The Thomas Berryman Number (23 page)

“Bring me some black coffee, too,” he said to the girl.

July 4th was announced with the usual cotton and hog reports on WKDK. Then the morning disc jockey discharged a string of fire-poppers in his studio. Then he played Johnny Cash and Tammy Wynette singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

It was a red-hot day, and already bright at 7:30
A.M.
People were wearing sunglasses like it was noon.

Wearing dark glasses himself, Thomas Berryman sat over a rib-eye and eggs at Gail’s on the Turnpike diner. But Berryman was hungrier for a little countrified bullshit than for diner food.

A young gas-pump jockey named Uncle Smith Tarkanian finally filled the bill. Uncle Smith was no more than twenty-five; he was eating ham for breakfast: two ten-ounce ham steaks with light blue grease spread over the top.

Just relax now,
Berryman was saying to himself.

“I’ve been playing those damn cards for about seven years now,” he was saying to Tarkanian. “Knew a guy who hit six one time.”

Tarkanian chewed ham and drank coffee simultaneously. “Say it like he won a fifty-thousan’-dollar lot’ry.”

Both men snickered into their food. They were discussing pro football betting cards. The gas man distributed the sheets winners at his station. He was still carrying a few of the cards in his work pants.

“It’s pathetic,” Berryman said. “There’s this guy I read. Sportswriter. He says he won seventeen thousand. Larry Merchant.”

“Read the man in
Spotes Illustrated,
” Tarkanian said. “He’s full of shit.”

“He really is.”

“Has the long hair to prove it. Looks like absolute piss on old men.”

“He’s all of thirty-five.”

“Uh-huh … Well, I remember this pi-ture of Lyndon Johnson and whatisname, McGovern,” Uncle Smith said. “Big Ears had a fucking ducktail on … What’s ’at five winners on the card pay in Hot’lanta? Ten to one?”

“Fifteen. You do better parlaying it with a bookie. If they’ll parlay for you.”

“Fifteen ain’t bad,” the young man considered. “Ain’t bad at all. Card works on a ninety-one percent we-win basis, my man. You should know that. You want another cup of mud there? Mrs. Bo-reen,” Tarkanian shouted for their old-lady waitress, “get this man here some more of Gail’s heav-en-ly coffee.”

Berryman smiled. He sat at the counter looking at the backs of his hands. The shaking from the night before had passed. He lighted up a cigarillo.

“You know what,” he shook the little cigar at the gas-pump jockey. “Lyndon is going to go down as one of the great presidents in the United States.”

“Wouldn’t doubt it,” Tarkanian said. He lowered his voice. “Because pretty soon we’re gonna have a nigger up there. Then a Jew. Then some goddam woman like Miss Gail cookin back there in the kitchen. Bet you.”

“No bet,” Berryman said. “I think you’re exactly right.”

“Seems I’m
always
right,” Uncle Smith said, “when I don’t want to be.”

Berryman paid his check, then walked outside with a big smile on his face. For the moment he felt pretty level, not even any butterflies after the meal. He looked down on the turnpike and saw that it was extra busy with cars going into Nashville for the parade. He rubbed his knuckles hard against his short hair, and wondered for a minute if Oona was going to meet him.

10:30
A.M.

Horn’s security got insecure on the morning of the Fourth, and young Santo Massimino later had to take adult responsibility for the mix-ups.

Nashville’s wise-old-owl police chief covered his scarred flanks early in the day. Chief Carl Henry fully understood the possibilities for misadventure.

He appeared to Massimino out of the Halloween marching lines of Shriners and the Best People on Earth, and he attempted to rectify the problem of both too many chiefs and too many Indians. The scene was Dudley Field football stadium.

The old chief’s mouth was open so wide a bat could have flown out of it. He was vexed, but also helpless.

“Suh. Suh, are you Mister Mass-a-mino?” he asked between nose-blowing trumpets and cymbals.

Massimino smiled and nodded without actually looking at Henry. He was planting fresh roses in the lapels of all the VIPs with seats on the speaker’s dais, and he was in a dandy mood. There was good reason for this: with the mere paper promise of “celebrities” and “fireworks,” he’d jammed a southern college football stadium for a black politician. (At least the stadium looked full. What most people didn’t notice was that a good quarter of the seats had been cleverly masked with billboard-sized banners. But as Massimino would say,
That was, you know, show biz.)

