This is the third part of a four-part series. Read the last part.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: ALL QUOTATIONS IN THIS ARTICLE ARE TAKEN EITHER FROM OFFICIAL RECORDS OR FROM CONVERSATIONS, TRANSCRIBED VERBATIM, BETWEEN THE AUTHOR AND THE PRINCIPALS.)
The young man’s name was Floyd Wells, and he was short and nearly chinless. He had attempted several careers, as soldier, ranch hand, mechanic, thief, the last of which had earned him a sentence of three to five years in Kansas State Penitentiary, at Lansing, Kansas. On the evening of Tuesday, November 17, 1959, he was lying in his cell with a pair of radio carphones clamped to his head. He was listening to a news broadcast, but the announcer’s voice and the drabness of the day’s events (“Chancellor Konrad Adenauer arrived in London today for talks with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. . . . President Eisenhower put in seventy minutes going over space problems and the budget for space exploration with Dr. T. Keith Glennan”) were luring him toward sleep. His drowsiness instantly vanished when he heard: “Officers investigating the tragic slaying of four members of the Herbert W. Clutter family have appealed to the public for any information which might aid in solving this baffling crime. Clutter, his wife, and their two teenage children were found murdered in their farm home near Garden City early last Sunday morning. Each had been bound, gagged, and shot through the head with a 12-gauge shotgun. Investigating officials admit they can discover no motive for the crime, termed by Logan Sanford, Director of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, as the most vicious in the history of Kansas. Clutter, a prominent wheatgrower and former Eisenhower appointee to the Federal Farm Credit Board . . .”
Wells was stunned. As he was eventually to describe his reaction, he “didn’t hardly believe it.” Yet he had good reason to, for not only had he known the murdered family, he knew very well who had murdered them.
It had begun a long time ago—eleven years ago, in the autumn of 1948, when Wells was nineteen. He was “sort of drifting around the country, taking jobs as they came,” as he recalled it. “One way and another, I found myself out there in western Kansas. Near the Colorado border. I was hunting work, and, asking round, I heard maybe they could use a hand over to River Valley Farm—that’s how he called his place, Mr. Clutter did. Sure enough, he put me on. I stayed there I guess a year—all that winter, anyway—and when I left, it was just ‘cause I was feeling kind of footy. Wanted to move on. Not account of any quarrel with Mr. Clutter. He treated me fine, same as he treated everybody that worked for him; like, if you was a little short before payday, he’d always hand you a ten or a five. He paid good wages, and if you deserved it he was quick to give you a bonus. The fact is, I liked Mr. Clutter much as any man I ever met. The whole family. Mrs. Clutter and the four kids. When I knew them, the youngest two, the ones that got killed—Nancy and the little boy what wore glasses—they were only babies, maybe—five or six years old. The other two—one was called Beverly, the other girl I don’t remember her name—they were already in high school. A nice family, real nice. I never forgot them. When I left there, it was sometime in 1949. I got married, I got divorced, the Army took me, other stuff happened, time went by, you might say, and in 1959—June, 1959, ten years since I last seen Mr. Clutter—I got sent to Lansing. Because of breaking into this appliance store. Electrical appliances. What I had in mind was, I wanted to get hold of some electrical lawnmowers. Not to sell. I was going to start a lawnmower rental service. That way, see, I’d have had my own permanent little business. Course, nothing come of it. ‘Cept I drew a three-to five. If I hadn’t, then I never would have met Dick. And maybe Mr. Clutter wouldn’t be in his grave. But there you are. There it is. I come to meet Dick.
“He was the first fellow I celled with. We celled together I guess a month. June and part of July. He was just finishing a three-to-five—due for parole in August. He talked a lot about what he planned to do when he got out. Said he thought he might go to Nevada, one of them missile-base towns, buy hisself a uniform, and pass hisself off as a Air Force officer. So he could hang out a regular wash line of hot paper. That was one idea he told me. (Never thought much of it myself. He was smart, I don’t deny, but he didn’t look the part. Like no Air Force officer.) Other times, he mentioned this friend of his. Perry. A half-Indian fellow he used to cell with. And the big deals him and Perry might pull when they got together again. I never met him—Perry. Never saw him. He’d already left Lansing. Was out on parole. But Dick always said if the chance of a real big score came up, he could rely on Perry Smith to go partners. I don’t exactly recall how Mr. Clutter first got mentioned. It must have been when we were discussing jobs, different kinds of work we’d done. Dick, he was a trained car mechanic, and mostly that was the work he’d done. Only, once he’d had a job driving a hospital ambulance. He was full of brag about that. About nurses. And all what he’d done with them in the back of the ambulance. Anyway, I informed him how I’d worked a year on a considerable wheat spread in western Kansas. For Mr. Clutter. He wanted to know if Mr. Clutter was a wealthy man. Yes, I said. Yes, he was. In fact, I said, Mr. Clutter had once told me that he got rid of ten thousand dollars in one week. I mean, said it sometimes cost him ten thousand dollars a week to run his operation. After that, Dick never stopped asking me about the family. How many was they? What ages would the kids be now? Exactly how did you get to the house? How was it laid out? Did Mr. Clutter keep a safe? I won’t deny it—I told him he did. Because I seemed to remember a sort of cabinet, or safe, or something, right behind the desk in the room Mr. Clutter used as an office. Next thing I knew, Dick was talking about killing Mr. Clutter. Said him and Perry was gonna go out there and rob the place, and they was gonna kill all witnesses—the Clutters, and anybody else that happened to be around. He described to me a dozen times how he was gonna do it, how him and Perry was gonna tie them people up and gun them down. I told him, ‘Dick, you’ll never get by with it.” But I can’t honestly say I tried to persuade him different. Because I never for a minute believed he meant to carry it out. I thought it was just talk. Like you hear plenty of in Lansing. That’s about all you do hear: what a fellow’s gonna do when he gets out the holdups and robberies and so forth. It’s nothing but brag, mostly. Nobody takes it serious. That’s why, when I heard what I heard on the earphones—well, I didn’t hardly believe it. Still and all, it happened. Just like Dick said it would.”
That was Floyd Wells’ story, though as yet he was far from telling it. He was afraid to, for if the other prisoners heard of his bearing tales to the warden, then his life, as he put it, “wouldn’t be worth a dead coyote.” A week passed. He monitored the radio, he followed the newspaper accounts—and in one of them read that a Kansas paper, the Hutchinson News, was offering a reward of one thousand dollars for any information leading to the capture and conviction of the person or persons guilty of the Clutter murders. An interesting item; it almost inspired Wells to speak. But he was still too much afraid, and his fear was not solely of the other prisoners. There was also the chance that the authorities might charge him as an accessory to the crime. After all, it was he who had guided Dick to the Clutters’ door; certainly it could be claimed that he had been aware of Dick’s intentions. However one viewed it, his situation was curious and his excuses were questionable. So he said nothing, and ten more days went by. December replaced November, and those investigating the case remained, according to increasingly brief newspaper reports (radio newscasters had ceased to mention the subject), as bewildered, as virtually clueless, as they had been the morning of the tragic discovery.
But he knew. Presently, tortured by a need to “tell somebody,” he confided in another prisoner. “A particular friend. A Catholic. Kind of very religious. He asked me, ‘Well, what are you gonna do, Floyd?’ I said, Well, I didn’t rightly know—what did he think I ought to do? Well, he was all for me going to the proper people. Said he didn’t think I ought to live with something like that on my mind. And he said I could do it without anybody inside guessing I was the one who told. Said he’d fix it. So the next day he got word to the deputy warden—told him I wanted to be ‘called out.’ Said if the deputy called me to his office on some pretext or other, maybe I could tell him who killed the Clutters. Sure enough, the deputy sent for me. I was scared, and I thought, Oh, Jesus, they gonna get me for this. But soon as I started talking I stopped being scared. I remembered Mr. Clutter, and how he’d never done me no harm, how at Christmas he’d give me a little purse with fifty dollars in it. I talked to the deputy. Then I told the warden hisself. And while I was still sitting there, right there in Warden Hand’s office, he picked up the telephone. . . .”
The person to whom Warden Hand telephoned was Logan Sanford, Director of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, an organization with headquarters in the state capital, Topeka. Sanford listened, hung up, issued several orders, then placed a call of his own, to Alvin Dewey, the K.B.I. agent resident in Finney County, Kansas, where the Clutter murders took place, and the man in overall charge of the case. That evening, when Dewey left his office in the courthouse at Garden City, the county seat, he took home with him a manila envelope.
When Dewey got home, his wife, Marie, was in the kitchen preparing supper. The moment he appeared, she launched into an account of household upsets. The family cat had attacked the cocker spaniel that lived across the street, and now it seemed as if one of the spaniel’s eyes might be seriously damaged. And Paul, their nine-year-old, had fallen out of a tree. It was a wonder he was alive. And then their twelve-year-old, Dewey’s namesake, had gone into the yard to burn rubbish and started a blaze that had threatened the neighborhood. Someone—she didn’t know who—had actually called the fire department.
While his wife described these unhappy episodes, Dewey poured two cups of coffee. Suddenly, Marie stopped in the middle of a sentence and stared at him. His face was flushed, and she could tell that he was elated. She said, “Alvin. Oh, honey. Is it good news?” Without comment, he gave her the manila envelope. Her hands were wet; she dried them, sat down at the kitchen table, sipped her coffee, opened the envelope, and took out photographs of a blond young man and a dark-haired, dark-skinned young man—police-made “mug shots.” A pair of semi-coded dossiers accompanied the photographs. The one for the fair-headed man read:
The second of these abbreviated histories applied to the fair-headed man’s dark companion:
Marie examined the front-view and profile photographs of Smith: an arrogant face, tough, yet not entirely, for there was about it a peculiar refinement; the lips and nose seemed nicely made, and she thought the eyes, with their moist, dreamy expression, rather pretty—rather, in an actorish way, sensitive. Sensitive, and something more—“mean.” Though not as mean, as forbiddingly “criminal,” as the eyes of Hickock, Richard Eugene. Marie, transfixed by Hickock’s eyes, was reminded of a childhood incident—of a bobcat she’d once seen caught in a trap, and of how, though she’d wanted to release it, the cat’s eyes, radiant with pain and hatred, had drained her of pity and filled her with terror. “Who are they?” Marie asked.
Dewey told her Floyd Wells’ story, and at the end he said, “Funny. The past three weeks, that’s the angle we’ve concentrated on. Tracking down every man ever worked on the Clutter place. Now, the way it’s turned out, it just seems like a piece of luck. But a few days more and we would’ve hit this Wells. Found he was in prison. We would’ve got the truth then. Hell, yes.”
“Maybe it isn’t the truth,” Marie said. Dewey and the seventeen men assisting him had pursued hundreds of leads to barren destinations, and she hoped to warn him against another disappointment, for she was worried about his health. His state of mind was bad; he was emaciated; and he was smoking sixty cigarettes a day.
“No. Maybe not,” Dewey said. “But I have a hunch.”
His tone impressed her; she looked again at the faces on the kitchen table. “Think of him,” she said, placing a finger against the front-view portrait of the blond young man. “Think of those eyes. Coming toward you.” Then she pushed the pictures back into their envelope. “I wish you hadn’t shown me.”
That same evening, another woman, in another kitchen, put aside a sock she was darning, removed a pair of plastic-rimmed spectacles, and, levelling them at a visitor, said, “I hope you find him, Mr. Nye. For his own sake. We have two sons, and he’s one of them, our first-born. We love him. But— Oh, I realized. I realized he wouldn’t have packed up. Run off. Without a word to anybody—his daddy or his brother. Unless he was in trouble again. What makes him do it? Why?” She glanced across the small, stove-warmed room at a gaunt figure hunched in a rocking chair—Walter Hickock, her husband and the father of Richard Eugene. He was a man with faded, defeated eyes and rough hands; when he spoke, his voice sounded as if it were seldom used.
“Was nothing wrong with my boy, Mr. Nye,” Mr. Hickock said. “A outstanding athlete—always on the first team at school. Basketball! Baseball! Football! Dick was always the star player. A pretty good student, too. With A marks in several subjects. History. Mechanical drawing. After he graduated from high school—June, 1949—he wanted to go on to college. Study to be a engineer. But we couldn’t do it. Plain didn’t have the money. Never have had any money. Our farm here, it’s only forty-four acres—we hardly can scratch a living. I guess Dick resented it, not getting to college. The first job he had was with Santa Fe Railway, in Kansas City. Made seventy-five dollars a week. He figured that was enough to get married on, so him and Carol got married. She wasn’t but sixteen; he wasn’t but nineteen hisself. I never thought nothing good would come of it. Didn’t, neither.”
Mrs. Hickock, a plump woman with a soft, round face unmarred by a lifetime of dawn-to-dark endeavor, reproached him. “Three precious little boys, our grandchildren—there, that’s what came of it. And Carol was a lovely girl. She’s not to blame.”
Mr. Hickock continued, “Him and Carol rented a good-size house, bought a fancy car—they was in debt all the time. Even though pretty soon Dick was making better money driving a hospital ambulance. Later on, the Markl Buick Company, a big outfit there in Kansas City, they hired him. As a mechanic and car painter. But him and Carol lived too high, kept buying stuff they couldn’t nohow afford, and Dick got to writing checks. I still think the reason he started doing stunts such as that was connected with the smashup. Concussed his head in a car smashup. After that, he wasn’t the same boy. Gambling, writing bad checks. I never knew him to do them things before. And it was along about then he took up with this other gal. The one he divorced Carol for, and was his second wife.”
Mrs. Hickock said, “Dick couldn’t help that. You remember how Margaret Edna attracted him.”
“ ’Cause a woman attracts you, does that mean you got to marry her?” Mr. Hickock said. “Well, Mr. Nye, I expect you know as much about it as we do. Why our boy was sent to prison. Locked away seventeen months, and all he done was borrow a hunting rifle. From the house of a neighbor here. He had no idea to steal it, I don’t give a damn what nobody says. And that was the ruination of him. When he come out of Lansing, he was a plain stranger to me. You couldn’t talk to him. The whole world was against Dick Hickock—that’s how he figured. Even the second wife, she left him—filed for divorce while he was in prison. Just the same, lately there, he seemed to be settling down. Working for the Bob Sands Body Shop, over in Olathe. Living here at home with us, getting to bed early, not violating his parole any shape or fashion. I’ll tell you, Mr. Nye, I’ve not got long, I’m with cancer, and Dick knowed that—leastways, he knowed I’m sickly—and not a month ago, right before he took off, he told me, ‘Dad, you’ve been a pretty good old dad to me. I’m not ever gonna do nothing more to hurt you.’ He meant it, too. That boy has plenty of good inside him. If ever you seen him on a football field, if ever you seen him play with his children, you wouldn’t doubt me. Lord, I wish the Lord could tell me, because I don’t know what happened.”
His wife said, “I do,” resumed her darning, and was forced by tears to stop. “That friend of his. That’s what happened.”
The visitor, K.B.I. Agent Harold Nye, who was one of the principal investigators assigned to the Clutter case, busied himself scribbling in a shorthand notebook—a notebook already well filled with the results of a long day spent probing the accusations of the informer, Floyd Wells. Thus far, the facts ascertained corroborated Wells’ story most persuasively. On November 20th, the suspect, Richard Eugene Hickock, had gone on a Kansas City shopping spree during which he had passed not fewer than “seven pieces of hot paper.” Nye had called on all the reported victims salesmen of cameras and of radio and television equipment, the proprietor of a jewelry shop, a clerk in a clothing store—and in each instance the witness, when he was shown photographs of Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, had identified the former as the author of the spurious checks, the latter as his “silent” accomplice. (One deceived salesman said, “He [Hickock] did the work. A very smooth talker, very convincing. The other one—I thought he might be a foreigner, a Mexican maybe—he never opened his mouth.”) Nye had next driven to the suburban village of Olathe, where he interviewed Hickock’s last employer, the owner of the Bob Sands Body Shop.
“Yes, he worked here,” said Mr. Sands. “From August until—Well, I never saw him after the nineteenth of November, or maybe it was the twentieth. He left without giving me any notice whatever. Just took off—I don’t know where to, and neither does his dad. Surprised? Well, yes. Yes, I was. We were on a fairly friendly basis. Dick kind of has a way with him, you know. He can be very likable. Once in a while, he used to come to our house. Fact is, a week before he left, we had some people over, a little party, and Dick brought this friend he had visiting him, a boy from Nevada—Perry Smith was his name. He could play the guitar real nice. He played the guitar and sang some songs, and him and Dick entertained everybody with a weightlifting act. Perry Smith, he’s a little fellow, not much over five feet high, but he could just about pick up a horse. No, they didn’t seem nervous, neither one. I’d say they were enjoying themselves. The exact date? Sure I remember. It was the thirteenth. Friday, the thirteenth of November.”
From there, Nye steered his car northward along raw country roads. As he neared the Hickock farm, he stopped at several neighboring homesteads, ostensibly to ask directions, actually to make inquiries concerning the suspect. One farmer’s wife said, “Dick Hickock! Don’t talk to me about Dick Hickock! If ever I met the devil! Steal? Steal the weights off a dead man’s eyes! His mother, though, Eunice, she’s a fine woman. Heart big as a barn. His daddy, too. Both of them plain, honest people. Dick would’ve gone to jail more times than you can count, except nobody around here ever wanted to prosecute. Out of respect for his folks.”
Dusk had fallen when Nye knocked at the door of Walter Hickock’s weather-grayed four-room farmhouse. It was as though some such visit had been expected. Mr. Hickock invited the detective into the kitchen, and Mrs. Hickock offered him coffee. Perhaps, if they had known the true meaning of the caller’s presence, the reception tendered him would have been less gracious, more guarded. But they did not know, and during the hours the three sat conversing, the name Clutter was never mentioned, or the word murder. The parents accepted what Nye implied—that parole violation and financial fraud were all that motivated his pursuit of their son.
“Dick brought him [Perry] home one evening, and told us he was a friend just off a bus from Las Vegas, and he wanted to know couldn’t he sleep here, stay here awhile,” Mrs. Hickock said. “No, sir, I wouldn’t have him in the house. One look, and I saw what he was. With his perfume. And his oily hair. It was clear as day where Dick had met him. According to the conditions of his parole, he wasn’t supposed to associate with anybody he’d met up there. I warned Dick, but he wouldn’t listen. He found a room for his friend at the Hotel Olathe, in Olathe, and after that Dick was with him every spare minute. Once, they went off on a weekend trip. Mr. Nye, certain as I’m sitting here, Perry Smith was the one put him up to writing them checks.”
Nye shut his notebook and put his pen in his pocket, and both his hands as well, for his hands were shaking from excitement. “Now, on this weekend trip. Where did they go?”
“Fort Scott,” Mr. Hickock said, naming a Kansas town with a military history. “The way I understood it, Perry Smith has a sister lives in Fort Scott. She was supposed to be holding a piece of money belonged to him. Fifteen hundred dollars was the sum mentioned. That was the main reason he’d come to Kansas, to collect this money his sister was holding. So Dick drove him down there to get it. It was only a overnight trip. He was back home a little before noon Sunday. Time for Sunday dinner.”
“I see,” said Nye. “An overnight trip. Which means they left here sometime Saturday. That would be Saturday, November 14th?” The old man agreed.
“And returned Sunday, November 15th?”
“Sunday noon.”
Nye pondered the mathematics involved, and was encouraged by the conclusion he came to: that within a time span of twenty or twenty-four hours the suspects could have made a round-trip journey of rather more than eight hundred miles, and, in the process, murder four people.
“Now, Mr. Hickock,” Nye said. “On Sunday, when your son came home, was he alone? Or was Perry Smith with him?”
“No, he was alone. He said he’d left Perry off at the Hotel Olathe.”
Nye, whose normal voice is cuttingly nasal and naturally intimidating, was attempting a subdued timbre, a disarming, throwaway style. “And do you remember—did anything in his manner strike you as unusual? Different?”
“Who?”
“Your son.”
“When?”
“When he returned from Fort Scott.”
Mr. Hickock ruminated. Then he said, “He seemed the same as ever. Soon as he came in, we sat down to dinner. He was mighty hungry. Started piling his plate before I’d finished the blessing. I remarked on it—said, ‘Dick, you’re shovelling it in fast as you can work your elbow. Don’t you mean to leave nothing for the rest of us?’ Course, he’s always been a big eater. Pickles. He can eat a whole tub of pickles.”
