The Thomas Berryman Number Page 4

  Watching out for the inevitable attendant or security guard, I let myself out Bowditch’s unlocked outside door. (There were three doors; two of them were locked, but the one leading into the foyer wasn’t.)

  Alan Shulman was waiting for me, sitting on the front steps.

  The young doctor was dressed in well-worn sixties street clothes; he was scratching little xs and os in the driveway gravel with two-toned desert boots.

  “Asher called you,” I said.

  He nodded. “I wish you’d asked me for those files,” he said. “That really bothers me, Mr. Jones.”

  Then he got up from the front steps and walked inside. I listened to the two inner doors being unlocked, closed. Then it was silent again.

  I wished I’d asked him too.

  I also wished he hadn’t dealt with it in quite that way.

  West Hampton, July 10

  For breakfast the next morning I sat alone in a wrinkled double bed at Howard Johnson’s and tried to write the first news story about Thomas Berryman. I didn’t do spectacularly well.

  Random Observation: We of the new journalism schools, energetic, smarter than anybody else, insane with the desire to say truths–simply cannot express ourselves as well as many of our elders.

  Random Observation: People I know, kith and kin, like to compare newspaper and police investigation to jigsaw puzzle solving … but if the investigations I’ve worked on are anything like the average jigsaw puzzle–it’s a puzzle where all the pieces have been lost.

  Lost in different places. Around the house, the backyard, the car, anywhere the car may have been since the puzzle was bought.

  Before a reporter can try to put the puzzle together, he has to find all the pieces.

  I sat in the motel bed looking at all of my pieces. ExposÉs are made of this:

  The name of a bar in Provincetown, Mass.: A. J. Fogarty’s.

  A hotel: the Bay Arms (also in Provincetown).

  A New York florist’s: Flower & Toy Shop.

  Phone numbers Ben Toy had charged calls to since entering the hospital:

  212-686-4212 (Carole Ann Mahoney)

  312-238-1774 (Robert Stringer)

  617-753-8581 (Bernard Shaw)

  212-838-6643 (Mary Ellen Terry)

  212-259-9311 (Berryman; N.Y.C.)

  516-249-6835 (Berryman; Long Island)

  Names: Dr. Reva Baumwell (100 Park); Michel Romains; Charles Izzie; Ina and Calvin Toy.

  I added notes to myself:

  Call Lewis Rosten (my editor) about gunman in Philadelphia.

  Call Alan Shulman about lunch and/or boxing match.

  I called N.Y. telephone information and asked for the number of Thomas Berryman in Manhattan.

  They gave me 259-9311, which I knew of course.

  “That’s at 60 West 80th Street?” I then asked.

  “No, sir,” the operator said. “It’s 80 Central Park South.”

  I added Berryman’s New York address to my list.

  Then I started dialing the other numbers.

  The response at 686-4212 set the tone for the rest of my morning. A young woman with a bright, friendly, mid-western voice answered.

  “Hi there.”

  “Hi. My name is Ochs Jones. I’m a friend of Ben Toy’s.”

  “Who?”

  “Ben Toy, Thomas Berryman … They said that you …”

  “Oh. Hold on. You must want Maggie.”

  Off receiver: “Mags, a friend of Ben Toy? …”

  The phone is set down on a table. Sounds of women walking around in high heels on hardwood floors. Ten minutes pass. The phone is hung up. I call again and there’s no answer.

  The desk at the Bay Arms Hotel in Provincetown had no record of a Toy or Berryman staying there during the month of June.

  A. J. Fogarty’s suggested I call after five, when the night staff came on.

  There was no answer at the florist’s.

  Both Hertz and Avis said there was no way Harley Wynn or anyone else could have rented a Lincoln Mark IV at Boston’s Logan Airport. The Wizard at Avis said it was a “logistical impossibility.”

  Around noon I decided to call Lewis Rosten. Lewis is my editor at the Citizen-Reporter. He’s a thick-skinned wordsmith out of the University of the South–Sewanee. He’s 100% bite, no bark, and the prime mover behind this book. Also, he’s my friend.

  It sounded like he’d just arrived at the office.

  “Ochs, how is it going? Or isn’t it? Where are you?”

