In Cold Blood - 03

“Goodness, no. I just love her to death. Well, everybody does. There isn’t anybody like Nancy. Do you know what Mrs. Stringer says?” said Jolene, naming her home-economics teacher. “One day she told the class, ‘Nancy Clutter is always in a hurry, but she always has time. And that’s one definition of a lady.’ ”

“Yes,” replied Mrs. Clutter. “All my children are very efficient. They don’t need me.”

Jolene had never before been alone with Nancy’s “strange” mother, but despite discussions she had heard, she felt much at ease, for Mrs. Clutter, though unrelaxed herself, had a relaxing quality, as is generally true of defenseless persons who present no threat; even in Jolene, a very childlike child, Mrs. Clutter’s heart-shaped, missionary’s face, her look of helpless, homespun ethereality aroused protective compassion. But to think that she was Nancy’s mother! An aunt—that seemed possible; a visiting spinster aunt, slightly odd, but nice.

“No, they don’t need me,” she repeated, pouring herself a cup of coffee. Though all the other members of the family observed her husband’s boycott of this beverage, she drank two cups every morning and often as not ate nothing else the rest of the day. She weighed ninety-eight pounds; rings—a wedding band and one set with a diamond modest to the point of meekness—wobbled on one of her bony hands.

Jolene cut a piece of pie. “Boy!” she said, wolfing it down. “I’m going to make one of these every day seven days a week.”

“Well, you have all those little brothers, and boys can eat a lot of pie. Mr. Clutter and Kenyon, I know they never get tired of them. But the cook does—Nancy just turns up her nose. It’ll be the same with you. No, no—why do I say that?” Mrs. Clutter, who wore rimless glasses, removed them and pressed her eyes. “Forgive me, dear. I’m sure you’ll never know what it is to be tired. I’m sure you’ll always be happy . . .”

Jolene was silent. The note of panic in Mrs. Clutter’s voice had caused her to have a shift of feeling; Jolene was confused, and wished that her mother, who had promised to call back for her at eleven, would come.

Presently, more calmly, Mrs. Clutter asked, “Do you like miniature things? Tiny things?” and invited Jolene into the dining room to inspect the shelves of a whatnot on which were arranged assorted Lilliputian gewgaws—scissors, thimbles, crystal flower baskets, toy figurines, forks and knives. “I’ve had some of these since I was a child. Daddy and Mama—all of us—spent part of most years in California. By the ocean. And there was a shop that sold such precious little things. These cups.” A set of doll-house teacups, anchored to a diminutive tray, trembled in the palm of her hand. “Daddy gave them to me; I had a lovely childhood.”

The only daughter of a prosperous wheat grower named Fox, the adored sister of three older brothers, she had not been spoiled but spared, led to suppose that life was a sequence of agreeable events—Kansas autumns, California summers, a round of teacup gifts. When she was eighteen, inflamed by a biography of Florence Nightingale, she enrolled as a student nurse at St. Rose’s Hospital in Great Bend, Kansas. She was not meant to be a nurse, and after two years she confessed it: a hospital’s realities—scenes, odors—sickened her. Yet to this day she regretted not having completed the course and received her diploma—“just to prove,” as she had told a friend, “that I once succeeded at something.” Instead, she had met and married Herb, a college classmate of her oldest brother, Glenn; actually, since the two families lived within twenty miles of each other, she had long known him by sight, but the Clutters, plain farm people, were not on visiting terms with the well-to-do and cultivated Foxes. However, Herb was handsome, he was pious, he was strong-willed, he wanted her—and she was in love.

“Mr. Clutter travels a great deal,” she said to Jolene. “Oh, he’s always headed somewhere. Washington and Chicago and Oklahoma and Kansas City—sometimes it seems like he’s never home. But wherever he goes, he remembers how I dote on tiny things.” She unfolded a little paper fan. “He brought me this from San Francisco. It only cost a penny. But isn’t it pretty?”

