In Cold Blood (13 page)

Duntz’s story concerned a father and son who shall here be known as John Senior and John Junior. Some years earlier John Senior had conducted with Mr. Clutter a minor business transaction, the outcome of which angered John Senior, who felt that Clutter had thrown him “a queer ball.” Now, both John Senior and his son “boozed”; indeed, John Junior was an often incarcerated alcoholic. One unfortunate day father and son, full of whiskey courage, appeared at the Clutter home intending to “have it out with Herb.” They were denied the chance, for Mr. Clutter, an abstainer aggressively opposed to drink and drunkards, seized a gun and marched them off his property. This discourtesy the Johns had not forgiven; as recently as a month ago, John Senior had told an acquaintance, “Every time I think of that bastard, my hands start to twitch. I just want to choke him.”

Church’s lead was of a similar nature. He, too, had heard of someone admittedly hostile to Mr. Clutter: a certain Mr. Smith (though that is not his true name), who believed that the squire of River Valley Farm had shot and killed Smith’s hunting dog. Church had inspected Smith’s farm home and seen there, hanging from a barn rafter, a length of rope tied with the same kind of knot that was used to bind the four Clutters.

Dewey said, “One of those, maybe that’s our deal. A personal thing—a grudge that got out of hand.”

“Unless it was robbery,” said Nye, though robbery as the motive had been much discussed and then more or less dismissed. The arguments against it were good, the strongest being that Mr. Clutter’s aversion to cash was a county legend; he had no safe and never carried large sums of money. Also, if robbery were the explanation, why hadn’t the robber removed the jewelry that Mrs. Clutter was wearing—a gold wedding band and a diamond ring? Yet Nye was not convinced: “The whole setup has that robbery smell. What about Clutter’s wallet? Someone left it open and empty on Clutter’s bed—I
don’t
think it was the owner. And Nancy’s purse. The purse was lying on the kitchen floor. How did it get there? Yes, and not a dime in the house. Well—two dollars. We found two dollars in an envelope on Nancy’s desk. And we
know
Clutter cashed a check for sixty bucks just the day
before. We figure there ought to have been at least fifty of that left. So some say, ‘Nobody would kill four people for fifty bucks.’ And say, ‘Sure, maybe the killer did take the money—but just to try and mislead us, make us think robbery was the reason.’ I wonder.”

As darkness fell, Dewey interrupted the consultation to telephone his wife, Marie, at their home, and warn her that he wouldn’t be home for dinner. She said, “Yes. All right, Alvin,” but he noticed in her tone an uncharacteristic anxiety. The Deweys, parents of two young boys, had been married seventeen years, and Marie, a Louisiana-born former F.B.I. stenographer, whom he’d met while he was stationed in New Orleans, sympathized with the hardships of his profession—the eccentric hours, the sudden calls summoning him to distant areas of the state.

He said, “Anything the matter?”

“Not a thing,” she assured him. “Only, when you come home tonight, you’ll have to ring the bell. I’ve had all the locks changed.”

Now he understood, and said, “Don’t worry, honey. Just lock the doors and turn on the porch light.”

After he’d hung up, a colleague asked, “What’s wrong? Marie scared?”

“Hell, yes,” Dewey said. “Her, and everybody else.”

NOT EVERYBODY. CERTAINLY NOT Holcomb’s widowed postmistress, the intrepid Mrs. Myrtle Clare, who scorned her fellow townsmen as “a lily-livered lot, shaking in their boots afraid to shut their eyes,” and said of herself, “This old girl, she’s sleeping good as ever. Anybody wants to play a trick on me, let ’em try.” (Eleven months later a gun-toting team of masked bandits took her at her word by invading the post
office and relieving the lady of nine hundred and fifty dollars.) As usual, Mrs. Clare’s notions conformed with those of very few. “Around here,” according to the proprietor of one Garden City hardware store, “locks and bolts are the fastest-going item. Folks ain’t particular what brand they buy; they just want them to
hold
.” Imagination, of course, can open any door—turn the key and let terror walk right in. Tuesday, at dawn, a carload of pheasant hunters from Colorado—strangers, ignorant of the local disaster—were startled by what they saw as they crossed the prairies and passed through Holcomb: windows ablaze, almost every window in almost every house, and, in the brightly lit rooms, fully clothed people, even entire families, who had sat the whole night wide awake, watchful, listening. Of what were they frightened? “It might happen again.” That, with variations, was the customary response. However, one woman, a schoolteacher, observed, “Feeling wouldn’t run half so high if this had happened to anyone
except
the Clutters. Anyone
less
admired. Prosperous. Secure. But that family represented everything people hereabouts really value and respect, and that such a thing could happen to them—well, it’s like being told there is no God. It makes life seem pointless. I don’t think people are so much frightened as they are deeply depressed.”

