Free The Thomas Berryman Number by James Patterson Page A

wouldn’t have to back off of later.
    Lewis Rosten stopped by at the house while I was packing up to go back North that night. He seemed as restless about the story as I was. He kept referring to it as “a mystery story.”
    Rosten told me that the editor-in-chief of the
Nashville Tennessean
had called Reed that afternoon. He’d wanted to know why we were sending reporters around to every hotel and motel in central Tennessee.
    “That’s all we need,” I said. “To get scooped on this.”
    Rosten didn’t want to discuss the possibility. He waved it away like a nauseous man being presented with dessert.
    “We checked out every single hotel. Every motel,” he said. “We’ve shown his photograph everywhere a man can sleep in a twenty-five-mile radius.”
    “Yeah … and?”
    “Goose egg.”

PART II
    The End of the Funniest Man in America
    West Hampton, July 17
    That Monday in West Hampton I could smell northern winters.
    The rusty white thermometer on Bowditch’s front porch said 67.
    I had a feeling that the St. Louis Cardinals were going to get into the World Series; that Ali was going to beat George Foreman. It was all in the air.
    It was July 17th and this was to be my last visit with Toy. Our subject was the whereabouts of the southern contact man, Harley John Wynn.
    We set up my Sony cassette recorder on a redwood table out in the exercise yard. Its learner traveling case made it look official and important. Historical.
    The two of us sat on hardwood deck chairs. Our respective sport shirts off, facing into a lukewarm ball of off-yellow sun.
    The sun was just on the verge of overcoming the morning’s chill.
    Ronald Asher slumped up against a dwarf oak at the center of the yard, growing disenchanted with news reporting I could see. It wasn’t exactly as Hunter Thompson had anti-romanticized it in
Rolling Stone.
    A slight breeze turned oak leaves, lifted the blond hair on Toy’s forehead, softly bristled my beard.
    Ben Toy leaned back and closed his eyes. He was king of the hospital.
    After a minute watching five or six contented-looking mental patients sunbathing around the yard, I closed my eyes too.
    This was privilege, I was thinking. This was interviewing Elizabeth Taylor over breakfast in a flowery Puerto Vallarta courtyard.
    “Tom Berryman never did know it.” Toy alternately sucked in the morning air and sniffled. “But on and off for about six months I’d been seeing this wiggy Jewish lady … this shrink in New York.”
    I opened my eyes and saw that Toy was looking at me too. “Why didn’t Berryman know?” I asked.
    “Because he would have had a shit fit. He wanted me around because I was dependable. He didn’t have to worry when I was handling details for him. I was backup.
    “So I had to be very careful about this lady. It was all on the sly. All my visits. It was all about me getting depressed. No big shit anyway.
    “I went to see her the Wednesday after we’d met Harley Wynn in Massachusetts. I was feeling like a dishrag again. She usually gave me some pills. Valiums. Stelazines.
    “This was the day the walls came tumbling down on my head … I remember how it was real sunny. Nice out. I wouldn’t have believed it was going to turn into such a shit day …”
    New York City, June 14
    Toy’s doctor was a Park Avenue psychiatrist, a seventy-year-old woman who preferred being called Reva to Doctor Baumwell.
    She saw all her patients at a luxury apartment in a prewar building on the corner of East 74th Street. She always wore dark dresses and red high-heeled shoes for her appointments.
    In his six months with Reva Baumwell, Ben Toy had never once spoken about Thomas Berryman.
    For her part, Reva talked of little else except rebuilding Toy’s personality. This was “getting as common as face-lifting” she said in an unguarded moment. She also forewarned him that this rebuilding process would probably involve a crisis for him. She was continually asking him if he was about ready