The Thomas Berryman Number (13 page)

“Here! Hey you!” the sergeant yelled without getting up.

Ben Toy in turn spoke to him. “Which is which?” he asked. It was a serious question: like someone asking about the burial of a loved one in a strange country.

Fall got slightly irritated and burped. “What is
what?”
He looked at Lasini. “What the fuck is this guy talking about? What is this shit right at dinnertime?”

Lasini shook his head and whistled into his soda bottle. “Check the footwear,” he grinned.

Fall begrudgingly came around in front of his desk. “Who dressed you this morning?” he asked with poker-faced sternness.

“Oona Quinn is my left hand,” Ben Toy tried to explain once again. His face was getting panicky. “Harley John is my right hand.

“Pow! Pow! Pow!” he said with a flourish of flailing arms. “Shot’m.” He winked with a sane sense of timing.

He began circling around the concrete block room. Trying to get out a cigarette, he proceeded to spill his entire pack in twos and threes. The cigarettes rolled around the linoleum and made letters with one another. “Which is which?” He gritted his teeth a foot from Pauly Lasini’s bug eyes. “I’m not fooling around.”

The law student said nothing now.

The pudgy sergeant backpedaled behind his desk. His supper got cold.

“Which is which?” Ben Toy shouted. “Which is which? Which is which? Which is which? Which is which?”

This time Lasini gave him his answer. Oona Quinn and Harley John. Left and right.

Toy smiled at Lasini. He unsheathed a long-barreled Mauser from under his shirt. He handed the ass-heavy cannon to the law student, who held it loosely by the butt, like a wet diaper.

“Like this, man.” Ben Toy illustrated a proper grip: two hands on the gun, both arms straight, knees bent slightly. Then he casually walked away to a bench and occupied himself with knotting his windbreaker around his waist.

A second law student took two photographs of Ben Toy, and fingerprinted him on an ordinary ink pad.

There was a scuffle in the back room, and Toy cold-cocked Lasini. It was a loud, cracking right fist that broke the law student’s jaw in two places.

Toy was a good fighter, aggressive, unafraid of being hit in the face himself. Sergeant Fall clubbed him from behind with a soda bottle.

As they rode with Ben Toy handcuffed between them, Fall and Lasini were all serious business. They conspired in whispers.
Zim zim zim zim zim.

“Which is which?” Ben Toy checked every five minutes or so.

Pauly Lasini, his lip and cheek discolored, told him wrong answers in retribution for his wound.

“I’d just like you to repeat these simple numbers.” The resident on admissions duty spoke to Toy in a semi-darkened examination room. The room was at the far end of a weird underground tunnel, and there was a network of old yellowed pipes over their heads.

“This is a nuthouse.” Toy looked around at the walls and X-rays machines. “Good,” he said. “I have a chemical imbalance in my brain. You better write that down.”

“Frontward and backward,” the resident was friendly, but firm. “Listen to the numbers now, Ben. Don’t stare at the walls. No numbers on the walls … Thank you … OK now. 328 … 4729.”

Ben Toy slapped down his right hand on the meat wrapping paper which covered the examination table. “Which is my right hand?” he asked.

“Forget about your hands,” the resident said. “I’ll repeat the number for you.”

“Two nine,” Ben Toy said. “Which is which, you son of a bitch?”

Aboveground, on rolling green lawns, Ben Toy was walked to the maximum security ward by a team of five aides and a doctor. He was put in a seclusion room and placed on constant two-to-one male supervision. For two hours he was put in wet packs; then he was given so much Thorazine he had trouble rolling over on his mattress.

Nursing notes were written for the 11-7 shift:

. . . Ben T. was admitted in agitated state this eve. Pt. slaps hand flat on mattress and says, “This is Oona Quinn” (or Shepherd, Berryman, Horn, something or other). Pt. then slaps other hand on mattress. Gives it another name (any of the above) … Pt. then tests staff on which hand is which. Pt. will stop on request. But starts again within minutes. His span of attention is about 30 sec. Pt. claims to have shot several people. But this is highly unlikely. Knows much about business, and he may be a flipped-out businessman. Pt. slept well.

In the morning, all of the nursing reports were read and noted by Doctor Alan Shulman.

