In Cold Blood - 13

“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 [Lansing]. 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 fourteenth?”

The old man agreed.

“And returned Sunday, November fifteenth?”

“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, murdered 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 shoveling it in as 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 300; a delicately etched scene of pheasants in flight ornamented the handle.

“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 traveling salesman who shall here be known as Mr. Bell, was 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 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. 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 Wyoming into Nebraska. Until now, however, a suitable victim had eluded them. Mr. Bell was the first prosperous-seeming solitary traveler to offer them a lift. Their other hosts had been either truck drivers or soldiers—and, 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 somber as sheet iron. Now was the time, now. He stared at Dick, as though to communicate this realization, and 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 bathroom 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 cathouses 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 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 snapbrim 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 suspect’s 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”; as he said, there was “always a pack of them in any gambling town.” Together, Nye and the Las Vegas detective had 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 during the first week in November. It was from this ticket that Nye had obtained the address of the rooming house.

“Registered October thirtieth,” the landlady said. “Pulled out November eleventh.” 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.

“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, but her eyes stayed on Nye. “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 in the firm 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 landlady 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 weightlifters) 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, preparing his official notes, Nye 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. On 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, pleasant and commonplace. Mrs. Johnson loved it; she was in love with the redwood paneling, 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 Mrs. Johnson 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 and 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), Mrs. Johnson 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 quarreled and separated before they reached the border. Perry turned back; my father went on to Alaska alone.”

“And he hasn’t written you since?”

“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,” Nye said. 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 that 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. “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 snapbrim. “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.”