  “Still up on Long Island,” I said. “You sound pretty chipper. Must have a pretty good headline going for today.”

  “It’s pure rubbish.” Rosten drawled pure Mississippi. “Speculation about this Joe Cubbah cat up in Philadelphia.”

  “I talked with Ben Toy at the hospital last night,” I said. “I really think this might be something, Lewis.”

  I read from my notes on Toy, filling in my own gut feelings.

  “Jeeee-ssus!” Rosten yowled when I was finished. “I was going to apologize for sending you up there in the middle of things down here … I just had this feeling about that doctor who called … Listen,” Rosten said, “Toy said, ‘I can’t tell you,’ when you first asked him who had hired Thomas Berryman?”

  “Yeah. But then he came right back and said he didn’t know. It’s hard to read Toy. They have him on a ton of medication … Apparently he’s kicked the shit out of some attendants. He’s a pretty big boy.”

  “How did they get him in there anyway?”

  “You know, I don’t know … I don’t have all the details anyway. He fell asleep on me last night.”

  Rosten wasn’t too happy with that one.

  “When do you see him again?” he wanted to know.

  “I hope today … I, uh, made a few problems for my-self last night. Looked at some hospital workups on Toy. Got caught.”

  Far, far away in Nashville Rosten calmly puffed away on his pipe. “Accidents,” he muttered, “will occur in the best-regulated families. Mister Charles Dickens, David Copperfield … Ochs,” he went on in the same breath, “please be careful with this.”

  I sat at the motel desk and smoked a few more cigarettes. It was bright noon outside.

  Some little girls were having a high-diving marathon in the swimming pool.

  I went back over what I had and what I didn’t have point by point. Among other things, it occurred to me that I had absolutely no idea how or why the gunman from Philadelphia had been in Nashville. Not a clue.

  It also occurred to me that I had no idea what had happened to Thomas Berryman. I sat there, puffing tobacco, watching little girls play, wondering where Berryman was right at that very moment.

  West Hampton, July 11

  Two husky attendants were wrapping Ben Toy up like Tutankhamen, only in wet, ice-cold sheets. He lay flat out on one of two pinewood massage tables in the immaculate Bowditch shower room.

  One aide pulled the dripping sheets tight, then the other held them down–the way you’d keep a finger on string while wrapping a package.

  The tightly bound sheets trapped all of Toy’s body heat; made it numb; floated his mind. He started to look like he was knocked out on dope.

  As we sat in the shower room, different smart-aleck patients kept coming in and threatening to sit on his face. That was a big joke on Bowditch. The intruders always laughed; Ben Toy laughed.

  There was a strange camaraderie among the patients that wouldn’t have held up on the outside. It was disorienting, but I was “being careful” as per Lewis Rosten’s request. This was meeting number 2, and Toy had requested “cold packs” for it.

  I bent down and touched a Winston to his chapped lips. His face pores were open, exuding oily sweat.

  He drew smoke slowly, deep, then exhaled it in a steamy cloud. There was something expensive, exotic, about the entire experience, the madhouse atmosphere.

  “It really relaxes me,” Toy said of the cold packs. His drawn cheeks and his forehead were starting to
flush bright red. “You fight like a bastard the first time they try to do it to you. Then you can’t get enough of it.”

  He exhaled more smoke. He tried to blow it up to the green tile ceiling.

  My eyes traveled up and down the neatly bound-up sheets. I looked over at Asher. He and I had squared things with Shulman. Kind of squared things, anyway. “I think I’d put up a little fight if you tried to put me in these,” I said.

  Toy smiled. His eyes were on the Winston in my hand. “One more puff,” he said. “Then I have a story for you.”

  The story elaborated on Thomas Berryman’s unconventional techniques for murder.

  The most recent number had occurred in the small town of Lake Stevens, Washington. The victims were two of three brothers owning an airplane company: Shepherd Industries of Washington.

  Berryman was used because the deaths had to appear accidental; suspicion had to be cast away from the family: the man paying Berryman’s forty thousand dollar fee was the third brother.

  I recalled Harley Wynn’s remarks about displacing blame after the murder of Jimmie Horn. If Berryman had somehow done the shooting in Nashville, he certainly had succeeded in that regard.

