The Thomas Berryman Number Read online

  Harley Wynn laughed at the way nervous men try to condescend.

  Toy still said nothing.

  “All right then,” Wynn’s southern twang stiffened. “… Horn’s a fairly intelligent nigger … Very intelligent, matter of fact.”

  Toy looked up and established eye contact with the man.

  “Horn has affronted sensibilities in the South, however. That’s neither here nor there. My interest in the matter, your interest, is purely monetary.” He looked for some nod of agreement from Ben Toy.

  “I don’t have anything to say to that,” Toy finally spoke. He lighted a cigarette, spread his long, bluejeaned legs, sat back on the bench and watched traffic.

  The young lawyer began to force smiles. He was capable of getting quick acceptance and he was overly used to it. He glanced to where Toy was looking, expecting someone else to join them.

  “You’ll be provided with detailed information on Horn,” he said. “Daily routines and schedules if you like …” The lawyer spewed out information like a computer.

  “All right, stop it now.” Toy finally swung around and looked at Wynn again. His teeth were clenched tight.

  He jabbed the man in the stomach with his fist. “I could kill you, man,” he said. “Stop fucking around with me.”

  The lawyer was pale, perspiring at the hairline. He wasn’t comprehending.

  Toy cleared his throat before he spoke again. He spit up an impressive gob on the lawn. Headlights went across Harley Wynn’s eyes, then over his own.

  “Berryman wants a reason,” he said. “He wants to know exactly why you’re offering all this money.”

  Toy cautioned Harley Wynn with his finger before he let him answer. “Don’t fuck with me.”

  “I haven’t been fucking with you,” Wynn said. “I understand the seriousness of this. The precautions … Infact, that’s the explanation you want … There can be no suspicions after this thing is over with. No loose ends. This isn’t a simple matter of killing Horn. My people are vulnerable to suspicion. They want no questions asked of them afterward.”

  Ben Toy smiled at the lawyer’s answer. He slid over closer to Wynn. He put his arm around the pin-striped suit. This was where he earned all his pay.

  “Then I think we’ve had enough Looney Tunes for tonight,” he said in a soft, Texas drawl. “You owe us half of our money as of right now. You have the money inside your jacket.”

  Wynn tried to pull away, “I was told I’d get to talk with Berryman himself,” he protested.

  “You just give me the money you’re supposed to have,” Toy said. “The money or I leave. No more talk.”

  The southern man hesitated, but he finally took out the brown envelope. The contact was completed.

  Ben Toy walked away with fifty thousand dollars stuffed around his dungarees. He was feeling very good about himself.

  Over his head the City Hall clock sounded like it was floating in the sky. Bongg. Bongg. Bongg.

  Inside the pub window Thomas Berryman was clicking off important photographs of Harley John Wynn.

  The Thomas Berryman Number had begun.

  New York City, June 12

  Six days after the first exchange of money, a white pigeon walked down Central Park South in New York City, stopped to taste a soggy wad of Kleenex, then flew up to the granite ledge surrounding the windows of Thomas Berryman’s apartment.

  Berryman says there are always pathetic city pigeons perched on his ledge. And that they’ll never look in at him or anyone else.

  There are also long cigarillo ends all over the ledge.

  And there’s an old Texarkana trick of burning off bird feathers with cigars.

  The window is up ten stories over Central Park South. The building is picturesque, a dark, towering graystone hotel.

  A famous fascist banker once killed himself out of one of the nearby floor-to-ceiling windows. He tied a rope to a radiator, jumped, hanged himself.

  Because his neck is thick and his hair so black, Berryman looks fierce from the back. Face-on it’s different. People trust him right away. Nearly everyone does.

  Thomas Berryman says he’s a hard worker, a brooder when it comes to work. He says he’d read all of Charles Dickens by the time he was fourteen, but that he just did it to accomplish a task.

  He’s a broad-shouldered man, with beautiful woolly hair, and a seemingly darker, bushy, Civil War mustache.

  His look reminded me of Irish football players, or at least my limited sports-desk experience with their pictures. Also, he would be right for Tiparillo cigar ads.

