Read Online The Thomas Berryman Number by James Patterson - Free Book Online
Authors: James Patterson
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fifteen.
Berryman’s mother died of lung cancer when he was eleven.
Both of them had apparently been well liked around Clyde, Texas. Berryman was called the “Pleasure King”; Ben Toy was called “the funniest man in America.”
Ben Toy had gone through a period where he’d worn his mother’s underwear whenever she left him alone in the house.
The first man Berryman ever shot was a priest from New Mexico.
Berryman had been wounded in a New York shooting in 1968.
Berryman had received one hundred thousand dollars in two payments to kill Jimmie Horn. The money was probably being held by a man named Michael Kittredge.
Ben Toy had advised Berryman not to take the Horn job. He didn’t want to be party to the assassination. Berryman had told him Horn was going to be shot whether he did it or not.
“Most patients have their little tales,” Miss Hatfield explained to me at one point. “You’ll hear about how they’ve had relations with these three hundred women—and then they’ll tell you how they think they may be impotent.” The old lady laughed. “Sometimes it’s not so funny. Sometimes it
is,
though.
“Now Ben Toy,” she went on, “he was sounding pretty authentic to me. No attempt to impress anybody. No big contradictions in things he said … That’s why I told Doctor Shulman.”
She stood up and stepped away from her easy chair. “I have something to show you,” she said. “This is my big contribution.”
She went over and got a brown schoolboy’s duffel bag sitting beside the velvet love seat. “Carry all my little gewgaws to work in this,” she laughed.
She unzippered the bag and reached around inside for a minute or so.
She took out a bent photograph and handed it over to me. Harley Wynn, I thought as I took it. But it was Berryman. The picture looked to be two or three years old, but it was definitely him. The curly black hair, the floppy mustache.
“It came in Ben Toy’s things from his apartment,” she said. “Kind of looks like a regular person, doesn’t he? Some man you see anyday in Manhattan. That kind of frightens me.” The old woman made a strange face by closing one eye tight. “I’d like to be able to look right at him and tell. Just by looking … like Lee Harvey Oswald. That one down in Alabama, too.”
“Yeah.” I agreed with what I thought she was saying. “And just like Bert Poole down in Tennessee,” I added.
Nashville, July 14
My black swivel chair at the
Nashville Citizen-Reporter
is ancient. The line WHAT HAS HE DONE FOR US LATELY? is a recent addition to it, chalked across the back in three bold lines. Something about the chair makes me think of black leather jackets.
I sit under a gold four-sided clock hanging at the center of a huge two-hundred-foot-by-one-hundred-and-fifty-foot city room. I doubt that anything other than the people inside the room has changed since the 1930s.
At noon, only one other typewriter was going in the whole place. Most of the writers and editors would come in around one or one-thirty.
At one exactly, I called my editor, Lewis Rosten, to let him know I was at my desk if he wanted to touch and see me.
Moments later, the diminutive Mississippian appeared, unsmiling, in front of my desk.
Lewis reminds me of Truman Capote either having gone straight, or never having gone at all. He was wearing striped suspenders, a polka-dot bow tie, Harry Truman eyeglasses.
“A beard!” he drawled thickly. “That’s
exactly
what you didn’t need.” He slipped away, back in the direction of his own office. “Come,” he called.
I went down to his office and he was already on the phone to our executive editor, Moses Reed.
Rosten’s office is cluttered with old newspapers and assorted antebellum memorabilia; it looks like the parlor of a Margaret Mitchell devotee. I sat down, noticing a new, or at least uncovered, sign over his desk.
What the Good Lord
lets happen,
I’m not afraid to
print in my paper.
—Mr. Charles A.
Berryman’s mother died of lung cancer when he was eleven.
Both of them had apparently been well liked around Clyde, Texas. Berryman was called the “Pleasure King”; Ben Toy was called “the funniest man in America.”
Ben Toy had gone through a period where he’d worn his mother’s underwear whenever she left him alone in the house.
The first man Berryman ever shot was a priest from New Mexico.
Berryman had been wounded in a New York shooting in 1968.
Berryman had received one hundred thousand dollars in two payments to kill Jimmie Horn. The money was probably being held by a man named Michael Kittredge.
Ben Toy had advised Berryman not to take the Horn job. He didn’t want to be party to the assassination. Berryman had told him Horn was going to be shot whether he did it or not.
“Most patients have their little tales,” Miss Hatfield explained to me at one point. “You’ll hear about how they’ve had relations with these three hundred women—and then they’ll tell you how they think they may be impotent.” The old lady laughed. “Sometimes it’s not so funny. Sometimes it
is,
though.
“Now Ben Toy,” she went on, “he was sounding pretty authentic to me. No attempt to impress anybody. No big contradictions in things he said … That’s why I told Doctor Shulman.”
She stood up and stepped away from her easy chair. “I have something to show you,” she said. “This is my big contribution.”
She went over and got a brown schoolboy’s duffel bag sitting beside the velvet love seat. “Carry all my little gewgaws to work in this,” she laughed.
She unzippered the bag and reached around inside for a minute or so.
She took out a bent photograph and handed it over to me. Harley Wynn, I thought as I took it. But it was Berryman. The picture looked to be two or three years old, but it was definitely him. The curly black hair, the floppy mustache.
“It came in Ben Toy’s things from his apartment,” she said. “Kind of looks like a regular person, doesn’t he? Some man you see anyday in Manhattan. That kind of frightens me.” The old woman made a strange face by closing one eye tight. “I’d like to be able to look right at him and tell. Just by looking … like Lee Harvey Oswald. That one down in Alabama, too.”
“Yeah.” I agreed with what I thought she was saying. “And just like Bert Poole down in Tennessee,” I added.
Nashville, July 14
My black swivel chair at the
Nashville Citizen-Reporter
is ancient. The line WHAT HAS HE DONE FOR US LATELY? is a recent addition to it, chalked across the back in three bold lines. Something about the chair makes me think of black leather jackets.
I sit under a gold four-sided clock hanging at the center of a huge two-hundred-foot-by-one-hundred-and-fifty-foot city room. I doubt that anything other than the people inside the room has changed since the 1930s.
At noon, only one other typewriter was going in the whole place. Most of the writers and editors would come in around one or one-thirty.
At one exactly, I called my editor, Lewis Rosten, to let him know I was at my desk if he wanted to touch and see me.
Moments later, the diminutive Mississippian appeared, unsmiling, in front of my desk.
Lewis reminds me of Truman Capote either having gone straight, or never having gone at all. He was wearing striped suspenders, a polka-dot bow tie, Harry Truman eyeglasses.
“A beard!” he drawled thickly. “That’s
exactly
what you didn’t need.” He slipped away, back in the direction of his own office. “Come,” he called.
I went down to his office and he was already on the phone to our executive editor, Moses Reed.
Rosten’s office is cluttered with old newspapers and assorted antebellum memorabilia; it looks like the parlor of a Margaret Mitchell devotee. I sat down, noticing a new, or at least uncovered, sign over his desk.
What the Good Lord
lets happen,
I’m not afraid to
print in my paper.
—Mr. Charles A.
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