The Thomas Berryman Number by James Patterson Page A

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.
    “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