Another reason, the simplest, the ugliest, was that this hitherto peaceful congregation of neighbors and old friends had suddenly to endure the unique experience of distrusting each other; understandably, they believed that the murderer was among themselves, and, to the last man, endorsed an opinion advanced by Arthur Clutter, a brother of the deceased, who, while talking to journalists in the lobby of a Garden City hotel on November 17, had said, “When this is cleared up, I’ll wager whoever did it was someone within ten miles of where we now stand.”

APPROXIMATELY FOUR HUNDRED MILES east of where Arthur Clutter then stood, two young men were sharing a booth in the Eagle Buffet, a Kansas City diner. One—narrow-faced, and with a blue cat tattooed on his right hand—had polished off several chicken-salad sandwiches and was now eying his companion’s meal: an untouched hamburger and a glass of root beer in which three aspirin were dissolving.

“Perry, baby,” Dick said, “you don’t want that burger. I’ll take it.”

Perry shoved the plate across the table. “Christ! Can’t you let me concentrate?”

“You don’t have to read it fifty times.”

The reference was to a front-page article in the November 17 edition of the Kansas City
Star
. Headlined CLUES ARE FEW IN SLAYING OF 4, the article, which was a follow-up of the previous day’s initial announcement of the murders, ended with a summarizing paragraph:

The investigators are left faced with a search for a killer or killers whose cunning is apparent if his (or their) motive is not. For this killer or killers: * Carefully cut the telephone cords of the home’s two telephones. * Bound and gagged their victims expertly, with no evidence of a struggle with any of them. * Left nothing in the house amiss, left no indication they had searched for anything with the possible exception of [Clutter’s] billfold. * Shot four persons in different parts of the house, calmly picking up the expended shotgun shells. * Arrived and left the home, presumably with the murder weapon, without being seen. * Acted without a motive, if you care to discount an abortive robbery attempt, which the investigators are wont to do.

“ ‘For this killer or killers,’ ” said Perry, reading aloud. “That’s incorrect. The grammar is. It ought to be ‘For this killer or
these
killers.’ ” Sipping his aspirin-spiked root beer, he went on, “Anyway, I don’t believe it. Neither do you. Own up, Dick. Be honest. You don’t believe this no-clue stuff?”

Yesterday, after studying the papers, Perry had put the same question, and Dick, who thought he’d disposed of it (“Look. If those cowboys could make the slightest connection, we’d have heard the sound of hoofs a hundred miles off”), was bored at hearing it again. Too bored to protest when Perry once more pursued the matter: “I’ve always played my hunches. That’s why I’m alive today. You know Willie-Jay? He said I was a natural-born ‘medium,’ and he knew about things like that, he was interested. He said I had a high degree of ‘extrasensory perception.’ Sort of like having built-in radar—you see things before you see them. The outlines of coming events. Take, like, my brother and his wife. Jimmy and his wife. They were crazy about each other, but he was jealous as hell, and he made her so miserable, being jealous and always thinking she was passing it out behind his back, that she shot herself, and the next day Jimmy put a bullet through his head. When it happened—this was 1949, and I was in Alaska with Dad up around Circle City—I told Dad, ‘Jimmy’s dead.’ A week later we got the news. Lord’s truth. Another time, over in Japan, I was helping load a ship, and I sat down to rest a minute. Suddenly a voice inside me said, ‘Jump!’ I jumped I guess maybe ten feet, and just then, right where I’d been sitting, a ton of stuff came crashing down. I could give you a hundred examples. I don’t care if you believe me or not. For instance, right before I had my motorcycle accident I saw the whole thing happen: saw it in my mind—the rain, the skid tracks, me lying there bleeding and my legs broken. That’s what I’ve got now. A premonition. Something tells me this is a trap.” He tapped the newspaper. “A lot of
pre
varications.”

Dick ordered another hamburger. During the past few days he’d known a hunger that nothing—three successive steaks, a dozen Hershey bars, a pound of gumdrops—seemed to interrupt. Perry, on the other hand, was without appetite; he subsisted on root beer, aspirin, and cigarettes. “No wonder you got leaps,” Dick told him. “Aw, come on, baby. Get the bubbles out of your blood. We scored. It was perfect.”

“I’m surprised to hear that, all things considered,” Perry said. The quietness of his tone italicized the malice of his reply. But Dick took it, even smiled—and his smile was a skillful proposition.
Here, it said, wearing a kid grin, was a very personable character, clean-cut, affable, a fellow any man might trust to shave him.

