The Thomas Berryman Number Read online

  Rosten told me that the editor-in-chief of the Nashville Tennessean had called Reed that afternoon. He’d wanted to know why we were sending reporters around to every hotel and motel in central Tennessee.

  “That’s all we need,” I said. “To get scooped on this.”

  Rosten didn’t want to discuss the possibility. He waved it away like a nauseous man being presented with dessert.

  “We checked out every single hotel. Every motel,” he said. “We’ve shown his photograph everywhere a man can sleep in a twenty-five-mile radius.”

  “Yeah … and?”

  “Goose egg.”

  PART II

  The End of the Funniest Man in America

  West Hampton, July 17

  That Monday in West Hampton I could smell northern winters.

  The rusty white thermometer on Bowditch’s front porch said 67.

  I had a feeling that the St. Louis Cardinals were going to get into the World Series; that Ali was going to beat George Foreman. It was all in the air.

  It was July 17th and this was to be my last visit with Toy. Our subject was the whereabouts of the southern contact man, Harley John Wynn.

  We set up my Sony cassette recorder on a redwood table out in the exercise yard. Its learner traveling case made it look official and important. Historical.

  The two of us sat on hardwood deck chairs. Our respective sport shirts off, facing into a lukewarm ball of off-yellow sun.

  The sun was just on the verge of overcoming the morning’s chill.

  Ronald Asher slumped up against a dwarf oak at the center of the yard, growing disenchanted with news reporting I could see. It wasn’t exactly as Hunter Thompson had anti-romanticized it in Rolling Stone.

  A slight breeze turned oak leaves, lifted the blond hair on Toy’s forehead, softly bristled my beard.

  Ben Toy leaned back and closed his eyes. He was king of the hospital.

  After a minute watching five or six contented-looking mental patients sunbathing around the yard, I closed my eyes too.

  This was privilege, I was thinking. This was interviewing Elizabeth Taylor over breakfast in a flowery Puerto Vallarta courtyard.

  “Tom Berryman never did know it.” Toy alternately sucked in the morning air and sniffled. “But on and off for about six months I’d been seeing this wiggy Jewish lady … this shrink in New York.”

  I opened my eyes and saw that Toy was looking at me too. “Why didn’t Berryman know?” I asked.

  “Because he would have had a shit fit. He wanted me around because I was dependable. He didn’t have to worry when I was handling details for him. I was backup.

  “So I had to be very careful about this lady. It was all on the sly. All my visits. It was all about me getting depressed. No big shit anyway.

  “I went to see her the Wednesday after we’d met Harley Wynn in Massachusetts. I was feeling like a dishrag again. She usually gave me some pills. Valiums. Stelazines.

  “This was the day the walls came tumbling down on my head … I remember how it was real sunny. Nice out. I wouldn’t have believed it was going to turn into such a shit day …”

  New York City, June 14

  Toy’s doctor was a Park Avenue psychiatrist, a seventy-year-old woman who preferred being called Reva to Doctor Baumwell.

  She saw all her patients at a luxury apartment in a prewar building on the corner of East 74th Street. She always wore dark dresses and red high-heeled shoes for her appointments.

  In his six months with Reva Baumwell, Ben Toy had never once spoken about Thomas Berryman.

  For her part, Reva talked of little else except rebuilding Toy’s personality. This was “getting as common as face-lifting” she said in an unguarded moment. She also forewarned him that this rebuilding process would probably involve a crisis for him. She was continually asking him if he was about ready for a little crisis, a little pesonality change for the better.

  Sometimes, Toy considered the psychiatrist certifiable herself. But she dispensed tranquilizers like vitamin pills, and Ben Toy believed in Valium, in Stelazine and Thorazine. They had a proven track record. They worked for him.

  When he left Reva Baumwell’s apartment building that day he had a prescription for twenty milligrams of Stelazine in the pocket of his peach nik-nik shirt. Basically, he was feeling pretty good about life.

  Then he saw Harley Wynn again.