Oona Quinn was reached that afternoon at Berryman’s telephone number. She explained that she hadn’t been shot by Ben Toy. She admitted knowing him and said she would like to come talk with him. He was her friend’s friend.

She said that no, she didn’t know two other friends or business acquaintances of Toy’s—neither Harley Wynn nor James Horn. She didn’t know anything about them.

Hampton Bays, July 24

I couldn’t take my eyes off Oona Quinn.

She was locking up Berryman’s house, pausing in front of the door. Then she dropped the keys in her big western saddlebag purse. She had on a navy skirt that day, puffy white blouse, makeup: it was the look of a New York career girl.

I was on my way back to Tennessee for a while. She was going to New England. (To visit friends on Cape Cod, she said. Maybe to stop off at Revere.) We’d decided to go to the airport together.

The Pinto was sputtering badly on the quiet country road that goes out to the Long Island Expressway.

“How long do you plan to be up there?” I asked over the engine noise.

“Dunno,” she said. “Haven’t figured it out yet. Dunno.”

I hesitated before continuing. She was in one of her spacy moods. Continually brushing black hair back out of her face.

“I just want to say one more thing. Serious thing,” I said. “I’ve got to follow through,” I started, then stopped. “This kind of reporting …”

Oona stopped me. “I’m fine,” she said. “You were fine, Ochs. Just do your job.”

I started combing my hair with my fingers again. I’m just too big and clumsy to finesse apologies, I was thinking. I don’t want to destroy this young woman’s life, I was thinking.

We eventually were approaching the one-story concrete building where the Eastern shuttle to Boston leaves.

Oona stayed inside the car for an extra minute and all the N.Y. cabbies started honking at us. Some brutalized dispatcher rapped my window with his newspaper.

When she did get out of the car, she was banging a big, clumsy portmanteau all over her ankles. I thought that the hard square box looked a lot closer to her parents’ style than Thomas Berryman’s.

Oona disappeared inside the terminal without looking back.

It seemed to me that she’d had enough. I was certain Frank and Margaret Quinn had … so I made an executive decision in front of the airways building. I decided to give the family a false name in any stories I’d write. I invented the “Quinn” for them.

That’s what some people call protecting a source. It’s what I call common decency. And I think it’s what Walter and Edna Jones, way back in little, antiquated Zebulon, Kentucky, call “refined.”

PART IV

The First Southern Detective Story

Nashville, Early September

It was getting to be election time when I finally settled back into the South. Nashville was still green, and quite beautiful. Her skies were autumnal blue, filled with Kentucky bluebirds. It was what they used to call Indian Summer.

I’d been to five states plus the District of Columbia since July 9th. I’d traveled to New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Texas.

I felt I nearly had my story. I also had a frizzy honey-colored beard. The beard frightened old southern women, small children, and my editors.

Small Problems:

The old biddies on our street insisted I had run away from my family for the several weeks I’d been away. They ‘d hatched a spellbinding plot in which I’d been fired, then passed the summer bumming my way around the eastern racetrack circuit. One fat Letitia Mills asked me if I thought I was going to find my identity or some damn fool thing like that. I could only answer her in pig Latin. And she could only tip her little black-veiled hat at me. That’s their way of saying
fuck you, Charlie!

The
Citizen-Reporter
wanted my free time. All of it. They said I was up for a senior editor’s job because of my fine Berryman stories. My two-hundred-sixty-dollar-a-week salary was raised to three-twenty-five, and I immediately bought a silver Audi Fox.

My lawn hadn’t been cut for months; leaves lay piled high under higher weeds.

The screen windows were still up.

The screen doors.

The broken hammock.

Larger Problems:

My wife Nan was nervous and edgy.

She wanted to know if I was happy now and I told her
no,
but I was preoccupied. She read the New York notes and didn’t react as much as I needed her to. She was taking a karate class at Nashville Free University, and she kept threatening to break things. She liked the new Audi, however.

The kids had forgotten exactly how I fit into the family. They didn’t know the man behind the red-blond beard very well. They kept singsonging for me to “take it all off,” and that “Gillette was one blade better than whatever I was using.” Sometimes I’d get one or both of them down on the floor, rub my beard on their bare bellies, and they’d laugh like hell.

