Massimino swiveled around in the front seat. Cars coming up from the rear backlit his hair like an old psychedelic poster. ?You want me to speak plain?? he said.
?Of course I want you to speak plain.?
?All right men, we?myself, Jap Quarry, everybody down here who gives a shit about you?we all feel that you shouldn?t turn down this particular Cadillac.? Massimino was suddenly sounding very intelligent and convincing. ?And the reason we feel that way is that this Cadillac is coming in special from Detroit. It has bulletproof glass in all the windows.?
Nashville, October 17, 18
Nathanial Brown, Jr., twenty-three, a black American, an assistant cameraman with the WNET-TV affiliate in Nashville, had filmed the shooting of Jimmie Horn in grainy 16mm color?home movie quality.
Within six hours of the shooting, that washed-out clip was picked up by every major TV station in America. It was viewed with morbid fascination in more than forty other countries. Print-quality photographs were made off the film, and they appeared in newspapers as well as the national newsmagazines.
The
received a black and white dup of Brown?s film the day of the shooting. It wasn?t until I returned from the North, however, that anybody studied the footage in detail.
First one of our art men snipped out the individual frames and had them mounted on slides. Then Lewis Rosten, Reed, and myself spent the better part of two days projecting Kodak slide after slide onto a plaster wall in Reed?s darkened office.
It was a curious, nauseating experience for all three of us.
Each of us took turns standing at the wall with a school-teacher?s wooden pointer, moving from face to shadowy face on the black and white slides.
First we looked for Thomas Berryman. We examined every face on every frame, even sending out for super blowups of distorted or partially hidden men.
We found Berryman on none of the slides, however.
Our next step was to examine the footage of the shooting itself. Either because Nathanial Brown had to pan his camera too rapidly, or because the people around him were bumping the camera, this footage was partially blurred.
Bert Poole was visible in two short sequences just prior to the shooting. Though two minutes apart on the film, both pieces showed Poole in precisely the same pose: he was huddled against restraining ropes, both of his arms inside a khaki, army-style jacket. He seemed to be sick; possibly he was frightened, though.
The man from Philadelphia, Joe Cubbah, was shown clearly in one seven-second sequence.
But no Thomas Berryman.
Both Bert Poole and Jimmie Horn were on camera when the pistol was drawn.
The distance between them was about ten feet; the first shot seemed to strike Horn somewhere at the top of his chest. The impact of the bullet knocked him backward and Reed said a .44 would do that.
The first shot was followed by a blurry sequence in which both Horn and Poole were on camera. There were a lot of inappropriate lights and shadows here. (The sequence lasted seventy frames, or just under three seconds.)
Seconds after that (another ninety frames to look at), both Poole and Jimmie Horn had fallen and were out of the camera shot.
After studying the film for two days (Rosten and I had been looking at it for four days), our opinion was that Poole had definitely shot Horn, and that Berryman had probably been planning the shooting later?if at all that day.
Our opinion, however, was completely wrong.
Nashville, Late October
An equally bad mistake (for me at least) came in our investigation of Bert Poole.
By the end of the summer, tons of material had already been gathered on Poole.
Poole, the educators said, had a low, but certainly not a defective intellect. Poole, the psychologists said, was under strong pressures to realize himself in some way. Poole had an ambiguous and inconsistent attitude toward Jimmie Horn. Poole had been addicted to adventure comic books as a boy. Poole had been in homosexual panic at the time of the shooting.
But Moses Reed felt that we needed more information. Life-style material.
detail. ?Poole was fucked up,? Reed said, ?but I?m convinced that Poole wasn?t simply a nut.?
So I spent nearly two weeks contacting Bert Poole?s relatives and his friends.
His mother and father had already refused interviews to the major magazines and other newspapers, but Lewis felt I ought to approach them anyway. He reasoned that I was the only one working under the assumption that their son might
be a murderer.
During one week in October I reached Mrs. Helen Poole several times on the telephone.
She was courteous and cooperative, but she always ended up telling me the same thing: ?Doctor Poole is making all the decisions about Bert. But Doctor Poole isn?t at home right now.?
At 8 A.M., 12 noon, 7 P.M., 10 P.M.?Doctor Poole was never home.
One night, though, I decided I had to camp out at the Pooles? and find out some things for myself.
