In Cold Blood—II

This is the second part of a four-part series. Read the third part.

Monday, the sixteenth of November, 1959, was still another fine specimen of pheasant weather on the high wheat plains of western Kansas—a day gloriously bright-skied, as glittery as mica. Often, on such days in years past, Andy Erhart had spent long pheasant-hunting afternoons at River Valley Farm, the home of his good friend Mr. Herbert W. Clutter, and often, on these sporting expeditions, he’d been accompanied by three more of Herb Clutter’s closest friends: Dr. J. E. Dale, a veterinarian; Carl Myers, a dairy owner; and Everett Ogburn, a businessman. Like Erhart, the superintendent of the Kansas State University Agricultural Experiment Station, all were prominent citizens of Garden City, the county seat of Finney County, Kansas. Today, this quartet of old hunting companions had once again gathered to make the familiar journey, but in an unfamiliar spirit and armed with odd, non-sportive equipment—mops and pails, scrubbing brushes, and a hamper heaped with rags and strong detergents. They were wearing their oldest clothes. For, feeling it their duty, a Christian task, these men had volunteered to clean certain of the fourteen rooms in the main house at River Valley Farm: rooms in which, on the morning of the previous day, four members of the Clutter family—Mr. Clutter himself; his wife, Bonnie; his son, Kenyon, fifteen; and a daughter, Nancy, sixteen—had been discovered bound, gagged, and shot in the head, by, as their death certificates declared, “a person or persons unknown.”

Holcomb (pop., 270), the village in which the tragedy happened, is seven miles west of Garden City (pop., 11,000). Erhart and his partners drove the distance in silence. One of them later remarked, “It just shut you up. The strangeness of it. Going out there, where we’d always had such a welcome.” On the present occasion, a highway patrolman welcomed them. The patrolman, guardian of a barricade that the authorities had erected at the entrance to the farm, waved them on, and they drove a half mile more, down the elm-shaded lane leading to the Clutter house, which was locally considered rather a show place—white and spacious and standing on an acre of well tended lawn. Alfred Stoecklein, a hired man and the only employee who actually lived on the property, was waiting to admit them.

They went first to the basement, in separate sections of which two of the killings had occurred: a furnace room, where the pajama-clad Mr. Clutter had been found sprawled atop a cardboard mattress box, the victim of seemingly passionate savagery (not only had someone shot him in the face with a shotgun at very close range but someone had also cut his throat), and an adjoining, much larger area, which the children, Nancy and Kenyon, had furnished as a playroom, and in which Kenyon, bound to a couch, had been shot to death. The couch (an attic relic that Kenyon had rescued and mended and that Nancy had slipcovered and piled with mottoed pillows—“YES,” “NO,” “WHY NOT?”—upon which Kenyon’s head had been propped when the killer took aim) was a blood-splashed ruin; like the mattress box, it would have to be burned. Gradually, as the cleaning party progressed from the basement to the second-floor bedrooms where Nancy and her mother had been murdered in their beds, they acquired additional fuel for the impending fire—blood-soiled bedclothes, mattresses, a bedside rug, a Teddy bear.

Alfred Stoecklein, not usually a talkative man, had much to say as he fetched water and otherwise assisted in the cleaning up. He wished “folks would stop yappin’ and try to understand” why he and his wife, though they lived in a tenant house scarcely a hundred yards from the Clutter home, had heard “nary a nothin’ ”—not the slightest echo of gun thunder—of the violence taking place. “Sheriff and all them fellas been out here fingerprintin’ and scratchin’ around, they got good sense, they understand how it was. How come we didn’t hear. For one thing, the wind. A west wind, like it was, would carry the sound t’other way. Another thing, there’s that big milo barn ’tween this house and our’n. That old barn ’ud soak up a lotta racket ’fore it reached us. And did you ever think of this? Him that done it, he must’ve knowed we wouldn’t hear. Else he wouldn’t have took the chance—shootin’ off a shotgun four times in the middle of the night! Why, he’d be crazy. Course, you might say he must be crazy anyhow. To go doin’ what he did. But my opinion, him that done it had it figured out to the final T. He knowed. And there’s one thing I know, too. Me and the Missis, we’ve slept our last night on this place. We’re movin’ to a house alongside the highway.”

The men worked from noon to dusk. When the time came to burn what they had collected, they piled it on a pickup truck and, with Stoecklein at the wheel, drove deep into the farm’s north field, a flat place full of color, though a single color—the shimmering tawny yellow of November wheat stubble. There they unloaded the truck and made a pyramid of Nancy’s pillows, the bedclothes, the mattresses, the playroom couch; Stoecklein sprinkled it with kerosene and struck a match.

Of those present, none had been closer to the Clutter family than Andy Erhart. Gentle, genially dignified, a scholar with work-calloused hands and sunburned neck, he’d been a classmate of Herb’s at Kansas State University. “We were friends for thirty years,” he said some time afterward, and during those decades Erhart had seen his friend evolve from a poorly paid County Agricultural Agent into one of the region’s most widely known and respected farm ranchers: “Everything Herb had, he earned—with the help of God. He was a modest man but a proud man, as he had a right to be. He raised a fine family. He made something of his life.” But that life, and what he’d made of it—how could it happen, Erhart wondered as he watched the bonfire catch. How was it possible that such effort, such plain virtue, could overnight be reduced to this—smoke, thinning as it rose and was received by the big, annihilating sky?

The Kansas Bureau of Investigation, a statewide organization with headquarters in Topeka, has a staff of nineteen experienced detectives scattered through the state, and the services of these men are available whenever a case seems beyond the competence of local authorities. The Bureau’s Garden City representative, and the agent responsible for a sizable portion of western Kansas, is a lean and handsome fourth-generation Kansan of forty-seven named Alvin Adams Dewey. It was inevitable that Earl Robinson, the sheriff of Finney County, should ask Al Dewey to take charge of the Clutter case. Inevitable, and appropriate. For Dewey, himself a former sheriff of Finney County (from 1947 to 1955) and, prior to that, a Special Agent of the F.B.I. (between 1940 and 1945 he had served in New Orleans, in San Antonio, in Denver, in Miami, and in San Francisco), was professionally qualified to cope with even as intricate an affair as the apparently motiveless, all but clueless Clutter murders. Moreover, his attitude toward the crime made it, as he later said, “a personal proposition.” He went on to say that he and his wife “were real fond of Herb and Bonnie,” and “saw them every Sunday at church, visited a lot back and forth,” adding, “But even if I hadn’t known the family, and liked them so well, I wouldn’t feel any different. Because I’ve seen some bad things, I sure as hell have. But nothing so vicious as this. However long it takes, it may be the rest of my life, I’m going to know what happened in that house: the why and the who.”

Toward that end, a total of eighteen men were assigned to the case full time, among them three of the K.B.I.’s ablest investigators—Special Agents Harold Nye, Roy Church, and Clarence Duntz. With the arrival in Garden City of this trio, Dewey was satisfied that “a strong team” had been assembled. “Somebody better watch out,” he said.

The sheriff’s office is on the third floor of the Finney County Courthouse, an ordinary stone-and-cement building standing in the center of an otherwise attractive tree-filled square. Nowadays, Garden City, which was once a rather raucous frontier town, is quite subdued. On the whole, the sheriff doesn’t do much business, and his office, three sparsely furnished rooms, is usually a quiet place popular with courthouse idlers; Mrs. Edna Richardson, his hospitable secretary, usually has a pot of coffee going and plenty of time to “chew the fat.” Or did, until, as she complained, “this Clutter thing came along,” bringing with it “all these out-of-towners, all this news-paper fuss.” The case, then commanding headlines as far east as Chicago, as far west as Denver, had indeed lured to Garden City a considerable press corps.

On Monday, at midday, Dewey held a press conference in the sheriff’s office. “I’ll talk facts but not theories,” he informed the assembled journalists. “Now, the big fact here, the thing to remember, is we’re not dealing with one murder but four. And we don’t know which of the four was the main target. The primary victim. It could have been Nancy or Kenyon, or either of the parents. Some people say, ‘Well, it must have been Mr. Clutter. Because his throat was cut; he was the most abused.’ But that’s theory, not fact. It would help if we knew in what order the family died, but the coroner can’t tell us that; he only knows the murders happened sometime between 11 P.M. Saturday and 2 A.M. Sunday.” Then, responding to questions, he said, no, neither of the women had been “sexually molested,” and, no, as far as was known, nothing had been stolen from the house, and, yes, he did think it a “queer coincidence” that Mr. Clutter should have taken out a forty-thousand-dollar life-insurance policy, with double indemnity, within eight hours of his death. However, Dewey was “pretty darn sure” that no connection existed between this purchase and the crime; how could there be one, when the only persons who benefited financially were Mr. Clutter’s two surviving children, the elder daughters, Mrs. Donald Jarchow and Miss Beverly Clutter? And, yes, he told the reporters, he did have an opinion on whether the murders were the work of one man or two, but he preferred not to disclose it.

Actually, at this time, on this subject, Dewey was undecided. He still entertained a pair of opinions—or, to use his word, “concepts”—and, in reconstructing the crime, had developed both a “single-killer concept” and a “double-killer concept.” In the former, the murderer was thought to be a friend of the family, or, at any rate, a man with more than casual knowledge of the house and its inhabitants—someone who knew that the doors were seldom locked, that Mr. Clutter slept alone in the master bedroom on the ground floor, that Mrs. Clutter and the children occupied separate bedrooms on the second floor. This person, so Dewey imagined, approached the house on foot, probably around midnight. The windows were dark, the Clutters asleep, and as for Teddy, the farm’s watchdog—well, Teddy was famously gun-shy. He would have cringed at the sight of the intruder’s weapon, whimpered, and crept away. On entering the house, the killer first disposed of the telephone installations—one in Mr. Clutter’s office, the other in the kitchen—and then, after cutting the wires, he went to Mr. Clutter’s bedroom and awakened him. Mr. Clutter, at the mercy of the gun-bearing visitor, was forced to obey instructions—forced to accompany him to the second floor, where they aroused the rest of the family. Then, with cord and adhesive tape supplied by the killer, Mr. Clutter bound and gagged his wife, bound his daughter (who, inexplicably, had not been gagged), and roped them to their beds. Next, father and son were escorted to the basement, and there Mr. Clutter was made to tape Kenyon and tie him to the playroom couch. Then Mr. Clutter was taken into the furnace room, hit on the head, gagged, and trussed. Now free to do as he pleased, the murderer killed them one by one, each time carefully collecting the discharged shell. When he had finished, he turned out all the lights and left.

It might have happened that way; it was just possible. But Dewey had doubts: “If Herb had thought his family was in danger, mortal danger, he would have fought like a tiger. And Herb was no ninny—a strong guy in top condition. Kenyon too—big as his dad, bigger, a big-shouldered boy. It’s hard to see how one man, armed or not, could have handled the two of them.” Moreover, there was reason to suppose that all four had been bound by the same person: in all four instances the same type of knot, a half hitch, was used.

Dewey—and the majority of his colleagues, as well—favored the second hypothesis, which in many essentials followed the first, the important difference being that the killer was not alone but had an accomplice, who helped subdue the family, tape, and tie them. Still, as a theory, this, too, had its faults. Dewey, for example, found it difficult to understand “how two individuals could reach the same degree of rage, the kind of psychopathic rage it took to commit such a crime.” He went on to explain: “Assuming the murderer was someone known to the family, a member of this community; assuming that he was an ordinary man, ordinary except that he had a quirk, an insane grudge against the Clutters, or one of the Clutters—where did he find a partner, someone crazy enough to help him? It doesn’t add up. It doesn’t make sense. But then, come right down to it, nothing does.”

After the news conference, Dewey retired to his office, a room that the sheriff had temporarily lent him. It contained a desk and two straight chairs. The desk was littered with what Dewey hoped would someday constitute courtroom exhibits: the adhesive tape and the yards of cord removed from the victims and now sealed in plastic sacks (as clues, neither item seemed very promising, for both were common-brand products, obtainable anywhere in the United States), and photographs taken at the scene of the crime by a police photographer—twenty blown-up glossy-print pictures of Mr. Clutter’s shattered skull, his son’s demolished face, Nancy’s bound hands, her mother’s death-dulled, still staring eyes, and so on. In days to come, Dewey was to spend many hours examining these photographs, hoping that he might “suddenly see something,” that a meaningful detail would declare itself: “Like those puzzles. The ones that ask, ‘How many animals can you find in this picture?’ In a way, that’s what I’m trying to do. Find the hidden animals. I feel they must be there—if only I could see them.” As a matter of fact, one of the photographs, a closeup of Mr. Clutter and the mattress box upon which he lay, had already provided a valuable surprise: footprints, the dusty trackings of shoes with diamond-patterned soles. The prints, not noticeable to the naked eye, registered on film; indeed, the delineating glare of a flash bulb had revealed their presence with superb exactness. These prints, together with another footmark, found on the same cardboard cover—the bold and bloody impression of a Cat’s Paw half sole—were the only “serious clues” the investigators could claim. Not that they were claiming them; Dewey and his team had decided to keep secret the existence of this evidence.

Among the other articles on Dewey’s desk was Nancy Clutter’s diary. He had glanced through it, no more than that, and now he settled down to an earnest reading of the day-by-day entries, which began on her thirteenth birthday and ended some two months short of her seventeenth: the unsensational confidings of an intelligent child who adored animals, who liked to read, cook, sew, dance, ride horseback—a popular, pretty, virginal girl who thought it “fun to flirt” but was nevertheless “only really and truly in love with Bobby,” Bobby being Bobby Rupp, the classmate and local basketball hero with whom she had “gone steady” since grammar-school days. Dewey read the final entry first. It consisted of three lines written an hour or two before she died: “Jolene K. came over and I showed her how to make a cherry pie. Practiced with Roxie. Bobby here and we watched TV. Left at 11:00.” Young Rupp, the last person known to have seen the family alive, had already undergone one extensive interrogation, and although he’d told a straightforward story of having passed “just an ordinary evening” with the Clutters, he was scheduled for a second interview, at which time he was to be given a polygraph test. The plain fact was that the police were not quite ready to dismiss him as a suspect. Dewey himself did not believe that Bobby, soft-spoken and slender, the son of a respected sugar-beet farmer, had “anything to do with it;” still, it was true that, at this early stage of the investigation, Bobby was the only person to whom a motive, however feeble, could be attributed. Here and there in the diary, Nancy referred to the situation that was supposed to have created the motive: her father’s insistence that she and Bobby “break off,” stop “seeing so much of each other,” his objection being that the Clutters were Methodist, the Rupps Catholic—a circumstance that, in his view, completely cancelled any hope the young couple might have of one day marrying. But the diary notation that most tantalized Dewey was unrelated to the Clutter-Rupp, Methodist-Catholic impasse. Rather, it concerned a cat, the mysterious demise of Nancy’s favorite pet, Boobs, whom, according to an entry dated two weeks prior to her own death, she’d found “lying in the barn,” the victim, or so she suspected (without saying why), of a poisoner: “Poor Boobs. I buried him in a special place.” On reading this, Dewey felt it could be “very important.” If the cat had been poisoned, might not this act have been a small, malicious prelude to the murders? He determined to find the “special place” where Nancy had buried her pet, even if it meant combing the vast whole of River Valley Farm.

While Dewey was occupying himself with the diary, his principal assistants, the agents Church, Duntz, and Nye were crisscrossing the countryside, talking, as Duntz said, “to anyone who could tell us anything”: the faculty of the Holcomb School, where both Nancy and Kenyon had been honor-roll, straight-A students; the employees of River Valley Farm (a staff that in spring and summer sometimes amounted to as many as eighteen men but in the present fallow season consisted of the farm manager, whose name was Gerald Van Vleet, and three hired men, plus a part-time housekeeper, Mrs. Paul Helm); friends of the victims; their neighbors; and, very particularly, their relatives. From far and near, some twenty of the last had arrived to attend the funeral services, which were to take place Wednesday morning.

The youngest of the K.B.I. group, Harold Nye, who was a peppy little man of thirty-four with restless, distrustful eyes and a sharp nose, chin, and mind, had been assigned what he called “the damned delicate business” of interviewing the Clutter kinfolk: “It’s painful for you and it’s painful for them. When it comes to murder, you can’t respect grief. Or privacy. Or personal feelings. You’ve got to ask the questions. And some of them cut deep.” But none of the persons he questioned, and none of the questions he asked (“I was exploring the emotional background. I thought the answer might be another woman—a triangle. Well, consider: Mr. Clutter was a fairly young, very healthy man, but his wife, she was a semi-invalid, she slept in a separate bedroom. . . .”), produced useful information; not even the two surviving daughters—Eveanna, who had married and moved to Illinois, and Beverly, a student nurse in Kansas City—could suggest a cause for the crime. In brief, Nye learned only this: “Of all the people in all the world, the Clutters were the least likely to be murdered.”

At the end of the day, when the three agents convened in Dewey’s office, it developed that Duntz and Church had had better luck than Nye—Brother Nye, as the others called him. (Members of the K.B.I. are partial to nicknames; Duntz is known as Old Man—unfairly, since he is not quite fifty, a burly but light-footed man with a broad, tomcat face—and Church, who is sixty or so, pink-skinned, and professorial-looking, but “tough,” according to colleagues, and “the fastest draw in Kansas,” is called Curly, because his head is partly hairless.) Both men, in the course of their inquiries, had picked up “promising leads.”

Duntz’s story concerned a father and son who shall here be known as John Senior and John Junior. Some years earlier, John Senior had conducted with Mr. Clutter a minor business transaction, the outcome of which angered John Senior, who felt that Clutter had thrown him “a queer ball.” Now, both John Senior and his son “boozed;” indeed, John Junior was an often incarcerated alcoholic. One unfortunate day, father and son, full of whiskey courage, appeared at the Clutter home intending to “have it out with Herb.” They were denied the chance, for Mr. Clutter, an abstainer aggressively opposed to drink and drunkards, seized a gun and marched them off his property. This discourtesy the Johns had not forgiven; as recently as a month ago, John Senior had told an acquaintance, “Every time I think of that bastard, my hands start to twitch. I just want to choke him.”