  This time Wynn didn’t run away. He was leaning against a silver Mercedes parked in front of the building’s awning. The smug look on his face brought to mind F.B.I. agents harassing hippie dope dealers.

  The two of them met under the building’s long shadow.

  “I saw you on East End Avenue too,” Wynn said in a drawl that seemed to be thickening. “You see, I’ve been thinking about last week. I decided you were a little too abrupt with me … So I’ve been following you around. I’ve seen Berryman.”

  Ben Toy’s impulse was to sucker-punch Wynn right there. To smash his head across the car hood.

  “I want to talk to him,” the southern man continued. “Face to face … we have things to discuss about Jimmie Horn.”

  Toy lighted up a cigarette, “Where did you see Berryman?” he asked.

  “Outside of Eighty Central Park South,” Harley Wynn said. “He was with this tall girl. Foxy lady. They caught a cab.”

  “All right,” Toy said.

  Together, they started walking toward 72nd Street. Toy stopped at a corner phone booth on 72nd and called Berryman.

  Berryman listened to the whole story before he said a word.

  “That’s his fuck-up,” was what Toy remembered him saying first. “I’d have to say it’s your fuck-up too,” he went on. “I think you know the alternatives. I hope you do anyway.”

  Berryman hung up on him, but Toy held the receiver to his ear an extra minute or two. His head was reeling.

  Then Toy swung open the phone booth door and smiled at the young southerner for the first time. What he said was, “Everything’s cool. Berryman said it was my fuck-up … He wants to talk to you this afternoon.”

  A little after three o’clock that afternoon, Ben Toy sat beside the slightly younger Wynn in the crackling red leather seat of an Olds 98.

  Toy was thinking that his mind was going to snap. Crack like somebody’s backbone.

  The shiny black sedan was parked in bright sun in a Flushing junkyard near La Guardia Airport. It was all flat, baking weeds over to dismal, sagging high-risers a mile or so away.

  Harley Wynn kept saying that Berryman was late. Five minutes late. Ten minutes late. Fifteen minutes late.

  A white Chevy came barrel-assing down the dirt road leading into the junkyard. It was doing seventy or eighty, then it skidded and u-turned. Kids. Joy-riders.

  “Y’see Tom Berryman is real concerned with his own safety,” Ben Toy explained to Wynn. “He’s a real brain. Takes zip chances. He’s obsessed sometimes. But he’ll be here. Don’t worry. Stop worrying.”

  Wynn had his arm across the back of the leather seat and he was looking off at the apartment buildings. His head was at a good angle for a portrait. He was showing his nice white teeth just right.

  “I’m sure Berryman doesn’t take chances,” he said.

  The two men were sitting around, talking like that, and then Ben Toy very suddenly reached out of his jacket, and shot Harley Wynn in the side of the forehead.

  The action was completed totally on impulse. Toy kept saying now, now, now, now, and when it felt real, when he believed it somewhere in his body, a small black .38 flashed out, the trigger snapped back. The sound was deafening, a sound Toy would never forget. Pink flesh and blood splatted onto the vinyl roof and the windshield. Wynn’s head went out the open window and hung there.

  Toy left the southerner spreadeagled across a pink flowered box spring in the junkyard. His blond hair wasn’t even mussed.

  Before driving away, Toy had the presence of mind to fire a second shot into the back of Wynn’s head. That secon
d shot distorted the handsome face considerably.

  Because of that second, meaningless bullet, the evening papers in New York reported the killing as gangland style. No identification was found on Wynn. No one claimed the body until November. By that time, it was hopelessly lost in Potter’s Field. New York simply sent a large skeleton down to Tennessee.

  Directly after the shooting, Ben Toy called Berryman to tell him it was done.

  Then Toy spent four days in Mill House Sanitarium in upstate New York. He barely spoke to anyone at the private hospital, especially the doctors. He sat around a sunny parlor overlooking the Hudson River, and whatever he was feeling got worse.

  Toy thought he was the only person at the hospital who wasn’t drying out. Who wasn’t getting B12 shots. He was also the only one hallucinating. One afternoon he heard a black woman’s voice that announced it was James Horn’s mother. One night in his room he heard his father’s voice and saw flashes of light outside his window.

