The Thomas Berryman Number

The Thomas Berryman Number

by James Patterson

The author is grateful to Warner Bros. Music for permission to quote excerpted lyrics from “Ballad of a Thin Man” by Bob Dylan. Copyright Š 1965 by M. Witmark & Sons. All rights reserved.

GREAT ACCLAIM FOR JAMES PATTERSON AND

THE THOMAS BERRYMAN NUMBER

“PATTERSON JOINS THE ELITE COMPANY OF THOMAS HARRIS AND JOHN SANFORD.”

—San Francisco Examiner

“PATTERSON KNOWS HOW TO SELL THRILLS AND SUSPENSE IN CLEAR, UNWAVERING PROSE.”

—People

“THE THOMAS BERRYMAN NUMBER

IS SURE-FIRE!”

—New York Times

“WRITTEN SIMPLY, POWERFULLY, WITH SHIFTING POINTS OF VIEW. The book will satisfy mystery and thriller fans, as well as students of the human condition.”

—Washington Post Book World

“BRILLIANTLY WRITTEN!”

—Library Journal

“JAMES PATTERSON IS TO SUSPENSE WHAT DANIELLE STEEL IS TO ROMANCE.”

—New York Daily News

“PATTERSON’S SKILL AT BUILDING SUSPENSE IS ENVIABLE!”

—Kansas City Star

“PATTERSON DEVELOPS CHARACTERS WITH BROAD STROKES AND FINE LINES. Even the villains are multilayered and believable.”

—Nashville Banner

“HURRAY! ONCE YOU READ PAGE ONE YOU WILL NOT STOP UNTIL YOU HAVE FINISHED.”

—Robin Moore, author of The French Connection

“HE CREATES A MULTILAYERED, CONVOLUTED PLOT THAT KEEPS READERS OFF-BALANCE, JOLTING THEM AROUND NARRATIVE HAIRPIN TURNS WHILE TRANSFIXING THEM WITH AN EXTRAORDINARY SUSTAINED TENSION.”

—Buffalo News

“PATTERSON KNOWS HOW TO KEEP THE POT BOILING.”

—Publishers Weekly

“MR. PATTERSON IS A SKILLFUL PLOTTER, and… has constructed an elaborate thriller full of twists and false starts.”

—Baltimore Morning Sun

“A WILD RIDE, FROM THE IVIED HALLS OF SOUTHERN ACADEMIA TO THE CRASHING BIG SUR SURF.”

—Denver Post

“THIS NOVEL IS HARD TO SET ASIDE. PATTERSON’S COMPLEX TALE CHILLS, ENTHRALLS, AND ENTERTAINS THE READER IN A DAZZLING AND UNFORGETTABLE READING EXPERIENCE.”

—Toronto Star

“Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta, and Evan Hunter’s 87^th

Precinct detectives… IT’S TIME TO GET OUT THE PARTY HATS, WELCOME JAMES PATTERSON TO THE CLUB.”

—Grand Rapids Press

“A TENSE, COMPLEX PLOT OF ABDUCTION AND MURDER THAT IS HARD TO PUT DOWN. THE READER IS HOOKED FROM PAGE ONE…This is a crime story so scary it will hold the reader’s attention and leave a lingering horror at the back of the mind for days.”

—Baton Rouge Magazine

“AN ENJOYABLE READ, WRITTEN IN CONCISE, PITHY LANGUAGE THAT MOVES AS GRACEFULLY AS IF WE WERE WATCHING IT ON WIDE SCREEN AT THE LOCAL THEATER.”

—West Coast Review of Books

“EXPECT NONSTOP, MUSCLE-JANGLING THRILLS… DON’T READ IT ALONE, OR ON A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT.”

—Woman’s Own Magazine

“DESERVES TO BE THIS SEASON’S #1 BESTSELLER AND SHOULD INSTANTLY MAKE JAMES PATTERSON A HOUSHOLD NAME.”

—Nelson DeMille

“A FIRST-RATE THRILLER—FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELTS AND KEEP THE LIGHTS ON!”

—Sidney Sheldon

“PATTERSON BRILLIANTLY EXPLORES DARK CREVICES OF THE ABERRANT MIND…[AND] LETS US SOAR AND DIP WITH ROLLER-COASTER THRILLS.”

—Ann Rule

“PATTERSON IS AN EXCELLENT WRITER.”

—Lexington Herald-Leader (KY)

“A TALE WITH THE POLISH OF A MASTER…It’s the sort of tale that keeps your hands gripping the book and your heart pounding at any unusual noise in the house.”

—Oakland Press

“PATTERSON HAS CREATED A FAST-MOVING, CHARACTER-DRIVEN ROLLER COASTER OF A THRILLER.”

—Mostly Murder

“AS ENGROSSING AS IT IS GRAPHIC…AN INCREDIBLY SUSPENSEFUL READ WITH A ONE-OF-A-KIND VILLAIN WHO IS AS TERRIFYING AS HE IS INTRIGUING.”

—Clive Cussler

“THIS IS HORROR THAT’LL HAVE READERS CHECKING THE WINDOW AND DOOR LOCKS, PULLING DOWN THE SHADES.”

—Hartford Courant

PROLOGUE

Down on the Farm (1962)

Claude, Texas, 1962

The year he and Ben Toy left Claude, Texas—1962—Thomas Berryman had been in the habit of wearing black cowboy boots with distinctive red stars on the ankles. He’d also been stuffing four twenty-dollar bills in each boot sole. By mid-July the money had begun to shred and smell like feet.

One otherwise unpromising afternoon there’d been a shiny Coupe de Ville out on Ranch Road #5. It was metallic blue. Throwing sun spirals and stars off the bumpers.

He and Ben Toy had watched its approach for six or eight miles of scruffy Panhandle desert. They were doing nothing. “Bored sick and dying fast on a fencerail,” Berryman had said earlier. Toy had only half-smiled.

“You heard about that greaseball Raymond Cone? I suppose you did,” the conversation was going now.

“I always said that was going to happen.” Berryman puffed thoughtfully on a non-filter cigarette. “The way he’s always talking about dry-humping Nadine in his old man’s Chevrolet, it had to.”

“You think he’ll marry her?”

“I

know

he’ll marry her. It’s been happening for about a hundred years straight around here. Then the old man gets him with Pepsi in Amarillo. Then she has the kid. Then he splits on both of them for Reno, Nevada, or California. I hate that, I really do.”

Toy took out a small, wrinkled roll of money and started counting five- and ten- and one-dollar bills. “He says he’ll put a 30-30 in his mouth. Before he marries Nadine.”

“Yeah, well … He’ll be haulassing soda cases pretty soon. That’ll dilute his ‘Frankie and Johnny’ philosophies.”

Thomas Berryman shaded his sunglasses so he could see the approaching car better. A finely made coil of brown dust followed it like a streamer. Buzzards crossed its path, heading east toward Wichita Falls.

When the Coupe was less than twenty-five yards away, Berryman flipped out his thumb. “Are you coming or not?” he said to Toy.

The big car, meanwhile, had clicked out of cruise-control and was easing to a stop.

The driver turned out to be the Bishop of Albuquerque. Padre Luis Gonsolo. Both young men left Claude, Texas, with him. They kept right on going until they were in New York City.

Thomas Berryman and Ben Toy rode into New York in high style too … in the 1962 metallic blue Coupe de Ville … without the Bishop.

PREFACE

Jones’ Thomas Berryman (1974)

My parents, Walter and Edna Linda Jones, didn’t want me to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or even successful; they just wanted me to be refined… I disappointed them badly, however; I went out and became a newspaperman.

SIGN OVER THE DESK OF OCHS JONES

Steve McQueen is a killeryou have to cheer on and root for. NEWSPAPER MOVIE REVIEW

Zebulon, Kentucky, 1974

In November of this year I came back to my hometown (Zebulon) in Poland County, Kentucky; I came home to write about the deaths of men named Bertram Poole, Lieutenant Martin Weesner, and especially my friend Jimmie Lee Horn of Nashville, Tennessee … but most of all I came home to write about something an editor at the

Nashville Citizen-Reporter

had named the Thomas Berryman Number.

This book is mostly for my nine-year-old daughter Cat, I think.

It’s a Sam Peckinpah kind of story: all in all there are six murders in it. It’s about a young Texas man who decided to become a professional killer at the age of eighteen. So far as I can make out, he decided by virtue of executing several beautiful pronghorn antelopes and one Mexican priest, a bishop actually.

Random observation

: A story in a Houston paper reports that

“Not less than five men in the United States are making over two hundred thousand dollars a year as independent (non-mob) assassins.”

What the hell is the point of view over in Houston I wondered when I cut out the clipping and folded it for my wallet.

Random observation

:Very few people have understood the character of men who do evil… Most people who’ve written about them just make everything too black for me. Either that, or they’re trying to make some sugar and spice “Bonnie & Clyde” movie … Anyway, movie stars withstanding, I don’t believe your bad man can be obtuse, and I don’t believe he’d necessarily be morose … In fact, Thomas Berryman was neither of these.

Random observation

: The other day, I showed Cat something Berryman’s girlfriend had given me: it was a Crossman air pistol. To demonstrate how it could put someone to sleep, I callously (stupidly) wounded Mrs. Mullhouse’s calico. It was too much for the old kitty, however, and she died.

Random observation

: Even Doc Fiddler’s Paradise Lounge, one of the top redneck gin mills in the state of Tennessee, has a fresh print of Jimmie Horn over the liquor these days. Horn’s strictly moral drama now, and people are partial to moral drama, no matter what.

One last observation

: In 1962, Thomas John Berryman graduated from Plains High School with one of the highest grade point averages ever recorded in Potter County, Texas. Some teachers said he had a photographic memory, and he had a measured I.Q. of one hundred sixty-six.

A little more digging revealed that he was known as the “Pleasure King,” and nicknamed “Pleasure.”

The women who’d been his girlfriends would only say that he made them feel inferior. Even the ones who’d liked him best never felt totally comfortable with him.

Most people around Clyde, Texas, thought he was a successful lawyer in the East now. At first I’d thought someone in the Berryman family started the rumor; later on, I’d learned it had been Berryman himself.

Berryman’s father was a retired circuit judge. Three weeks after he learned what his son had done in Tennessee, he died of a cerebrovascular accident.

Thomas Berryman is 6’1”, one hundred ninety-five pounds. He has black hair, hazel eyes. And extremely good concentration for a young man. He’s also charming. In fact, he just about says it all for American charm.

Background

: Four months ago, the thirty-seven-year-old mayor of our city, Jimmie Horn, was shot down under the saddest and most bizarre circumstances I can imagine.

Because of that, the

Nashville Citizen-Reporters

of last July 4th, 5th, and 6th are the three largest-selling editions the paper has ever had.

Maybe it’s because people are naturally curious when public figures are shot. They know casual facts out of their lives, and they regard these men almost as acquaintances. They want to know how, and where, and what time, and why it happened.

I believe it’s usually the same:

madman Bert Poole shoots Mayor Jimmie Horn, late in the day for no good reason.

That’s what I wrote, but only in pencil on foolscap. In the

Citizen,

I wrote a long filler about the state trooper who’d subsequently shot Poole.

It was real shit, and also crass … It was also incorrect.

Three days after the shooting, a story in the

Washington Post

reported that the man who’d shot Bert Poole hadn’t been a Tennessee state trooper as my story, and our other feature stories, had reported several times.

The man was an expensive professional killer from Philadelphia. His name was Joe Cubbah. Cubbah had been spotted in photographs of the Horn shooting; then he’d been picked up in Philadelphia.

The real Tennessee trooper, Martin Weesner, was finally found in the trunk of his own squad car. The car had been in a trooper barracks parking lot since July 3rd. Cubbah was called “an imaginative gunman” by the

Memphis Times-Scimitar.

Needless to say, this matter of a professional killer shooting down an assassin confused the hell out of everybody. It also depressed a good number of people, myself included. And it scared a lot of families into locking their doors at night.

Coincidentally, during the wake of the

Washington Post

story, the

Citizen-Reporter

received an hour-long phone call from a resident psychiatrist working at a Long Island, N.Y., hospital. The doctor explained to one of our editors how a patient of his had been talking about the Jimmie Horn shooting nearly a week before it happened. He gave out the patient’s name as Ben Toy, and he said it was fine if we wanted to send someone around to talk with him.

