Dick dropped the binoculars into a leather case, a luxurious receptacle initialed H.W.C. He was annoyed. Annoyed as hell. Why the hell couldn’t Perry shut up? Christ Jesus, what damn good did it do, always dragging the goddam thing up? It really was annoying. Especially since they’d agreed, sort of, not to talk about the goddam thing. Just forget it.
“There’s got to be something wrong with somebody who’d do a thing like that,” Perry said.
“Deal me out, baby,” Dick said. “I’m a normal.” And Dick meant what he said. He thought himself as balanced, as sane as anyone—maybe a bit smarter than the average fellow, that’s all. But Perry—there was, in Dick’s opinion, “something wrong” with Little Perry. To say the least. Last spring, when they had celled together at Kansas State Penitentiary, he’d learned most of Perry’s lesser peculiarities: Perry could be “such a kid,” always wetting his bed and crying in his sleep (“Dad, I been looking everywhere, where you been, Dad?”), and often Dick had seen him “sit for hours just sucking his thumb and poring over them phony damn treasure guides.” Which was one side; there were others. In some ways old Perry was “spooky as hell.” Take, for instance, that temper of his. He could slide into a fury “quicker than ten drunk Indians.” And yet you wouldn’t know it. “He might be ready to kill you, but you’d never know it, not to look at or listen to,” Dick once said. For however extreme the inward rage, outwardly Perry remained a cool young tough, with eyes serene and slightly sleepy. The time had been when Dick had thought he could control, could regulate the temperature of these sudden cold fevers that burned and chilled his friend. He had been mistaken, and in the aftermath of that discovery, had grown very unsure of Perry, not at all certain what to think—except that he felt he ought to be afraid of him, and wondered really why he wasn’t.
“Deep down,” Perry continued, “way, way rock-bottom, I never thought I could do it. A thing like that.”
“How about the nigger?” Dick said. Silence. Dick realized that Perry was staring at him. A week ago, in Kansas City, Perry had bought a pair of dark glasses—fancy ones with silver-lacquered rims and mirrored lenses. Dick disliked them; he’d told Perry he was ashamed to be seen with “anyone who’d wear that kind of flit stuff.” Actually, what irked him was the mirrored lenses; it was unpleasant having Perry’s eyes hidden behind the privacy of those tinted, reflecting surfaces.
“But a nigger,” said Perry. “That’s different.”
The comment, the reluctance with which it was pronounced, made Dick ask, “Or did you? Kill him like you said?” It was a significant question, for his original interest in Perry, his assessment of Perry’s character and potentialities, was founded on the story Perry had once told him of how he had beaten a colored man to death.
“Sure I did. Only—a nigger. It’s not the same.” Then Perry said, “Know what it is that really bugs me? About the other thing? It’s just I don’t believe it—that anyone can get away with a thing like that. Because I don’t see how it’s possible. To do what we did. And just one hundred percent get away with it. I mean, that’s what bugs me—I can’t get it out of my head that something’s got to happen.”
Though as a child he had attended church, Dick had never “come near” a belief in God; nor was he troubled by superstitions. Unlike Perry, he was not convinced that a broken mirror meant seven years’ misfortune, or that a young moon if glimpsed through glass portended evil. But Perry, with his sharp and scratchy intuitions, had hit upon Dick’s one abiding doubt. Dick, too, suffered moments when that question circled inside his head: Was it possible—were the two of them “honest to God going to get away with doing a thing like that”? Suddenly, he said to Perry, “Now, just shut up!” Then he gunned the motor and backed the car off the promontory. Ahead of him, on the dusty road, he saw a dog trotting along in the warm sunshine.
Mountains. Hawks wheeling in a white sky.
When Perry asked Dick, “Know what I think?” he knew he was beginning a conversation that would displease Dick, and one that, for that matter, he himself would just as soon avoid. He agreed with Dick: Why go on talking about it? But he could not always stop himself. Spells of helplessness occurred, moments when he “remembered things”—blue light exploding in a black room, the glass eyes of a big toy bear—and when voices, a particular few words, started nagging his mind: “Oh, no! Oh, please! No! No! No! No! Don’t! Oh, please don’t, please!” And certain sounds returned—a silver dollar rolling across a floor, boot steps on hardwood stairs, and the sounds of breathing, the gasps, the hysterical inhalations of a man with a severed windpipe.
