The Thomas Berryman Number Read online

  I met Miss Hatfield in a parlor room already smelling strongly of musk.

  The nurse was a smily, white-haired lady with a little hitch in her walk. She was a fast-walking limper though, a female Walter Brennan.

  “How’re you this fine morning?” She shook my hand with some of the friendliness I’d been missing since coming up North. “I’m Ettie. Be more than happy to help you all I can … Alan Shulman already said it’d be fine.” She grinned perfect shiny false teeth. “Heard about your mess-up with young Asher. Tsk. Tsk.”

  The little nurse had completely taken over the room. Her big smile was everywhere. Ettie shit, I was thinking, this was my Great-Aunt Mary Elizabeth Collins Jones–the one who had me pegged.

  “Sit down. Sit down,” she said to me. “Daddy, why don’t you take a nice walk?” She turned to her father.

  The old fellow had just settled into a cushiony velvet love seat. It took him a while to get up, and to hobble across the room. “Why don’t she take a nice flyin’ crap for herself?” he loud-whispered as he passed my chair.

  “Not while this nice young man is here,” Ettie Hatfield said without missing a beat.

  She talked for as long as I wanted to listen. She was very thorough, very serious once she got going. She exhausted her memory for every last detail, cursing when one wouldn’t come back to her.

  The nurse had heard a lot of anecdotes about the way Ben Toy and Berryman had grown up in Texas; but she also knew stories about several of the killings. Curiosities, which I filled my notebook with:

  Thomas Berryman had been married in Mexico when he was fifteen.

  Berryman’s mother died of lung cancer when he was eleven.

  Both of them had apparently been well liked around Clyde, Texas. Berryman was called the “Pleasure King”; Ben Toy was called “the funniest man in America.”

  Ben Toy had gone through a period where he’d worn his mother’s underwear whenever she left him alone in the house.

  The first man Berryman ever shot was a priest from New Mexico.

  Berryman had been wounded in a New York shooting in 1968.

  Berryman had received one hundred thousand dollars in two payments to kill Jimmie Horn. The money was probably being held by a man named Michael Kittredge.

  Ben Toy had advised Berryman not to take the Horn job. He didn’t want to be party to the assassination. Berryman had told him Horn was going to be shot whether he did it or not.

  “Most patients have their little tales,” Miss Hatfield explained to me at one point. “You’ll hear about how they’ve had relations with these three hundred women–and then they’ll tell you how they think they may be impotent.” The old lady laughed. “Sometimes it’s not so funny. Sometimes it is, though.

  “Now Ben Toy,” she went on, “he was sounding pretty authentic to me. No attempt to impress anybody. No big contradictions in things he said … That’s why I told Doctor Shulman.”

  She stood up and stepped away from her easy chair. “I have something to show you,” she said. “This is my big contribution.”

  She went over and got a brown schoolboy’s duffel bag sitting beside the velvet love seat. “Carry all my little gewgaws to work in this,” she laughed.

  She unzippered the bag and reached around inside for a minute or so.

  She took out a bent photograph and handed it over to me. Harley Wynn, I thought as I took it. But it was Berryman. The picture looked to be two or three years old, but it was definitely him. The curly black hair, the floppy mustache.

  “It came in Ben Toy’s things from his apartment,” she said. “Kind of looks like a regular person, doesn’t he? Some man you see anyday in Manhattan. That kind of frightens me.” The old woman made a strange face by closing one eye tight. “I’d like to be able to look right at him and tell. Just by looking … like Lee Harvey Oswald. That one down in Alabama, too.”

  “Yeah.” I agreed with what I thought she was saying. “And just like Bert Poole down in Tennessee,” I added.

  Nashville, July 14

  My black swivel chair at the Nashville Citizen-Reporter is ancient. The line WHAT HAS HE DONE FOR US LATELY? is a recent addition to it, chalked across the back in three bold lines. Something about the chair makes me think of black leather jackets.

  I sit under a gold four-sided clock hanging at the center of a huge two-hundred-foot-by-one-hundred-and-fifty-foot city room. I doubt that anything other than the people inside the room has changed since the 1930s.