Church’s lead was of a similar nature. He, too, had heard of someone admittedly hostile to Mr. Clutter: a certain Mr. Smith (though that is not his true name), who believed that the squire of River Valley Farm had shot and killed Smith’s hunting dog. Church had inspected Smith’s farm home and seen there, hanging from a barn rafter, a length of rope tied with the same kind of knot that was used to bind the four Clutters.

Dewey said, “One of those, maybe that’s our deal. A personal thing—a grudge that got out of hand.”

“Unless it was robbery,” said Nye, though robbery as the motive had been much discussed and then more or less dismissed. The arguments against it were good, the strongest being that Mr. Clutter’s aversion to cash was a county legend; he had no safe, and never carried large sums of money. Also, if robbery were the explanation, why hadn’t the robber removed the jewelry that Mrs. Clutter was wearing—a gold wedding band and a diamond ring? Yet Nye was not convinced: “The whole setup has that robbery smell. What about Clutter’s wallet? Someone left it open and empty on Clutter’s bed—I don’t think it was the owner. And Nancy’s purse. The purse was lying on the kitchen floor. How did it get there? Yes, and not a dime in the house. Well—two dollars. We found two dollars in an envelope on Nancy’s desk. And we know Clutter cashed a check for sixty bucks just the day before. We figure there ought to have been at least fifty of that left. So some say, ‘Nobody would kill four people for fifty bucks.’ And say, ‘Sure, maybe the killer did take the money—but just to try and mislead us, make us think robbery was the reason.’ I wonder.”

As darkness fell, Dewey interrupted the consultation to telephone his wife, Marie, at their home, and warn her that he wouldn’t be home for dinner. She said, “Yes. All right, Alvin,” but he noticed in her tone an uncharacteristic anxiety. The Deweys, parents of two young boys, had been married seventeen years, and Marie, a Louisiana-born former F.B.I. stenographer, whom he’d met while he was stationed in New Orleans, sympathized with the hardships of his profession—the eccentric hours, the sudden calls summoning him to distant areas of the state.

He said, “Anything the matter?” “Not a thing,” she assured him. “Only, when you come home tonight, you’ll have to ring the bell. I’ve had all the locks changed.”

Now he understood, and said, “Don’t worry, honey. Just lock the doors, and turn on the porch light.”

After he’d hung up, a colleague asked, “What’s wrong? Marie scared?”

“Hell, yes,” Dewey said. “Her, and everybody else.”

Not everybody. Certainly not Holcomb’s widowed, betrousered postmistress, the intrepid Mrs. Myrtle Clare, who scorned her fellow-townsmen as “a lily-livered lot, shaking in their boots, afraid to shut their eyes,” and said of herself, “This old girl, she’s sleeping good as ever. Anybody wants to play a trick on me, let ’em try.” (Eleven months later, a gun-toting team of masked bandits took her at her word by invading the post office and relieving the lady of nine hundred and fifty dollars.) As usual, Mrs. Clare’s notions conformed with those of very few. “Around here,” according to the proprietor of one Garden City hardware store, “locks and bolts are the fastest-going item. Folks ain’t particular what brand they buy; they just want them to hold.” Imagination, of course, can open any door—turn the key and let terror walk right in. Tuesday, at dawn, a carload of pheasant hunters from Colorado—strangers, ignorant of the local disaster—were startled by what they saw as they crossed the prairies and passed through Holcomb: windows ablaze, almost every window in almost every house, and, in the brightly lit rooms, fully clothed people, even entire families, who had sat the whole night wide awake, watchful, listening. Of what were they frightened? “It might happen again.” That, with variations, was the customary response. However, one woman, a schoolteacher, observed, “Feeling wouldn’t run half so high if this had happened to anyone except the Clutters. Anyone less admired. Prosperous. Secure. But that family represented everything people hereabouts really value and respect, and that such a thing could happen to them—well, it’s like being told there is no God. It makes life seem pointless. I don’t think people are so much frightened as they are deeply depressed.”

Another reason, the simplest, the ugliest, was that this hitherto peaceful congregation of neighbors and old friends had suddenly to endure the unique experience of distrusting each other; understandably, they believed that the murderer was among themselves, and, to the last man, endorsed an opinion advanced by Arthur Clutter, a brother of the deceased, who, while talking to journalists in the lobby of a Garden City hotel on November 17th, had said, “When this is cleared up, I’ll wager whoever did it was someone within ten miles of where we now stand.”

Approximately four hundred miles northeast of where Arthur Clutter then stood, two young men were sharing a booth in the Eagle Buffet, a Kansas City diner. One—narrow-faced, and with a blue cat tattooed on his right hand—had polished off several chicken-salad sandwiches and was now eying his companion’s meal: an untouched hamburger, and a glass of root beer in which three aspirin were dissolving.

“Perry, baby,” Dick said, “you don’t want that burger. I’ll take it.”

Perry shoved the plate across the table. “Christ! Can’t you let me concentrate?”

“You don’t have to read it fifty times.”

The reference was to a front-page article in the November 17th edition of the Kansas City Star. Headlined “CLUES ARE FEW IN SLAYING OF 4,” the article, which was a follow-up of the previous day’s initial announcement of the murders, ended with a summarizing paragraph:

The investigators are left faced with a search for a killer or killers whose cunning is apparent if his (or their) motive is not. For this killer or killers: *Carefully cut the telephone cords of the home’s two telephones. *Bound and gagged their victims expertly, with no evidence of a struggle with any of them. *Left nothing in the house amiss, left no indication they had searched for anything, with the possible exception of the [Clutter’s] billfold. *Shot four persons in different parts of the house, calmly picking up the expended shotgun shells. *Arrived and left the home, presumably with the murder weapon, without being seen. *Acted without a motive, if you care to discount an abortive robbery attempt, which the investigators are wont to do.

“ ‘For this killer or killers,’ ” said Perry, reading aloud. “That’s incorrect. The grammar is. It ought to be ‘For this killer or these killers.’ ” Sipping his aspirin-spiked root beer, he went on, “Anyway, I don’t believe it. Neither do you. Own up, Dick, be honest. You don’t believe this no-clue stuff?”

Yesterday, after studying the papers, Perry had put the same question, and Dick, who thought he’d disposed of it (“Look. If those cowboys could make the slightest connection, we’d have heard the sound of hoofs a hundred miles off”), was bored at hearing it again. Too bored to protest when Perry once more pursued the matter: “I’ve always played my hunches. That’s why I’m alive today. You know Willie-Jay? He said I was a natural-born ‘medium,’ and he knew about things like that, he was interested. He said I had a high degree of ‘extrasensory perception.’ Sort of like having built-in radar—you see things before you see them. The outlines of coming events. Take, like, my brother and his wife. Jimmy and his wife. They were crazy about each other, but he was jealous as hell, and he made her so miserable, being jealous and always thinking she was passing it out behind his back. One day, he shot her, and the next day he shot himself. When it happened—this was 1949, and I was in Alaska with Dad, up around Circle City—I told Dad, ‘Jimmy’s dead.’ A week later we got the news. Lord’s truth. Another time, over in Japan, I was helping load a ship, and I sat down to rest a minute. Suddenly a voice inside me said ‘Jump!’ I jumped I guess maybe ten feet, and just then, right where I’d been sitting, a ton of stuff came crashing down. I could give you a hundred examples. I don’t care if you believe me or not. For instance, right before I had my motorcycle accident I saw the whole thing happen: saw it in my mind—the rain, the skid tracks, me lying there bleeding and my legs broken. That’s what I’ve got now. A premonition. Something tells me this is a trap.” He tapped the newspaper. “A lot of prevarications.”

Dick ordered another hamburger. During the past few days, he’d known a hunger that nothing—three successive steaks, a dozen Hershey bars, a pound of gumdrops—seemed to interrupt. Perry, on the other hand, was without appetite; he subsisted on root beer, aspirin, and cigarettes. “No wonder you got the leaps,” Dick told him. “Aw, come on, baby. Get the bubbles out of your blood. We scored. It was perfect.”

“I’m surprised to hear that, all things considered,” Perry said. The quietness of his tone italicized the malice of his reply. But Dick took it, even smiled—and his smile was a skillful proposition. Here, it said, wearing a kid grin, was a very personable character, clean-cut, affable, a fellow any man might trust to shave him.

“O.K.,” Dick said. “Maybe I had some wrong information.”

“Hallelujah.”

“But on the whole it was perfect. We hit the ball right out of the park. It’s lost. And it’s gonna stay lost. There isn’t a single connection.”

“I can think of one.”

Perry had gone too far. He went further: “Floyd—is that the name?” A bit below the belt, but then Dick deserved it; his confidence was like a kite that needed reeling in. Nevertheless, Perry observed with some misgiving the symptoms of fury rearranging Dick’s expression: jaw, lips, the whole face slackened; saliva bubbles appeared at the corners of his mouth. Well, if it came to a fight, Perry could defend himself. He was short, several inches shorter than Dick, and his runty, damaged legs were unreliable, but he outweighed his friend, was thicker, had arms that could squeeze the breath out of a bear. To prove it, however—have a fight, a real falling out—was far from desirable. Like Dick or not (and he didn’t dislike Dick, though once he’d liked him better, respected him more), it was obvious they could not now safely separate. On that point they were in accord, for Dick had said, “If we get caught, let’s get caught together. Then we can back each other up. When they start pulling the confession gag, saying you said and I said.” Moreover, if he broke with Dick, it meant the end of plans still attractive to Perry, and still, despite recent reverses, deemed possible by both—a skin-diving, treasure-hunting life lived together among islands or along coasts south of the border.

Dick said, “Mr. Wells!” He picked up a fork. “It’d be worth it. Like if I was nabbed on a check charge, it’d be worth it. Just to get back in there.” The fork came down and stabbed the table. “Right through the heart, honey.”

“I’m not saying he would,” said Perry, willing to make a concession now that Dick’s anger had soared past him and struck elsewhere. “He’d be too scared.”

“Sure,” said Dick. “Sure. He’d be too scared.” A marvel, really, the ease with which Dick negotiated changes of mood; in a trice, all trace of meanness, of sullen bravura, had evaporated. He said, “About that premonition stuff. Tell me this: If you were so damn sure you were gonna crack up, why didn’t you call it quits? It wouldn’t have happened if you’d stayed off your bike—right?”

That was a riddle that Perry had pondered. He felt he’d solved it, but the solution, while simple, was also somewhat hazy: “No. Because once a thing is set to happen, all you can do is hope it won’t. Or will—depending. As long as you live, there’s always something waiting, and even if it’s bad, and you know it’s bad, what can you do? You can’t stop living. Like my dreams. Since I was a kid, I’ve had this same dream. Where I’m in Africa. A jungle. I’m moving through the trees toward a tree standing all alone. Jesus, it smells bad, that tree; it kind of makes me sick, the way it stinks. Only, it’s beautiful to look at—it has blue leaves and diamonds hanging everywhere. Diamonds like oranges. That’s why I’m there—to pick myself a bushel of diamonds. But I know the minute I try to, the minute I reach up, a snake is gonna fall on me. A snake that guards the tree. This fat son of a bitch living in the branches. I know this beforehand, see? And, Jesus, I don’t know how to fight a snake. But I figure, Well, I’ll take my chances. What it comes down to is I want the diamonds more than I’m afraid of the snake. So I go to pick one, I have the diamond in my hand, I’m pulling at it, when the snake lands on top of me. We wrestle around, but he’s a slippery son of a bitch and I can’t get a hold, he’s crushing me, you can hear my legs cracking. Now comes the part it makes me sweat even to think about. See, he starts to swallow me. Feet first. Like going down in quicksand.” Perry hesitated. He could not help noticing that Dick, busy gouging under his fingernails with a fork prong, was uninterested in his dream.

Dick said, “So? The snake swallows you? Or what?”

“Never mind. It’s not important.” (But it was! The finale was of great importance, a source of private joy. He’d once told it to his friend Willie-Jay; he had described to him the towering bird, the yellow “sort of parrot.” Of course, Willie-Jay was different—delicate-minded, “a saint.” He’d understood. But Dick? Dick might laugh. And that Perry could not abide: anyone’s ridiculing the parrot, which had first flown into his dreams when he was seven years old, a hated, hating half-breed child living in a California orphanage run by nuns—shrouded disciplinarians who whipped him for wetting his bed. It was after one of these beatings, one he could never forget [“She woke me up. She had a flashlight, and she hit me with it. Hit me and hit me. And when the flashlight broke, she went on hitting me in the dark”], that the parrot appeared, arrived while he slept, a bird “taller than Jesus, yellow like a sunflower,” a warrior-angel who blinded the nuns with its beak, fed upon their eyes, slaughtered them as they “pleaded for mercy,” then so gently lifted him, enfolded him, winged him away to “Paradise.” As the years went by, the particular torments from which the bird delivered him altered; others—older children, his father, a faithless girl, a sergeant he’d known in the Army—replaced the nuns, but the parrot remained, a hovering avenger. Thus, the snake, that custodian of the diamond-bearing tree, never finished devouring him but was itself always devoured. And afterward the blessed ascent! Ascension to a Paradise that in one version was merely “a feeling,” a sense of power, of unassailable superiority—sensations that in another version were transposed into “A real place. Like out of a movie. Maybe that’s where I did see it—remembered it from a movie. Because where else would I have seen a garden like that? With white marble steps? Fountains? And way down below, if you go to the edge of the garden, you can see the ocean. Terrific! Like around Carmel, California. The best thing, though—well, it’s a long, long table. You never imagined so much food. Oysters. Turkeys. Hot dogs. Fruit you could make into a million fruit cups. And, listen—it’s every bit free. I mean, I don’t have to be afraid to touch it. I can eat as much as I want, and it won’t cost a cent. That’s how I know where I am.”)

Dick said, “I’m a normal. I only dream about blond chicken. Speaking of which, you hear about the nanny goat’s nightmare?” That was Dick—always ready with a dirty joke on any subject. But he told the joke well, and Perry, though he was in some measure a prude, could not help laughing, as always.

The crime had been discovered by two young girls who, accustomed to attending church with the Clutter family, had gone to River Valley Farm that brilliant Sunday morning, entered the house, and found what one of them, Susan Kidwell, described as “this thing I have to live with—even when I’m asleep.”

A girl of fifteen, the good-looking and intelligent only child of a high-school music teacher, Susan was Nancy Clutter’s best friend. “We were like sisters,” Susan once said, after the murder. “At least, that’s how I felt about her—as though she were my sister. I couldn’t go to school—not those first few days. I stayed out of school until after the funeral. So did Bobby Rupp. For a while, Bobby and I were always together. He’s a nice boy—he has a good heart—but nothing very terrible had ever happened to him before. Like losing anyone he’d loved. And then, on top of it, having to take a lie-detector test. I don’t mean he was bitter about that; he realized the police were doing what they had to do. Some hard things, two or three, had already happened to me, but not to him, so it was a shock when he found out maybe life isn’t one long basketball game. Mostly, we just drove around in his old Ford. Up and down the highway. Out to the airport and back. Or we’d go to the Cree-Mee—that’s a drive-in—and sit in the car, order a Coke, listen to the radio. The radio was always playing; we didn’t have anything to say ourselves. Except, once in a while, Bobby said how much he’d loved Nancy, and how he could never care about another girl. Well, I was sure Nancy wouldn’t have wanted that, and I told him so. I remember—I think it was Monday—we drove down to the river [the Arkansas River, a section of which flows along the southern edge of Holcomb]. We parked on the bridge. You can see the house from there—the Clutter house. And part of the land—Mr. Clutter’s fruit orchard, and the wheat fields going away. Way off in one of the fields a bonfire was burning; they were burning stuff from the house. Everywhere you looked, there was something to remind you. Men with nets and poles were fishing along the banks of the river, but not fishing for fish. Bobby said they were looking for the weapons. The knife. The gun.

“Nancy loved the river. Summer nights, we used to ride double on Nancy’s horse, Babe—that old fat gray? Ride straight to the river and right into the water. Then Babe would wade along in the shallow part while we played our flutes and sang. Got cool. I keep wondering, Gosh, what will become of her? Babe. A lady from Garden City took Kenyon’s dog. Took Teddy. He ran away—found his way back to Holcomb. But she came and got him again. And I have Nancy’s cat—Evinrude. But Babe. I suppose they’ll sell her. Wouldn’t Nancy hate that? Wouldn’t she be furious? Another day, the day before the funeral, Bobby and I were sitting by the railroad tracks. Watching the trains go by. Real stupid. Like sheep in a blizzard. When suddenly Bobby woke up and said, ‘We ought to go see Nancy. We ought to be with her.’ So we drove to Garden City—went to the Phillips Funeral Home, there on Main Street. I think Bobby’s kid brother was with us. Yes, I’m sure he was. Because I remember we picked him up after school. And I remember he said how there wasn’t going to be any school the next day, so all the Holcomb kids could go to the funeral. And he kept telling us what the kids thought. He said the kids were convinced it was the work of ‘a hired killer.’ I didn’t want to hear about it. Just gossip and talk—everything Nancy despised. Anyway, I don’t much care who did it. Somehow it seems beside the point. My friend is gone. Knowing who killed her isn’t going to bring her back. What else matters? They wouldn’t let us. At the funeral parlor, I mean. They said no one could ‘view the family.’ Except the relatives. But Bobby insisted, and finally the undertaker—he knew Bobby, and, I guess, felt sorry for him—he said all right, be quiet about it, but come on in. Now I wish we hadn’t.”

The four coffins, which quite filled the small, flower-crowded parlor, were to be sealed at the funeral services—very understandably, for despite the care taken with the appearance of the victims, the effect achieved was disquieting. Nancy wore a dress of cherry-red velvet, her brother a bright plaid shirt; the parents were more sedately attired, Mr. Clutter in navy-blue flannel, his wife in navy-blue crêpe; and—and it was this, especially, that lent the scene an awful aura—the head of each was completely encased in cotton, a swollen cocoon twice the size of an ordinary blown-up balloon, and the cotton, because it had been sprayed with a glossy substance, twinkled like Christmas-tree snow.

