In Cold Blood Page 12

The rings were pawned for a hundred and fifty dollars. They visited another jewelry store, Goldman’s, and sauntered out of there with a man’s gold wristwatch. Next stop, an Elko Camera Store, where they “bought” an elaborate motion-picture camera. “Cameras are your best investment,” Dick informed Perry. “Easiest thing to hock or sell. Cameras and TV sets.” This being the case, they decided to obtain several of the latter, and, having completed the mission, went on to attack a few more clothing emporiums—Sheperd & Foster’s, Rothschild’s, Shopper’s Paradise. By sundown, when the stores were closing, their pockets were filled with cash and the car was heaped with salable, pawnable wares. Surveying this harvest of shirts and cigarette lighters, expensive machinery and cheap cuff links, Perry felt elatedly tall—now Mexico, a new chance, a “really living” life. But Dick seemed depressed. He shrugged off Perry’s praises (“I mean it, Dick. You were amazing. Half the time I believed you myself”). And Perry was puzzled; he could not fathom why Dick, usually so full of himself, should suddenly, when he had good cause to gloat, be meek, look wilted and sad. Perry said, “I’ll stand you a drink.”

  They stopped at a bar. Dick drank three Orange Blossoms. After the third, he abruptly asked, “What about Dad? I feel—oh, Jesus, he’s such a good old guy. And my mother—well, you saw her. What about them? Me, I’ll be off in Mexico. Or wherever. But they’ll be right here when those checks start to bounce. I know Dad. He’ll want to make them good. Like he tried to before. And he can’t—he’s old and he’s sick, he ain’t got anything.”

  “I sympathize with that,” said Perry truthfully. Without being kind, he was sentimental, and Dick’s affection for his parents, his professed concern for them, did indeed touch him. “But hell, Dick. It’s very simple,” Perry said. “We can pay off the checks. Once we’re in Mexico, once we get started down there, we’ll make money. Lots of it.”

  “How?”

  “How?”—what could Dick mean? The question dazed Perry. After all, such a rich assortment of ventures had been discussed. Prospecting for gold, skin-diving for sunken treasure—these were but two of the projects Perry had ardently proposed. And there were others. The boat, for instance. They had often talked of a deep-sea-fishing boat, which they would buy, man themselves, and rent to vacationers—this though neither had ever skippered a canoe or hooked a guppy. Then, too, there was quick money to be made chauffeuring stolen cars across South American borders. (“You get paid five hundred bucks a trip,” or so Perry had read somewhere.) But of the many replies he might have made, he chose to remind Dick of the fortune awaiting them on Cocos Island, a land speck off the coast of Costa Rica. “No fooling, Dick,” Perry said. “This is authentic. I’ve got a map. I’ve got the whole history. It was buried there back in 1821—Peruvian bullion, jewelry. Sixty million dollars—that’s what they say it’s worth. Even if we didn’t find all of it, even if we found only some of it—Are you with me, Dick?” Heretofore, Dick had always encouraged him, listened attentively to his talk of maps, tales of treasure, but now—and it had not occurred to him before—he wondered if all along Dick had only been pretending, just kidding him.

  The thought, acutely painful, passed, for Dick, with a wink and a playful jab, said, “Sure, honey. I’m with you. All the way.”

  It was three in the morning, and the telephone rang again. Not that the hour mattered. Al Dewey was wide awake anyway, and so were Marie and their sons, nine-year-old Paul and twelve-year-old Alvin Adams Dewey, Jr. For who could sleep in a house—a modest one-story house-where all night the telephone had been sounding every few minutes? As he got out of bed, Dewey promised his wife, “This time I’ll leave it off the hook.” But it was not a promise he dared keep. True, many of the calls came from news-hunting journalists, or would-be humorists, or theorists (“Al? Listen, fella, I’ve got this deal figured. It’s suicide and murder. I happen to know Herb was in a bad way financially. He was spread pretty thin. So what does he do? He takes out this big insurance policy, shoots Bonnie and the kids, and kills himself with a bomb. A hand grenade stuffed with buckshot”), or anonymous persons with poison-pen minds (“Know them Ls? Foreigners? Don’t work? Give parties? Serve cocktails? Where’s the money come from? Wouldn’t surprise me a darn if they ain’t at the roots of this Clutter trouble”), or nervous ladies alarmed by the gossip going around, rumors that knew neither ceiling nor cellar (“Alvin, now, I’ve known you since you were a boy. And I want you to tell me straight out whether it’s so. I loved and respected Mr. Clutter, and I refuse to believe that that man, that Christian—I refuse to believe he was chasing after women. . .”).