  On this particular June morning, he flicked on a Carousel projector’s fan and tugged on a customary wake-up cigar.

  He pulled curtains on a full wall of glass, and Central Park’s lollipop trees and hansom cabs disappeared. The Plaza Hotel disappeared.

  One lazy-bodied horse in a blue straw hat disappeared last and caused Berryman to laugh. He hadn’t worked for four months. He’d played in the sun at MazatlÁn and Caneel Bay. He was fresh as a rose.

  Thomas Berryman sometimes spoke of his individual jobs as numbers. He would talk about getting ready for another little number; about having performed a number. In that respect, this would be the Horn number.

  For the next three days he arduously prepared for his meeting with Jimmie Lee Horn. He read everything ever written about Horn, and everything Horn himself had written. He read everything that was available, twice. Until his eyes began to hurt. Until his brain wore raw.

  Sitting in his cramped library, he was thorough as an archbishop’s secretary, wore no cowboy boots, wore high-priced cologne, read Larry McMurtry books to relax. Thomas Berryman’s idÉe fixe was to study, study, study, and then study some more.

  Life with Berryman had been good to Ben Toy.

  He lived in a six-hundred-and-ninety-five-dollar-a-month penthouse. He owned and occasionally operated the Flower & Toy Shop on East 89th Street in Yorkville. The tiny florist shop was his hobby. Something he felt made him more than just a wiseass cowboy with a few dollars to throw around in bars.

  One afternoon as he was locking up the shop–his free arm was holding a leather satchel; his cigarette was tilted up at a rakish angle–he was very suddenly drained of every ounce of cool, or bourgeois chic, or whatever it is that currently describes the Upper East Side demeanor.

  Toy thought he had seen Harley Wynn watching him from the corner of East End Avenue.

  First Toy squinted down the street into the sun. Then he started to jog, his handbag making him look slightly feminine in spite of his bulk.

  Wynn–whoever it was–turned to light a cigarette out of the wind. Very Alfred Hitchcock. Then he disappeared into the chimney-red brownstone on the corner.

  Toy ran up and stopped on the sidewalk in front of the house. He started to call out. “Wynn,” he shouted huskily. Up to the rooftops.

  “Wynn! Yo! Hey Wynn. Hey you fucking asshole!” he shouted. “Hey, you!”

  There were lots of blue and red flowerpots in the windows on the top floor. No lights on the second floor. No Wynn.

  A little old woman in a whorehouse-red kimono came out on her terrace to look at him. Big dogs inside the house started barking. Doormen were peering down the street like the town gossips they were.

  Ben Toy finally hailed a yellow cab dawdling on the side street. He took it over to the West Side. He popped a Stelazine tablet en route, and consequently forgot to tell Berryman about the man who looked like Harley John Wynn.

  I bent over closer to Ben Toy. Either the mattress or his pajamas smelled of urine. “Harley Wynn,” I said.

  His eyes popped open. They were blue. He’d been on the verge of falling asleep.

  “Thorazine.” He licked dry, chapped lips. “Makes you sleepy as hell.”

  “Just a few more questions,” I said. “A couple of important ones.”

  Toy sighed. Then he nodded.

  “Was Harley Wynn definitely a southerner?” I asked.

  “Sure.” Toy
curled up on the end of the bare mattress. He shivered. “Just as much as you are … Could I have a blanket?” He asked Asher in a sweet, boyish voice. It was a strange sound coming out of a big man with two days’ stubble on his chin.

  “Answer his questions,” the aide told him. “You know you can have a blanket, Ben. So just cut the crap, all right?”

  “Can I have a blanket now?”

  Asher pointed at me. He lighted up his pipe and stared out the window into blackness.

  Toy struggled upright and sat with his bare back against the plaster wall. He was starting to pout, I thought. I hoped the aide knew what he was doing.

  “Do you know where Wynn came from?” I asked.

  Toy’s answer was curt. “Tennessee.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I said Tennessee didn’t I.”

  I was starting to feel guilty about grilling him too much. “OK, I’m sorry,” I said. “I only have one more question, Ben.”