“O.K.,” Dick said. “Maybe I had some wrong information.”

“Hallelujah.”

“But on the whole it was perfect. We hit the ball right out of the park. It’s lost. And it’s gonna stay lost. There isn’t a single connection.”

“I can think of one.”

Perry had gone too far. He went further: “Floyd—is that the name?” A bit below the belt, but then Dick deserved it, his confidence was like a kite that needed reeling in. Nevertheless, Perry observed with some misgiving the symptoms of fury rearranging Dick’s expression: jaw, lips, the whole face slackened; saliva bubbles appeared at the corners of his mouth. Well, if it came to a fight, Perry could defend himself. He was short, several inches shorter than Dick, and his runty, damaged legs were unreliable, but he outweighed his friend, was thicker, had arms that could squeeze the breath out of a bear. To prove it, however—have a fight, a real falling-out—was far from desirable. Like Dick or not (and he didn’t dislike Dick, though once he’d liked him better, respected him more), it was obvious they could not now safely separate. On that point they were in accord, for Dick had said, “If we get caught, let’s get caught together. Then we can back each other up. When they start pulling the confession crap, saying you said and I said.” Moreover, if he broke with Dick, it meant the end of plans still attractive to Perry, and still, despite recent reverses, deemed possible by both—a skin-diving, treasure-hunting life lived together among islands or along coasts south of the border.

Dick said, “
Mr
. Wells!” He picked up a fork. “It’d be worth it. Like if I was nabbed on a check charge, it’d be worth it. Just to get back in there.” The fork came down and stabbed the table. “Right through the heart, honey.”

“I’m not saying he would,” said Perry, willing to make a concession now that Dick’s anger had soared past him and struck elsewhere. “He’d be too scared.”

“Sure,” said Dick. “Sure. He’d be too scared.” A marvel, really, the ease with which Dick negotiated changes of mood; in a trice,
all trace of meanness, of sullen bravura, had evaporated. He said, “About that premonition stuff. Tell me this: If you were so damn sure you were gonna crack up, why didn’t you call it quits? It wouldn’t have happened if you’d stayed off your bike—right?”

That was a riddle that Perry had pondered. He felt he’d solved it, but the solution, while simple, was also somewhat hazy: “No. Because once a thing is set to happen, all you can do is hope it won’t. Or will—depending. As long as you live, there’s always something waiting, and even if it’s bad, and you know it’s bad, what can you do? You can’t stop living. Like my dream. Since I was a kid, I’ve had this same dream. Where I’m in Africa. A jungle. I’m moving through the trees toward a tree standing all alone. Jesus, it smells bad, that tree; it kind of makes me sick, the way it stinks. Only, it’s beautiful to look at—it has blue leaves and diamonds hanging everywhere. Diamonds like oranges. That’s why I’m there—to pick myself a bushel of diamonds. But I know the minute I try to, the minute I reach up, a snake is gonna fall on me. A snake that guards the tree. This fat son of a bitch living in the branches. I know this beforehand, see? And Jesus, I don’t know how to fight a snake. But I figure, Well, I’ll take my chances. What it comes down to is I want the diamonds more than I’m afraid of the snake. So I go to pick one, I have the diamond in my hand, I’m pulling at it, when the snake lands on top of me. We wrestle around, but he’s a slippery sonofabitch and I can’t get a hold, he’s crushing me, you can hear my legs cracking. Now comes the part it makes me sweat even to think about. See, he starts to swallow me. Feet first. Like going down in quicksand.” Perry hesitated. He could not help noticing that Dick, busy gouging under his fingernails with a fork prong, was uninterested in his dream.

Dick said, “So? The snake swallows you? Or what?”

“Never mind. It’s not important.” (But it was! The finale was of great importance, a source of private joy. He’d once told it to his friend Willie-Jay; he had described to him the towering bird, the yellow “sort of parrot.” Of course, Willie-Jay was different—delicate-minded, “a saint.” He’d understood. But Dick? Dick might laugh. And that Perry could not abide: anyone’s
ridiculing the parrot, which had first flown into his dreams when he was seven years old, a hated, hating half-breed child living in a California orphanage run by nuns—shrouded disciplinarians who whipped him for wetting his bed. It was after one of these beatings, one he could never forget [“She woke me up. She had a flashlight, and she hit me with it. Hit me and hit me. And when the flashlight broke, she went on hitting me in the dark”], that the parrot appeared, arrived while he slept, a bird “taller than Jesus, yellow like a sunflower,” a warrior-angel who blinded the nuns with its beak, fed upon their eyes, slaughtered them as they “pleaded for mercy,” then so gently lifted him, enfolded him, winged him away to “paradise.”