  At noon, only one other typewriter was going in the whole place. Most of the writers and editors would come in around one or one-thirty.

  At one exactly, I called my editor, Lewis Rosten, to let him know I was at my desk if he wanted to touch and see me.

  Moments later, the diminutive Mississippian appeared, unsmiling, in front of my desk.

  Lewis reminds me of Truman Capote either having gone straight, or never having gone at all. He was wearing striped suspenders, a polka-dot bow tie, Harry Truman eyeglasses.

  “A beard!” he drawled thickly. “That’s exactly what you didn’t need.” He slipped away, back in the direction of his own office. “Come,” he called.

  I went down to his office and he was already on the phone to our executive editor, Moses Reed.

  Rosten’s office is cluttered with old newspapers and assorted antebellum memorabilia; it looks like the parlor of a Margaret Mitchell devotee. I sat down, noticing a new, or at least uncovered, sign over his desk.

  What the Good Lord

  lets happen,

  I’m not afraid to

  print in my paper.

  –Mr. Charles A. Davis

  That sign, notwithstanding Mr. Davis, was vintage Lewis Rosten.

  “Ochs is back,” he was saying over the phone. He turned to catch me perusing a 1921 Citizen. “Moses wants to know what you’ve turned up?”

  “A lot of things.” I smiled.

  “A lot of things,” he told Reed. “Yeah, don’t I know it,” he added. I winced.

  Lewis hung up the phone and banged out a sentence on his old battered Royal. “The quick brown fox. You and me and Reed. The Honorable Francis Marion Parker. Arnold. Michael Cooder. Up on seven in twenty minutes,” he said. “Big strategy session. What have you got? Anything new?”

  I took out the photograph of Thomas Berryman. “I have this.”

  Lewis held the picture about three inches under his nose and eyeglasses. “Hmmm … Mr. Thomas Berryman, I presume.”

  I nodded and stayed with my 1921 paper.

  “I’d like to get some copies of this. What I’d like to do is run it around to all the hotels later. Look at these, will you.”

  He handed me a telephone toll call check. Also some kind of credit card check through American Express.

  The credit card slip showed that Thomas J. Berryman had charged seven flights on Amex number 041-220-160-1-100AX since January 1.

  His flights had been to Port Antonio, Jamaica; Port-au-Prince; Amarillo, Texas; Caneel Bay; and London. None of the flights were to anywhere near Nashville.

  “Fuck,” I muttered.

  The phone check showed one call made to the Walter Scott Hotel in Nashville on June 9th.

  “This is pretty interesting. He called here at least.”

  Rosten didn’t comment. He was collecting paperwork for the big meeting.

  “From the looks of that credit card thing, the man lives pretty damn well.” He finally spoke. “What do people up there think he does?”

  “Some people seem to think he works as a lawyer. Not too many people know him.”

  Rosten put the photograph up to his face again. “I s’pose he could be a lawyer, though?”

  “No, Lewis … He’s a killer.”

  Rosten rocked back and forth in his own swivel chair, smiling, puffing on his pipe. “Now this,” he said like some Old South storyteller, “is what we used to call a barnburner.”

  “Barnburner’s for basketball,” I grinned. “You never went to
a basketball game in your life.”

  “No,” Rosten smiled wider. “But I heard a lot about them.”

  He stood up, and we started our walk to the executive editor’s office. Calmly puffing his pipe, picking motes and strings off his white shirt, Lewis reminded me to try to be politic.

  Moses Reed is what people of a certain age around Tennessee, men and women, would call “a man’s man.”

  He’s tall, always well-dressed, with wavy black hair just hinting at gray. He may have played football somewhere or other–Princeton, I’d heard somewhere–and though under six feet tall, he’s considerably broader than I am. He appears to come from money.

  His office looks like a wealthy man’s dining room. Only some photographs of famous men (Ernest Hemingway kicking a can up a solitary road … Churchill smoking a cigar in a high-rimmed bathtub … Bobby Kennedy playing football) spoil the dining room effect.

  There is no desk in the office; and no typewriter.