We wanted to send me, and that’s how I fit into the story.

As a consequence of that decision, I’m now sequestered away in a Victorian farmhouse outside of Zebulon, in Poland County. It’s November now as I mentioned.

I’d thought that I would enjoy hunting down the murderer of a friend—delicious revenge, they say—but I was wrong.

From 4 A.M. until around eleven each day I try to collate, then make sense out of the over two thousand pages of notes, scraps, and interview transcripts that recreate the days leading up to the Horn shooting this past July.

I’ve already made an indecent amount of money from advances, magazine sales, and newspaper serials on Thomas Berryman stories. This is the book.

PART I

The First Trip North

West Hampton, July 9

In nineteen sixty-nine I won a George Polk prize for some life-style articles about black Mayor Jimmie Lee Horn of Nashville. The series was called “A Walker’s Guide to Shantytown,” but it ran in the

Citizen-Reporter

as “Black Lives.”

It wasn’t a bad writing job, but it was more a case of being in the right place at the right time: I’d written life-affirming stories about a black man in Tennessee, just a year after Martin Luther King had died there.

It felt right to people who judged things somewhere. They said the series was “vital.”

So I was lucky in ’69.

I figured things were beginning to even out the day I drove into the William Pound Institute in West Hampton, Long Island. On account of my assignment there I wouldn’t be writing any of the article about Horn’s murder. The good Horn assignments had already gone elsewhere. Higher up.

I parked my rent-a-car in a crowded yard marked ALL HOSPITAL VISITORS ALL. Then, armed with tape recorder, suitcoat over my arm too, I made my way along a broken flagstone path tunneling through bent old oak trees.

I didn’t really notice a lot about the hospital at first. I was busy feeling sorry for myself.

Random Observation

: The man looking most obviously lost and disturbed at the William Pound Institute—baggy white suit, torn panama hat, Monkey Ward dress shirt—must have been me.

Here was Ochs Jones, thirty-one-year-old cornpone savant, never before having been north of Washington D.C.

But the Brooks Brothers doctors, the nurses, the fire-haired patients walking around the hospital paid no attention.

Which isn’t easy—even at 9:30 on a drizzly, unfriendly morning.

Generally I’m noticed most places.

My blond hair is close-cropped, just a little seedy on the sides, already falling out on top—so that my head resembles a Franciscan monk’s. I’m slightly cross-eyed without my glasses (and because of the rain I had them off). Moreover, I’m 6’7”, and I stand out quite nicely without the aid of quirky clothes.

No one noticed, though. One doctory-looking woman said, “Hello, Michael.” “Ochs,” I told her. That was about it for introductions.

Less than 1% believing Ben Toy might have a story for me, I dutifully followed all the blue-arrowed signs marked BOWDITCH.

The grounds of the Pound Institute were clean and fresh-smelling and green as a state park. The hospital reminded me of an eastern university campus, someplace with a name like Ithaca, or Swarthmore, or Hobart.

It was nearly ten as I walked past huge red-brick houses along an equally red cobblestone road.

Occasionally a Cadillac or Mercedes crept by at the posted ten m.p.h. speed limit.

The federalist-style houses I passed were the different wards of the hospital.

One was for the elderly bedridden. Another was for the elderly who could still putter around—predominantly lobotomies.

One four-story building housed nothing but children aged over ten years. A little girl sat rocking in the window of one of the downstairs rooms. She reminded me of Anthony Perkins at the end of

Psycho.

I jotted down a few observations and felt silly making them. I kept one wandering eye peeled for Ben Toy’s ward: Bowditch: male maximum security.

A curious thing happened to me in front of the ward for young girls.

A round-shouldered girl was sitting on the wet front lawn close to the road where I was walking. She was playing a blond-wood guitar and singing.

There’s something goin’ on,

she just about talked the pop song.

But you don’t know what it is,

Do you, Mr. Jones?

I was Ochs Jones, thirty-one, father of two daughters … The only violent act I could recall in my life, was

hearing

—as a boy—that my great-uncle Ochs Jones had been hanged in Moon, Kentucky, as a horsethief … and

no,

I didn’t know what was going on.

As a matter of fact, I knew considerably less than I thought I did.

The last of the Federal-style houses was more rambling, less formal and kept-up than any of the others: It bordered on scrub pine woods with very green waist-high underbrush running through it. A high stockade fence had been built up as the ward’s backyard.

BOWDITCH a fancy gold plaque by the front door said.

The man who’d contacted the

Citizen-Reporter,

Dr. Alan Shulman, met me on the front porch. Right off, Shulman informed me that this was an unusual and delicate situation for him. The hospital, he said, had only divulged information about patients a few times before—and that invariably had to do with court cases. “But an assassination,” he said, “is somewhat extraordinary. We

want

to help.”

Shulman was very New Yorkerish, with curly, scraggly black hair. He wore the kind of black-frame eyeglasses with little silver arrows in the corners. He was probably in his mid-thirties, with some kind of Brooklyn or Queens accent that was odd to my ear.

Some men slouching inside behind steel-screened windows seemed to be finding us quite a curious combination to observe.

A steady flow of collected rainwater rattled the drainpipe on the porch.

It made it a little harder for Shulman and myself to hear one another’s side of the argument that was developing.

“I left my home around five, five-fifteen this morning,” I said in a quick, agitated bluegrass drawl.

“I took an awful Southern Airways flight up to Kennedy Airport … awful flight … stopped at places like Dohren, Alabama … Then I drove an Econo-Car out to God-knows-where-but-I-don’t, Long Island. And now, you’re not going to let me in to see Toy … Is that right Doctor Shulman? That’s right, isn’t it?”

Shulman just nodded the curly black head.

Then he said something like this to me: “Ben Toy had a very bad, piss-poor night last night. He’s been up and down since he got in here … I think he

wants

to get better now … I don’t think he wants to kill himself right now … So maybe you can talk with him tomorrow. Maybe even tonight. Not now, though.”

“Aw shit,” I shook my head. I loosened up my tie and a laugh snorted out through my nose. The laugh is a big flaw in my business style. I can’t really take myself too seriously, and it shows.

When Shulman laughed too I started to like him. He had a good way of laughing that was hard to stay pissed off at. I imagined he used it on all his patients.

“Well, at least invite me in for some damn coffee,” I grinned.

The doctor took me into a back door through Bowditch’s nurse’s station.

I caught a glimpse of nurses, some patients, and a lot of Plexiglas surrounding the station. We entered another room, a wood-paneled conference room, and Shulman personally mixed me some Sanka.

After some general small talk, he told me why he’d started to feel that Ben Toy was somehow involved in the murders of Jimmie Horn, Bert Poole, and Lieutenant Mart Weesner.

I told him why most of the people at the

Citizen

doubted it.

Our reasons had to do with motion pictures of the Horn shooting. The films clearly showed young Poole shooting Horn in the chest and face.

Alan Shulman’s reasons had to do with gut feelings. (And also with the nagging fact that the police would probably never remove Ben Toy from an institution to face trial.)

Like the man or not, I was not overly impressed with his theories.

“Don’t you worry,” he assured me, “this story will be worth your time and air fare … if you handle it right.”

As part of the idea of getting my money’s worth out of the trip, I drove about six miles south after leaving the hospital.

I slipped into a pair of cut-offs in my rent-a-car, then went for my first swim in an ocean.

If I’d known how little time I’d be having for the next five months, I would have squeezed even more out of the free afternoon.

The rainy day turned into beautiful, pink-and-blue-skied night.

I was wearing bluejeans and white shirttails, walking down the hospital’s cobblestone road again. It was 8:30 that same evening and I’d been asked to come back to Bowditch.

A bear-bearded, rabbinical-looking attendant was assigned to record and supervise my visit with Ben Toy. A ring of keys and metal badges jangled from the rope belt around his Levi’s. A plastic name pin said that he was MR. RONALD ASHER, SENIOR MENTAL HEALTH WORKER.

The two of us, both carrying pads and pencils, walked down a long, gray-carpeted hall with airy, white-curtained bedrooms on either side.

Something about being locked in the hall made me a little tense. I was combing my hair with my fingers as I walked along.

“Our quiet room’s about the size of a den,” Asher told me. “It’s a seclusion room. Seclusion room’s used for patients who act-out violently. Act-out against the staff, or other patients, or against themselves.”

“Which did Ben Toy do?” I asked the attendant.

“Oh shit.” Big white teeth showed in his beard. “He’s been in there for all three at one time or another. He can be a total jerk-off, and then again he can be a pretty nice guy.”

Asher stopped in front of the one closed door in the hallway. While he opened it with two different keys, I looked inside through a book-sized observation window.

The room

was

tiny.

It had gunboat metal screens and red bars on small, mud-spattered windows. A half-eaten bowl of cereal and milk was on the windowsill. Outside was the stockade wall and an exercise yard.

Ben Toy was seated on the room’s only furniture, a narrow blue pinstriped mattress. He was wearing a black cowboy Stetson, but when he saw my face in the window he took it off.

“Come on the hell in,” I heard a friendly, muffled voice. “The door’s only triple-locked.”

Just then Asher opened it.

Ben Toy was a tall, thin man, about thirty, with a fast, easy, hustler’s smile. His blond hair was oily, unwashed. He was Jon Voight on the skids.

Toy was wearing white pajama bottoms with no top. His ribs were sticking out to be counted. His chest was covered with curly, auburn hair, however, and he was basically rugged-looking.

According to Asher, Toy had tried to starve himself when he’d first come in the hospital. Asher said he’d been burly back then.

When Toy spoke his voice was soft. He seemed to be trying to sound hip. N.Y.-L.A. dope world sounds.

“You look like a Christian monk, man,” he drawled pleasantly.

“No shit,” I laughed, and he laughed too. He seemed pretty normal. Either that, or the black-bearded aide was a snake charmer.

After a little bit of measuring each other up, Toy and I went right into Jimmie Horn.

Actually, I started on the subject, but Toy did most of the talking.

He knew what Horn looked like; where Horn had lived; precisely where his campaign headquarters had been. He knew the names of Jimmie Horn’s two children; his parents’ names; all sorts of impossible trivia nobody outside of Tennessee would have any interest in.

At that point, I found myself talking rapidly and listening very closely. The Sony was burning up tape.

“You think you know who shot Horn up?” Toy said to me.

“I think I do, yes. A man named Bert Poole shot him. A chronic bumbler who lived in Nashville all his life. A fuck-up.”

“This

bumbler,”

Toy asked. “How did you figure out he did it?”

His question was very serious; forensic, in a country pool hall way. He was slowly turning the black Stetson around on his fist.

“For one thing,” I said, “I saw it on television. For another thing, I’ve talked to a shitload of people who were there.”

Toy frowned at me. “Guess you talked to the wrong shitload of people,” he said. He was acting very sure of himself.

It was just after that when Toy spoke of the contact, or bagman, involved with Jimmie Horn.

It was then also that I heard the name Thomas Berryman for the first time.

Provincetown, June 6

The time Toy spoke of was early June of that year; the place was Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Young Harley John Wynn parked in the shadows behind the Provincetown City Hall and started off toward Commercial Street with visions of power and money dancing in his head. Wynn was handsome, fair and baby-faced like the early F. Scott Fitzgerald photographs. His car was a Lincoln Mark IV. In some ways he was like Thomas Berryman. Both men were thoroughly modern, coldly sober, distressingly sure of themselves.

For over three weeks, Harley Wynn had been making enquiries about Berryman. He’d finally been contacted the Tuesday before that weekend.

The meeting had been set up for Provincetown. Wynn was asked to be reading a

Boston Globe

on one of the benches in front of the City Hall at 9:45 p.m.

It was almost 9:30, and cool, even for Cape Cod in June.

The grass was freshly mown, and it had a good smell for Wynn: it reminded him of college quadrangles in the deep South. Cape Cod itself reminded him of poliomyelitis.

Careful of his shoeshine, he stayed in tree shadows just off the edge of the lawn. He sidestepped a snake, which turned out to be a tangle of electrician’s tape.

He was startled by some green willow fingers, and realized he was still in a driving fog.

