this to me: “Ben Toy had a very bad, piss-poor night last night. He’s been up and down since he got in here … I think he wants to get better now … I don’t think he wants to kill himself right now … So maybe you can talk with him tomorrow. Maybe even tonight. Not now, though.”

  “Aw shit,” I shook my head. I loosened up my tie and a laugh snorted out through my nose. The laugh is a big flaw in my business style. I can’t really take myself too seriously, and it shows.

  When Shulman laughed too I started to like him. He had a good way of laughing that was hard to stay pissed off at. I imagined he used it on all his patients.

  “Well, at least invite me in for some damn coffee,” I grinned.

  The doctor took me into a back door through Bowditch’s nurse’s station.

  I caught a glimpse of nurses, some patients, and a lot of Plexiglas surrounding the station. We entered another room, a wood-paneled conference room, and Shulman personally mixed me some Sanka.

  After some general small talk, he told me why he’d started to feel that Ben Toy was somehow involved in the murders of Jimmie Horn, Bert Poole, and Lieutenant Mart Weesner.

  I told him why most of the people at the Citizen doubted it.

  Our reasons had to do with motion pictures of the Horn shooting. The films clearly showed young Poole shooting Horn in the chest and face.

  Alan Shulman’s reasons had to do with gut feelings. (And also with the nagging fact that the police would probably never remove Ben Toy from an institution to face trial.)

  Like the man or not, I was not overly impressed with his theories.

  “Don’t you worry,” he assured me, “this story will be worth your time and air fare … if you handle it right.”

  As part of the idea of getting my money’s worth out of the trip, I drove about six miles south after leaving the hospital.

  I slipped into a pair of cut-offs in my rent-a-car, then went for my first swim in an ocean.

  If I’d known how little time I’d be having for the next five months, I would have squeezed even more out of the free afternoon.

  The rainy day turned into beautiful, pink-and-blue-skied night.

  I was wearing bluejeans and white shirttails, walking down the hospital’s cobblestone road again. It was 8:30 that same evening and I’d been asked to come back to Bowditch.

  A bear-bearded, rabbinical-looking attendant was assigned to record and supervise my visit with Ben Toy. A ring of keys and metal badges jangled from the rope belt around his Levi’s. A plastic name pin
said that he was MR. RONALD ASHER, SENIOR MENTAL HEALTH WORKER.

  The two of us, both carrying pads and pencils, walked down a long, gray-carpeted hall with airy, white-curtained bedrooms on either side.

  Something about being locked in the hall made me a little tense. I was combing my hair with my fingers as I walked along.

  “Our quiet room’s about the size of a den,” Asher told me. “It’s a seclusion room. Seclusion room’s used for patients who act-out violently. Act-out against the staff, or other patients, or against themselves.”

  “Which did Ben Toy do?” I asked the attendant.

  “Oh shit.” Big white teeth showed in his beard. “He’s been in there for all three at one time or another. He can be a total jerk-off, and then again he can be a pretty nice guy.”

  Asher stopped in front of the one closed door in the hallway. While he opened it with two different keys, I looked inside through a book-sized observation window.

  The room was tiny.

  It had gunboat metal screens and red bars on small, mud-spattered windows. A half-eaten bowl of cereal and milk was on the windowsill. Outside was the stockade wall and an exercise yard.

  Ben Toy was seated on the room’s only furniture, a narrow blue pinstriped mattress. He was wearing a black cowboy Stetson, but when he saw my face in the window he took it off.

  “Come on the hell in,” I heard a friendly, muffled voice. “The door’s only triple-locked.”

  Just then Asher opened it.

  Ben Toy was a tall, thin man, about thirty, with a fast, easy, hustler’s smile. His blond hair was oily, unwashed. He was Jon Voight on the skids.

  Toy was wearing white pajama bottoms with no top. His ribs were sticking out to be counted. His chest was covered with curly, auburn hair, however, and he was basically rugged-looking.

  According to Asher, Toy had tried to starve himself when he’d first come in the hospital. Asher said he’d been burly back then.

  When Toy spoke his voice was soft. He seemed to be trying to sound hip. N.Y.-L.A. dope world sounds.

  “You look like a Christian monk, man,” he drawled pleasantly.

  “No shit,” I laughed, and he laughed too. He seemed pretty normal. Either that, or the black-bearded aide was a snake charmer.

  After a little bit of measuring each other up, Toy and I went right into Jimmie Horn.

  Actually, I started on the subject, but Toy did most of the talking.

  He knew what Horn looked like; where Horn had lived; precisely where his campaign headquarters had been. He knew the names of Jimmie Horn’s two children; his parents’ names; all sorts of impossible trivia nobody outside of Tennessee would have any interest in.

  At that point, I found myself talking rapidly and listening very closely. The Sony was burning up tape.

  “You think you know who shot Horn up?” Toy said to me.

  “I think I do, yes. A man named Bert Poole shot him. A chronic bumbler who lived in Nashville all his life. A fuck-up.”

  “This bumbler,” Toy asked. “How did you figure out he did it?”

  His question was very serious; forensic, in a country pool hall way. He was slowly turning the black Stetson around on his fist.

  “For one thing,” I said, “I saw it on television. For another thing, I’ve talked to a shitload of people who were there.”

  Toy frowned at me. “Guess you talked to the wrong shitload of people,” he said. He was acting very sure of himself.

  It was just after that when Toy spoke of the contact, or bagman, involved with Jimmie Horn.

  It was then also that I heard the name Thomas Berryman for the first time.

  Provincetown, June 6

  The time Toy spoke of was early June of that year; the place was Provincetown, Massachusetts.

