The Thomas Berryman Number Read online

  But when Charles and Willy Shepherd stopped to see their brother on their way to the plane, Berryman, though peaked, was packed and dressed to travel with them.

  He was smiling thinly. Puffing on a characteristic cigarillo. But he looked like a man just over a hospital convalescence.

  That much is approximated in a statement filed by Ben Shepherd with the Lake Stevens, Washington, police.

  Pioneer types, Charles and Willy Shepherd fueled and set up their own plane. It was work they liked doing.

  Berryman pitched in where he could, driving a BP fuel truck back and forth from a hangar. The three men worked without speaking.

  It wasn’t until all the work was done that Berryman took Charles Shepherd aside.

  They sat down on a small metal handtruck beside the private jet’s boarding stairs. Berryman was hyperventilating. Charles Shepherd’s hands were dirty as a mechanic’s and he sat with them held out away from his shirt.

  “Whew!” Berryman kept blowing out air and catching his breath as he spoke. “I guess,” he said, “all this phew extra running around … set me off again.”

  “Sure it did,” Shepherd agreed. “You should be back in bed. You look pitiful.”

  “Damn stomach’s rolling.”

  “Rhubarb and soda’s the thing.”

  “Fuck me,” Berryman puffed.

  “I told you, you dumbass. Go on back with Ben now.”

  Thomas Berryman continued to swear like a man about to miss out on box seats for a pro football game. “Shee-it,” he said over and over.

  Willy Shepherd stood close by, looking as if he’d suddenly figured something out. He was lighting a cigarette. “Too much running around,” he said to Berryman. “Got to take it easy after these things.”

  “Phew,” Berryman said. He was beet red, blushing. “Fuck me, Willy” were his last words, really, to either of the brothers. He gave both men back-thumping abrazos. Then he headed back toward the big house.

  The private plane cruised over Douglas fir tops like a living, looking thing. It was blue, electric blue.

  Thomas Berryman watched through mottled leaves that were hiding his face. Then he turned away and began hiking through woods toward the main state road, away from the house.

  Berryman walked watching the tops of his boots. Watching the underbrush. The bleached hay. Noting greenish grasshoppers. Red ants on stalks of hay. A dead field mouse like a wet, gray mitten.

  Overhead, the blue jet’s wheels slowly tucked into its stomach, and as the wheels folded, the sky cracked like a giant fir splitting all the way up from its roots.

  Berryman knew enough not to look back. Once, sometime in Texas, he’d seen a buck on fire. It hadn’t been pretty, or edifying.

  He walked faster. In deeper woods. In a dark house with a soft needle floor. He kept seeing the burning deer.

  The nose and the belly puffed smoke just about the color of sheep wool. It shot flames that were orange at first. Then just about blue. Then near-invisible in black smoke.

  It smoked ashes. It made shrieking metal-against-metal noises. The entire dark sky seemed to fall into the woods.

  That much was reported by a gas station owner on the Lake Stevens Highway.

  Berryman hiked two miles to a picnic roadstop. The roadstop was simply two redwood tables in a small clearing.

  He got into a rented beige and white camper he’d parked there earlier in the week.

  There were sleeping bags and Garcia fishing poles and tackle in the back. There was a Texaco map of Washington across the front seat. An old pipe was on the dashboard.

  Propped against the pipe was the familiar old sign: GONE-FISHING. Berryman crumpled the message in his hand.

  He turned on the radio. Opened all the windows. Put on a workshirt, Stetson, and Tony Lama boots. He drove away calmly, like a man away on a vacation.

  The smell of fir was so thick and good he began to get over his nausea from the ipecac residue.

  Hours later, sitting in a roadhouse in Cahone, Oregon, he read that businessman Michael J. Shear (the body of the young airfield security guard) was among those killed in the crash of a private plane near the Charles Shepherd estate in Lake Stevens, Washington. There wasn’t any mention of an investigation, the local media aura being one of either supernatural catastrophe, or casual indifference. (Even afterward, the matter of the missing security guard was either overlooked or attributed to coincidence by the tiny Lake Stevens police force.)