Susan at once retreated. “I went outside and waited in the car,” she recalled. “Across the street, a man was raking leaves. I kept looking at him. Because I didn’t want to close my eyes. I thought, If I do, I’ll faint. So I watched him rake leaves and burn them. Watched, without really seeing him. Because all I could see was the dress. I knew it so well. I helped her pick the material. It was her own design, and she sewed it herself. I remember how excited she was the first time she wore it. At a party. All I could see was Nancy’s red velvet. And Nancy in it. Dancing.”

The Kansas City Star printed a lengthy account of the Clutter funeral, but the edition containing the article was two days old before Perry, lying abed in a hotel room, got around to reading it. Even so, he merely skimmed through, skipped about among the paragraphs: “About 1,000 persons, the largest crowd in the 5-year history of the First Methodist church here, attended services for the four victims today. . . . Several classmates of Nancy’s from the Holcomb high school wept as the Rev. Leonard Cowan said: ‘God offers the courage, love and hope even though we walk through the shadows of the valley of death. I’m sure He was with them in their last hours. Jesus has never promised us we would not suffer pain or sorrow but He has always said He would be there to help us bear the sorrow and pain.’ . . . On the unseasonably warm day about 600 persons went to the Valley View cemetery on the north edge of this city. There, at graveside services, they recited the Lord’s prayer. Their voices, massed together in a low whisper, could be heard throughout the cemetery.”

A thousand people! Perry was impressed. He wondered how much the funeral had cost. Money was greatly on his mind, though not as relentlessly as it had been earlier in the day—a day he’d begun “without the price of a cat’s miaow.” The situation had improved since then; thanks to Dick, he and Dick now possessed “a pretty fair stake”—enough to get them to Mexico.

Dick! Smooth. Smart. Yes, you had to hand it to him. Christ, it was incredible how he could “con a guy.” Like the clerk in the Kansas City, Missouri, clothing store, the first of the places Dick had decided to “hit.” As for Perry, he’d never tried to “pass a check.” He was nervous, but Dick told him, “All I want you to do is stand there. Don’t laugh, and don’t be surprised at anything I say. You got to play these things by ear.” For the task proposed, it seemed, Dick had perfect pitch. He breezed in, breezily introduced Perry to the clerk as “a friend of mine about to get married,” and went on, “I’m his best man. Helping him kind of shop around for the clothes he’ll want. Ha-ha, what you might say his—ha-ha—trousseau.” The salesman “ate it up,” and soon Perry, stripped of his denim trousers, was trying on a gloomy suit that the clerk considered “ideal for an informal ceremony.” After commenting on the customer’s oddly proportioned figure—the oversized torso supported by the undersized legs—he added, “I’m afraid we haven’t anything that would fit without alteration.” Oh, said Dick, that was O.K., there was plenty of time—the wedding was “a week tomorrow.” That settled, they then selected a gaudy array of jackets and slacks regarded as appropriate for what was to be, according to Dick, a Florida honeymoon. “You know the Eden Roc?” Dick said to the salesman. “In Miami Beach? They got reservations. A present from her folks—two weeks at forty bucks a day. How about that? An ugly runt like him, he’s making it with a honey she’s not only built but loaded. While guys like you and me, good-lookin’ guys . . .” The clerk presented the bill. Dick reached in his hip pocket, frowned, snapped his fingers, and said, “Hot damn! I forgot my wallet.” Which to his partner seemed a ploy so feeble that it couldn’t possibly “fool a day-old nigger.” The clerk, apparently, was not of that opinion, for he produced a blank check and, when Dick made it out for eighty dollars more than the bill totalled, instantly paid over the difference in cash.

Outside, Dick said, “So you’re going to get married next week? Well, you’ll need a ring.” Moments later, riding in Dick’s aged Chevrolet, they arrived at a store named Best Jewelry. From there, after purchasing by check a diamond engagement ring and a diamond wedding band, they drove to a pawnshop to dispose of these items. Perry was sorry to see them go. He’d begun to half credit the make-believe bride, though in his conception of her, as opposed to Dick’s, she was not rich, not beautiful; rather, she was nicely groomed, gently spoken, was conceivably a college graduate, in any event “a very intellectual type”—the sort of girl he’d always wanted to meet but in fact never had.

Unless you counted Cookie, a nurse he’d known when, as a result of his motorcycle accident, he was hospitalized for six months. A swell kid, Cookie, and she had liked him, pitied him, babied him, inspired him to read “serious literature”—“Gone with the Wind,” “This Is My Beloved.” Sexual episodes of a strange and stealthy nature had occurred, and love had been mentioned, and marriage, too, but eventually, when his injuries had mended, he’d told her goodbye and given her, by way of explanation, a poem he pretended to have written:

There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,
   A race that can’t stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
  And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and they rove the flood,
  And they climb the mountain’s crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
  And they don’t know how to rest.
If they just went straight they might go far;
  They are strong and brave and true;
But they’re always tired of the things that are,
  And they want the strange and new.

He had not seen her again, or ever heard from or of her, yet several years later he’d had her name tattooed on his arm, and once, when Dick asked who “Cookie” was, he’d said, “Nobody. A girl I almost married.” (That Dick had been married—married twice—and had fathered three sons was something he envied. A wife, children—those were experiences “a man ought to have,” even if, as with Dick, they didn’t “make him happy or do him any good.”)

The rings were pawned for a hundred and fifty dollars. They visited another jewelry store, Goldman’s, and sauntered out of there with a man’s gold wristwatch. Next stop, an Elko Camera Store, where they “bought” an elaborate motion-picture camera. “Cameras are your best investment,” Dick informed Perry. “Easiest thing to hock or sell. Cameras and TV sets.” This being the case, they decided to obtain several of the latter, and, having completed the mission, went on to attack a few more clothing emporiums—Sheperd & Foster’s, Rothschild’s, Shopper’s Paradise. By sundown, when the stores were closing, their pockets were filled with cash and the car was heaped with salable, pawnable wares. Surveying this harvest of shirts and cigarette lighters, expensive machinery and cheap cufflinks, Perry felt elatedly tall—now Mexico, a new chance, a “really living” life. But Dick seemed depressed. He shrugged off Perry’s praises (“I mean it, Dick. You were amazing. Half the time, I believed you myself”). And Perry was puzzled; he could not fathom why Dick, usually so full of himself, should suddenly, when he had good cause to gloat, be meek, look wilted and sad. Perry said, “I’ll stand you a drink.”

They stopped at a bar. Dick drank three Orange Blossoms. After the third, he abruptly asked, “What about Dad? I feel—oh, Jesus, he’s such a good old guy. And my mother—well, you saw her. What about them? Me, I’ll be off in Mexico. Or wherever. But they’ll be right here when those checks start to bounce. I know Dad. He’ll want to make them good. Like he tried to before. And he can’t—he’s old and he’s sick, he ain’t got anything.”

“I sympathize with that,” said Perry, truthfully. Without being kind, he was sentimental, and Dick’s affection for his parents, his professed concern for them, did indeed touch him. “But, hell, Dick. It’s very simple,” Perry said. “We can pay off the checks. Once we’re in Mexico, once we get started down there, we’ll make money. Lots of it.”

“How?”

“How?”—what could Dick mean? The question dazed Perry. After all, such a rich assortment of ventures had been discussed. Prospecting for gold, skin-diving for sunken treasure—these were but two of the projects Perry had ardently proposed. And there were others. The boat, for instance. They had often talked of a deep-sea-fishing boat, which they would buy, man themselves, and rent to vacationers—this though neither had ever skippered a canoe or hooked a guppy. Then, too, there was quick money to be made chauffeuring stolen cars across South American borders. (“You get paid five hundred bucks a trip,” or so Perry had read somewhere.) But of the many replies he might have made, he chose to remind Dick of the fortune awaiting them on Cocos Island, a land speck off the coast of Costa Rica. “No fooling, Dick,” Perry said. “This is authentic. I’ve got a map. I’ve got the whole history. It was buried there back in 1821—Peruvian bullion, jewelry. Sixty million dollars—that’s what they say it’s worth. Even if we didn’t find all of it, even if we found only some of it— Are you with me, Dick?” Heretofore, Dick had always encouraged him, listened attentively to his talk of maps, tales of treasure, but now—and it had not occurred to him before—he wondered if all along Dick had only been pretending, just kidding him.

The thought, acutely painful, passed, for Dick, with a wink and a playful jab, said, “Sure, honey. I’m with you. All the way.”

It was three in the morning, and the telephone rang again. Not that the hour mattered. Al Dewey was wide awake anyway, and so were Marie and their sons, nine-year-old Paul and twelve-year-old Alvin Adams Dewey, Jr. For who could sleep in a house—a modest one-story frame house—where all night the telephone had been sounding every few minutes? As he got out of bed, Dewey promised his wife, “This time, I’ll leave it off the hook.” But it was not a promise he dared keep. True, many of the calls came from news-hunting journalists, or would-be humorists, or theorists (“Al? Listen, fella, I’ve got this deal figured. It’s suicide and murder. I happen to know Herb was in a bad way financially. He was spread pretty thin. So what does he do? He takes out this big insurance policy, shoots Bonnie and the kids, and kills himself with a bomb. A hand grenade stuffed with buckshot”), or anonymous persons with poison-pen minds (“Know them Ls? Foreigners? Don’t work? Give parties? Serve cocktails? Where’s the money come from? Wouldn’t surprise me a darn if they ain’t at the roots of this Clutter trouble”), or nervous ladies alarmed by the gossip going around, rumors that knew neither ceiling nor cellar (“Alvin, now, I’ve known you since you were a boy. And I want you to tell me straight out whether it’s so. I loved and respected Mr. Clutter, and I refuse to believe that man, that Christian—I refuse to believe he was chasing after women. . . .”).

But most of those who telephoned were responsible citizens wanting to be helpful (“I wonder if you’ve interviewed Nancy’s friend Sue Kidwell? I was talking to the child, and she said something that struck me. She said the last time she ever spoke to Nancy, Nancy told her Mr. Clutter was in a real bad mood. Had been the past three weeks. That she thought he was very worried about something, so worried he’d taken to smoking cigarettes. . . .” ). Either that or the callers were people officially concerned—law officers and sheriffs from other parts of the state (“This may be something, may not, but a bartender here says he overheard two fellows discussing the case in terms made it sound like they had a lot to do with it. . . .”). And while none of these conversations had as yet done more than make extra work for the investigators, it was always possible that the next one might be, as Dewey put it, “the break that brings down the curtain.”

On answering the present call, Dewey immediately heard, “I want to confess.”

He said, “To whom am I speaking, please?”

The caller, a man, repeated his original assertion, and added, “I did it. I killed them all.”

“Yes,” said Dewey. “Now, if I could have your name and address . . .”

“Oh, no, you don’t,” said the man, his voice thick with inebriated indignation. “I’m not going to tell you anything. Not till I get the reward. You send the reward, then I’ll tell you who I am. That’s final.”

Dewey went back to bed. “No, honey,” he said. “Nothing important. Just another drunk.”

“What did he want?”

“Wanted to confess. Provided we sent the reward first.” (A Kansas paper, the Hutchinson News, had offered a thousand dollars for information leading to the solution of the crime.)

“Alvin, are you lighting another cigarette? Honestly, Alvin, can’t you at least try to sleep?”

He was too tense to sleep, even if the telephone could be silenced—too fretful and frustrated. None of his “leads” had led anywhere, except, perhaps, down a blind alley toward the blankest of walls. Bobby Rupp? The polygraph machine had eliminated Bobby. And Mr. Smith, the farmer who tied rope knots identical with those used by the murderer—he, too, was a discarded suspect, having established that on the night of the crime he’d been “off in Oklahoma.” Which left the Johns, father and son, but they had also submitted provable alibis. “So,” to quote Harold Nye, “it all adds up to a nice round number. Zero.” Even the hunt for the grave of Nancy’s cat had come to nothing.

Nevertheless, there had been one or two meaningful developments. First, while sorting Nancy’s clothes, Mrs. Elaine Selsor, her aunt, had found tucked in the toe of a shoe a gold wrist-watch. Second, accompanied by a K.B.I. agent, the housekeeper, Mrs. Helm, had explored every room at River Valley Farm, toured the house in the expectation that she might notice something awry or absent, and she had. It happened in Kenyon’s room. Mrs. Helm looked and looked, paced round and round the room with pursed lips, touching this and that—Kenyon’s old baseball mitt, Kenyon’s mud-spattered work boots, his pathetic abandoned spectacles. All the while, she kept whispering, “Something here is wrong, I feel it, I know it, but I don’t know what it is.” And then she did know. “It’s the radio! Where is Kenyon’s little radio?”

Taken together, these discoveries forced Dewey to consider again the possibility of “plain robbery” as a motive. Surely that watch had not tumbled into Nancy’s shoe by accident? She must, lying there in the dark, have heard sounds—footfalls, perhaps voices—that led her to suppose thieves were in the house, and, so believing, must have hurriedly hidden the watch, a gift from her father that she treasured. As for the radio, a gray portable made by Zenith—no doubt about it, the radio was gone. All the same, Dewey could not accept the theory that the family had been slaughtered for paltry profit—“a few dollars and a radio.” To accept it would obliterate his image of the killer—or, rather, killers. He and his associates had definitely decided to pluralize the term. The expert execution of the crimes was proof enough that at least one of the pair commanded an immoderate amount of coolheaded slyness, and was—must be—a person too clever to have done such a deed without calculated motive. Then, too, Dewey had become aware of several particulars that reinforced his conviction that at least one of the murderers was emotionally involved with the victims, and felt for them, even as he destroyed them, a certain twisted tenderness. How else explain the mattress box?

The business of the mattress box was one of the things that most tantalized Dewey. Why had the murderers taken the trouble to move the box from the far end of the basement room and lay it on the floor in front of the furnace, unless the intention had been to make Mr. Clutter more comfortable—to provide him, while he contemplated the approaching knife, with a couch less rigid than cold cement? And in studying the death-scene photographs Dewey had distinguished other details that seemed to support his notion of a murderer now and again moved by considerate impulses. “Or”—he could never quite find the word he wanted—“something fussy. And soft. Those bedcovers. Now, what kind of person would do that—tie up two women, the way Bonnie and the girl were tied, and then draw up the bedcovers, tuck them in, like sweet dreams and good night? Or the pillows under Kenyon’s head. At first, I thought maybe the pillows were put there to make his head a simpler target. Now I think, No, it was done for the same reason the mattress box was spread on the floor—to make the victim more comfortable.”

But speculations such as these, though they absorbed Dewey, did not gratify him or give him a sense of “getting somewhere.” A case was seldom solved by “fancy theories;” he put his faith in facts—“sweated for and sworn to.” The quantity of facts to be sought and sifted, and the agenda planned to obtain them, promised perspiration aplenty, entailing, as it did, the tracking down, the “checking out,” of hundreds of people, among them all former River Valley Farm employees, friends and family, anyone with whom Mr. Clutter had done business, much or little—a tortoise crawl into the past. For as Dewey had told his team, “We have to keep going till we know the Clutters better than they ever knew themselves. Until we see the connection between what we found last Sunday morning and something that happened maybe five years ago. The link. Got to be one. Got to.”

Dewey’s wife dozed, but she awakened when she felt him leave their bed, heard him once more answering the telephone, and heard, from the nearby room where her sons slept, sobs, a small boy crying. “Paul?” Ordinarily, Paul was neither troubled nor troublesome—not a whiner, ever. He was too busy digging tunnels in the back yard or practicing to be “the fastest runner in Finney County.” But at breakfast that morning he’d burst into tears. His mother had not needed to ask him why; she knew that although he understood only hazily the reasons for the uproar round him, he felt endangered by it—by the harassing telephone, and the strangers at the door, and his father’s worry-wearied eyes. She went to comfort Paul. His brother helped. “Paul,” he said, “you take it easy now, and tomorrow I’ll teach you to play poker.”

Dewey was in the kitchen; Marie, searching for him, found him there, waiting for a pot of coffee to percolate, and with the murder-scene photographs spread before him on the kitchen table—bleak stains, spoiling the table’s pretty fruit-patterned oilcloth. (Once, he had offered to let her look at the pictures. She had declined. She had said, “I want to remember Bonnie the way Bonnie was—and all of them.”) He said, “Maybe the boys ought to stay with Mother.” His mother, a widow, lived not far off, in a house she thought too spacious and silent; the grandchildren were always welcome. “For just a few days. Until—well, until.”

“Alvin, do you think we’ll ever get back to normal living?” Mrs. Dewey asked.

Their normal life was like this: Both worked, Mrs. Dewey as an office secretary, and they divided between them the household chores, taking turns at the stove and the sink. (“When Alvin was sheriff, I know some of the boys teased him. Used to say, ‘Looka-yonder! Here comes Sheriff Dewey! Tough guy! Totes a six-shooter! But once he gets home, off comes the gun and on goes the apron!’ ”) At that time, they were saving to build a house on a farm that Dewey had bought in 1951—two hundred and forty acres several miles north of Garden City. If the weather was fine, and especially when the days were hot and the wheat was high and ripe, he liked to drive out there and practice his draw—shoot crows, tin cans—or, in his imagination, roam through the house he hoped to have, and through the garden he meant to plant, and under trees yet to be seeded. He was very certain that someday his own oasis of oaks and elms would stand upon those shadeless plains: “Someday. God willing.”

A belief in God and the rituals surrounding that belief—church every Sunday, grace before meals, prayers before bed—were an important part of the Deweys’ existence. “I don’t see how anyone can sit down to table without wanting to bless it,” Mrs. Dewey once said. “Sometimes, when I come home from work—well, I’m tired. But there’s always coffee on the stove, and sometimes a steak in the icebox. The boys make a fire to cook the steak, and we talk, and tell each other our day, and by the time supper’s ready I know we have good cause to be happy and grateful. So I say, ‘Thank you, Lord.’ Not just because I should—because I want to.”

