The Thomas Berryman Number

That much was reported by a gas station owner on the Lake Stevens Highway.

Berryman hiked two miles to a picnic roadstop. The roadstop was simply two redwood tables in a small clearing.

He got into a rented beige and white camper he’d parked there earlier in the week.

There were sleeping bags and Garcia fishing poles and tackle in the back. There was a Texaco map of Washington across the front seat. An old pipe was on the dashboard.

Propped against the pipe was the familiar old sign: GONE-FISHING. Berryman crumpled the message in his hand.

He turned on the radio. Opened all the windows. Put on a workshirt, Stetson, and Tony Lama boots. He drove away calmly, like a man away on a vacation.

The smell of fir was so thick and good he began to get over his nausea from the ipecac residue.

Hours later, sitting in a roadhouse in Cahone, Oregon, he read that businessman Michael J. Shear (the body of the young airfield security guard) was among those killed in the crash of a private plane near the Charles Shepherd estate in Lake Stevens, Washington. There wasn’t any mention of an investigation, the local media aura being one of either supernatural catastrophe, or casual indifference. (Even afterward, the matter of the missing security guard was either overlooked or attributed to coincidence by the tiny Lake Stevens police force.)

There was an accompanying photograph with the newspaper story. It showed a sad and silly-looking policeman holding up a large man’s shoe.

Because he had extended it out toward the camera, it looked like a giant’s shoe. This was the same trick used in “big fish” photos, and Berryman wondered if the man had done it on purpose.

Ben Toy lay still as a corpse in his cold packs. His blond hair was wet, darker. I’d pushed it back out of his face, and he looked younger that way.

“That’s the way his mind works,” he said to me, to Asher and the Sony.

“And that’s why they wanted him for Jimmie Horn.”

New York City, July 12

At 9:30 the next morning I was perched on a four-foot-high stone wall surrounding Central Park. I was memorizing Thomas Berryman’s apartment building as though it was Westminster Abbey or the Louvre.

My hands had been sweating when I woke up at 6 A.M.; they were still sweating. I’d been considering calling the police. The blood-and-shit terribleness of the story was just beginning to dawn on me and it was oppressive.

I had a good idea what I was going to do at Berryman’s, only not knowing New York, I didn’t think it would be quite as easy as it turned out to be.

Between nine-thirty and ten, two liveried doormen whistled down Yellow Cab after Yellow Cab in front of the building. It’s gray-canopied entrance, marked with a big white number 80, seemed a glorified bus stop more than anything else.

My hands continued to sweat. Even my legs were wet. For sharp contrast I could see suits and jewels munching breakfast across the way at the Park Lane Hotel.

Ben Toy had spoken of the tenth floor … dirty ledges … pigeons. I counted up to the tenth floor. But there were no pigeons that day; and no people at any of the windows. The windows appeared to be black.

After the taxi rush, one of the doormen emerged from the lobby trailing four large dogs on leashes. A dapper blackman in his forties, he was wearing a dark green suitcoat over his blue uniform—that plus a racetrack fedora with a little yellow feather cocked up on the side.

He controlled the dogs with flicks of his wrists, getting them to successfully jaywalk through Central Park South’s midmorning traffic.

I caught up with him on a secluded patch of lawn inside the park. It was under the eye of RCA and GM; of planted penthouse terraces and wooden water towers. I told the doorman my name and business, and he was sympathetic, I thought. He’d been born in Kentucky, in fact, and he knew about Horn. His name was Leroy Bones Cooper.

“Well, sure, yes, I’d like to cooperate with you on this matter of Mr. Horn,” he said without any southern in his voice. “I didn’t person’ly know the man, you understand—I believe I did see him on the news program several times.”

I quickly decided to ask the doorman if he could possibly get me inside Berryman’s apartment.

His reaction was sudden inner-city suspicion. “Mr. Berr’man?” He cocked his head on a sharp slant. “What does Mr. Berr’man have to do with it? He been away lately.”

“He might not be involved at all,” I told the man. “We think he is, though.”

The doorman started to lead his dogs back toward the street. “Hard for me to believe that,” he said over their sudden barking.

I trailed along, about a step behind. “Can I ask why?”

The little blackman seemed a little angry now. “You askin it,” he said. He took off his hat and wiped his head with a big white hankie. “Don’t have no answer for sure.” He looked at me. “Mr. Berr’man’s a nice young fella is all. Stock man or manageer’ial I believe.”

He continued to walk forward. The dogs were being irritated by squirrels in the maple trees.