Henry laid kind hands on the young man’s bush jacket. “The mayor axt me to talk with you,” he said. “Well, actually, he didn’t. But I’m going to.”

The chief raised one heavy arm and pointed his wedding ring finger toward neat rows of card-table chairs sticking out of the stadium infield. “What do you think? Those are state troopers over there, aren’t they?”

Massimino, who never laughed, laughed.

He held on to the liver-spotted hand of an elderly dignitary as he answered. “No disrespect meant,” he said. “But I’ll take the responsibility for having the governor call in state police.”

“I see,” Henry nodded. “You’ll take the responsibility. That’s good.”

“The
real
problem today is going to be
over-enthusiasm,”
Massimino grinned. “I wanted your men to make sure Jimmie Horn doesn’t get trampled by well-wishers.”

The old congressman stood looking on with his solitary rose.

Henry winked at him. He cleared his throat, took a breath. “Boy’s some kind of bullshitter,” he rasped.

“Well,” he turned to Massimino, “I guess we’ll have to live with the arrangement for today. You know,” he spoke to both Massimino and the old man, “I don’t want anybody shooting up his ass either.”

“That’s fine,” Massimino said. “That’s the idea.”

The old man smelled his rose.

Chief Henry cleared his throat again. He backed off a step and tapped his walkie-talkie. “You keep in touch, Santo.”

Henry then gazed off into the buzzing grandstands like a Roman general at the Colosseum. Today, he was a loser for some ungodly reason or another. “Those state boys give out speeding tickets right well,” he chatted idly. “But I wouldn’t depend on’m for too much more.”

The old man VIP coughed out a laugh at that remark. “I wouldn’t depend on’m,” he tugged Massimino’s sleeve, “findin’ they’ah zippers to pee.”

Joe Cubbah talked to himself as he paced the ranks of folding metal chairs.

Cubbah was melting. He had sweat stains halfway down to his Sam Browne, and his kinky black curls were dripping on the shoulder patches of Martin Weesner’s uniform. They didn’t have fucking inhuman weather like this in Philadelphia, he mumbled. Some asshole had told him it was a hundred and fifteen degrees down on the field. The temperature dropped ten to fifteen degrees just walking in the shade of the speaker’s platform.

He nudged a redheaded boy sipping Ripple wine in the open, and the youngster obediently tucked away his bottle. He even said he was sorry.

“Man, don’t ever say you’re sorry,” Cubbah advised. “Just be more careful. Be more careful, see.”

Keeping an eye out for Thomas Berryman, he continued to circle in closer to the speaker’s dais. He enjoyed the way the country crowds parted for his uniform. He thought he understood why mountain boys leave home to become sheriffs.

Inside the locker room marked VISITORS, Jimmie Horn was sitting by himself at the far end of a long golden bench. The bench ran along in front of golden lockers, all of them filled with golden shirts and helmets.

As is the standard procedure in the Southeastern Football Conference, the locker room floor was covered with wall-to-wall carpeting.

Twenty or more men and women were standing around the room but none of them were talking. It was like a hollow cell at the center of all the football crowd noise.

At 10:35 Jimmie Horn’s press secretary went over to the mayor. He performed a ritual that often went on with Horn before big speeches.

He knelt so that his face was down even with Horn’s. “It’s twenty-five minutes to eleven now,” he whispered.

Jimmie Horn only nodded.

At 10:45 the press secretary repeated the procedure, giving Horn the new time.

Jimmie Horn nodded, spoke the man’s name, and stood up.

Now the twenty-odd people in the room began to talk. Laughter started up. “All right. All right. All right now.” Santo Massimino began to pace and clap his hands.

After a few minutes, Massimino walked up to Jimmie Horn and asked him what he was thinking about.

Horn smiled at him. “You really need to know?” he said.

“Yeah,” Massimino said. “I need to know.”

“Well … I was in a rowboat, fishing out on Lake Walden,” Horn said. “It was a pleasantly cool day; I kept dipping my arms in the lakewater … I caught some catfish, and some nice bass, Santo. Sometimes, though, the fishing isn’t so good out there.”

When Jimmie Horn appeared in the dark eye of a concrete tunnel entrance to the field, Joe Cubbah ran ahead and joined the six or seven city policemen who crossed over to meet the mayor.