The second year of the marriage, Eveanna was born, and three years later, Beverly; after each confinement the young mother had experienced an inexplicable despondency—seizures of grief that sent her wandering from room to room in a hand-wringing daze. Between the births of Beverly and Nancy, three more years elapsed, and these were the years of the Sunday picnics and of summer excursions to Colorado, the years when she really ran her own home and was the happy center of it. But with Nancy and then with Kenyon, the pattern of postnatal depression repeated itself, and following the birth of her son, the mood of misery that descended never altogether lifted; it lingered like a cloud that might rain or might not. She knew “good days,” and occasionally they accumulated into weeks, months, but even on the best of the good days, those days when she was otherwise her “old self,” the affectionate and charming Bonnie her friends cherished, she could not summon the social vitality her husband’s pyramiding activities required. He was a “joiner,” a “born leader”; she was not and stopped attempting to be. And so, along paths bordered by tender regard, by total fidelity, they began to go their semi-separate ways—his a public route, a march of satisfying conquests, and hers a private one that eventually wound through hospital corridors. But she was not without hope. Trust in God sustained her, and from time to time secular sources supplemented her faith in His forthcoming mercy; she read of a miracle medicine, heard of a new therapy, or, as most recently, decided to believe that a “pinched nerve” was to blame.

“Little things really belong to you,” she said, folding the fan. “They don’t have to be left behind. You can carry them in a shoebox.”

“Carry them where to?”

“Why, wherever you go. You might be gone for a long time.”

Some years earlier Mrs. Clutter had traveled to Wichita for two weeks of treatment and remained two months. On the advice of a doctor, who had thought the experience would aid her to regain “a sense of adequacy and usefulness,” she had taken an apartment, then found a job—as a file clerk at the Y.W.C.A. Her husband, entirely sympathetic, had encouraged the adventure, but she had liked it too well, so much that it seemed to her unchristian, and the sense of guilt she in consequence developed ultimately outweighed the experiment’s therapeutic value.

“Or you might never go home. And—it’s important always to have with you something of your own. That’s really yours.”

The doorbell rang. It was Jolene’s mother.

Mrs. Clutter said, “Goodbye, dear,” and pressed into Jolene’s hand the paper fan. “It’s only a penny thing—but it’s pretty.”

Afterward Mrs. Clutter was alone in the house. Kenyon and Mr. Clutter had gone to Garden City; Gerald Van Vleet had left for the day; and the housekeeper, the blessed Mrs. Helm to whom she could confide anything, did not come to work on Saturdays. She might as well go back to bed—the bed she so rarely abandoned that poor Mrs. Helm had to battle for the chance to change its linen twice a week.

There were four bedrooms on the second floor, and hers was the last at the end of a spacious hall, which was bare except for a baby crib that had been bought for the visits of her grandson. If cots were brought in and the hall was used as a dormitory, Mrs. Clutter estimated, the house could accommodate twenty guests during the Thanksgiving holidays; the others would have to lodge at motels or with neighbors. Among the Clutter kinfolk the Thanksgiving get-together was an annual, turnabout to-do, and this year Herb was the appointed host, so it had to be done, but coinciding, as it did, with the preparations for Beverly’s wedding, Mrs. Clutter despaired of surviving either project. Both involved the necessity of making decisions—a process she had always disliked, and had learned to dread, for when her husband was off on one of his business journeys she was continually expected, in his absence, to supply snap judgments concerning the affairs of the farm, and it was unendurable, a torment. What if she made a mistake? What if Herb should be displeased? Better to lock the bedroom door and pretend not to hear, or say, as she sometimes did, “I can’t. I don’t know. Please.”