  There are antique chairs with embroidered seats. Plus an oblong mahogany table for tea. And a Sheffield tea service.

  It’s difficult to imagine Reed as a ragamuffin growing up in Birmingham, Alabama–which he was.

  Seven of us sat at the highly polished table. A work session. Everyone in crisply starched shirttails except me.

  Francis Parker, the conservative Citizen publisher–peevish, but a fair man, I’d heard; Reed, transplanted Georgetown journalist, the executive editor; Arnold Beckton, the managing editor; Rosten, metropolitan editor; two other up-and-coming editors; and Ochs Jones, shooting star of the moment.

  This was journalism by committee. It’s always a disaster. No exceptions.

  My heart was in my throat. I kept clearing my throat and trying to catch my breath. The attempts to catch my breath made me yawn.

  A stooped black lady was pouring coffee and giving each of us a fresh-sugared cruller. The middle-aged Sunday editor was spouting wit from Sports Illustrated stories as though it was essential wisdom.

  The mood of the room was jovial right up until the coffee lady left.

  Then the jokes stopped abruptly. Each of the others solemnly shook my hand and congratulated me. Reed said a few introductory remarks about the importance of the story I was working on. Then he opened up the floor for questions. They came like a flood.

  Was Ben Toy’s testimony reliable? Was I sure?

  Why hadn’t we been able to trace down Harley John Wynn thus far?

  Who had hired Berryman?

  Where was Berryman right now?

  Had anything been done to follow up on the story of the Shepherd brothers out in Washington?

  How did the Philadelphia gunman fit in? Did Ben Toy know him?

  Exactly what did I think had happened on the day of the shooting? How was young Bert Poole connected?

  I answered about eighty-five percent of their questions, but that isn’t necessarily a winning percentage in a meeting like that. At least two of the editors were trying to score points by throwing me stumpers.

  I began to make excuses for some of the things I’d done. Then quite suddenly Reed was standing over me at the table.

  He was smiling like a genial master of ceremonies, turning one of his editors’ serious and valid questions into a cute little joke. I felt like a vaudeville comedian about to get the hook. Reed had stopped me in midsentence.

  “That’s fine,” the broad-shouldered man said. His fingers were moving lightly on my arm.

  “I think that’s just fine, Ochs.” He pointed down the table to Lewis Rosten. “We have a few exhibits to show all of you now.”

  Very suddenly, I understood the purpose of the meeting. It was all a show. All theater for the publisher’s benefit.

  Lewis dutifully passed around the credit card and phone checks on Berryman; then the photographs of Harley Wynn; finally the picture of Thomas Berryman and a typed report he’d written on the story’s progress. His report was just long enough, I noticed, not to be read right away.

  Francis Parker was nodding thoughtfully. He asked Rosten a few informal questions and I found myself being talked to by Reed.

  “Don’t you be hesitant to call me, even at my home,” was one of the things he said. “I expect you’ll have to go back up North again. Is that all right?”

  I said that it was what I had in mind and Reed took my shoulder again. He was emotionally involved, and I couldn’t believe how much so.

  We both caught the last of what the publisher was saying. Because of the general tone of the meeting, it sounded both important and dramatic.

  “Right on through since 1963, every newspaper in this country has been trying to break a story like this one. None of them has … I believe, however,” he said, “that Moses, Lewis Rosten, and Mr. Ochs are about to do it right here.”

  Mr. Ochs or Mr. Jones, I remained keyed up for the rest of the day.

  I finally got started home around seven that night.

  My eyes were tired, watery, blurring up Nashville’s streets and traffic. Tex Ritter’s Chuckwagon, Ernest Tubb’s Records, Luby’s Cadillacs flashed out and welcomed me home. I was yawning in a way that could have dislocated my jaw.

  Nan tells the story that I put my head down in the middle of dinner and went to sleep beside the roast beef. I remember finishing dessert, so that much of her story is exaggeration.

  On the other hand, I don’t remember anything much past finishing dinner that night.

  I do remember one other phrase of Nan’s. “It’s like somebody trying to become somebody who other people wish they were,” she said.

  She didn’t say that I was trying to become a newspaper superstar; she just made her statement.