  Very confused in his mind, he walked off to get a drink one afternoon. He strolled down a country road with farms and seminaries all around. He eventually called Reva Baumwell from a tavern under rocky mountains over the Hudson.

  “I told Tom I wouldn’t be able to kill anybody,” he said. “I was right. I was right this time. That fuck thinks anybody can do it. Shit, everybody isn’t built that way. Jesus Christ, I’m hearing voices, Reva.” He almost started crying over the phone. He was losing control and it was horrible.

  “One message at a time,” Doctor Baumwell said. “What’s kill? Hurt someone, you mean? Hurt who, Benjamin? Hurt yourself? Hurt me?”

  Thomas Berryman watched teenagers crowding the steps of Carnegie Hall. A silvery sign with attached glossy photos announced that Blue Oyster Cult was appearing that evening.

  Berryman was in a pay phone directly across the street from the concert hall on 57th Street. He was calling a man in the Belle Meade section of Nashville, Tennessee.

  A gruff southern man’s voice finally came on the other end of the line.

  Berryman spoke in a slow, deliberate monotone. He gave out his name. He said he was calling in reference to a man named Harley Wynn.

  “What about him?” The southern man seemed to be an authoritarian.

  “He’s dead. I just had to have him shot,” Berryman continued the monotone.

  The southern man’s voice cracked. “You had him what?”

  A city bus applied loud air brakes a few feet from the glass booth window. Berryman found himself looking at a naked blond man promoting Viva magazine on the side of the bus. “Hello, hello?” he could hear in the receiver.

  The bus started up with a sick, heavy grumble.

  “You knew my rules,” Berryman began to talk again. “I don’t know what Wynn saw around here. He was supposed to pay us some money, then go back to Tennessee.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that part,” the southerner said. “He told me he had other business keeping him in New York. I had no intention of interfering with you.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Berryman said flatly. He’d decided to take the offensive.

  “Goddamnit, I didn’t,” the other man exploded. “Listen you …” he started to say.

  Berryman raised his voice over the man’s next few words. “I’ve already begun on your business. I have your money,” he said, “the first half anyway. I’ve had to spend some of it. Do you want me to continue?”

  The southerner spoke without hesitation. “Of course continue. Go on with it. Wynn is a very small part of this thing.”

  “I’m planning to be in Nashville the first week, the last week in June,” Berryman said. “You should have the remaining money. You won’t hear from me until then.”

  The southerner added a few conditions of his own. Then the phone call was over.

  Berryman took a long, deep breath. He’d momentarily lost control of the situation, but now he had it back.

  He left the booth running a white comb back through his curly black hair.

  I don’t know at what point, but at a definite point, within the span of say five minutes, Ben Toy began to talk indiscriminately about anything that came into his head.

  He talked about mathematics, about God–I think, about his parents in Texas, my nineteen-fiftyish oxblood loafers, lobotomies, Martin Luther King … all kinds of ridiculous, moronic things that didn’t coordinate.

  It was scary, because I’d started to believe there was nothing really wrong with Toy.

  “My mother used to dance in Reno, Nevada,” he spoke very seriously to me. “That’s why nobody in Potter County wanted to take her out for a goddamn celery soda.”

  I slowly stood up, no shirt on or anything, and I called Asher.

  He came, and then three more aides came running. They walked Toy back onto the hall, and he went quietly, meekly. I filially turned off the Sony, which had been silently going about its business.

  Ronald Asher was closing the heavy quiet room door when I arrived on the hall. The other three aides and a nurse who was just a young girl were standing around with him.

  “He broke off a fucking needle in his ass,” Asher said.

  I gave him an uncomprehending look and peeked in through the observation window.

  “Annie gave him the needle, and then he just flip-flopped over on it.”

  “It came out,” the young nurse said.

  “Jesus,” I said. “I don’t believe the way he just … went off. Poof.”

  “Believe it,” the nurse smiled.

  “I don’t know where Ben’s head is,” Asher said: “Shulman thinks he knows.”

