The Thomas Berryman Number Read Online Free PDF Page A

asleep.
    “Thorazine.” He licked dry, chapped lips. “Makes you sleepy as hell.”
    “Just a few more questions,” I said. “A couple of important ones.”
    Toy sighed. Then he nodded.
    “Was Harley Wynn definitely a southerner?” I asked.
    “Sure.” Toy curled up on the end of the bare mattress. He shivered. “Just as much as you are … Could I have a blanket?” He asked Asher in a sweet, boyish voice. It was a strange sound coming out of a big man with two days’ stubble on his chin.
    “Answer his questions,” the aide told him. “You know you can have a blanket, Ben. So just cut the crap, all right?”
    “Can I have a blanket
now?”
    Asher pointed at me. He lighted up his pipe and stared out the window into blackness.
    Toy struggled upright and sat with his bare back against the plaster wall. He was starting to pout, I thought. I hoped the aide knew what he was doing.
    “Do you know where Wynn came from?” I asked.
    Toy’s answer was curt. “Tennessee.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “I
said
Tennessee didn’t I.”
    I was starting to feel guilty about grilling him too much. “OK, I’m sorry,” I said. “I only have one more question, Ben.”
    “Shoot,
Ochs.”
    “I’m not trying to condescend to you. I’m really not.”
    Toy smiled as though we were only playing a little game anyway. A lot of Joe Buck Conneroo came through with the smile.
    “You said that Wynn wasn’t hiring you himself …”
    “No. He was a front man. Always said, ‘They said’ this; ‘They said’ that. He was a small fish. Just like me.”
    “OK then, do you know who hired Berryman?”
    Ben Toy looked over at Asher, then at me. “Can’t say.”
    My palm came down hard on the floor. “We’ve come a long ways tonight to start that shit now,” I said.
    “I really don’t know,” Toy said then. “I never knew who it was. Berryman knew.”
    Toy closed his eyes for a full two or three minutes after that answer.
    Asher and I sat in total, eerie silence, just watching him breathe. The young aide had a dazed, tired look on his face. I figured I was probably pop-eyed myself.
    Toy licked his chapped lips again. He shivered as though he were dropping off to sleep.
    Rock and roll erupted in a nearby room and his eyes popped open again. He seemed annoyed that we were still in his room. Annoyed and slightly wild-eyed.
    “Can I go to sleep now?” The soft, southern voice again. “Would you turn on the dimmer, please?”
    “I’ll talk tomorrow if you want.” He turned to me.
    For no reason I can imagine now, I reached over and shook Ben Toy’s hand. I wished him good night.
    Maybe the reason was that our first interview had completely caved in my mind … Right from when Toy had begun to describe the money transfer in Provincetown, I’d known I had a big story.
    Walking beside Ronald Asher, coming down the hallway from the quiet room, I flashed a bad scene I’d been part of five days earlier at the
Citizen-Reporter
offices.
    A copy cub, an arrogant nineteen-year-old black, had come up to my desk and sat down all over my paperwork that afternoon. The young writer’s name was John Seawright, and he was in the habit of riding me about verisimilitude in my Horn articles. I was just about to tell him to get off the desk, and out of my life, when he grabbed hold of my shoulders and began to cry. “They just shot him,” he sobbed. “They shot Jimmie Horn, man. He’s dead,” the boy told me. That was how I’d found out about Horn. Zap.
    Someone somewhere on the hospital ward was playing an out-of-tune piano. “A House Is Not a Home” was the song.
    I was still fairly shell-shocked from the interview.
    The high yellow corridor lights were turned down low. It made it difficult for me not to peek into the brighter bedrooms we were passing.
    Two middle-aged men who appeared to be twins were playing chess in one room.
    A boy in his underwear was sitting in bed reading a mathematics text in another.
    A young boy in hornrims