The Thomas Berryman Number

was happening. Some Nashville policeman had the job of coming in to tell us that nothing was happening.

His one big news break was the information that ex-Governor Terrell had taken some pills from a little black snap case just before he went in to meet with the grand jury.

A long-haired northern reporter stood up and said with a straight face, “Sergeant, could you give us anything on the

color

of the pills?”

That was the big laugh of the morning. In fact, that

was

the morning.

Just after lunch, though, we finally got a little surprise.

A Tom Wolfe-ish young man (the

new

Tom Wolfe) walked into the press room to make an important announcement for Mr. Terrell.

He was a little dandy, in a white suit and polka-dot bow tie. Yale, without any doubt. Word went out that he was Terrell’s own son.

“Contrary to the suspicions of many of you here,” he read from a small brown pad, “my father is not planning to sneak out a back door to a second Cadillac after these proceedings.” The petulant young man looked up at us as though he’d really stung it to us. “Following the grand jury session,” he continued without aid of his pad, “Mr. Terrell will entertain questions from the press outside.” With that, Terrell’s son stalked out of the room.

Well, you’ve heard the speech Terrell gave several times over these past few sad years in America.

It’s the one that never fails to bug your eyes and put a ringing in your ears. It’s the same speech that proved that Nixon, and Mitchell, and Connally, and all the others, despised us to the point of ridiculing us to our faces.

Standing up on the white courthouse steps, Terrell seemed overly casual to me. Confident. Thoroughly despicable.

And in the sincerest voice I could remember hearing out of him, in a voice choking with moral outrage, he said that he “welcomed the chance to prove his innocence once and for all, before a judicial system that he for one still believed in.”

Some people booed loudly; more people cheered.

He went on to say how he was confident that “the courts will vindicate me.” And he said, “I swear to you before my Lord and Savior, that I have done nothing wrong, and nothing to be ashamed of.”

It was as strange and scary then as it was the first time I heard a grown adult serve up that kind of tripe to a group of other adults.

An even more frightening thing was in store for me that afternoon.

I’d gone down near the Fleetwood to observe the crowd up close. I was standing with a long-haired

Citizen-Reporter

photographer putting it all down on film.

To a man the people down by the Cadillac had that sick, hurt look I’ve never seen so much as at the Bible Belt showings of a movie called

Marjoe. Marjoe

is a documentary about a young, very well loved evangelist who openly admits how he’s been lying to and defrauding the people of the South. I want to tell you that the people around here cried after seeing that film. They are basically trusting, and they can’t comprehend deceit at that high a level.

At any rate, I was busy watching this fussed-up crowd, and I never saw Terrell until he was practically on top of me. In fact, I only saw him because the photographer started snapping away like a madman.

Johnboy never stepped one foot out of his chosen path, but he raised a stubby index finger and pointed at me from about ten feet or so away.

He looked at me with all the pride and Son-of-God feelings power can give a weak man. He looked and pointed, and all he said was “You.”

I’ve got the photograph to prove that, too. It’s hanging safe and sound, blown up into proportion over my fireplace up here in Poland County.

Standing in front of the Tennessee state courthouse that day, October 12, I took the wild guess that Terrell would never be tried and convicted. That turned out to be right.

Nashville, June 30

A wasted American dreamer, Jefferson Terrell is 99% fat now. He has greasy, cardboard-colored hair slickly parted down the middle, but ducktailing in back. He constantly smells of tobacco and mash whiskey, and since he’s developed high blood pressure his plump face is tomato red. Johnboy also has a big, lazy accent. He pronounces words like pleasure, “play-sure.”

But there is a smoldering brain in the wreck of Terrell’s body, and he is the man who finally got Thomas Berryman.

They met to exchange money in a top-floor suite in the old Walter Scott Hotel near the Old Opry Building and Tootsie’s Orchard Lounge. Berryman showed up late. He wore a yellow rubber terrorist’s mask for the meeting.

Still, an open Amana freezer couldn’t have dominated the tacky hotel sitting room any more than Johnboy. The man had presence; he’d always had it.

He’d ordered Beam’s Pin, and he was lounging over a squash-yellow davenport, drinking the overrated whiskey without ice. He told Berryman that he looked like a State Farm Insurance agent. His clothes did. Terrell said nothing about the mask, though it clearly had surprised him.