It wasn’t night on Commercial Street, and as Wynn came into the amber lights he began to smell light cologne instead of sod.

He sat on one of the freshly painted benches—bone white, like the City Hall—and he saw that he was among male and female homosexuals.

There were several tall blonds in scarlet and powder blue halter suits. Small, bushy-haired men in white bucks and thongs, and bright sailor-style pants. There were tank-shirts and flapping sandals and New York

Times

magazine models posing under street-lamps.

Wynn lighted a Marlboro, noticed uneasiness in his big hands, and took a long, deep breath.

He looked up and down the street for Ben Toy.

Up on the porch of the City Hall, his eyes stopped to watch flour-white gargoyles and witchy teenagers parading to and from the public toilets.

Harley Wynn’s hand kept slipping inside his suitjacket and touching a thick, brown envelope.

Across the street, Ben Toy, thirty, and Thomas Berryman, twenty-nine, were sitting together drinking beer and Taylor Cream in a rear alcove of the A. J. Fogarty bar.

Rough-hewn men with expensive sunglasses, they brought to mind tennis bums.

They were talking about Texas with two Irish girls they’d discovered in Hyannis. One girl wore a tartan skirt and top; the other was wearing a pea-coat, rolled-up jeans, and striped baseball-player socks.

Toy and Berryman told old Texas stories back and forth, and listened to less-polished but promising Boston tales.

Oona, the taller, prettier girl, was telling how she sometimes walked Massachusetts Avenue in Boston, pretending she was a paraplegic. “Like all these business types from the Pru,” she said, “they get too embarrassed to ogle. I can be by myself if I want to.”

Thomas Berryman stared at her boozily with great red eyes. “That’s a very funny bit,” he smiled slightly. Then he was tilting his head back and forth with the pendulum of a Miller beer clock.

It was ten o’clock. Miller’s was still the champagne of bottled beers. Bette Midler was singing boogie on the jukebox.

A handsome blond man was talking to Oona from a stool at the bar. “You know who you remind me of,” he smiled brightly, “you remind me of Lauren Hutton.”

“Excuse me,” the tall girl smiled back innocently, “but you’ve obviously mistaken me for someone who gives a shit.”

This time Berryman laughed out loud. All of them did.

Then Berryman spoke quietly to Ben Toy. “Don’t you think he’s been waiting long enough now?”

Toy licked beer foam off his upper lip. “No,” he said. “Hell no.”

“You’re sure about that, Ben? Got it buttoned up for me? …”

“The man’s just getting uncomfortable about now. Taking an occasional deep breath. Getting real p.o.’d at me. I want him good and squirmy when I go talk to him … Besides though, I don’t need this paranoia shit.”

Berryman grinned at him. “Just checking,” he said. “So long as you deliver, you do it any way you want to.”

At 10:30, forty-five minutes after the arranged time, Ben Toy got up and slowly walked up to A. J. Fogarty’s front window.

He was later to remember watching Wynn through the Calligraphia window lettering. Wynn in an expensive blue suit with gray pinstripes. Wynn in brown Florsheim tie shoes and a matching brown belt. Southern macho, Toy thought.

For his part, Ben Toy was wearing a blue muslin shirt with a red butterfly design on the back. With pearl snaps. He was a big, blue-eyed man; Berryman’s back-up; Berryman’s old friend from Texas; a Texas rake.

Among boys in Amarillo, Ben Toy had once been known as “the funniest man in America.”

He smiled now as Wynn started to read the

Boston Globe

again. The money was apparently in his left side jacket pocket. He kept rubbing his elbow up against it.

Harley John Wynn couldn’t have helped noticing Toy as he left Fogarty’s bar. Toy looked like a drunken lord: he had long blond hair, and an untroubled face.

He walked slowly behind a college boy in a mauve Boston College sweatshirt. He waded through various kinds of Volkswagens on the street; then he calmly sat down on Harley Wynn’s bench.

In his own right, southern lawyer Harley Wynn was a cool, collected, and moderately successful young man. He knew himself to be clearheaded and analytical. He identified with men like Bernie Cornfeld and Robert Yablans—the brash, bootleg quarterback types in the business world. Now he was making a big play of his own.

Wynn’s generally

together

appearance didn’t fool Ben Toy, however. The southern man’s hands had given him away. They were sweaty, and had taken newspaper print up off the

Boston Globe.

Telltale smudges were on his forehead and right on the tip of his nose.

“I was just thinking about all of this,” Wynn gestured around the street and environs. “The fact that you’re nearly an hour late. The faggots … You’re trying very hard to put me at a disadvantage.” The southerner smiled boyishly. He held out an athletic-looking hand. “I approve of that,” he said.

Ben Toy ignored the outstretched hand. He grunted indifferently and looked down at his boottips.

Harley Wynn laughed at the way nervous men try to condescend.

Toy still said nothing.

“All right then,” Wynn’s southern twang stiffened. “… Horn’s a fairly intelligent nigger … Very intelligent, matter of fact.”

Toy looked up and established eye contact with the man.

“Horn has affronted sensibilities in the South, however. That’s neither here nor there. My interest in the matter, your interest, is purely monetary.” He looked for some nod of agreement from Ben Toy.

“I don’t have anything to say to that,” Toy finally spoke. He lighted a cigarette, spread his long, bluejeaned legs, sat back on the bench and watched traffic.

The young lawyer began to force smiles. He was capable of getting quick acceptance and he was overly used to it. He glanced to where Toy was looking, expecting someone else to join them.

“You’ll be provided with detailed information on Horn,” he said. “Daily routines and schedules if you like …” The lawyer spewed out information like a computer.

“All right, stop it now.” Toy finally swung around and looked at Wynn again. His teeth were clenched tight.

He jabbed the man in the stomach with his fist. “I could kill you, man,” he said. “Stop fucking around with me.”

The lawyer was pale, perspiring at the hairline. He wasn’t comprehending.

Toy cleared his throat before he spoke again. He spit up an impressive gob on the lawn. Headlights went across Harley Wynn’s eyes, then over his own.

“Berryman wants a reason,” he said. “He wants to know exactly why you’re offering all this money.”

Toy cautioned Harley Wynn with his finger before he let him answer. “Don’t fuck with me.”

“I haven’t been fucking with you,” Wynn said. “I understand the seriousness of this. The precautions … Infact, that’s the explanation you want … There can be no suspicions after this thing is over with. No loose ends. This isn’t a simple matter of killing Horn. My people are vulnerable to suspicion. They want no questions asked of them afterward.”

Ben Toy smiled at the lawyer’s answer. He slid over closer to Wynn. He put his arm around the pin-striped suit. This was where he earned all his pay.

“Then I think we’ve had enough Looney Tunes for tonight,” he said in a soft, Texas drawl. “You owe us half of our money as of right now. You have the money inside your jacket.”

Wynn tried to pull away, “I was told I’d get to talk with Berryman himself,” he protested.

“You just give me the money you’re supposed to have,” Toy said. “The money or I leave. No more talk.”

The southern man hesitated, but he finally took out the brown envelope. The contact was completed.

Ben Toy walked away with fifty thousand dollars stuffed around his dungarees. He was feeling very good about himself.

Over his head the City Hall clock sounded like it was floating in the sky.

Bongg. Bongg. Bongg.

Inside the pub window Thomas Berryman was clicking off important photographs of Harley John Wynn.

The Thomas Berryman Number had begun.

New York City, June 12

Six days after the first exchange of money, a white pigeon walked down Central Park South in New York City, stopped to taste a soggy wad of Kleenex, then flew up to the granite ledge surrounding the windows of Thomas Berryman’s apartment.

Berryman says there are always pathetic city pigeons perched on his ledge. And that they’ll never look in at him or anyone else.

There are also long cigarillo ends all over the ledge.

And there’s an old Texarkana trick of burning off bird feathers with cigars.

The window is up ten stories over Central Park South. The building is picturesque, a dark, towering graystone hotel.

A famous fascist banker once killed himself out of one of the nearby floor-to-ceiling windows. He tied a rope to a radiator, jumped, hanged himself.

Because his neck is thick and his hair so black, Berryman looks fierce from the back. Face-on it’s different. People trust him right away. Nearly everyone does.

Thomas Berryman says he’s a hard worker, a brooder when it comes to work. He says he’d read all of Charles Dickens by the time he was fourteen, but that he just did it to accomplish a task.

He’s a broad-shouldered man, with beautiful woolly hair, and a seemingly darker, bushy, Civil War mustache.

His look reminded me of Irish football players, or at least my limited sports-desk experience with their pictures. Also, he would be right for Tiparillo cigar ads.

On this particular June morning, he flicked on a Carousel projector’s fan and tugged on a customary wake-up cigar.

He pulled curtains on a full wall of glass, and Central Park’s lollipop trees and hansom cabs disappeared. The Plaza Hotel disappeared.

One lazy-bodied horse in a blue straw hat disappeared last and caused Berryman to laugh. He hadn’t worked for four months. He’d played in the sun at MazatlÁn and Caneel Bay. He was fresh as a rose.

Thomas Berryman sometimes spoke of his individual jobs as numbers. He would talk about getting ready for another little number; about having performed a number. In that respect, this would be the Horn number.

For the next three days he arduously prepared for his meeting with Jimmie Lee Horn. He read everything ever written about Horn, and everything Horn himself had written. He read everything that was available, twice. Until his eyes began to hurt. Until his brain wore raw.

Sitting in his cramped library, he was thorough as an archbishop’s secretary, wore no cowboy boots, wore high-priced cologne, read Larry McMurtry books to relax. Thomas Berryman’s

idÉe fixe

was to

study, study, study,

and then

study

some more.

Life with Berryman had been good to Ben Toy.

He lived in a six-hundred-and-ninety-five-dollar-a-month penthouse. He owned and occasionally operated the Flower & Toy Shop on East 89th Street in Yorkville. The tiny florist shop was his hobby. Something he felt made him more than just a wiseass cowboy with a few dollars to throw around in bars.

One afternoon as he was locking up the shop—his free arm was holding a leather satchel; his cigarette was tilted up at a rakish angle—he was very suddenly drained of every ounce of cool, or bourgeois chic, or whatever it is that currently describes the Upper East Side demeanor.

Toy thought he had seen Harley Wynn watching him from the corner of East End Avenue.

First Toy squinted down the street into the sun. Then he started to jog, his handbag making him look slightly feminine in spite of his bulk.

Wynn—whoever it was—turned to light a cigarette out of the wind. Very Alfred Hitchcock. Then he disappeared into the chimney-red brownstone on the corner.

Toy ran up and stopped on the sidewalk in front of the house. He started to call out. “Wynn,” he shouted huskily. Up to the rooftops.

“Wynn! Yo! Hey Wynn. Hey you fucking asshole!” he shouted. “Hey, you!”

There were lots of blue and red flowerpots in the windows on the top floor. No lights on the second floor. No Wynn.

A little old woman in a whorehouse-red kimono came out on her terrace to look at him. Big dogs inside the house started barking. Doormen were peering down the street like the town gossips they were.

Ben Toy finally hailed a yellow cab dawdling on the side street. He took it over to the West Side. He popped a Stelazine tablet en route, and consequently forgot to tell Berryman about the man who looked like Harley John Wynn.

I bent over closer to Ben Toy. Either the mattress or his pajamas smelled of urine. “Harley Wynn,” I said.

His eyes popped open. They were blue. He’d been on the verge of falling asleep.

“Thorazine.” He licked dry, chapped lips. “Makes you sleepy as hell.”

“Just a few more questions,” I said. “A couple of important ones.”

Toy sighed. Then he nodded.

“Was Harley Wynn definitely a southerner?” I asked.

“Sure.” Toy curled up on the end of the bare mattress. He shivered. “Just as much as you are … Could I have a blanket?” He asked Asher in a sweet, boyish voice. It was a strange sound coming out of a big man with two days’ stubble on his chin.

“Answer his questions,” the aide told him. “You know you can have a blanket, Ben. So just cut the crap, all right?”

“Can I have a blanket

now?”

Asher pointed at me. He lighted up his pipe and stared out the window into blackness.

Toy struggled upright and sat with his bare back against the plaster wall. He was starting to pout, I thought. I hoped the aide knew what he was doing.

“Do you know where Wynn came from?” I asked.