  But most of those who telephoned were responsible citizens wanting to be helpful (“I wonder if you’ve interviewed Nancy’s friend, Sue Kidwell? I was talking to the child, and she said something that struck me. She said the last time she ever spoke to Nancy, Nancy told her Mr. Clutter was in a real bad mood. Had been the past three weeks. That she thought he was very worried about something, so worried he’d taken to smoking cigarettes . . .”). Either that or the callers were people officially concerned—law officers and sheriffs from other parts of the state (“This may be something, may not, but a bartender here says he overheard two fellows discussing the case in terms made it sound like they had a lot to do with it . . .”). And while none of these conversations had as yet done more than make extra work for the investigators, it was always possible that the next one might be, as Dewey put it, “the break that brings down the curtain.”

  On answering the present call, Dewey immediately heard “I want to confess.”

  He said, “To whom am I speaking, please?”

  The caller, a man, repeated his original assertion, and added, “I did it. I killed them all.”

  “Yes,” said Dewey. “Now, if I could have your name and address . . .”

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” said the man, his voice thick with inebriated indignation. “I’m not going to tell you anything. Not till I get the reward. You send the reward, then I’ll tell you who I am. That’s final.”

  Dewey went back to bed. “No, honey,” he said. “Nothing important. Just another drunk.”

  “What did he want?”

  “Wanted to confess. Provided we sent the reward first.” (A Kansas paper, the Hutchinson News, had offered a thousand dollars for information leading to the solution of the crime.)

  “Alvin, are you lighting another cigarette? Honestly, Alvin, can’t you at least try to sleep?”

  He was too tense to sleep, even if the telephone could be silenced—too fretful and frustrated. None of his “leads” had led anywhere, except, perhaps, down a blind alley toward the blankest of walls. Bobby Rupp? The polygraph machine had eliminated Bobby. And Mr. Smith, the farmer who tied rope knots identical with those used by the murderer—he, too, was a discarded suspect, having established that on the night of the crime he’d been “off in Oklahoma.” Which left the Johns, father and son, but they had also submitted provable alibis. “So,” to quote Harold Nye, “it all adds up to a nice round number. Zero.” Even the hunt for the grave of Nancy’s cat had come to nothing.

  Nevertheless, there had been one or two meaningful developments. First, while sorting Nancy’s clothes, Mrs. Elaine Selsor, her aunt, had found tucked in the toe of a shoe a gold wristwatch. Second, accompanied by a K.B.I. agent, Mrs. Helm had explored every room at River Valley Farm, toured the house in the expectation that she might notice something awry or absent, and she had. It happened in Kenyon’s room. Mrs. Helm looked and looked, paced round and round the room with pursed lips, touching this and that—Kenyon’s old baseball mitt, Kenyon’s mud-spattered work boots, his pathetic abandoned spectacles. All the while she kept whispering, “Something here is wrong, I feel it, I know it, but I don’t know what it is.” And then she did know. “It’s the radio! Where is Kenyon’s little radio?”

  Taken together, these discoveries forced Dewey to consider again the possibility of “plain robbery” as a motive. Surely that watch had not tumbled into Nanc
y’s shoe by accident? She must, lying there in the dark, have heard sounds—footfalls, perhaps voices—that led her to suppose thieves were in the house, and so believing must have hurriedly hidden the watch, a gift from her father that she treasured. As for the radio, a gray portable made by Zenith—no doubt about it, the radio was gone. All. the same, Dewey could not accept the theory that the family had been slaughtered for paltry profit—“a few dollars and a radio.” To accept it would obliterate his image of the killer—or, rather, killers. He and his associates had definitely decided to pluralize the term. The expert execution of the crimes was proof enough that at least one of the pair commanded an immoderate amount of coolheaded slyness, and was—must be—a person too clever to have done such a deed without calculated motive. Then, too, Dewey had become aware of several particulars that reinforced his conviction that at least one of the murderers was emotionally involved with the victims, and felt for them, even as he destroyed them, a certain twisted tenderness. How else explain the mattress box?