The room she so seldom left was austere; had the bed been made, a visitor might have thought it permanently unoccupied. An oak bed, a walnut bureau, a bedside table—nothing else except lamps, one curtained window, and a picture of Jesus walking on the water. It was as though by keeping this room impersonal, by not importing her intimate belongings but leaving them mingled with those of her husband, she lessened the offense of not sharing his quarters. The only used drawer in the bureau contained a jar of Vick’s Vaporub, Kleenex, an electric heating pad, a number of white nightgowns, and white cotton socks. She always wore a pair of these socks to bed, for she was always cold. And, for the same reason, she habitually kept her windows closed. Summer before last, on a sweltering August Sunday, when she was secluded here, a difficult incident had taken place. There were guests that day, a party of friends who had been invited to the farm to pick mulberries, and among them was Wilma Kidwell, Susan’s mother. Like most of the people who were often entertained by the Clutters, Mrs. Kidwell accepted the absence of the hostess without comment, and assumed, as was the custom, that she was either “indisposed” or “away in Wichita.” In any event, when the hour came to go to the fruit orchard, Mrs. Kidwell declined; a city-bred woman, easily fatigued, she wished to remain indoors. Later, while she was awaiting the return of the mulberry pickers, she heard the sound of weeping, heartbroken, heartbreaking. “Bonnie?” she called, and ran up the stairs, ran down the hall to Bonnie’s room. When she opened it, the heat gathered inside the room was like a sudden, awful hand over her mouth; she hurried to open a window. “Don’t!” Bonnie cried. “I’m not hot. I’m cold. I’m freezing. Lord, Lord, Lord!” She flailed her arms. “Please, Lord, don’t let anybody see me this way.” Mrs. Kidwell sat down on the bed; she wanted to hold Bonnie in her arms, and eventually Bonnie let herself be held. “Wilma,” she said, “I’ve been listening to you, Wilma. All of you. Laughing. Having a good time. I’m missing out on everything. The best years, the children—everything. A little while, and even Kenyon will be grown up—a man. And how will he remember me? As a kind of ghost, Wilma.”

Now, on this final day of her life, Mrs. Clutter hung in the closet the calico housedress she had been wearing, and put on one of her trailing nightgowns and a fresh set of white socks. Then, before retiring, she exchanged her ordinary glasses for a pair of reading spectacles. Though she subscribed to several periodicals (the Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Reader’s Digest, and Together: Midmonth Magazine for Methodist Families), none of these rested on the bedside table—only a Bible. A bookmark lay between its pages, a stiff piece of watered silk upon which an admonition had been embroidered: “Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is.”





The two young men had little in common, but they did not realize it, for they shared a number of surface traits. Both, for example, were fastidious, very attentive to hygiene and the condition of their fingernails. After their grease-monkey morning, they spent the better part of an hour sprucing up in the lavatory of the garage. Dick stripped to his briefs was not quite the same as Dick fully clothed. In the latter state, he seemed a flimsy dingy-blond youth of medium height, fleshless and perhaps sunken-chested; disrobing revealed that he was nothing of the sort, but, rather, an athlete constructed on a welterweight scale. The tattooed face of a cat, blue and grinning, covered his right hand; on one shoulder a blue rose blossomed. More markings, self-designed and self-executed, ornamented his arms and torso: the head of a dragon with a human skull between its open jaws; bosomy nudes; a gremlin brandishing a pitchfork; the word PEACE accompanied by a cross radiating, in the form of crude strokes, rays of holy light; and two sentimental concoctions—one a bouquet of flowers dedicated to MOTHER-DAD, the other a heart that celebrated the romance of DICK and CAROL, the girl whom he had married when he was nineteen, and from whom he had separated six years later in order to “do the right thing” by another young lady, the mother of his youngest child. (“I have three boys who I will definitely take care of,” he had written in applying for parole. “My wife is remarried. I have been married twice, only I don’t want anything to do with my second wife.”)

But neither Dick’s physique nor the inky gallery adorning it made as remarkable an impression as his face, which seemed composed of mismatching parts. It was as though his head had been halved like an apple, then put together a fraction off center. Something of the kind had happened; the imperfectly aligned features were the outcome of a car collision in 1950—an accident that left his long-jawed and narrow face tilted, the left side rather lower than the right, with the results that the lips were slightly aslant, the nose askew, and his eyes not only situated at uneven levels but of uneven size, the left eye being truly serpentine, with a venomous, sickly-blue squint that although it was involuntarily acquired, seemed nevertheless to warn of bitter sediment at the bottom of his nature. But Perry had told him, “The eye doesn’t matter. Because you have a wonderful smile. One of those smiles that really work.” It was true that the tightening action of a smile contracted his face into its correct proportions, and made it possible to discern a less unnerving personality—an American-style “good kid” with an outgrown crew cut, sane enough but not too bright. (Actually, he was very intelligent. An I.Q. test taken in prison gave him a rating of 130; the average subject, in prison or out, scores between 90 and 110.)