Toy’s answer was curt. “Tennessee.”

“Are you sure?”

“I

said

Tennessee didn’t I.”

I was starting to feel guilty about grilling him too much. “OK, I’m sorry,” I said. “I only have one more question, Ben.”

“Shoot,

Ochs.”

“I’m not trying to condescend to you. I’m really not.”

Toy smiled as though we were only playing a little game anyway. A lot of Joe Buck Conneroo came through with the smile.

“You said that Wynn wasn’t hiring you himself …”

“No. He was a front man. Always said, ‘They said’ this; ‘They said’ that. He was a small fish. Just like me.”

“OK then, do you know who hired Berryman?”

Ben Toy looked over at Asher, then at me. “Can’t say.”

My palm came down hard on the floor. “We’ve come a long ways tonight to start that shit now,” I said.

“I really don’t know,” Toy said then. “I never knew who it was. Berryman knew.”

Toy closed his eyes for a full two or three minutes after that answer.

Asher and I sat in total, eerie silence, just watching him breathe. The young aide had a dazed, tired look on his face. I figured I was probably pop-eyed myself.

Toy licked his chapped lips again. He shivered as though he were dropping off to sleep.

Rock and roll erupted in a nearby room and his eyes popped open again. He seemed annoyed that we were still in his room. Annoyed and slightly wild-eyed.

“Can I go to sleep now?” The soft, southern voice again. “Would you turn on the dimmer, please?”

“I’ll talk tomorrow if you want.” He turned to me.

For no reason I can imagine now, I reached over and shook Ben Toy’s hand. I wished him good night.

Maybe the reason was that our first interview had completely caved in my mind … Right from when Toy had begun to describe the money transfer in Provincetown, I’d known I had a big story.

Walking beside Ronald Asher, coming down the hallway from the quiet room, I flashed a bad scene I’d been part of five days earlier at the

Citizen-Reporter

offices.

A copy cub, an arrogant nineteen-year-old black, had come up to my desk and sat down all over my paperwork that afternoon. The young writer’s name was John Seawright, and he was in the habit of riding me about verisimilitude in my Horn articles. I was just about to tell him to get off the desk, and out of my life, when he grabbed hold of my shoulders and began to cry. “They just shot him,” he sobbed. “They shot Jimmie Horn, man. He’s dead,” the boy told me. That was how I’d found out about Horn. Zap.

Someone somewhere on the hospital ward was playing an out-of-tune piano. “A House Is Not a Home” was the song.

I was still fairly shell-shocked from the interview.

The high yellow corridor lights were turned down low. It made it difficult for me not to peek into the brighter bedrooms we were passing.

Two middle-aged men who appeared to be twins were playing chess in one room.

A boy in his underwear was sitting in bed reading a mathematics text in another.

A young boy in hornrims was reading

Shockproof Sydney Skate

by Marijane Meaker.

I looked down at Asher.

The Beard.

There was something about the scraggly face growth that appealed to me.

“I’ve been thinking about a beard.” I broke our mutual silence. “I don’t understand my motivation though.”

“You want people to know how smart you really are,” the aide grinned. “Beard’s a pain-in-the-ass way to do it though. Always getting spaghetti and cake in mine.”

“I don’t want people to think I’m smart.” I watched the dull ceiling lights pass over my head. “I don’t know exactly what it is. Not that, though.”

We stopped at the patients’ kitchen and he went on about the physical hardships of a beard. It was the kind of conversation people have at wakes down South—you talk about anything but the wake and the wakee.

Asher poured out some of the blackest coffee I’d ever seen. He had kind of an intriguing job, I was thinking.

I was also watching a pimply teenager who was in the kitchen with us. The boy was shoveling tablespoons of sugar into a tall glass of milk. He had fuzzy, electric hair and looked burned out at sixteen.

A fairly good (pragmatic) idea occurred to me in the kitchen. I began building up the nerve to ask Asher for an important favor.

“How much do you know about all this?” I asked for starters.

“The whole.” Asher sipped the black coffee. “Just about, anyway. Shulman took me to dinner tonight. He told me the

hospital

position. He said I’d be the only one to supervise visits between you and Ben.”

I put cream and raw sugar in my coffee. All motions. I wasn’t going to drink the muddy geedunk. It reminded me of the Mississippi River.

“So you’re pretty tight with Shulman?”

“We agree. We disagree. He generalizes too much for my taste. Textbooks sometimes. Basically he trusts my instincts, though. Believe it or not, I was in Columbia before this.”

“He told you about Jimmie Horn?” I said.

“Yes, he told me. But I still wasn’t prepared for what I heard back there with Toy. Most of us hadn’t taken him all that seriously before.”

I decided to ask Asher for a big favor. I was close to blurting it out anyway.

I started by moronically sipping some coffee.

“I don’t want to play on your emotions,” I said, “but I knew Horn for about eight years before this happened.

“In a lot of ways we were friends. In

some

ways,” I corrected myself. “That doesn’t have anything to do with you … except that it gives you an idea of what’s going on in my head right now. My mind is a fucking wreck.”

The aide nodded. Once again, the coffee.

“OK,” I sighed. “

The problem …

I’d like to read what’s been written about Toy since he’s been in here … I could ask Alan Shulman. But I’m afraid to. If Shulman turns me down, I’m fucked. I’m looking for names, dates, anything about Thomas Berryman. I swear to you that I won’t use anything that would hurt anybody else in here. On Bowditch.”

Asher nodded again. He really looked exhausted and I felt sorry for him. His eyes shifted out the kitchen window into the dark exercise yard.

Beyond the floodlights on the wall was a staff parking lot. Then the end of the hospital grounds. Then the ocean. At night you could only see the wall, though. Salvador Dali couldn’t have done it better.

“When you turn left outside the front door, the inside door,” Asher turned to me, “there’s a small conference room. Wait in there. I’ll try to get you what you need.”

The aide brought me Ben Toy’s admission notes, workup notes, daily nursing charts—over two hundred pages in all.

Everything was stamped CONFIDENTIAL or NOT TO BE REMOVED FROM THIS ROOM. Some of it was typed, but most of the notes were handwritten in black ink.

I started to copy names, addresses, telephone numbers

Jimmie Horn was mentioned several times in the daily notes; Harley Wynn was mentioned; Thomas Berryman didn’t come up that frequently.

I recognized none of the other names or addresses. There was nothing to immediately connect anyone in Tennessee.

I found Toy’s admission note especially interesting though:

Mr. Toy is an extremely handsome, well-developed young man from the northwestern part of Texas. He has a history of not having close, stable relationships, with the exception of one longstanding boyhood relationship.

Mr. Toy claims to have killed a man and a woman, and some traumatic incident has precipitated a severe depression with accompanying physical hostility. (He punches walls and people.)

Mr. Toy has also had auditory hallucinations. Immediate care inside a psychiatric hospital is recommended, and suicidal behavior should not be discounted with this young man

I stopped reading as I remembered one fact that put a damper on my excitement and speculation about Toy and Thomas Berryman. Jimmie Horn had been shot down by Bert Poole. I’d seen it several times on film. It was as clear in my mind as the famous televised sequence in which Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald.

Bowditch was silent around me, reminding me of late nights in my own house. The only sound was water running through the old building’s pipes. Then it

glug-glugged

off. It was 2:30 in the morning. I was feeling ever so slightly deranged.

I sat with my stockinged feet up on a green-blottered desk, smoking, drinking machine coffee, thinking about both Ben Toy and Ronald Asher.

I knew I had a story now, probably a pretty good one, and I started to consider more thorough approaches for future interviews.

I knew from past experience that I should quickly identify myself and my newspaper. People like to have situations with strangers defined … Then, I thought it would be best to work off people’s natural sympathies for Jimmie Horn. For political assassinations anyway.

I scribbled out a speech for myself, but it was so convoluted people would have forgotten the beginning by the time I reached the end.

Then I considered a very simple, direct approach.

“My name is Ochs Jones,” it went. “I’m a reporter for the

Nashville Citizen-Reporter

(local newspaper if necessary). I’m investigating the murder of Jimmie Horn of Nashville. Would you help me?”

It was an introduction that never failed me during four months of investigation, in six states.

Watching out for the inevitable attendant or security guard, I let myself out Bowditch’s unlocked outside door. (There were three doors; two of them were locked, but the one leading into the foyer wasn’t.)

Alan Shulman was waiting for me, sitting on the front steps.

The young doctor was dressed in well-worn sixties street clothes; he was scratching little xs and os in the driveway gravel with two-toned desert boots.

“Asher called you,” I said.

He nodded. “I wish you’d asked me for those files,” he said. “That really bothers me, Mr. Jones.”

Then he got up from the front steps and walked inside. I listened to the two inner doors being unlocked, closed. Then it was silent again.

I wished I’d asked him too.

I also wished he hadn’t dealt with it in quite that way.

West Hampton, July 10

For breakfast the next morning I sat alone in a wrinkled double bed at Howard Johnson’s and tried to write the first news story about Thomas Berryman. I didn’t do spectacularly well.

Random Observation:

We of the new journalism schools,

energetic, smarter than anybody else, insane with the desire to say truths

—simply cannot express ourselves as well as many of our elders.

Random Observation:

People I know, kith and kin, like to compare newspaper and police investigation to jigsaw puzzle solving … but if the investigations I’ve worked on are anything like the average jigsaw puzzle—it’s a puzzle where all the pieces have been lost.

Lost in different places. Around the house, the backyard, the car, anywhere the car may have been since the puzzle was bought.

Before a reporter can try to put the puzzle together, he has to find all the pieces.

I sat in the motel bed looking at all of my pieces. ExposÉs are made of this:

The name of a bar in Provincetown, Mass.: A. J. Fogarty’s.

A hotel: the Bay Arms (also in Provincetown).

A New York florist’s: Flower & Toy Shop.

Phone numbers Ben Toy had charged calls to since entering the hospital:

212-686-4212 (Carole Ann Mahoney)

312-238-1774 (Robert Stringer)

617-753-8581 (Bernard Shaw)

212-838-6643 (Mary Ellen Terry)

212-259-9311 (Berryman; N.Y.C.)

516-249-6835 (Berryman; Long Island)

Names: Dr. Reva Baumwell (100 Park); Michel Romains; Charles Izzie; Ina and Calvin Toy.

I added notes to myself:

Call Lewis Rosten (my editor) about gunman in Philadelphia.

Call Alan Shulman about lunch and/or boxing match.

I called N.Y. telephone information and asked for the number of Thomas Berryman in Manhattan.

They gave me 259-9311, which I knew of course.

“That’s at 60 West 80th Street?” I then asked.

“No, sir,” the operator said. “It’s 80 Central Park South.”

I added Berryman’s New York address to my list.

Then I started dialing the other numbers.

The response at 686-4212 set the tone for the rest of my morning. A young woman with a bright, friendly, mid-western voice answered.

“Hi there.”

“Hi. My name is Ochs Jones. I’m a friend of Ben Toy’s.”

“Who?”

“Ben Toy, Thomas Berryman … They said that you …”

“Oh. Hold on. You must want Maggie.”

Off receiver: “Mags, a friend of Ben Toy? …”

The phone is set down on a table. Sounds of women walking around in high heels on hardwood floors. Ten minutes pass. The phone is hung up. I call again and there’s no answer.

The desk at the Bay Arms Hotel in Provincetown had no record of a Toy or Berryman staying there during the month of June.

A. J. Fogarty’s suggested I call after five, when the night staff came on.

There was no answer at the florist’s.

Both Hertz and Avis said there was no way Harley Wynn or anyone else could have rented a Lincoln Mark IV at Boston’s Logan Airport. The Wizard at Avis said it was a “logistical impossibility.”

Around noon I decided to call Lewis Rosten. Lewis is my editor at the

Citizen-Reporter.

He’s a thick-skinned wordsmith out of the University of the South—Sewanee. He’s 100% bite, no bark, and the prime mover behind this book. Also, he’s my friend.

It sounded like he’d just arrived at the office.

“Ochs, how is it going? Or isn’t it? Where are you?”

“Still up on Long Island,” I said. “You sound pretty chipper. Must have a pretty good headline going for today.”

“It’s pure rubbish.” Rosten drawled pure Mississippi. “Speculation about this Joe Cubbah cat up in Philadelphia.”

