In Cold Blood (16 page)

There was some truth in the story. Perry had known, under the circumstances stated, a Negro named King. But if the man was dead today it was none of Perry’s doing; he’d never raised a hand against him. For all he knew, King might still be lying abed somewhere, fanning himself and sipping beer.

“Or did you? Kill him like you said?” Dick asked.

Perry was not a gifted liar, or a prolific one; however, once he had told a fiction he usually stuck by it. “Sure I did. Only—a nigger. It’s not the same.” Presently, he said, “Know what it is that really bugs me? About that other thing? It’s just I don’t believe it—that anyone can get away with a thing like that.” And he suspected that Dick didn’t, either. For Dick was at least partly inhabited by Perry’s mystical-moral apprehensions. Thus: “Now, just shut up!”

The car was moving. A hundred feet ahead, a dog trotted along the side of the road. Dick swerved toward it. It was an old half-dead mongrel, brittle-boned and mangy, and the impact, as it met the car, was little more than what a bird might make. But Dick was satisfied. “Boy!” he said—and it was what he always said after running down a dog, which was something he did whenever the opportunity arose. “Boy! We sure splattered him!”

T
hanksgiving passed, and the pheasant season came to a halt, but not the beautiful Indian summer, with its flow of clear, pure days. The last of the out-of-town newsmen, convinced that the case was never going to be solved, left Garden City. But the case was by no means closed for the people of Finney County, and least of all for those who patronized Holcomb’s favorite meeting place, Hartman’s Café.

“Since the trouble started, we’ve been doing all the business we can handle,” Mrs. Hartman said, gazing around her snug domain, every scrap of which was being sat or stood or leaned upon by tobacco-scented, coffee-drinking farmers, farm helpers, and ranch hands. “Just a bunch of old women,” added Mrs. Hartman’s cousin, Postmistress Clare, who happened to be on the premises. “If it was spring and work to be done, they wouldn’t be here. But wheat’s in, winter’s on the way, they got nothing to do but sit around and scare each other. You know Bill Brown, down to the
Telegram
? See the editorial he wrote? That one he called it ‘Another Crime’? Said, ‘It’s time for everyone to stop wagging loose tongues.’ Because that’s a crime, too—telling plain-out lies. But what can you expect? Look around you. Rattlesnakes. Varmints.
Rumor
mongers. See anything else? Ha! Like dash you do.”

One rumor originating in Hartman’s Café involved Taylor Jones, a rancher whose property adjoins River Valley Farm. In the opinion of a good part of the café’s clientele, Mr. Jones and his family, not the Clutters, were the murderer’s intended victims. “It makes harder sense,” argued one of those who held this view. “Taylor Jones, he’s a richer man than Herb Clutter ever was. Now, pretend the fellow who done it wasn’t anyone from hereabouts. Pretend he’d been maybe hired to kill, and all he had was instructions on how to get to the house. Well, it would be mighty easy to make a mistake—take a wrong turn—and end up at Herb’s place ’stead of Taylor’s.” The “Jones Theory” was much repeated—especially to the Joneses, a dignified and sensible family, who refused to be flustered.

A lunch counter, a few tables, an alcove harboring a hot grill and an icebox and a radio—that’s all there is to Hartman’s Café. “But our customers like it,” says the proprietress. “Got to. Nowhere else for them to go. ’Less they drive seven miles one direction or fifteen the other. Anyway, we run a friendly place, and the coffee’s good since Mable came to work”—Mabel being Mrs. Helm. “After the tragedy, I said, ‘Mabel, now that you’re out of a job, why don’t you come give me a hand at the café. Cook a little. Wait counter.’ How it turned out—the only bad feature is, everybody comes in here, they pester her with questions. About the tragedy. But Mabel’s not like Cousin Myrt. Or me. She’s shy. Besides, she doesn’t know anything special. No more than anybody else.” But by and large the Hartman congregation continued to suspect that Mabel Helm knew a thing or two that she was holding back. And, of course, she did. Dewey had had several conversations with her and had requested that everything they said be kept secret. Particularly, she was not to mention the missing radio or the watch found in Nancy’s shoe. Which is why she said to Mrs. Archibald William Warren-Browne, “Anybody reads the papers knows as much as I do. More. Because I don’t read them.”