Perry, too, had been maimed, and his injuries, received in a motorcycle wreck, were severer than Dick’s; he had spent half a year in a State of Washington hospital and another six months on crutches, and though the accident had occurred in 1952, his chunky, dwarfish legs, broken in five places and pitifully scarred, still pained him so severely that he had become an aspirin addict. While he had fewer tattoos than his companion, they were more elaborate—not the self-inflicted work of an amateur but epics of the art contrived by Honolulu and Yokohama masters. COOKIE, the name of a nurse who had been friendly to him when he was hospitalized, was tattooed on his right biceps. Blue-furred, orange-eyed, red-fanged, a tiger snarled upon his left biceps; a spitting snake, coiled around a dagger, slithered down his arm; and elsewhere skulls gleamed, a tombstone loomed, a chrysanthemum flourished.

“O.K., beauty. Put away the comb,” said Dick, dressed now and ready to go. Having discarded his work uniform, he wore gray khakis, a matching shirt, and, like Perry, ankle-high black boots. Perry, who could never find trousers to fit his truncated lower half, wore blue jeans rolled up at the bottom and a leather windbreaker. Scrubbed, combed, as tidy as two dudes setting off on a double date, they went out to the car.





The distance between Olathe, a suburb of Kansas City, and Holcomb, which might be called a suburb of Garden City, is approximately four hundred miles.

A town of eleven thousand, Garden City began assembling its founders soon after the Civil War. An itinerant buffalo hunter, Mr. C. J. (Buffalo) Jones, had much to do with its subsequent expansion from a collection of huts and hitching posts into an opulent ranching center with razzle-dazzle saloons, an opera house, and the plushiest hotel anywhere between Kansas City and Denver—in brief, a specimen of frontier fanciness that rivaled a more famous settlement fifty miles east of it, Dodge City. Along with Buffalo Jones, who lost his money and then his mind (the last years of his life were spent haranguing street groups against the wanton extermination of the beasts he himself had so profitably slaughtered), the glamours of the past are today entombed. Some souvenirs exist; a moderately colorful row of commercial buildings is known as the Buffalo Block, and the once splendid Windsor Hotel, with its still splendid high-ceilinged saloon and its atmosphere of spittoons and potted palms, endures amid the variety stores and supermarkets as a Main Street landmark—one comparatively unpatronized, for the Windsor’s dark, huge chambers and echoing hallways, evocative as they are, cannot compete with the air-conditioned amenities offered at the trim little Hotel Warren, or with the Wheat Lands Motel’s individual television sets and “Heated Swimming Pool.”

Anyone who has made the coast-to-coast journey across America, whether by train or by car, has probably passed through Garden City, but it is reasonable to assume that few travelers remember the event. It seems just another fair-sized town in the middle—almost the exact middle—of the continental United States. Not that the inhabitants would tolerate such an opinion—perhaps rightly. Though they may overstate the case (“Look all over the world, and you won’t find friendlier people or fresher air or sweeter drinking water,” and “I could go to Denver at triple the salary, but I’ve got five kids, and I figure there’s no better place to raise kids than right here. Swell schools with every kind of sport. We even have a junior college,” and “I came out here to practice law. A temporary thing, I never planned to stay. But when the chance came to move, I thought, Why go? What the hell for? Maybe it’s not New York—but who wants New York? Good neighbors, people who care about each other, that’s what counts. And everything else a decent man needs—we’ve got that, too. Beautiful churches. A golf course”), the newcomer to Garden City, once he has adjusted to the nightly after-eight silence of Main Street, discovers much to support the defensive boastings of the citizenry: a well-run public library, a competent daily newspaper, green-lawned and shady squares here and there, placid residential streets where animals and children are safe to run free, a big, rambling park complete with a small menagerie (“See the Polar Bears!” “See Penny the Elephant!”), and a swimming pool that consumes several acres (“World’s Largest FREE Swimpool!”). Such accessories, and the dust and the winds and the ever-calling train whistles, add up to a “home town” that is probably remembered with nostalgia by those who have left it, and that, for those who have remained, provides a sense of roots and contentment.