Jimmie Horn was tall, stately, but Cubbah thought he looked a little nervous.

Cowboys, two roadhouse bouncers outfitted in chambray shirts, came riding by firing blanks. Cubbah was so startled he wheeled and nearly shot one of them off his horse.

Each little detail seemed both extremely important, and extremely unimportant, to Thomas Berryman.

He took out a thick, black, garrison belt. The belt was about three inches in width. He looped it around his rib cage, then pulled it as tight as he could stand it. The pressure made him burp on his breakfast.

A risk should be taken now, he was thinking. Some of his calmness at breakfast was gone; some of the shaking from the night before had returned.

He picked up the hotel room’s desk chair. Stood it up on the bed. Flush against Versailles garden in the wallpaper.

He removed velveteen couch cushions and carefully stacked them on end across the desk chair.

Finally, he fluffed all three bed pillows and punched them in tight, punched them in front of the couch cushions. The back of the chair was up level with his face now. At chin level.

Berryman measured the distance across the room to the door.

He unlatched it. Looked up and down the halls where black chambermaids were up to their morning cleaning business. There was some sisterly chattering and some vacuuming, but it was fairly quiet and orderly in the hotel corridor. It smelled slightly of the dust being raised. Perfumed dust.

Standing in the open doorway, Berryman raised the .44 magnum revolver with its silencer. He braced the handle tightly against the garrison belt.

Occasionally checking the cleaning women with glances, he rehearsed the fast motion of raising and lowering the gun to belt level.

He fired off two shots with the gun pressed against his ribs. The distance from the doorway to the chair was about sixteen feet.

The gunshots destroyed the bed pillows, blowing dust and feathers all over the room.

The nearest maid was two doorways away. She was draping white towels over her arm. Scooping a handful of soap bars. Humming. The two muffled
pfftts
had gone unnoticed in the hall.

Berryman shut the door. He sat down and took off the belt. The recoils had left a slight, livery bruise on his ribs. His stomach was quivering.

The hunting pistol was unwieldy and overly nasty, but it would work for the job. He hoped that his central nervous system would function half as well.

Husky, bowlegged farmers sauntered along Nashville’s sidewalks with their thumbs in their belt loops.

Their wives held pinwheels or Nashville pennants or rabbit balloons; they used the toys to point out the monuments of President Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay.

Their children seemed more impressed with what the parade horses had left in the streets.

That fact of life amused the farmers almost as much as city life did.

Thomas Berryman sat at a stoplight on West End Avenue. The light changed and he straddled the tracks of a peppy Volkswagen. Five hippie girls in the bug.

He took the Dart over two quiet single-block streets—one west, one south—and when he turned onto a wider avenue, he tested the car up to fifty-five. Another little precaution.

Black people began to appear down another quiet street.

A crazy-looking old woman was boiling clothes in a washpot.

Three teenagers bopped along in black shirts and porkpie hats, looking like fugitives from the law.

A large blackman lounged in a white convertible with the radio blaring “R-E-S-P-E-C-T.”

Berryman finally parked on a hill overlooking Bert Poole’s building. Now for the proof of the pudding.

As he came down the hill, Thomas Berryman smelled fish frying. Once again he noticed the black Marlboro cowboy.

He buttoned his green shirt and tightened the green and red Christmas tie. He waited until he got to the pink house itself before he slipped into the green Bond’s suitjacket.

Dressed the way he was, Thomas Berryman looked like a character out of James T. Cain.

Bert Poole answered the door wearing only blue-jeans and green wool socks.

He didn’t have a chest or stomach, just a straight plumb-line drop from his chin to his toes. His belly button was protruding like a small wart.

Loud music was coming from inside the apartment.

“I’m Marion Walker,” Berryman said. “Sorry to have to bother you on a holiday. I’m with the Cain-Sloan Department Stores.”

He handed Poole one of the business cards he’d been collecting around Nashville. It said
Marion A. Walker,
Cain-Sloan Co.

Bert Poole looked troubled and confused at first, then he started to smile.

“Damn,” he spoke in a soft, polite hippie’s voice, “they don’t even let you guys rest on a holiday, do they?”

Berryman shook his head. “No sir, they don’t. They been tryin to reach you all over the place I guess. People at home more on the holidays. That’s how the F.B.I. catches deserters, I heard.”