The Thomas Berryman Number

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.