  There was an accompanying photograph with the newspaper story. It showed a sad and silly-looking policeman holding up a large man’s shoe.

  Because he had extended it out toward the camera, it looked like a giant’s shoe. This was the same trick used in “big fish” photos, and Berryman wondered if the man had done it on purpose.

  Ben Toy lay still as a corpse in his cold packs. His blond hair was wet, darker. I’d pushed it back out of his face, and he looked younger that way.

  “That’s the way his mind works,” he said to me, to Asher and the Sony.

  “And that’s why they wanted him for Jimmie Horn.”

  New York City, July 12

  At 9:30 the next morning I was perched on a four-foot-high stone wall surrounding Central Park. I was memorizing Thomas Berryman’s apartment building as though it was Westminster Abbey or the Louvre.

  My hands had been sweating when I woke up at 6 A.M.; they were still sweating. I’d been considering calling the police. The blood-and-shit terribleness of the story was just beginning to dawn on me and it was oppressive.

  I had a good idea what I was going to do at Berryman’s, only not knowing New York, I didn’t think it would be quite as easy as it turned out to be.

  Between nine-thirty and ten, two liveried doormen whistled down Yellow Cab after Yellow Cab in front of the building. It’s gray-canopied entrance, marked with a big white number 80, seemed a glorified bus stop more than anything else.

  My hands continued to sweat. Even my legs were wet. For sharp contrast I could see suits and jewels munching breakfast across the way at the Park Lane Hotel.

  Ben Toy had spoken of the tenth floor … dirty ledges … pigeons. I counted up to the tenth floor. But there were no pigeons that day; and no people at any of the windows. The windows appeared to be black.

  After the taxi rush, one of the doormen emerged from the lobby trailing four large dogs on leashes. A dapper blackman in his forties, he was wearing a dark green suitcoat over his blue uniform–that plus a racetrack fedora with a little yellow feather cocked up on the side.

  He controlled the dogs with flicks of his wrists, getting them to successfully jaywalk through Central Park South’s midmorning traffic.

  I caught up with him on a secluded patch of lawn inside the park. It was under the eye of RCA and GM; of planted penthouse terraces and wooden water towers. I told the doorman my name and business, and he was sympathetic, I thought. He’d been born in Kentucky, in fact, and he knew about Horn. His name was Leroy Bones Cooper.

  “Well, sure, yes, I’d like to cooperate with you on this matter of Mr. Horn,” he said without any southern in his voice. “I didn’t person’ly know the man, you understand–I believe I did see him on the news program several times.”

  I quickly decided to ask the doorman if he could possibly get me inside Berryman’s apartment.

  His reaction was sudden inner-city suspicion. “Mr. Berr’man?” He cocked his head on a sharp slant. “What does Mr. Berr’man have to do with it? He been away lately.”

  “He might not be involved at all,” I told the man. “We think he is, though.”

  The doorman started to lead his dogs back toward the street. “Hard for me to believe that,” he said over their sudden barking.

  I trailed along, about a step behind. “Can I ask why?”

  The little blackman seemed a little angry now. “You askin it,” he said. He took off his hat and wiped his head with a big white hankie. “Don’t have no answer for sure.” He looked at me. �
�Mr. Berr’man’s a nice young fella is all. Stock man or manageer’ial I believe.”

  He continued to walk forward. The dogs were being irritated by squirrels in the maple trees.

  “The way I see it,” he turned to me when we reached the stone wall, “it’s twenty-five dollars for me. Twenty-five for the super.”

  I didn’t quite believe what he’d said. I brought up the concern he’d shown about Horn.

  “Whether I’m concerned or whether I’m not,” he waved off my objection, “you want your peek upstairs. The money’s its own separate thing. I see how it can help Mr. Horn, all right, and it can help me too.”

  I let the argument drop and I counted out five ten-dollar bills for Cooper. He thanked me in a polite, New York-doorman way. He wasn’t from Kentucky, I thought–not anymore.

  “You’re going to take me up there yourself,” I told the little man.