Without exception, Garden Citians deny that the population of the town can be socially graded (“No, sir. Nothing like that here. All equal, regardless of wealth, color, or creed. Everything the way it ought to be in a democracy; that’s us”), but, of course, class distinctions are as clearly observed, and as clearly observable, as in any other human hive. A hundred miles west and one would be out of the “Bible Belt,” that gospel-haunted strip of American territory in which a man must, if only for business reasons, take his religion with the straightest of faces, but in Finney County one is still within the Bible Belt borders, and therefore a person’s church affiliation is the most important factor influencing his class status. A combination of Baptists, Methodists, and Roman Catholics would account for eighty percent of the county’s devout, yet among the elite—the businessmen, bankers, lawyers, physicians, and more prominent ranchers who tenant the top drawer—Presbyterians and Episcopalians predominate. An occasional Methodist is welcomed, and once in a while a Democrat infiltrates, but on the whole the Establishment is composed of rightwing Republicans of the Presbyterian and Episcopalian faiths.

As an educated man successful in his profession, as an eminent Republican and church leader—even though of the Methodist church—Mr. Clutter was entitled to rank among the local patricians, but just as he had never joined the Garden City Country Club, he had never sought to associate with the reigning coterie. Quite the contrary, for their pleasures were not his; he had no use for card games, golf, cocktails, or buffet suppers served at ten—or, indeed, for any pastime that he felt did not “accomplish something.” Which is why, instead of being part of a golfing foursome on this shining Saturday, Mr. Clutter was acting as chairman of a meeting of the Finney County 4-H Club. (4-H stands for “Head, Heart, Hands, Health,” and the club motto claims “We learn to do by doing.” It is a national organization, with overseas branches, whose purpose is to help those living in rural areas—and the children particularly—develop practical abilities and moral character. Nancy and Kenyon had been conscientious members from the age of six.) Toward the end of the meeting, Mr. Clutter said, “Now I have something to say concerning one of our adult members.” His eyes singled out a chubby Japanese woman surrounded by four chubby Japanese children. “You all know Mrs. Hideo Ashida. Know how the Ashidas moved here from Colorado—started farming out to Holcomb two years ago. A fine family, the kind of people Holcomb’s lucky to have. As anyone will tell you. Anyone who has been sick and had Mrs. Ashida walk nobody can calculate how many miles to bring them some of the wonderful soups she makes. Or the flowers she grows where you wouldn’t expect a flower could grow. And last year at the county fair you will recall how much she contributed to the success of the 4-H exhibits. So I want to suggest we honor Mrs. Ashida with an award at our Achievement Banquet next Tuesday.”

Her children tugged at her, punched her; the oldest boy shouted, “Hey, Ma, that’s you!” But Mrs. Ashida was bashful; she rubbed her eyes with her baby-plump hands and laughed. She was the wife of a tenant farmer; the farm, an especially wind-swept and lonesome one, was halfway between Garden City and Holcomb. After 4-H conferences, Mr. Clutter usually drove the Ashidas home, and he did so today.

“Gosh, that was a jolt,” said Mrs. Ashida as they rolled along Route 50 in Mr. Clutter’s pickup truck. “Seems like I’m always thanking you, Herb. But thanks.” She had met him on her second day in Finney County; it was the day before Halloween, and he and Kenyon had come to call, bringing a load of pumpkins and squash. All through that first hard year, gifts had arrived, of produce that the Ashidas had not yet planted—baskets of asparagus, lettuce. And Nancy often brought Babe by for the children to ride. “You know, in most ways, this is the best place we’ve ever lived. Hideo says the same. We sure hate to think about leaving. Starting all over again.”

“Leaving?” protested Mr. Clutter, and slowed the car.

“Well, Herb. The farm here, the people we’re working for—Hideo thinks we could do better. Maybe in Nebraska. But nothing’s settled. It’s just talk so far.” Her hearty voice, always on the verge of laughter, made the melancholy news sound somehow cheerful, but seeing that she had saddened Mr. Clutter, she turned to other matters. “Herb, give me a man’s opinion,” she said. “Me and the kids, we’ve been saving up, we want to give Hideo something on the grand side for Christmas. What he needs is teeth. Now, if your wife was to give you three gold teeth, would that strike you as a wrong kind of present? I mean, asking a man to spend Christmas in the dentist’s chair?”