Now Mrs. Dewey said, “Alvin, answer me. Do you think we’ll ever have a normal life again?”

He started to reply, but the telephone stopped him.

The old Chevrolet left Kansas City November 21st, Saturday night. Luggage was lashed to the fenders and roped to the roof; the trunk was so stuffed it could not be shut; inside, on the back seat, two television sets stood, one atop the other. It was a tight fit for the passengers: Dick, who was driving, and Perry, who sat clutching an old Gibson guitar, his most beloved possession. As for Perry’s other belongings—a cardboard suitcase, a gray Zenith portable radio, a gallon jug of root-beer syrup (he feared that his favorite beverage might not be available in Mexico), and two big boxes containing books, manuscripts, cherished memorabilia (and hadn’t Dick raised hell! Cursed, kicked the boxes, called them “five hundred pounds of pig slop!” )—these, too, were part of the car’s untidy interior.

Around midnight, they crossed the border into Oklahoma. Perry, glad to be out of Kansas, at last relaxed. Now it was true—they were on their way. On their way, and never coming back—without regret, as far as he was concerned, for he was leaving nothing behind, and no one who might deeply wonder into what thin air he’d spiralled. The same could not be said of Dick. There were those Dick claimed to love: three sons, a mother, a father, a brother—persons he hadn’t dared confide his plans to, or bid goodbye, though he never expected to see them again—not in this life.

“Clutter-English vows given in Saturday ceremony”: that headline, appearing on the social page of the Garden City Telegram for Monday, November 23rd, surprised many of its readers. It seemed that Beverly, the second of Mr. Clutter’s surviving daughters, had married Mr. Vere Edward English, the young biology student to whom she had long been engaged. Miss Clutter had worn white, and the wedding, a full-scale affair (“Mrs. Leonard Cowan was soloist, and Mrs. Howard Blanchard organist”), had been “solemnized at the First Methodist Church”—the church in which, three days earlier, the bride had formally mourned her parents, her brother, and her younger sister. However, according to the Telegram’s account, “Vere and Beverly had planned to be married at Christmas time. The invitations were printed and her father had reserved the church for that date. Due to the unexpected tragedy and because of the many relatives being here from distant places, the young couple decided to have their wedding Saturday.”

The wedding over, the Clutter kinfolk dispersed. On that same Monday—the day the last of them left Garden City—the Telegram featured on its front page a letter written by Mr. Howard Fox, of Oregon, Illinois, a brother of Bonnie Clutter. The letter, after expressing gratitude to the townspeople for having opened their “homes and hearts” to the bereaved family, turned into a plea. “There is much resentment in this community [that is, Garden City],” wrote Mr. Fox. “I have even heard on more than one occasion that the man, when found, should be hanged from the nearest tree. Let us not feel this way. The deed is done and taking another life cannot change it. Instead, let us forgive as God would have us do. It is not right that we should hold a grudge in our hearts. The doer of this act is going to find it very difficult indeed to live with himself. His only peace of mind will be when he goes to God for forgiveness. Let us not stand in the way but instead give prayers that he may find his peace.”

The car was parked on a promontory where Perry and Dick had stopped to eat. It was noon. Dick scanned the view through a pair of binoculars. Mountains. Hawks wheeling in a white sky. A dusty road winding into and out of a white and dusty village. Today was his second day in Mexico, and so far he liked it fine—even the food. (At this very moment, he was eating a cold, oily tortilla.) They had crossed the border at Laredo, Texas, the morning of November 23rd, and spent the first night in a San Luis Potosi brothel. They were now two hundred miles north of their next destination, Mexico City.

“Know what I think?” said Perry. “I think there must be something wrong with us. To do what we did.”

“Did what?”

“Out there.”

Dick dropped the binoculars into a leather case, a luxurious receptacle initialled “H.W.C.” He was annoyed. Annoyed as hell. Why the hell couldn’t Perry shut up? Christ Jesus, what damn good did it do, always dragging the goddam thing up? It really was annoying. Especially since they’d agreed, sort of, not to talk about the goddam thing. Just forget it.

“There’s got to be something wrong with somebody who’d do a thing like that,” Perry said.

“Deal me out, baby,” Dick said. “I’m a normal.” And Dick meant what he said. He thought himself as balanced, as sane as anyone—maybe a bit smarter than the average fellow, that’s all. But Perry—there was, in Dick’s opinion, “something wrong” with Little Perry. To say the least. Last spring, when they had celled together at Kansas State Penitentiary, he’d learned most of Perry’s lesser peculiarities: Perry could be “such a kid,” always wetting his bed and crying in his sleep (“Dad, I been looking everywhere, where you been, Dad?”), and often Dick had seen him “sit for hours just sucking his thumb and poring over them phony damn treasure guides.” Which was one side; there were others. In some ways, old Perry was “spooky as hell.” Take, for instance, that temper of his. He could slide into a fury “quicker than ten drunk Indians.” And yet you wouldn’t know it. “He might be ready to kill you, but you’d never know it, not to look at or listen to,” Dick once said. For, however extreme the inward rage, outwardly Perry remained a cool young tough, with eyes serene and slightly sleepy, and a soft, unemphatic voice. The time had been when Dick had thought he could control, could regulate the temperature of these sudden cold fevers that burned and chilled his friend. He had been mistaken, and, in the aftermath of that discovery, had grown very unsure of Perry, not at all certain what to think—except that he felt he ought to be afraid of him, and wondered really why he wasn’t.

“Deep down,” Perry continued, “way, way rock-bottom, I never thought I could do it. A thing like that.”

“How about the nigger?” Dick said. Silence. Dick realized that Perry was staring at him. A week ago, in Kansas City, Perry had bought a pair of dark glasses—fancy ones with silver-lacquered rims and mirrored lenses. Dick disliked them; he’d told Perry he was ashamed to be seen with “anyone who’d wear that kind of flit stuff.” Actually, what irked him was the mirrored lenses; it was unpleasant having Perry’s eyes hidden behind the privacy of those tinted, reflecting surfaces.

“But a nigger,” said Perry. “That’s different.”

The comment, the reluctance with which it was pronounced, made Dick ask, “Or did you? Kill him like you said?” It was a significant question, for his original interest in Perry, his assessment of Perry’s character and potentialities, was founded on a story Perry had told him—the tale of how he’d once, merely because he “felt like it,” beaten a colored man to death.

“Sure I did. Only—a nigger. It’s not the same.” Then Perry said, “Know what it is that really bugs me? About that other thing? It’s just I don’t believe it—that anyone can get away with a thing like that. Because I don’t see how it’s possible. To do what we did. And just one hundred per cent get away with it. I mean, that’s what bugs me—I can’t get it out of my head that something’s got to happen.”

Though as a child he had attended church, Dick had never “come near” a belief in God. Nor was he troubled by superstitions. Unlike Perry, he was not convinced that a broken mirror meant seven years’ misfortune, or that a young moon, if glimpsed through glass, portended evil. But Perry, with his sharp and scratchy intuitions, had hit upon Dick’s one abiding doubt. Dick, too, suffered moments when that question circled inside his head: Was it possible—were the two of them going to “just one hundred per cent get away with it”? Suddenly he said to Perry, “Now, just shut up!” Then he gunned the motor and backed the car off the promontory. Ahead of him, on the dusty road, he saw a dog trotting along in the warm sunshine.

The car parked on the promontory. Mountains. Hawks wheeling in the white sky.

When Perry asked Dick the question “Know what I think?” he knew he was beginning a conversation that would displease Dick, and one that, for that matter, he himself would quite as soon avoid. He agreed with Dick: Why go on talking about it? But he could not always stop himself. Spells of helplessness occurred, moments when he “remembered things”—blue light exploding in a black room, the glass eyes of a big toy bear—and when voices, a particular few words, started nagging his mind: “Oh, no! Oh, please! No! No! No! No! Don’t! Oh, please don’t! Please!” And certain sounds returned—a silver dollar rolling across a floor, bootsteps on hardwood stairs, and the sounds of breathing, the gasps, the hysterical inhalations of a man with a severed windpipe.

When Perry said, “I think there must be something wrong with us,” he was making an admission he “hated to make.” After all, it was “painful” to imagine that one might be “not just right”—particularly if whatever was wrong was not your own fault but “maybe a thing you were born with.” Look at his family! Look at what had happened there! His mother, an alcoholic, had strangled to death on her own vomit. Of her children, two sons and two daughters, only the younger girl, Barbara, had entered ordinary life, married, begun raising a family. Fern, the other daughter, jumped out of a window of a San Francisco hotel. (Perry had ever since “tried to believe she slipped,” for he’d loved Fern. She was “such a sweet person,” so “artistic,” a “terrific” dancer, and she could sing, too. “If she’d ever had any luck at all, with her looks and all she could have got somewhere, been somebody.” It was sad to think of her climbing over a window sill and falling fifteen floors.) And there was Jimmy, the older boy—Jimmy, who had killed his wife one day and himself the next.

Then he heard Dick say, “Deal me out, baby. I’m a normal.” Wasn’t that a horse’s laugh? But never mind, let it pass. “Deep down,” Perry continued, “way, way rock-bottom, I never thought I could do it. A thing like that.” And at once he recognized his error: Dick would, of course, answer by asking, “How about the nigger?” When he’d told Dick that story, it was because he’d wanted Dick’s friendship, wanted Dick to “respect” him, think him “hard,” as much “the masculine type” as he had considered Dick to be. And so, one day, after they had both read and were discussing a Reader’s Digest article entitled “How Good a Character Detective Are You?” (“As you wait in a dentist’s office or a railway station, try studying the giveaway signs in people around you. Watch the way they walk, for example. A stiff-legged gait can reveal a rigid, unbending personality; a shambling walk a lack of determination”), Perry had said, “I’ve always been an outstanding character detective, otherwise I’d be dead today. Like if I couldn’t judge when to trust somebody. You never can much. But I’ve come to trust you, Dick. You’ll see I do, because I’m going to put myself in your power. I’m going to tell you something I never told anybody. Not even Willie-Jay. About the time I fixed a guy.” And Perry saw, as he went on, that Dick was interested; he was really listening. “It was a couple of summers ago. Out in Vegas. I was living in this old boarding house—it used to be a fancy cat house. But all the fancy was gone. It was a place they should have torn down ten years back; anyway, it was sort of coming down by itself. The cheapest rooms were in the attic, and I lived up there. So did this nigger. His name was King; he was a transient. We were the only two up there—us and a million cucarachas. King, he wasn’t too young, but he’d done roadwork and other outdoor stuff—he had a good build. He wore glasses, and he read a lot. He never shut his door. Every time I passed by, he was always lying there buck-naked. He was out of work, and said he’d saved a few dollars from his last job, said he wanted to stay in bed awhile, read and fan himself and drink beer. The stuff he read, it was just junk—comic books and cowboy junk. He was O.K. Sometimes we’d have a beer together, and once he lent me ten dollars. I had no cause to hurt him. But one night we were sitting in the attic, it was so hot you couldn’t sleep, so I said, ‘Come on, King, let’s go for a drive.’ I had an old car I’d stripped and souped and painted silver—the Silver Ghost, I called it. We went for a long drive. Drove way out in the desert. Out there it was cool. We parked and drank a few more beers. King got out of the car, and I followed after him. He didn’t see I’d picked up this chain. A bicycle chain I kept under the seat. Actually, I had no real idea to do it till I did it. I hit him across the face. Broke his glasses. I kept right on. Afterward, I didn’t feel a thing. I left him there, and never heard a word about it. Maybe nobody ever found him. Just buzzards.”

There was some truth in the story. Perry had known, under the circumstances stated, a Negro named King. But if the man was dead today it was none of Perry’s doing; he’d never raised a hand against him. For all he knew, King might still be lying abed somewhere, fanning himself and sipping beer.

“Or did you? Kill him like you said?” Dick asked.

Perry was not a gifted liar, or a prolific one; however, once he had told a fiction he usually stuck by it. “Sure I did. Only—a nigger. It’s not the same.” Presently, he said, “Know what it is that really bugs me? About that other thing? It’s just I don’t believe it—that anyone can get away with a thing like that.” And he suspected that Dick didn’t, either. For Dick was at least partly inhabited by Perry’s mystical-moral apprehensions. Thus: “Now, just shut up!”

The car was moving. A hundred feet ahead, a dog trotted along the side of the road. Dick swerved toward it. It was an old, starved, half-dead mongrel, brittle-boned and mangy, and the impact, as it met the car, was little more than what a bird might make. But Dick was satisfied. “Boy!” he said—and it was what he always said after running down a dog, which was something he did whenever the opportunity arose. “Boy! We sure splattered him!”

Thanksgiving passed, and the pheasant season came to a halt, but not the beautiful, long Indian summer, with its flow of clear, pure days. The last of the out-of-town newsmen, convinced that the case was never going to be solved, left Garden City. But the case was by no means closed for the people of Finney County, and least of all for those who patronized Holcomb’s favorite meeting place, Hartman’s Café.

“Since the trouble started, we’ve been doing all the business we can handle,” Mrs. Bess Hartman said, gazing around her snug domain, every scrap of which was being sat or stood or leaned upon by tobacco-scented, coffee-drinking farmers, farm helpers, and ranch hands. “Just a bunch of old women,” added Mrs. Hartman’s cousin, Postmistress Clare, who happened to be on the premises. “If it was spring, and work to be done, they wouldn’t be here. But wheat’s in, winter’s on the way, they got nothing to do but sit around and scare each other. You know Bill Brown, down to the Telegram? See the editorial he wrote? That one he called it ‘Another Crime’? Said, ‘It’s time for everyone to stop wagging loose tongues.’ Because that’s a crime, too—telling plain-out lies. But what can you expect? Look around you. Rattlesnakes. Varmints. Rumormongers. See anything else? Ha! Like dash you do.”

One rumor originating in Hartman’s Café involved Mr. Taylor Jones, a rancher whose property adjoins River Valley Farm. In the opinion of a good part of the cafe’s clientele, Mr. Jones and his family, not the Clutters, were the murderer’s intended victims. “It makes harder sense,” argued one of those who held this view. “Taylor Jones, he’s a richer man than Herb Clutter ever was. Now, pretend the fellow who done it wasn’t anyone from hereabouts. Pretend he’d been maybe hired to kill, and all he had was instructions on how to get to the house. Well, it would be mighty easy to make a mistake—take the wrong turn—and end up at Herb’s place ’stead of Taylor’s.” The “Jones Theory” was much repeated—especially to the Joneses, a dignified and sensible family, who refused to be flustered.

A lunch counter, a few tables, an alcove harboring a hot grill and an icebox and a radio—that’s all there is to Hartman’s Café. “But our customers like it,” says the proprietress. “Got to. Nowhere else for them to go. ’Less they drive seven miles one direction or fifteen the other. Anyway, we run a friendly place, and the coffee’s good since Mabel came to work,” Mabel being Mrs. Helm, the Clutters’ former housekeeper. “After the tragedy, I said, ‘Mabel, now that you’re out of a job, why don’t you come give me a hand at the café. Cook a little. Wait counter.’ How it turned out—the only bad feature is, everybody comes in here, they pester her with questions. About the tragedy. But Mabel’s not like Cousin Myrt. Or me. She’s shy. Besides, she doesn’t know anything special. No more than anybody else.” But by and large the Hartman congregation continued to suspect that Mabel Helm knew a thing or two that she was holding back. And, of course, she did. Dewey had had several conversations with her and had requested that everything they said be kept secret. Particularly, she was not to mention the missing radio or the watch found in Nancy’s shoe. Which is why she said to Mrs. Archibald William Warren-Browne, “Anybody reads the papers knows as much as I do. More. Because I don’t read them.”

Square, squat, in the earlier forties, an Englishwoman fitted out with an accent almost incoherently upper-class, Mrs. Archibald William Warren-Browne did not at all resemble the café’s other frequenters, and seemed, within that setting, like a peacock trapped in a turkey pen. Once, explaining to an acquaintance why she and her husband had abandoned “family estates in the North of England,” exchanging the hereditary home—“the jolliest, oh, the prettiest old priory”—for an old and highly unjolly farmhouse on the plains of western Kansas, Mrs. Warren-Browne said, “Taxes, my dear. Death duties. Enormous, criminal death duties. That’s what drove us out of England. Yes, we left a year ago. Without regrets. None. We love it here. Just adore it. Though, of course, it’s very different from our other life. The life we’ve always known. Paris and Rome. Monte. London. I do—occasionally—think of London. Oh, I don’t really miss it—the frenzy, and never a cab, and always worrying how one looks. Positively not. We love it here. I suppose some people—those aware of our past, the life we’ve led—wonder aren’t we the tiniest bit lonely, out here in the wheat fields. Out West is where we meant to settle. Wyoming or Nevada—la vraie chose. We hoped when we got there some oil might stick to us. But on our way we stopped to visit friends in Garden City—friends of friends, actually. But they couldn’t have been kinder. Insisted we linger on. And we thought, Well, why not? Why not hire a bit of land and start ranching? Or farming. Which is a decision we still haven’t come to—whether to ranch or farm. Dr. Austin asked if we didn’t find it perhaps too quiet. Actually, no. Actually, I’ve never known such bedlam. It’s noisier than a bomb raid. Train whistles. Coyotes. Monsters howling the bloody night long. A horrid racket. And since the murders it seems to bother me more. So many things do. Our house—what an old creaker it is! Mark you, I’m not complaining. Really, it’s quite a serviceable house—has all the mod. cons.—but, oh, how it coughs and grunts! And after dark, when the wind commences, that hateful prairie wind, one hears the most appalling moans. I mean, if one’s a bit nervy, one can’t help imagining—silly things. Dear God! That poor family! No, we never met them. I saw Mr. Clutter once. In the Federal Building.”