“And after dinner what did he do?”
“Fell asleep,” said Mr. Hickock, and appeared to be moderately taken aback by his own reply. “Fell fast asleep. And I guess you could say that was unusual. We’d gathered round to watch a basketball game. On the TV. Me and Dick and our other boy, David. Pretty soon, Dick was snoring like a buzz saw, and I said to his brother, ‘Lord, I never thought I’d live to see the day Dick would go to sleep at a basketball game.’ Did, though. Slept straight through it. Only woke up long enough to eat some cold supper, and right after went off to bed.”
Mrs. Hickock rethreaded her darning needle; her husband rocked his rocker and sucked on an unlit pipe. The detective’s trained eyes roamed the scrubbed and humble room. In a corner, a gun stood propped against the wall; he had noticed it before. Rising, reaching for it, he said, “You do much hunting, Mr. Hickock?”
“That’s his gun. Dick’s. Him and David go out once in a while. After rabbits, mostly.”
It was a 12-gauge Savage shotgun, Model 30-D; a delicately etched scene of pheasants in flight ornamented the stock.
“How long has Dick had it?” The question aroused Mrs. Hickock. “That gun cost over a hundred dollars. Dick bought it on credit, and now the store won’t have it back, even though it’s not hardly a month old and only been used the one time—the start of November, when him and David went to Grinnell on a pheasant shoot. He used our names to buy it—his daddy let him—so here we are, liable for the payments, and when you think of Walter, sick as he is, and all the things we need, all we do without . . .” She held her breath, as though trying to halt an attack of hiccups. “Are you sure you won’t have a cup of coffee, Mr. Nye? It’s no trouble.”
The detective leaned the gun against the wall, relinquishing it, although he felt certain it was the weapon that had killed the Clutter family. “‘Thank you, but it’s late, and I have to drive to Topeka,” he said, and then, consulting his notebook, “Now, I’ll just run through this, see if I have it straight. Perry Smith arrived in Kansas Thursday, the twelfth of November. Your son claimed this person came here to collect a sum of money from a sister residing in Fort Scott. That Saturday, the two drove to Fort Scott, where they remained overnight—I assume in the home of the sister?”
Mr. Hickock said, “No. They never could find her. Seems like she’d moved.”
Nye smiled. “Nevertheless, they stayed away overnight. And during the week that followed—that is, from the fifteenth to the twenty-first—Dick continued to see his friend Perry Smith, but otherwise, or as far as you know, he maintained a normal routine: lived at home, and reported to work every day. On the twenty-first, he disappeared, and so did Perry Smith. And since then you’ve not heard from him? He hasn’t written you?”
“He’s afraid to,” said Mrs. Hickock. “Ashamed and afraid.”
“Ashamed?”
“Of what he’s done. Of how he’s hurt us again. And afraid because he thinks we won’t forgive him. Like we always have. And will. You have children, Mr. Nye?”
He nodded.
“Then you know how it is.”
“One thing more. Have you any idea, any at all, where your son might have gone?”
“Open a map,” said Mr. Hickock. “Point your finger—maybe that’s it.”
It was late afternoon, and the driver of the car, a middle-aged travelling salesman who shall here be known as Mr. Bell, was quite tired. He longed to stop for a short nap. However, he was only a hundred miles from his destination—Omaha, Nebraska, the headquarters of the large meat-packing company for which he worked. A company rule forbade its salesmen to pick up hitchhikers, but Mr. Bell often disobeyed it, particularly if he was bored and drowsy, so when he saw the two young men standing by the side of the road he immediately braked his car.
They looked to him like “O.K. boys.” The taller of the two, a wiry type with dirty-blond, crew-cut hair, had an engaging grin and a most polite manner, and his partner, the “runty” one, holding a harmonica in his right hand and, in his left, a swollen straw suitcase, seemed “nice enough,” shy but amiable. In any event, Mr. Bell, entirely unaware of his guests’ intentions, which included throttling him with a belt and leaving him, robbed of his car, his money, and his life, concealed in a prairie grave, was glad to have company, somebody to talk to and keep him awake until he arrived at Omaha.
He introduced himself, then asked them their names, and the affable young man with whom he was sharing the front seat said his name was Dick. “And that’s Perry,” he said, winking at Perry, who was seated directly behind the driver.
“I can ride you boys as far as Omaha.”
Dick said, “Thank you, sir. Omaha’s where we were headed. Hoped we might find some work.”
What kind of work were they hunting? The salesman thought perhaps he could help.
Dick said, “I’m a first-class car painter. Mechanic, too. I’m used to making real money. My buddy and me, we just been down in Old Mexico. Our idea was, we wanted to live there. But, hell, they don’t pay any wages. Nothing a white man could live off.”
Ah, Mexico. Mr. Bell explained that he had honeymooned in Cuernavaca. “We always wanted to go back. But it’s hard to move around when you’ve got five kids.”
Perry, as he later recalled, thought, Five kids—well, too bad. And, listening to Dick’s conceited chatter, hearing him start to describe his Mexican “amorous conquests,” he thought how “queer” it was, “egomaniacal.” Imagine going all out to impress a man you were going to kill, a man who wouldn’t be alive ten minutes from now—not if the plan he and Dick had devised went smoothly. And why shouldn’t it? The setup was ideal—exactly what they had been looking for during the three days it had taken them to hitchhike from California to Nevada and across Nevada and Utah and Wyoming into Nebraska. Until now, however, a suitable victim had eluded them. Mr. Bell was the first prosperous-seeming solitary traveller to offer them a lift. Their other hosts had been either truck drivers or soldiersand, once, a pair of Negro prizefighters driving a lavender Cadillac. But Mr. Bell was perfect. Perry felt inside a pocket of the leather windbreaker he was wearing. The pocket bulged with a bottle of Bayer aspirin and with a jagged, fist-size rock wrapped in a yellow cotton cowboy handkerchief. He unfastened his belt, a Navajo belt, silver-buckled and studded with turquoise beads; he took it off, flexed it, placed it across his knees. He waited. He watched the Nebraska prairie rolling by, and fooled with his harmonica—made up a tune and played it and waited for Dick to pronounce the agreed-upon signal: “Hey, Perry, pass me a match.” Whereupon Dick was supposed to seize the steering wheel, while Perry, wielding his handkerchief wrapped rock, belabored the salesman’s head—“opened it up.” Later, along some quiet side road, use would be made of the belt with the sky-blue beads.
Meanwhile, Dick and the condemned man were trading dirty jokes. Their laughter irritated Perry; he especially disliked Mr. Bell’s outbursts—hearty barks that sounded very much like the laughter of Tex John Smith, Perry’s father. The memory of his father’s laughter increased his tension; his head hurt, his knees ached. He chewed three aspirin and swallowed them dry. Jesus! He thought he might vomit, or faint; he felt certain he would if Dick delayed “the party” much longer. The light was dimming, the road was straight, with neither house nor human being in view—nothing but land winter—stripped and as sombre as sheet iron. Now was the time, now. He stared at Dick, as though to communicate this realization, but a few small signs—a twitching eyelid, a mustache of sweat drops—told him that Dick had already reached the same conclusion.
And yet, when Dick next spoke, it was only to launch another joke. “Here’s a riddle. The riddle is: What’s the similarity between a trip to the bath, room and a trip to the cemetery?” He grinned. “Give up?”
“Give up.”
“When you gotta go, you gotta go!” Mr. Bell barked.
“Hey, Perry, pass me a match.”
But, just as Perry raised his hand, and the rock was on the verge of descent, something extraordinary occurred—what Perry later called “a goddam miracle.” The miracle was the sudden appearance of a third hitchhiker, a Negro soldier, for whom the charitable salesman stopped. “Say, that’s pretty cute,” he said as his savior ran toward the car. “When you gotta go, you gotta go!”
December 16, 1959, Las Vegas, Nevada. Age and weather had removed the first letter and the last—an “R” and an “S”—thereby coining a somewhat ominous word: “OOM.” The word, faintly present upon a sun-warped sign, seemed appropriate to the place it publicized, which was, as Harold Nye wrote in his official K.B.I. report, “run-down and shabby, the lowest type of hotel or rooming house.” The report continued, “Until a few years ago (according to information supplied by the Las Vegas police) it was one of the biggest cat houses in the West. Then fire destroyed the main building, and the remaining portion was converted into a cheap-rent rooming house.” The “lobby” was unfurnished, except for a cactus plant six feet tall and a makeshift reception desk; it was also uninhabited. The detective clapped his hands. Eventually, a voice, female but not very feminine, shouted, “I’m coming,” but it was five minutes before the woman appeared. She wore a soiled housecoat and high-heeled gold leather sandals. Curlers pinioned her thinning yellowish hair. Her face was broad, muscular, rouged, powdered. She was carrying a can of Miller’s High Life beer; she smelled of beer and tobacco and recently applied nail varnish. She was seventy-four years old but, in Nye’s opinion, “looked younger—maybe ten minutes younger.” She stared at him—his trim brown suit, his brown snap-brim hat. When he displayed his badge, she was amused; her lips parted, and Nye glimpsed two rows of fake teeth. “Uh-huh. That’s what I figured,” she said. “O.K. Let’s hear it.”
He handed her a photograph of Richard Hickock. “Know him?”
A negative grunt.
“Or him?”
She said, “Uh-huh. He’s stayed here a coupla times. But he’s not here now. Checked out over a month ago. You wanna see the register?”
Nye leaned against the desk and watched the landlady’s long and lacquered fingernails search a page of pencil-scribbled names. Las Vegas was the first of three places that his employers wished him to visit. Each had been chosen because of its connection with the history of Perry Smith. The two others were Reno, where it was thought that Smith’s father lived, and San Francisco, the home of Smith’s sister, who shall here be known as Mrs. Frederic Johnson. Though Nye planned to interview these relatives, and anyone else who might have knowledge of the suspects’ whereabouts, his main objective was to obtain the aid of the local law agencies. On arriving in Las Vegas, for example, he had discussed the Clutter case with Lieutenant B. J. Handlon, chief of the Detective Division of the Las Vegas Police Department. The Lieutenant had then written a memorandum ordering all police personnel to be on the alert for Hickock and Smith: “Wanted in Kansas for parole violation, and said to be driving a 1949 Chevrolet bearing Kansas license JO-58269. These men are probably armed and should be considered dangerous.” Also, Handlon had assigned a detective to help Nye “case the pawnbrokers,” saying, “Always a pack of them in any gambling town.”
Together, Nye and the Las Vegas detective checked every pawn ticket issued during the past month. Specifically, Nye hoped to find a Zenith portable radio believed to have been stolen from the Clutter house on the night of the crime, but he had no luck with that. One broker, though, remembered Smith (“He’s been in and out of here going on a good ten years”), and was able to produce a ticket for a bearskin rug pawned the first week in November. It was from this ticket that Nye had obtained the address of the rooming house.
“Registered October 30th,” the landlady said. “Pulled out November 11th.” Nye glanced at Smith’s signature. The ornateness of it, the mannered swoops and swirls, surprised him—a reaction that the landlady apparently divined, for she said, “Uh-huh. And you oughta hear him talk. Big, long words coming at you in this kinda lispy, whispery voice. Quite a personality. What you got against him—a nice little punk like that?”
“Parole violation.”
“Uh-huh. Came all the way from Kansas on a parole case. Well, I’m just a dizzy blonde. I believe you. But I wouldn’t tell that tale to any brunettes.” She raised the beer can, emptied it, then thoughtfully rolled the empty can between her veined and freckled hands. “Whatever it is, it ain’t nothing big-big. Couldn’t be. I never saw the man yet I couldn’t gauge his shoe size. This one, he’s only a punk. Little punk tried to sweet-talk me out of paying rent the last week he was here.” She chuckled, presumably at the absurdity of such an ambition.
The detective asked how much Smith’s room had cost him.
“Regular rate. Nine bucks a week. Plus a fifty-cent key deposit. Strictly cash. Strictly in advance.”
“While he was here, what did he do with himself? Does he have any friends?” Nye asked.
“You think I keep an eye on every crawly that comes in here?” the landlady retorted. “Bums. Punks. I’m not interested. I got a daughter married big-big.” Then she said, “No, he doesn’t have any friends. Least, I never noticed him run around with anybody special. This last time he was here, he spent most every day tinkering with his car. Had it parked out front there. An old Ford. Looked like it was made before he was born. He gave it a paint job. Painted the top part black and the rest silver. Then he wrote ‘For Sale’ on the windshield. One day, I heard a sucker stop and offer him forty bucks—that’s forty more than it was worth. But he allowed he couldn’t take less than ninety. Said he needed the money for a bus ticket. Just before he left, I heard some colored man bought it.”
“He said he needed the money for a bus ticket. But you don’t know where it was he wanted to go?”
She pursed her lips, hung a cigarette between them. Meanwhile, her eyes stayed on him. “Play fair. Any money on the table? A reward?” She waited for an answer; when none arrived, she seemed to weigh the probabilities and decide in favor of proceeding. “Because I got the impression wherever he was going he didn’t mean to stay long. That he meant to cut back here. Sorta been expecting him to turn up any day.” She nodded toward the interior of the establishment. “Come along, and I’ll show you why.”
Stairs. Gray halls. Nye sniffed the odors, separating one from another: lavatory disinfectant, alcohol, dead cigars. Beyond one door, a drunken tenant wailed and sang as though in the firmest grip of either gladness or grief. “Boil down, Dutch! Turn it off or out you go!” the woman yelled. “Here,” she said to Nye, leading him into a darkened storage room. She switched on a light. “Over there. That box. He asked would I keep it till he came back.”
It was a cardboard box, unwrapped but tied with cord. A declaration, a warning somewhat in the spirit of an Egyptian curse, was crayoned across the top: “BEWARE! Property of Perry E. Smith! BEWARE!” Nye undid the cord; the knot, he was unhappy to see, was not the same as the half hitch that the killers had used when binding the Clutter family. He parted the flaps. A cockroach emerged, and the woman stepped on it, squashing it under the heel of her gold leather sandal. “Hey!” she said as he carefully extracted and slowly examined Smith’s possessions. “The sneak. That’s my towel.” In addition to the towel, the meticulous Nye listed in his notebook: “One dirty pillow, ‘Souvenir of Honolulu;’ one pink baby blanket; one pair khaki trousers; one aluminum pan with pancake turner.” Other oddments included a scrapbook thick with photographs clipped from physical-culture magazines (sweaty studies of weight-lifting weight lifters) and, inside a shoebox, a collection of medicines: rinses and powders employed to combat trench mouth, and also a mystifying amount of aspirin—at least a dozen containers, several of them empty.
“Junk,” the landlady said. “Nothing but trash.”
True, it was valueless stuff, even to a clue-hungry detective. Still, Nye was glad to have seen it; each item—the palliatives for sore gums, the greasy Honolulu pillow—gave him a clearer impression of the owner and his lonely, mean life.
The next day, in Reno, Nye, preparing his official notes, wrote: “At 9:00 a.m. the reporting agent contacted Mr. Bill Driscoll, chief criminal investigator, Sheriff’s Office, Washoe County, Reno, Nevada. After being briefed on the circumstances of this case, Mr. Driscoll was supplied with photographs, fingerprints and warrants for Hickock and Smith. Stops were placed in the files on both these individuals as well as the automobile. At 10:30 a.m. the reporting agent contacted Sgt. Abe Feroah, Detective Division, Police Department, Reno, Nevada. Sgt. Feroah and the reporting agent checked the police files. Neither the name of Smith or Hickock was reflected in the felon registration file. A check of the pawnshop-ticket files failed to reflect any information about the missing radio. A permanent stop was placed in these files in the event the radio is pawned in Reno. The detective handling the pawnshop detail took photographs of Smith and Hickock to each of the pawnshops in town and also made a personal check of each shop for the radio. These pawnshops made an identification of Smith as being familiar, but were unable to furnish any further information.”
Thus the morning. That afternoon, Nye set forth in search of Tex John Smith. But at his first stop, the post office, a clerk at the General Delivery window told him he need look no farther—not in Nevada—for “the individual” had left there the previous August and now lived in the vicinity of Circle City, Alaska. That, anyway, was where his mail was being forwarded. “Gosh! Now, there’s a tall order,” said the clerk in response to Nye’s request for a description of the elder Smith. “The guy’s out of a book. He calls himself the Lone Wolf. A lot of his mail comes addressed that way—the Lone Wolf. He doesn’t receive many letters, no, but bales of catalogues and advertising pamphlets. You’d be surprised the number of people send away for that stuff—just to get some mail, must be. How old? I’d say sixty. Dresses Western—cowboy boots and a big ten-gallon hat. He told me he used to be with the rodeo. I’ve talked to him quite a bit. He’s been in here almost every day the last few years. Once in a while he’d disappear, stay away a month or so—always claimed he’d been off prospecting. One day last August, a young man came here to the window. He said he was looking for his father, Tex John Smith, and did I know where he could find him. He didn’t look much like his dad; the Wolf is so thin-lipped and Irish, and this boy looked almost pure Indian—hair black as boot polish, with eyes to match. But next morning in walks the Wolf and confirms it; he told me his son had just got out of the Army and that they were going to Alaska. He’s an old Alaska hand. I think he once owned a hotel there, or some kind of hunting lodge. He said he expected to be gone about two years. Nope, never seen him since, him or his boy.”
The Johnson family were recent arrivals in their San Francisco community—a middle-class, middle-income real-estate development high in the hills north of the city. The afternoon of December 18, 1959, young Mrs. Johnson was expecting guests; three women of the neighborhood were coming by for coffee and cake and perhaps a game of cards. The hostess was tense; it would be the first time she had entertained in her new home. Now, while she was listening for the doorbell, she made a final tour, pausing to dispose of a speck of lint or alter an arrangement of Christmas poinsettias. The house, like the others on the slanting hillside street, was a conventional suburban ranch house, very pleasant, very commonplace. Mrs. Johnson loved it; she was in love with the redwood panelling, the wall-to-wall carpeting, the picture windows fore and aft, the view that the rear window provided—hills, a valley, then sky and ocean. And she was proud of the small back garden; her husband—by profession an insurance salesman, by inclination a carpenter—had built around it a white picket fence and inside it a house for the family dog, and a sandbox and swings for the children. At the moment, all four—dog, two little boys, and a girl—were playing there under a mild sky; she hoped they would be happy in the garden until the guests had gone. When the doorbell sounded, and she went to the door, she was wearing what she considered her most becoming dress, a yellow knit that hugged her figure and heightened the pale-tea shine of her Cherokee coloring, the blackness of her feather-bobbed hair. She opened the door, prepared to admit three neighbors; instead she discovered two strangers—men who tipped their hats and flipped open badge-studded billfolds. “Mrs. Johnson?” one of them said. “My name is Nye. This is Inspector Guthrie. We’re attached to the San Francisco police, and we’ve just received an inquiry from Kansas concerning your brother, Perry Edward Smith. It seems he hasn’t been reporting to his parole officer, and we wondered if you could tell us anything of his present whereabouts.”
Mrs. Johnson was not distressed—and definitely not surprised—to learn that the police were once more interested in her brother’s activities. What did upset her was the prospect of having guests arrive to find her being questioned by detectives. She said, “No. Nothing. I haven’t seen Perry in four years.”
“This is a serious matter, Mrs. Johnson,” Nye said. “We’d like to talk it over.”
Having surrendered, having asked them in and offered them coffee (which was accepted), she said, “I haven’t seen Perry in four years. Or heard from him since he was paroled. Last summer, when he came out of prison, he visited my father in Reno. In a letter, my father told me he was returning to Alaska and taking Perry with him. Then he wrote again, I think in September, and he was very angry. He and Perry had quarrelled and separated before they reached the border. Perry turned back; my father went on into Alaska alone.”
“And he hasn’t written you since?”
“No.”
“Then it’s possible your brother may have joined him recently. Within the last month.”
“I don’t know, I don’t care.”
“On bad terms?”
“With Perry? Yes. I’m afraid of him.”
“But while he was in Lansing you wrote him frequently. Or so the Kansas authorities tell us.”
It was a duologue. The second man, Inspector Guthrie, seemed content to occupy the sidelines.
“I wanted to help him. I hoped I might change a few of his ideas. Now I know better. The rights of other people mean nothing to Perry. He has no respect for anyone.”