  Leroy Cooper was making a lot of throat-clearing and sniffling noises. He was having trouble unlocking the heavy green door marked with a gold 10D.

  The strong-box door finally opened, and I was looking across a long room, all the way up Central Park to 110th Street. It was a spectacular view of bright woods, narrow roads, even a few dark ponds.

  The apartment itself was weighted down with heavy wood furniture and hanging plants. It was conspicuously neat and clean.

  “Maid comes two, three times a week. Ears’la Libscomb,” Cooper said. “Anybody else comes,” he cautioned me with a stiff outstretched finger, “you’re a burglar.”

  “Thanks,” I mumbled. “I thought I might be able to count on you.”

  “I hope you find what you’re looking for,” he said anyway. His knobby, black hands were visibly shaking, but he was trying to look arrogant. He was totally confused, I decided.

  He slowly, noiselessly closed the door and I was alone in Thomas Berryman’s apartment.

  Feeling more than a little unreal, I set right to work.

  I started with a quick tour of the place.

  Besides the airy living room, there were two large bedrooms. There was an eat-in kitchen and another large room being used as a study. I walked along flinging open closets, pulling out drawers, making quite an arbitrary mess of things.

  I found a Walther automatic in the master bedroom, but there were no other guns anywhere.

  There were photographs of an exquisite, dark-haired girl over a fireplace in the bedroom. She was an Irisher … There were also black-and-white photographs and paintings of Last Picture Show western towns all over the walls. But there were no pictures of Thomas Berryman.

  Only clues about him.

  Blouses and Cardin and Yves Saint Laurent suits next to hunting wear from Abercrombie’s. Boots from Neiman-Marcus. Givenchy colognes. A rugged-looking jacket made of the good, soft leather used for horse equipage.

  The second bedroom seemed to be some kind of guest room with bath.

  It was all set up like a room at the Plaza Hotel. Fresh untouched Turkish towels and linen. Neutrogena soap still in its black wrapper. An unused tube of Close-up that I opened for candy purposes.

  The study was full of books and cigars, and also one of the few things I’d specifically been looking for.

  It was a fat, red book published by Random House. The maid or someone had put it upside down on one of the bookshelves. The book was called Jiminy and it was Jimmie Horn’s autobiography.

  Close beside Jiminy were four other books containing articles on Horn: Sambo; The Young Bloods; Black Consciousness; and Re-Nig.

  My next interesting discovery was three photographs. They were wrapped up in tissue paper and squirreled away in a bottom desk drawer.

  One of them showed a well-dressed blond man who seemed to be signaling for a cab on a crowded, glittery street. The blond man was in crisp, sharp focus.

  The second picture was of the same blond man turned toward a street hustler this time. The second man wore bluejean biballs with no shirt, and a bluejean cap with a peak. The blond man’s eyes were half-closed and his mouth was open in a capital O. It looked like a candid comedy picture.

  The final shot was the blond man again, but standing beside Ben Toy. This Ben Toy weighed twenty to thirty pounds more than when I’d seen him at the hospital. He was physically impressive to look at. Behind the two men was a white municipal building, a library or courthouse. The blond man seemed to be pointing right at the camera.

  I was certain that he was Harley John Wynn.

  Soon after I looked at the pictures, I heard a loud creaking noise inside the apartment. I looked across the room, and saw that the front door was slowly opening. I was helpless to do anything but watch it.

  First a hat, then Leroy Cooper’s face appeared in a foot-wide crack. “How long you gonna be?” he complained. “Damn, man, you’re, taking too long for this.”

  I said nothing to Cooper. I felt as though my skull had been shattered by someone swinging a heavy metal bar. Somehow, the experience had translated into nausea too.

  Getting no answer from me, Cooper slowly shook his head. He shut the door again. I heard him swearing outside. Very slowly, I was getting an emotional grasp of the situation I was involved in: I was starting to understand genuine fear of being hurt; the ability to take lives; fast, unexpected death.

  Eventually I regrouped and left the building. I sent the three photographs to Lewis Rosten in Nashville. Then I spent the rest of the day visiting psychiatrists and psychologists who’d worked with Ben Toy.

