The Thomas Berryman Number

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.