“I talked with Ben Toy at the hospital last night,” I said. “I really think this might be something, Lewis.”

I read from my notes on Toy, filling in my own gut feelings.

“Jeeee-ssus!” Rosten yowled when I was finished. “I was going to apologize for sending you up there in the middle of things down here … I just had this feeling about that doctor who called … Listen,” Rosten said, “Toy said,

‘I can’t tell you,’

when you first asked him who had hired Thomas Berryman?”

“Yeah. But then he came right back and said he didn’t know. It’s hard to read Toy. They have him on a ton of medication … Apparently he’s kicked the shit out of some attendants. He’s a pretty big boy.”

“How did they get him in there anyway?”

“You know, I don’t know … I don’t have all the details anyway. He fell asleep on me last night.”

Rosten wasn’t too happy with that one.

“When do you see him again?” he wanted to know.

“I hope today … I, uh, made a few problems for my-self last night. Looked at some hospital workups on Toy. Got caught.”

Far, far away in Nashville Rosten calmly puffed away on his pipe. “Accidents,” he muttered, “will occur in the best-regulated families. Mister Charles Dickens,

David Copperfield …

Ochs,” he went on in the same breath, “please be careful with this.”

I sat at the motel desk and smoked a few more cigarettes. It was bright noon outside.

Some little girls were having a high-diving marathon in the swimming pool.

I went back over what I had and what I didn’t have point by point. Among other things, it occurred to me that I had absolutely no idea how or why the gunman from Philadelphia had been in Nashville. Not a clue.

It also occurred to me that I had no idea what had happened to Thomas Berryman. I sat there, puffing tobacco, watching little girls play, wondering where Berryman was right at that very moment.

West Hampton, July 11

Two husky attendants were wrapping Ben Toy up like Tutankhamen, only in wet, ice-cold sheets. He lay flat out on one of two pinewood massage tables in the immaculate Bowditch shower room.

One aide pulled the dripping sheets tight, then the other held them down—the way you’d keep a finger on string while wrapping a package.

The tightly bound sheets trapped all of Toy’s body heat; made it numb; floated his mind. He started to look like he was knocked out on dope.

As we sat in the shower room, different smart-aleck patients kept coming in and threatening to sit on his face. That was a big joke on Bowditch. The intruders always laughed; Ben Toy laughed.

There was a strange camaraderie among the patients that wouldn’t have held up on the outside. It was disorienting, but I was “being careful” as per Lewis Rosten’s request. This was meeting number 2, and Toy had requested “cold packs” for it.

I bent down and touched a Winston to his chapped lips. His face pores were open, exuding oily sweat.

He drew smoke slowly, deep, then exhaled it in a steamy cloud. There was something expensive, exotic, about the entire experience, the madhouse atmosphere.

“It really relaxes me,” Toy said of the cold packs. His drawn cheeks and his forehead were starting to flush bright red. “You fight like a bastard the first time they try to do it to you. Then you can’t get enough of it.”

He exhaled more smoke. He tried to blow it up to the green tile ceiling.

My eyes traveled up and down the neatly bound-up sheets. I looked over at Asher. He and I had squared things with Shulman. Kind of squared things, anyway. “I think I’d put up a little fight if you tried to put me in these,” I said.

Toy smiled. His eyes were on the Winston in my hand. “One more puff,” he said. “Then I have a story for you.”

The story elaborated on Thomas Berryman’s unconventional techniques for murder.

The most recent

number

had occurred in the small town of Lake Stevens, Washington. The victims were two of three brothers owning an airplane company: Shepherd Industries of Washington.

Berryman was used because the deaths had to appear accidental; suspicion had to be cast away from the family: the man paying Berryman’s forty thousand dollar fee was the third brother.

I recalled Harley Wynn’s remarks about displacing blame after the murder of Jimmie Horn. If Berryman had somehow done the shooting in Nashville, he certainly had succeeded in that regard.

The Shepherd Number had taken him three days to complete.

On January 17th, a Friday, he’d flown to the Shepherd family estate in Lake Stevens. He was posed as a sales representative for a Michigan tool and die company, Michael J. Shear. On Monday, he and all three brothers were scheduled to go to Detroit to inspect Shear’s plant operations.

Berryman’s plan for the job was characteristically complicated in execution. It unraveled, however, with a fascinating, what Ben Toy called a “neat,” result.

As I listened I considered the related parallels for Jimmie Horn.

Lake Stevens, Washington, January 19 and 20

On a Sunday night, the 19th of January, Thomas Berryman sat in a moonlit kitchen, lazily drinking instant coffee, daydreaming about a girl named Oona Quinn.

He listened for noises around him in the big Shepherd house. Heard the cold wind in the firs outside. The soothing fire crackling under his water pan.

A plastic clock on the stove read five of two.

At two, Berryman pushed himself back from the table. He held back a yawn and pinched grit out of the corners of his eyes. He went outside into the winter cold.

The night air was better for his concentration. Still, he felt that he was sleepwalking for a while.

He was carrying a duffel bag the size of a lunchbox. Also an oversized pistol, a five-inch Crossman air pistol.

His tennis shoes made a padding sound across the patio. Then he was stiff-arming tree and bush forms in the dark.

Following a skinny, winding creek that carried the moon’s reflection like a boat, Berryman was eventually turning a dogleg right in the woods. In time he saw-amber floodlights from the Shepherd airfield. Saw how they seemed to pin down the planes like guy wires.

Down under one plane’s nose an old Chevy BelAir was parked alongside a slender clapboard sentry house. Berryman could read I BRAKE FOR ANIMALS on a big orange sticker across the car’s trunk. Farmers with night jobs, he considered. Maybe down-and-outers.

A hairy gray head was in one sentry house window. A muffled radio played country and western music. Charlie Pride, it sounded like.

About a quarter mile down the field he could see the jet he’d come in on that past Friday. Staying about ten feet inside the woods, he made a way, the long way, down toward the jet.

He noticed several lean Dobermans roaming loose, prancing on the shiny tarmac, apparently liking the sound made by their paws on stone.

Out beyond the main lights the field got dark enough for Berryman to walk out of the bushes again. Far down the airfield, a younger guard came up to the little pillbox with a leashed Doberman. He tied up the muscular animal, and for a minute or two it stood around front snapping at its old lady, also tied.

As Berryman stood watching the pair, a hidden Doberman flew out of the tree shadows. It barked no warning, growled late.

Berryman fell, and the long Crossman flashed up with an airy

pffssss. Pffssss.

The pretty dog twisted around itself and collapsed. It lay still with its teeth bared, the way dogs look after they’ve tried, too late, to bite killer automobiles.

The Doberman would sleep for hours. Then, it would wake up yipping and limping. With religion.

The younger of the two watchmen wasn’t going to be so fortunate. Berryman needed him.

He pushed himself up from the cold airfield tarmac. Felt where his coat and sweater were ripped at the elbow. He started off toward the jet, and a long night’s work.

The following morning, Berryman prowled around the Shepherd kitchen like a sick man. He had butterflies in his stomach and he was trembling slightly. Among other things, he hadn’t slept that night.

Across the room, a little blacklady cook was doing a slow burn.

Morality had never been ambiguous with the woman and she highly disapproved of a party held there the night before. She held Thomas Berryman responsible.

He’d arranged the bash.

“Hmmpff. I jus won’t work ’round here no more, things being like this,” she complained around the kitchen. “Hmmpff.”

She scrambled a bowl of eggs and kept shaking her head in disgust. “Women’s underwears in the garden. Little maraschinos cherries in the swimmin’ pool. Hmmpff. Hmmpff.” She turned to Berryman and looked him squarely in the face: wise little acorn face to big mustache face. “I thought you was a gentleman,” she said. “Wrong. Wrong again,” she shrugged. “Won’t be the first time. Won’t be the last.”

Berryman was fiddling over by her stove, looking half-contrite. He appeared to be sorry to have caused her displeasure, if nothing else. “What’s this here?” he asked after a respectful pause.

“Hmmpff,” the old lady bit her tongue. She beat her duck eggs dark gold. “Now what …” she said, biting the tongue, “now what in the world does that

look

like?”

Thomas Berryman cocked his head back and popped a biscuit-sized fruit into his mouth. “Tastes like strawberries,” he grinned. “Only they’re too big to be strawberries.” Juice ran over his chin and he dammed the flow with a forefinger.

The cook moved over and nudged him away from her stove. She was half-playing now. “I’m really mad at you, Mister Shear.”

She sidled him across the kitchen with her bony little hip. “You a bad influence comin up Lake Steven actin like that last night.”

As further appeasement, it seemed, Berryman started to fill a row of four pewter coffee mugs on the counter. “Who’s who?”

“Mister Ben an’ you the cream an’ sugar boys,” the old lady started. Then she reconsidered. “But you not bringin nothin’ to nobody. You must make it a big joke. Bit joke on Mrs. Bibbs, ha ha, very funny indeed.”

“Put down the coffee,” she said. “

Down

boy.”

As the little black woman returned to scooping eggs onto warmed, waiting plates, Berryman dropped small tablets into two of the coffee mugs. The tablets were a combination of iron sulfate, magnesium oxide, and ipecac.

“What a sore sport,” he sucked his cheek as he watched the pills dissolve. “What a party pooper, Mrs. B.”

As he continued to grin at her, the old woman finally looked up. She flashed a gold bridgework smile at him. As usual, he was forgiven.

The youngest Shepherd brother, Benjamin, sat still as grass, glassy-eyed, chewing a breakfast muffin over and over like it was rubber tire. He thought he was having a heart attack.

He could hear his big heart thumping and felt it could blow open his chest. His body was flushing blood. Numb fingers, toes. His lungs were filling up with fluids, and he was having regrets about the life he’d led.

Pancakes were being passed by. His brother was kidding Thomas Berryman about the trip back to Michigan.

Benjamin Shepherd slipped down to the floor, and began vomiting recognizable food.

Charles and William Shepherd carried their brother to a first floor bedroom. They held him on a bed while his body convulsed. He dryheaved. His back arched like a drawbridge.

Gradually it dawned on Charles Shepherd that his cook was screaming bloody murder in another room. Back in the dining room. She screamed for a long time, calling for Charles Shepherd and for Jesus.

When his young brother finally fainted, Charles ran back to the dining room.

What he found was Thomas Berryman lying across the rug. Berryman was holding his knees up around his chest. He’d kicked over the dining room table—at least it was turned over on its side. “Oh my God,” he kept gasping. “Oh God, it’s horrible.” He wasn’t having regrets about the life he’d led. He’d poisoned himself.

The exact sound he made was: O g-a-a-ad.

Late that afternoon the little cook, Mrs. Bibbs, sat on a tiny leather hassock in the front hallway of the Shepherd house. She’d cried until she had no control over her limbs. The sun was passing down through the glass portion of the front door. The woman slipped off the hassock onto the sunstreaked floor.

The family doctor had just gone out the door. He’d said that both Berryman and Benjamin Shepherd had suffered from acute food poisoning. It was lucky for them, he announced with great pomp, that they’d both thrown up so violently.

Orating in front of Charles and Willy Shepherd, the doctor had sternly and ridiculously questioned the cook about whether or not she’d washed her strawberries before serving them. “I think not,” he’d said. And who was she to argue with a doctor of medicine.

That afternoon, Benjamin Shepherd was recuperating in his own bedroom.

Propped in front of a Trinitron portable, eating ice cream like a tonsillectomy patient, his large head was positioned beneath a framed Kodachrome of Maria Schneider in

Last Tango in Paris.

The girl had more hair over her vagina than an ape does.

Benjamin wasn’t flying back to Michigan with Berryman and his brothers, he’d announced.

The family advised Thomas Berryman to do the same. Recuperate for a few days. Get the poisons out of his system. Take rhubarb and soda at regular intervals.

But when Charles and Willy Shepherd stopped to see their brother on their way to the plane, Berryman, though peaked, was packed and dressed to travel with them.

He was smiling thinly. Puffing on a characteristic cigarillo. But he looked like a man just over a hospital convalescence.

That much is approximated in a statement filed by Ben Shepherd with the Lake Stevens, Washington, police.

Pioneer types, Charles and Willy Shepherd fueled and set up their own plane. It was work they liked doing.