Cat was entering fourth grade and she was involved in the school-busing trouble. She wanted to know if
I
wanted her to ride for an hour and a half back and forth to school every day. She kept telling me about friends who were going to the Baptist Academy.

My younger girl, Janie, was beginning to talk like southern boys. She said that segregation killed piss out of her.

As things turned out, I had to set up an unusual schedule at the newspaper.

I wrote early in the morning (like 5 until 9); and I took leisurely late-night drives to pivotal book locations. In between, I spent my time mending fences and relationships.

Nashville was quiet those days. The election, especially, was subdued.

Both
The Banner
and
Tennessean
were priming up for the investigation of ex-Governor Johnboy Terrell.

I wrote occasional pretrial articles, but in the main— free of newspaper deadlines and space limitations—it was Thomas Berryman.

At this point, I still didn’t know what had happened to Berryman after the shooting.

I was to find out that Oona Quinn had misled me slightly. I was to find out quite a lot of nasty little things.

According to Lewis Rosten, the real Dashiell Hammett/Frederick Forsyth detective story didn’t begin until I returned to Nashville.

Six weeks of my life belie the absolute truth of that statement, but Lewis is partially correct.

Over the course of the fall, he and I, and numerous other
Citizen
reporters, compiled over twenty-five hundred pages of notes, interviews, phone numbers, hotel and restaurant receipts, all sorts of trivial documents. We could have done Ph.D. dissertations on any of these four men: Thomas John Berryman, Jefferson John Terrell, Bertram Poole, Joseph Dominick Cubbah.

Lewis was writing a book then too, but he was also being conscientious, even noble, about his city editor responsibilities.

He’d sit around the
Citizen
city room nitpicking some fourteen-year-old farmboy’s account of an automobile wreck, then he’d call me at home at twelve midnight, and ask if I’d like to meet him somewhere like Lummie’s Heart of Dixie.

“Just to kick around some theories I have about Berryman,” he’d always set the hook. “Just for thirty minutes or so, Ochs.”

More often than not I’d meet him.

Lummie’s Heart of Dixie is a
Citizen-Reporter
lunch bar which is returned to the local, or “real,” people after 5
P.M.

From five o’clock on it’s crawling with failed country music singers who will slide into your booth and give you a sad song for the price of a Sterling beer. By my standards, it’s the best, certainly the cheapest show in town.

By general Tennessee standards though, Lummie’s is a talking bar.

Because of my high 6’7” visibility, and my general good-natured laugh, I’m tolerated by the crowd there.

Lewis Rosten, however, can be a wholly different matter.

On account of this, we generally tried to commandeer one of the red vinyl booths near the rear exit. It would take us twenty minutes to spread out all our notes and scraps, and they’d cover up every flat space available.

Only then would we begin the ritualistic struggles over what was going where, in which article.

This letter is typical of the kind of notes and scraps we brought to decide what to do with. It had suddenly appeared in my mail slot one Monday in late September:

Dear Mr. Ochs Jones,

My occupation is customs inspector. I live at Rockaway Beach in the Queens, New York. Recently I read one of your stories about the killer Thomas Berryman in
Parade
magazine. This was the story that ran here on September 7th.

Well, to get to the pernt. At the end of July, I was sent Diner’s Club chits for four dinners at the Tale of the Fox restaurant in Nashville, Tennessee. But I had never been to Tennessee, and sure enough, when I check my wallet, no Diner’s Card, and a few others missing too.

The forged tabs were forged J.P. Golly, myself, and it wasn’t until this month that they were traced to Thomas Berryman. Included on each tab was a listing of the exact meals which might be of interest to your files.

1 Vodka Gimlet

1 Sirloin

1 Black coffee

I even started to picture this character, this elegant pickpocket, settling down to these cute little dinners. On yours truly!

Anyways, I don’t know what this information is worth to you, but I don’t think I should be the one to pay for the dinners.

John Patrick Golly

GS-11

The funny (peculiar) thing was that J.P. Golly had already been recompensed for his losses by Diner’s Club. The
Citizen-Reporter
wasn’t about to pay him, of course, but we checked with Diner’s anyway.