The Thomas Berryman Number Read online

  The Quinn house had been bright white, then neutral green, then pale yellow, matching her parents’ diminishing regard for their 1955 purchase.

  In some ways the house even resembled her father. The grass was cut short, but not trimmed. The Weatherbeater paint job looked passable from the street, but was peeling, scabbing, up close. The front porch was starting to sag; and the screen in the door was torn.

  I went out of my way to stop at the Quinns’ on my way back from Provincetown that third week in July. I wanted to know what kind of a girl would take up with a young man like Thomas Berryman.

  When I first met him, Oona’s father was as suspicious and closemouthed as she had been. He made me give him my wallet and we both stood out on the front lawn while he read all the press cards and matched signatures.

  “My newspaper is willing to pay you for an interview,” I mentioned at one point.

  He nodded, but didn’t indicate yes or no. “What do you know about Oona?” he asked me.

  “I’ve met her and talked to her. She told me about you and her mother. She’s in some trouble.”

  “Yeah, I figured that,” the man said. He gestured toward the house and I walked behind him to the front steps.

  I sat out on the sagging porch with Frankie Quinn for nearly two hours that afternoon. He was a forty-three-year-old man with graying muttonchop sideburns, a flattened pug nose, a considerable two-pillow pouch.

  He didn’t look like he could possibly be Oona’s father.

  He worked as a four-to-one A.M. bartender at the Mayflower in South Boston, he told me. But he handled none of the action there: no gambling, no drugs, no prostitutes. He brought home an honest one-sixty-one a week.

  He said he’d remained a devout Roman Catholic until the 1960s when the English mass had come in. He’d felt personally betrayed by that, and by the goom-bi-ya folk singing.

  His personal cross to bear, his family’s cross, was his extraordinary thirst for stout. He had what he called a “case a day habit.”

  His wife, Margaret, and Oona were the two best things that had ever happened to him. He made no bones about it. He wanted to know everything I knew about her, and he wanted to talk about her himself.

  So far, so good, I thought. I switched on the Sony.

  “I could have been stricter with Oona,” Frankie Quinn admitted between sips of Guinness and plunges into a box of Ritz crackers. “She got her own way a little more than most. Because she was so pretty, you know. We may have been too good to her. I don’t know if we were or not.”

  “She’s a good kid, a wonderful one. Until she stops hearing how pretty she is. Then she kinda falls apart. Then everything’s a downer for her. She never learned to cope if you know what I mean. Maybe she doesn’t have to, though. Some people never seem to have to.”

  “I don’t remember that she had many girlfriends growing up. Too many boyfriends. I used to come home Saturday night it looked like a bachelor’s party here. All these gazuzus from Cathedral High School. Just waiting for her to tell them to go get her a pistachio ice cream down the store …”

  “She talks a lot about you,” I told Frankie Quinn.

  Quinn laughed. His voice went way up into the tenor range.

  “We got along ok, me and her. Used to go on these long, long walks down the beach. People staring at me like I’m some Irish Mafioso with his young bird.

  “It’s Margaret she’s got problems with these days. Margaret never got over she doesn’t go to church anymore. What the hell, now Margaret doesn’t go herself.”

  Quinn stopped talking and looked hard at me for a moment. He had watery eyes that were always shiny.

  “You’re Thomas Berryman, aren’t you?” he said quite seriously.

  I was too startled to answer for a second. I thought he’d gotten tipsy. Then I told him that I wasn’t Berryman and went looking for more identification in my wallet.

  “No, no.” He grabbed my arm and held it out of my pocket. “I knew you weren’t. Just had to make sure of it. I got nervous, I guess.”

  He went on to tell me that Oona had mentioned Berryman to him during several phone calls over the past few months.

  Then he brought up Jimmie Horn.

  He said Oona had dropped the name during a phone call on July 3rd. Then on the 4th of July he’d read that Jimmie Horn had been murdered down South.

  Quinn clarified further. He said that Oona had called him from Tennessee on July 2nd, 3rd, and 4th. He said that she was almost hysterical when she called on the 4th. He wanted me to tell him why, and I told him what I could.

