In Cold Blood (29 page)

“Even so, our case was very shaky—nothing that couldn’t be pulled apart. But I remember, while we were waiting in the corridor—I remember being feverish and nervous as hell, but
confident
. We all were; we felt we were on the edge of the truth. My job, mine and Church’s, was to pressure it out of Hickock. Smith belonged to Al and Old Man Duntz. At that time I hadn’t seen the suspects—just examined their possessions and arranged the extradition waivers. I’d never laid eyes on Hickock until he was brought down to the interrogation room. I’d imagined a bigger guy. Brawnier. Not some skinny kid. He was twenty-eight, but he looked like a kid. Hungry—right down to the bone. He was wearing a blue shirt and suntans and white socks and black shoes. We shook hands; his hand was drier than mine. Clean, polite, nice voice, good diction, a pretty decent-looking fellow, with a very disarming smile—and in the beginning he smiled quite a lot.

“I said, ‘Mr. Hickock, my name is Harold Nye, and this other gentleman is Mr. Roy Church. We’re Special Agents of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, and we’ve come here to discuss your parole violation. Of course, you’re under no obligation to answer our questions, and anything you say may be used against you in evidence. You’re entitled to a lawyer at all times. We’ll use no force, no threats, and we’ll make you no promises.’ He was calm as could be.”

“I
know the form,” Dick said. “I’ve been questioned before.”

“Now, Mr. Hickock—”

“Dick.”

“Dick, we want to talk to you about your activities since your parole. To our knowledge, you’ve gone on at least two big check sprees in the Kansas City area.”

“Uh-huh. Hung out quite a few.”

“Could you give us a list?”

The prisoner, evidently proud of his one authentic gift, a brilliant memory, recited the names and addresses of twenty Kansas City stores, cafés, and garages, and recalled, accurately, the “purchase” made at each and the amount of the check passed.

“I’m curious, Dick. Why do these people accept your checks? I’d like to know the secret.”

“The secret is: People are dumb.”

Roy Church said, “Fine, Dick. Very funny. But just for the moment let’s forget these checks.” Though he sounds as if his throat were lined with hog bristle, and has hands so hardened that he can punch stone walls (his favorite stunt, in fact), persons have been known to mistake Church for a kindly little man, somebody’s bald-headed, pink-cheeked uncle. “Dick,” he said, “suppose you tell us something about your family background.”

The prisoner reminisced. Once, when he was nine or ten, his father had fallen ill. “It was rabbit fever,” and the illness lasted many months, during which the family had depended upon church assistance and the charity of neighbors—“otherwise we would’ve starved.” That episode aside, his childhood had been O.K. “We never had much money, but we were never really down-and-out,” Hickock said. “We always had clean clothes and something to eat. My dad was strict, though. He wasn’t happy unless he had me doing chores. But we got along O.K.—no serious arguments. My parents never argued, either. I can’t recall a single quarrel. She’s wonderful, my mother. Dad’s a good guy, too. I’d say they did the best for me they could.” School? Well, he felt he might have been more than an average student if he had contributed to books a fraction of the time he’d “wasted” on sports. “Baseball. Football. I made all the teams. After high school I could have gone to college on a football scholarship. I wanted to study engineering, but even with a scholarship, deals like that cost plenty. I don’t know, it seemed safer to get a job.”

Before his twenty-first birthday Hickock had worked as a railway trackman, an ambulance driver, a car painter, and a garage mechanic; he’d also married a girl sixteen years old. “Carol. Her father was a minister. He was dead against me. Said I was a full-time nobody. He made all the trouble he could. But I was nuts about Carol. Still am. There’s a real princess. Only—see, we had three kids. Boys. And we were too young to have three kids. Maybe if we hadn’t got so deep into debt. If I could’ve earned extra money. I tried.”

He tried gambling, and started forging checks and experimenting with other forms of theft. In 1958 he was convicted of house burglary in a Johnson County court and sentenced to five years in Kansas State Penitentiary. But by then Carol had departed and he’d taken as a bride another girl aged sixteen. “Mean as hell. Her and her whole family. She divorced me while I was inside. I’m not complaining. Last August, when I left The Walls, I figured I had every chance to start new. I got a job in Olathe, lived with my family, and stayed home nights. I was doing swell—”

“Until November twentieth,” said Nye, and Hickock seemed not to understand him. “The day you stopped doing swell and started hanging paper. Why?”