When Perry said, “I think there must be something wrong with us,” he was making an admission he “hated to make.” After all, it was “painful” to imagine that one might be “not just right”—particularly if whatever was wrong was not your own fault but “maybe a thing you were born with.” Look at his family! Look at what had happened there! His mother, an alcoholic, had strangled to death on her own vomit. Of her children, two sons and two daughters, only the younger girl, Barbara, had entered ordinary life, married, begun raising a family. Fern, the other daughter, jumped out of a window of a San Francisco hotel. (Perry had ever since “tried to believe she slipped,” for he’d loved Fern. She was “such a sweet person,” so “artistic,” a “terrific” dancer, and she could sing, too. “If she’d ever had any luck at all, with her looks and all, she could have got somewhere, been somebody.” It was sad to think of her climbing over a window sill and falling fifteen floors.) And there was Jimmy, the older boy—Jimmy, who had one day driven his wife to suicide and killed himself the next.
Then he heard Dick say, “Deal me out, baby. I’m a normal.” Wasn’t that a horse’s laugh? But never mind, let it pass. “Deep down,” Perry continued, “way, way rock-bottom, I never thought I could do it. A thing like that.” And at once he recognized his error: Dick would, of course, answer by asking, “How about the nigger?” When he’d told Dick that story, it was because he’d wanted Dick’s friendship, wanted Dick to “respect” him, think him “hard,” as much “the masculine type” as he had considered Dick to be. And so one day after they had both read and were discussing a Reader’s Digest article entitled “How Good a Character Detective Are You?” (“As you wait in a dentist’s office or a railway station, try studying the give-away signs in people around you. Watch the way they walk, for example. A stiff-legged gait can reveal a rigid, unbending personality; a shambling walk a lack of determination”), Perry had said “I’ve always been an outstanding character detective, otherwise I’d be dead today. Like if I couldn’t judge when to trust somebody. You never can much. But I’ve come to trust you, Dick. You’ll see I do, because I’m going to put myself in your power. I’m going to tell you something I never told anybody. Not even Willie-Jay. About the time I fixed a guy.” And Perry saw, as he went on, that Dick was interested; he was really listening. “It was a couple of summers ago. Out in Vegas. I was living in this old boarding house—it used to be a fancy cathouse. But all the fancy was gone. It was a place they should have torn down ten years back; anyway, it was sort of coming down by itself. The cheapest rooms were in the attic, and I lived up there. So did this nigger. His name was King; he was a transient. We were the only two up there—us and a million cucarachas. King, he wasn’t too young, but he’d done roadwork and other outdoor stuff—he had a good build. He wore glasses, and he read a lot. He never shut his door. Every time I passed by, he was always lying there buck-naked. He was out of work, and said he’d saved a few dollars from his last job, said he wanted to stay in bed awhile, read and fan himself and drink beer. The stuff he read, it was just junk—comic books and cowboy junk. He was O.K. Sometimes we’d have a beer together, and once he lent me ten dollars. I had no cause to hurt him. But one night we were sitting in the attic, it was so hot you couldn’t sleep, so I said, ‘Come on, King, let’s go for a drive.’ I had an old car I’d stripped and souped and painted silver—the Silver Ghost, I called it. We went for
a long drive. Drove way out in the desert. Out there it was cool. We parked and drank a few more beers. King got out of the car, and I followed after him. He didn’t see I’d picked up this chain. A bicycle chain I kept under the seat. Actually, I had no real idea to do it till I did it. I hit him across the face. Broke his glasses. I kept right on. Afterward, I didn’t feel a thing. I left him there, and never heard a word about it. Maybe nobody ever found him. Just buzzards.”
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!”
Thanksgiving 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. Rumormongers. 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. Enormous, criminal 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 different from our other life. The life we’ve always known. Paris and Rome. Monte. London. I do—occasionally—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, actually. 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. Actually, no. Actually, I’ve never known such bedlam. It’s noisier than a bomb raid. Train whistles. Coyotes. Monsters howling 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 hateful prairie wind, one hears the most appalling 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.”