  Margaret Quinn came home just after five. Frankie and I were still out oh the porch.

  Margaret was a slender; dark-haired woman who reminded me of her daughter. I agreed with Frank Quinn’s estimate that he was a lucky man.

  I also got the feeling that neither one of them had any idea what their daughter had become. In their eyes she was still a high school girl, thought high school girl thoughts, wore plaid jumpers and blue blazers.

  I liked the Quinns, but I also felt sorry for them. What was about to happen to them, especially if my story broke nationally, frightened me. Frank and Margaret Quinn were going to be totally unprepared to deal with it.

  In general, I just wasn’t meeting the kind of bad people I’d expected to be connected with an assassination.

  In the meantime, though, I had the problem that Oona Quinn wasn’t telling me everything I needed to know. At least maybe she wasn’t. And maybe she was lying to me altogether.

  I didn’t like it at all, but then it wasn’t asking to be liked.

  I drove back from Massachusetts to New York in a gray-blue rainstorm. It was Saturday night, nearly 6:30 when I began the trip.

  The storm came on strong as I was winding away from the Revere amusement park area. The families-with-young-children crowd was just arriving on the opposite side of the street.

  The first raindrops were half-dollar-sized, and I had to close up all the car windows in spite of the heat.

  The downpour didn’t let up once until I was getting off the New London ferry back on Long Island. I began to feel like that L’il Abner character with the personal rain-cloud that follows him everywhere he goes.

  Every light in Berryman’s house was burning. Floodlights on top of the garages showed up large patches of white dune grass.

  I eased up the driveway, crunching gravel, fantasizing either a party or a suicide.

  Oona was sitting all by herself in the front room. She was wrapped up in a red star quilt on the couch, bare feet and head showing, watching the TV.

  “Ochs?” she looked at the dark screen door and called. “Is that Ochs?”

  I stood on the porch, wondering who else it could be. Then I started to rap on the wood frame around the door. “Anybody home?” I called out. I was acting like I was fresh back from a ten-duck shoot. I was psyched up to talk with her about Tennessee.

  She wasn’t in the mood for that, though.

  “We can talk tomorrow,” she said. “Tomorrow’s soon enough. You’ve had enough for tonight, little man.”

  I sat down in a musty easy chair. “Little man?” I laughed.

  She sat across the width of the room wrapped up in her ball of red quilt. She was looking at me kind of funny. Boy-girl funny, I thought.

  All scrunched up on the couch, she seemed to be freezing cold. She looked like she wanted someone to cuddle.

  Both of us sat there not saying anything. Easy Rider was playing on TV, but it was already past the Jack Nicholson part. I was thinking that Oona reminded me of those high-paid and basically overwhelming photographic models … only this was the way they were behind the scenes: high-strung, and strung-out.

  She watched me with a troubled look on her face. Then she smiled. “I’m going up now,” she said.

  She made cocoa in the kitchen. Then she slipped up the creaky stairs with a pewter cup sticking out of her quilt like a candle. “Ochs,” she called from the top of the stair
s, “Tom Berryman isn’t going to show up here.”

  I sat downstairs trying to figure out what she had meant by that. Finally, after another ten minutes or so, I went upstairs to the room I was using.

  I sprawled flat-out on a six-foot-long spring bed. My feet were sticking out the iron rungs.

  I lay there in my white shirt and boxer shorts, smoking, watching the man in the moon, going a little crazy inside.

  It’s not my favorite way to relax after a long day, but it’s a way.

  I tried thinking about some of the things I had to ask her the next day. I couldn’t organize those thoughts, though.

  I reached back and pulled the chain lamp over my bed.

  I took off my shirt and brought a crinkly sheet up around my chin. Itchy new beard. Sandy sheets. Man in the moon looking puffy–like he’d been in a fistfight.

  I heard bare feet padding out in the hall.

  The bathroom door opened. Sound of the chain lamp in there. Bottles, Charlie and Pot Pourri, tinkling.

  She ran herself a tub, and didn’t come out again until after I was asleep.