Square, squat, in the earlier forties, an Englishwoman fitted out with an accent almost incoherently upper-class, Mrs. Archibald William Warren-Browne did not at all resemble the café’s other frequenters, and seemed, within that setting, like a peacock trapped in a turkey pen. Once, explaining to an acquaintance why she and her husband had abandoned “family estates in the North of England,” exchanging the hereditary home—“the jolliest, oh, the prettiest old priory”—for an old and highly unjolly farmhouse on the plains of western Kansas, Mrs. Warren-Browne said: “Taxes, my dear. Death duties.
Enor
mous,
crim
inal death duties. That’s what drove us out of England. Yes, we left a year ago. Without regrets. None. We love it here.
Just
adore it. Though, of course, it’s very
dif
ferent from our other life. The life we’ve always known. Paris and Rome. Monte. London. I do—occ
a
sionally—think of London. Oh, I don’t
really
miss it—the frenzy, and never a cab, and always worrying how one looks. Positively not. We love it here. I suppose some people—those aware of our past, the life we’ve led—wonder aren’t we the tiniest bit
lonely
, out there in the wheat fields. Out West is where we meant to settle. Wyoming or Nevada—
la vraie chose
. We hoped when we got there some oil might stick to us. But on our way we stopped to visit friends in Garden City—friends
of
friends,
ac
tually. But they couldn’t have been kinder. Insisted we linger on. And we thought, Well, why not? Why not hire a bit of land and start ranching? Or farming. Which is a decision we still haven’t come to—whether to ranch or farm. Dr. Austin asked if we didn’t find it perhaps too quiet.
Ac
tually, no.
Ac
tually, I’ve never known such bedlam. It’s noisier than a bomb raid.
Train
whistles. Co
yo
tes. Monsters
howl
ing the bloody night long. A horrid racket. And since the murders it seems to bother me more. So many things do. Our house—what an old creaker it is! Mark you, I’m not complaining. Really, it’s quite a serviceable house—has all the mod. cons.—but, oh, how it coughs and grunts! And after dark, when the wind commences, that
hate
ful prairie wind, one hears the most ap
pall
ing moans. I mean, if one’s a bit nervy, one can’t help imagining—silly things. Dear God! That poor family! No, we never met them. I
saw
Mr. Clutter once. In the Federal Building.”

Early in December, in the course of a single afternoon, two of the café’s steadiest customers announced plans to pack up and leave not merely Finney County but the state. The first was a tenant farmer who worked for Lester McCoy, a well-known western-Kansas landowner and businessman. He said, “I had myself a talk with Mr. McCoy. Tried to let him know what’s going on out here in Holcomb and hereabouts. How a body can’t sleep. My wife can’t sleep, and she won’t allow me. So I told Mr. McCoy I like his place fine but he better hunt up another man. ’Count of we’re movin’ on. Down to east Colorado. Maybe then I’ll get some rest.”

The second announcement was made by Mrs. Hideo Ashida, who stopped by the café with three of her four red-cheeked children. She lined them up at the counter and told Mrs. Hartman, “Give Bruce a box of Cracker Jack. Bobby wants a Coke. Bonnie Jean? We know how you feel, Bonnie Jean, but come on, have a treat.” Bonnie Jean shook her head, and Mrs. Ashida said, “Bonnie Jean’s sort of blue. She don’t want to leave here. The school here. And all her friends.”

“Why, say,” said Mrs. Hartman, smiling at Bonnie Jean. “That’s nothing to be sad over. Transferring from Holcomb to Garden City High. Lots more boys—”

Bonnie Jean said, “You don’t understand. Daddy’s taking us away. To Nebraska.”

Bess Hartman looked at the mother, as if expecting her to deny the daughter’s allegation.

“It’s true, Bess,” Mrs. Ashida said.

“I don’t know what to say,” said Mrs. Hartman, her voice indignantly astonished, and also despairing. The Ashidas were a part of the Holcomb community everyone appreciated—a family likably high-spirited, yet hard-working and neighborly and generous, though they didn’t have much to be generous with.

Mrs. Ashida said, “We’ve been talking on it a long time. Hideo, he thinks we can do better somewhere else.”

“When you plan to go?”

“Soon as we sell up. But anyway not before Christmas. On account of a deal we’ve worked out with the dentist. About Hideo’s Christmas present. Me and the kids, we’re giving him three gold teeth. For Christmas.”

Mrs. Hartman sighed. “I don’t know what to say. Except I wish you wouldn’t. Just up and leave us.” She sighed again. “Seems like we’re losing everybody. One way and another.”

