In Cold Blood (17 page)

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

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

“Chance?”

“To catch a big one.”

“Jesus, I’ve got the bastard kind,” Dick said. “I’m sick.” Dick often had headaches of migraine intensity—“the bastard kind.” He thought they were the result of his automobile accident. “Please, baby. Let’s be very, very quiet.”

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

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

O
ne December afternoon Paul Helm was pruning the patch of floral odds and ends that had entitled Bonnie Clutter to membership in the Garden City Garden Club. It was a melancholy task, for he was reminded of another afternoon when he’d done the same chore. Kenyon had helped him that day, and it was the last time he’d seen Kenyon alive, or Nancy, or any of them. The weeks between had been hard on Mr. Helm. He was “in poor health” (poorer than he knew; he had less than four months to live), and he was worried about a lot of things. His job, for one. He doubted he would have it much longer. Nobody seemed really to know, but he understood that “the girls,” Beverly and Eveanna, intended to sell the property—though, as he’d heard one of the boys at the café remark, “ain’t nobody gonna buy that spread, long as the mystery lasts.” It “didn’t do” to think about—strangers here, harvesting “our” land. Mr. Helm minded—he minded for Herb’s sake. This was a place, he said, that “ought to be kept in a man’s family.” Once Herb had said to him, “I hope there’ll always be a Clutter here, and a Helm, too.” It was only a year ago Herb had said that. Lord, what was he to do if the farm got sold? He felt “too old to fit in somewhere different.”

Still, he must work, and he wanted to. He wasn’t, he said, the kind to kick off his shoes and sit by the stove. And yet it was true that the farm nowadays made him uneasy: the locked house, Nancy’s horse forlornly waiting in a field, the odor of windfall apples rotting under the apple trees, and the absence of voices—Kenyon calling Nancy to the telephone, Herb whistling, his glad “
Good
morning, Paul.” He and Herb had “got along grand”—never a cross word between them. Why, then, did the men from the sheriff’s office continue to question him? Unless they thought he had “something to hide”? Maybe he ought never to have mentioned the Mexicans. He had informed Al Dewey that at approximately four o’clock on Saturday, November 14, the day of the murders, a pair of Mexicans, one mustachioed and the other pockmarked, appeared at River Valley Farm. Mr. Helm had seen them knock on the door of “the office,” seen Herb step outside and talk to them on the lawn, and, possibly ten minutes later, watched the strangers walk away, “looking sulky.” Mr. Helm figured that they had come asking for work and had been told there was none. Unfortunately, though he’d been called upon to recount his version of that day’s events many times, he had not spoken of the incident until two weeks after the crime, because, as he explained to Dewey, “I just suddenly recalled it.” But Dewey, and some of the other investigators, seemed not to credit his story, and behaved as though it were a tale he’d invented to mislead them. They preferred to believe Bob Johnson, the insurance salesman, who had spent all of Saturday afternoon conferring with Mr. Clutter in the latter’s office, and who was “absolutely positive” that from two to ten past six he had been Herb’s sole visitor. Mr. Helm was equally definite: Mexicans, a mustache, pockmarks, four o’clock. Herb would have told them that he was speaking the truth, convinced them that he, Paul Helm, was a man who “said his prayers and earned his bread.” But Herb was gone.