  I also ate a pork chop sandwich in a lunch shop run by some Greek men. The chop was silver-dollar size with the bone still in it. Because of the bone, the Greek men couldn’t cut the sandwich. I ate around it, not completely understanding how or why people live in New York City.

  That night, after dinner with Alan Shulman, I called home.

  My wife Nan said she was missing me, and I was missing her too. Nan knows how to put me on an even keel, and I’d been flying just a little too high in New York.

  We talked about the Berryman story, and talking with her I began to feel that I’d accomplished some things.

  After we finished, Nan put on my daughters for two minutes each.

  Janie Bug said almost nothing. Then she started to cry because her time was up.

  Little Cat said she’d pray for me at Trinity Episcopal if I promised to bring her back one of those miniature Empire State Buildings.

  That kind of thing (attitude) upsets me, but I don’t know what to do about it.

  I tried to go to sleep, but I couldn’t quite get there.

  Amagansett, July 13

  Random Observation: I’d been handed a ticket on the fast rail, and I was well on my way to God knew where. It was Tom Wickerdom or bust.

  Or was it? I began to remember strange, sad stories about men called “assassination buffs.” I remembered people laughing at the expense of an ex-newsman from Memphis who was still dredging up facts about Martin Luther King’s murder.

  My body was trying to accept another northern morning. It was agreeably warm outside, but springwarm.

  It was 8 A.M. and I was badly in need of a caffeine fix. I had to settle for nicotine, American-tobacco style.

  Cigarette in hand, I surveyed a big, gray Victorian-style house bordering the yard of William Seward Junior High in Amagansett. I was fingering a rash under my new beard. In retrospect, I think the lack of sleep had caught up with me.

  The big house had four white gables and a black Fleetwood sticking out of the garage. The house number told me it was Miss Ettie Hatfield’s place, and I was properly impressed with the living style of the Bowditch nurse.

  Miss Hatfield had been night charge nurse on Bowditch for over thirty-five years. Both Shulman and Ronald Asher said she was the only person on Bowditch Ben Toy might have opened up to. Miss Hatfield was a magical old lady, they said. She was the one who’d originally alerted Shulman to the Jimmie Horn references in Toy’s ramblings.

  I could distinguish a bald head reading a ne
wspaper inside the house’s darkened living room. Steam was drifting up from a coffee cup on the windowsill.

  I slogged up the spongy-wet front lawn, stood on a wet, bristle mat, and tried to get a brass lionhead to make noise for me. The knocker would stick on the downswing–then it would make a sound like ttthummm. Stick, then ttthummm.

  “Doesn’t work right.” A man’s voice finally came from inside. “I’m coming around. I’m coming around.”

  He of the bald head, an ancient fellow in a plaid shirt with black string tie, finally opened up the front door.

  He was Miss Hatfield’s father, and he appeared to be well into his nineties. He shook from Parkinson’s disease, he told me, but other than that, everything was shipshape.

  “She’s sleepin’ now,” he said after we’d gotten our autobiographies in order. “Works nights up the hospital. I just picked her up seven-fifteen.”

  The old man looked down at a handsome gold watch, searched the dial for arms, looked back up at me.

  “Made my fortune sellin’ these Benruses,” he remarked. “You’re about six foot six, aren’t you?” he went on.

  “Six foot seven,” I blushed, then slouched out of an old, no, I don’t play basketball habit.

  Mr. Hatfield shook his head and made a clucking noise with his cheek. “Seventy-nine fuckin’ inches,” he said. “Here I stand sixty-one and a half. Used to be sixty-four. Hell, Ettie’s near sixty-three herself.”

  I couldn’t help laughing at the way he’d said it, and the old man chortled along with me. I asked what time I should come back to talk with his daughter.

  “Aw hell, I’m goin’ to wake her now.”

  He gave me a little hand signal to follow him inside. “She’s been expectin’ you all yesterday. Ever since Ben Toy told her you come. I ever let you get away, she’d cut me off my cream of wheat.”

  He went up the stairs chucking to himself. He was a country boy, in his own quaint Long Island, N.Y., way.