Hickock sighed, and said, “That would make a book.” Then, smoking a cigarette borrowed from Nye and lighted by the courteous Church, he said, “Perry—my buddy Perry Smith—was paroled in the spring. Later on, when I came out, he sent me a letter. Postmarked Idaho. He wrote reminding me of this deal we used to talk over. About Mexico. The idea was we would go to Acapulco, one of them places, buy a fishing boat, and run it ourselves—take tourists deep-sea fishing.”

Nye said, “This boat. How did you plan to pay for it?”

“I’m coming to that,” Hickock said. “See, Perry wrote me he had a sister living in Fort Scott. And she was holding some heavy change for him. Several thousand dollars. Money his dad owed him from the sale of some property up in Alaska. He said he was coming to Kansas to get the dough.”

“And the two of you would use it to buy a boat.”

“Correct.”

“But it didn’t work out that way.”

“What happened was, Perry showed up maybe a month later. I met him at the bus station in Kansas City—”

“When?” said Church. “The day of the week.”

“A Thursday.”

“And when did you go to Fort Scott?”

“Saturday.”

“November fourteenth.”

Hickock’s eyes flashed with surprise. One could see that he was asking himself why Church should be so certain of the date; and hurriedly—for it was too soon to stir suspicions—the detective said, “What time did you leave for Fort Scott?”

“That afternoon. We did some work on my car, and had a bowl of chili at the West Side Café. It must have been around three.”

“Around three. Was Perry Smith’s sister expecting you?”

“No. Because, see, Perry lost her address. And she didn’t have a telephone.”

“Then how did you expect to find her?”

“By inquiring at the post office.”

“Did you?”

“Perry did. They said she’d moved away. To Oregon, they thought. But she hadn’t left any forwarding address.”

“Must have been quite a blow. After you’d been counting on a big piece of money like that.”

Hickock agreed. “Because—well, we’d definitely decided to go to Mexico. Otherwise, I never would’ve cashed them checks. But I hoped . . . Now listen to me; I’m telling the truth. I thought once we got to Mexico and began making money, then I’d be able to pay them off. The checks.”

Nye took over. “One minute, Dick.” Nye is a short, short-tempered man who has difficulty moderating his aggressive vigor, his talent for language both sharp and outspoken. “I’d like to hear a little more about the trip to Fort Scott,” he said, soft-pedaling. “When you found Smith’s sister no longer there, what did you do then?”

“Walked around. Had a beer. Drove back.”

“You mean you went home?”

“No. To Kansas City. We stopped at the Zesto Drive-In. Ate hamburgers. We tried Cherry Row.”

Neither Nye nor Church was familiar with Cherry Row.

Hickock said, “You kiddin’? Every cop in Kansas knows it.” When the detectives again pleaded ignorance, he explained that it was a stretch of park where one encountered “hustlers mostly,” adding, “but plenty of amateurs, too. Nurses. Secretaries. I’ve had a lot of luck there.”

“And this particular evening. Have any luck?”

“The bad kind. We ended up with a pair of rollers.”

“Named?”

“Mildred. The other one, Perry’s girl, I think she was called Joan.”

“Describe them.”

“Maybe they were sisters. Both blond. Plump. I’m not too clear about it. See, we’d bought a bottle of ready-mix Orange Blossoms—that’s orange pop and vodka—and I was getting stiff. We gave the girls a few drinks and drove them out to Fun Haven. I imagine you gentlemen never heard of Fun Haven?”

They hadn’t.

Hickock grinned and shrugged. “It’s on the Blue Ridge Road. Eight miles south of Kansas City. A combination night-club-motel. You pay ten bucks for the key to a cabin.”

Continuing, he described the cabin in which he claimed that the foursome had stayed the night: twin beds, an old Coca-Cola calendar, a radio that wouldn’t play unless the customer deposited a quarter. His poise, his explicitness, the assured presentation of verifiable detail impressed Nye—though, of course, the boy was lying. Well, wasn’t he? Whether because of flu and fever or an abrupt lessening in the warmth of his confidence, Nye exuded an icy sweat.

“Next morning we woke up to find they’d rolled us and beat it,” said Hickock. “Didn’t get much off me. But Perry lost his wallet, with forty or fifty dollars.”

“What did you do about it?”

“There wasn’t nothing to do.”

“You could’ve notified the police.”