“About friends. Do you know of any with whom he might be staying?”
“Joe James,” she said, and explained that James was a young Indian logger and fisherman who lived in the forest near Bellingham, Washington. No, she was not personally acquainted with him, but she understood that he and his family were generous people who had often been kind to Perry in the past. The only friend of Perry’s she had ever met was a young lady who had appeared on the Johnsons’ doorstep in June, 1955, bringing with her a letter from Perry in which he introduced her as his wife. “He said he was in trouble, and asked if I would take care of his wife until he could send for her. The girl looked twenty; it turned out she was fourteen. And, of course, she wasn’t anyone’s wife. But at the time I was taken in. I felt sorry for her, and asked her to stay with us. She did, though not for long. Less than a week. And when she left, she took our suitcases and everything they could hold—most of my clothes and most of my husband’s, the silver, even the kitchen clock.”
“When this happened, where were you living?”
“Denver.”
“Have you ever lived in Fort Scott, Kansas?”
“Never. I’ve never been to Kansas.”
“Have you a sister who lives in Fort Scott?”
“My sister is dead. My only sister.”
Nye smiled. He said, “You understand, Mrs. Johnson, we’re working on the assumption your brother will contact you. Write or call. Or come to see you.”
“I hope not. As a matter of fact, he doesn’t know we’ve moved. He thinks I’m still in Denver. Please, if you do find him, don’t give him my address. I’m afraid.”
“When you say that, is it because you think he might harm you? Hurt you physically?”
She considered, and, unable to decide, said she didn’t know, continuing, “But I’m afraid of him. I always have been. He can seem so warmhearted and sympathetic. Gentle. He cries so easily. Sometimes music sets him off, and when he was a little boy he used to cry because he thought a sunset was beautiful. Or the moon. Oh, he can fool you. He can make you feel so sorry for him—”
The doorbell rang. Mrs. Johnson’s reluctance to answer conveyed her dilemma, and Nye (who later wrote of her, “Throughout the interview she remained composed and most gracious. A person of exceptional character’ ”) reached for his brown snap-brim. “Sorry to have troubled you, Mrs. Johnson. But if you hear from Perry we hope you’ll have the good sense to call us. Ask for Inspector Guthrie.”
After the departure of the detectives, the composure that had impressed Nye faltered; a familiar despair impended. She fought it, delayed its full impact until the party was done and the guests had gone, until she’d fed the children and bathed them and heard their prayers. Then the mood, like the evening ocean fog now clouding the street lamps, closed round her. She had said she was afraid of Perry, and she was, but was it simply Perry she feared, or was it a configuration of which he was part—the terrible destinies that seemed promised the four children of Florence Buckskin and Tex John Smith? The eldest, the brother she loved, had shot himself; Fern had fallen out of a window, or jumped; and Perry was committed to violence, a criminal. So, in a sense, she was the only survivor. But what tormented her was the thought that in time she, too, would be overwhelmed: go mad, or contract an incurable illness, or in a fire lose all she valued—home, husband, children.
Her husband was away on a business trip, and usually, when she was alone, she never thought of having a drink. Tonight, she fixed a strong one, then lay down on the living-room couch, a picture album propped against her knees.
A photograph of her father dominated the first page—a studio portrait taken in 1922, the year of his marriage to the young Indian rodeo rider Miss Florence Buckskin. It was a photograph that invariably transfixed the daughter of the subject. Because of it, she could understand why, when essentially they were so mismatched, her mother had married him. The young man in the picture exuded virile allure. Everything—the cocky tilt of his ginger-haired head, the squint in his left eye (as though he were sighting a target), the tiny cowboy scarf knotted round his throat—was abundantly attractive. On the whole, Mrs. Johnson’s attitude toward her father was ambivalent, but one aspect of him she had always respected—his fortitude. She well knew how eccentric he seemed to others; he seemed so to her, for that matter. All the same, he was “a real man.” He did things—did them easily. He could make a tree fall precisely where he wished. He could skin a bear, repair a watch, build a house, bake a cake, darn a sock, or catch a trout with a bent pin and a piece of string. Once, he had survived a winter alone in the Alaskan wilderness.
Alone—that, in Mrs. Johnson’s opinion, was how such men should live. Wives, children, a timid life are not for them.
She turned over some pages of childhood snapshots—pictures made in Utah and Nevada and Idaho and Oregon. The rodeo careers of “Tex & Flo” were finished, and the family, living in an old truck, roamed the country hunting work—a hard thing to find in 1933. “Tex John Smith Family picking berries in Oregon, 1933”—thus the caption under a snapshot of four barefooted children wearing overalls and cranky, uniformly fatigued expressions. Berries, stale bread soaked in sweet condensed milk—such fodder was often all they had to eat. Barbara Johnson remembered that once the family had lived for days on rotten bananas, and that, as a result, Perry had got colic—had screamed all night, while Bobo, as Barbara was called, wept for fear he was dying.
Bobo was three years older than Perry, and she adored him; he was her only toy—a doll she scrubbed and combed and kissed and sometimes spanked. Here was a picture of the two together bathing naked in a diamond-watered Colorado creek, the brother, a pot-bellied, sun-blackened cupid, clutching his sister’s hand and giggling, as though the tumbling stream contained ghostly tickling fingers. In another snapshot (Mrs. Johnson was unsure, but she thought probably it was made at a remote Nevada ranch where the family was staying when a final battle between the parents, a terrifying contest in which horsewhips and scalding water and kerosene lamps were used as weapons, had brought the marriage to a stop), she and Perry are astride a pony, their heads together, their cheeks touching; beyond them dry mountains burn.
Later, when the children and their mother had gone to live in San Francisco, Bobo’s love for the little boy weakened until it quite went away. He wasn’t her baby anymore but a wild thing, a thief, a robber. His first recorded arrest was on October 27, 1936—his eighth birthday. Ultimately, after several confinements in institutions and children’s detention centers, he was returned to the custody of his father, and it was many years before Bobo saw him again, except in photographs that Tex John occasionally sent his other children—pictures that, pasted above white—ink captions, were part of the album’s contents. There were “Perry, Dad, and their Husky Dog,” “Perry and Dad Panning for Gold,” “Perry Bear-Hunting in Alaska.” In this last, he was a fur-capped boy of fifteen standing on snowshoes among snow weighted trees, a rifle hooked under his arm; the face was drawn and the eyes were sad and very tired, and Mrs. Johnson, looking at the picture, was reminded of a “scene” that Perry had made once when he had visited her in Denver. Indeed, it was the last time she had ever seen him—the spring of 1955. They were discussing his childhood with Tex John, and suddenly Perry, who had too much drink inside him, pushed her against a wall and held her there. “I was his nigger,” Perry said. “That’s all. Somebody he could work their guts out and never have to pay them one hot dime. No, Bobo. I’m talking. Shut up, or I’ll throw you in the river. Like once when I was walking across a bridge in Japan, and a guy was standing there, I never saw him before, I just picked him up and threw him in the river. Please, Bobo. Please listen. You think I like myself? Oh, the man I could have been! But that bastard never gave me a chance. He wouldn’t let me go to school. O.K. O.K. I was a bad kid. But the time came I begged to go to school. I happen to have a brilliant mind. In case you don’t know. A brilliant mind and talent plus. But no education. Because he didn’t want me to learn anything. Only how to tote and carry for him. Dumb. Ignorant. That’s the way he wanted me to be. So that I could never escape him. But you, Bobo. You went to school. You and Jimmy and Fern. Every damn one of you got an education. Everybody but me. And I hate you, all of you—Dad and everybody.”
As though for his brother and sisters life had been a bed of roses! Maybe so, if that meant cleaning up Mama’s drunken vomit, if it meant never anything nice to wear or enough to eat. Still, it was true; all three had finished high school. Jimmy, in fact, had graduated at the top of his class—an honor he owed entirely to his own will power. That, from Barbara Johnson’s point of view, was what made his suicide so ominous. Strong character, high courage, hard work—it seemed that none of these were determining factors in the fates of Tex John’s children. They shared a doom against which virtue was no defense. Not that Perry was virtuous, or Fern. When Fern was fourteen, she changed her name, and for the rest of her short life she tried to justify the replacement: Joy. She was an easygoing girl, “everybody’s sweetheart”—rather too much everybody’s, for she was partial to men, though somehow she hadn’t had much luck with them.
Somehow, the kind of man she liked always let her down. Her mother had died in an alcoholic coma, and she was afraid of drink, vet she drank. Before she was twenty, she was beginning the day with a bottle of beer. Then, one summer night, she fell from the window of a hotel room. Falling, she struck a theatre marquee, bounced off it, and rolled under the wheels of a taxi. Above, in the vacated room, police found her shoes, a moneyless purse, an empty whiskey bottle.
One could understand Fern, and forgive her, but Jimmy was a different matter. Mrs. Johnson was looking at a picture of him in which he was dressed as a sailor; during the war he had served in the Navy. Slender, a pale young seafarer with an elongated face of slightly dour saintliness, he stood with an arm around the waist of the girl he had married and, in Mrs. Johnson’s estimation, ought not to have, for they had nothing in common—the serious Jimmy and this teen-age San Diego fleet-follower, whose glass beads reflected a now long-faded sun. And yet what Jimmy had felt for her was beyond normal love; it was passion—a passion that was in part pathological. As for the girl, she must have loved him, and loved him completely, or she would not have done as she did. If only Jimmy had believed that! Or been capable of believing it. But jealousy imprisoned him. He was mortified by thoughts of the men she had slept with before their marriage; he was convinced, moreover, that she had remained promiscuous—that every time he went to sea, or even left her alone for the day, she betrayed him with a multitude of lovers, whose existence he unendingly demanded that she admit. Jimmy killed his wife one day and himself the next.
Opposite the picture of Jimmy and his wife was a photograph of Perry in Army uniform. It had been clipped from a newspaper, and was accompanied by a paragraph of text: “Headquarters, United States Army, Alaska. Pvt. Perry E. Smith, 23, first Army Korean combat veteran to return to the Anchorage, Alaska, area, is greeted by Captain Mason, Public Information Officer, upon arrival at Elmendorf Air Force Base. Smith served 15 months with the 24th Division as a combat engineer. His trip from Seattle to Anchorage was a gift from Pacific Northern Airlines. Miss Lynn Marquis, airline hostess, smiles approval at welcome. (Official U.S. Army Photo).” Captain Mason, with hand extended, is looking at Private Smith, but Private Smith is looking at the camera. In his expression his sister saw, or imagined she saw, not gratitude but arrogance, and, in place of pride, immense conceit. It wasn’t incredible that he had met a man on a bridge and thrown him off it. Of course he had. She had never doubted it.
She shut the album and switched on the television, but it did not console her. Suppose he did come? The detectives had found her. Why shouldn’t Perry? He need not expect her to help him; she wouldn’t even let him in. The front door was locked, but not the door to the garden. The garden was white with sea fog; it might have been an assembly of spirits: Mama and Jimmy and Fern. When Mrs. Johnson bolted the door, she had in mind, as she would never forget, the dead as well as the living.
A cloudburst. Rain. Buckets of it. Dick ran. Perry ran, too, but he could not run as fast; his legs were shorter, and he was lugging the suitcase. Dick reached shelter—a barn near the highway—long before him. On leaving Omaha, after a night spent in a Salvation Army dormitory, a truck driver had given them a ride across the Nebraska border into Iowa. The past several hours, however, had found them afoot. The rain came when they were sixteen miles north of an Iowa settlement called Tenville Junction.
The barn was dark.
“Dick?” Perry said.
“Over here,” Dick said. He was sprawled on a bed of hay.
Perry, drenched and shaking, dropped beside him. “I’m so cold,” he said, burrowing in the hay, “I’m so cold I wouldn’t give a damn if this caught fire and burned me alive.” He was hungry, too. Starved. Last night, they dined on bowls of Salvation Army soup, and today the only nourishment they’d had was some chocolate bars and chewing gum that Dick had stolen from a drugstore candy counter. “Any more Hershey?” Perry asked.
No, but there was still a pack of chewing gum. They divided it, then settled down to chewing it, each chomping on two and a half sticks of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit, Dick’s favorite flavor. (Perry preferred Doublemint.) Money was the problem. Their utter lack of it had led Dick to decide that their next move should be what Perry considered “a crazy-man stunt’”—a return to Kansas City. When Dick had first urged the return, Perry had said, “You ought to see a doctor.” Now, huddled together in the cold darkness, listening to the dark, cold rain, they resumed the argument, Perry once more listing the dangers of such a move, for surely by this time Dick was wanted for parole violation—“if nothing worse.” But Dick was not to be dissuaded. Kansas City, he again insisted, was the one place he was certain he could successfully “hang a lot of hot paper.” He went on, “Hell, I know we’ve got to be careful. I know they’ve got a warrant out. Because of the paper we hung before. But we’ll move fast. One day—that’ll do it. If we grab enough, maybe we ought to try Florida. Spend Christmas in Miami. Stay the winter if it looks good.” But Perry chewed his gum and shivered and sulked. Dick said, “What is it, honey? That other deal? Why the hell can’t you forget it? They never made any connection. They never will.”
Perry said, “You could be wrong. And if you are, it means The Corner.” Neither one had ever before referred to the ultimate penalty in the State of Kansas—the gallows, or death in The Corner, as the inmates of Kansas State Penitentiary have named the shed that houses the equipment required to hang a man.
Dick said, “The comedian, You kill me.” He struck a match, intending to smoke a cigarette, but something seen by the light of the flaring match brought him to his feet and carried him across the barn to a cow stall. A car was parked inside the stall. A black-and-white two-door 1956 Chevrolet. The key was in the ignition.
Dewey was determined to conceal from “the civilian population” any knowledge of a major break in the Clutter case—so determined that he decided to take into his confidence Garden City’s two professional town criers: Bill Brown, editor of the Garden City Telegram, and Robert Wells, manager of the local radio station, KIUL. In outlining the situation, Dewey emphasized his reasons for considering secrecy of the first importance. “Remember, there’s a possibility these men are innocent.”
It was a possibility too valid to dismiss. The informer, Floyd Wells, might easily have invented his story; such tale—telling was not infrequently undertaken by prisoners who hoped to win favor or attract official notice. But even if the man’s every word was gospel, Dewey and his colleagues had not yet unearthed one bit of solid supporting evidence—“courtroom evidence.” What had they discovered that could not be interpreted as plausible, though exceptional, coincidence? Just because Smith had travelled to Kansas to visit his friend Hickock, and just because Hickock possessed a gun of the calibre used to commit the crime, and just because the suspects had arranged a false alibi to account for their whereabouts the night of November 14th, they were not necessarily mass murderers.
“But we’re pretty sure this is it. We all think so. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t have set up a seventeen-state alarm. From Arkansas to Oregon. But keep in mind: It could be years before we catch them. They may have separated. Or left the country. There’s a chance they’ve gone to Alaska—not hard to get lost in Alaska. The longer they’re free, the less of a case we’ll have. Frankly, as matters stand, we don’t have much of a case anyhow. We could nab those sonsabitches tomorrow, and never be able to prove spit.”
Dewey did not exaggerate. Except for two sets of boot prints, one bearing a diamond pattern and the other a Cat’s Paw design, the slayers had left not a single clue. Undoubtedly, since they seemed to take such care, they had long ago got rid of the boots. And the radio, too—assuming that it was they who had stolen it, which was something Dewey still hesitated to do, for it appeared to him “ludicrously inconsistent” with the magnitude of the crime and the manifest cunning of the criminals, and “inconceivable” that these men had entered a house expecting to find a money-filled safe, and then, not finding it, had thought it expedient to slaughter the family for perhaps a few dollars and a small portable radio. “Without a confession, we’ll never get a conviction,” he said. “That’s my opinion. And that’s why we can’t be too cautious. They think they’ve got away with it. Well, we don’t want them to know any different. The safer they feel, the sooner we’ll grab them.”
But secrets are an unusual commodity in a town the size of Garden City. Anyone visiting the sheriff’s office, three underfurnished, overcrowded rooms on the third floor of the county courthouse, could detect an odd, almost sinister atmosphere. The hurry-scurry, the angry hum of recent weeks had departed; a quivering stillness now permeated the premises. Mrs. Edna Richardson, the office secretary and a very down-to-earth person, had acquired overnight a dainty lot of whispery, tiptoe mannerisms, and the men she served, the sheriff and his staff, Dewey, and the imported team of K.B.I. agents, crept about conversing in hushed tones. It was as though, like huntsmen hiding in a forest, they were afraid that any abrupt sound or movement would warn away approaching beasts.
People talked. The Trail Room of the Warren Hotel, a coffee shop that Garden City businessmen treat as though it were a private club, was a murmuring cave of speculation and rumor. An eminent citizen, so one heard, was on the point of arrest. Or it was now known that the crime was the work of killers hired by enemies of the Kansas Association of Wheat Growers, a progressive organization in which Mr. Clutter had played a large role. Of the many stories circulating, the most nearly accurate was contributed by a prominent car dealer (who refused to disclose its source): “Seems there was a man who worked for Herb way back yonder around ‘47 or ‘48. Ordinary ranch hand. Seems he went to prison, state prison, and while he was there he got to thinking what a rich man Herb was. So about a month ago, when they let him loose, the first thing he did was come on out here to rob and kill those people.”
But seven miles westward, in the village of Holcomb, where River Valley Farm was situated, where the Clutter family had lived, and where the murders had taken place, not a hint was heard of impending sensations, one reason being that for some while the Clutter tragedy had been a banned topic at both of the community’s principal gossip-dispensaries—the post office and Hartman’s Café. “Myself, I don’t want to hear another word,” said Mrs. Hartman. “I told them, ‘We can’t go on like this. Distrusting everybody. Scaring each other to death. What I say is, if you want to talk about it stay out of my place.” Her cousin Mrs. Myrtle Clare, Holcomb’s opinionated postmistress, took quite as strong a stand. “Folks come in here to buy a nickel’s worth of postage and think they can spend the next three hours and thirty-three minutes turning the Clutters inside out. Pickin’ the wings off other people. Rattlesnakes, that’s all they are. I don’t have the time to listen. I’m in business—I’m a representative of the government of the United States. Anyway, it’s morbid. Al Dewey and those hot-shot cops from Topeka and Kansas City—supposed to be sharp as turpentine. But I don’t know a soul who still thinks they’ve got hell’s chance of catching the one done it. So I say the sane thing to do is shut up. You live until you die, and it doesn’t matter how you go—dead’s dead. So why carry on like a sackful of sick cats just because Herb Clutter got his throat cut? Anyway, it’s morbid. Polly Stringer, from over at the schoolhouse—Polly Stringer was in here this morning. She said it’s only now, after over a month, only now those kids are beginning to quiet down. Which made me think: What if they do arrest somebody? If they do, it’s bound to be somebody everybody knows. And that would fan the fire for sure, get the pot boiling just when it had started to cool off. Ask me, we’ve had enough excitement.”
It was early, not yet nine, and Perry was the first customer at the Washateria, a self-service laundry. He opened his fat straw suitcase, extracted a wad of briefs and socks and shirts (some his, some Dick’s), tossed them into a washing machine, and fed the machine a lead slug—one of many bought in Mexico. He was expertly acquainted with the workings of such emporiums, having often patronized them, and happily, since he usually found it “so relaxing” to sit quiet and watch clothes get clean. Not today. He was too apprehensive. Despite his warnings, Dick had won out. Here they were, back in Kansas City—dead broke, to boot, and driving a stolen car! All night, they had raced the Iowa Chevrolet through thick rain, stopping twice to siphon gas, both times from vehicles parked on the empty streets of small sleeping towns. (This was Perry’s job, and one at which he judged himself “absolutely tops,” saying, “Just a short piece of rubber hose, that’s my cross-country credit card.”) On reaching Kansas City, at sunrise, the travellers had gone first to the airport, where, in the men’s lavatory, they washed and shaved and brushed their teeth; two hours later, after a nap in the airport lounge, they returned to the city. It was then that Dick had dropped his partner at the Washateria, promising to come back for him within the hour.