  In the morning it was business as usual. The gardener out in the yard. Toes wiggling in wool socks. Her nervousness before the microphone. My nervousness with her.

  Oona said she would tell me anything I wanted to know. She also said that she got a kick out of my 1930s Bible Belt morality. She wasn’t being mean, just truthful.

  New York City, June 21

  Lying around outside Berryman’s largest garage, just collecting seagull shit and other natural indignities, there is a black Porsche Targa, a Cadillac, and a mint-condition tan Mercedes 450SE convertible.

  Early one morning in the last week of June, Berryman drove Oona into midtown Manhattan in the convertible. The air was thick, gauzy, which was good for hiding housing tracts and cigarette billboards.

  The two of them jabbered and kidded for the entire two-hour commute. Hollering over wind and WABC, she told him that she’d become aware she was straightening her hair before mirrors some twenty or twenty-five times a day. But she told the story as a very funny joke.

  He finally dropped her off to shop on Fifth Avenue. Watched her floppy yellow skimmer go through the waves of sleepy office workers like an umbrella. Disappear into Lord & Taylor.

  Then Berryman used the sluggish blocking of a growling city bus to inch his way up to Central Park South, and (he was hoping) Ben Toy.

  Ben Toy wasn’t at the Central Park apartment, so Berryman tried to call him at his own apartment. He tried to call him at the Flower & Toy, and at the apartments of lady friends.

  He lighted a cigarillo and sat at his work desk, wondering what had happened to Toy. He couldn’t remember passing a month without seeing the funniest man in America.

  After thinking about Toy for a while, getting as depressed as he allowed himself to get, he went to his wall safe. He took out fifteen fifty-dollar bills and he copied an address from a small red pad kept in with the cash. The address was 88 East End Avenue. Berryman was back in business. The business was Jimmie Horn.

  Doubleparked on East 87th Street, he sat on the trunk of the Mercedes, thinking.

  Trying not to be distracted by the New York carnival, he was, nonetheless. By a businessman riding an expensive bicycle, with a gas mask over his face. His system of empty pipes carried the sign: NON-POLLUTING VEHICLE.

  The gas mask struck Berryman’s fancy. Once he’d passed Joe Namath and his girlfriend on that same corner. Not a very pretty girl, she’d said, “You don’t have to hold my hand” to Namath. So much for fame and football.

  Berryman walked past buildings numbered 92, 94, 100–toward 86th Street. He paused at a city litter basket advertising a midwestern beer. He rummaged through the trash. But there was nothing he could use to implement his plan.

  At a flashy boutique on 84th, however, he was given a fancy, plastic carryball bag. It was perfect. It would become a mask.

  The glass front door of 88 East End was spray-painted Kool Whip 111. This was luxury, New York style. Smoking a long rope cigarillo, Thomas Berryman walked inside. He was trying to look well-to-do and important, and he looked it.

  A heavy Puerto Rican security guard announced him from the lobby. The guard was stationed in front of a system of security monitors showing scenes like the garbage pails out back. The man was smoking a fat cigar, looking as official as a Banana Republic general. “A Mister Ben Toy, jes sir?” he said into a small microphone.

  A clipped British voice bounced back from upstairs. “Mr. Toy, please come right up.”

  “Ju can go up now,” the doorman said with undaunted authority.

  As the elevator cruised efficiently to the thirtieth floor, Berryman carefully poked and dug holes in the plastic bag.

  The thirtieth-floor hallway was carpeted, empty, luxuriously quiet. As Berryman looked for the apartment marked M. Romains, he slipped on the plastic bag. He pulled the tie-cord and the bag closed over his head like a White Cap’s hood.

  Checking himself in one of the hallway’s gilded mirrors, he had to smile. Both his eyes appeared in one thin slit. His mouth was a small black circle.

  He pushed Romains’ button and heard distant chimes.

  Presently a man with a shaggy blond haircut and pocked cheeks opened the door the length of a safety chain.

  “Well, you’re obviously not Mr. Toy,” he observed. “Who are you, uh, masked stranger?”

