The Thomas Berryman Number

It also occurred to me that I had no idea what had happened to Thomas Berryman. I sat there, puffing tobacco, watching little girls play, wondering where Berryman was right at that very moment.

West Hampton, July 11

Two husky attendants were wrapping Ben Toy up like Tutankhamen, only in wet, ice-cold sheets. He lay flat out on one of two pinewood massage tables in the immaculate Bowditch shower room.

One aide pulled the dripping sheets tight, then the other held them down—the way you’d keep a finger on string while wrapping a package.

The tightly bound sheets trapped all of Toy’s body heat; made it numb; floated his mind. He started to look like he was knocked out on dope.

As we sat in the shower room, different smart-aleck patients kept coming in and threatening to sit on his face. That was a big joke on Bowditch. The intruders always laughed; Ben Toy laughed.

There was a strange camaraderie among the patients that wouldn’t have held up on the outside. It was disorienting, but I was “being careful” as per Lewis Rosten’s request. This was meeting number 2, and Toy had requested “cold packs” for it.

I bent down and touched a Winston to his chapped lips. His face pores were open, exuding oily sweat.

He drew smoke slowly, deep, then exhaled it in a steamy cloud. There was something expensive, exotic, about the entire experience, the madhouse atmosphere.

“It really relaxes me,” Toy said of the cold packs. His drawn cheeks and his forehead were starting to flush bright red. “You fight like a bastard the first time they try to do it to you. Then you can’t get enough of it.”

He exhaled more smoke. He tried to blow it up to the green tile ceiling.

My eyes traveled up and down the neatly bound-up sheets. I looked over at Asher. He and I had squared things with Shulman. Kind of squared things, anyway. “I think I’d put up a little fight if you tried to put me in these,” I said.

Toy smiled. His eyes were on the Winston in my hand. “One more puff,” he said. “Then I have a story for you.”

The story elaborated on Thomas Berryman’s unconventional techniques for murder.

The most recent

number

had occurred in the small town of Lake Stevens, Washington. The victims were two of three brothers owning an airplane company: Shepherd Industries of Washington.

Berryman was used because the deaths had to appear accidental; suspicion had to be cast away from the family: the man paying Berryman’s forty thousand dollar fee was the third brother.

I recalled Harley Wynn’s remarks about displacing blame after the murder of Jimmie Horn. If Berryman had somehow done the shooting in Nashville, he certainly had succeeded in that regard.

The Shepherd Number had taken him three days to complete.

On January 17th, a Friday, he’d flown to the Shepherd family estate in Lake Stevens. He was posed as a sales representative for a Michigan tool and die company, Michael J. Shear. On Monday, he and all three brothers were scheduled to go to Detroit to inspect Shear’s plant operations.

Berryman’s plan for the job was characteristically complicated in execution. It unraveled, however, with a fascinating, what Ben Toy called a “neat,” result.

As I listened I considered the related parallels for Jimmie Horn.

Lake Stevens, Washington, January 19 and 20

On a Sunday night, the 19th of January, Thomas Berryman sat in a moonlit kitchen, lazily drinking instant coffee, daydreaming about a girl named Oona Quinn.

He listened for noises around him in the big Shepherd house. Heard the cold wind in the firs outside. The soothing fire crackling under his water pan.

A plastic clock on the stove read five of two.

At two, Berryman pushed himself back from the table. He held back a yawn and pinched grit out of the corners of his eyes. He went outside into the winter cold.

The night air was better for his concentration. Still, he felt that he was sleepwalking for a while.

He was carrying a duffel bag the size of a lunchbox. Also an oversized pistol, a five-inch Crossman air pistol.

His tennis shoes made a padding sound across the patio. Then he was stiff-arming tree and bush forms in the dark.

Following a skinny, winding creek that carried the moon’s reflection like a boat, Berryman was eventually turning a dogleg right in the woods. In time he saw-amber floodlights from the Shepherd airfield. Saw how they seemed to pin down the planes like guy wires.

Down under one plane’s nose an old Chevy BelAir was parked alongside a slender clapboard sentry house. Berryman could read I BRAKE FOR ANIMALS on a big orange sticker across the car’s trunk. Farmers with night jobs, he considered. Maybe down-and-outers.

A hairy gray head was in one sentry house window. A muffled radio played country and western music. Charlie Pride, it sounded like.

About a quarter mile down the field he could see the jet he’d come in on that past Friday. Staying about ten feet inside the woods, he made a way, the long way, down toward the jet.