When the laundry was clean and dry, if not ironed, Perry repacked the suitcase. It was past ten. Dick, supposedly off somewhere “hanging paper,” was overdue. He sat down to wait, choosing a bench on which, an arm’s length away, a woman’s purse rested—tempting him to snake his hand around inside it. But the appearance of its owner, the burliest of several women now employing the establishment’s facilities, deterred him. Once, when he was a running-wild child in San Francisco, he and a “Chink kid” (Tommy Chan? Tommy Lee?) had worked together as a “purse-snatching team.” It amused Perry—cheered him up—to remember some of their escapades. Like one time we sneaked up an old lady, really old, and Tommy grabbed her handbag, but she wouldn’t let go, she was a regular tiger,” as he recalled on one occasion. “The harder he tugged one way, the harder she tugged the other. Then she saw me, and said ‘Help me! Help me!’ and I said ‘Hell, lady, I’m helping him’—and bopped her good. Put her on the pavement. Ninety cents was all we got. I remember exactly. We went to a Chink restaurant and ate ourselves under the table.” Things hadn’t changed much. He was twenty-odd years older and a hundred pounds heavier, and yet his material situation had improved not at all. He was still (and wasn’t it incredible, a person of his intelligence, his talents?) an urchin, dependent, so to say, on stolen coins.
A clock on the wall kept catching his life. At half past ten, he began to worry; by eleven, his legs were pulsing with pain, which was always, with him, a sign of approaching panic—“bubbles in my blood.” He ate an aspirin, and tried to blot out—blur, at least—the brilliantly vivid cavalcade gliding across his mind, a procession of dire visions: Dick in the hands of the law, perhaps arrested while writing a phony check, or for committing a minor traffic violation (and found to be driving a “hot” car). Very likely, at this very instant, Dick sat trapped inside a circle of red-necked detectives. And they weren’t discussing trivialities—bad checks or stolen automobiles. Murder, that was the topic, for somehow the connection that Dick had been so certain no one could make had been made. And a carload of Kansas City police were on their way to the Washateria.
But, no, he was imagining too much. Dick would never do that—“spill his guts.” Think of how often he had heard him say, “They can beat me blind, I’ll never tell them anything.” Of course, Dick was a “blowhard;” his “toughness,” as Perry had come to know, existed solely in situations where he unarguably had the upper hand. Suddenly, gratefully, he thought of a less desperate reason for Dick’s prolonged absence. He’d gone to visit his parents. A risky thing to do, but Dick was “devoted” to them, or claimed to be, and last night, during the long rainy ride, he had told Perry, “I’d sure like to see my folks. They wouldn’t mention it. I mean, they wouldn’t tell the parole officer—do anything to get us into trouble. Only, I’m ashamed to. I’m afraid of what my mother would say. About the checks. And going off like we did. But I wish I could call them. Hear how they are.” However, that was not possible, for the Hickock home was without a telephone; otherwise, Perry would have rung up to ask if Dick was there.
Another few minutes, and he was again convinced that Dick was under arrest. His leg pains flared up, flashed through his body, and the laundry odors, the steamy stench, all at once sickened him, picked him up and propelled him out the door. He stood at the curb retching like “a drunk with the dry heaves.” Kansas City! Hadn’t he known Kansas City was bad luck, and begged Dick to keep away? Now, maybe now, Dick was sorry he hadn’t listened. And he wondered: “But what about me, with a dime or two and a bunch of lead slugs in my pocket?” Where could he go? Who would help him? Bobo? Fat chance! But her husband might. If Fred Johnson had followed his own inclination, he would have guaranteed employment for Perry after he left prison, thus helping him obtain a parole. But Bobo wouldn’t permit it; she had said it would only lead to trouble, and possibly danger. Then she had written to Perry to tell him precisely that. One fine day, he’d pay her back, have a little fun—talk to her, advertise his abilities, spell out in detail the things he was capable of doing to people like her, respectable people, safe and smug people, exactly like Bobo. Yes, let her know just how dangerous he could be, and watch her eyes. Surely that was worth a trip to Denver? Which was what he’d do—go to Denver and visit the Johnsons. Fred Johnson would stake him to a new start in life; he’d have to, if he wanted ever to be rid of him.
Then Dick came up to him at the curb. “Hey, Perry,” he said. “You sick?”
The sound of Dick’s voice was like an injection of some very potent narcotic, a drug that, invading his veins, produced a delirium of colliding sensations: tension and relief, fury and affection. He advanced toward Dick with clenched fists. “You son of a bitch,” he said.
Dick grinned, and said, “Come on. We’re eating again.”
But explanations were in order—apologies, too—and, over a bowl of chili at the Kansas City hash house that Dick liked best, the Eagle Buffet, Dick supplied them. “I’m sorry, honey. I knew you’d get the bends. Think I’d tangled with a bull. But I was having such a run of luck it seemed like I ought to let it ride.” He explained that after leaving Perry he had gone to the Markl Buick Company, the firm that had once employed him, hoping to find a set of license plates to substitute for the hazardous Iowa plates on the abducted Chevrolet. “Nobody saw me come or go. Markl used to do a considerable wrecked-car trade. Sure enough, out back there was a smashed-up De Soto with Kansas tags.” And where were they now? “On our buggy, pal.”
Having made the switch, Dick had dropped the Iowa plates in a municipal reservoir. Then he’d stopped at a filling station where a friend worked, a former high—school classmate named Steve, and persuaded Steve to cash a check for fifty dollars, which was something he’d not done before—“rob a buddy.” Well, he’d never see Steve again. He was “cutting out” of Kansas City tonight, this time really forever. So why not fleece a few old friends? With that in mind, he’d called on another ex-classmate, a drugstore clerk. “The take” was thereby increased to seventy-five dollars. “Now, this afternoon we’ll roll that up to a couple hundred. I’ve made a list of places to hit. Six or seven, starting right here,” he said, meaning the Eagle Buffet, where everybody—the bartender and waiters—knew and liked him, and called him Pickles (in honor of his favorite food). “Then—Florida, here we come. How about it, honey? Didn’t I promise you we’d spend Christmas in Miami? Just like all the millionaires?”
Dewey and his colleague K.B.I. Agent Clarence Duntz stood waiting for a free table in the Trail Room. Looking around at the customary exhibit of lunch-hour faces—soft-fleshed businessmen and ranchers with sun-branded, coarse complexions—Dewey acknowledged particular acquaintances: the county coroner, Dr. Robert Fenton; and the manager of the Warren, Tom Mahar; and Harrison Smith, who had run for county attorney last year and lost the election to Duane West; and also Herbert W. Clutter, the owner of River Valley Farm and a member of Dewey’s Sunday-school class. Wait a minute! Wasn’t Herb Clutter dead? And hadn’t Dewey attended his funeral? Yet there he was, sitting in the Trail Room’s circular corner booth, his lively brown eyes, his square-jawed genial good looks unchanged by death. But Herb was not alone. Sharing the table were two young men, and Dewey, recognizing them, nudged Agent Duntz.
“Look.”
“Where?”
“The corner.”
“I’ll be damned.”
Hickock and Smith! But the moment of recognition was mutual. Those boys smelled danger. Feet first, they crashed through the Trail Room’s plate-glass window, and, with Duntz and Dewey leaping after them, sped along Main Street, past Palmer Jewelry, Norris Drugs, the Garden Café, then around the corner and down to the depot and in and out, hide-and-seek, among a congregation of white grain-storage towers. Dewey drew a pistol, and so did Duntz, but as they took aim, the supernatural intervened. Abruptly, mysteriously (it was like a dream!), everyone was swimming—the pursued, the pursuers—stroking the awesome width of water that the Garden City Chamber of Commerce claims is the “World’s Largest FREE Swimpool.” As the detectives drew abreast of their quarry, why, once more (How did it happen? Could he be dreaming!)—once more the scene faded out, and faded in upon another landscape: Valley View Cemetery, that gray-and-green island of tombs and trees and flowered paths, a restful, leafy, whispering oasis lying like a cool piece of cloud shade on the luminous wheat plains north of town. But now Duntz had disappeared, and Dewey was alone with the hunted men. Though he could not see them, he was certain they were hiding among the dead, crouching there behind a headstone, perhaps the headstone of his own father: “Alvin Adams Dewey, Sept. 6, 1879—Jan. 26, 1948.” Gun drawn, he crept along the solemn lanes until, hearing laughter and tracing its sound, he saw that they were not hiding at all—Hickock and Smith—but standing astride the as yet unmarked mass grave of Herb and Bonnie and Nancy and Kenyon, standing legs apart, hands on hips, heads flung back, laughing. Dewey fired . . . and again . . . and again. . . . Neither man fell, though each had been shot through the heart three times; they simply, rather slowly, turned transparent, by degrees grew invisible, evaporated, though the loud laughter stayed, expanded until Dewey bowed before it, ran from it, filled with a despair so mournfully intense that it awakened him.
And when he awoke, it was as though he were a feverish, frightened ten-year-old; his hair was wet, his shirt cold-damp and clinging. The room-a-room in the sheriff’s office, into which he’d locked himself before falling asleep at a desk—was dull with near-darkness. Listening, he could hear Mrs. Richardson’s telephone ringing in the adjacent office. But she was not there to answer it; the office was closed. On his way out, he walked past the ringing phone with determined indifference, and then hesitated. It might be Marie, calling to ask if he was still working and should she wait dinner.
“Mr. A. A. Dewey, please. Kansas City calling.”
“This is Mr. Dewey.”
“Go ahead, Kansas City. Your party is on the line.”
“Al? Brother Nye.”
“Yes, Brother.”
“Get ready for some very big news.”
“I’m ready.”
“Our friends are here. Right here in Kansas City.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, they aren’t exactly keeping it a secret. Hickock’s written checks from one side of town to the other. Using his own name.”
“His own name. That must mean he doesn’t plan to hang around long—either that or he’s feeling awful damn sure of himself. So Smith’s still with him?”
“Oh, they’re together O.K. But driving a different car. A 1956 Chevy—black-and-white two-door job.”
“Kansas tags?”
“Kansas tags. And listen, Al—are we lucky! They bought a television set, see? Hickock gave the salesman a check. Just as they were driving off, the guy had the sense to write down the license number. Jot it on the back of the check. Johnson County License 16212.”
“Checked the registration?”
“Guess what?”
“It’s a stolen car.”
“Undoubtedly. But the tags were definitely lifted. Our friends took them off a wrecked De Soto in a K.C. garage.”
“Know when?”
“Yesterday morning. The boss [Logan Sanford] sent out an alert with the new license number and a description of the car.”
“How about the Hickock farm? If they’re still in the area, it seems to me sooner or later they’ll go there.”
“Don’t worry. We’re watching it. Al—”
“I’m here.”
“That’s what I want for Christmas. All I want. To wrap this up. Wrap it up and sleep till New Year’s. Wouldn’t that be one hell of a present?”
“Well, I hope you get it.”
“Well, I hope we both do.”
Afterward, as he crossed the darkening courthouse square, pensively scuffing through dry mounds of unraked leaves, Dewey wondered at his lack of elation. Why, when he now knew that the suspects were not forever lost in Alaska or Mexico or Timbuktu, when the next second an arrest might be made—why was it he felt none of the excitement he ought to feel? The dream was at fault, for the treadmill mood of it had lingered, making him question Nye’s assertions—in a sense, disbelieve them. He did not believe that Hickock and Smith would be caught in Kansas City. They were invulnerable.
In Miami Beach, 335 Ocean Drive is the address of the Somerset Hotel, a small, square building painted more or less white, with many lavender touches, among them a lavender sign that read, “VACANCY—LOWEST RATES—BEACH FACILITIES—ALWAYS A SEABREEZE.” It is one of a row of little stucco-and-cement hotels lining a white, melancholy street. The Somerset’s “Beach Facilities” included, in December, 1959, two beach umbrellas stuck in a strip of sand at the rear of the hotel. One umbrella, pink, had written upon it, “We Serve Valentine Ice Cream.” At noon on Christmas Day, a quartet of women lay under and around it, a transistor radio serenading them. The second umbrella, blue and bearing the command “Tan with Coppertone,” sheltered Dick and Perry, who for five days had been living at the Somerset, in a double room, renting for eighteen dollars weekly.
Perry said, “You never wished me a Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas, honey. And a Happy New Year.”
Dick wore bathing trunks, but Perry, as in Acapulco, refused to expose his injured legs—he feared the sight might “offend” other beachgoers—and therefore sat fully clothed, wearing even socks and shoes. Still, he was comparatively content, and when Dick stood up and started performing exercises—headstands, meant to impress the ladies beneath the pink umbrella—he occupied himself with the Miami Herald. Presently, he came across an inner page story that won his entire attention. It concerned murder, the slaying of a Florida family, a Mr. and Mrs. Clifford Walker, their four-year-old son, and their two-year-old daughter. Each of the victims, though not bound or gagged, had been shot through the head with a .22 weapon. The crime, clueless and apparently motiveless, had taken place Saturday night, December 19th, at the Walker home, on a cattle-raising ranch not far from Tampa.
Perry interrupted Dick’s athletics to read the story aloud, and said, “Where were we last Saturday night?”
“Tallahassee?”
“I’m asking you.”
Dick concentrated. Thursday night, taking turns at the wheel, they had driven out of Kansas and through Missouri into Arkansas and over the Ozarks, “up” to Louisiana, where a burned-out generator stopped them early Friday morning. (A second-hand replacement, bought in Shreveport, cost twenty-two fifty.) That night, they’d slept parked by the side of the road somewhere near the Alabama-Florida border. The next day’s journey, an unhurried affair, had included several touristic diversions—visits to an alligator farm and a rattlesnake ranch, a ride in a glass-bottomed boat over a silvery-clear swamp lake, a late and long and costly broiled-lobster lunch at a roadside seafood restaurant. Delightful day! But both were exhausted when they arrived at Tallahassee, and decided to spend the night there. “Yes, Tallahassee,” Dick said.
“Amazing!” Perry glanced through the article again. “Know what I wouldn’t be surprised? If this wasn’t done by a lunatic. Some nut that read about what happened out in Kansas.”
Dick, because he didn’t care to hear Perry “get going on that subject,” shrugged and grinned and trotted down to the ocean’s edge, where he ambled awhile over the surf-drenched sand, here and there stooping to collect a seashell. As a boy, he’d so envied the son of a neighbor who had gone to the Gulf Coast on vacation and returned with a box full of shells—so hated him—that he’d stolen the shells and, one by one, crushed them with a hammer. Envy was constantly with him; the Enemy was anyone who was someone he wanted to be or who had anything he wanted to have. For instance, the man he had seen by the pool at the Fontainebleau. Miles away, shrouded in a summery veil of heat haze and sea sparkle, he could now see the towers of the pale, expensive hotels—the Fontainebleau, the Eden Roc, the Roney Plaza. On their second day in Miami, he had suggested to Perry that they invade these pleasure domes. “Maybe pick up a coupla rich women,” he had said. Perry had been most reluctant; he felt people would stare at them because of their clothes—khaki trousers and T shirts. Actually, their tour of the Fontainebleau’s gaudy premises went unnoticed, amid the men striding about in Bermuda shorts of candy-striped raw silk, and the women wearing bathing suits and mink stoles simultaneously. The trespassers had loitered in the lobby, strolled in the garden, lounged by the swimming pool. It was there that Dick saw the man, who was his own age-twenty-eight or thirty. The man could have been a “gambler or lawyer or maybe a gangster from Chicago.” Whatever he was, he looked as though he knew the glories of money and power. A blonde who resembled Marilyn Monroe was kneading him with sun-tan oil, and his lazy, beringed hand reached for a tumbler of iced orange juice. All that belonged to him, Dick, but he would never have it. Why should that son of a bitch have everything while he had nothing? Why should that “big-shot bastard” have all the luck? With a knife in his hand, he, Dick, had power. Big-shot bastards like that had better be careful or he might “open them up and let a little of their luck spill on the floor.” But Dick’s day was ruined. The beautiful blonde rubbing on the sun-tan oil had ruined it. He’d said to Perry, “Let’s pull the hell out of here.”
Now a young girl, probably twelve, was drawing figures in the sand, carving out big, crude faces with a piece of drift-wood. Dick, pretending to admire her art, offered the shells he had gathered. “They make good eyes,” he said. The child accepted the gift, whereupon Dick smiled and winked at her. He was sorry he felt as he did about her, for his sexual interest in female children was a failing of which he was “sincerely ashamed”—a “secret” he’d not confessed to anyone and hoped no one suspected (though he was aware that Perry had reason to), because other people might not think it “normal.” That, to be sure, was something he was certain he was—“a normal.” Seducing pubescent girls, as he had done “eight or nine” times in the past, did not disprove it, for if the truth were known, most real men had the same desires he had. He took her hand and said, “You’re my baby girl. My little sweetheart.” But she objected. Her hand, held by his, twitched like a fish on a hook, and he recognized the astounded expression in her eyes from earlier incidents in his career. He let go, laughed lightly, and said, “Just a game. Don’t you like games?” Perry, still reclining under the blue umbrella, had observed the scene from the start, and realized Dick’s purpose at once, and despised him for it; he had “no respect for people who can’t control themselves sexually,” especially when the lack of control involved what he called “pervertiness”—“bothering kids,” “queer stuff,” rape. And he thought he had made his views obvious to Dick; indeed, hadn’t they almost had a fistfight when, quite recently, he had prevented Dick from raping a terrified young girl? However, he wouldn’t care to repeat that particular test of strength. He was relieved when he saw the child walk away from Dick.
Christmas carols were in the air; they issued from the radio of the four women and mixed strangely with Miami’s sunshine and the cries of the querulous, never thoroughly silent seagulls. “Oh, come let us adore Him, Oh, come let us adore Him”: a cathedral choir, an exalted music that “moved” Perry to tears—which refused to stop, even after the music did. And, as was not uncommon when he was thus afflicted, he dwelt upon a possibility that had for him “tremendous fascination”: suicide. As a child, he had often thought of killing himself, but those were sentimental reveries born of a wish to punish his father and mother and other enemies. From young manhood onward, however, the prospect of ending his own life had more and more lost its fantastic quality. That, he must remember, was Jimmy’s “solution,” and Fern’s, too. And lately it had come to seem not just an alternative but the specific death awaiting him. Anyway, he couldn’t see that he had “a lot to live for.” Hot islands and buried gold, diving deep in fire-blue seas toward sunken treasure—such dreams were gone. Gone, too, was “Perry O’Parsons,” the name invented for the singing sensation of stage and screen that he’d half-seriously hoped someday to be. Perry O’Parsons, without having ever lived, had nonetheless died. What was there to look forward to? He and Dick were “running a race without a finish line”—that was how it struck him. And now, after not quite a week in Miami, the long ride was to resume, for Dick, who had worked one day at the ABC auto-service company, for sixty-five cents an hour, had told him, “Miami’s worse than Mexico. Sixty-five cents! Not me. I’m white.” So tomorrow, with only twenty-seven dollars left of the money raised in Kansas City, they were heading west again, to Texas, to Nevada—“nowhere definite.”
Dick, who had waded into the surf, returned. He fell, wet and breathless, face down on the sticky sand.
“How was the water?”
“Wonderful.”
The closeness of Christmas to Nancy Clutter’s birthday, which was right after New Year’s, had always created problems for her boy friend, Bobby Rupp. It had strained his imagination to think of two suitable gifts in such quick succession. But each year, with money made working summers on his father’s sugar-beet farm, he had done the best he could, and on Christmas morning he had always hurried to the Clutter house carrying a package that his sisters had helped him wrap and that he hoped would surprise Nancy and delight her. Last year, he had given her a small heart-shaped gold locket. This year, as forehanded as ever, he’d been wavering, in the matter of a Christmas present, between the imported perfumes on sale at Norris Drugs and a pair of riding boots. But then Nancy had died. On Christmas morning, instead of racing off to River Valley Farm, he remained at home, and later in the day he shared with his family the splendid dinner his mother had been a week preparing. Everybody—his parents and every one of his seven brothers and sisters—had treated him gently since the tragedy. All the same, at mealtimes he was told again and again that he must please eat. No one comprehended that really he was ill, that grief had made him so, that grief had drawn a circle around him he could not escape from and others could not enter—except possibly Sue, who was Susan Kidwell, Nancy’s best friend. Until Nancy’s death, he had not appreciated Sue, never felt altogether comfortable with her. She was too “different,” taking seriously things that even girls ought not to take very seriously: paintings, poems, the music she played on the piano. And, of course, he was jealous of her; her position in Nancy’s esteem had been, though of another order, at least equal to his. But that was why she was able to understand his loss. Without Sue, without her almost constant presence, how could he have withstood such an avalanche of shocks—the crime itself, his interviews with Mr. Dewey, the pathetic irony of being for a while the principal suspect?