Early in December, in the course of a single afternoon, two of the café’s steadiest customers announced plans to pack up and leave not merely Finney County but the state. The first was a tenant farmer who worked for Mr. Lester McCoy, a well-known western-Kansas landowner and businessman. He said, “I had myself a talk with Mr. McCoy. Tried to let him know what’s going on out here in Holcomb and hereabouts. How a body can’t sleep. My wife can’t sleep, and she won’t allow me. So I told Mr. McCoy I like his place fine but he better hunt up another man. ’Count of we’re movin’ on. Down to east Colorado. Maybe then I’ll get some rest.”

The second announcement was made by Mrs. Hideo Ashida, a farmer’s wife, who stopped by the café with three of her four red-cheeked Japanese-American children. She lined them up at the counter and told Mrs. Hartman, “Give Bruce a box of Cracker Jack. Bobby wants a Coke,. Bonnie Jean? We know how you feel, Bonnie Jean, but come on, have a treat.” Bonnie Jean shook her head, and Mrs. Ashida said, “Bonnie Jean’s sort of blue. She don’t want to leave here. The school here. And all her friends.”

“Why, say,” said Mrs. Hartman, smiling at Bonnie Jean. “That’s nothing to be sad over. Transferring from Holcomb to Garden City High. Lots more boys—”

Bonnie Jean said, “You don’t understand. Daddy’s taking us away. To Nebraska.”

Bess Hartman looked at the mother, as if expecting her to deny the daughter’s allegation.

“It’s true, Bess,” Mrs. Ashida said.

“I don’t know what to say,” said Mrs. Hartman, her voice indignantly astonished, and also despairing. The Ashidas were a part of the Holcomb community everyone appreciated—a family likably high-spirited, yet hardworking, and neighborly and generous, though they didn’t have much to be generous with.

Mrs. Ashida said, “We’ve been talking on it a long time. Hideo, he thinks we can do better somewhere else.”

“When you plan to go?”

“Soon as we sell up. But anyway not before Christmas. On account of a deal we’ve worked out with the dentist. About Hideo’s Christmas present. Me and the kids, we’re giving him three gold teeth. For Christmas.”

Mrs. Hartman sighed. “I don’t know what to say. Except I wish you wouldn’t. Just up and leave us.” She sighed again. “Seems like we’re losing everybody. One way and another.”

“Gosh, you think I want to leave?” Mrs. Ashida said. “Far as people go, this is the nicest place we ever lived. But Hideo, he’s the man, and he says we can get a better farm in Nebraska. And I’ll tell you something, Bess.” Mrs. Ashida attempted a frown, but her plump, round, smooth face could not quite manage it. “We used to argue about it. Then, one night, I said, ‘O.K., you’re the boss, let’s go.’ After what happened to Herb and his family, I felt something around here had come to an end. I mean personally. For me. And so I quit arguing. I said O.K.” She dipped a hand into Bruce’s box of Cracker Jack. “Gosh, I can’t get over it. I can’t get it off my mind. I liked Herb. Did you know I was one of the last to see him alive? Uh-huh. Me and the kids. We been to the 4-H meeting in Garden City and he gave us a ride home. The last thing I said to Herb, I told him how I couldn’t imagine his ever being afraid. That no matter what the situation was, he could talk his way out of it.” Thoughtfully she nibbled a kernel of Cracker Jack, took a swig of Bobby’s Coke, then said, “Funny, but, you know, Bess, I’ll bet he wasn’t afraid. I mean, however it happened, I’ll bet right up to the last he didn’t believe it would. Because it couldn’t. Not to him.”

The sun was blazing. A small boat was riding at anchor in a mild sea: the Estrellita, with four persons aboard—Dick, Perry, a young Mexican, and Otto, a rich middle-aged German.

“Please. Again,” said Otto, and Perry, strumming his guitar, sang in a husky-sweet voice a Smoky Mountains song:

“In this world today while we’re living
Some folks say the worst of us they can,
But when we’re dead and in our caskets,
They always slip some lilies in our hand.
Won’t you give me flowers while I’m living. . . .”

A week in Mexico City, and then he and Dick had driven south—Cuernavaca, Taxco, Acapulco. And it was in Acapulco, in a “jukebox honky-tonk,” that they had met the hairy-legged and hearty Otto. Dick had “picked him up.” But the gentleman, a vacationing Hamburg lawyer, “already had a friend”—a young native Acapulcan who called himself the Cowboy. “He proved to be a trustworthy person,” Perry once said of the Cowboy. “Mean as Judas, some ways, but, oh, man, a funny boy, a real fast jockey. Dick liked him, too. We got on great.”

The Cowboy found for the tattooed drifters a room in the house of an uncle, undertook to improve Perry’s Spanish, and shared the benefits of his liaison with the holidaymaker from Hamburg, in whose company and at whose expense they drank and ate and bought women. The host seemed to think his pesos well spent, if only because he relished Dick’s jokes. Each day, Otto hired the Estrellita, a deep-sea-fishing craft, and the four friends went trawling along the coast. The Cowboy skippered the boat; Otto sketched and fished; Perry baited hooks, daydreamed, sang, and sometimes fished; Dick did nothing—only moaned, complained of the motion, lay about sun-drugged and listless, like a lizard at siesta. But Perry said, “This is finally it. The way it ought to be.” Still, he knew that it couldn’t continue—that it was, in fact, destined to stop that very day. The next day, Otto was returning to Germany, and Perry and Dick were driving back to Mexico City—at Dick’s insistence. “Sure, baby,” he’d said when they were debating the matter. “It’s nice and all. With the sun on your back. But the dough’s going-going-gone. And after we’ve sold the car, what have we got left?” The answer was that they had very little, for they had by now mostly disposed of the stuff acquired the day of the Kansas City check-passing spree—the camera, the cufflinks, the television sets. Also, they had sold, to a Mexico City policeman with whom Dick had got acquainted, a pair of binoculars and a gray Zenith portable radio. “What we’ll do is, we’ll go back to Mex, sell the car, and maybe I can get a garage job. Anyway, it’s a better deal up there. Better opportunities. Christ, I sure could use some more of that Inez.” Inez was a prostitute who had accosted Dick on the steps of the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City (the visit was part of a sightseeing tour taken to please Perry). She was eighteen, and Dick had promised to marry her. But he had also promised to marry Maria, a woman of fifty, who was the widow of a “very prominent Mexican banker.” They had met in a bar, and the next morning she had paid him the equivalent of seven dollars. “So how about it?” Dick said to Perry. “We’ll sell the wagon. Find a job. Save our dough. And see what happens.” As though Perry couldn’t predict precisely what would happen. Suppose they got two or three hundred for the old Chevrolet. Dick, if he knew Dick, and he did—now he did—would spend it right away on vodka and women.

While Perry sang, Otto sketched him in a sketchbook. It was a passable likeness, and the artist perceived one not very obvious aspect of the sitter’s countenance—its mischief, an amused, babyish malice that suggested some unkind cupid aiming envenomed arrows. He was naked to the waist. (Perry was “ashamed” to take off his trousers, “ashamed” to wear swimming trunks, for he was afraid that the sight of his injured legs would “disgust people,” and so, despite his underwater reveries, all the talk about skin diving, he hadn’t once gone into the water.) Otto reproduced a number of the tattoos ornamenting the subject’s overmuscled chest, his arms (a snake, a snarling tiger), and his small and calloused but girlish hands. The sketchbook, which Otto gave Perry as a parting gift, contained several drawings of Dick—“nude studies.”

Otto shut his sketchbook, Perry put down his guitar, and the Cowboy raised anchor, started the engine. It was time to go. They were ten miles out, and the water was darkening.

Perry urged Dick to fish. “We may never have another chance,” he said.

“Chance?”

“To catch a big one.”

“Jesus, I’ve got the bastard kind,” Dick said. “I’m sick.” Dick often had headaches of migraine intensity—“the bastard kind.” He thought they were the result of his 1950 automobile accident, the collision that had unbalanced the proportions of his face and left his eyes unmatching, one aslant, misshapen. “Please, baby. Let’s be very, very quiet.”

Moments later, Dick had forgotten his pain. He was on his feet, shouting with excitement. Otto and the Cowboy were shouting, too. Perry had hooked “a big one.” Ten feet of soaring, plunging sailfish, it leaped, arched like a rainbow, dived, sank deep, tugged the line taut, rose, flew, fell, rose. An hour passed, and part of another, before the sweat-soaked sportsman reeled it in.

There is an old man with an ancient wooden box camera who hangs around the harbor in Acapulco, and when the Estrellita docked, Otto commissioned him to do six portraits of Perry posed beside his catch. Technically, the old man’s work turned out badly—brown and streaked. Still, they were remarkable photographs, and what made them so was Perry’s expression, his look of unflawed fulfillment, of beatitude, as though at last, and as in one of his dreams, the tall yellow bird had hauled him to Heaven.

One December afternoon, Paul Helm, husband of Mabel and himself a long-time employee of River Valley Farm, was pruning the patch of floral odds and ends that had entitled Bonnie Clutter to membership in the Garden City Garden Club. It was a melancholy task, for he was reminded of another afternoon when he’d done the same chore. Kenyon had helped him that day, and it was the last time he’d seen Kenyon alive, or Nancy, or any of them. The weeks between had been hard on Mr. Helm. He was “in poor health” (poorer than he knew; he had less than four months to live), and he was worried about a lot of things. His job, for one. He doubted he would have it much longer. Nobody seemed really to know, but he understood that “the girls,” Beverly and Eveanna, intended to sell the property—though, as he’d heard one of the boys at the café remark, “ain’t nobody gonna buy that spread, long as the mystery lasts.” It “didn’t do” to think about—strangers here, harvesting “our” land. Mr. Helm minded—he minded for Herb’s sake. This was a place, he said, that “ought to be kept in a man’s family.” Once, Herb had said to him, “I hope there’ll always be a Clutter here, and a Helm, too.” It was only a year ago Herb had said that. Lord, what was he to do if the farm got sold? He felt “too old to fit in somewhere different.” Still, he must work, and he wanted to. He wasn’t, he said, the kind to kick off his shoes and sit by the stove. And yet it was true that the farm nowadays made him uneasy: the locked house, Nancy’s horse forlornly waiting in a field, the odor of windfall apples rotting under the apple trees, and the absence of voices—Kenyon calling Nancy to the telephone, Herb whistling, his glad “Good morning, Paul.” He and Herb had “got along grand”—never a cross word between them. Why, then, did the men from the sheriff’s office continue to question him? Unless they thought he had “something to hide”? Maybe he ought never to have mentioned the Mexicans. He had informed Al Dewey that at approximately four o’clock on Saturday, November 14th, the day of the murders, a pair of Mexicans, one mustachioed and the other pock-marked, appeared at River Valley Farm. Mr. Helm had seen them knock on the door of “the office,” seen Herb step outside and talk to them on the lawn, and, possibly ten minutes later, watched the strangers walk away, “looking sulky.” Mr. Helm figured that they had come asking for work and had been told there was none. Unfortunately, though he’d been called upon to recount his version of that day’s events many times, he had not spoken of the incident until two weeks after the crime, because, as he explained to Dewey, “I just suddenly recalled it.” But Dewey, and some of the other investigators, seemed not to credit his story, and behaved as though it were a tale he’d invented to mislead them. They preferred to believe Bob Johnson, the insurance salesman, who had spent all of Saturday afternoon conferring with Mr. Clutter in the latter’s office, and who was “absolutely positive” that, from two to ten past six, he had been Herb’s sole visitor. Mr. Helm was equally definite: Mexicans, a mustache, pockmarks, four o’clock. Herb would have told them that he was speaking the truth, convinced them that he, Paul Helm, was a man who “said his prayers and earned his bread.” But Herb was gone.

Gone. And Bonnie, too. Her bedroom window overlooked the garden, and now and then, usually when she was “having a bad spell,” Mr. Helm had seen her stand long hours gazing into the garden, as though what she saw bewitched her. (“When I was a girl,” she had once told a friend, “I was terribly sure trees and flowers were the same as birds or people. That they thought things, and talked among themselves. And we could hear them if we really tried. It was just a matter of emptying your head of all other sounds. Being very quiet and listening very hard. Sometimes I still believe that. But one can never get quiet enough. . . .”)

Remembering Bonnie at the window, Mr. Helm looked up, as though he expected to see her, a ghost behind the glass. If he had, it could not have amazed him more than what he did in fact discern—a hand holding back a curtain, and eyes. “But,” as he subsequently described it, “the sun was hitting that side of the house”—it made the window glass waver, shimmeringly twisted what hung beyond it—and, by the time Mr. Helm had shielded his eyes, then looked again, the curtains had swung closed, the window was vacant. “My eyes aren’t too good, and I wondered if they had played me a trick,” he recalled. “But I was pretty darn certain that they hadn’t. And I was pretty darn certain it wasn’t any spook. Because I don’t believe in spooks. So who could it be? Sneaking around in there. Where nobody’s got a right to go, except the law. And how did they get in? With everything locked up like the radio was advertising tornadoes. That’s what I wondered. But I wasn’t expecting to find out—not by myself. I dropped what I was doing, and cut across the fields to Holcomb. Soon as I got there, I phoned Sheriff Robinson. Explained that there was somebody prowling around inside the Clutter house. Well, they came raring right on out. State troopers. The sheriff and his bunch. The K.B.I. fellows. Al Dewey. Just as they were stringing themselves around the place, sort of getting ready for action, the front door opened.” Out walked a person no one present had ever seen before—a man in his middle thirties, dull-eyed, wild-haired, and wearing a hip holster stocked with a .38-calibre pistol. “I guess all of us there had the identical idea—this was him, the one who came and killed them,” Mr. Helm continued. “He didn’t make a move. Stood quiet. Kind of blinking. They took the gun away, and started asking questions.” The man’s name was Adrian—Jonathan Daniel Adrian. He was on his way to New Mexico, and at present had no fixed address. For what purpose had he broken into the Clutter house, and how, incidentally, had he managed it? He showed them how. (He had lifted a lid off a water well and crawled through a pipe tunnel that led into the basement.) As for why, he had read about the case and was curious, just wanted to see what the place looked like. “And then,” according to Mr. Helm’s memory of the episode, “somebody asked him was he a hitchhiker? Hitchhiking his way to New Mexico? No, he said, he was driving his own car. And it was parked down the lane a piece. So everybody went to look at the car. When they found what was inside it, one of the men—maybe it was Al Dewey—said to him, told this Jonathan Daniel Adrian, ‘Well, Mister, seems like we’ve got something to discuss.’ Because, inside the car, what they’d found was a 12-gauge shotgun. And a hunting knife.”

A room in a hotel in Mexico City. In the room was an ugly modern bureau with a lavender-tinted mirror, and tucked into a corner of the mirror was a printed warning from the management:

SU DÍA TERMINA A LAS 2 P.M.
YOUR DAY ENDS AT 2 P.M.

Guests, in other words, must vacate the room by the stated hour or expect to be charged another day’s rent—a luxury that the present occupants were not contemplating. They wondered only whether they could settle the sum already owed. For everything had evolved as Perry had prophesied: Dick had sold the car, and three days later the money, slightly less than two hundred dollars, had largely vanished. On the fourth day, Dick had gone out hunting honest work, and that night he had announced to Perry, “Nuts! You know what they pay? What the wages are? For an expert mechanic? Two bucks a day. Mexico! Honey, I’ve had it. We got to make it out of here. Back to the States. No, now, I’m not going to listen. Diamonds. Buried treasure. Wake up, little boy. There ain’t no caskets of gold. No sunken ship. And even if there was—hell, you can’t even swim.” And the next day, having borrowed money from the richer of his two fiancées, the banker’s widow, Dick bought bus tickets that would take them, via San Diego, as far as Barstow, California. “After that,” he said, “we walk.”

Of course, Perry could have struck out on his own, stayed in Mexico, let Dick go where he damn well wanted. Why not? Hadn’t he always been “a loner,” and without any “real friends” (except the gray-haired, gray-eyed, and “brilliant” Willie-Jay)? But he was afraid to leave Dick; merely to consider it made him feel “sort of sick,” as though he were trying to make up his mind to “jump off a train going ninety-nine miles an hour.” The basis of his fear, or so he himself seemed to believe, was a newly grown superstitious certainty that “whatever has to happen won’t happen” as long as he and Dick “stick together.” Then, too, the severity of Dick’s “wake-up” speech, the belligerence with which he’d proclaimed his theretofore concealed opinion of Perry’s dreams and hopes—all this, perversity being what it is, appealed to Perry, hurt and shocked him but charmed him, almost revived his former faith in the tough, the “totally masculine,” the pragmatic, the decisive Dick he’d once allowed to boss him. And so, since a sunrise hour on a chilly Mexico City morning in early December, Perry had been prowling about the unheated hotel room assembling and packing his possessions—stealthily, lest he waken the two sleeping shapes lying on one of the room’s twin beds: Dick, and the younger of his betrotheds, Inez.

There was one belonging of his that need no longer concern him. On their last night in Acapulco, a thief had stolen the Gibson guitar—absconded with it from a waterfront café where he, Otto, Dick, and the Cowboy had been bidding one another a highly alcoholic goodbye. And Perry was bitter about it. He felt, he later said, “real mean and low,” explaining, “You have a guitar long enough, like I had that one, wax and shine it, fit your voice to it, treat it like it was a girl you really had some use for—well, it gets to be kind of holy.” But while the purloined guitar presented no ownership problem, his remaining property did. As he and Dick would soon be travelling by foot or thumb, they clearly could not carry with them more than a few shirts and socks. The rest of their clothing would have to be shipped, and, indeed, Perry had already filled a cardboard carton (putting into it—along with some bits of unlaundered laundry—two pairs of boots, one pair with soles that left a Cat’s Paw print, the other pair with diamond-patterned soles) and addressed it to himself, care of General Delivery, Las Vegas, Nevada.