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

Remembering Bonnie at the window, Mr. Helm looked up, as though he expected to see her, a ghost behind the glass. If he had, it could not have amazed him more than what he did in fact discern—a hand holding back a curtain, and eyes. “But,” as he subsequently described it, “the sun was hitting that side of the house”—it made the window glass waver, shimmeringly twisted what hung beyond it—and by the time Mr. Helm had shielded his eyes, then looked again, the curtains had swung closed, the window was vacant. “My eyes aren’t too good, and I wondered if they had played me a trick,” he recalled. “But I was pretty darn certain that they hadn’t. And I was pretty darn certain it wasn’t any spook. Because I don’t believe in spooks. So who could it be? Sneaking around in there. Where nobody’s got a right to go, except the law. And how did they get in? With everything locked up like the radio was advertising tornadoes. That’s what I wondered. But I wasn’t expecting to find out—not by myself. I dropped what I was doing, and cut across the fields to Holcomb. Soon as I got there, I phoned Sheriff Robinson. Explained that there was somebody prowling around inside the Clutter house. Well, they came raring right on out. State troopers. The sheriff and his bunch. The K.B.I. fellows. Al Dewey. Just as they were stringing themselves around the place, sort of getting ready for action, the front door opened.” Out walked a person no one present had ever seen before—a man in his middle thirties, dull-eyed, wild-haired, and wearing a hip holster stocked with a .38-caliber pistol. “I guess all of us there had the identical idea—this was him, the one who came and killed them,” Mr. Helm continued. “He didn’t make a move. Stood quiet. Kind of blinking. They took the gun away, and started asking questions.”

The man’s name was Adrian—Jonathan Daniel Adrian. He was on his way to New Mexico, and at present had no fixed address. For what purpose had he broken into the Clutter house, and how, incidentally, had he managed it? He showed them how. (He had lifted a lid off a water well and crawled through a pipe tunnel that led into the basement.) As for why, he had read about the case and was curious, just wanted to see what the place looked like. “And then,” according to Mr. Helm’s memory of the episode, “somebody asked him was he a hitchhiker? Hitchhiking his way to New Mexico? No, he said, he was driving his own car. And it was parked down the lane a piece. So everybody went to look at the car. When they found what was inside it, one of the men—maybe it was Al Dewey—said to him, told this Jonathan Daniel Adrian, ‘Well, mister, seems like we’ve got something to discuss.’ Because, inside the car, what they’d found was a .12-gauge shotgun. And a hunting knife.”

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

S
U
D
ÍA
T
ERMINA A LAS
2
P.M.

Y
OUR
D
AY
E
NDS AT
2
P.M.

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

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

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

But the big question, and source of heartache, was what to do with his much-loved memorabilia—the two huge boxes heavy with books and maps, yellowing letters, song lyrics, poems, and unusual souvenirs (suspenders and a belt fabricated from the skins of Nevada rattlers he himself had slain; an erotic
netsuke
bought in Kyoto; a petrified dwarf tree, also from Japan; the foot of an Alaskan bear). Probably the best solution—at least, the best Perry could devise—was to leave the stuff with “Jesus.” The “Jesus” he had in mind tended bar in a café across the street from the hotel, and was, Perry thought,
muy simpático
, definitely someone he could trust to return the boxes on demand. (He intended to send for them as soon as he had a “fixed address.”)

Still, there were some things too precious to chance losing, so while the lovers drowsed and time dawdled on toward 2:00
P.M.
, Perry looked through old letters, photographs, clippings, and selected from them those mementos he meant to take with him. Among them was a badly typed composition entitled “A History of My Boy’s Life.” The author of this manuscript was Perry’s father, who in an effort to help his son obtain a parole from Kansas State Penitentiary, had written it the previous December and mailed it to the Kansas State Parole Board. It was a document that Perry had read at least a hundred times, never with indifference:

    C
HILDHOOD
—Be glad to tell you, as I see it, both good and bad. Yes, Perry birth was
normal
. Healthy—yes. Yes, I was able to care for him properly until my wife turned out to be a disgraceful drunkard when my children were at school age. Happy disposition—
yes
and
no
, very serious if mistreated he never forgets. I also keep my promises and make him do so. My wife was different. We lived in the country. We are all truly outdoor people. I taught my children the Golden Rule. Live & let live and in many cases my children would tell on each other when doing wrong and the guilty one would always admit, and come forward, willing for a spanking. And promise to be good, and always done their work quickly and willing so they could be free to play. Always wash themselves first thing in the morning, dress in clean clothes, I was very strict about that, and wrong doings to others, and if wrong was done to them by other kids I made them quit playing with them. Our children were no
trouble to us as long as we were together. It all started when my wife wanted to go to the City and live a wild life—and ran away to do so. I let her go and said goodby as she took the car and left me behind (this was during depression). My children all cryed at the top of their voices. She only cussed them saying they would run away to come to me later. She got mad and then said she would turn the children to hate me, which she did, all but
Perry
. For the love of my children after several months I went to find them, located them in San Francisco, my wife not knowing. I tryed to see them in school. My wife had given orders to the teacher not to let me see them. However, I managed to see them while playing in the school yard and was surprised when they told me, “Mama told us not to talk to you.” All but
Perry
. He was different. He put his arms around me and wanted to run away with me rite then. I told him
No
. But rite after school was out, he ran away to my lawyers office Mr.
Rinso Turco
. I took
my boy back to his mother and left the City. Perry later told me, his mother told him to find a new home. While my children were with her they run around as they pleased, I understand Perry got into trouble. I wanted
her
to ask for divorce, which she did after about a year or so. Her drinkin and stepin out, living with a young man. I contested the divorce and was granted full custody of the children. I took Perry to my home to live with me. The other children were put in homes as I could not manage to take them all in my home and them being part indian blood and welfare took care of them as I requested.
    This was during depression time. I was working on W.P.A. very small wages. I owned some property and small home at the time. Perry and I lived together peacefully. My heart was hurt, as I still loved my other children also. So I took to roaming to forget it all. I made a livin for us both. I sold my property and we lived in a “house car.” Perry went to school often as possible. He didn’t like school very well. He learns quick and never got into trouble with the other kids. Only when the
Bully Kid
picked on him. He was short and stocky a new kid in school they tried to mistreat him. They found him willing to fight for his rights. That was the way I raised my kids. I always told them dont start a fight, if you do, I’ll give you a beaten when I find out. But if the other kids start a fight, do your best. One time a kid twice his age at school, run up and hit him, to his surprise Perry got him down and give him a good beating. I had given him some advice in wrestling.
As I once used to Box & Wrestle. The lady principal of the school and all the kids watched this fight. The lady principal loved the big kid. To see him get whipped by my little boy Perry was more than she could take. After that Perry was King of the Kids at school. If any big kid tried to mistreat a small one, Perry would settle that rite now. Even the Big Bully was afraid of Perry now, and had to be good. But that hurt the lady principal so she came to me complaining about Perry fighting in school. I told her I knew all about it and that I didnt intend to let my boy get beat up by kids twice his size. I also asked her why she let that Bully Kid beat up on other kids. I told her that Perry had a rite to defend himself. Perry never started the trouble and that I would take a hand in this affair myself. I told her my son was well liked by all the neighbors, and their kids. I also told her I was going to take Perry out of her school real soon, move away to another state. Which I did. Perry is no Angel he has done
wrong many times same as so many other kids. Rite is Rite and wrong is wrong. I dont stick up for his wrong doings. He must pay the
Hardway
when he does wrong, law is Boss he knows that by now.
    Y
OUTH
—Perry joined the merchant Marines in second war. I went to Alaska, he came later and joined me there. I trapped furs and Perry worked with the Alaska Road Commission the first winter then he got work on the railroad for a short while. He couldn’t get the work he liked to do. Yes—he give me $ now and then when he had it. He also sent me $30.00 a month while in Korea war while he was there from beginning until the end and was dischard in Seattle, Wash. Honorable as far as I know. He is mechanically inclined. Bulldozers, draglines, shovels, heavy duty trucks of all type is his desire. For the experience he has had he is real good. Somewhat reckless and speed crazy with motorcycles and light cars. But since he has had a good taste of what speed will do, and his both legs Broke & hip injury he now has slowed down on that I’m sure.