Then, after about a month, the friendship waned. Bobby went less frequently to sit in the Kidwell’s tiny, cozy parlor, and when he did go, Sue seemed not as welcoming. The trouble was that they were forcing each other to mourn and remember what in fact they wanted to forget. Sometimes Bobby could; he could when he was playing basketball or driving his car over country roads at eighty miles an hour, or when he went, as part of a self-imposed athletic program (his ambition was to be a high-school gymnastics instructor), on long-distance jog trots across flat yellow fields. And now, after helping clear the dining table of all its holiday dishes, that was what he decided to do—put on a sweatshirt and go for a run.
The weather was remarkable. Even for western Kansas, renowned for the longevity of its Indian summers, the current sample seemed farfetched—dry air, bold sun, azure sky. Optimistic ranchers were predicting an “open winter”—a season so bland that cattle could graze during the whole of it. Such winters are rare, but Bobby could remember one—the year he had started to court Nancy. They were both twelve, and after school he used to carry her book satchel the mile separating the Holcomb schoolhouse from the prosperous acres of her father’s farm ranch. Often, if the day was warm and sun-kindled, they stopped along the way and sat by the river—a snaky, slow-moving, brown piece of the Arkansas. Nancy had once said to him, “One summer, when we were in Colorado, I saw where the Arkansas begins. The exact place. You wouldn’t believe it, though. That it was our river. It’s not the same color. But pure as drinking water. And fast. And full of rocks. Whirlpools. Daddy caught a trout.” It had stayed with Bobby, her memory of the river’s source, and since her death—Well, he couldn’t explain it, but whenever he looked at the Arkansas, it was for an instant transformed, and what he saw was not a muddy stream meandering across the Kansas plains; he saw what Nancy had described—a Colorado torrent, a chilly, crystal trout river speeding down a mountain valley. That, in life, was how Nancy had been: like young water—energetic, joyous.
Usually, though, western-Kansas winters are imprisoning, and usually frost on the fields and razory winds have altered the climate before Christmas. Some years back, snow had fallen on Christmas Eve and continued falling, and when Bobby set out the next morning for the Clutter property, a three-mile walk, he had had to fight through deep drifts. It was worth it, for though he was numbed and scarlet, the welcome he got thawed him thoroughly. Nancy was amazed and proud, and her mother, often so timid and distant, had hugged and kissed him, insisting that he wrap up in a quilt and sit close to the living-room fire. While Nancy and her mother worked in the kitchen, he and Kenyon and Mr. Clutter had sat around the fire cracking walnuts and pecans, and Mr. Clutter said he was reminded of another Christmas, when he was Kenyon’s age: “There were seven of us. Mother, my father, the two girls, and us three boys. We lived on a farm a good ways from town. For that reason, it was the custom to do our Christmas buying in a bunch—make the trip once and do it all together. The year I’m thinking of, the morning we were supposed to go, the snow was high as today, higher, and still coming down—flakes like saucers. Looked like we were in for a snowbound Christmas, with no presents under the tree. Mother and the girls were heartbroken. Then I had an idea.” It was this: He would saddle their huskiest plow horse, ride into town, and shop for everybody. The family agreed. All of them gave him their Christmas savings and a list of the things they wished him to buy: four yards of calico, a football, a pincushion, shotgun shells—an assortment of orders that took until nightfall to fill. Heading homeward, the purchases secure inside a tarpaulin sack, he was grateful that his father had forced him to carry a lantern, and glad, too, that the horse’s harness was strung with bells, for both their jaunty racket and the careening light of the kerosene lantern were a comfort to him. “The ride in, that was easy. A piece of cake. But now the road was gone, and every landmark.” Earth and air—all was snow. The horse, up to his haunches in it, slipped sidewise. “I dropped our lamp. We were lost in the night. It was just a question of time before we fell asleep and froze. Yes, I was afraid. But I prayed. And I felt God’s presence. . . .” Dogs howled. He followed the noise until he saw the windows of a familiar farmhouse. “I ought to have stopped there. But I thought of the family—imagined my mother in tears, Dad and the boys getting up a search party. And I pushed on. So, naturally, I wasn’t too happy when finally I reached home and found the house dark. Doors locked. Found everybody had gone to bed and plain forgot me. None of them could understand why I was so put out. Dad said, ‘We were sure you’d stay the night in town. Good grief, boy! Who’d have thought you hadn’t better sense than to start home in a perfect blizzard?’ ”
The cider-tart odor of spoiling apples. Apple trees and pear trees, peach and cherry: Mr. Clutter’s orchard, the treasured assembly of fruit trees he had planted. Bobby, running mindlessly, had not meant to come here, or any other part of River Valley Farm. It was inexplicable, and he turned to leave, but he turned again and wandered toward the house—white, very solid and spacious. He had always been impressed by it, and pleased to think his girlfriend lived there. But now that it was deprived of the late owner’s dedicated attention, the first threads of decay’s cobweb were being spun. A gravel rake lay rusting in the driveway; the lawn was parched and shabby. That fateful Sunday, when the sheriff summoned ambulances to remove the murdered family, the ambulances had driven across the grass straight to the front door, and the tire tracks were still visible. The hired man’s house was empty, too; he had found new quarters for his family, nearer Holcomb—to no one’s surprise, for nowadays, though the weather was glittering, the Clutter place seemed shadowed, and hushed, and motionless. But as Bobby passed a storage barn and, beyond that, a livestock corral, he heard a horse’s tail swish. It was Nancy’s Babe, the obedient old dappled mare with a flaxen mane and dark-purple eyes like magnificent pansy blossoms. Clutching her mane, Bobby rubbed his cheek along Babe’s neck—something Nancy used to do. And the horse whinnied. Last Sunday, the last time he visited the Kidwells, Sue’s mother had mentioned Babe. Mrs. Kidwell, a fanciful woman, had been standing at a window watching dusk tint the outdoors—the sprawling prairie.
And, out of the blue, she had said, “Susan? You know what I keep seeing? Nancy. On Babe. Coming this way.”
Perry noticed them first—hitchhikers, a boy and an old man, both carrying homemade knapsacks, and each, despite the blowy weather, a gritty and bitter Texas wind, wearing only overalls and a thin denim shirt. “Let’s give them a lift,” Perry said. Dick was reluctant; he had no objection to assisting hitchhikers, provided they looked as if they could “pay their way”—at least “chip in a couple of gallons of gas.” But Perry, little old bighearted Perry, was always pestering Dick to pick up the damnedest, sorriest-looking people. Finally, Dick, who was driving, agreed, and stopped the car.
The boy—a stocky, sharp-eyed, talkative towhead of about twelve—was exuberantly grateful, but the old man, whose face was seamed and yellow, feebly crawled into the back seat and slumped there silently. The boy said, “We sure do appreciate this. Johnny was ready to drop. We ain’t had a ride since Galveston.”
Perry and Dick had left the port city of Galveston an hour earlier, having spent a morning there applying at various shipping offices for jobs as able-bodied seamen. One company offered them immediate work on a tanker bound for Brazil, and, indeed, the two would now have been at sea if their prospective employer had not discovered that neither man possessed union papers or a passport. Strangely, Dick’s disappointment exceeded Perry’s: “Brazil! That’s where they’re building a whole new capital city. Right from scratch. Imagine getting in on the ground floor of something like that! Any fool could make a fortune.”
“Where you headed?” Perry asked the boy.
“Sweetwater.”
“Where’s Sweetwater?”
“Well, it’s along in this direction somewhere. It’s somewhere in Texas. Johnny, here, he’s my gramp. And he’s got a sister lives in Sweetwater. Least, I sure Jesus hope he does. We thought she lived in Jasper, Texas. But when we got to Jasper, folks told us her and her people moved to Galveston. But she wasn’t in Galveston—lady there said she was gone to Sweetwater. I sure Jesus hope we find her. Johnny,” he said, rubbing the old man’s hands, as if to thaw them, “you hear me, Johnny? We’re riding in a nice warm Chevrolet—’56 model.”
The old man coughed, rolled his head slightly, opened and closed his eyes, and coughed again.
Dick said, “Hey, listen. What’s wrong with him?”
“It’s the change,” the boy said. “And the walking. We been walking since before Christmas. Seems to me we covered the better part of Texas.” In the most matter-of-fact voice, and while continuing to massage the old man’s hands, the boy told them that up to the start of the present journey he and his grandfather and an aunt had lived alone on a farm near Shreveport, Louisiana. Not long ago, the aunt had died. “Johnny’s been poorly about a year, and Auntie had all the work to do. With only me to help. We were chopping firewood. Chopping up a stump. Right in the middle of it, Auntie said she was wore out. Ever seen a horse just lay down and never get up? I have. And that’s like what Auntie did.” A few days before Christmas, the man from whom the grandfather rented the farm “turned us off the place,” the boy continued. “That’s how come we started out for Texas. Looking to find Mrs. Jackson. I never seen her, but she’s Johnny’s own blood sister. And somebody’s got to take us in. Leastways, him. He can’t go a lot more. Last night, it rained on us.”
The car stopped. Perry asked Dick why he had stopped it.
“That man’s very sick,” Dick said.
“Well? What do you want to do? Put him out?”
“Use your head. Just for once.”
“You really are a mean bastard.”
“Suppose he dies?”
The boy said, “He won’t die. We’ve got this far, he’ll wait now.”
Dick persisted. “Suppose he dies? Think of what could happen. The questions.”
“Frankly, I don’t give a damn. You want to put them out? Then by all means.” Perry looked at the invalid, still somnolent, dazed, deaf, and he looked at the boy, who returned his gaze calmly, not begging, not “asking for anything,” and Perry remembered himself at that age, his own wanderings with an old man. “Go ahead. Put them out. But I’ll be getting out, too.”
“O.K. O.K. O.K. Only, don’t forget,” said Dick. “It’s your damn fault.”
Dick shifted gears. Suddenly, as the car began to move again, the boy hollered, “Hold it!” Hopping out, he hurried along the edge of the road, stopped, stooped, picked up one, two, three, four empty Coca-Cola bottles, ran back, and hopped in, happy and grinning. “There’s plenty of money in bottles,” he said to Dick. “Why, Mister, if you was to drive kind of slow, I guarantee you we can pick us up a big piece of change. That’s what me and Johnny been eating off. Refund money.”
Dick was amused, but he was also interested, and when next the boy commanded him to halt, he at once obeyed. The commands came so frequently that it took them an hour to travel five miles, but it was worth it. The kid had an “honest-to-God genius” for spotting, amid the roadside rocks and grassy rubble, amid the brown glow of thrown-away beer bottles, the emerald daubs that had once imprisoned 7-Up and Canada Dry. Perry soon developed a personal gift for spying out discarded glassware. At first, he merely indicated to the boy the whereabouts of his finds; he thought it too undignified to scurry about collecting them himself. It was all “pretty silly,” just “kid stuff.” Nevertheless, the game generated a treasure-hunt excitement, and presently Perry succumbed to the fun, the fervor of this quest for refundable “empties.” Dick, too, but Dick was in dead earnest. Screwy as it seemed, maybe this was a way to make some money—or, at any rate, “a few bucks.” Lord knows, he and Perry could use them, their combined finances amounting at the moment to less than five dollars.
Now all three—Dick and the boy and Perry—were piling out of the car and shamelessly, though amiably, competing with one another. Once, Dick located a cache of wine and whiskey bottles at the bottom of a ditch, and was chagrined to learn that his discovery was valueless. “They don’t give no refund on liquor empties,” the boy informed him. “Even some of the beers ain’t no good. I don’t mess with them usually. Just stick with the surefire things. Dr. Pepper. Pepsi. Coke. White Rock. Nehi.”
Dick said, “What’s your name?”
“Bill,” the boy said.
“Well, Bill. You’re a regular education.”
Nightfall came, and forced the hunters to quit—that, and lack of space, for they had amassed as many bottles as the car could contain. The trunk was filled, the back seat seemed a glittering dump heap; unnoticed, unmentioned by even his grandson, the ailing old man was all but hidden under the shifting, dangerously chiming cargo.
Dick said, “Be funny if we had a smashup.”
A bunch of lights publicized the New Motel, which proved to be, as the travellers neared it, an impressive compound consisting of bungalows, a garage, a restaurant, and a cocktail lounge. Taking charge, the boy said to Dick, “Pull in there. Maybe we can make a deal. Only, let me talk. I’ve had the experience. Sometimes they try to cheat.” Perry could not imagine “anyone smart enough to cheat that kid,” he said later. “It didn’t shame him a bit going in there with all those bottles. Me, I never could’ve, I’d have felt so ashamed. But the people at the motel were nice about it; they just laughed. Turned out the bottles were worth twelve dollars and sixty cents.”
The boy divided the money evenly, giving half to himself, the rest to his partners, and said, “Know what!? I’m gonna blow me and Johnny to a good feed. Ain’t you fellows hungry?” Dick, as always, was. And, after so much activity, even Perry felt starved. As he later told about it, “We carted the old man into the restaurant and propped him up at a table. He looked exactly the same—thanatoid. And he never said one word. But you should have seen him shovel it in. The kid ordered him pancakes; he said that was what Johnny liked best. I swear he ate something like thirty pancakes. With maybe two pounds of butter, and a quart of syrup. The kid could put it down himself. Potato chips and ice cream, that was all he wanted, but he sure ate a lot of them. I wonder it didn’t make him sick.”
During the dinner party, Dick, who had consulted a map, announced that Sweetwater was a hundred or more miles west of the route he was driving—the route that would take him across New Mexico and Arizona to Nevada—to Las Vegas. Though this was true, it was clear to Perry that Dick simply wanted to rid himself of the boy and the old man. Dick’s purpose was obvious to the boy, too, but the boy was polite and said, “Oh, don’t you worry about us. Plenty of traffic must stop here. We’ll get a ride.”
The boy walked with them to the car, leaving the old man to devour a fresh stack of pancakes. He shook hands with Dick and with Perry, wished them a Happy New Year, and waved them away into the dark.
The evening of Wednesday, December 30th, was a memorable one in the household of Agent A. A. Dewey, and, in giving an account of it to a friend, his wife said, “Alvin was singing in the bath. ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas.’ The kids were watching TV. And I was setting the dining room table. For a buffet. I’m from New Orleans; I love to cook and entertain, and my mother had just sent us a crate of avocados and black-eyed peas, and—oh, a heap of real nice things. So I decided: We’re going to have a buffet, invite some friends over—the Murrays, and Cliff and Dodie Hope. Alvin didn’t want to, but I was determined. My goodness! The case could go on forever, and he hadn’t taken hardly a minute off since it began. Well, I was setting the table, so when I heard the phone I asked one of the boys to answer it—Paul. Paul said it was for Daddy, and I said, ‘You tell them he’s in the bath,’ but Paul said he wondered if he ought to do that, because it was Mr. Sanford calling from Topeka. Alvin’s boss. Alvin took the call with just a towel around him. Made me so mad—dripping puddles everywhere. But when I went to get a mop I saw something worse—that cat, that fool Pete, up on the kitchen table gorging crabmeat salad. My avocado stuffing. The next thing was, suddenly Alvin had hold of me, he was hugging me, and I said, ‘Alvin Dewey, have you lost your mind?’ Fun’s fun, but the man was wet as a pond, he was ruining my dress, and I was already dressed for company. Of course, when I understood why he was hugging me I hugged him right back. You can imagine what it meant to Alvin to know those men had been arrested. Out in Las Vegas. He said he had to leave for Las Vegas straightaway, and I asked him hadn’t he ought to put on some clothes first, and Alvin, he was so excited, he said, ‘Gosh, honey, I guess I’ve spoiled your party.’ I couldn’t think of a happier way of having it spoiled not if this meant that maybe one day soon we’d be back living an ordinary life, Alvin laughed—it was just beautiful to hear him. I mean, the past two weeks had been the worst of all. Because the week before Christmas those men turned up in Kansas City—came and went without getting caught—and I never saw Alvin more depressed, except once when young Alvin was in the hospital, had encephalitis, we thought we might lose him. But I don’t want to talk about that.
“Anyway, I made coffee for him and took it to the bedroom, where he was supposed to be getting dressed. But he wasn’t. He was sitting on the edge of our bed holding his head, as if he had a headache. Hadn’t put on even a sock. So I said, ‘What do you want to do, get pneumonia?’ And he looked at me, and said, ‘Marie, listen, it’s got to be these guys, has to, that’s the only logical solution.’ Alvin’s funny. Like the first time he ran for Finney County sheriff. Election night, when practically every vote had been counted and it was plain as plain he’d won, he said—I could have strangled him—said over and over, ‘Well, we won’t know till the last return.’ I told him, ‘Now, Alvin, don’t start that. Of course they did it! He said, ‘Where’s our proof? We can’t prove either of them ever set foot inside the Clutter house!’ But that seemed to me exactly what he could prove: footprints—weren’t footprints the one thing those animals left behind? Alvin said, ‘Yes, and a big lot of good they are unless those boys still happen to be wearing the boots that made them. Just footprints by themselves aren’t worth a Dixie dollar.’ I said, ‘All right, honey, drink your coffee and I’ll help you pack.’ Sometimes you can’t reason with Alvin. The way he kept on, he had me almost convinced Hickock and Smith were innocent, and if they weren’t innocent would never confess, and if they didn’t confess could never be convicted—the evidence was too circumstantial. What bothered him most, though—he was afraid that the story would leak, that the men would learn the truth before the K.B.I. could question them. As it was, they thought they’d been picked up for parole violation. Passing bad checks. And Alvin felt it was very important they keep thinking that. He said, ‘The name Clutter has to hit them like a hammer, a blow they never knew was coming.’
“Paul (I’d sent him out to the washline for some of Alvin’s socks)—Paul came back and stood around watching me pack. He wanted to know where Alvin was going. Alvin lifted him up in his arms. He said, ‘Can you keep a secret, Pauly?’ Not that he needed to ask. Both boys know they mustn’t talk about Alvin’s work—the bits and pieces they hear around the house. So he said, ‘Pauly, you remember those two fellows we’ve been looking for? Well, now we know where they are, and Daddy’s going to go get them and bring them here to Garden City.’ But Paul begged him, ‘Don’t do that, Daddy, don’t bring them here.’ He was frightened—any child might’ve been. Alvin kissed him. He said, ‘Now, that’s O.K., Pauly, we won’t let them hurt anybody. They’re not going to hurt anybody ever again.’ ”
At five that afternoon, some twenty minutes after the stolen Chevrolet rolled off the Nevada desert into Las Vegas, the long ride came to an end. But not before Perry had visited the Las Vegas post office, where he claimed a package addressed to himself in care of General Delivery—the large cardboard box he had mailed from Mexico, and had insured for a hundred dollars, a sum exceeding to an impertinent extent the value of the contents, which were khaki and denim pants, worn shirts, underwear, and two pairs of steel-buckled boots. Dick, waiting for Perry outside the post office, was in excellent spirits; he had reached a decision that he was certain would eradicate his current difficulties and start him on a new road, with a new rainbow in view.
The decision involved impersonating an Air Force officer. It was a project that had long fascinated him, and Las Vegas was the ideal place to try it out. He’d already selected the officer’s rank and name, the latter borrowed from a former acquaintance, the then warden of Kansas State Penitentiary—Tracy Hand. A Captain Tracy Hand, smartly clothed in a made-to-order uniform, he intended to “crawl the strip,” Las Vegas’s street of never-closed casinos. Small-time, big-time, the Sands, the Stardust—he meant to hit them all, distributing en route “a bundle of confetti.” By writing worthless checks right around the clock, he expected to haul in, within a twenty-four-hour period, three, maybe four thousand dollars. That was half the plot, the second half being: Goodbye, Perry. Dick was sick of him—his harmonica, his aches and ills, his superstitions, the weepy, womanly eyes, the nagging, whispery voice. Suspicious, self-righteous, spiteful, he was like a wife that must be got rid of. And there was but one way to do it: Say nothing—just go.