“You beat all. Don’t ever try to get away from here. We’ll hogtie you,” said Mr. Clutter. “Yes, yes, by all means gold teeth. Was me, I’d be tickled.”

His reaction delighted Mrs. Ashida, for she knew he would not approve her plan unless he meant it; he was a gentleman. She had never known him to “act the Squire,” or to take advantage or break a promise. She ventured to obtain a promise now. “Look, Herb. At the banquet—no speeches, huh? Not for me. You, you’re different. The way you can stand up and talk to hundreds of people. Thousands. And be so easy—convince anybody about whatever. Just nothing scares you,” she said, commenting upon a generally recognized quality of Mr. Clutter’s: a fearless self-assurance that set him apart, and while it created respect, also limited the affections of others a little. “I can’t imagine you afraid. No matter what happened, you’d talk your way out of it.”





By midafternoon the black Chevrolet had reached Emporia, Kansas—a large town, almost a city, and a safe place, so the occupants of the car had decided, to do a bit of shopping. They parked on a side street, then wandered about until a suitably crowded variety store presented itself.

The first purchase was a pair of rubber gloves; these were for Perry, who, unlike Dick, had neglected to bring old gloves of his own.

They moved on to a counter displaying women’s hosiery. After a spell of indecisive quibbling, Perry said, “I’m for it.”

Dick was not. “What about my eye? They’re all too light-colored to hide that.”

“Miss,” said Perry, attracting a salesgirl’s attention. “You got any black stockings?” When she told him no, he proposed that they try another store. “Black’s foolproof.”

But Dick had made up his mind: stockings of any shade were unnecessary, an encumbrance, a useless expense (“I’ve already invested enough money in this operation”), and, after all, anyone they encountered would not live to bear witness. “No witnesses,” he reminded Perry, for what seemed to Perry the millionth time. It rankled in him, the way Dick mouthed those two words, as though they solved every problem; it was stupid not to admit that there might be a witness they hadn’t seen. “The ineffable happens, things do take a turn,” he said. But Dick, smiling boastfully, boyishly, did not agree: “Get the bubbles out of your blood. Nothing can go wrong.” No. Because the plan was Dick’s, and from first footfall to final silence, flawlessly devised.

Next they were interested in rope. Perry studied the stock, tested it. Having once served in the Merchant Marine, he understood rope and was clever with knots. He chose a white nylon cord, as strong as wire and not much thicker. They discussed how many yards of it they required. The question irritated Dick, for it was part of a greater quandary, and he could not, despite the alleged perfection of his over-all design, be certain of the answer. Eventually, he said, “Christ, how the hell should I know?”

“You damn well better.”

Dick tried. “There’s him. Her. The kid and the girl. And maybe the other two. But it’s Saturday. They might have guests. Let’s count on eight, or even twelve. The only sure thing is every one of them has got to go.”

“Seems like a lot of it. To be so sure about.”

“Ain’t that what I promised you, honey—plenty of hair on them-those walls?”

Perry shrugged. “Then we’d better buy the whole roll.”

It was a hundred yards long—quite enough for twelve.





Kenyon had built the chest himself: a mahogany hope chest, lined with cedar, which he intended to give Beverly as a wedding present. Now, working on it in the so-called den in the basement, he applied a last coat of varnish. The furniture of the den, a cement-floored room that ran the length of the house, consisted almost entirely of examples of his carpentry (shelves, tables, stools, a ping-pong table) and Nancy’s needlework (chintz slip covers that rejuvenated a decrepit couch, curtains, pillows bearing legends: HAPPY? and YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE CRAZY TO LIVE HERE BUT IT HELPS). Together, Kenyon and Nancy had made a paint-splattered attempt to deprive the basement room of its unremovable dourness, and neither was aware of failure. In fact, they both thought their den a triumph and a blessing—Nancy because it was a place where she could entertain “the gang” without disturbing her mother, and Kenyon because here he could be alone, free to bang, saw, and mess with his “inventions,” the newest of which was an electric deep-dish frying pan. Adjoining the den was a furnace room, which contained a tool-littered table piled with some of his other works-in-progress—an amplifying unit, an elderly wind-up Victrola that he was restoring to service.