  “Shoot, Ochs.”

  “I’m not trying to condescend to you. I’m really not.”

  Toy smiled as though we were only playing a little game anyway. A lot of Joe Buck Conneroo came through with the smile.

  “You said that Wynn wasn’t hiring you himself …”

  “No. He was a front man. Always said, ‘They said’ this; ‘They said’ that. He was a small fish. Just like me.”

  “OK then, do you know who hired Berryman?”

  Ben Toy looked over at Asher, then at me. “Can’t say.”

  My palm came down hard on the floor. “We’ve come a long ways tonight to start that shit now,” I said.

  “I really don’t know,” Toy said then. “I never knew who it was. Berryman knew.”

  Toy closed his eyes for a full two or three minutes after that answer.

  Asher and I sat in total, eerie silence, just watching him breathe. The young aide had a dazed, tired look on his face. I figured I was probably pop-eyed myself.

  Toy licked his chapped lips again. He shivered as though he were dropping off to sleep.

  Rock and roll erupted in a nearby room and his eyes popped open again. He seemed annoyed that we were still in his room. Annoyed and slightly wild-eyed.

  “Can I go to sleep now?” The soft, southern voice again. “Would you turn on the dimmer, please?”

  “I’ll talk tomorrow if you want.” He turned to me.

  For no reason I can imagine now, I reached over and shook Ben Toy’s hand. I wished him good night.

  Maybe the reason was that our first interview had completely caved in my mind … Right from when Toy had begun to describe the money transfer in Provincetown, I’d known I had a big story.

  Walking beside Ronald Asher, coming down the hallway from the quiet room, I flashed a bad scene I’d been part of five days earlier at the Citizen-Reporter offices.

  A copy cub, an arrogant nineteen-year-old black, had come up to my desk and sat down all over my paperwork that afternoon. The young writer’s name was John Seawright, and he was in the habit of riding me about verisimilitude in my Horn articles. I was just about to tell him to get off the desk, and out of my life, when he grabbed hold of my shoulders and began to cry. “They just shot him,” he sobbed. “They shot Jimmie Horn, man. He’s dead,” the boy told me. That was how I’d found out about Horn. Zap.

  Someone somewhere on the hospital ward was playing an out-of-tune piano. “A House Is Not a Home” was the song.

  I was still fairly shell-shocked from the interview.

  The high yellow corridor lights were turned down low. It made it difficult for me not to peek into the brighter bedrooms we were passing.

  Two middle-aged men who appeared to be twins were playing chess in one room.

  A boy in his underwear was sitting in bed reading a mathematics text in another.

  A young boy in hornrims was reading Shockproof Sydney Skate by Marijane Meaker.

  I looked down at Asher. The Beard. There was something about the scraggly face growth that appealed to me.

  “I’ve been thinking about a beard.” I broke our mutual silence. “I don’t understand my motivation though.”

  “You want people to know how smart you really are,” the aide grinned. “Beard’s a pain-in-the-ass way to do it though. Always getting spaghetti and cake in mine.”

  “I don’t want people to think I’m smart.” I watched the dull ceiling lights pass over my head. “I don’t know exactly what it is. Not that, though.”

  We stopped at the patients’ kitchen and he went on about the physical hardships of a beard. It was the kind of conversation people have at wakes down South–you talk about anything but the wake and the wakee.

  Asher poured out some of the blackest coffee I’d ever seen. He had kind of an intriguing job, I was thinking.

  I was also watching a pimply teenager who was in the kitchen with us. The boy was shoveling tablespoons of sugar into a tall glass of milk. He had fuzzy, electric hair and looked burned out at sixteen.

  A fairly good (pragmatic) idea occurred to me in the kitchen. I began building up the nerve to ask Asher for an important favor.

  “How much do you know about all this?” I asked for starters.

  “The whole.” Asher sipped the black coffee. “Just about, anyway. Shulman took me to dinner tonight. He told me the hospital position. He said I’d be the only one to supervise visits between you and Ben.”

  I put cream and raw sugar in my coffee. All motions. I wasn’t going to drink the muddy geedunk. It reminded me of the Mississippi River.