Absorbed in his plans, Dick did not notice a patrol car pass him, slow down, reconnoitre. Nor did Perry, descending the post-office steps with the Mexican box balanced on a shoulder, observe the prowl car and the policemen in it: Officers Ocie Pigford and Francis Macauley—men who carried in their heads pages of memorized data, including a description of a black-and-white 1956 Chevrolet bearing Kansas license plate JO-16212. Neither Perry nor Dick was aware of the police vehicle trailing them as they pulled away from the post office and, with Dick driving and Perry directing, travelled five blocks north, turned left, then right, drove a quarter mile more, and stopped in front of a dying palm tree and a weather wrecked sign from which all lettering had faded except the word “OOM.”
“This it?” Dick asked.
Perry, as the patrol car drew along-side, nodded.
The Detective Division of the Las Vegas city jail contains two interrogation rooms—fluorescent-lighted chambers measuring ten by twelve feet, with walls and ceilings of Celotex. In each room, in addition to an electric fan, a metal table, and folding metal chairs, there are camouflaged microphones, concealed tape recorders, and, set into the door, a mirrored one-way observation window. On Saturday, the second day of 1960, both rooms were booked for 2 P.M.—the hour that four detectives from Kansas had selected for their first confrontation with Hickock and Smith.
Shortly before the appointed moment, the quartet of K.B.I. agents—Harold Nye, Roy Church, Alvin Dewey, and Clarence Duntz—gathered in a corridor outside the interrogation rooms. Nye was running a temperature. “Part flu. But mostly sheer excitement,” he subsequently informed a journalist. “By then, I’d already been waiting in Las Vegas two days—took the next plane out after news of the arrest reached our headquarters in Topeka. The rest of the team, Al and Roy and Clarence, came on by car—had a lousy trip, too. Lousy weather. Spent New Year’s Eve snowed up in a motel in Albuquerque. Boy, when they finally hit Vegas, they needed good whiskey and good news. I was ready with both. Our young men had signed waivers of extradition. Better yet: We had the boots, both pairs, and the soles—the Cat’s Paw and the diamond pattern—matched perfectly the life-size photographs of the footprints found in the Clutter house. The boots were in a box of stuff the boys picked up at the post office just before the curtain fell. Like I told Al Dewey, suppose the squeeze had come five minutes sooner! Even so, our case was very shaky—nothing that couldn’t be pulled apart. But I remember, while we were waiting in the corridor—I remember being feverish and nervous as hell, but confident. We all were; we felt we were on the edge of the truth. My job, mine and Church’s, was to pressure it out of Hickock. Smith belonged to Al and Old Man Duntz. At that time, I hadn’t seen the suspects just examined their possessions and arranged the extradition waivers, I’d never laid eyes on Hickock until he was brought down to the interrogation room. I’d imagined a bigger guy. Brawnier. Not some skinny kid. He was twenty-eight, but he looked like a kid. Hungry—right down to the bone. He was wearing a blue shirt and suntans and white socks and black shoes. We shook hands; his hand was drier than mine. Clean, polite, nice voice, good diction, a pretty decent-looking fellow, with a very disarming smile—and in the beginning he smiled quite a lot. I said, ‘Mr. Hickock, my name is Harold Nye, and this other gentleman is Mr. Roy Church. We’re Special Agents of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, and we’ve come here to discuss your parole violation. Of course, you’re under no obligation to answer our questions, and anything you say may be used against you in evidence. You’re entitled to a lawyer at all times. We’ll use no force, no threats, and we’ll make you no promises.’ He was calm as could be.”
“I know the form,” Dick said.
“I’ve been questioned before.”
“Now, Mr. Hickock—”
“Dick.”
“Dick, we want to talk to you about your activities since your parole. To our knowledge, you’ve gone on at least two big check sprees in the Kansas City area.”
“Uh-huh. Hung out quite a few.”
“Could you give us a list?” The prisoner, evidently proud of his one authentic gift, a brilliant memory, recited the names and addresses of twenty Kansas City stores, cafés, and garages, and recalled, accurately, the “purchase” made at each and the amount of the check passed.
“I’m curious, Dick. Why do these people accept your checks? I’d like to know the secret.”
“The secret is: People are dumb.”
Roy Church said, “Fine, Dick. Very funny. But just for the moment let’s forget these checks.” Though he sounds as if his throat were lined with hog bristle, and has hands so hardened that he can punch stone walls (his favorite stunt, in fact), persons have been known to mistake Church for a kindly little man, somebody’s bald-headed, pink-cheeked uncle. “Dick,” he said, “suppose you tell us something about your family background.”
The prisoner reminisced. Once, when he was nine or ten, his father had fallen ill. “It was rabbit fever,” and the illness lasted many months, during which the family had depended upon church assistance and the charity of neighbors—“otherwise we would’ve starved.” That episode aside, his childhood had been O.K. “We never had much money, but we were never really down-and-out,” he said. “We always had clean clothes and something to eat. My dad was strict, though. He wasn’t happy unless he had me doing chores. But we got along O.K.—no serious arguments. My parents never argued, either. I can’t recall a single quarrel. She’s wonderful, my mother. Dad’s a good guy, too. I’d say they did the best for me they could.” School? Well, he felt he might have been more than an average student if he had contributed to books a fraction of the time he’d “wasted” on sports. “Baseball. Football. I made all the teams. After high school I could have gone to college on a football scholarship. I wanted to study engineering, but even with a scholarship deals like that cost plenty. I don’t know, it seemed safer to get a job.” Before his twenty-first birthday, he’d worked as a railway trackman, an ambulance driver, a car painter, and a garage mechanic; he’d also married a girl sixteen years old. “Carol. Her father was a minister. He was dead against me. Said I was a full-time nobody. He made all the trouble he could. But I was nuts about Carol. Still am. There’s a real princess. Only—see, we had three kids. Boys. And we were too young to have three kids. Maybe if we hadn’t got so deep into debt. If I could’ve earned extra money. I tried.” He tried gambling, and started forging checks and experimenting with other forms of theft. In 1958, he was convicted of house burglary in a Johnson County court and sentenced to five years in Kansas State Penitentiary. But by then Carol had departed and he’d taken as a bride another girl aged sixteen. “Mean as hell. Her and her whole family. She divorced me while I was inside. I’m not complaining. Last August, when I left The Walls, I figured I had every chance to start new. I got a job in Olathe, lived with my family, and stayed home nights. I was doing swell—”
“Until November 20th,” said Nye, and Hickock seemed not to understand him. “The day you stopped doing swell and started hanging paper. Why?”
Hickock sighed, and said, “That would make a book.” Then, smoking a cigarette borrowed from Nye and lighted by the courteous Church, he said, “Perry—my buddy Perry Smith—was paroled in the summer. Later on, when I came out, he sent me a letter. Postmarked Idaho. He wrote reminding me of this deal we used to talk over. About Mexico. The idea was we would go to Acapulco, one of them places, buy a fishing boat, and run it ourselves—take tourists deep-sea fishing.”
Nye said, “This boat. How did you plan to pay for it?”
“I’m coming to that,” Hickock said. “See, Perry wrote me he had a sister living in Fort Scott. And she was holding some heavy change for him. Several thousand dollars. Money his dad owed him from the sale of some property up in Alaska. He said he was coming to Kansas to get the dough.”
“And the two of you would use it to buy a boat.”
“Correct.”
“But it didn’t work out that way.”
“What happened was, Perry showed up maybe a month later. I met him at the bus station in Kansas City—”
“When?” said Church. “The day of the week.”
“A Thursday.”
“And when did you go to Fort Scott?”
“Saturday.”
“November 14th.”
Hickock’s eyes flashed with surprise. One could see that he was asking himself why Church should be so certain of the date; and hurriedly—for it was too soon to stir suspicions—the detective said, “What time did you leave for Fort Scott?”
“That afternoon. We did some work on my car, and had a bowl of chili at the West Side Café. It must have been around three.”
“Around three. Was Perry Smith’s sister expecting you?”
“No. Because, see, Perry lost her address. And she didn’t have a telephone.”
“Then how did you expect to find her?”
“By inquiring at the post office.”
“Did you?”
“Perry did. They said she’d moved away. To Oregon, they thought. But she hadn’t left any forwarding address.”
“Must have been quite a blow. After you’d been counting on a big piece of money like that.”
Hickock agreed. “Because—well, we’d definitely decided to go to Mexico. Otherwise I never would’ve cashed them checks. But I hoped—Now, listen to me; I’m telling the truth. I thought once we got to Mexico and began making money, then I’d be able to pay them off. The checks.”
Nye took over. “One minute, Dick.” Nye is a short, short-tempered man who has difficulty moderating his aggressive vigor, his talent for language both sharp and outspoken. “I’d like to hear a little more about the trip to Fort Scott,” he said, soft-pedalling. “When you found Smith’s sister no longer there, what did you do then?”
“Walked around. Had a beer. Drove back.”
“You mean you went home?”
“No. To Kansas City. We stopped at the Zesto Drive-In. Ate hamburgers. We tried Virgin Lane.”
Neither Nye nor Church was familiar with Virgin Lane.
Hickock said, “You kiddin’? Every cop in Kansas knows it.” When the detectives again pleaded ignorance, he explained that it was a stretch of park where one encountered “hustlers mostly,” adding, “But plenty of amateurs, too. Nurses. Secretaries. I’ve had a lot of luck there.”
“And this particular evening. Have any luck?”
“The bad kind. We ended up with a pair of rollers.”
“Named?”
“Mildred. The other one, Perry’s girl, I think she was called Joan.”
“Describe them.”
“Maybe they were sisters. Both blond. Plump. I’m not too clear about it. See, we’d bought a bottle of ready mix Orange Blossoms—that’s orange pop and vodka—and I was getting stiff. We gave the girls a few drinks and drove them out to Fun Haven. I imagine you gentlemen never heard of Fun Haven?”
They said they hadn’t.
Hickock grinned and shrugged, and told them, “It’s on the Blue Ridge Road. Eight miles south of Kansas City. A combination night club-motel. You pay ten bucks for the key to a cabin.” Continuing, he described the cabin in which he claimed that the foursome had stayed the night: twin beds, an old Coca-Cola calendar, a radio that wouldn’t play unless the customer deposited a quarter. His poise, his explicitness, the assured presentation of verifiable detail impressed Nye—though, of course, the boy was lying. Well, wasn’t he? Nye, whether because of flu and fever or an abrupt lessening in the warmth of his confidence, exuded an icy sweat.
“Next morning, we woke up to find they’d rolled us and beat it,” said Hickock. “Didn’t get much off me. But Perry lost his wallet, with forty or fifty dollars.”
“What did you do about it?”
“There wasn’t nothing to do.”
“You could’ve notified the police.”
“Aw, come on. Quit it. Notify the police. For your information, a guy on parole’s not allowed to booze. Or associate with another Old Grad—”
“All right, Dick. It’s Sunday. The fifteenth of November. Tell us what you did that day. From the moment you checked out of Fun Haven.”
“Well, we ate breakfast. At a truck stop near Happy Hill. Then we drove to Olathe, and I dropped Perry off at the hotel where he was living. I’d say that was around eleven. Afterward, I went home and had dinner with the family. Same as every Sunday. Watched TV. A basketball game, or maybe it was football. I was pretty tired.”
“When did you next see Perry Smith?”
“Monday. He came by where I worked. Bob Sands Body Shop.”
“And what did you talk about? Mexico?”
“Well, we still liked the idea. Even if we hadn’t got hold of the money to do all we had in mind—put ourselves in business down there. But we wanted to go, and it seemed worth the risk.”
“Worth another stretch in Lansing?”
“That didn’t figure. See, we never intended coming Stateside again.”
Nye, who had been jotting notes in a notebook, said, “On the day following the check spree—that would be the twenty-first—you and your friend Smith disappeared. Now, Dick, please outline your movements between then and the time of your arrest here in Las Vegas. Just a rough idea.”
Hickock whistled and rolled his eyes. “Wow!” he said, and then, summoning his talent for something very like total recall, he began an account of the long ride—the approximately ten thousand miles he and Smith had covered in the past six weeks. He talked for an hour and twenty-five minutes—from two-fifty to four-fifteen—and told, with Nye attempting to list them, of highways and hotels, motels, rivers, towns and cities, a chorus of entwining names: Apache, El Paso, Corpus Christi, Santillo, San Luis Potosi, Acapulco, San Diego, Dallas, Omaha, Sweetwater, Stillwater, Tenville Junction, Tallahassee, Needles, Miami, Hotel Nuevo Waldorf, Somerset Hotel, Hotel Simone, Arrowhead Motel, Cherokee Motel, and many, many more. He gave them the name of the man in Mexico to whom he’d sold his own old 1949 Chevrolet, and confessed that he had stolen a newer model in Iowa. He described persons he and his partner had met: a Mexican widow, rich and sexy; Otto, a German “millionaire;” a “swish” pair of Negro prizefighters driving a “swish” lavender Cadillac; the blind proprietor of a Florida rattlesnake farm; a dying old man and his grandson; and others. And when he’d finished he sat with folded arms and a pleased smile, as though waiting to be commended for the humor, the clarity, and the candor of his traveller’s tale.
But Nye, in pursuit of the narrative, raced his pen, and Church, lazily slamming a shut hand against an open palm, said nothing—until suddenly he said, “I guess you know why we’re here.”
Hickock’s mouth straightened—his posture, too.
“I guess you realize we wouldn’t have come all the way to Nevada just to chat with a couple of two-bit check chisellers.”
Nye had closed the notebook. He, too, stared at the prisoner, and observed that a cluster of veins had appeared in his left temple.
“Would we, Dick?”
“What?”
“Come this far to talk about a bunch of checks.”
“I can’t think of any other reason.”
Nye drew a dagger on the cover of his notebook. While doing so, he said, “Tell me, Dick. Have you ever heard of the Clutter murder case?” Whereupon, he wrote in a formal report of the interview, “Suspect underwent an intense visible reaction. He turned gray. His eves twitched.”
Hickock said, “Whoa, now. Hold on, here. I’m no goddam killer.”
“The question asked,” Church reminded him, “was whether you’d heard of the Clutter murders.”
“I may have read something,” Hickock said.
“A vicious crime. Vicious. Cowardly.”
“And almost perfect,” Nye said.
“But you made two mistakes, Dick. One was, you left a witness. A living witness. Who’ll testify in court. Who’ll stand in the witness box and tell a jury how Richard Hickock and Perry Smith bound and gagged and slaughtered four helpless people.”
Hickock’s face reddened with returning color. “Living witness! There can’t be!”
“Because you thought you’d got rid of everyone?”
“I said whoa! There ain’t anybody can connect me with any goddam murder. Checks. A little petty thievery. But I’m no goddam killer.”
“Then why,” Nye asked hotly, “have you been lying to us?”
“I’ve been telling you the goddam truth.”
“Now and then. Not always. For instance, what about Saturday afternoon, November 14th? You say you drove to Fort Scott.”
“Yes.”
“And when you got there you went to the post office.”
“Yes.”
“To obtain the address of Perry Smith’s sister.”
“That’s right.”
Nye rose. He walked around to the rear of Hickock’s chair and, placing his hands on the back of the chair, leaned down as though to whisper in the prisoner’s ear. “Perry Smith has no sister living in Fort Scott,” he said. “He never has had. And on Saturday afternoons the Fort Scott post office happens to be closed.” Then he said, “Think it over, Dick. That’s all for now. We’ll talk to you later.”
After Hickock’s dismissal, Nye and Church crossed the corridor and, looking through the one-way observation window set in the door of the interrogation room, watched the questioning of Perry Smith—a scene visible though not audible. Smith was seated between his interrogators, Dewey and Clarence Duntz. Nye, who was seeing Smith for the first time, was fascinated by his feet—by the fact that his legs were so short that his feet, as small as a child’s, couldn’t quite make the floor. Smith’s head—the stiff Indian hair, the Irish-Indian blending of dark skin and pert, impish features—reminded him of the suspect’s pretty sister, the nice Mrs. Johnson. But Smith, this chunky, misshapen child-man, was not pretty; the pink end of his tongue darted forth, flickering like the tongue of a lizard. He was smoking a cigarette, and from the evenness of his exhalations Nye deduced that he was still a “virgin”—that is, still uninformed about the real purpose of the interview.
Nye was right. For Dewey and Duntz, patient professionals, had gradually narrowed the prisoner’s life story to events of the last seven weeks, then reduced those to a concentrated recapitulation of the crucial weekend—Saturday noon to Sunday noon, November 14th to 15th. Now, having spent three hours preparing the way, they were not far from coming to the point.
Dewey said, “Perry, let’s review our position. Now, when you received parole, it was on condition that you never return to Kansas.”
“The Sunflower State. I cried my eyes out.”
“Feeling that way, why did you go back? You must have had some very strong reason.”
“I told you. To see my sister. To get the money she was holding for me.”
“Oh, yes. The sister you and Hickock tried to find in Fort Scott. Perry, how far is Fort Scott from Kansas City?”
Smith shook his head. He didn’t know.
“Well, how long did it take you to drive there?” No response.
“One hour? Two? Three? Four?” The prisoner said he couldn’t remember, “Of course you can’t. Because you’ve never in your life been to Fort Scott.”
Until then, neither of the detectives had challenged any part of Smith’s statement. He shifted in his chair; with the tip of his tongue he wet his lips.
“The fact is, nothing you’ve told us is true. You never set foot in Fort Scott. You never picked up any two girls and never took them to any motel—”
“We did. No kidding.”
“What were their names?”
“I never asked.”
“You and Hickock spent the night with these women and never asked their names?”
“They were just prostitutes.”
“Tell us the name of the motel.”
“Ask Dick. He’ll know. I never remember junk like that.”
Dewey addressed his colleague.
“Clarence, I think it’s time we straightened Perry out.”
Duntz hunched forward. He is a heavyweight with a welterweight’s spontaneous agility, but his eyes are hooded and lazy. He drawls; each word, formed reluctantly and framed in a cattle-country accent, lasts a while. “Yes, sir,” he said. “ ’Bout time.”
“Listen good, Perry. Because Mr. Duntz is going to tell you where you really were that Saturday night. Where you were and what you were doing.”
Duntz said, “You were killing the Clutter family.”
Smith swallowed. He began to rub his knees.
“You were out in Holcomb, Kansas. In the home of Mr. Herbert W. Clutter. And before you left that house you killed all the people in it.”
“Never. I never.”
“Never what?”
“Knew anybody by that name. Clutter.”
Dewey called him a liar, and, conjuring a card that, in prior consultation, the four detectives had agreed to play face down, told him, “We have a living witness, Perry. Somebody you boys overlooked.”
A full minute elapsed, and Dewey exulted in Smith’s silence, for an innocent man would ask who was this witness, and who were these Clutters, and why did they think he’d murdered them—would, at any rate, say something. But Smith sat quiet, squeezing his knees.
“Well, Perry?”
“You got an aspirin? They took away my aspirin.”
“Feeling bad?”
“My legs do.”
It was five-thirty. Dewey, intentionally abrupt, terminated the interview. “We’ll take this up again tomorrow,” he said. “By the way, do you know what tomorrow is? Nancy Clutter’s birthday. She would have been seventeen.”
“She would have been seventeen.”
Perry, sleepless in the dawn hours, wondered (he later recalled) if it was true that today was the girl’s birthday, and decided no—that it was just another way of getting under his skin, like that phony business about “a witness—a living witness.” There couldn’t be. Or did they mean— If only he could talk to Dick! But he and Dick were being kept apart; Dick was locked in a cell on another floor. “Listen good, Perry. Because Mr. Duntz is going to tell you where you really were.” Midway in the questioning, after he’d begun to notice the number of allusions to a particular November weekend, he’d nerved himself for what he knew was coming, yet when it did, when the big cowboy with the sleepy voice said, “You were killing the Clutter family”—well, he’d damn near died, that’s all. He must have lost ten pounds in two seconds. Thank God he hadn’t let them see it. Or hoped he hadn’t. And Dick? Presumably they’d pulled the same stunt on him. Dick was smart, a convincing performer, but his “guts” were unreliable—he panicked too easily. Even so, and however much they pressured him, Perry was sure Dick would hold out. Unless he wanted to hang. “And before you left that house you killed all the people in it.” It wouldn’t amaze him if every Old Grad in Kansas had heard that line. They must have questioned hundreds of men, and no doubt accused dozens; he and Dick were merely two more. On the other hand—well, would Kansas send four Special Agents a thousand miles to pick up a small-time pair of parole violators? Maybe somehow they had stumbled on something, somebody—“a living witness.” But that was impossible. Except— He’d give an arm, a leg to talk to Dick for just five minutes.
