The Thomas Berryman Number

“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.