The Thomas Berryman Number

“I’ve met her and talked to her. She told me about you and her mother. She’s in some trouble.”

“Yeah, I figured that,” the man said. He gestured toward the house and I walked behind him to the front steps.

I sat out on the sagging porch with Frankie Quinn for nearly two hours that afternoon. He was a forty-three-year-old man with graying muttonchop sideburns, a flattened pug nose, a considerable two-pillow pouch.

He didn’t look like he could possibly be Oona’s father.

He worked as a four-to-one A.M. bartender at the Mayflower in South Boston, he told me. But he handled none of the action there: no gambling, no drugs, no prostitutes. He brought home an honest one-sixty-one a week.

He said he’d remained a devout Roman Catholic until the 1960s when the English mass had come in. He’d felt personally betrayed by that, and by the

goom-bi-ya

folk singing.

His personal cross to bear, his family’s cross, was his extraordinary thirst for stout. He had what he called a “case a day habit.”

His wife, Margaret, and Oona were the two best things that had ever happened to him. He made no bones about it. He wanted to know everything I knew about her, and he wanted to talk about her himself.

So far, so good, I thought. I switched on the Sony.

“I could have been stricter with Oona,” Frankie Quinn admitted between sips of Guinness and plunges into a box of Ritz crackers. “She got her own way a little more than most. Because she was so pretty, you know. We may have been too good to her. I don’t know if we were or not.”

“She’s a good kid, a wonderful one. Until she stops hearing how pretty she is. Then she kinda falls apart. Then everything’s a downer for her. She never learned to cope if you know what I mean. Maybe she doesn’t have to, though. Some people never seem to have to.”

“I don’t remember that she had many girlfriends growing up. Too many boyfriends. I used to come home Saturday night it looked like a bachelor’s party here. All these gazuzus from Cathedral High School. Just waiting for her to tell them to go get her a pistachio ice cream down the store …”

“She talks a lot about you,” I told Frankie Quinn.

Quinn laughed. His voice went way up into the tenor range.

“We got along ok, me and her. Used to go on these long, long walks down the beach. People staring at me like I’m some Irish Mafioso with his young bird.

“It’s Margaret she’s got problems with these days. Margaret never got over she doesn’t go to church anymore. What the hell, now Margaret doesn’t go herself.”

Quinn stopped talking and looked hard at me for a moment. He had watery eyes that were always shiny.

“You’re Thomas Berryman, aren’t you?” he said quite seriously.

I was too startled to answer for a second. I thought he’d gotten tipsy. Then I told him that I wasn’t Berryman and went looking for more identification in my wallet.

“No, no.” He grabbed my arm and held it out of my pocket. “I knew you weren’t. Just had to make sure of it. I got nervous, I guess.”

He went on to tell me that Oona had mentioned Berryman to him during several phone calls over the past few months.

Then he brought up Jimmie Horn.

He said Oona had dropped the name during a phone call on July 3rd. Then on the 4th of July he’d read that Jimmie Horn had been murdered down South.

Quinn clarified further. He said that Oona had called him from Tennessee on July 2nd, 3rd, and 4th. He said that she was almost hysterical when she called on the 4th. He wanted me to tell him why, and I told him what I could.

Margaret Quinn came home just after five. Frankie and I were still out oh the porch.

Margaret was a slender; dark-haired woman who reminded me of her daughter. I agreed with Frank Quinn’s estimate that he was a lucky man.

I also got the feeling that neither one of them had any idea what their daughter had become. In their eyes she was still a high school girl, thought high school girl thoughts, wore plaid jumpers and blue blazers.

I liked the Quinns, but I also felt sorry for them. What was about to happen to them, especially if my story broke nationally, frightened me. Frank and Margaret Quinn were going to be totally unprepared to deal with it.

In general, I just wasn’t meeting the kind of bad people I’d expected to be connected with an assassination.

In the meantime, though, I had the problem that Oona Quinn wasn’t telling me everything I needed to know. At least maybe she wasn’t. And maybe she was lying to me altogether.

I didn’t like it at all, but then

it

wasn’t asking to be liked.

I drove back from Massachusetts to New York in a gray-blue rainstorm. It was Saturday night, nearly 6:30 when I began the trip.

The storm came on strong as I was winding away from the Revere amusement park area. The families-with-young-children crowd was just arriving on the opposite side of the street.

The first raindrops were half-dollar-sized, and I had to close up all the car windows in spite of the heat.