  The business of the mattress box was one of the things that most tantalized Dewey. Why had the murderers taken the trouble to move the box from the far end of the basement room and lay it on the floor in front of the furnace, unless the intention had been to make Mr. Clutter more comfortable—to provide him, while he contemplated the approaching knife, with a couch less rigid than cold cement? And in studying the death-scene photographs Dewey had distinguished other details that seemed to support his notion of a murderer now and again moved by considerate impulses. “Or”—he could never quite find the word he wanted—“something fussy. And soft. Those bedcovers. Now, what kind of person would do that—tie up two women, the way Bonnie and the girl were tied, and then draw up the bedcovers, tuck them in, like sweet dreams and good night? Or the pillow under Kenyon’s head. At first I thought maybe the pillow was put there to make his head a simpler target. Now I think, No, it was done for the same reason the mattress box was spread on the floor—to make the victim more comfortable.”

  But speculations such as these, though they absorbed Dewey, did not gratify him or give him a sense of “getting somewhere.” A case was seldom solved by “fancy theories”; he put his faith in facts—“sweated for and sworn to.” The quantity of facts to be sought and sifted, and the agenda planned to obtain them, promised perspiration aplenty, entailing, as it did, the tracking down, the “checking out,” of hundreds of people, among them all former River Valley Farm employees, friends and family, anyone with whom Mr. Clutter had done business, much or little—a tortoise crawl into the past. For, as Dewey had told his team, “we have to keep going till we know the Clutters better than they ever knew themselves. Until we see the connection between what we found last Sunday morning and something that happened maybe five years ago. The link. Got to be one. Got to.”

  Dewey’s wife dozed, but she awakened when she felt him leave their bed, heard him once more answering the telephone, and heard, from the nearby room where her sons slept, sobs, a small boy crying. “Paul?” Ordinarily, Paul was neither troubled nor troublesome—not a whiner, ever. He was too busy digging tunnels in the backyard or practicing to be “the fastest runner in Finney County.” But at breakfast that morning he’d burst into tears. His mother had not needed to ask him why; she knew that although he understood only hazily the reasons for the uproar round him, he felt endangered by it—by the harassing telephone, and the strangers at the door, and his father’s worry-wearied eyes. She went to comfort Paul. His brother, three years older, helped. “Paul,” he said, “you take it easy now, and tomorrow I’ll teach you to play poker.”

  Dewey was in the kitchen; Marie, searching for him, found him there, waiting for a pot of coffee to percolate and with the murder-scene photographs spread before him on the kitchen table—bleak stains, spoiling the table’s pretty fruit-patterned oilcloth. (Once he had offered to let her look at the pictures. She had declined. She had said, “I want to remember Bonnie the way Bonnie was—and all of them.”) He said, “Maybe the boys ought to stay with Mother.” His mother, a widow, lived not far off, in a house she thought too spacious and silent; the grandchildren were always welcome. “For just a few days. Until—well, until.”

  “Alvin, do you think we’ll ever get back to normal living?” Mrs. Dewey asked.

  Their normal life was like this: both worked, Mrs. Dewey as an office secretary, and they divided between them the household chores, taking turns at the stove and the sink. (“When Alvin was sheriff, I know some of the boys teased him. Used to say, ‘Lookayonder! Here comes Sheriff Dewey! Tough guy! Totes a six-shooter! But once he gets home, off comes the gun and on goes the apron!”) At that time they were saving to build a house on a farm that Dewey had bought in 1951—two hundred and forty acres several miles north of Garden City. If the weather was fine, and especially when the days were hot and the wheat was high and ripe, he liked to drive out there and practice his draw—shoot crows, tin cans—or in his imagination roam through the house he hoped to have, and through the garden he meant to plant, and under trees yet to be seeded. He was very certain that some day his own oasis of oaks and elms would stand upon those shadeless plains: “Some day. God willing.”