But the big question, and source of heartache, was what to do with his much loved memorabilia—the two huge boxes heavy with books and maps, yellowing letters, song lyrics, poems, and unusual souvenirs (suspenders and a belt fabricated from the skins of Nevada rattlers he himself had slain; an erotic netsuke bought in Kyoto; a petrified dwarf tree, also from Japan; the foot of an Alaskan bear). Probably the best solution—at least, the best Perry could devise—was to leave the stuff with “Jesus.” The “Jesus” he had in mind tended bar in a café across the street from the hotel, and was, Perry thought, muy simpático, definitely someone he could trust to return the boxes on demand. (He intended to send for them as soon as he had a “fixed address.”) Still, there were some things too precious to chance losing, so while the lovers drowsed and time dawdled on toward 2P.M., Perry looked through old letters, photographs, clippings, and selected from them those mementos he meant to take with him. Among them was a badly typed composition entitled “A History of My Boy’s Life.” The author of this manuscript was Perry’s father, who, in an effort to help his son obtain a parole from Kansas State Penitentiary, had written it the previous December and mailed it to the Kansas State Parole Board. It was a document that Perry had read at least a hundred times, never with indifference:

“Childhood—Be glad to tell you, as I see it, both bad and good. Yes, Perry birth was normal. Healthy—yes. Yes, I was able to care for him properly until my wife turned out to be a disgraceful drunkard when my children were at school age. Happy disposition—yes and no, very serious if mistreated he never forgets. I also keep my promises and make him do so. My wife was different. We lived in the country. We are all truly outdoor people. I taught my children the Golden Rule. Live & let live and in many cases my children would tell on each other when doing wrong and the guilty one would always admit, and come forward, willing for a spanking. And promise to be good, and always done their work quickly and willing so they could be free to play. Always wash themselves first thing in the morning, dress in clean clothes. I was very strict about that, and wrong doings to others, and if wrong was done to them by other kids I made them quit playing with them. Our children were no trouble to us while we were together. It all started when my wife wanted to go to the City and live a wild life, and ran away to do so. I let her go and said goodby as she took the car and left me behind (this was during depression ). My children all cryed at the top of their voices. She only cussed them saying they would run away to come to me later. She got mad and then said she would turn the children to hate me, which she did, all but Perry. For the love of my children after several months I went to find them, located them in San Francisco, my wife not knowing. I tryed to see them in school. My wife had given orders to the teacher not to let me see them. However, I managed to see them while playing in the school yard and was surprised when they told me, ‘Mama told us not to talk to you.’ All but Perry. He was different. He put his arms around me and wanted to run away with me rite then. I told him No. But rite after school was out, he ran away to my lawyers office Mr. Rinso Turco. I took my boy back to his mother and left the City. Perry later told me, his mother told him to find a new home. While my children were with her they run around as they pleased, I understand Perry got into trouble. I wanted her to ask for divorce, which she did after about a year or so. Her drinkin and stepin out, living with a young man. I contested the divorce and was granted full custody of the children. I took Perry to my home to live with me. The other children were put in homes as I could not manage to take them all in my home and them being part indian blood and welfare took care of them as I requested.

“This was during depression time. I was working on W.P.A. very small wages. I owned some property and small home at the time. Perry and I lived together peacefully. My heart was hurt, as I still loved my other children also. So I took to roaming to forget it all. I made a livin for us both. I sold my property and we lived in a ‘house Car.’ Perry went to school often as possible. He didn’t like school very well. He learns quick and never got into trouble with other kids. Only when the Bully Kid picked on him. He was short and stocky a new kid in school they tried to mistreat him. They found him willing to fight for his rights. That was the way I raised my kids. I always told them dont start a fight, if you do, I’ll give you a beaten when I find out. But if the other kids start a fight, do your best. One time a kid twice his age at school, run up and hit him, to his surprise Perry got him down and give him a good beating. I had given him some advice in wrestling. As I once used to Box & Wrestle. The lady principal of the school and all the kids watched this fight. The lady principal loved the big kid. To see him get whipped by my little boy Perry was more than she could take. After that Perry was King of the Kids at school. If any big kid tried to mistreat a small one, Perry would settle that rite now. Even the Big Bully was afraid of Perry now, and had to be good. But that hurt the lady principal so she came to me complaining about Perry fighting in school. I told her I knew all about it and that I didnt intend to let my boy get beat up by kids twice his size. I also asked her why she let that Bully Kid beat up on other kids. I told her that Perry had a rite to defend himself. Perry never started the trouble and that I would take a hand in this affair myself. I told her my son was well liked by all the neighbors, and their kids. I also told her I was going to take Perry out of her school real soon, move away to another state. Which I did. Perry is no Angel he has done wrong many times same as so many other kids. Rite is Rite and wrong is wrong. I dont stick up for his wrong doings. He must pay the Hardway when he does wrong, law is Boss he knows that by now.

“YOUTH—Perry joined the merchant Marines in second war. I went to Alaska, he came later and joined me there. I trapped furs and Perry worked with the Alaska Road Commission the first winter then he got work on the railroad for a short while. He couldn’t get the work he liked to do. Yes—he give me $ now and then when he had it. He also sent me $30.00 a month while in Korea war while he was there from beginning until the end and was dischard in Seattle, Wash. Honorable as far as I know. He is mechanically inclined. Bulldozers, draglines, shovels, heavy duty trucks of all type is his desire. For the experience he has had he is real good. Somewhat reckless and speed crazy with motorcycles and light cars. But since he has had a good taste of what speed will do, and his both legs Broke & hip injury he now has slowed down on that I’m sure.

“RECREATION—INTERESTS. Yes he had several girl friends, soon as he found a girl to mistreat him or trifle, he would quit her. He never was married as far as I know. My troubles with his mother made him afraid of marriage somewhat. Im a Sober man and as far as I know Perry is also a person that dont like drunks. Perry is like myself a great deal. He likes Company of decent type—outdoors people, he like myself, likes to be by himself also he likes best to work for himself. As I do. I’m a jack of all trades, so to speak, master of few and so is Perry. I showed him how to make a living working for himself as a fur trapper, prospector, carpenter, woodsman, horses, etc. I know how to cook and so does he, not a professional cook just plane cooking for himself. Bake bread etc. hunt, and fish, trap, do most anything else. As I said before, Perry likes to be his own Boss & if he is given a chance to work at a job he likes, tell him how you want it done, then leave him alone, he will take great pride in doing his work. If he sees the Boss appreciates his work he will go out of his way for him. But dont get tuff with him. Tell him in a pleasant way how you want to have it done. He is very touchie, his feeling is very easily hurt, and so are mine. I have quit several jobs & so has Perry on account of Bully Bosses. Perry does not have much schooling I don’t either, I only had second reader. But dont let that make you think we are not sharp. Im a self taught man & so is Perry. A White Colar job is not for Perry or me. But outdoors jobs we can master & if we cant, show him or me how its done & in just a couple of days we can master a job or machine. Books are out. Actual experience we both catch on rite now, if we like to work at it. First of all we must like the job. But now hes a Cripple and almost middle-aged man. Perry knows he is not wanted now by Contracters, cripples can’t get jobs on heavy equipment, unless you are well know to the Contracter. He is beginning to realize that, he is beginning to think of a more easier way of supporting himself in line with my life. Im sure Im correct. I also think speed is no longer his desire. I notice all that now in his letters to me. He says ‘be careful Dad. Dont drive if you feel sleepy, better stop & rest by the road side.’ These are the same words I used to tell him. Now he’s telling me. He’s learned a lesson.

“As I see it—Perry has learned a lesson he will never forget. Freedom means everything to him you will never get him behind bars again. Im quite sure Im rite. I notice a big change in the way he talks. He deeply regrets his mistake he told me. I also know he feels ashamed to meet people he knows he will not tell them he was behind bars. He asked me not to mention where he is to his friends. When he wrote & told me he was behind bars, I told him let that be a lesson—that I was glad that it happened that way where it could have been worse. Someone could have shot him. I also told him to take his term behind bars with a smile U done it yourself. U know better. I didn’t raise you to steal from others, so dont complain to me how tuff it is in prison. Be a good boy in prison. & he promised that he would. I hope he is a good prisoner. Im sure no one will talk him into stealing anymore. The law is boss, he knows that. He loves his Freedom.

“How well I know that Perry is good-hearted if you treat him rite. Treat him mean & you got a buzz saw to fight. You can trust him with any amount of $ if your his friend. He will do as you say he wont steal a cent from a friend or anyone else. Before this happened. And I sincerely hope he will live the rest of his life a honest man. He did steal something in Company with others when he was a little kid. Just ask Perry if I was a good father to him ask him if his mother was good to him in Frisco. Perry knows whats good for him. U got him whipped forever. He knows when he’s beat. He’s not a dunce. He knows life is too short to sweet to spend behind bars ever again.

“RELATIVES. One sister Bobo married, and me his father is all that is living of Perry. Bobo & her husband are self-supporting. Own their own home & I’m able & active to take care of myself also. I sold my lodge in Alaska two years ago. I intend to have another small place of my own next year. I located several mineral claims & hope to get something out of them. Besides that I have not given up prospecting. I am also asked to write a book on artistic wood-carving, and the famous Trappers Den Lodge I build in Alaska once my homestead known by all tourists that travel by car to Anchorage and maybe I will. I’ll share all I have with Perry. Anytime I eat he eats. As long as Im alive. & when I die Ive got life insurance that will be paid to him so he can start LIFE Anew when he gets free again. In case Im not alive then.”

This biography always set racing a stable of emotions—self-pity in the lead, love and hate running evenly at first, the latter ultimately pulling ahead. And most of the memories it released were unwanted, though not all. In fact, the first part of his life that Perry could remember was treasurable—a fragment composed of applause, glamour. He was perhaps three, and he was seated with his sisters and his older brother in the grandstand at an open-air rodeo; in the ring, a lean Cherokee girl rode a wild horse, a “bucking bronc,” and her loosened hair whipped back and forth, flew about like a flamenco dancer’s. Her name was Flo Buckskin, and she was a professional rodeo performer, a “champion bronc-rider.” So was her husband, Tex John Smith; it was while touring the Western rodeo circuit that the handsome Indian girl and the homely-handsome Irish cowboy had met, married, and had the four children sitting in the grandstand. (And Perry could remember many another rodeo spectacle—see again his father skipping about inside a circle of spinning lassos, or his mother, with silver and turquoise bangles jangling on her wrists, trick-riding at a desperado speed that thrilled her youngest child and caused crowds in towns from Texas to Oregon to “stand up and clap.”) Until Perry was five, the team of “Tex & Flo” continued to work the rodeo circuit. As a way of life, it wasn’t “any gallon of ice cream,” Perry once recalled: “Six of us riding in an old truck, sleeping in it, too, sometimes, living off mush and Hershey Kisses and condensed milk. The condensed milk weakened my kidneys—the sugar content—which is why I was always wetting the bed.” Yet it was not an unhappy existence, especially for a little boy proud of his parents, admiring of their showmanship and courage—a happier life, certainly, than what replaced it. For Tex and Flo, both forced by ailments to retire from their occupation, settled near Reno, Nevada. They fought, and Flo “took to whiskey,” and then, when Perry was six, she departed for San Francisco, taking the children with her. It was exactly as the old man had written : “I let her go and said goodby as she took the car and left me behind (this was during depression). My children all cried at the top of their voices. She only cussed them saying they would run away to come to me later.” And, indeed, over the course of the next three years Perry had on several occasions run off, set out to find his lost father, for he had lost his mother as well, learned to “despise” her; liquor had blurred the face, swollen the figure of the once sinewy, limber Cherokee girl, had “soured her soul,” honed her tongue to the wickedest point, so dissolved her self-respect that generally she did not bother to ask the names of the stevedores and trolley-car conductors and such persons who accepted what she offered without charge (except that she insisted they drink with her first, and dance to the tunes of a wind-up Victrola). Consequently, as Perry recalled, “I was always thinking about Dad, hoping he would come take me away, and I remember, like a second ago, the time I saw him again. Standing in the schoolyard. It was like when the ball hits the bat really solid. DiMaggio. Only Dad wouldn’t help me. Told me to be good and hugged me and went away. It was not long afterward my mother put me to stay in a Catholic orphanage. The one where the Black Widows were always at me. Hitting me. Because of wetting the bed. Which is one reason I have an aversion to nuns. And God. And religion. But later on I found there are people even more evil. Because, after a couple of months, they tossed me out of the orphanage, and she [his mother] put me someplace worse. A children’s shelter operated by the Salvation Army. They hated me, too. For wetting the bed. And being half-Indian. There was this one . . . nurse, she used to call me ‘nigger’ and say there wasn’t any difference between niggers and Indians. Oh, Jesus, was she an Evil Bastard! Incarnate. What she used to do, she’d fill a tub with ice-cold water, put me in it, and hold me under till I was blue. Nearly drowned. But she got found out, the bitch. Because I caught pneumonia. I almost conked. I was in the hospital two months. It was while I was so sick that Dad came back. When I got well, he took me away.”

For almost a year, father and son lived together in the house near Reno, and Perry went to school. “I finished the third grade,” Perry recalled. “Which was the finish. I never went back. Because that summer Dad built a primitive sort of trailer, what he called a ‘house car.’ It had two bunks and a little cooking galley. The stove was good. You could cook anything on it. Baked our own bread. I used to put up preserves—pickled apples, crab-apple jelly. Anyway, for the next six years we shifted around the country. Never stayed nowhere too long. When we stayed someplace too long, people would begin to look at Dad, act like he was a character, and I hated that, it hurt me. Because I loved Dad then. Even though he could be rough on me. Bossy as hell. But I loved Dad then. So I was always glad when we moved on.” Moved on—to Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon, eventually Alaska. In Alaska, Tex taught his son to dream of gold, to hunt for it in the sandy beds of snow-water streams, and there, too, Perry learned to use a gun, skin a bear, track wolves and deer.

“Christ, it was cold,” Perry remembered. “Dad and I slept hugged together, rolled up in blankets and bearskins. Mornings, before daylight, I’d hustle our breakfast, biscuits and syrup, fried meat, and off we went to scratch a living. It would have been O.K. if only I hadn’t grown up; the older I got, the less I was able to appreciate Dad. He knew everything, one way, but he didn’t know anything, another way. Whole sections of me Dad was ignorant of. Didn’t understand an iota of. Like I could play a harmonica first time I picked one up. Guitar, too. I had this great natural musical ability. Which Dad didn’t recognize. Or care about. I liked to read, too. Improve my vocabulary. Make up songs. And I could draw. But I never got any encouragement— from him or anybody else. Nights I used to lie awake—trying to control my bladder, partly, and partly because I couldn’t stop thinking. Always, when it was too cold hardly to breathe, I’d think about Hawaii. About a movie I’d seen. With Dorothy Lamour. I wanted to go there. Where the sun was. And all you wore was grass and flowers.”

Wearing considerably more, Perry, one balmy evening in wartime 1945, found himself inside a Honolulu tattoo parlor having a snake-and-dagger design applied to his right forearm. He had got there by the following route: a row with his father, a hitchhike journey from Anchorage to Seattle, a visit to the recruiting offices of the Merchant Marine. “But I never would have joined if I’d known what I was going up against,” Perry once said. “I never minded the work, and I liked being a sailor—seaports, and all that. But the queens on ship wouldn’t leave me alone. A sixteen-year-old kid, and a small kid. I could handle myself, sure. But a lot of queens aren’t effeminate, you know. Hell, I’ve known queens could toss a pool table out the window. And the piano after it. Those kind of girls, they can give you an evil time, especially when there’s a couple of them; they get together and gang up on you, and you’re just a kid. It can make you practically want to kill yourself. Years later, when I went into the Army—when I was stationed in Korea—the same problem came up. I had a good record in the Army, good as anybody; they gave me the Bronze Star. But I never got promoted. After four years, and fighting through the whole goddam Korean War, I ought at least to have made corporal. But I never did. Know why? Because the sergeant we had was tough. Because I wouldn’t roll over. Jesus, I hate that stuff. I can’t stand it. Though—I don’t know. Some queers I’ve really liked. As long as they didn’t try anything. The most worthwhile friend I ever had, really sensitive and intelligent, he turned out to be queer.”

In the interval between quitting the Merchant Marine and entering the Army, Perry had made peace with his father, who, when his son left him, drifted down to Nevada, then back to Alaska. In 1952, the year Perry completed his military service, the old man was in the midst of plans meant to end his travels forever. “Dad was in a fever,” Perry recalled. “Wrote me he had bought some land on the highway outside Anchorage. Said he was going to have a hunting lodge, a place for tourists. Trapper’s Den Lodge—that was to be the name. And asked me to hurry on up there and help him build it. He was sure we’d make a fortune. Well, while I was still in the Army, stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington, I’d bought a motorcycle (murdercycles, they ought to call them), and as soon as I got discharged I headed for Alaska. Got as far as Bellingham. Up there on the border. It was raining. My bike went into a skid.” The skid delayed for a year the reunion with his father. Surgery and hospitalization accounted for six months of that year; the remainder he spent recuperating in the forest home, near Bellingham, of a young Indian logger and fisherman. “Joe James. He and his wife befriended me. The difference in our age was only two or three years, but they took me into their home and treated me like I was one of their kids. Which was O.K. Because they took trouble with their kids and liked them. At the time, they had four; the number finally went to seven. They were very good to me, Joe and his family. I was on crutches, I was pretty helpless. Just had to sit around. So to give me something to do, try to make myself useful, I started what became a sort of school. The pupils were Joe’s kids, along with some of their friends, and we held classes in the parlor. I was teaching harmonica and guitar. Drawing. And penmanship. Everybody always remarks what a beautiful handwriting I have. I do, and it’s because once I bought a book on the subject and practiced till I could write the same as in the book. Also, we used to read stories—the kids did, each one in turn, and I’d correct them as we went along. It was fun. I like kids. Little kids. And that was a nice time. But then the spring came. It hurt me to walk, but I could walk, And Dad was still waiting for me.”