  The Shepherd Number had taken him three days to complete.

  On January 17th, a Friday, he’d flown to the Shepherd family estate in Lake Stevens. He was posed as a sales representative for a Michigan tool and die company, Michael J. Shear. On Monday, he and all three brothers were scheduled to go to Detroit to inspect Shear’s plant operations.

  Berryman’s plan for the job was characteristically complicated in execution. It unraveled, however, with a fascinating, what Ben Toy called a “neat,” result.

  As I listened I considered the related parallels for Jimmie Horn.

  Lake Stevens, Washington, January 19 and 20

  On a Sunday night, the 19th of January, Thomas Berryman sat in a moonlit kitchen, lazily drinking instant coffee, daydreaming about a girl named Oona Quinn.

  He listened for noises around him in the big Shepherd house. Heard the cold wind in the firs outside. The soothing fire crackling under his water pan.

  A plastic clock on the stove read five of two.

  At two, Berryman pushed himself back from the table. He held back a yawn and pinched grit out of the corners of his eyes. He went outside into the winter cold.

  The night air was better for his concentration. Still, he felt that he was sleepwalking for a while.

  He was carrying a duffel bag the size of a lunchbox. Also an oversized pistol, a five-inch Crossman air pistol.

  His tennis shoes made a padding sound across the patio. Then he was stiff-arming tree and bush forms in the dark.

  Following a skinny, winding creek that carried the moon’s reflection like a boat, Berryman was eventually turning a dogleg right in the woods. In time he saw-amber floodlights from the Shepherd airfield. Saw how they seemed to pin down the planes like guy wires.

  Down under one plane’s nose an old Chevy BelAir was parked alongside a slender clapboard sentry house. Berryman could read I BRAKE FOR ANIMALS on a big orange sticker across the car’s trunk. Farmers with night jobs, he considered. Maybe down-and-outers.

  A hairy gray head was in one sentry house window. A muffled radio played country and western music. Charlie Pride, it sounded like.

  About a quarter mile down the field he could see the jet he’d come in on that past Friday. Staying about ten feet inside the woods, he made a way, the long way, down toward the jet.

  He noticed several lean Dobermans roaming loose, prancing on the shiny tarmac, apparently liking the sound made by their paws on stone.

  Out beyond the main lights the field got dark enough for Berryman to walk out of the bushes again. Far down the airfield, a younger guard came up to the little pillbox with a leashed Doberman. He tied up the muscular animal, and for a minute or two it stood around front snapping at its old lady, also tied.

  As Berryman stood watching the pair, a hidden Doberman flew out of the tree shadows. It barked no warning, growled late.

  Berryman fell, and the long Crossman flashed up with an airy pffssss. Pffssss. The pretty dog twisted around itself and collapsed. It lay still with its teeth bared, the way dogs look after they’ve tried, too late, to bite killer automobiles.

  The Doberman would sleep for hours. Then, it would wake up yipping and limping. With religion.

  The younger of the two watchmen wasn’t going to be so fortunate. Berryman needed him.

  He pushed himself up from the cold airfield tarmac. Felt where his coat and sweater were ripped at the elbow. He started off toward the jet, and a long night’s work.

  The following morning, Berryman prowled around the Shepherd kitchen like a sick man. He had butterflies in his stomach and he was trembling slightly. Among other things, he hadn’t slept that night.

  Across the room, a little blacklady cook was doing a slow burn.

  Morality had never been ambiguous with the woman and she highly disapproved of a party held there the night before. She held Thomas Berryman responsible.

  He’d arranged the bash.

  “Hmmpff. I jus won’t work ’round here no more, things being like this,” she complained around the kitchen. “Hmmpff.”

  She scrambled a bowl of eggs and kept shaking her head in disgust. “Women’s underwears in the garden. Little maraschinos cherries in the swimmin’ pool. Hmmpff. Hmmpff.” She turned to Berryman and looked him squarely in the face: wise little acorn face to big mustache face. “I thought you was a gentleman,” she said. “Wrong. Wrong again,” she shrugged. “Won’t be the first time. Won’t be the last.”