And Dick, awake in a cell on the floor below, was (he later recalled) equally eager to converse with Perry—find out what the punk had told them. Christ, you couldn’t trust him to remember even the outline of the Fun Haven alibi—though they had discussed it often enough. And when those bastards threatened him with a witness! Ten to one the little spook had thought they meant an eyewitness. Whereas he, Dick, had known at once who the so-called witness must be: Floyd Wells, his old friend and former cellmate. While serving the last weeks of his sentence, Dick had plotted to knife Floyd—stab him through the heart with a handmade “shiv’’—and what a fool he was not to have done it. Except for Perry, Floyd Wells was the one human being who could link the names Hickock and Clutter. Floyd, with his sloping shoulders and inclining chin—Dick had thought he’d be too afraid. The son of a bitch was probably expecting some fancy reward—a parole or money, or both. But hell would freeze before he got it. Because a convict’s tattle wasn’t proof. Proof is footprints, fingerprints, witnesses, a confession. Hell, if all those cowboys had to go on was some story Floyd Wells had told, then there wasn’t a lot to worry about. Come right down to it, Floyd wasn’t half as dangerous as Perry. Perry, if he lost his nerve and let fly, could put them both in The Corner. And suddenly he saw the truth: It was Perry he ought to have silenced. On a mountain road in Mexico. Or while walking across the Mojave. Why had it never occurred to him until now? For now was much too late.
Ultimately, at five minutes past three that afternoon, Perry admitted the falsity of the Fort Scott tale: “That was only something Dick told his family. So he could stay out overnight. Do some drinking. See, Dick’s dad watched him pretty close—afraid he’d break parole. So we made up an excuse. About my sister. It was just to pacify Mr. Hickock.” Otherwise, he repeated the same story again and again, and Duntz and Dewey, regardless of how often they corrected him and accused him of lying, could not make him change it—except to add fresh details. The names of the “prostitutes,” he recalled today, were Mildred and Jane (or Joan). “They rolled us,” he now remembered. “Walked off with all our dough while we were asleep.” And though even Duntz had forfeited his composure—had shed, along with tie and coat, his enigmatic, drowsy dignity—the suspect seemed content and serene; he refused to budge. He’d never heard of the Clutters or Holcomb, or even Garden City.
Across the hall, in the smoke-choked room where Hickock was undergoing his second interrogation, Church and Nye were methodically applying a more roundabout strategy. Not once during this interview, now almost three hours old, had either of them mentioned murde edgy, expectant. They talked of everything else: Hickock’s religious philosophy (“I know about Hell. I been there. Maybe there’s a Heaven, too. Lots of rich people must think so”); his sexual history (“I’ve always behaved like a one-hundred-per-cent normal”); and, once more, the history of his recent cross-country hegira (“Why we kept going like that, the only reason was we were looking for jobs. Couldn’t find anything decent, though. I worked one day digging a ditch”). But things unspoken were the center of interest—the cause, the detectives were convinced, of Hickock’s escalating distress. Presently, he shut his eyes and touched the lids with trembling fingertips. And Church said, “Something wrong?”
“A headache. I get real bastards.”
Then Nye said, “Look at me, Dick.” Hickock obeyed, with an expression that the detective interpreted as a pleading with him to speak, to accuse, and let the prisoner escape into the sanctuary of steadfast denial. “When we discussed the matter yesterday, you may recall my saying that the Clutter murders were almost a perfect crime. The killers made only two mistakes. The first one was they left a witness. The second—well, I’ll show you.” Rising, he retrieved from a corner a box and a briefcase, both of which he’d brought into the room at the start of the interview. Out of the briefcase came a large photograph. “This,” he said, leaving it on the table, “is a one-to-one reproduction of certain footprints found near Mr. Clutter’s body. And here”—he opened the box—“are the boots that made them. Your boots, Dick.” Hickock looked, and looked away. He rested his elbows on his knees and cradled his head in his hands. “Smith,” said Nye, “was even more careless. We have his boots, too, and they exactly fit another set of prints. Bloody ones.”
Church closed in. “Here’s what’s going to happen to you, Hickock,” he said. “You’ll be taken back to Kansas. You’ll be charged on four counts of first-degree murder. Count One: That on or about the fifteenth day of November, 1959, one Richard Eugene Hickock did unlawfully, feloniously, willfully and with deliberation and premeditation, and while being engaged in the perpetration of a felony, kill and take the life of Herbert W. Clutter. Count Two: That on or about the fifteenth day of November, 1959, the same Richard Eugene Hickock did fully—”
Hickock said, “Perry Smith killed the Clutters.” He lifted his head, and slowly straightened up, like a fighter staggering to his feet. “It was Perry. I couldn’t stop him. He killed them all.”
Postmistress Clare, enjoying a coffee break at Hartman’s Café, complained of the low volume of the cafe’s radio. “Turn it up,” she demanded.
The radio was tuned to Garden City’s Station KIUL. She heard the words “. . . after sobbing out his dramatic confession, Hickock emerged from the interrogation room and fainted in a hallway. K.B.I. agents caught him as he fell to the floor. The agents quoted Hickock as saying he and Smith invaded the Clutter home expecting to find a safe containing at least ten thousand dollars. But there was no safe, so they tied the family up and shot them one by one. Smith has neither confirmed nor denied taking part in the crime. When told that Hickock had signed a confession, Smith said, ‘I’d like to see my buddy’s statement.’ But the request was rejected. Officers have declined to reveal whether it was Hickock or Smith who actually shot the members of the family. They emphasized that the statement was only Hickock’s version. K.B.I. personnel, returning the two men to Kansas, have already left Las Vegas by car. It is expected the party will arrive in Garden City late Wednesday. Meanwhile, County Attorney Duane West . . .”
“One by one,” said Mrs. Hartman. “Just imagine. I don’t wonder the varmint fainted.”
Others in the café—Mrs. Clare and Mabel Helm and a husky young farmer who had stopped to buy a plug of Brown’s Mule chewing tobacco—muttered and mumbled. Mrs. Helm, Bonnie Clutter’s confidante and for many years the family’s housekeeper, dabbed at her eyes with a paper napkin. “I won’t listen,” she said. “I mustn’t. I won’t.”
“. . . news of a break in the case has met with little reaction in the town of Holcomb, a half mile from the Clutter home. Generally, townspeople in the community of two hundred and seventy expressed relief . . .”
The young farmer hooted. “Relief! Last night, after we heard it on the TV, know what my wife did? Bawled like a baby.”
“Shush,” said Mrs. Clare. “That’s me.”
“. . . and Holcomb’s postmistress, Mrs. Myrtle Clare, said the residents are glad the case has been solved, but some of them still feel others may be involved. She said plenty of folks are still keeping their doors locked and their guns ready. . . .”
Mrs. Hartman laughed. “Oh, Myrt!” she said. “Who’d you tell that to?”
“A reporter from the Telegram.”
The men of her acquaintance, many of them, treat Mrs. Clare as though she were another man. Possibly this is because she dresses like one. The farmer slapped her on the back and said, “Gosh, Myrt. Gee, fella. You don’t still think one of us—anybody round here—had something to do with it?” But that, of course, was what Mrs. Clare did think, and though she was usually unique in her opinions, this time she was not without company, for the majority of Holcomb’s population, having lived for seven weeks amid unwholesome rumors, general mistrust, and suspicion, felt, it appeared, disappointed at being told that the murderer was not someone among themselves. Indeed, a sizable faction refused to accept the fact that two unknown men, two thieving strangers, were solely responsible. As Mrs. Clare now remarked, “Maybe they did it, these fellows. But there’s more to it than that. Wait. Someday they’ll get to the bottom, and when they do they’ll find the one behind it. The one wanted Clutter out of the way. The brains.”
Mrs. Hartman sighed. She hoped Myrt was wrong. And Mrs. Helm said, “What I hope is, I hope they keep ‘em locked up good. I won’t feel easy knowing they’re in our vicinity.”
“Oh, I don’t think you got to worry, Ma’am,” said the young farmer. “Right now those boys are a lot more scared of us than we are of them.”
On an Arizona highway, a two-car caravan is flashing across sagebrush country—the mesa country, of hawks and rattlesnakes and towering red rocks. Dewey is driving the lead car; Perry Smith sits beside him; and Duntz is sitting in the back seat. Smith is handcuffed, and the handcuffs are attached to a security belt by a short length of chain—an arrangement so restricting his movements that he cannot smoke unaided. When he wants a cigarette, Dewey must light it for him and place it between his lips, a task that the detective finds “repellent,” for it seems such an intimate action—the kind of thing he’d done while he was courting his wife.
On the whole, the prisoner ignores his guardians and their sporadic attempts to goad him by repeating parts of Hickock’s hour-long tape-recorded confession: “He says he tried to stop you, Perry. But says he couldn’t. Says he was scared you’d shoot him, too,” and “Yes, sir, Perry. It’s all your fault. Hickock himself, he says he wouldn’t harm the fleas on a dog.” None of this—outwardly, at any rate—agitates Smith. He continues to contemplate the scenery, to read Burma-Shave doggerel, and to count the carcasses of shotgunned coyotes festooning ranch fences.
Dewey, not anticipating any exceptional response, says, “Hickock tells us you’re a natural-born killer. Says it doesn’t bother you a bit. Says one time out there in Las Vegas you went after a colored man with a bicycle chain. Whipped him to death. For fun.”
To Dewey’s surprise, the prisoner gasps. He twists around in his seat until he can see, through the rear window, the motorcade’s second car, and see inside it: “The tough boy!” Turning back, he stares at the dark streak of desert highway. “I thought it was a stunt. I didn’t believe you. That Dick let fly. The tough boy! Oh, a real brass boy. Wouldn’t harm the fleas on a dog. Just run over the dog.” He spits. “I never killed any nigger.” Duntz agrees with him; Duntz, having studied the files on unsolved Las Vegas homicides, knows Smith to be innocent of this particular deed. “I never killed any niggers. But he thought so. I always knew if we ever got caught, if Dick ever really let fly, dropped his guts all over the goddam floor—I knew he’d tell about the nigger.” He spits again. “So Dick was afraid of me? That’s amusing. I’m very amused. What he don’t know is, I almost did shoot him.”
Dewey lights two cigarettes, one for himself, one for the prisoner. “Tell us about it, Perry.”
Smith smokes with closed eyes, and explains, “I’m thinking. I want to remember this just the way it was.” He pauses for quite a while. “Well, it all started with a letter I got while I was out in Buhl, Idaho. That was September or October. The letter was from Dick, and he said he was on to a cinch. The perfect score. I didn’t answer him, but he wrote again, urging me to come back to Kansas and go partners with him. He never said what kind of score it was. Just that it was a ‘surefire cinch.’ Now, as it happened, I had another reason for wanting to be in Kansas around about that time. A personal matter I’d just as soon keep to myself—it’s got nothing to do with this deal. Only that otherwise I wouldn’t have gone back there. But I did. And Dick met me at the bus station in Kansas City. We drove out to the farm, his parents’ place. But they didn’t want me there. I’m very sensitive; I usually know what people are feeling. Like you.” He means Dewey, but does not look at him. “You hate handing me a butt. That’s your business. I don’t blame you. Any more than I blamed Dick’s mother. The fact is, she’s a very sweet person. But she knew what I was—a friend from The Walls—and she didn't want me in her house. Christ, I was glad to get out. Go to a hotel. Dick took me to a hotel in Olathe. We bought some beer and carried it up to the room, and that’s when Dick outlined what he had in mind. He said after I’d left Lansing he celled with someone who’d once worked for a wealthy wheat grower out in western Kansas. Mr. Clutter. Dick drew me a diagram of the Clutter house. He knew where everything was—doors, halls, bedrooms. He said one of the ground-floor rooms was used as an office, and in the office there was a safe—a wall safe. He said Mr. Clutter needed it because he always kept on hand large sums of cash. Never less than ten thousand dollars. The plan was to rob the safe, and if we were seen—well, whoever saw us would have to go. Dick must have said it a million times: ‘No witnesses.’ ”
Dewey says, “How many of these he wasn’t sure. At least four. Probably six. And it was possible the family might have guests. He thought we ought to be ready to handle up to a dozen.”
Dewey groans, Duntz whistles, and witnesses did he think there might be? I mean, how many people did he expect to find in the Clutter house?”
“That’s what I wanted to know. But he wasn’t sure. At least four. Probably six. And it was possible the family might have guests. He thought we ought to be ready to handle up to a dozen.”
Dewey groans, Duntz whistles, and Smith, smiling wanly, adds, “Me, too. Seemed to me that was a little off. Twelve people. But Dick said it was a cinch. He said, ‘We’re gonna go in there and splatter those walls with hair.’ The mood I was in, I let myself be carried along. But also—I’ll be honest—I had faith in Dick; he struck me as being very practical, the masculine type, and I wanted the money as much as he did. I wanted to get it and go to Mexico. But I hoped we could do it without violence. Seemed to me we could if we wore masks. We argued about it. On the way out there, out to Holcomb, I wanted to stop and buy some black silk stockings to wear over our heads. But Dick felt that even with a stocking he could still be identified. Because of his bad eye. All the same, when we got to Emporia—”
Duntz says, “Hold on, Perry. You’re jumping ahead. Go back to Olathe. What time did you leave there?”
“One. One-thirty. We left just after lunch and drove to Emporia. Where we bought some rubber gloves and a roll of cord. The knife and shotgun, the shells—Dick had brought all that from home. But he didn’t want to look for black stockings. It got to be quite an argument. Somewhere on the outskirts of Emporia, we passed a Catholic hospital, and I persuaded him to stop and go inside and try and buy some black stockings from the nuns. I knew nuns wear them. But he only made believe. Came out and said they wouldn’t sell him any. I was sure he hadn’t even asked, and he confessed it; he said it was a puky idea—the nuns would’ve thought he was crazy. So we didn’t stop again till Great Bend. That’s where we bought the tape. Had dinner there. A big dinner. It put me to sleep. When I woke up, we were just coming into Garden City. Seemed like a real dead dog town. We stopped for gas at a filling station—”
Dewey asks if he remembers which one.
“Believe it was a Phillips 66.”
“What time was this?”
“Around midnight. Dick said it was seven miles more to Holcomb. All the rest of the way, he kept talking to himself, saying this ought to be here and that ought to be there—according to the instructions he’d memorized. I hardly realized it when we went through Holcomb, it was such a little settlement. We crossed a railroad track. Suddenly Dick said, ‘This is it, this has to be it.’ It was the entrance to a private road. Lined with trees. We slowed down and turned off the lights. Didn’t need them. Account of the moon. There wasn’t nothing else up there—not a cloud, nothing. Just that full moon. It was like broad day, and Dick, when we started up the road, said, ‘Look at this spread! The barns! That house! Don’t tell me this guy ain’t loaded.’ But I didn’t like the setup, the atmosphere; it was sort of too impressive. We parked in the shadows of a tree. While we were sitting there, a light came on—not in the main house but a house maybe a hundred yards to the left. Dick said it was the hired man’s house; he knew because of the diagram. But he said it was a damn sight nearer the Clutter house than it was supposed to be. Then the light went off. Mr. Dewey—the witness you mentioned. Is that who you meant—the hired man?”
“No. He never heard a sound. But his wife was nursing a sick baby. He said they were up and down the whole night.”
“A sick baby. Well, I wondered. While we were still sitting there, it happened again—a light flashed on and off. And that really put bubbles in my blood. I told Dick to count me out. If he was determined to go ahead with it, he’d have to do it alone. He started the car, we were leaving, and I thought, Bless Jesus. I’ve always trusted my intuitions; they’ve saved my life more than once. But halfway down the road Dick stopped. He was sore as hell. I could see he was thinking, Here I’ve set up this big score, here we’ve come all this way, and now this punk wants to chicken out. He said, ‘Maybe you think I ain’t got the guts to do it alone. But, by God, I’ll show you who’s got guts.’ There was some liquor in the car. We each had a drink, and I told him, ‘O.K., Dick. I’m with you.’ So we turned back. Parked where we had before. In the shadows of a tree. Dick put on gloves; I’d already put on mine. He carried the knife and a flashlight. I had the gun. The house looked tremendous in the moonlight. Looked empty. I remember hoping there was nobody home—”
Dewey says, “But you saw a dog?”
“No.”
“The family had an old gun-shy dog. We couldn’t understand why he didn’t bark. Unless he’d seen a gun and bolted.”
“Well, I didn’t see anything or nobody. That’s why I never believed it. About eyewitness.”
“Not eyewitness. Witness. Someone whose testimony associates you and Hickock with this case.”
“Oh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Him. And Dick always said he’d be too scared. Ha!”
Duntz, not to be diverted, reminds him, “Hickock had the knife. You had the gun. How did you get into the house?”
“The door was unlocked. A side door. It took us into Mr. Clutter’s office. Then we waited in the dark. Listening. But the only sound was the wind. There was quite a little wind outside. It made the trees move, and you could hear the leaves. The one window was curtained with Venetian blinds, but moonlight was coming through. I closed the blinds, and Dick turned on his flashlight. We saw the desk. The safe was supposed to be in the wall directly behind the desk. But we couldn’t find it. It was a panelled wall, and there were books and framed maps; and I noticed, on a shelf, a terrific pair of binoculars. I decided I was going to take them with me when we left there.”
“Did you?” asks Dewey, for the binoculars had not been missed.
Smith nods. “We sold them in Mexico.”
“Sorry. Go on.”
“Well, when we couldn’t find the safe, Dick doused the flashlight and we moved in darkness out of the office and across a parlor, a living room. Dick whispered to me, couldn’t I walk quieter. But he was just as bad. Every step we took made a racket. We came to a hall and a door, and Dick, remembering the diagram, said it was a bedroom. He shined the flashlight and opened the door. A man said, ‘Honey?’ He’d been asleep, and he blinked, and said, ‘Is that you, honey?’ Dick asked him, ‘Are you Mr. Clutter?’ He was wide awake now; he sat up and said, ‘Who is it? What do you want?’ Dick told him, very polite, like we were a couple of door-to-door salesmen, ‘We want to talk to you, sir. In your office, please.’ And Mr. Clutter, barefoot, just wearing pajamas, he went with us to the office and we turned on the office lights. Up till then he hadn’t been able to see us very good. I think what he saw hit him hard. Dick says, ‘Now, sir, all we want you to do is show us where you keep that safe.’ But Mr. Clutter says, ‘What safe?’ He says he don’t have any safe. I knew right then it was true. He had that kind of face. You just knew whatever he told you was pretty much the truth. But Dick shouted at him, ‘Don’t lie to me, you son of a bitch! I know goddam well you got a safe!’ My feeling was nobody had ever spoken to Mr. Clutter like that. But he looked Dick straight in the eye, and told him, being very mild about it—said, Well, he was sorry but he just didn’t have any safe. Dick tapped him on the chest with the knife, says, ‘Show us where that safe is or you’re gonna be a good bit sorrier.’ But Mr. Clutter—oh, you could see he was scared, but his voice stayed mild and steady—he went on denying he had a safe. Sometime along in there, I fixed the telephone. The one in the office. I ripped out the wires. And I asked Mr. Clutter if there were any other telephones in the house. He said yes, there was one in the kitchen. So I took the flashlight and went to the kitchen—it was quite a distance from the office. When I found the telephone, I removed the receiver and cut the line with a pair of pliers. Then, heading back, I heard a noise. A creaking overhead. I stopped at the foot of the stairs leading to the second floor. It was dark, and I didn’t dare use the flashlight. But I could tell there was someone there. At the top of the stairs. Silhouetted against a window. A figure. Then it moved away.”
Dewey imagines it must have been Nancy. He’d often theorized, on the basis of the gold wristwatch found tucked in the toe of a shoe in her closet, that Nancy had awakened, heard persons in the house, thought they might be thieves, and prudently hidden the watch, her most valuable property.