    R
ECREATION
—I
NTERESTS
. Yes he had several girl friends, soon as he found a girl to mistreat him or trifle, he would quit her. He never was married as far as I know. My troubles with his mother made him afraid of marriage somewhat. Im a
Sober man
and as far as I know Perry is also a person that dont like drunks. Perry is like myself a great deal. He likes Company of decent type—outdoors people, he like myself, likes to be by himself also he likes best to work for himself. As I do. I’m a jack of all trades, so to speak, master of few and so is Perry. I showed him how to make a living working for himself as a fur trapper, prospector, carpenter, woodsman, horses, etc. I know how to cook and so does he, not a professional cook just plane cooking for himself. Bake bread, etc. hunt, and fish, trap, do most anything else. As I said before, Perry likes to be his own Boss & if he is given a chance to work at a job he likes, tell him how you want it done, then leave him alone,
he will take great pride in doing his work. If he sees the Boss appreciates his work he will go out of his way for him. But dont get
tuff with him
. Tell him in a pleasant way how you want to have it done. He is very
touchie
, his feeling is very easily hurt, and so are mine. I have quit several jobs & so has Perry on account of Bully Bosses. Perry does not have much schooling I dont either, I only had
second reader
. But dont let that make you think we are not
sharp
. Im a self taught man & so is Perry. A
White Colar
job is not for
Perry or me
. But outdoors jobs we can master & if we cant, show him or me how its done & in just a couple of days we can master a job or machine. Books are out. Actual experience we both catch on rite now, if we like to work at it. First of all we must like the job. But now hes a Cripple and almost middle-aged man. Perry knows he is not wanted now by Contracters, cripples can’t get jobs on heavy equiptment, unless you are well know to the Contracter. He is beginning
to realize that, he is beginning to think of a more easier way of supporting himself in line with my life. Im sure Im
correct
. I also think speed is no longer his desire. I notice all that now in his letters to me. He says “be careful Dad. Don’t drive if you feel sleepy, better stop & rest by the road side.” These are the same words I used to tell him. Now he’s telling me. He’s learned a lesson.
    As I see it—Perry has learned a lesson he will never forget. Freedom means everything to him you will never get him behind bars again. Im quite sure Im rite. I notice a big change in the way he talks. He deeply regrets his mistake he told me. I also know he feels ashamed to meet people he knows he will not tell them he was behind bars. He asked me not to mention where he is to his friends. When he wrote & told me he was behind bars, I told him let that be a lesson—that I was glad that it happened that way when it could have been worse. Someone could have shot him. I also told him to take his term behind bars with a smile U done it yourself. U know better. I didn’t raise you to steal from others, so dont complain to me how tuff it is in prison. Be a good boy in prison. & he promised that he would. I hope he is a good prisoner. Im sure no one will talk him into stealing anymore. The
law is boss
, he knows that. He loves his Freedom.
    How well I know that Perry is goodhearted if you treat him rite. Treat him mean & you got a buzz saw to fight. You can trust him with any amount of $ if your his friend. He will do as you say he wont steal a cent from a friend or anyone else. Before this happened. And I sincerely hope he will live the rest of his life a honest man. He did steal something in Company with others when he was a little kid. just ask Perry if I was a good father to him ask him if his mother was good to him in Frisco. Perry knows whats good for him. U got him whipped forever. He knows when he’s beat. He’s not a dunce. He knows life is too short to sweet to spend behind bars ever again.
    R
ELATIVES
. One sister
Bobo
married, and me his father is all that is living of Perry. Bobo & her husband are self-supporting. Own their own home & I’m able & active to take care of myself also. I sold my lodge in Alaska two years ago. I intend to have another small place of my own next year. I located several mineral claims & hope to get something out of them. Besides that I have not given up prospecting. I am also asked to write a book on artistic wood carving, and the famous Trappers Den Lodge I build in Alaska once my homestead known by all tourists that travel by car to Anchorage and maybe I will. I’ll share all I have with Perry. Anytime I eat he eats. As long as Im alive. & when I die Ive got life insurance that will be paid to him so he can start LIFE
Anew
when he gets free again. In case Im not alive then.