  Young Harley John Wynn parked in the shadows behind the Provincetown City Hall and started off toward Commercial Street with visions of power and money dancing in his head. Wynn was handsome, fair and baby-faced like the early F. Scott Fitzgerald photographs. His car was a Lincoln Mark IV. In some ways he was like Thomas Berryman. Both men were thoroughly modern, coldly sober, distressingly sure of themselves.

  For over three weeks, Harley Wynn had been making enquiries about Berryman. He’d finally been contacted the Tuesday before that weekend.

  The meeting had been set up for Provincetown. Wynn was asked to be reading a Boston Globe on one of the benches in front of the City Hall at 9:45 p.m.

  It was almost 9:30, and cool, even for Cape Cod in June.

  The grass was freshly mown, and it had a good smell for Wynn: it reminded him of college quadrangles in the deep South. Cape Cod itself reminded him of poliomyelitis.

  Careful of his shoeshine, he stayed in tree shadows just off the edge of the lawn. He sidestepped a snake, which turned out to be a tangle of electrician’s tape.

  He was startled by some green willow fingers, and realized he was still in a driving fog.

  It wasn’t night on Commercial Street, and as Wynn came into the amber lights he began to smell light cologne instead of sod.

  He sat on one of the freshly painted benches–bone white, like the City Hall–and he saw that he was among male and female homosexuals.

  There were several tall blonds in scarlet and powder blue halter suits. Small, bushy-haired men in white bucks and thongs, and bright sailor-style pants. There were tank-shirts and flapping sandals and New York Times magazine models posing under street-lamps.

  Wynn lighted a Marlboro, noticed uneasiness in his big hands, and took a long, deep breath.

  He looked up and down the street for Ben Toy.

  Up on the porch of the City Hall, his eyes stopped to watch flour-white gargoyles and witchy teenagers parading to and from the public toilets.

  Harley Wynn’s hand kept slipping inside his suitjacket and touching a thick, brown envelope.

  Across the street, Ben Toy, thirty, and Thomas Berryman, twenty-nine, were sitting together drinking beer and Taylor Cream in a rear alcove of the A. J. Fogarty bar.

  Rough-hewn men with expensive sunglasses, they brought to mind tennis bums.

  They were talking about Texas with two Irish girls they’d discovered in Hyannis. One girl wore a tartan skirt and top; the other was wearing a pea-coat, rolled-up jeans, and striped baseball-player socks.

  Toy and Berryman told old Texas stories back and forth, and listened to less-polished but promising Boston tales.

  Oona, the taller, prettier girl, was telling how she sometimes walked Massachusetts Avenue in Boston, pretending she was a paraplegic. “Like all these business types from the Pru,” she said, “they get too embarrassed to ogle. I can be by myself if I want to.”

  Thomas Berryman stared at her boozily with great red eyes. “That’s a very funny bit,” he smiled slightly. Then he was tilting his head back and forth with the pendulum of a Miller beer clock.

  It was ten o’clock. Miller’s was still the champagne of bottled beers. Bette Midler was singing boogie on the jukebox.

  A handsome blond man was talking to Oona from a stool at the bar. “You know who you remind me of,” he smiled brightly, “you remind me of Lauren Hutton.”

  “Excuse me,” the tall girl smiled back innocently, “but you’ve obviously mistaken me for someone who gives a shit.”

  This time Berryman laughed out loud. All of them did.

  Then Berryman spoke quietly to Ben Toy. “Don’t you think he’s been waiting long enough now?”

  Toy licked beer foam off his upper lip. “No,” he said. “Hell no.”

  “You’re sure about that, Ben? Got it buttoned up for me? …”

  “The man’s just getting uncomfortable about now. Taking an occasional deep breath. Getting real p.o.’d at me. I want him good and squirmy when I go talk to him … Besides though, I don’t need this paranoia shit.”

  Berryman grinned at him. “Just checking,” he said. “So long as you deliver, you do it any way you want to.”

  At 10:30,
forty-five minutes after the arranged time, Ben Toy got up and slowly walked up to A. J. Fogarty’s front window.

  He was later to remember watching Wynn through the Calligraphia window lettering. Wynn in an expensive blue suit with gray pinstripes. Wynn in brown Florsheim tie shoes and a matching brown belt. Southern macho, Toy thought.

  For his part, Ben Toy was wearing a blue muslin shirt with a red butterfly design on the back. With pearl snaps. He was a big, blue-eyed man; Berryman’s back-up; Berryman’s old friend from Texas; a Texas rake.

  Among boys in Amarillo, Ben Toy had once been known as “the funniest man in America.”

  He smiled now as Wynn started to read the Boston Globe again. The money was apparently in his left side jacket pocket. He kept rubbing his elbow up against it.

  Harley John Wynn couldn’t have helped noticing Toy as he left Fogarty’s bar. Toy looked like a drunken lord: he had long blond hair, and an untroubled face.

  He walked slowly behind a college boy in a mauve Boston College sweatshirt. He waded through various kinds of Volkswagens on the street; then he calmly sat down on Harley Wynn’s bench.

  In his own right, southern lawyer Harley Wynn was a cool, collected, and moderately successful young man. He knew himself to be clearheaded and analytical. He identified with men like Bernie Cornfeld and Robert Yablans–the brash, bootleg quarterback types in the business world. Now he was making a big play of his own.

  Wynn’s generally together appearance didn’t fool Ben Toy, however. The southern man’s hands had given him away. They were sweaty, and had taken newspaper print up off the Boston Globe. Telltale smudges were on his forehead and right on the tip of his nose.

  “I was just thinking about all of this,” Wynn gestured around the street and environs. “The fact that you’re nearly an hour late. The faggots … You’re trying very hard to put me at a disadvantage.” The southerner smiled boyishly. He held out an athletic-looking hand. “I approve of that,” he said.

  Ben Toy ignored the outstretched hand. He grunted indifferently and looked down at his boottips.