Berryman pitched in where he could, driving a BP fuel truck back and forth from a hangar. The three men worked without speaking.

It wasn’t until all the work was done that Berryman took Charles Shepherd aside.

They sat down on a small metal handtruck beside the private jet’s boarding stairs. Berryman was hyperventilating. Charles Shepherd’s hands were dirty as a mechanic’s and he sat with them held out away from his shirt.

“Whew!” Berryman kept blowing out air and catching his breath as he spoke. “I guess,” he said, “all this

phew

extra running around … set me off again.”

“Sure it did,” Shepherd agreed. “You should be back in bed. You look pitiful.”

“Damn stomach’s rolling.”

“Rhubarb and soda’s the thing.”

“Fuck me,” Berryman puffed.

“I told you, you dumbass. Go on back with Ben now.”

Thomas Berryman continued to swear like a man about to miss out on box seats for a pro football game. “Shee-it,” he said over and over.

Willy Shepherd stood close by, looking as if he’d suddenly figured something out. He was lighting a cigarette. “Too much running around,” he said to Berryman. “Got to take it easy after these things.”

“Phew,” Berryman said. He was beet red, blushing. “Fuck me, Willy” were his last words, really, to either of the brothers. He gave both men back-thumping

abrazos.

Then he headed back toward the big house.

The private plane cruised over Douglas fir tops like a living, looking thing. It was blue, electric blue.

Thomas Berryman watched through mottled leaves that were hiding his face. Then he turned away and began hiking through woods toward the main state road, away from the house.

Berryman walked watching the tops of his boots. Watching the underbrush. The bleached hay. Noting greenish grasshoppers. Red ants on stalks of hay. A dead field mouse like a wet, gray mitten.

Overhead, the blue jet’s wheels slowly tucked into its stomach, and as the wheels folded, the sky cracked like a giant fir splitting all the way up from its roots.

Berryman knew enough not to look back. Once, sometime in Texas, he’d seen a buck on fire. It hadn’t been pretty, or edifying.

He walked faster. In deeper woods. In a dark house with a soft needle floor. He kept seeing the burning deer.

The nose and the belly puffed smoke just about the color of sheep wool. It shot flames that were orange at first. Then just about blue. Then near-invisible in black smoke.

It smoked ashes. It made shrieking metal-against-metal noises. The entire dark sky seemed to fall into the woods.

That much was reported by a gas station owner on the Lake Stevens Highway.

Berryman hiked two miles to a picnic roadstop. The roadstop was simply two redwood tables in a small clearing.

He got into a rented beige and white camper he’d parked there earlier in the week.

There were sleeping bags and Garcia fishing poles and tackle in the back. There was a Texaco map of Washington across the front seat. An old pipe was on the dashboard.

Propped against the pipe was the familiar old sign: GONE-FISHING. Berryman crumpled the message in his hand.

He turned on the radio. Opened all the windows. Put on a workshirt, Stetson, and Tony Lama boots. He drove away calmly, like a man away on a vacation.

The smell of fir was so thick and good he began to get over his nausea from the ipecac residue.

Hours later, sitting in a roadhouse in Cahone, Oregon, he read that businessman Michael J. Shear (the body of the young airfield security guard) was among those killed in the crash of a private plane near the Charles Shepherd estate in Lake Stevens, Washington. There wasn’t any mention of an investigation, the local media aura being one of either supernatural catastrophe, or casual indifference. (Even afterward, the matter of the missing security guard was either overlooked or attributed to coincidence by the tiny Lake Stevens police force.)

There was an accompanying photograph with the newspaper story. It showed a sad and silly-looking policeman holding up a large man’s shoe.

Because he had extended it out toward the camera, it looked like a giant’s shoe. This was the same trick used in “big fish” photos, and Berryman wondered if the man had done it on purpose.

Ben Toy lay still as a corpse in his cold packs. His blond hair was wet, darker. I’d pushed it back out of his face, and he looked younger that way.

“That’s the way his mind works,” he said to me, to Asher and the Sony.

“And that’s why they wanted him for Jimmie Horn.”

New York City, July 12

At 9:30 the next morning I was perched on a four-foot-high stone wall surrounding Central Park. I was memorizing Thomas Berryman’s apartment building as though it was Westminster Abbey or the Louvre.

My hands had been sweating when I woke up at 6 A.M.; they were still sweating. I’d been considering calling the police. The blood-and-shit terribleness of the story was just beginning to dawn on me and it was oppressive.

I had a good idea what I was going to do at Berryman’s, only not knowing New York, I didn’t think it would be quite as easy as it turned out to be.

Between nine-thirty and ten, two liveried doormen whistled down Yellow Cab after Yellow Cab in front of the building. It’s gray-canopied entrance, marked with a big white number 80, seemed a glorified bus stop more than anything else.

My hands continued to sweat. Even my legs were wet. For sharp contrast I could see suits and jewels munching breakfast across the way at the Park Lane Hotel.

Ben Toy had spoken of the tenth floor … dirty ledges … pigeons. I counted up to the tenth floor. But there were no pigeons that day; and no people at any of the windows. The windows appeared to be black.

After the taxi rush, one of the doormen emerged from the lobby trailing four large dogs on leashes. A dapper blackman in his forties, he was wearing a dark green suitcoat over his blue uniform—that plus a racetrack fedora with a little yellow feather cocked up on the side.

He controlled the dogs with flicks of his wrists, getting them to successfully jaywalk through Central Park South’s midmorning traffic.

I caught up with him on a secluded patch of lawn inside the park. It was under the eye of RCA and GM; of planted penthouse terraces and wooden water towers. I told the doorman my name and business, and he was sympathetic, I thought. He’d been born in Kentucky, in fact, and he knew about Horn. His name was Leroy Bones Cooper.

“Well, sure, yes, I’d like to cooperate with you on this matter of Mr. Horn,” he said without any southern in his voice. “I didn’t person’ly know the man, you understand—I believe I did see him on the news program several times.”

I quickly decided to ask the doorman if he could possibly get me inside Berryman’s apartment.

His reaction was sudden inner-city suspicion. “Mr. Berr’man?” He cocked his head on a sharp slant. “What does Mr. Berr’man have to do with it? He been away lately.”

“He might not be involved at all,” I told the man. “We think he is, though.”

The doorman started to lead his dogs back toward the street. “Hard for me to believe that,” he said over their sudden barking.

I trailed along, about a step behind. “Can I ask why?”

The little blackman seemed a little angry now. “You askin it,” he said. He took off his hat and wiped his head with a big white hankie. “Don’t have no answer for sure.” He looked at me. “Mr. Berr’man’s a nice young fella is all. Stock man or manageer’ial I believe.”

He continued to walk forward. The dogs were being irritated by squirrels in the maple trees.

“The way I see it,” he turned to me when we reached the stone wall, “it’s twenty-five dollars for me. Twenty-five for the super.”

I didn’t quite believe what he’d said. I brought up the concern he’d shown about Horn.

“Whether I’m concerned or whether I’m not,” he waved off my objection, “you want your peek upstairs. The money’s its own separate thing. I see how it can help Mr. Horn, all right, and it can help me too.”

I let the argument drop and I counted out five ten-dollar bills for Cooper. He thanked me in a polite, New York-doorman way. He wasn’t from Kentucky, I thought—not anymore.

“You’re going to take me up there yourself,” I told the little man.

Leroy Cooper was making a lot of throat-clearing and sniffling noises. He was having trouble unlocking the heavy green door marked with a gold 10D.

The strong-box door finally opened, and I was looking across a long room, all the way up Central Park to 110th Street. It was a spectacular view of bright woods, narrow roads, even a few dark ponds.

The apartment itself was weighted down with heavy wood furniture and hanging plants. It was conspicuously neat and clean.

“Maid comes two, three times a week. Ears’la Libscomb,” Cooper said. “Anybody else comes,” he cautioned me with a stiff outstretched finger, “

you’re

a burglar.”

“Thanks,” I mumbled. “I thought I might be able to count on you.”

“I hope you find what you’re looking for,” he said anyway. His knobby, black hands were visibly shaking, but he was trying to look arrogant. He was totally confused, I decided.

He slowly, noiselessly closed the door and I was alone in Thomas Berryman’s apartment.

Feeling more than a little unreal, I set right to work.

I started with a quick tour of the place.

Besides the airy living room, there were two large bedrooms. There was an eat-in kitchen and another large room being used as a study. I walked along flinging open closets, pulling out drawers, making quite an arbitrary mess of things.

I found a Walther automatic in the master bedroom, but there were no other guns anywhere.

There were photographs of an exquisite, dark-haired girl over a fireplace in the bedroom. She was an Irisher … There were also black-and-white photographs and paintings of

Last Picture Show

western towns all over the walls. But there were no pictures of Thomas Berryman.

Only clues about him.

Blouses and Cardin and Yves Saint Laurent suits next to hunting wear from Abercrombie’s. Boots from Neiman-Marcus. Givenchy colognes. A rugged-looking jacket made of the good, soft leather used for horse equipage.

The second bedroom seemed to be some kind of guest room with bath.

It was all set up like a room at the Plaza Hotel. Fresh untouched Turkish towels and linen. Neutrogena soap still in its black wrapper. An unused tube of Close-up that I opened for candy purposes.

The study was full of books and cigars, and also one of the few things I’d specifically been looking for.

It was a fat, red book published by Random House. The maid or someone had put it upside down on one of the bookshelves. The book was called

Jiminy

and it was Jimmie Horn’s autobiography.

Close beside

Jiminy

were four other books containing articles on Horn:

Sambo; The Young Bloods; Black Consciousness;

and

Re-Nig.

My next interesting discovery was three photographs. They were wrapped up in tissue paper and squirreled away in a bottom desk drawer.

One of them showed a well-dressed blond man who seemed to be signaling for a cab on a crowded, glittery street. The blond man was in crisp, sharp focus.

The second picture was of the same blond man turned toward a street hustler this time. The second man wore bluejean biballs with no shirt, and a bluejean cap with a peak. The blond man’s eyes were half-closed and his mouth was open in a capital O. It looked like a candid comedy picture.

The final shot was the blond man again, but standing beside Ben Toy. This Ben Toy weighed twenty to thirty pounds more than when I’d seen him at the hospital. He was physically impressive to look at. Behind the two men was a white municipal building, a library or courthouse. The blond man seemed to be pointing right at the camera.

I was certain that he was Harley John Wynn.

Soon after I looked at the pictures, I heard a loud creaking noise inside the apartment. I looked across the room, and saw that the front door was slowly opening. I was helpless to do anything but watch it.

First a hat, then Leroy Cooper’s face appeared in a foot-wide crack. “How long you gonna be?” he complained. “Damn, man, you’re, taking too long for this.”

I said nothing to Cooper. I felt as though my skull had been shattered by someone swinging a heavy metal bar. Somehow, the experience had translated into nausea too.

Getting no answer from me, Cooper slowly shook his head. He shut the door again. I heard him swearing outside. Very slowly, I was getting an emotional grasp of the situation I was involved in: I was starting to understand genuine fear of being hurt; the ability to take lives; fast, unexpected death.

Eventually I regrouped and left the building. I sent the three photographs to Lewis Rosten in Nashville. Then I spent the rest of the day visiting psychiatrists and psychologists who’d worked with Ben Toy.

I also ate a pork chop sandwich in a lunch shop run by some Greek men. The chop was silver-dollar size with the bone still in it. Because of the bone, the Greek men couldn’t cut the sandwich. I ate around it, not completely understanding how or why people live in New York City.

That night, after dinner with Alan Shulman, I called home.

My wife Nan said she was missing me, and I was missing her too. Nan knows how to put me on an even keel, and I’d been flying just a little too high in New York.

We talked about the Berryman story, and talking with her I began to feel that I’d accomplished some things.

After we finished, Nan put on my daughters for two minutes each.

Janie Bug said almost nothing. Then she started to cry because her time was up.

Little Cat said she’d pray for me at Trinity Episcopal if I promised to bring her back one of those miniature Empire State Buildings.

That kind of thing (attitude) upsets me, but I don’t know what to do about it.

I tried to go to sleep, but I couldn’t quite get there.

Amagansett, July 13

Random Observation

: I’d been handed a ticket on the fast rail, and I was well on my way to God knew where. It was Tom Wickerdom or bust.