“For all I knew, maybe it was somebody with a gun. But Dick wouldn’t even listen to me. He was so busy playing tough boy. Bossing Mr. Clutter around. Now he’d brought him back to the bedroom. He was counting the money in Mr. Clutter’s billfold. There was about thirty dollars. He threw the billfold on the bed, and told him, ‘You’ve got more money in this house than that. A rich man like you. Living on a spread like this.’ Mr. Clutter said that was all the cash he had, and explained he always did business by check. He offered to write us a check. Dick just blew up—‘What kind of Mongolians do you think we are?’—and I thought Dick was ready to smash him, so I said, ‘Dick. Listen to me. There’s somebody awake upstairs. Mr. Clutter told us the only people upstairs were his wife and a son and a daughter. Dick wanted to know if the wife had any money, and Mr. Clutter said if she did, it would be very little, a few dollars, and he asked us really kind of broke down—please not to bother her, because she was an invalid, she’d been very ill for a long time. But Dick insisted on going upstairs. He made Mr. Clutter lead the way. At the foot of the stairs, Mr. Clutter switched on lights that lighted the hall above, and as we were going up, he said, ‘I don’t know why you boys want to do this. I’ve never done you any harm. I never saw you before.’ That’s when Dick told him, ‘Shut up! When we want you to talk, we’ll tell you.’ Wasn’t anybody in the upstairs hall, and all the doors were shut. Mr. Clutter pointed out the rooms where the boy and girl were supposed to be sleeping, then opened his wife’s door. He lighted a lamp beside the bed and told her, ‘It’s all right, sweetheart. Don’t be afraid. These men, they just want some money.’ She was a thin, frail sort of woman in a long white nightgown. The minute she opened her eyes, she started to cry. She says, talking to her husband, ‘Sweetheart, I don’t have any money.’ He was holding her hand, patting it. He said, ‘Now don’t cry, honey. It’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s just I gave these men all the money I had, but they want some more. They believe we have a safe somewhere in the house. I told them we don’t.’ Dick raised his hand, like he was going to crack him across the mouth. Says, ‘Didn’t I tell you to shut up?’ Mrs. Clutter said, ‘But my husband’s telling you the God’s truth. There isn’t any safe.’ And Dick answers back, ‘I know goddam well you got a safe. And I’ll find it before I leave here. Needn’t worry that I won’t.’ Then he asked her where she kept her purse. The purse was in a bureau drawer. Dick turned it inside out. Found just some change and a dollar or two. I motioned to him to come into the hall. I wanted to discuss the situation. So we stepped outside, and I said—”
Duntz stops him to ask if Mr. and Mrs. Clutter could overhear the conversation.
“No. We were just outside the door. Where we could keep an eye on them. But we were whispering. I told Dick, ‘These people are telling the truth. The one who lied is your friend Floyd Wells. There isn’t any safe, so let’s get the hell out of here.’ But Dick was too ashamed to face it. He said he wouldn’t believe it till we searched the whole house. He said the thing to do was tie them all up, then take our time looking around. You couldn’t argue with him. He was so excited. The glory of having everybody at his mercy, that’s what excited him. Well, there was a bathroom next door to Mrs. Clutter’s room. The idea was to lock the parents in the bathroom, and wake the kids and put them there, then bring them out one by one and tie them up in different parts of the house, and then, says Dick, after we’ve found the safe, we’ll cut their throats. Can’t shoot them, he says—that would make too much noise.”
Perry frowns, rubs his knees with his manacled hands. “Let me think a minute. Because along in here things begin to get a little complicated. I remember. Yes. Yes, I took a chair out of the hall and stuck it in the bathroom. So Mrs. Clutter could sit down. Seeing she was said to be an invalid. When we locked them up, Mrs. Clutter was crying and telling us, ‘Please don’t hurt anybody. Please don’t hurt my children.’ And her husband had his arms around her, saying, like, ‘Sweetheart, these fellows don’t mean to hurt anybody. All they want is some money.’ We went to the boy’s room. He was awake. Lying there like he was too scared to move. Dick told him to get up, but he didn’t move, or move fast enough, so Dick punched him, pulled him out of bed, and I said, ‘You don’t have to hit him, Dick.’ And I told the boy—he was only wearing a T shirt—to put on his pants. He put on a pair of blue jeans, and we’d just locked him in the bathroom when the girl appeared—came out of her room. She was all dressed, like she’d been awake some while. I mean, she had on socks and slippers, and a kimono, and her hair was wrapped in a bandanna. She was trying to smile. She said, ‘Good grief, what is this? Some kind of joke?’ I don’t guess she thought it was much of a joke, though. Not after Dick opened the bathroom door and shoved her in. . . .”
Dewey envisions them: the captive family, meek and frightened but without any premonition of their destiny. Herb couldn’t have suspected, or he would have fought. He was a gentle man but strong and not unbrave. Herb, his friend Alvin Dewey felt certain, would have fought to the death defending Bonnie’s life and the lives of his children.
“Dick stood guard outside the bathroom door while I reconnoitred. I frisked the girl’s room, and I found a little purse. Like a doll’s purse. Inside it was a silver dollar. I dropped it somehow, and it rolled across the floor. Rolled under a chair. I had to get down on my knees. And just then it was like I was outside myself. Watching myself in some nutty movie. It made me sick. I was just disgusted. Dick, and all his talk about a rich man’s safe, and here I am crawling on my belly to steal a child’s silver dollar. One dollar. And I’m crawling on my belly to get it.” Perry squeezes his knees, asks the detectives for aspirin, thanks Duntz for giving him one, chews it, and resumes talking. “But that’s what you do. You get what you can. I frisked the boy’s room, too. Not a dime. But there was a little portable radio, and I decided to take it. Then I remembered the binoculars I‘d seen in Mr. Clutter’s office. I went downstairs to get them. I carried the binoculars and the radio out to the car. It was cold, and the wind and the cold felt good. The moon was so bright you could see for miles. And I thought, Why don’t I walk off? Walk to the highway. Hitch a ride. I sure Jesus didn’t want to go back in that house. And yet— How can I explain this? It was like I wasn’t part of it. More as though I was reading a story. And I had to know what was going to happen. The end. So I went back upstairs. And now, let’s see—uh-huh, that’s when we tied them up. Mr. Clutter first. We called him out of the bathroom, and I tied his hands together. Then I marched him all the way down to the basement—”
Dewey says, “Alone and unarmed?”
“I had the knife.”
Dewey says, “But Hickock stayed guard upstairs?”
“To keep them quiet. Anyway, I didn’t need help. I’ve worked with rope all my life.”
Dewey says, “Were you using the flashlight, or did you turn on the basement lights?”
“The lights. The basement was divided into two sections. One part seemed to be a playroom. I took him to the other section, the furnace room. I saw a big cardboard box leaning against the wall. A mattress box. Well, I didn’t feel I ought to ask him to stretch out on the cold floor. So I dragged the mattress box over, flattened it, and told him to lie down.”
The driver, via the rearview mirror, glances at his colleague, attracts his eye, and Duntz slightly nods, as if in tribute. Dewey had all along argued that the mattress box had been placed on the floor for the comfort of Mr. Clutter, and, taking heed of similar hints, other fragmentary indications of ironic, erratic compassion, the detective had conjectured that at least one of the killers was not altogether uncharitable.
“I tied his feet. Then tied his hands to his feet. I asked him was it too tight, and he said no, but said would we please leave his wife alone. There was no need to tie her up—she wasn’t going to holler or try to run out of the house. He said she’d been sick for years and years, and she was just beginning to get a little better, but an incident like this might cause her to have a setback. I know it’s nothing to laugh over, only I couldn’t help it—him talking about a ‘setback.’ Next thing, I brought the boy down. First I put him in the room with his dad. Tied his hands to an overhead steampipe. Then I figured that wasn’t very safe. He might somehow get loose and undo the old man. Or vice versa. So I cut him down and took him to the playroom, where there was a comfortable-looking couch. I roped his feet to the foot of the couch, roped his hands, then carried the rope up and made a loop around his neck, so if he struggled he’d choke himself. Once, while I was working, I put the knife down on this—well, it was a freshly varnished cedar chest; the whole cellar smelled of varnish—and he asked me not to put my knife there. The chest was a wedding present he’d built for somebody. A sister, I believe he said. Just as I was leaving, he had a coughing fit. So I stuffed pillows under his head. Then I turned off all the lights—”
Dewey says, “But you hadn’t taped their mouths?”
“No. The taping came later. After I’d tied both the women in their bedrooms. Mrs. Clutter was still crying, at the same time she was asking me about Dick. She didn’t trust him, but said she felt I was a decent young man. I’m sure you are, she says, and made me promise I wouldn’t let Dick hurt anybody. I think what she really had in mind was her daughter. I was worried about that myself. I suspected Dick was plotting something. Something I wouldn’t stand for. When I finished tying Mrs. Clutter, sure enough, I found he’d taken the girl to her bedroom. She was in the bed, and he was sitting on the edge of it talking to her. I stopped that; I told him to go look for the safe while I tied her up. After he’d gone, I roped her feet together and tied her hands behind her back. Then I pulled up the covers, tucked her in till just her head showed. There was a little easy chair near the bed, and I thought I’d rest a minute; my legs were on fire—all that climbing and kneeling. I asked Nancy if she had a boyfriend. She said yes, she did. She was trying hard to act casual and friendly. I really liked her. She was really nice. A very pretty girl, and not spoiled or anything. She told me quite a lot about herself. About school, and how she was going to go to a university to study music and art. Horses. Said next to dancing what she liked best was to gallop a horse, so I mentioned my mother had been a champion rodeo rider. And we talked about Dick. I was curious, see, what he’d been saying to her. Seems she’d asked him why he did things like this. Rob people. And, wow, did he toss her a tear-jerker—said he’d been raised an orphan in an orphanage, and how nobody had ever loved him, and his only relative was a sister who lived with men without marrying them. All the time we were talking, we could hear the lunatic roaming around below. Looking for the safe. Looking behind pictures. Tapping the walls. Tap tap tap. Like some nutty woodpecker. When he came back, just to be a real bastard I asked had he found it. Course he hadn’t. But he said he’d come across another purse in the kitchen. With seven dollars.”
Duntz says, “How long now had you been in the house?”
“Maybe an hour.”
Duntz says, “And when did you do the taping?”
“Right then. Started with Mrs. Clutter. I made Dick help me. Because I didn’t want to leave him alone with the girl. I cut the tape in long strips, and Dick wrapped them around Mrs. Clutter’s head like you’d wrap a mummy. He asked her, ‘How come you keep on crying? Nobody’s hurting you,’ and he turned off the bedside lamp, and said, ‘Good night, Mrs. Clutter. Go to sleep. Then he says to me, as we’re heading along the hall toward Nancy’s room, ‘I’m gonna bust that little girl.’ And I said, ‘Uh-huh. But you’ll have to kill me first.’ He looked like he didn’t believe he’d heard right. He says, ‘What do you care? Hell, you can bust her, too.’ Now, that’s something I despise. Anybody that can’t control themselves sexually. Christ, I hate that kind of stuff. I told him straight, ‘Leave her alone. Else you’ve got a buzz saw to fight.’ That really burned him. But he realized it wasn’t the time to have a flat-out free-for-all. So he says, ‘O.K., honey. If that’s the way you feel.’ The end of it was we never even taped her. We switched off the hall light and went down to the basement.” Perry hesitates. He has a question but phrases it as a statement: “I’ll bet he never said anything about wanting to rape the girl.”
Dewey admits it, but he adds that, except for an apparently somewhat expurgated version of his own conduct, Hickock’s story supports Smith’s. The details vary, the dialogue was not identical, but in substance the two accounts—thus far, at least—corroborated one another.
“Maybe. But I knew he hadn’t told about the girl. I’d have bet my shirt.”
Duntz says, “Perry, I’ve been keeping track of the lights. The way I calculate it, when you turned off the upstairs light, that left the house completely dark.”
“Did. And we never used the lights again. Except the flashlight. Dick carried the flashlight when we went to tape Mr. Clutter and the boy. Just before I taped him, Mr. Clutter asked me—and these were his last words—wanted to know how his wife was, if she was all right, and I said she was fine, she was ready to go to sleep, and I told him it wasn’t long till morning, and how in the morning somebody would find them, and then all of it, me and Dick and all, would seem like something they dreamed. I wasn’t kidding him. I didn’t want to harm the man. I thought he was a very nice gentleman. Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.
“Wait. I’m not telling it the way it was.” Perry scowls. He rubs his legs; the handcuffs rattle. “After—see, after we’d taped them, Dick and I went off in a corner. To talk it over. Remember, now, there were hard feelings between us. Just then it made my stomach turn to think I’d ever admired him. Lapped up all that brag. I said, ‘Well, Dick. Any qualms?’ He didn’t answer me. I said, ‘Leave them alive, and this won’t be any small rap. Ten years the very least.’ He still didn’t say anything. He was holding the knife. I asked him for it, and he gave it to me, and I said, ‘All right, Dick. Here goes.’ But I didn’t mean it. I meant to call his bluff, make him argue me out of it, make him admit he was a phony and a coward. See, it was something between me and Dick. I knelt down beside Mr. Clutter, and the pain of kneeling—I thought of that goddam dollar. Silver dollar. The shame. Disgust. And they told me never to come back to Kansas. But I didn’t realize what I’d done till I heard the sound. Like somebody drowning. Screaming under water. I handed the knife to Dick. I said, ‘Finish him. You’ll feel better.’ Dick tried. Or pretended to. But the man had the strength of ten men—he was half out of his ropes, his hands were free. Dick panicked. Dick wanted to get the hell out of there. But I wouldn’t let him go. The man would have died anyway, I know that, but I couldn’t leave him like he was. I told Dick to hold the flashlight. Focus it. Then I aimed the gun. The room just exploded. Went blue. Just blazed up. Jesus, I’ll never understand why they didn’t hear the noise twenty miles around.”
Dewey’s ears ring with it—a ringing that almost deafens him to the whispery rush of Smith’s soft voice. But the voice plunges on, ejecting a fusillade of sounds and images: Hickock hunting the discharged shell; hurrying, hurrying, and Kenyon’s head in a circle of light, the murmur of muffled pleadings, then Hickock again scrambling after a used cartridge; Nancy’s room, Nancy listening to boots on hardwood stairs, the creak of the steps as they climb toward her, Nancy’s eyes, Nancy watching the flashlight’s shine seek the target (“She said, ‘Oh, no! Oh, please! No! No! No! No! Don’t! Oh, please don’t! Please!’ I gave the gun to Dick. I told him I’d done all I could do. He took aim, and she turned her face to the wall”); the dark hall, the assassins hastening toward the final door. Perhaps, having heard all she had, Bonnie welcomed their swift approach.
“That last shell was a bitch to locate. Dick wiggled under the bed to get it. Then we closed Mrs. Clutter’s door and went downstairs to the office. We waited there, like we had when we first came. Looked through the blinds to see if the hired man was poking around. Or anybody else who might have heard the gunfire. But it was just the same. Not a sound. Just the wind—and Dick panting like wolves were after him. Right there, in those few seconds before we ran out to the car and drove away, that’s when I decided I’d better shoot Dick. He’d said over and over, he’d drummed it into me: No witnesses. And I thought, He’s a witness. I don’t know what stopped me. God knows I should’ve done it. Shot him dead. Got in the car and kept on going till I lost myself in Mexico.”
A hush. For ten miles and more, the three men ride without speaking.
Sorrow and profound fatigue are at the heart of Dewey’s silence. It had been his ambition to learn “exactly what happened in that house that night.” Twice now he’d been told, and the two versions were very much alike, the only serious discrepancy being that Hickock attributed all four deaths to Smith, while Smith contended that Hickock had killed the two women. But the confessions, though they answered questions of how and why, failed to satisfy his sense of meaningful design. The crime was a psychological accident, virtually an impersonal act; the victims might as well have been killed by lightning. Except for one thing: they had experienced prolonged terror, they had suffered. And Dewey cannot forget their sufferings. Nonetheless, he finds it possible to look at the man beside him without anger—with, rather, a measure of sympathy—for Perry Smith’s life has been no bed of roses but pitiful, an ugly and lonely progress toward one mirage and then another. Dewey’s sympathy, however, is not deep enough to accommodate either forgiveness or mercy. He hopes to see Perry and his partner hanged—hanged back to back.
Duntz asks Smith, “Added up, how much money did you get from the Clutters?”
“Between forty and fifty dollars.”
Among Garden City’s animals are two gray tomcats who are always together—thin, dirty strays with strange and clever habits. The chief ceremony of their day is performed at twilight. First, they trot the length of Main Street, stopping to scrutinize the engine grilles of parked automobiles, and particularly those stationed in front of the two hotels, the Windsor and Warren, for these cars, usually the property of travellers from afar, often yield what the bony, methodical creatures are hunting: slaughtered birds—crows, chickadees, sparrows foolhardy enough to have flown into the path of oncoming motorists. Using their paws as though they were surgical instruments, the cats extract from the grilles every feathery particle. Having cruised Main Street, they invariably turn the corner at Main and Grant, then lope along toward Courthouse Square, another of their hunting grounds—and a highly promising one on the afternoon of Wednesday, January 6th, for the area swarmed with Finney County vehicles, the cars that had brought to town part of the crowd populating the square.
The crowd started forming at four o’clock, the hour that the County Attorney had given as the probable arrival time of Hickock and Smith. Since Sunday evening, and the announcement of Hickock’s confession, newsmen of every style had assembled in Garden City: representatives of the major wire services, photographers, newsreel and television cameramen, reporters from Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, and, of course, all the principal Kansas papers—twenty or twenty-five men. Many of them had been waiting three days without much to do except interview the service-station attendant James Spor, who, after seeing published photographs of the accused killers, had identified them as customers to whom he’d sold three dollars and six cents’ worth of gas the night of the Holcomb tragedy. It was the return of Hickock and Smith that these professional spectators were on hand to record, and Captain Gerald Murray, of the Highway Patrol, had reserved for them ample space on the sidewalk fronting the courthouse steps—the steps the prisoners must mount on their way to the county jail, an institution that occupies the top floor of the four-story limestone structure. One reporter, Richard Parr, of the Kansas City Star, had obtained a copy of Monday’s Las Vegas Sun. The paper’s headline raised rounds of laughter: “FEAR LYNCH MOB AWAITING RETURN OF KILLER SUSPECTS.” Captain Murray remarked, “Don’t look much like a necktie party to me.”
Indeed, the congregation in the square might have been expecting a parade, or attending a political rally. High-school students, among them former classmates of Nancy and Kenyon Clutter, chanted cheerleader rhymes, bubbled bubble gum, gobbled hot dogs and soda pop. Mothers soothed wailing babies. Men strode about with young children perched on their shoulders. The Boy Scouts were present—an entire troop. And the middle-aged membership of a women’s bridge club arrived en masse. Mr. J. P. (Jap) Adams, head of the local Veterans Commission office, appeared, attired in a tweed garment so oddly tailored that a friend yelled, “Hey, Jap! What ya doin’ wearin’ ladies clothes?”—for Mr. Adams, in his haste to reach the scene, had unwittingly donned his secretary’s coat. A roving radio reporter interviewed sundry other specimens, asking them what, in their opinion, the proper retribution would be for “the doers of such a dastardly deed,” and while most of his subjects said gosh or gee whizz, one student replied, “I think they ought to be locked in the same cell for the rest of their lives. Never allowed any visitors. Just sit there staring at each other till the day they die.” And a tough, strutty little man said, “I believe in capital punishment. It’s like the Bible says. An eye for an eye. And, even so, we’re two pair short!” The day, as long as the sun lasted, had been dry and warm-October weather in January. But when the sun descended, when the shadows of the square’s giant shade trees met and combined, the coldness as well as darkness numbed the crowd. Numbed and pruned it. By six o’clock, fewer than three hundred persons remained. Newsmen, cursing the undue delay, stamped their feet and slapped frozen ears with ungloved, freezing hands. Suddenly a murmuring arose on the south side of the square. The cars were coming. Although none of the journalists anticipated violence, several had predicted shouted abuse. But when it caught sight of the murderers, with their escort of blue-coated highway patrolmen, the crowd fell silent, as though amazed to find them humanly shaped. The handcuffed men, white-faced and blinking blindly, glistened in the glare of flash bulbs and floodlights. The photographers, pursuing the prisoners and the police into the courthouse and up three flights of stairs, photographed the door of the county jail slamming shut.
No one lingered—neither the press corps nor any of the townspeople. Warm rooms and warm suppers beckoned them, and, as they hurried away, leaving the cold square to the two gray cats, the miraculous autumn departed, too; the year’s first snow began to fall. ♦
This was the third part of a four-part series. The pieces became the book “In Cold Blood,” published by Random House.