Waiting, but not idly. By the time Perry arrived at the site of the proposed hunting lodge, his father, working alone, had finished the hardest chores—had cleared the ground, logged the necessary timber, cracked and carted wagonloads of native rock. “But he didn’t commence to build till I got there. We did every damn piece of it ourselves. With once in a while an Indian helper. Dad was like a maniac. It didn’t matter what was happening—snowstorms, rainstorms, winds that could split a tree—we kept right at it. The day the roof was finished, Dad danced all over it, shouting and laughing, doing a regular jig. Well, it turned out quite an exceptional place. That could sleep twenty people. Had a big fireplace in the dining room. And there was a cocktail lounge. The Totem Pole Cocktail Lounge. Where I was to entertain the customers. Singing and so forth. We opened for business end of 1953.”

But the expected huntsmen did not materialize, and though ordinary tourists—the few that trickled along the highway—now and again paused to photograph the beyond-belief rusticity of Trapper’s Den Lodge, they seldom stopped overnight. “For a while we fooled ourselves. Kept thinking it would catch on. Dad tried to trick up the place. Made a Garden of Memories. With a Wishing Well. Put painted signs up and down the highway. But none of it meant a nickel more. When Dad realized that—saw it wasn’t any use, all we’d done was waste ourselves and all our money—he began to take it out on me. Boss me around. Be spiteful. Say I didn’t do my proper share of the work. It wasn’t his fault, any more than it was mine. A situation like that, with no money and the grub getting low, we couldn’t help but be on each other’s nerves. The point came we were downright hungry. Which is what we fell out over. Ostensibly. A biscuit. Dad snatched a biscuit out of my hand, and said I ate too much, what a greedy, selfish bastard I was, and why didn’t I get out, he didn’t want me there no more. He carried on like that till I couldn’t stand it. My hands got hold of his throat. My hands—but I couldn’t control them. They wanted to choke him to death. Dad, though, he’s slippery, a smart wrestler. He tore loose and ran to get his gun. Came back pointing it at me. He said, ‘Look at me, Perry. I’m the last living thing you’re ever gonna see.’ I just stood my ground. And when he realized the gun wasn’t even loaded he started to cry. Sat down and bawled like a kid. Then I guess I wasn’t mad at him anymore. I was sorry for him. For both of us. But it wasn’t a bit of use—there wasn’t anything I could say. I went out for a walk. This was April, but the woods were still deep in snow. I walked till it was almost night. When I got back, the lodge was dark, and all the doors were locked. And everything I owned was lying out there in the snow. Where Dad had thrown it. Books. Clothes. Everything. I just let it lie. Except my guitar. I picked up my guitar and started on down the highway. Not a dollar in my pocket. Around midnight, a truck stopped to give me a lift. The driver asked where I was going. I told him, ‘Wherever you’re headed, that’s where I’m going.’ ”

Several weeks later, after again sheltering with the James family, Perry decided on a definite destination—Worcester, Massachusetts, the home town of an “Army buddy” he thought might welcome him and help him find “a good paying job.” Various detours prolonged the eastward journey; he washed dishes in an Omaha restaurant, pumped gas at an Oklahoma garage, worked a month on a ranch in Texas. By July of 1955, he had reached, on the trek to Worcester, a small Kansas town, Phillipsburg, and there “fate,” in the form of “bad company,” asserted itself. “His name was Smith,” Perry said. “Same as me. I don’t even recall his first name. He was just somebody I’d picked up with somewhere, and he had a car, and he said he’d give me a ride as far as Chicago. Anyway, driving through Kansas, we came to this little Phillipsburg place and stopped to look at a map. Seems to me like it was a Sunday. Stores shut. Streets quiet. My friend there, bless his heart, he looked around and made a suggestion.” The suggestion was that they burglarize a nearby building, the Chandler Sales Company. Perry agreed, and they broke into the deserted premises and removed a quantity of office equipment (typewriters, adding machines). That might have been that if only, some days afterward, the thieves hadn’t ignored a traffic signal in the city of St. Joseph, Missouri. “The junk was still in the car. The cop that stopped us wanted to know where we got it. A little checking was done, and, as they say, we were ‘returned’ to Phillipsburg, Kansas. Where the folks have a real cute jail. If you like jails.” Within forty-eight hours, Perry and his companion had discovered an open window, climbed out of it, stolen a car, and driven northwest to McCook, Nebraska. “Pretty soon we broke up, me and Mr. Smith. I don’t know what ever became of him. We both made the F.B.I.’s Wanted list. But, far as I know, they never caught up with him.”

One wet afternoon the following November, a Greyhound bus deposited Perry in Worcester, a factory town of steep, up-and-down streets that, even in the best of weathers, seem cheerless and hostile. “I found the house where my friend was supposed to live. My Army friend from Korea. But the people there said he’d left six months back and they had no idea where he’d gone. Too bad, big disappointment, end of the world, all that. So I found a liquor store and bought a half gallon of red wop and went back to the bus depot and sat there drinking my wine and getting a little warmer. I was really enjoying myself till a man came along and arrested me for vagrancy.” The police booked him as “Bob Turner”—a name he’d adopted because of being listed by the F.B.I. He spent fourteen days in jail, was fined ten dollars, and departed from Worcester on another wet November afternoon. “I went down to New York, and took a room in a hotel on Eighth Avenue,” Perry said. “Near Forty-second Street. Finally, I got a night job. Doing odd jobs around a penny arcade. Right there on Forty-second Street, near to an Automat. Which is where I ate—when I ate. In over three months, I practically never left the Broadway area. For one thing, I didn’t have the right clothes. Just Western clothes—jeans and boots. But there on Forty-second Street nobody cares, it all rides—anything. My whole life, I never met so many freaks.”

He lived out the winter in that ugly, neon-lit neighborhood, with its air full of the scent of popcorn, simmering hot dogs, and orange drink. But then, one bright March morning on the edge of spring, as he remembered it, “two F.B.I. bastards woke me up.” He went on, “Arrested me at the hotel. Bang!—I was extradited back to Kansas. To Phillipsburg. That same cute jail. They nailed me to the cross—larceny, jailbreak, car theft. I got five to ten years. In Lansing. After I’d been there awhile, I wrote Dad. Let him know the news. And wrote Barbara, my sister. By now, over the years, that was all I had left me. Jimmy a suicide. Fern out the window. My mother dead. Been dead eight years. Everybody gone but Dad and Barbara.”

A letter from Barbara was among the sheaf of selected matter that Perry preferred not to leave behind in the Mexico City hotel room. The letter, written in a pleasingly legible script, was dated April 28, 1958, at which time the recipient had been imprisoned for approximately two years:

“DEAREST BRO. PERRY,

“We got your 2nd letter today & forgive me for not writing sooner. Our weather here, as yours is, is turning warmer & maybe I am getting spring fever but I am going to try and do better. Your first letter was very disturbing, as I’m sure you must have suspected but that was not the reason I haven’t written—it’s true the children do keep me busy & it’s hard to find time to sit and concentrate on a letter as I have wanted to write for some time. Donnie has learned to open the doors & climb on the chairs & other furniture & he worries me constantly about falling.

“I have been able to let the children play in the yard—now & then—but I always have to go out with them as they can hurt themselves if I don’t pay attention. But nothing is forever & I know I will be sorry when they start running the block & I don’t know where they’re at. Here are some statistics if you’re interested—

     HEIGHT            WEIGHT        SHOE SIZE
Freddie   36½”   26½ lbs.   7½  narrow
Baby       37½”   29½ lbs.   8     narrow
Donnie  34”      26 lbs.       6½ wide     

“You can see that Donnie is a pretty big boy for 15 months & with 16 teeth and his sparkling personality—people just can’t help loving him. He wears the same size clothes as Baby and Freddie but the pants are all too long as yet.

“I am going to try & make this letter a long one so it will probably have a lot of interruptions such as right now it’s time for Donnie’s bath—Baby & Freddie had theirs this A.M. as it’s quite cold today & I have had them inside. Be back soon—

“About my typing—First—I cannot tell a lie! I am not a typist. I use from 1 to 5 fingers & although I can manage & do help Big Fred with his business affairs, what it takes me 1 hr. to do would probably take someone with the Know How—15 minutes— Seriously, I do not have the time—nor the will to learn professionally. But I think it is wonderful how you have stuck with it and become such an excellent typist. I do believe we all were very adaptable (Jimmy, Fern, you and myself) & we had all been blessed with a basic flair for the artistic—among other things. Even Mother & Dad were artistic.

“I truthfully feel none of us have anyone to blame for whatever we have done with our own personal lives. It has been proven that at the age of 7 most of us have reached the age of reason—which means we do, at this age, understand & know the difference between right & wrong. Of course—environment plays an awfully important part in our lives such as the Convent in mine & in my case I am grateful for that influence. In Jimmy’s case—he was the strongest of us all. I remember how he worked & went to school when there was no one to tell him & it was his own WILL to make something of himself. We will never know the reasons for what eventually happened, why he did what he did, but I still hurt thinking of it. It was such a waste. But we have very little control over our human weaknesses, & this applies also to Fern & the hundred of thousands of other people including ourselves—for we all have weaknesses. In your case—I don’t know what your weakness is but I do feel—IT IS NO SHAME TO HAVE A DIRTY FACE—THE SHAME COMES WHEN YOU KEEP IT DIRTY.

“In all truthfulness & with love for you Perry, for you are my only living brother and the uncle of my children, I cannot say or feel your attitude towards our father or your imprisonment JUST or healthy. If you are getting your back up—better simmer down as I realize there are none of us who take criticism cheerfully & it is natural to feel a certain amount of resentment towards the one giving this criticism so I am prepared for one of two things—a) not to hear from you at all, or b) a letter telling me exactly what you think of me.

“I hope I’m wrong & I sincerely hope you will give this letter a lot of thought & try to see—how someone else feels. Please understand I know I am not an authority & I do not boast great intelligence or education but I do believe I am a normal individual with basic reasoning powers & the will to live my life according to the laws of God & Man. It is also true that I have ‘fallen’ at times, as is normal—for as I said I am human & therefore I too have human weaknesses but the point is, again, There is no shame—having a dirty face—the shame comes when you keep it dirty. No one is more aware of my shortcomings and mistakes than myself so I won’t bore you further.

“Now, first, & most important—Dad is not responsible for your wrong doings or your good deeds. What you have done, whether right or wrong, is your own doing. From what I personally know, you lived your life exactly as you pleased without regard to circumstances or persons who loved you—who might be hurt. Whether you realize it or not—your present confinement is embarrassing to me as well as Dad—not because of what you did but the fact that you don’t show me any signs of SINCERE regret and seem to show no respect for any laws, people or anything. Your letter implies that the blame of all your problems is that of someone else, but never you. I do admit that you are intelligent & your vocabulary is excellent & I do feel you can do anything you decide to do & do it well but what exactly do you want to do & are you willing to work & make an honest effort to attain whatever it is you choose to do? Nothing good comes easy & I’m sure you’ve heard this many times but once more won’t hurt.

“In case you want the truth about Dad—his heart is broken because of you. He would give anything to get you out so he can have his son back—but I am afraid you would only hurt him worse if you could. He is not well and is getting older &, as the saying goes—he cannot ‘Cut the Mustard’ as in the old days. He has been wrong at times & he realizes this but whatever he had and wherever he went he shared his life & belongings with you when he wouldn’t do this for anyone else. Now I don’t say you owe him your undying gratitude or your life but you do owe him RESPECT and COMMON DECENCY. I, personally, am proud of Dad. I love him & Respect him as my Dad & I am only sorry he chose to be the Lone Wolf with his son, or he might be living with us and share our love instead of alone in his little trailer & longing & waiting & lonesome for you, his son. I worry for him & when I say I I mean my husband too for my husband respects our Dad. Because he is a MAN. It’s true that Dad did not have a great extensive education but in school we only learn to recognize the words and to spell but the application of these words to real life is another thing that only LIFE & LIVING can give us. Dad has lived & you show ignorance in calling him uneducated & unable to understand ‘the scientific meaning etc’ of life’s problems. A mother is still the only one who can kiss a boo-boo and make it all well—explain that scientifically.

“I’m sorry to let you have it so strong but I feel I must speak my piece. I am sorry that this must be censored [by the prison authorities], & I sincerely hope this letter is not detrimental towards your eventual release but I feel you should know & realize exactly what terrible hurt you have done. Dad is the important one as I am dedicated to my family but you are the only one Dad loves—in short, his ‘family.’ He knows I love him, of course but the closeness is not there, as you know.

“Your confinement is nothing to be proud of and you will have to live with it & try & live it down & it can be done but not with your attitude of feeling everyone is stupid & uneducated & un-understanding. You are a human being with a free will. Which puts you above the animal level. But if you live your life without feeling and compassion for your fellow-man—you are as an animal—‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ & happiness & peace of mind is not attained by living thus.

“As far as responsibility goes, no one really wants it—but all of us are responsible to the community we live in & its laws. When the time comes to assume the responsibility of a home and children or business, this is the seeding of the boys from the Men—for surely you can realize what a mess the world would be if everyone in it said, ‘I want to be an individual, without responsibilities, & be able to speak my mind freely & do as I alone will.’ We are all free to speak & do as we individually will—providing this ‘freedom’ of Speech & Deed are not injurious to our fellow-man.

“Think about it, Perry. You are above average in intelligence, but somehow your reasoning is off the beam. Maybe it’s the strain of your confinement. Whatever it is—remember—you & only you are responsible and it is up to you and you alone to overcome this part of your life. Hoping to hear from you soon.

With Love & Prayers,
Your sister & Bro. in Law,
BARBARA & FREDERIC & FAMILY”

In preserving this letter, and including it in his collection of particular treasures, Perry was not moved by affection. Far from it. He “loathed” Barbara, and just the other day he had told Dick, “The only real regret I have—I wish the hell my sister had been in that house.” (Dick had laughed, and confessed to a similar yearning: “I keep thinking what fun if my second wife had been there. Her, and all her goddam family.”) No, he valued the letter merely because his prison friend, the “super-intelligent” Willie-Jay, had written for him a “very sensitive” analysis of it, occupying two single-spaced typewritten pages, with the title “Impressions I Garnered from the Letter” at the top:

“IMPRESSIONS I GARNERED FROM THE LETTER

“1.) When she began this letter, she intended that it should be a compassionate demonstration of Christian principles. That is to say that in return for your letter to her, which apparently annoyed her, she meant to turn the other cheek hoping in this way to incite regret for your previous letter and to place you on the defensive in your next.

“However few people can successfully demonstrate a principle in common ethics when their deliberation is festered with emotionalism. Your sister substantiates this failing for as her letter progresses her judgment gives way to temper—her thoughts are good, lucid, the products of intelligence, but it is not now an unbiased, impersonal intelligence. It is a mind propelled by emotional response to memory and frustration; consequently, however wise her admonishments might be, they fail to inspire resolve, unless it would be the resolve to retaliate by hurting her in your next letter. Thus commencing a cycle that can only culminate in further anger and distress.

“2.) It is a foolish letter, but born of human failing.

“Your letter to her, and this, her answer to you failed in their objective. Your letter was an attempt to explain your outlook on life, as you are necessarily affected by it. It was destined to be misunderstood, or taken too literally because your ideas are opposed to conventionalism. What could be more conventional than a housewife with three children, who is ‘dedicated’ to her family???? What could be more natural than that she would resent an unconventional person. There is considerable hypocrisy in conventionalism. Any thinking person is aware of this paradox; but in dealing with conventional people it is advantageous to treat them as though they were not hypocrites. It isn’t a question of faithfulness to your own concepts; it is a matter of compromise so that you can remain an individual without the constant threat of conventional pressure. Her letter failed because she couldn’t conceive of the profundity of your problem—she couldn’t fathom the pressures brought to bear upon you because of environment, intellectual frustration and a growing tendency toward isolationism.

“3.) She feels that:
    a) You are leaning too heavily towards self-pity.
    b) That you are too calculating.
    c) That you are really undeserving of an 8 page letter written in between motherly duties.

“4.) On page 3 she writes: I truthfully feel none of us has anyone to blame etc.” Thus vindicating those who bore influence in her formative years. But is this the whole truth? She is a wife and mother. Respectable and more or less secure. It is easy to ignore the rain if you have a raincoat. But how would she feel if she were compelled to hustle her living on the streets? Would she still be all-forgiving about the people in her past? Absolutely not. Nothing is more usual than to feel that others have shared in our failures, just as it is an ordinary reaction to forget those who have shared in our achievements.

“5.) Your sister respects your Dad. She also resents the fact that you have been preferred. Her jealousy takes a subtle form in this letter. Between the lines she is registering a question: ‘I love Dad and have tried to live so he could be proud to own me as his daughter. But I have had to content myself with the crumbs of his affection. Because it is you he loves, and why should it be so?”

“Obviously over the years your Dad has taken advantage of your sister’s emotional nature via the mails. Painting a picture that justifies her opinion of him—an underdog cursed with an ungrateful son upon whom he has showered love and concern, only to be infamously treated by that son in return.

“On page 7 she says she is sorry that her letter must be censored. But she is really not sorry at all. She is glad it passes through a censor. Subconsciously she has written it with the censor in mind, hoping to convey the idea that the Smith family is really a well-ordered unit: ‘Please do not judge us all by Perry.’

“About the mother kissing away her child’s boo-boo. This is a woman’s form of sarcasm.

“6.) You write to her because:
    a) You love her after a fashion.
    b) You feel a need for this contact with the outside world.
    c) You can use her.

“Prognosis: Correspondence between you and your sister cannot serve anything but a purely social function. Keep the theme of your letters within the scope of her understanding. Do not unburden your private conclusions. Do not put her on the defensive and do not permit her to put you on the defensive. Respect her limitations to comprehend your objectives, and remember that she is touchy towards criticism of your Dad. Be consistent in your attitude towards her and do not add anything to the impression she has that you are weak, not because you need her good-will but because you can expect more letters like this, and they can only serve to increase your already dangerous anti-social instincts.