  Berryman laughed behind the bag. “I’d like it if you never had to see my face,” he said in a slightly muffled voice. “I’m Berryman. Ben Toy is away on other business for me.”

  “I suppose,” the forger Romains said. He slid away the gold chain. “I understood he wasn’t playing with a full deck myself.”

  “Where’d you hear that one?”

  “From a man. Someone,” the forger said.

  The living room Berryman entered was large and sunken. It was cluttered with hundreds of lithographs, some stacked against walls like discount art stores. Berryman unsuccessfully tried to take it all in without the aid of peripheral vision.

  Romains led him to a white cafÉ table. The table overlooked the East River and an immense neon soda sign.

  “You wish to exchange pleasantries?” the forger acted belligerent. But there was absolutely no expression on his puffy face. His eyes were sad and rheumy as a chicken’s.

  Berryman shook his head. He barely looked at Romains. Mostly he examined the Hellgate Bridge. Then he started to explain what he wanted.

  “First,” he said. “There will be three separate driver’s licenses from three southern states. Georgia. South Carolina. Not Tennessee.”

  The forger made a one-word notation.

  “Second. There will be credit cards under the names on the licenses. At the very least, I want Diner’s Club and BankAmericard.” These two, Berryman knew, were the simplest to fraud.

  “Finally,” Berryman said. “At least one of the credit cards must carry my photograph. The bank card, I suppose.”

  M. Romains made a rigid chimneystacked steeple of his fingers and felt-tipped pen. He smiled. “Photograph, Mr. Berryman?”

  Berryman withdrew an envelope packet from his jacket.

  Romains removed the photo, holding it carefully by its edges. It showed a whisky-nosed man with a blond crew cut. Middle-aged. This, he was certain, was not a Thomas Berryman he would recognize. “Of course.” He made another notation. “A photograph on one of the credit cards. A wise safeguard against theft.”

  “There won’t be any problem?” Berryman asked.

  The forger looked into the slit of eyes. “No problem,” he said. “You must tell me when, and where they must be delivered. I’ll tell you how much. Yes?”

  Thomas Berryman withdrew another envelope and handed over the fifteen fifty-dollar bills.

  Romains counted the bills and nodded. “Good,” he smiled. “One half in advance is my requirement.”

  Now Berryman smiled. “No, my friend,” he said. “I�
��m trusting you with the full payment now. I’ll expect delivery in no more than four days,” he said. He told the forger where the materials were to be sent.

  After leaving the forger’s building, Berryman walked up East End Avenue. He turned up 89th Street, walking very slowly to the Flower & Toy Shop. He passed six or eight young people circling around a dead man lying in his black raincoat on the sidewalk. Flies were buzzing over the man’s face and a psycho-looking girl was shooing them away with a New York Times.

  Birds and old men, Berryman thought, die terrible deaths in New York. Much worse than anything he would allow.

  The color of most of the flowers was perfect, but every one of them was dead. Berryman could see that no one had been in the shop for weeks.

  Long flowers were hung craze-jane over plastic vases and pots; or they’d just lain down and died in their little wooden windowboxes. Shorter flowers were fallen in heaps, as if they’d been mowed.

  The more fragrant flowers (stocks, some roses) gave off a heavy odor; and mere was foul water in the room. But most of the dead flowers bore no smell.

  Berryman slowly walked up the aisle, breaking flower heads off and smelling them. A hanging lightbulb was on, shining over the counter. Bells on the front door were still jingling back and forth, back and forth.

  “Hey Ben,” he called out. “Benboy. Goddamnit, Ben.”

  The answer was ka-rot, ka-rot. His boots on the wooden planks.

  There was no one in the small back room of the shop either. Water was dripping on more dead flowers in a stainless steel sink. Dead flowers were in a garbage pail. Dead flowers were wrapped in gift paper and ribbons, and signed with various billets doux.

  Berryman sat down and composed his own note. He wrote:

  Ben,

  You ‘re getting crazier than a shithouse rat. Call me on the Island or I’ll have to kick your ass.

  He Scotch-taped the note on the inside glass of the front door. It looked like a closed-because-of-a-death-in-the-family notice.