  A belief in God and the rituals surrounding that belief—church every Sunday, grace before meals, prayers before bed—were an important part of the Deweys’ existence. “I don’t see how anyone can sit down to table without wanting to bless it,” Mrs. Dewey once said. “Sometimes, when I come home from work—well, I’m tired. But there’s always coffee on the stove, and sometimes a steak in the icebox. The boys make a fire to cook the steak, and we talk, and tell each other our day, and by the time supper’s ready I know we have good cause to be happy and grateful. So I say, Thank you, Lord. Not just because I should—because I want to.”

  Now Mrs. Dewey said, “Alvin, answer me. Do you think we’ll ever have a normal life again?”

  He started to reply, but the telephone stopped him.

  The old Chevrolet left Kansas City November 21, Saturday night. Luggage was lashed to the fenders and roped to the roof; the trunk was so stuffed it could not be shut; inside, on the back seat, two television sets stood, one atop the other. It was a tight fit for the passengers: Dick, who was driving, and Perry, who sat clutching the old Gibson guitar, his most beloved possession. As for Perry’s other belongings—a cardboard suitcase, a gray Zenith portable radio, a gallon jug of root-beer syrup (he feared that his favorite beverage might not be available in Mexico), and two big boxes containing books, manuscripts, cherished memorabilia (and hadn’t Dick raised hell! Cursed, kicked the boxes, called them “five hundred pounds of pig slop!”)—these, too, were part of the car’s untidy interior.

  Around midnight they crossed the border into Oklahoma. Perry, glad to be out of Kansas, at last relaxed. Now it was true—they were on their way—On their way, and never coming back—without regret, as far as he was concerned, for he was leaving nothing behind, and no one who might deeply wonder into what thin air he’d spiraled. The same could not be said of Dick. There were those Dick claimed to love: three sons, a mother, a father, a brother—persons he hadn’t dared confide his plans to, or bid goodbye, though he never expected to see them again—not in this life.

  CLUTTER—ENGLISH VOWS GIVEN IN SATURDAY CEREMONY: that headline, appearing on the social page of the Garden City Telegram for November 23, surprised many of its readers. It seemed that Beverly, the second of Mr. Clutter’s surviving daughters, had married Mr. Vere Edward English, the young biology student to whom she had long been engaged. Miss Clutter had worn white, and the wedding, a full-scale affair (“Mrs. Leonard Cowan was soloist, and Mrs. Howard Blanchard organist”), had been “solemnized at the First Methodist Church”—the church in which, three days earlier, the bride had formally mourned her parents, her brother, and her younger sister. However, according to the Telegram’s account, “Vere and Beverly had planned to be married at Christmastime. The invitations were printed and her father had reserved the chu
rch for that date. Due to the unexpected tragedy and because of the many relatives being here from distant places, the young couple decided to have their wedding Saturday.”

  The wedding over, the Clutter kinfolk dispersed. On Monday, the day the last of them left Garden City, the Telegram featured on its front page a letter written by Mr. Howard Fox, of Oregon, Illinois, a brother of Bonnie Clutter. The letter, after expressing gratitude to the townspeople for having opened their “homes and hearts” to the bereaved family, turned into a plea. “There is much resentment in this community [that is, Garden City],” wrote Mr. Fox. “I have even heard on more than one occasion that the man, when found, should be hanged from the nearest tree. Let us not feel this way. The deed is done and taking another life cannot change it. Instead, let us forgive as God would have us do. It is not right that we should hold a grudge in our hearts. The doer of this act is going to find it very difficult indeed to live with himself. His only peace of mind will be when he goes to God for forgiveness. Let us not stand in the way but instead give prayers that he may find his peace.”

  The car was parked on a promontory where Perry and Dick had stopped to picnic. It was noon. Dick scanned the view through a pair of binoculars. Mountains. Hawks wheeling in a white sky. A dusty road winding into and out of a white and dusty village. Today was his second day in Mexico, and so far he liked it fine—even the food. (At this very moment he was eating a cold, oily tortilla.) They had crossed the border at Laredo, Texas, the morning of November 23, and spent the first night in a San Luis Potosí brothel. They were now two hundred miles north of their next destination, Mexico City.

  “Know what I think?” said Perry. “I think there must be something wrong with us. To do what we did.”

  “Did what?”

  “Out there.”