“Gosh, you think I want to leave?” Mrs. Ashida said.“Far as people go, this is the nicest place we ever lived. But Hideo, he’s the man, and he says we can get a better farm in Nebraska. And I’ll tell you something, Bess.” Mrs. Ashida attempted a frown, but her plump, round, smooth face could not quite manage it. “We used to argue about it. Then one night I said, ‘O.K., you’re the boss, let’s go.’ After what happened to Herb and his family, I felt something around here had come to an end. I mean personally. For me. And so I quit arguing. I said O.K.” She dipped a hand into Bruce’s box of Crackerjack. “Gosh, I can’t get over it. I can’t get it off my mind. I
liked
Herb. Did you know I was one of the last to see him alive? Uh-huh. Me and the kids. We been to the 4-H meeting in Garden City and he gave us a ride home. The last thing I said to Herb, I told him how I couldn’t imagine his ever being afraid. That no matter what the situation was, he could talk his way out of it.” Thoughtfully she nibbled a kernel of Cracker jack, took a swig of Bobby’s Coke, then said, “Funny, but you know, Bess, I’ll bet he
wasn’t
afraid. I mean, however it happened, I’ll bet right up to the last he didn’t believe it would. Because it couldn’t. Not to him.”

T
he sun was blazing. A small boat was riding at anchor in a mild sea: the
Estrellita
, with four persons aboard—Dick, Perry, a young Mexican, and Otto, a rich middle-aged German.

“Please. Again,” said Otto, and Perry, strumming his guitar, sang in a husky sweet voice a Smoky Mountains song:

“In this world today while we’re living

Some folks say the worst of us they can,

But when we’re dead and in our caskets,

They always slip some lilies in our hand.

Won’t you give me flowers while I’m living . . .”

A week in Mexico City, and then he and Dick had driven south—Cuernavaca, Taxco, Acapulco. And it was in Acapulco, in a “jukebox honky-tonk,” that they had met the hairy-legged and hearty Otto. Dick had “picked him up.” But the gentleman, a vacationing Hamburg lawyer, “already had a friend”—a young native Acapulcan who called himself the Cowboy. “He proved to be a trustworthy person,” Perry once said of the Cowboy. “Mean as Judas, some ways, but oh, man, a funny boy, a real fast jockey. Dick liked him, too. We got on great.”

The Cowboy found for the tattooed drifters a room in the house of an uncle, undertook to improve Perry’s Spanish, and shared the benefits of his liaison with the holidaymaker from Hamburg, in whose company and at whose expense they drank and ate and bought women. The host seemed to think his pesos well spent, if only because he relished Dick’s jokes. Each day Otto hired the
Estrellita
, a deep-sea-fishing craft, and the four friends went trolling along the coast. The Cowboy skippered the boat; Otto sketched and fished; Perry baited hooks, daydreamed, sang, and sometimes fished; Dick did nothing—only moaned, complained of the motion, lay about sun-drugged and listless, like a lizard at siesta. But Perry said, “This is finally it. The way it ought to be.” Still, he knew that it couldn’t continue—that it was, in fact, destined to stop that very day. The next day Otto was returning to Germany, and Perry and Dick were driving back to Mexico City—at Dick’s insistence. “Sure, baby,” he’d said when they were debating the matter. “It’s nice and all. With the sun on your back. But the dough’s going-going-gone. And after we’ve sold the car, what have we got left?”

The answer was that they had very little, for they had by now mostly disposed of the stuff acquired the day of the Kansas City check-passing spree—the camera, the cuff links, the television sets. Also, they had sold, to a Mexico City policeman with whom Dick had got acquainted, a pair of binoculars and a gray Zenith portable radio. “What we’ll do is, we’ll go back to Mex, sell the car, and maybe I can get a garage job. Anyway, it’s a better deal up there. Better opportunities. Christ, I sure could use some more of that Inez.” Inez was a prostitute who had accosted Dick on the steps of the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City (the visit was part of a sightseeing tour taken to please Perry). She was eighteen, and Dick had promised to marry her. But he had also promised to marry Maria, a woman of fifty, who was the widow of a “very prominent Mexican banker.” They had met in a bar, and the next morning she had paid him the equivalent of seven dollars. “So how about it?” Dick said to Perry. “We’ll sell the wagon. Find a job. Save our dough. And see what happens.” As though Perry couldn’t predict precisely what would happen. Suppose they got two or three hundred for the old Chevrolet. Dick, if he knew Dick, and he did—
now
he did—would spend it right away on vodka and women.

While Perry sang, Otto sketched him in a sketchbook. It was a passable likeness, and the artist perceived one not very obvious aspect of the sitter’s countenance—its mischief, an amused, babyish malice that suggested some unkind cupid aiming envenomed arrows. He was naked to the waist. (Perry was “ashamed” to take off his trousers, “ashamed” to wear swimming trunks, for he was afraid that the sight of his injured legs would “disgust people,” and so, despite his underwater reveries, all the talk about skin-diving, he hadn’t once gone into the water.) Otto reproduced a number of the tattoos ornamenting the subject’s overmuscled chest, arms, and small and calloused but girlish hands. The sketchbook, which Otto gave Perry as a parting gift, contained several drawings of Dick—“nude studies.”