The Thomas Berryman Number

detail. “Poole was fucked up,” Reed said, “but I’m convinced that Poole wasn’t simply a nut.”

So I spent nearly two weeks contacting Bert Poole’s relatives and his friends.

His mother and father had already refused interviews to the major magazines and other newspapers, but Lewis felt I ought to approach them anyway. He reasoned that I was the only one working under the assumption that their son might

not

be a murderer.

During one week in October I reached Mrs. Helen Poole several times on the telephone.

She was courteous and cooperative, but she always ended up telling me the same thing: “Doctor Poole is making all the decisions about Bert. But Doctor Poole isn’t at home right now.”

At 8 A.M., 12 noon, 7 P.M., 10 P.M.—Doctor Poole was never home.

One night, though, I decided I had to camp out at the Pooles’ and find out some things for myself.

Their home was a modest split-level on Whippland Road in Nashville’s Brentwood section. It was a very neat place, kept up, certainly in character for a divinity school professor.

I parked across the street from the Pooles’, and I immediately got a lot of strange looks from the neighbors. One or two of them came by and gave me lectures on privacy.

Then around eleven o’clock, with me just about to go under from an overdose of AM radio, Doctor Leland Poole finally turned into his driveway.

The taillights of his Pontiac station wagon flashed red. The heavy car scraped bottom on the street’s drainage ditch. Then he eased it up in front of his porch.

No lights were on outside the house, so I couldn’t get a good look at Doctor Poole. The only detail I caught was that he wore eyeglasses. It was difficult connecting the man and his house with Bert Poole or the shooting of Horn.

Moments after he went inside I saw him in the living room window. He was tall, very tall, balding, still holding his briefcase. He was staring directly at my car.

I opened the car door and let him see me. Then I got out of the car and walked over the dark lawn.

At first I thought the Pooles weren’t going to answer the doorbell. They hadn’t turned on the porch light and I could feel water bugs crawling over my shoes.

Then a dim yellow light popped on over my head. Mosquitoes went to it like candy. Leland Poole, still in his summer suit and tie, opened the front door.

Poole’s father was slightly shorter than I am—maybe 6’4”—but he didn’t slouch. He was able to look me directly in the eyes.

“Ah ah-sume you uh re-portah.” He spoke with a Deep South gentleman’s accent. He then listened politely as I told him my name and my mission.

“Well, Mr. Jones,” he said then, “I have read your articles.”

I waited for elaboration on that but only a long pause came. It was a silent time during which Doctor Poole kept his mouth opened slightly.

“I should tell you,” he eventually spoke again, “that owah lawyer, Mr. Huddlestone, owah lawyer, has asked us not to give out any interviews. Neither Helen or myself, Mr. Jones.

“It is Mr. Huddlestone’s position that interviews would not be in our best interest. Nor would they be best for Bert.

“To be quite candid”—the professor took in a gasp of night air—“I uh … I don’t believe that I could.

“To be candid … I uh, leave this house with my briefcase each morning. Uh, uh … and I kiss Helen goodbye … and Mr. Jones, without giving her any indication that I am going anyplace other than my office, or to the James Tate Library on the campus, I drive down to Murfreesboro, Tennessee. I sit around a farmhouse my father left me a few years back.”

Doctor Poole then began to cry. His crying made no sound. He neither wiped away the tears, nor tried to shut me outside.

“I just clockwatch,” he said.

Nashville, July 2

The morning sun was on his dark glasses and as he moved his head from side to side the sun danced across both black frames.

Berryman slowed his car across from a small pink house on a north-numbered street in East Nashville. It was where he’d followed Bert Poole the night they’d been together in the Horn storefront. He let the car roll on, slowing cracking twigs and branches. He stopped it at the end of the street, where there is no more curb, just crabgrass.

This is a black neighborhood bordering on Fisk University ground; it’s a shabby colony, chartered and owned by the First National Bank. On one corner, there is a Marlboro cigarette poster. It’s backlit so that the cowboy and his horse appear black.

Thomas Berryman walked past a wooden shack laundry that reported how they harlemize clothes.

He passed a stripped Imperial, its broken windshield caked with dead insects. A broken refrigerator was strapped into its open trunk.

A lot of small children and old people and what the children call “nigger dogs” are usually outdoors in the early morning here. That was how it was the morning Berryman came to find out what Bert Poole had on his mind.

The screen kitchen door to the pink shotgun house was in a littered alley. The door was warped, wormy wood, and it didn’t quite close. It was locked by a hook.