In Cold Blood (25 page)

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 weight-lifters) 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?”

“No.”

“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?”