In Cold Blood - 14

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; and 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 when she was alone, she never thought of having a drink. But 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 Mrs. Johnson. Because of it, she could understand why, when essentially they were so mismatched, her mother had married her father. 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: in Mrs. Johnson’s opinion, that 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” was the caption under a snapshot of four barefooted children wearing overalls and cranky, uniformly fatigued expressions. Berries or stale bread soaked in sweet condensed milk 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; he 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 taken 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 are together, their cheeks touch; 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 went quite away. He wasn’t her baby any more 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 was “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, Barbara Johnson felt, 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 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—yet she drank. Before she was twenty, Fern-Joy 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 theater 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 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. Then she aimed a shotgun at a point between her eyes and pressed the trigger with her toe. When Jimmy found her, he didn’t call the police. He picked her up and put her on the bed and lay down beside her. Sometime around dawn of the next day, he reloaded the gun and killed himself.

Opposite the picture of Jimmy and his wife was a photograph of Perry in 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 Mrs. Johnson 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 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 had 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 Doublemint, Dick’s favorite flavor (Perry preferred Juicy Fruit). 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 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 more.” 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. 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 traveled to Kansas to visit his friend Hickock, and just because Hickock possessed a gun of the caliber used to commit the crime, and just because the suspects had arranged a false alibi to account for their whereabouts the night of November 14, 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. Since they seemed to take such care, they had undoubtedly got rid of the boots long ago. 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. 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 Wheat Growers’ Association, 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, 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.” Myrt Clare 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 washer, and fed the machine a lead slug—one of many bought in Mexico.

Perry was well acquainted with the workings of such emporiums, having often patronized them, and happily, since usually he found it “so relaxing” to sit quietly 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, one at which he judged himself “absolutely tops. Just a short piece of rubber hose, that’s my cross-country credit card.”) On reaching Kansas City at sunrise, the travelers 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, 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 on an old lady, really old, and Tommy grabbed her handbag, but she wouldn’t let go, she was a regular tiger. 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. Perry 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 eye. 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 right now 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 see 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 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 sonofabitch,” 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. Marki 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 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. Fenton; the manager of the Warren, Tom Mahar; 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.”