  “So you’re pretty tight with Shulman?”

  “We agree. We disagree. He generalizes too much for my taste. Textbooks sometimes. Basically he trusts my instincts, though. Believe it or not, I was in Columbia before this.”

  “He told you about Jimmie Horn?” I said.

  “Yes, he told me. But I still wasn’t prepared for what I heard back there with Toy. Most of us hadn’t taken him all that seriously before.”

  I decided to ask Asher for a big favor. I was close to blurting it out anyway.

  I started by moronically sipping some coffee.

  “I don’t want to play on your emotions,” I said, “but I knew Horn for about eight years before this happened.

  “In a lot of ways we were friends. In some ways,” I corrected myself. “That doesn’t have anything to do with you … except that it gives you an idea of what’s going on in my head right now. My mind is a fucking wreck.”

  The aide nodded. Once again, the coffee.

  “OK,” I sighed. “The problem … I’d like to read what’s been written about Toy since he’s been in here … I could ask Alan Shulman. But I’m afraid to. If Shulman turns me down, I’m fucked. I’m looking for names, dates, anything about Thomas Berryman. I swear to you that I won’t use anything that would hurt anybody else in here. On Bowditch.”

  Asher nodded again. He really looked exhausted and I felt sorry for him. His eyes shifted out the kitchen window into the dark exercise yard.

  Beyond the floodlights on the wall was a staff parking lot. Then the end of the hospital grounds. Then the ocean. At night you could only see the wall, though. Salvador Dali couldn’t have done it better.

  “When you turn left outside the front door, the inside door,” Asher turned to me, “there’s a small conference room. Wait in there. I’ll try to get you what you need.”

  The aide brought me Ben Toy’s admission notes, workup notes, daily nursing charts–over two hundred pages in all.

  Everything was stamped CONFIDENTIAL or NOT TO BE REMOVED FROM THIS ROOM. Some of it was typed, but most of the notes were handwritten in black ink.

  I started to copy names, addresses, telephone numbers …

  Jimmie Horn was mentioned several times in the daily notes; Harley Wynn was mentioned; Thomas Berryman didn’t come up that frequently.

  I recognized none of the other names or addresses. There was nothing to immediately connect anyone in Tennessee.


  I found Toy’s admission note especially interesting though:

  Mr. Toy is an extremely handsome, well-developed young man from the northwestern part of Texas. He has a history of not having close, stable relationships, with the exception of one longstanding boyhood relationship.

  Mr. Toy claims to have killed a man and a woman, and some traumatic incident has precipitated a severe depression with accompanying physical hostility. (He punches walls and people.)

  Mr. Toy has also had auditory hallucinations. Immediate care inside a psychiatric hospital is recommended, and suicidal behavior should not be discounted with this young man …

  I stopped reading as I remembered one fact that put a damper on my excitement and speculation about Toy and Thomas Berryman. Jimmie Horn had been shot down by Bert Poole. I’d seen it several times on film. It was as clear in my mind as the famous televised sequence in which Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald.

  Bowditch was silent around me, reminding me of late nights in my own house. The only sound was water running through the old building’s pipes. Then it glug-glugged off. It was 2:30 in the morning. I was feeling ever so slightly deranged.

  I sat with my stockinged feet up on a green-blottered desk, smoking, drinking machine coffee, thinking about both Ben Toy and Ronald Asher.

  I knew I had a story now, probably a pretty good one, and I started to consider more thorough approaches for future interviews.

  I knew from past experience that I should quickly identify myself and my newspaper. People like to have situations with strangers defined … Then, I thought it would be best to work off people’s natural sympathies for Jimmie Horn. For political assassinations anyway.

  I scribbled out a speech for myself, but it was so convoluted people would have forgotten the beginning by the time I reached the end.

  Then I considered a very simple, direct approach.

  “My name is Ochs Jones,” it went. “I’m a reporter for the Nashville Citizen-Reporter (local newspaper if necessary). I’m investigating the murder of Jimmie Horn of Nashville. Would you help me?”

  It was an introduction that never failed me during four months of investigation, in six states.