Or was it? I began to remember strange, sad stories about men called “assassination buffs.” I remembered people laughing at the expense of an ex-newsman from Memphis who was still dredging up facts about Martin Luther King’s murder.

My body was trying to accept another northern morning. It was agreeably warm outside, but springwarm.

It was 8 A.M. and I was badly in need of a caffeine fix. I had to settle for nicotine, American-tobacco style.

Cigarette in hand, I surveyed a big, gray Victorian-style house bordering the yard of William Seward Junior High in Amagansett. I was fingering a rash under my new beard. In retrospect, I think the lack of sleep had caught up with me.

The big house had four white gables and a black Fleetwood sticking out of the garage. The house number told me it was Miss Ettie Hatfield’s place, and I was properly impressed with the living style of the Bowditch nurse.

Miss Hatfield had been night charge nurse on Bowditch for over thirty-five years. Both Shulman and Ronald Asher said she was the only person on Bowditch Ben Toy might have opened up to. Miss Hatfield was a magical old lady, they said. She was the one who’d originally alerted Shulman to the Jimmie Horn references in Toy’s ramblings.

I could distinguish a bald head reading a newspaper inside the house’s darkened living room. Steam was drifting up from a coffee cup on the windowsill.

I slogged up the spongy-wet front lawn, stood on a wet, bristle mat, and tried to get a brass lionhead to make noise for me. The knocker would stick on the downswing—then it would make a sound like

ttthummm.

Stick, then

ttthummm.

“Doesn’t work right.” A man’s voice finally came from inside. “I’m coming around. I’m coming around.”

He of the bald head, an ancient fellow in a plaid shirt with black string tie, finally opened up the front door.

He was Miss Hatfield’s father, and he appeared to be well into his nineties. He shook from Parkinson’s disease, he told me, but other than that, everything was shipshape.

“She’s sleepin’ now,” he said after we’d gotten our autobiographies in order. “Works nights up the hospital. I just picked her up seven-fifteen.”

The old man looked down at a handsome gold watch, searched the dial for arms, looked back up at me.

“Made my fortune sellin’ these Benruses,” he remarked. “You’re about six foot six, aren’t you?” he went on.

“Six foot seven,” I blushed, then slouched out of an old,

no, I don’t play basketball

habit.

Mr. Hatfield shook his head and made a clucking noise with his cheek. “Seventy-nine fuckin’ inches,” he said. “Here I stand sixty-one and a half. Used to be sixty-four. Hell, Ettie’s near sixty-three herself.”

I couldn’t help laughing at the way he’d said it, and the old man chortled along with me. I asked what time I should come back to talk with his daughter.

“Aw hell, I’m goin’ to wake her now.”

He gave me a little hand signal to follow him inside. “She’s been expectin’ you all yesterday. Ever since Ben Toy told her you come. I ever let you get away, she’d cut me off my cream of wheat.”

He went up the stairs chucking to himself. He was a country boy, in his own quaint Long Island, N.Y., way.

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.”

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 second 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 B

₁₂

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.

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.

I obliged him. I went partially, happily berserk at Hojo’s in West Hampton, Long Island.

I gave out some rebel hoots and howls that had people knocking at me through the motel walls. I crowhopped around the rug on my big bare feet. I kicked the walls like somebody on their way home from

Singin’ in the Rain.

Before I go any farther, though, I should tell you that during the years 1958 to 1962 Terrell was governor of the state; that from about 1958 on, Terrell had just about run Tennessee; and that some people, myself included, thought that he had run it very, very badly.

What’s more, Terrell certainly had a major grudge to settle with Jimmie Horn.

That night, my batteries all recharged, I wrote up a long, inspired list of follow-up calls and visits I still had to make in the North. For the very first time, I felt totally comfortable with the story.

I prepared for a trip out to Berryman’s summer house in a place called Hampton Bays. It was there that I was to make my one big mistake in judgment while recording this story.

PART III

The Girl Who Loved Thomas Berryman

Hampton Bays, July 20

Thomas Berryman’s house at Hampton Bays was a sprawling, storm-gray sea captain’s house with a long canopied porch and five hundred feet of private beachfront. There were separate garages all over the place. The garages were literally everywhere you looked.

Inside the ten-bedroom house I found an unexpected surprise: Berryman’s girlfriend, a strange, beautiful lady named Oona Quinn.

A modern woman I guess you could call her, Oona Quinn was growing up in the manner of young men: she was groping, grappling, scratching for what she considered her rightful place in the world. That’s why Thomas Berryman liked her, I imagine.

Oona is tall and thin. (5’9”, big bones, 130 pounds.) She has flowing black hair that can come below her waist, but she generally keeps it up in a large bun. She has the classic, stately look of New England, and the best of it. She’ll smoke brown cigarettes, however, letting them hang out of the side of her mouth.

Unlike Ben Toy, Oona was the kind of person I’d known in my own life. She’d been a clerk in a boutique the spring and winter before she met Berryman. But she was bright with common sense. She was the one, for example, who finally gave me a reasonable explanation why

beautiful people

are forever hugging. She said it was their way of breaking sexual tensions. I liked that idea.

Oona Quinn said she was twenty, and that was a startling, but possible, fact.

I first saw her through a screen door, a black, dirty screen in the kitchen. I had my eyes and nose up against it and the shadowy outline of her hair was wild and bushy. A beautiful witch, I thought. I called inside.

During our first moments in the doorway—as I explained how I’d come to the house via Ben Toy—I scratched my nose, took a deep breath, scratched my chin, my ear, blinked several times, brushed the shoulder of my jacket, and lit a cigarette.

“Haven’t you ever seen a woman before?” she asked. I laughed (embarrassing memory) and said, “Uh course.”

At the outset, Oona was reluctant to talk about anything—even the kind of day it was, or wasn’t, or ought to be. This didn’t surprise me, of course.

We walked down to the water on a gray picket fence that was laid flat instead of standing up. She carried a little kitchen radio that was playing cabaret songs, and it was almost as if I wasn’t there.

After we’d tramped a good distance from the house she asked me some questions. “What … exactly what did Ben Toy tell you?” she said.

I didn’t see a good reason to hold anything back, so I told her most of what I knew. She listened to it all, and then she simply laughed.

“He’s crazy, you know. Tuned out.”

“He said you know what happened in Nashville,” I told her.

“He said?” she stopped walking and turned to me. “Or are you figuring things out by yourself, Mr. Jones?”

She drifted away without an answer. Over closer to the water so it ran up over her feet. Her toes were long and bony with spots of red polish on the nails. And she

was

outrageously attractive.

When we finally reached a point out of sight of the house she plopped down in the sand. “Lili Marlene” came on her radio and she turned it up full.

“I feel very … like wind and things can pass right through me. It’s very weird talking to you right now. Unreal,” she said with a big sigh.

I asked her if Berryman was around somewhere and she gave no answer.

And then for some reason (I wasn’t able to understand it until I’d gathered more information) Oona Quinn began to tell me little things about herself. She spoke cautiously at first. In a cynical, irreverent sort of way. But after a while I started to get the feeling that I was hearing a nervous, maybe even a contrite confession. I also got the feeling that the girl was scared and confused.

She and I spent nearly three days together in Thomas Berryman’s house, and she spoke more and more freely (I thought) about what had happened between herself and Berryman.

One time she called him “the master of good vibes.” She said that he had a ten-inch prick, if that question was circulating around my mind. And she also said that I tended to be gloomy.

All in all it was a crazy environment for me. For one thing, I’d never spent a lot of time with beautiful women before; for another, the only other time I’d been at the seashore was in Biloxi, Mississippi. I also had trouble sleeping. At night, it got cold as Tennessee winter out there.

During our second day go-round, Oona told me that Bert Poole hadn’t shot Jimmie Horn.

“Ben Toy told me the same thing,” I said.

“He doesn’t know.” She disputed that. “He thinks Tom’s going to come take him back to Texas in the Mercedes.”

The back porch ran along the entire length of the house, and that was where we usually talked. We would sit on wicker porch furniture, facing out at the ocean. Thinking about it now, I can remember her bony, wool-socked toes wiggling in and out of leather clogs. It was her nervous tic, she said.

More often than not, a khaki-uniformed gardener would be working on the lawns as we taped.

A rangy, suspicious Jamaican, he thought I was getting into Oona’s pants behind Berryman’s back. He was fiercely loyal to Thomas Berryman, and said it was none of my damn business how come, mon.

One afternoon I noticed Oona handing the man several twenty-dollar bills. It gave me the uncomfortable feeling that Berryman was somewhere close by, supervising, maybe watching us from the mountainous dunes all around his house.

For her part, Oona Quinn would shrink up all vulnerable and wallflower-like whenever we talked. She’d sit on her long legs, hugging herself. She’d rock, and the wicker chair and porch would creak in unison.

She’d be very much in control, even haughty, until I pulled the tape recorder from its leather case. But something about the tape recorder got to her. Something about having her words recorded put a big, hard lump in her throat.

She was a lively storyteller though; she had a natural sense for ironic detail. I thought, in fact, that she was feeling ironic about herself, and I hoped to use that to get closer to Thomas Berryman.

Hampton Bays, June 18

Under a fat red sun, Thomas Berryman straddled the roof of his sea captain’s house and watched down where whitecaps were breaking all over a rough, stony Atlantic Ocean. The high air was clean, thick with salt, blue to look at. It was late June now.

Working at about fifty percent consciousness, Berryman’s mind kept drifting back to sugary Sunday school scenes from Texas. He wondered what was becoming of himself.

After a while, his eyes focused on a small piece of tar patchwork he’d completed, and he thought it was good work to patch your own roof. His gardener had refused to do the high roofing job, and now Berryman was pleased.

He looked over at sand dunes—rising fifty or sixty feet on the other side of the highway—and his eyes followed a white Mustang tooling along the pigeon-gray road at their base. The Mustang scampered away between the sand hills like a cartoon car. At one time, Berryman remembered, he’d threatened his father with bodily harm over the issue of a Ford Mustang.

He lit a rare cigarette and let himself float in warm, afternoon sensations. He could see Oona walking down on the beach in a white string suit. Very chic-chic. Now and again his mind drifted to the subject of Jimmie Horn.

He shimmied over to the dark stone (cool) chimney, and began to install a new screen over its big mouth.

Because the old penny loafers he was wearing slipped on the roof slates, he had to ride the apex horseback style. The danger of possibly slipping off the three-story roof—missing the sun porch—hitting patio furniture that looked the size of pocket change—was part of the job and part of its pleasure.

He placed his face inside the musky hole and in the light of a match saw that the chimney screen was clogged closed with soot. With sooty sand. With sooty seagull feathers and a child’s deflated balloon.

The white Ford sports car passed down on the road again. He flicked his cigarette butt at it, then yanked up the chimney debris with both hands on the inky screen.

He and Oona ate a good dinner of white spaghetti and red wine. He drew on a stogie joint and passed it to her across their dinner table on the front lawn. They were both dressed rather hautily, in white, and together looked like a page out of a fashion magazine.

On closer examination, he was wearing red, white, and blue track shoes. Oona was wearing no makeup. She had promised to chase his blues away that night.

“Oh,” she said before beginning her exorcism, “Ben Toy called.” Her lips were slightly blistered from sunbathing. She drew daintily on the fat joint.

Tom Berryman held smoke in as he spoke. “While I was on the roof?”

“Didn’t believe me when I told him … that you were on the roof. Sounded weird.”

Berryman continued to hold the smoke in.

“All he said was, something about, he read about the Horns. What good people the Horns are. Who are the Horns?”

Berryman blew out smoke and talked to himself.

“… Ben’s flipping out on me.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Oona passed the cigarette and cocked her head like a pretty bird. “So who are the Horns?”

“They ‘re nobody,” Berryman said. He took up the joint. His eyes twinkled with dope dust. “Really they’re twins,” he smiled. “We used to go out with them in Amarillo. Patsy and Darlene, High Plains High,” He started to laugh. “Darlene had a pretty little red mustache. Nice personality, too.” He laughed some more. “Great little talker, that girl.”

