The Thomas Berryman Number (6 page)

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.