  Nashville, July 15

  I had slept in my white suit on the living room couch.

  A white platter of glistening pork sausage and eggs passed by my eyes as they opened on morning. Canadian geese flew over a lake under the sausage.

  My little Cat sat down on the quilt somebody had used to cover me up the night before.

  She’d brought sausage, eggs, waffles and strawberries, a Peter Pan glass filled to the brim with bubbly milk.

  “Hi, sugar.”

  “Hi.” With that nice look kids get when they’re partially off somewhere in their minds.

  “Hey,” I said. “You awake?”

  “I cooked you pancakes and eggs didn’t I.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I quickly figured out the sitch. “I’m the one who’s not awake.”

  I took a tricky little bite of waffles and strawberries.

  “Mmmff,” I drooled. “Tasth jus lith waffleth ‘n’ strawbearth.”

  Cat punched me in the side. Misnomer: love tap.

  She lay in my lap and looked upside down into the new beard. Her little-owl eyeglasses were being held together with a Band-Aid.

  “Mom’s mad,” she said.

  “Mmm hmmm. Where’s Janie Bug at?”

  Not too long after the question was raised, our five-year-old appeared in the hall leading to the kitchen. She had a piece of rye toast stuck in her face.

  “Right here,” she managed.

  “It’s beautiful outside,” she continued after a bite.

  “How do you know that, Buggers?”

  “How do I know that, Daddy? I just took Mister Jack for a walk. He went to the bathroom in Mrs. Mills’ packajunk again.

  “By the way.” She pushed her way onto the couch. “The paperboy threw the Tennessean at me on Tuesday.”

  It goes like that at my house. More often than not, I like it very much. In fact, I’m still amazed that I have children.

  That’s one of the reasons I wound up in Poland County, Kentucky, writing all this down.

  Nan came downstairs before nine and I could tell she wasn’t that mad. Not at me anyway.

  She’d brushed out her long farmgirl’s hair, put on the smallest tic of makeup, put on an Indian blouse of hers I like very much.

  Nan is a tall, klutzy lady who happens to make as much
sense as anybody I’ve bumped into yet on this planet. We were married when we were both sophomores at the University of Kentucky, and I haven’t regretted it yet.

  “I had a funny dream, Ochs,” she said; she was sitting with Cat and Janie on the couch. “You and James Horn were riding on a raft on a river. Somewhere in the South it looked like. I was there … I watched you both through kudzu on the shore. You were talking quietly about something. Something sad and important it looked like. Individual words were carrying on the river, but I couldn’t make out the sentences. Then both of you floated out of sight,” she said.

  After the kids’ breakfast, Nan admitted she was glad I was doing the story, though. She’d done volunteer work for Horn once and she’d liked him quite well. Besides that was the fact that Horn’s daughter, Keesha, was a best friend of Cat’s in school.

  The four of us spent all day Saturday at a clambake out in Cumberland, Tennessee.

  Lewis Rosten and his graduate school girlfriend were there, and spirits and hopes were high as Mr. Jack Daniels could bring them.

  Lewis and I spent part of the day under a shade tree, figuring out how a possible lead story might go. Even that couldn’t bring us down though.

  Before the sun set Moses Reed showed up in his big, shiny Country Squire. For the first time since I’d come to the Citizen-Reporter in 1966,1 thought we were a family.

  On Sunday morning I took a long, solitary walk over to Nashville’s Centennial Park. Once there I tried to draft a story that could work with what I’d gotten from Ben Toy up to then.

  It turned out to be a hearsay story. Very exciting, but with the danger of no follow-up.

  The lead read:

  A NEW YORK MAN SAID TO BE CONNECTED WITH A HIGH-PRICED GUNMAN CLAIMS THAT MAYOR JIMMIE HORN WAS NOT SHOT BY BERT POOLE HERE LAST THURSDAY.

  I thought the Citizen might run something like that, but I hoped we could open up with a story we wouldn’t have to back off of later.

  Lewis Rosten stopped by at the house while I was packing up to go back North that night. He seemed as restless about the story as I was. He kept referring to it as “a mystery story.”