  Berryman was fiddling over by her stove, looking half-contrite. He appeared to be sorry to have caused her displeasure, if nothing else. “What’s this here?” he asked after a respectful pause.

  “Hmmpff,” the old lady bit her tongue. She beat her duck eggs dark gold. “Now what …” she said, biting the tongue, “now what in the world does that look like?”

  Thomas Berryman cocked his head back and popped a biscuit-sized fruit into his mouth. “Tastes like strawberries,” he grinned. “Only they’re too big to be strawberries.” Juice ran over his chin and he dammed the flow with a forefinger.

  The cook moved over and nudged him away from her stove. She was half-playing now. “I’m really mad at you, Mister Shear.”

  She sidled him across the kitchen with her bony little hip. “You a bad influence comin up Lake Steven actin like that last night.”

  As further appeasement, it seemed, Berryman started to fill a row of four pewter coffee mugs on the counter. “Who’s who?”

  “Mister Ben an’ you the cream an’ sugar boys,” the old lady started. Then she reconsidered. “But you not bringin nothin’ to nobody. You must make it a big joke. Bit joke on Mrs. Bibbs, ha ha, very funny indeed.”

  “Put down the coffee,” she said. “Down boy.”

  As the little black woman returned to scooping eggs onto warmed, waiting plates, Berryman dropped small tablets into two of the coffee mugs. The tablets were a combination of iron sulfate, magnesium oxide, and ipecac.

  “What a sore sport,” he sucked his cheek as he watched the pills dissolve. “What a party pooper, Mrs. B.”

  As he continued to grin at her, the old woman finally looked up. She flashed a gold bridgework smile at him. As usual, he was forgiven.

  The youngest Shepherd brother, Benjamin, sat still as grass, glassy-eyed, chewing a breakfast muffin over and over like it was rubber tire. He thought he was having a heart attack.

  He could hear his big heart thumping and felt it could blow open his chest. His body was flushing blood. Numb fingers, toes. His lungs were filling up with fluids, and he was having regrets about the life he’d led.

  Pancakes were being passed by. His brother was kidding Thomas Berryman about the trip back to Michigan.

  Benjamin Shepherd slipped down to the floor, and began vomiting recognizable food.

  Charles and Will
iam Shepherd carried their brother to a first floor bedroom. They held him on a bed while his body convulsed. He dryheaved. His back arched like a drawbridge.

  Gradually it dawned on Charles Shepherd that his cook was screaming bloody murder in another room. Back in the dining room. She screamed for a long time, calling for Charles Shepherd and for Jesus.

  When his young brother finally fainted, Charles ran back to the dining room.

  What he found was Thomas Berryman lying across the rug. Berryman was holding his knees up around his chest. He’d kicked over the dining room table–at least it was turned over on its side. “Oh my God,” he kept gasping. “Oh God, it’s horrible.” He wasn’t having regrets about the life he’d led. He’d poisoned himself.

  The exact sound he made was: O g-a-a-ad.

  Late that afternoon the little cook, Mrs. Bibbs, sat on a tiny leather hassock in the front hallway of the Shepherd house. She’d cried until she had no control over her limbs. The sun was passing down through the glass portion of the front door. The woman slipped off the hassock onto the sunstreaked floor.

  The family doctor had just gone out the door. He’d said that both Berryman and Benjamin Shepherd had suffered from acute food poisoning. It was lucky for them, he announced with great pomp, that they’d both thrown up so violently.

  Orating in front of Charles and Willy Shepherd, the doctor had sternly and ridiculously questioned the cook about whether or not she’d washed her strawberries before serving them. “I think not,” he’d said. And who was she to argue with a doctor of medicine.

  That afternoon, Benjamin Shepherd was recuperating in his own bedroom.

  Propped in front of a Trinitron portable, eating ice cream like a tonsillectomy patient, his large head was positioned beneath a framed Kodachrome of Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris. The girl had more hair over her vagina than an ape does.

  Benjamin wasn’t flying back to Michigan with Berryman and his brothers, he’d announced.

  The family advised Thomas Berryman to do the same. Recuperate for a few days. Get the poisons out of his system. Take rhubarb and soda at regular intervals.