The Thomas Berryman Number

This was journalism by committee. It’s always a disaster. No exceptions.

My heart was in my throat. I kept clearing my throat and trying to catch my breath. The attempts to catch my breath made me yawn.

A stooped black lady was pouring coffee and giving each of us a fresh-sugared cruller. The middle-aged Sunday editor was spouting wit from

Sports Illustrated

stories as though it was essential wisdom.

The mood of the room was jovial right up until the coffee lady left.

Then the jokes stopped abruptly. Each of the others solemnly shook my hand and congratulated me. Reed said a few introductory remarks about the importance of the story I was working on. Then he opened up the floor for questions. They came like a flood.

Was Ben Toy’s testimony reliable? Was I sure?

Why hadn’t we been able to trace down Harley John Wynn thus far?

Who had hired Berryman?

Where was Berryman right now?

Had anything been done to follow up on the story of the Shepherd brothers out in Washington?

How did the Philadelphia gunman fit in? Did Ben Toy know him?

Exactly what did I think had happened on the day of the shooting? How was young Bert Poole connected?

I answered about eighty-five percent of their questions, but that isn’t necessarily a winning percentage in a meeting like that. At least two of the editors were trying to score points by throwing me stumpers.

I began to make excuses for some of the things I’d done. Then quite suddenly Reed was standing over me at the table.

He was smiling like a genial master of ceremonies, turning one of his editors’ serious and valid questions into a cute little joke. I felt like a vaudeville comedian about to get the hook. Reed had stopped me in midsentence.

“That’s fine,” the broad-shouldered man said. His fingers were moving lightly on my arm.

“I think that’s just fine, Ochs.” He pointed down the table to Lewis Rosten. “We have a few exhibits to show all of you now.”

Very suddenly, I understood the purpose of the meeting. It was all a show. All theater for the publisher’s benefit.

Lewis dutifully passed around the credit card and phone checks on Berryman; then the photographs of Harley Wynn; finally the picture of Thomas Berryman and a typed report he’d written on the story’s progress. His report was just long enough, I noticed, not to be read right away.

Francis Parker was nodding thoughtfully. He asked Rosten a few informal questions and I found myself being talked to by Reed.

“Don’t you be hesitant to call me, even at my home,” was one of the things he said. “I expect you’ll have to go back up North again. Is that all right?”

I said that it was what I had in mind and Reed took my shoulder again. He was emotionally involved, and I couldn’t believe how much so.

We both caught the last of what the publisher was saying. Because of the general tone of the meeting, it sounded both important and dramatic.

“Right on through since 1963, every newspaper in this country has been trying to break a story like this one. None of them has … I believe, however,” he said, “that Moses, Lewis Rosten, and Mr. Ochs are about to do it right here.”

Mr. Ochs or Mr. Jones, I remained keyed up for the rest of the day.

I finally got started home around seven that night.

My eyes were tired, watery, blurring up Nashville’s streets and traffic. Tex Ritter’s Chuckwagon, Ernest Tubb’s Records, Luby’s Cadillacs flashed out and welcomed me home. I was yawning in a way that could have dislocated my jaw.

Nan tells the story that I put my head down in the middle of dinner and went to sleep beside the roast beef. I remember finishing dessert, so that much of her story is exaggeration.

On the other hand, I don’t remember anything much past finishing dinner that night.

I do remember one other phrase of Nan’s. “It’s like somebody trying to become somebody who other people wish they were,” she said.

She didn’t say that I was trying to become a newspaper superstar; she just made her statement.

Nashville, July 15

I had slept in my white suit on the living room couch.

A white platter of glistening pork sausage and eggs passed by my eyes as they opened on morning. Canadian geese flew over a lake under the sausage.

My little Cat sat down on the quilt somebody had used to cover me up the night before.

She’d brought sausage, eggs, waffles and strawberries, a Peter Pan glass filled to the brim with bubbly milk.

“Hi, sugar.”

“Hi.” With that nice look kids get when they’re partially off somewhere in their minds.

“Hey,” I said. “You awake?”

“I cooked you pancakes and eggs didn’t I.”

“Oh, yeah,” I quickly figured out the sitch. “I’m the one who’s not awake.”