?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
?What did you say??
?Nothing.?
?You said something. Say it.?
?Nothing. It doesn?t matter.
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
or
?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