Oona got the giggles, and then they both forgot about Ben Toy. He forgot his blues. They indulged in a freak rift that would have put good southern writers to shame. Berryman told a story in which a family’s grandmother dies on a long car trip, and the father puts her in the trunk so that the kids won’t know, and the car gets stolen at Hojo’s with grandma in the trunk. He said it was true.

Hours later, Oona Quinn sat stoned, looking at his face. Berryman held both her breasts in his hands, feeling them through her blouse, testing their weight.

A burning oak log gave the bedroom a smell like backwoods. The curtains on the open windows ballooned in the night breeze.

She stared at cool, splintering blue eyes.

A thick bushy mustache that wasn’t well groomed.

A flickering, pearly smile that caused her to smile back.

She imagined Thomas Berryman as one of Clark Gable’s sons. And she imagined, or remembered, a strange man who kept caged crickets to simulate the backwoods in his bedroom.

“Bugfucker,” Berryman commented when she told him. She sucked and ate crickets like the French candies with hard shells and gooey centers. She thought there was nothing she wouldn’t like to try.

“Ever been married?” he asked her in response to that.

“No. You?”

“I guess,” Berryman smiled up with his eyes closed. “For about seventeen days in high school. It wasn’t religious or legal bound. Lived in a treehouse if I remember right. Say,” he went on, “you said that Benboy called before? You said that, right? You said that?”

The bedroom where he and Oona Quinn were lying was the plainest space in the house. It was a wide place with a low, wood-beamed ceiling, a small fieldstone fireplace, and white rows of library shelves stacked with bound-up

National Geographies

and

American Scholars

(from a past owner).

The one small window (it is clouded with salt) looked out on the ocean, while a big bay window faced up the long narrow highway. Berryman said that the house had been spun assbackward in a hurricane and/or it had been built by assholes. Take your pick.

Oona slipped an expensive peasant’s blouse up over her hair, and her tiny breasts popped out of the folds one at a time. They were white and startling.

“Do you like my boobs tanned or white?” the twenty-year-old in her asked. She was both self-conscious and serious.

Thomas Berryman pinched one nipple and held it up near his chin. He examined it like a grocer with an apple by its stem. “Yes,” he said. “Very, very much.”

He pulled his own shirt over his head. He was lobster pink from the roofing job. “How do you like my little titties?”

She wrinkled her nose. “You’ll look like a black man in a week or so. Except your nose is so waspy.”

“I have to kill a blackman.”

She laughed. “That gardener. Good, he’s a snot.”

Berryman knelt in the middle of the bed and kissed her, without touching his pink chest against her.

He told her that ladies in Texas never cursed, and that they always kept scented handkerchiefs in their bosoms, and that they talcumed their rear ends.

Outside the bay window, far across the highway in the sand dunes, Ben Toy sat in darkness on the hood of the white Mustang. He studied the glowing second floor window. In his mind, he was there to protect Tom-Tom and the Irish girl. In return, they had to protect him.

A few times out on the dunes Toy heard a black woman’s voice announcing it was James Horn’s mother. One time he heard his father. Ben Toy thought he was having a nervous breakdown, and he was right.

Oona and Thomas Berryman continued to smoke the night away, and at a time when neither of them could do much more than nod their overblown heads, he started to ramble about a southern blackman he had been paid to kill.

As he described his plans for the unfortunate man, Oona Quinn threw up on the bed and then conveniently passed out.

Hampton Bays, June 19

In the morning, he was wearing a gray PROPERTY OF NEW YORK KNICKS sweatshirt and looking innocent as a new M.D.

He was ministering to the sick, too. Fluffing feather pillows. Opening old singed shades to bright ocean sunlight.

He carried Oona a pewter pot of coffee and honey cakes in a different bedroom from the one she’d thrown up in. The two of them didn’t have much to say, and only slowly did she realize he’d moved her, and changed her clothes sometime between night and morning. Put her in black tights.

“If you don’t want to stay,” he said, “you ought to go pretty soon. I had to find out, you know. You don’t have to be afraid to leave.” He continued to break bags of natural sugar into her coffee. “I’ve never harmed any friend. Not even anyone I liked. Don’t be afraid.”

She sipped the steamy coffee and watched him over the cup’s rim. Her eyes were slow and sad. Berryman had already figured that if she’d wanted to go, she would have tried to sneak away earlier.

“Coffee all right?”

He frowned at the dumbness of his question.

Oona refused to pout, however, “S’all right,” she said. She was drinking it.

“Scumbag,” she added after another sip.

Berryman felt obliged to offer her some explanation. “It just gives me too much freedom to stop now,” he offered first. “I don’t even think I want to.

“I remember when I was … some teenage year. Eighteen. Seventeen, nineteen … I drew up this philosophy. Ben and I did … I suppose it was more me than Ben

“It was more complicated, but it really boiled down to—fuck it all. Somebody named me the pleasure king. At least I made a choice,” he said.

“Let me put it another way. Take an average person. Approach him with an offer to do what I do. Bad stuff, right? All kinds of immoral. Imagine it, though.

“Say this man is offered fifty to kill a total stranger. Say he has the know-how to do it. That’s important for it to be a fair question.

“What do you think would happen? In most cases?”

Oona’s chin hadn’t moved from the coffee cup. “I don’t know,” she said.

“That’s no answer, babe.

“OK, that’s what you think. No, then. He’d call the police, OK?”

Berryman could see she was looking for some killer line. Some way to flush his toilet but good. He wouldn’t let her. “So you mean if I put fifty thousand dollars on this bed,” he asked her. “Better yet, if I’d left it at that little shop where you worked. Real money. Tens, twenties, fifties. And I’d told you—just to take a weak example—‘get rid of the manager of the Hyannis A&P’? No action, huh? …”

She said

scheis.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing.”

“You said something. Say it.”

“Nothing. It doesn’t matter.

Scheis

means shit in Russian.”

“Uh. I don’t think so.”

Oona Quinn didn’t say any more, but she didn’t go anywhere, either.

Revere, Massachusetts, July 22

Oona Quinn had grown up in one of a thousand similar claptrap houses in the amusement park town of Revere, Massachusetts. A pop singer named Freddie Cannon had grown up in Revere, too. Then he’d written a hit song about Palisades Park. It was that kind of uninspiring town.

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 stairs, “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.

For a very few moments outside, Berryman had a nervous tic in one eye. His mind was flooded with memories that portended (if one

believed,

in one way or another) big trouble for two reverse ass-kissers who had gone against near everything and everybody. Who had stoned girls and fucked Texas boys and cows.

Hampton Bays, June 23

It rained for several days straight near the end of June. It got muddy all around Berryman’s home, with the sea smelling extra salty, and all the cloth furniture cool and damp to the touch.

Berryman took the occasion to relax. He needed to relax totally before starting for Tennessee.

Now and then he caught a fish in the ocean; ate it, or threw it back. He thought that the ocean was profoundly intelligent, but that bluefish were not. He kept expecting Ben Toy to pop up, dirty and long-whiskered like some male dog on the bum.

One morning he sat sipping a mug of Yuban and munching honey cakes on the back (beach) porch. It was 9 A.M., but dark, and the house lights were on. He rocked on the love seat (cool on the back of his legs and against his arms), and he read Jimmie Horn’s fat autobiography: it was called

Jiminy.

He read every word, and enjoyed each sentence, each little vignette, immensely. Finishing one page, he would think about what had been described so adroitly, feel bad that it was over, then only slowly move on and start another page.

Over his head the rain sounded as if it was falling on soggy paper. The sky was steamy and cardboard-colored. All vertical noise was the ocean, which seemed especially wet because of the rain and wind.

It was his last pleasant memory of the sea captain’s house.

While he sat rocking, reading, humming, Oona came out in a boy’s yellow slicker and matching hat.

“What object—that is now sitting in the village of Hampton Bays—would make your day a little brighter?”

Berryman could think of nothing but the newspaper.

Oona told him that she was going to get wine; beef; com on the cob (did he like com on the cob?

yes, about half a dozen at a sitting);

mushrooms; clams (did he like Little Neck clams?

yes, about a dozen at a sitting).

She waded off through the mud in high, open-heeled sandals. Chose the best mudder, the Cadillac. Waved in the arc cleared by

swish-swash

windshield wipers. Rolled away into the stew.

Berryman drifted back into his book. It was going to be a terrific day, he thought. He was extremely comfortable, content, and Oona was getting to be a genuine delight to be with.

He read. Peacefully inhaled and exhaled the slightly mildew air. Until he was distracted by a sudden loud whacking in the house. It was a cracking whack. Then a pause. Then a whack. A pause.

Berryman slowly walked back through the long hall. The noise got louder. He went through the living room, stopped, switched off a lamp. He took a revolver from the desk. Put it down as a gesture connected with incipient craziness. Picked it up again and slipped it under his T-shirt. He went on to the still-breakfast-warm kitchen. More honey buns were sitting out. More coffee.

The screen door suddenly swung all the way to the outside wall. Hit it. Then swung back with a cracking whack.

As Berryman went to latch the door against the wind, he found a note. The door’s hook had been pierced through it.

TomTom

Garden spot of the world. You’re crazier.

Can’t go killing

—

killing Jimmie Horn.

Bigben

Oona came home singing Carly Simon hits—“Anticipation” and “Mockingbird.” She was carrying too much groceries for two people. Too many newspapers for five Berrymans.

She found a rained-on copy of

Jiminy

left out on the porch. She called inside and there was no answer.

Without looking further, she sensed that Berryman was gone on business again. This time she thought she knew what the business was.

Oona stalked around the sea captain’s house for the rest of the day.

In a fit of pouting anger she threw the corn, clams and steak out on the lawn.

She broke a living room window that looked out on the empty shore highway. Rain came in on the rug. Wind blew things around the room.

She called up a friend on Cape Cod and another in California. Whenever she hung up the phone, Ben Toy seemed to be calling for Berryman. Finally, she told him to go fuck himself.

The ocean was unseasonably cold that day, fifties, with scary five- and six-foot breakers throwing assorted garbage up on the beach. She sat on driftwood from a big house, boat, big something. Cold foamy water ran around her legs and wet her bottom.

She walked in the ocean, and the first wave that came threw her face-down into the sand. She swallowed saltwater and ate sand.

She walked up the lawn thinking her nose was broken. It wiggled in her fingers. Maybe it always had. She was noticing things. Sand in the spaces between her teeth. The shape of her legs.

Late in the afternoon a peculiar orange sun finally broke through the black ceiling of clouds. A seagull sat on a post, waiting for the picture postcard photographer. Oona was both nauseated and hungry.

She picked up one of the filets off the lawn and eventually cooked it. Then she fell asleep before eight. Her dreams were fast motion, then Richard Avedon-type shots of herself and Berryman in assorted cinematic disaster scenes.

She had completely different ideas in the morning.

She cleaned up what she’d broken and had the Jamaican fix whatever he could. She went around the house, each room, and examined things, possessions, in ways she never had before.

She called Berryman’s New York number and got a message recorder. “This is uhm Oona,” she said. “I’m missing you in H. Ben Toy has been calling. And uh … No, that’s it,” was the recorded message.

Oona Quinn had reasoned that by leaving her in the house, Berryman was making a commitment to her. She decided that she liked him, liked the way he lived. She decided she wanted to hold on to all of it for a while.

But the girl was wrong on almost all counts.

Quogue, June 24

Paul Lasini was so conservative that at twenty-three he thought Frank Sinatra was the greatest singer in the history of the world. The St. John’s University law student, appointed to the Village of Quogue police force for the summer, was the last person to see the funniest man in America.

Lasini was eating a Chinese-food dinner when Ben Toy walked into the Quogue police station talking to himself on June the 24th. Lasini laughed.

The courtly blond man looked stoned to him. Stoned ridiculous or blind drunk and in either case, stumble-bumming around the station house in one tennis sneaker and one beach thong. His hair was unruly and tangled. He’d also pissed in his pants. There was a big dark stain covering one leg of his khaki shorts.

“Oona Quinn is my left hand.” Ben Toy slobbered his chin as he spoke. “John Harley is my right hand.”

“Better sit down before you fall down,” Lasini called over advice.

The desk sergeant, a pink and pudgy veteran named Fall, slowly looked up from his

Daily News.

He kept his finger on his place in the baseball box scores, and he squinted a good look at Toy.

“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.