  “Too much Psilocybin,” a tall aide in a Levi’s shirt said.

  “A lot of patients just let their minds run loose when they’re in here,” Asher said. “Some of them are crazy because it feels better is my theory. Fuck my theories though.”

  Looking back through the observation window, I watched as Toy suddenly jumped up in the air. He floated on his back, then drop-kicked the screen window with his bare feet. He repeated this stunt several times, his back whopping the narrow mattress on each fall.

  “It won’t hurt him,” Asher said without looking in. “I think it calms him down. Like the way little kids rock in their beds.”

  The young nurse looked at me and shrugged.

  “My daughter does that,” I said. “Rocks in her bed, I mean …”

  The nurse asked me how old she was. We went back to the glass-encased station and joked our way back toward normalcy. The girl had never had a needle broken off on her before.

  I’d walked to the hospital, and I walked back, cutting a diagonal across the grounds, then going into some woods.

  I climbed a tall, forbidding fence at the end of the woods. Darted and stalked across the Long Island Expressway. Made private discoveries in the face of speeding headlights.

  Back at the motel, I drew myself a steamy, hot bath. I climbed in and things slowly began to come back into perspective.

  I remembered another mad scene I’d witnessed. It was in a snooker hall and gin mill in Frankfurt, Kentucky. (At that time, in ’62 I think, I was carrying a small pistol myself, so I was no great judge of madness.)

  What happened was this.

  A scarecrow-looking farmboy in the bar had decided he was going to sneak a dance with this other boy’s girl. They started dancing to this slow Elvis Presley song that was popular back then, “One Night” I think it was, and when the other boy saw what was happening, he walked up to the dancing couple, spit in the scarecrow’s face, and then stabbed him in the crotch area. Just that quick.

  Everybody in the bar immediately crowded around the crumpled clothes and body on the dance floor, and with hot eyes and crying, and low whispers, they kept repeating around the circle that Old Bean had been stoh-bbed.

  If you had taken that word’s meaning from its tone, you’d have guessed that the pleasures of dance and whiskey had been too much for Bean, and that he’d passed out.

&
nbsp; Pistol on and all, I’d nearly thrown up on the spot.

  The news about the Harley Wynn photograph came while I was up to my neck in hot bathwater and suds. I was reading single pages out of Jeb Magruder’s book on his life & Watergate, then putting it to rest on the lip of the tub. I found it infuriating that he’d had the cunning to churn out the book so quickly.

  The news came when I was melancholy, sentimental as country music, missing Nan and Cat and Janie Bug like close friends moved out of town.

  It couldn’t have come at a better time if I’d been in charge of planning my own life.

  The phone rang in the bedroom and I just let it ring. I thought it was Asher or that nurse checking on me.

  It kept right on ringing, a little red light buzzing with it.

  “Terrell,” I heard when I finally picked it up. “That shitheel, cocksucker Terrell.”

  The distant voice on the phone was Lewis Rosten’s. It wasn’t Rosten’s normal speaking voice, though. Rosten was rarely if ever vulgar.

  I tried to knock a cigarette out of a pack and four or five tumbled out.

  “What about Terrell?”

  “Ochs, Hurley Wynn is Terrell’s man. He’s his lawyer. He’s from Houston is the reason nobody knew him.”

  Rosten had started to shout. He was very happy. I was nervously lighting up one of the cigarettes.

  “You did it this time, you smart bastard,” I heard. “Reed says he could and will kiss your ass on television. Your sweet ass.”

  Somebody else was on the line. Happy rebel yells was who it was.

  I was holding the receiver away from my ear, starting to giggle like the big fucking village idiot.

  More people came on the line with congratulations.

  “How did it break?” I kept asking each new voice. “How did it break?”

  “Complicated.” I eventually got Lewis back. “Some friend of Reed’s is from Houston. Who cares!”

  I was just beginning to figure out the ramifications and I couldn’t believe it. It seemed so perfectly right and logical. Johnboy Terrell.

  “Let me have some damn enthusiasm,” quiet little Rosten yelled over the phone.