“Aw, come on. Quit it.
Notify
the police. For your information, a guy on parole’s not allowed to booze. Or associate with another Old Grad—”

“All right, Dick. It’s Sunday. The fifteenth of November. Tell us what you did that day from the moment you checked out of Fun Haven.”

“Well, we ate breakfast at a truck stop near Happy Hill. Then we drove to Olathe, and I dropped Perry off at the hotel where he was living. I’d say that was around eleven. Afterward, I went home and had dinner with the family. Same as every Sunday. Watched TV—a basketball game, or maybe it was football. I was pretty tired.”

“When did you next see Perry Smith?”

“Monday. He came by where I worked. Bob Sands’ Body Shop.”

“And what did you talk about? Mexico?”

“Well, we still liked the idea, even if we hadn’t got hold of the money to do all we had in mind—put ourselves in business down there. But we wanted to go, and it seemed worth the risk.”

“Worth another stretch in Lansing?”

“That didn’t figure. See, we never intended coming Stateside again.”

Nye, who had been jotting notes in a notebook, said, “On the day following the check spree—that would be the twenty-first—you and your friend Smith disappeared. Now, Dick, please outline your movements between then and the time of your arrest here in Las Vegas. Just a rough idea.”

Hickock whistled and rolled his eyes. “Wow!” he said, and then, summoning his talent for something very like total recall, he began an account of the long ride—the approximately ten thousand miles he and Smith had covered in the past six weeks. He talked for an hour and twenty-five minutes—from two-fifty to four-fifteen—and told, while Nye attempted to list them, of highways and hotels, motels, rivers, towns, and cities, a chorus of entwining names: Apache, El Paso, Corpus Christi, Santillo, San Luis Potosí, Acapulco, San Diego, Dallas, Omaha, Sweetwater, Stillwater, Tenville Junction, Tallahassee, Needles, Miami, Hotel Nuevo Waldorf, Somerset Hotel, Hotel Simone, Arrowhead Motel, Cherokee Motel, and many, many more. He gave them the name of the man in Mexico to whom he’d sold his own old 1949 Chevrolet, and confessed that he had stolen a newer model in Iowa. He described persons he and his partner had met: a Mexican widow, rich and sexy; Otto, a German “millionaire”; a “swish” pair of Negro prizefighters driving a “swish” lavender Cadillac; the blind proprietor of a Florida rattlesnake farm; a dying old man and his grandson; and others. And when he had finished he sat with folded arms and a pleased smile, as though waiting to be commended for the humor, the clarity, and the candor of his traveler’s tale.

But Nye, in pursuit of the narrative, raced his pen, and Church, lazily slamming a shut hand against an open palm, said nothing—until suddenly he said, “I guess you know why we’re here.”

Hickock’s mouth straightened—his posture, too.

“I guess you realize we wouldn’t have come all the way to Nevada just to chat with a couple of two-bit check chiselers.”

Nye had closed the notebook. He, too, stared at the prisoner, and observed that a cluster of veins had appeared in his left temple.

“Would we, Dick?”

“What?”

“Come this far to talk about a bunch of checks.”

“I can’t think of any other reason.”

Nye drew a dagger on the cover of his notebook. While doing so, he said, “Tell me, Dick. Have you ever heard of the Clutter murder case?” Whereupon, he later wrote in a formal report of the interview, “Suspect underwent an intense visible reaction. He turned gray. His eyes twitched.”

Hickock said, “Whoa, now. Hold on here. I’m no goddam killer.”

“The question asked,” Church reminded him, “was whether you’d
heard
of the Clutter murders.”

“I may have read something,” Hickock said.

“A vicious crime. Vicious. Cowardly.”

“And almost perfect,” Nye said. “But you made two mistakes, Dick. One was, you left a witness. A living witness. Who’ll testify in court. Who’ll stand in the witness box and tell a jury how Richard Hickock and Perry Smith bound and gagged and slaughtered four helpless people.”

Hickock’s face reddened with returning color. “Living witness! There can’t be!”

“Because you thought you’d got rid of everyone?”

“I said whoa! There ain’t anybody can connect me with any goddam murder. Checks. A little petty thievery. But I’m no goddam killer.”

“Then why,” Nye asked hotly, “have you been lying to us?”

“I’ve been telling you the goddam truth.”

“Now and then. Not always. For instance, what about Saturday afternoon, November fourteenth? You say you drove to Fort Scott.”

“Yes.”

“And when you got there you went to the post office.”

“Yes.”

“To obtain the address of Perry Smith’s sister.”