The Thomas Berryman Number

He told her that ladies in Texas never cursed, and that they always kept scented handkerchiefs in their bosoms, and that they talcumed their rear ends.

Outside the bay window, far across the highway in the sand dunes, Ben Toy sat in darkness on the hood of the white Mustang. He studied the glowing second floor window. In his mind, he was there to protect Tom-Tom and the Irish girl. In return, they had to protect him.

A few times out on the dunes Toy heard a black woman’s voice announcing it was James Horn’s mother. One time he heard his father. Ben Toy thought he was having a nervous breakdown, and he was right.

Oona and Thomas Berryman continued to smoke the night away, and at a time when neither of them could do much more than nod their overblown heads, he started to ramble about a southern blackman he had been paid to kill.

As he described his plans for the unfortunate man, Oona Quinn threw up on the bed and then conveniently passed out.

Hampton Bays, June 19

In the morning, he was wearing a gray PROPERTY OF NEW YORK KNICKS sweatshirt and looking innocent as a new M.D.

He was ministering to the sick, too. Fluffing feather pillows. Opening old singed shades to bright ocean sunlight.

He carried Oona a pewter pot of coffee and honey cakes in a different bedroom from the one she’d thrown up in. The two of them didn’t have much to say, and only slowly did she realize he’d moved her, and changed her clothes sometime between night and morning. Put her in black tights.

“If you don’t want to stay,” he said, “you ought to go pretty soon. I had to find out, you know. You don’t have to be afraid to leave.” He continued to break bags of natural sugar into her coffee. “I’ve never harmed any friend. Not even anyone I liked. Don’t be afraid.”

She sipped the steamy coffee and watched him over the cup’s rim. Her eyes were slow and sad. Berryman had already figured that if she’d wanted to go, she would have tried to sneak away earlier.

“Coffee all right?”

He frowned at the dumbness of his question.

Oona refused to pout, however, “S’all right,” she said. She was drinking it.

“Scumbag,” she added after another sip.

Berryman felt obliged to offer her some explanation. “It just gives me too much freedom to stop now,” he offered first. “I don’t even think I want to.

“I remember when I was … some teenage year. Eighteen. Seventeen, nineteen … I drew up this philosophy. Ben and I did … I suppose it was more me than Ben

“It was more complicated, but it really boiled down to—fuck it all. Somebody named me the pleasure king. At least I made a choice,” he said.

“Let me put it another way. Take an average person. Approach him with an offer to do what I do. Bad stuff, right? All kinds of immoral. Imagine it, though.

“Say this man is offered fifty to kill a total stranger. Say he has the know-how to do it. That’s important for it to be a fair question.

“What do you think would happen? In most cases?”

Oona’s chin hadn’t moved from the coffee cup. “I don’t know,” she said.

“That’s no answer, babe.

“OK, that’s what you think. No, then. He’d call the police, OK?”

Berryman could see she was looking for some killer line. Some way to flush his toilet but good. He wouldn’t let her. “So you mean if I put fifty thousand dollars on this bed,” he asked her. “Better yet, if I’d left it at that little shop where you worked. Real money. Tens, twenties, fifties. And I’d told you—just to take a weak example—‘get rid of the manager of the Hyannis A&P’? No action, huh? …”

She said

scheis.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing.”

“You said something. Say it.”

“Nothing. It doesn’t matter.

Scheis

means shit in Russian.”

“Uh. I don’t think so.”

Oona Quinn didn’t say any more, but she didn’t go anywhere, either.

Revere, Massachusetts, July 22

Oona Quinn had grown up in one of a thousand similar claptrap houses in the amusement park town of Revere, Massachusetts. A pop singer named Freddie Cannon had grown up in Revere, too. Then he’d written a hit song about Palisades Park. It was that kind of uninspiring town.

The Quinn house had been bright white, then neutral green, then pale yellow, matching her parents’ diminishing regard for their 1955 purchase.

In some ways the house even resembled her father. The grass was cut short, but not trimmed. The Weatherbeater paint job looked passable from the street, but was peeling, scabbing, up close. The front porch was starting to sag; and the screen in the door was torn.

I went out of my way to stop at the Quinns’ on my way back from Provincetown that third week in July. I wanted to know what kind of a girl would take up with a young man like Thomas Berryman.

When I first met him, Oona’s father was as suspicious and closemouthed as she had been. He made me give him my wallet and we both stood out on the front lawn while he read all the press cards and matched signatures.

“My newspaper is willing to pay you for an interview,” I mentioned at one point.

He nodded, but didn’t indicate

yes

or

no.

“What do you know about Oona?” he asked me.