Dewey’s desk was Nancy Clutter’s diary. He had glanced through it, no more than that, and now he settled down to an earnest reading of the day-by-day entries, which began on her thirteenth birthday and ended some two months short of her seventeenth; the unsensational confidings of an intelligent child who adored animals, who liked to read, cook, sew, dance, ride horseback—a popular, pretty, virginal girl who thought it “fun to flirt” but was nevertheless “only really and truly in love with Bobby.” Dewey read the final entry first. It consisted of three lines written an hour or two before she died: “Jolene K. came over and I showed her how to make a cherry pie. Practiced with Roxie. Bobby here and we watched TV. Left at eleven.”
Young Rupp, the last person known to have seen the family alive, had already undergone one extensive interrogation, and although he’d told a straightforward story of having passed “just an ordinary evening” with the Clutters, he was scheduled for a second interview, at which time he was to be given a polygraph test. The plain fact was that the police were not quite ready to dismiss him as a suspect. Dewey himself, did not believe the boy had “anything to do with it”; still, it was true that at this early stage of the investigation, Bobby was the only person to whom a motive, however feeble, could be attributed. Here and there in the diary, Nancy referred to the situation that was supposed to have created the motive: her father’s insistence that she and Bobby “break off,” stop “seeing so much of each other,” his objection being that the Clutters were Methodist, the Rupps Catholic—a circumstance that in his view completely canceled any hope the young couple might have of one day marrying. But the diary notation that most tantalized Dewey was unrelated to the Clutter-Rupp, Methodist-Catholic impasse. Rather, it concerned a cat, the mysterious demise of Nancy’s favorite pet, Boobs, whom, according to an entry dated two weeks prior to her own death, she’d found “lying in the barn,” the victim, or so she suspected (without saying why),of a poisoner: “Poor Boobs. I buried him in a special place.” On reading this, Dewey felt it could be “very important.” If the cat had been poisoned, might not this act have been a small, malicious prelude to the murders? He determined to find the “special place” where Nancy had buried her pet, even though it meant combing the vast whole of River Valley Farm.
While Dewey was occupying himself with the diary, his principal assistants, the Agents Church, Duntz, and Nye, were crisscrossing the countryside, talking, as Duntz said, “to anyone who could tell us anything”: the faculty of the Holcomb School, where both Nancy and Kenyon had been honor-roll, straight-A students; the employees of River Valley Farm (a staff that in spring and summer sometimes amounted to as many as eighteen men but in the present fallow season consisted of Gerald Van Vleet and three hired men, plus Mrs. Helm); friends of the victims; their neighbors; and, very particularly, their relatives. From far and near, some twenty of the last had arrived to attend the funeral services, which were to take place Wednesday morning.
The youngest of the K.B.I. group, Harold Nye, who was a peppy little man of thirty-four with restless, distrustful eyes and a sharp nose, chin, and mind, had been assigned what he called “the damned delicate business” of interviewing the Clutter kinfolk: “It’s painful for you and it’s painful for them. When it comes to murder, you can’t respect grief. Or privacy. Or personal feelings. You’ve got to ask the questions. And some of them cut deep, “But none of the persons he questioned, and none of the questions he asked (“I was exploring the emotional background. I thought the answer might be another woman—a triangle. Well, consider: Mr. Clutter was a fairly young, very healthy man, but his wife, she was a semi-invalid, she slept in a separate bedroom…”), produced useful information; not even the two surviving daughters could suggest a cause for the crime. In brief, Nye learned only this: “Of all the people in all the world, the Clutters were the least likely to be murdered.”
At the end of the day, when the three agents convened in Dewey’s office, it developed that Duntz and Church had had better luck than Nye—Brother Nye, as the others called him. (Members of the K.B.I, are partial to nicknames; Duntz is known as Old Man—unfairly, since he is not quite fifty, a burly but light-footed man with a broad, tomcat face, and Church, who is sixty or so, pink-skinned and professorial looking, but “
Duntz ‘s story concerned a father and son who shall here be known as John Senior and John Junior. Some years earlier John 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
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