FINISH”

As Perry continued to sort and choose, the pile of material he thought too dear to part with, even temporarily, assumed a tottering height. But what was he to do? He couldn’t risk losing the Bronze Medal earned in Korea, or his high-school diploma (issued by the Leavenworth County Board of Education as a result of his having, while in prison, resumed his long-recessed studies). Nor did he care to chance the loss of a manila envelope fat with photographs—primarily of himself, and ranging in time from a pretty-little-boy portrait made when he was in the Merchant Marine (and on the back of which he had scribbled, “16 yrs. old. Young, happy-go-lucky & Innocent”) to the recent Acapulco pictures. And there were half a hundred other items he had decided he must take with him, among them his treasure maps, Otto’s sketchbook, and two thick notebooks, the thicker of which constituted his personal dictionary, a non-alphabetically listed miscellany of words he believed “beautiful” or “useful,” or at least “worth memorizing.” (Sample page: “Thanatoid = deathlike; Omnilingual = versed in all languages; Amerce = punishment, amount fixed by court; Nescient = ignorance; Facinorous = atrociously wicked; Hagiophobia = a morbid fear of holy places & things; Lapidicolous = living under stones, as certain blind beetles; Dyspathy = lack of sympathy, fellow feeling; Psilosopher = a fellow who fain would pass as a philosopher; Omophagia = eating raw flesh, the rite of some savage tribes; Depredate = to pillage, rob, and prey upon; Aphrodisiac = a drug or the like which excites sexual desire; Megalodactylous = having abnormally large fingers; Myrtophobia = fear of night and darkness.”)

On the cover of the second notebook, the handwriting of which he was so proud, a script abounding in curly, feminine flourishes, proclaimed the contents to be “The Private Diary of Perry Edward Smith”—an inaccurate description, for it was not in the least a diary but, rather, a form of anthology consisting of obscure facts (“Every fifteen years Mars gets closer. 1958 is a close year”), poems and literary quotations (“No man is an island, entire of itself”), and passages from newspapers and books paraphrased or quoted. For example:

“My acquaintances are many, my friends are few; those who really know me fewer still.”

“Heard about a new rat poison on the market. Extremely potent, odorless, tasteless, is so completely absorbed once swallowed that no trace could ever be found in a dead body.”

“If called upon to make a speech: ‘I can’t remember what I was going to say for the life of me—I don’t think that ever before in my life have so many people been so directly responsible for my being so very, very glad. It’s a wonderful moment and a rare one and I’m certainly indebted. Thank you!’ ”

“Read interesting article Feb. issue of Man to Man: ‘I Knifed My Way to a Diamond Pit.’ ”

“ ‘It is almost impossible for a man who enjoys freedom with all its prerogatives, to realize what it means to be deprived of that freedom.’—Said by Erle Stanley Gardner.”

“ ‘What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is a breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.’—Said by Chief Crowfoot, Blackfoot Indian Chief.”

This last entry was written in red ink and decorated with a border of green-ink stars; the anthologist wished to emphasize its “personal significance.” “A breath of a buffalo in the wintertime”—that exactly evoked his view of life. Why worry? What was there to “sweat about”? Man was nothing, a mist, a shadow absorbed by shadows. But, damn it, you do worry, scheme, fret over your fingernails and the warnings of hotel managements: “SU DÍA TERMINA A LAS 2 P.M.”

“Dick? You hear me?” Perry said. “It’s almost one o’clock.”

Dick was awake. He was rather more than that; he and Inez were making love. As though reciting a rosary, Dick incessantly whispered, asking Inez to assure him he was doing all right. But Inez, smoking a cigarette, remained silent. The previous midnight, when Dick had brought her to the room and told Perry that she was going to sleep there, Perry, though disapproving, had acquiesced, but if they imagined that their conduct stimulated him, or seemed to him anything other than a “nuisance,” they were wrong. Nevertheless, Perry felt sorry for Inez. She was such a “stupid kid”—she really believed Dick meant to marry her, and had no idea he was planning to leave Mexico that very afternoon.

“For Christ’s sake, Dick,” Perry said. “Hurry it up, will you? Our day ends at 2 P.M.”

It was Saturday, Christmas was near, and the traffic along Main Street crept. Dewey, caught in the traffic, looked up at the holly garlands that hung above the street—swags of gala greenery festooned with scarlet paper bells—and was reminded that he had not yet bought a single gift for his wife or his sons. His mind automatically rejected problems not concerned with the Clutter case. Marie and many of their friends had begun to wonder at the completeness of his fixation.

One close friend, the young lawyer Clifford R. Hope, Jr., had spoken plainly: “Do you know what’s happening to you, Al? Do you realize you never talk about anything else?”

“Well,” Dewey had replied, “that’s all I think about. And there’s the chance that, just while talking the thing over, I’ll hit on something I haven’t thought of before. Some new angle. Or maybe you will. Damn it, Cliff, what do you suppose my life will be if this thing stays in the Open File? Years from now, I’ll still be running down tips, and every time there’s a murder, a case anywhere in the country even remotely similar, I’ll have to horn right in, check, see if there could be any possible connection. But it isn’t only that. The real thing is I’ve come to feel I know Herb and the family better than they ever knew themselves. I’m haunted by them. I guess I always will be. Until I know what happened.”

Dewey’s dedication to the puzzle had resulted in an uncharacteristic absentmindedness. Only that morning, Marie had asked him please, would he please, please, not forget to . . . But he couldn’t remember, or didn’t, until, free of the shopping-day traffic and racing along Route 50 toward Holcomb, he passed Dr. J. E. Dale’s veterinarian establishment. Of course. His wife had asked him to be sure and collect the family cat, Courthouse Pete. Pete, a tiger-striped tom weighing fifteen pounds, is a well-known character around Garden City, famous for his pugnacity, which was the cause of his current hospitalization; a battle lost to a boxer dog had left him with wounds necessitating both stitches and antibiotics. Released by Dr. Dale, Pete settled down on the front seat of his owner’s automobile and purred all the way to Holcomb.

The detective’s destination was River Valley Farm, but, wanting something warm—a cup of very hot coffee—he stopped off at Hartman’s Café.

“Hello, handsome,” said Mrs. Hartman. “What can I do for you?”

“Just coffee, Ma’am.”

She poured a cup. “Am I wrong? Or have you lost a lot of weight?”

“Some.” In fact, during the past three weeks Dewey had dropped twenty pounds. His suits fitted as though he had borrowed them from a stout friend, and his face, seldom suggestive of his profession, was now not at all so; it could have been that of an ascetic absorbed in occult pursuits.

“How do you feel?”

“Mighty fine.”

“You look awful.”

Unarguably. But no worse than the other members of the K.B.I. entourage—Agents Duntz, Church, and Nye. Certainly he was in better shape than Harold Nye, who, though full of flu and fever, kept reporting for duty. Among them, the four tired men had “checked out” some seven hundred tips and rumors. Dewey, for example, had spent two wearying and wasted days trying to trace that phantom pair, the Mexicans sworn by Paul Helm to have visited Mr. Clutter on the eve of the murders.

“Another cup, Alvin?”

“Don’t guess I will. Thank you, Ma’am.”

But she had already fetched the pot. “It’s on the house, Sheriff. How you look, you need it.”

At a corner table, two whiskery ranch hands were playing checkers. One of them got up and came over to the counter, where Dewey was seated. He said, “Is it true what we heard?”

“Depends.”

“About that fellow you caught? Prowling in the Clutter house? He’s the one responsible. That’s what we heard.”

“I think you heard wrong, old man. Yes, sir, I do.”

Although the past life of Jonathan Daniel Adrian, who was then being held in the county jail on a charge of carrying a concealed weapon, included a period of confinement as a mental patient in Topeka State Hospital, the data assembled by the investigators indicated that in relation to the Clutter case he was guilty only of an unhappy curiosity.

“Well, if he’s the wrong un, why the hell don’t you find the right-un? I got a houseful of women won’t go to the bathroom alone.”

Dewey had become accustomed to this brand of abuse; it was a routine part of his existence. He swallowed the second cup of coffee, sighed, smiled.

“Hell, I’m not cracking jokes. I mean it. Why don’t you arrest somebody? That’s what you’re paid for.”

“Hush your meanness,” said Mrs. Hartman. “We’re all in the same boat. Alvin’s doing good as he can.”

Dewey winked at her. “You tell him, Ma’am. And much obliged for the coffee.”

The ranch hand waited until his quarry had reached the door, then fired a farewell volley: “If you ever run for sheriff again just forget my vote. ’Cause you ain’t gonna get it.”

“Hush your meanness,” said Mrs. Hartman.

A mile separates River Valley Farm from Hartman’s Café. Dewey decided to walk it. He enjoyed hiking across wheat fields. Normally, once or twice a week he went for long walks on his own land, the well-loved piece of prairie where he had always hoped to build a house, plant trees, eventually entertain great-grandchildren. That was the dream, but it was one his wife had lately warned him she no longer shared; she had told him that never now would she consider living all alone “way out there in the country.” Dewey knew that even if he were to snare the murderers the next day, Marie would not change her mind—for an awful fate had befallen friends who lived in a lonely country house.

Of course, the Clutter family were not the first persons ever murdered in Finney County, or even in Holcomb. Senior members of that small community can recall “a wild goings on” of more than forty years ago—the Hefner slaying. Mrs. Sadie Truitt, the hamlet’s septuagenarian mail messenger, who is the mother of Postmistress Clare, is expert on this fabled affair: “August, it was. 1920. Hot as Hades. A fellow called Tunif was working on the Finnup ranch. Walter Tunif. He had a car, turned out to be stolen. Turned out he was a soldier A.W.O.L. from Fort Bliss, over there in Texas. He was a rascal, sure enough, and a lot of people suspected him. So one evening the sheriff—them days that was Orlie Hefner, such a fine singer, don’t you know he’s part of the Heavenly Choir?—one evening he rode out to the Finnup ranch to ask Tunif a few straightforward questions. Third of August. Hot as Hades. Outcome of it was, Walter Tunif shot the sheriff right through the heart. Poor Orlie was gone ’fore he hit the ground. The devil who done it, he lit out of there on one of the Finnup horses, rode east along the river. Word spread, and men for miles around made up a posse. Along about the next morning, they caught up with him; old Walter Tunif. He didn’t get the chance to say how d’you do. On account of the boys were pretty irate. They just let the buckshot fly.”

Dewey’s own initial contact with foul play in Finney County occurred in 1947. The incident is noted in his files as follows: “John Carlyle Polk, a Creek Indian, 32 years of age, resident Muskogee, Okla., killed Mary Kay Finley, white female, 40 years of age, a waitress residing in Garden City. Polk stabbed her with the jagged neck of a beer bottle in a room in the Copeland Hotel, Garden City, Kansas, 5-9-47.” A cut-and-dried description of an open-and-shut case. Of three other murders Dewey had since investigated, two were equally obvious (a pair of railroad workers robbed and killed an elderly farmer, 11-1-52; a drunken husband beat and kicked his wife to death, 6-17-56), but the third case, as it was once conversationally narrated by Dewey, was not without several original touches: “It all started out at Stevens Park. Where they have a bandstand, and under the bandstand a men’s room. Well, this man named Mooney was walking around the park. He was from North Carolina somewhere, just a stranger passing through town. Anyway, he went to the rest room, and somebody followed him inside—a boy from hereabouts, Wilmer Lee Stebbins, twenty years old. Afterward, Wilmer Lee always claimed Mr. Mooney made him an unnatural suggestion. And that was why he robbed Mr. Mooney, and knocked him down, and banged his head on the cement floor, and why, when that didn’t finish him, he stuck Mr. Mooney’s head in a toilet bowl and kept on flushing till he drowned him. Maybe so. But nothing can explain the rest of Wilmer Lee’s behavior. First off, he buried the body a couple of miles northeast of Garden City. Next day, he dug it up and put it down fourteen miles farther out. Well, it went on like that, burying and reburying. Wilmer Lee was like a dog with a bone—he just wouldn’t let Mr. Mooney rest in peace. Finally, he dug one grave too many; somebody saw him.” Prior to the Clutter mystery, the four cases cited were the sum of Dewey’s experience with murder, and, measured against the case confronting him, were as squalls preceding a hurricane.

Dewey fitted a key into the front door of the Clutter house. Inside, the house was warm, for the heat had not been turned off, and the shiny-floored rooms, smelling of a lemon-scented polish, seemed only temporarily untenanted; it was as though today were Sunday and the family might at any moment return from church. The heirs, Mrs. English and Mrs. Jarchow, had removed a vanload of clothing and furniture, yet the atmosphere of a house still humanly inhabited had not thereby been diminished. In the parlor, a sheet of music, “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye,” stood open on the piano rack. In the hall, a sweat-stained gray Stetson hat—Herb’s—hung on a hat peg. Upstairs in Kenyon’s room, on a shelf above his bed, the lenses of the dead boy’s spectacles gleamed with reflected light.

The detective moved from room to room. He had toured the house many times; indeed, he went out there almost every day, and, in one sense, could be said to find these visits pleasurable, for the place, unlike his own home, or the sheriff’s office, with its hullabaloo, was peaceful. The telephones, their wires still severed, were silent. The great quiet of the prairies surrounded him. He could sit in Herb’s parlor rocking chair, and rock and think. A few of his conclusions were unshakable: He believed that the death of Herb Clutter had been the criminals’ main objective, the motive being a psychopathic hatred, or possibly a combination of hatred and thievery, and he believed that the commission of the murders had been a leisurely labor, with perhaps two or more hours elapsing between the entrance of the killers and their exit. (The coroner, Dr. Robert Fenton, reported an appreciable difference in the body temperatures of the victims, and, on this basis, theorized that the order of execution had been: Mrs. Clutter, Nancy, Kenyon, and Mr. Clutter.) Attendant upon these beliefs was his conviction that the family had known very well the persons who destroyed them.

During this visit, Dewey paused at an upstairs window, his attention caught by something seen in the near distance—a scarecrow amid the wheat stubble. The scarecrow wore a man’s hunting cap and a dress of weather-faded flowered calico. (Surely an old dress of Bonnie Clutter’s?) Wind frolicked the skirt and made the scarecrow sway—made it seem a creature forlornly dancing in the cold December field. And Dewey was somehow reminded of Marie’s dream. One recent morning, she had served him a bungled breakfast of sugared eggs and salted coffee, then blamed it all on “a silly dream”—but a dream the power of daylight had not dispersed. “It was so real, Alvin,” she said. “As real as this kitchen. That’s where I was. Here in the kitchen. I was cooking supper, and suddenly Bonnie walked through the door. She was wearing a blue angora sweater, and she looked so sweet and pretty. And I said, ‘Oh Bonnie . . . Bonnie, dear . . . I haven’t seen you since that terrible thing happened.’ But she didn’t answer, only looked at me in that shy way of hers, and I didn’t know how to go on. Under the circumstances. So I said, ‘Honey, come see what I’m making Alvin for his supper. A pot of gumbo. With shrimp and fresh crabs. It’s just about ready. Come on, honey, have a taste.’ But she wouldn’t. She stayed by the door looking at me. And then—I don’t know how to tell you exactly, but she shut her eyes, she began to shake her head, very slowly, and wring her hands, very slowly, and to whimper, or whisper. I couldn’t understand what she was saying. But it broke my heart. I never felt so sorry for anyone, and I hugged her. I said, ‘Please, Bonnie! Oh, don’t, darling, don’t! If ever anyone was prepared to go to God, it was you, Bonnie.’ But I couldn’t comfort her. She shook her head, and wrung her hands, and then I heard what she was saying. She was saying, ‘To be murdered. To be murdered. No. No. There’s nothing worse. Nothing worse than that. Nothing.’ ”

It was midday deep in the Mojave Desert. Perry, sitting on a straw suitcase, was playing a harmonica. Dick was standing at the side of a black-surfaced highway, Route 66, his eyes fixed upon the immaculate emptiness as though the fervor of his gaze could force motorists to materialize. Few did, and none of those stopped for the hitchhikers. One truck driver, bound for Needles, California, had offered a lift, but Dick had declined. That was not the sort of “setup” he and Perry wanted. They were waiting for some solitary traveller in a decent car and with money in his billfold—a stranger to rob, strangle, discard in the desert.

In the desert, sound often precedes sight. Dick heard the dim vibrations of an oncoming, not yet visible car. Perry heard it, too; he put the harmonica in his pocket, picked up the straw suitcase (this, their only luggage, bulged and sagged with the weight of Perry’s souvenirs, plus three shirts, five pairs of white socks, a box of aspirin, a bottle of tequila, scissors, a safety razor, and a fingernail file; all their other belongings had either been pawned or been left with the Mexican bartender or been shipped to Las Vegas), and joined Dick at the side of the road. They watched. Now the car appeared, and grew until it became a blue Dodge sedan with a single passenger, a bald, skinny man. Perfect. Dick raised his hand and waved. The Dodge slowed down, and Dick gave the man a sumptuous smile. The car almost, but not quite, came to a stop, and the driver leaned out the window, looking them up and down. The impression they made was evidently alarming. (After a fifty-hour bus ride from Mexico City to Barstow, California, and half a day of trekking across the Mojave, both hikers were bearded, stark, dusty figures.) The car leaped forward and sped on. Dick cupped his hands around his mouth and called out, “You’re a lucky bastard!” Then he laughed, and hoisted the suitcase to his shoulder. Nothing could get him really angry, because, as he later recalled, he was “too glad to be back in the good ol’ U.S.A.” Anyway, another man in another car would come along.

Perry produced his harmonica (his since yesterday, when he stole it from a Barstow variety store) and played the opening bars of what had come to be their “marching music;” the song was one of Perry’s favorites, and he had taught Dick all five stanzas. In step, and side by side, they swung along the highway singing, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.” Through the silence of the desert, their hard, young voices rang: “Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!” ♦

This was the second part of a four-part series. The pieces became the book “In Cold Blood,” published by Random House.