In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences

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 if 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 cafe” 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 Cracker Jack. “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.”

The 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 holiday maker 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 over muscled chest, arms, and small and calloused but girlish hands. The sketch-book, which Otto gave Perry as a parting gift, contained several drawings of Dick—“nude studies.”

Otto shut his sketchbook, Perry put down his guitar, and the Cowboy raised anchor, started the engine. It was time to go. They were ten miles out, and the water was darkening.

Perry urged Dick to fish. “We may never have another chance,” he said.

“Chance?”

“To catch a big one.”

“Jesus, I’ve got the bastard kind,” Dick said. “I’m sick.” Dick often had headaches of migraine intensity —“the bastard kind. “He thought they were the result of his automobile accident. “Please, baby. Let’s be very, very quiet.”

Moments later Dick had forgotten his pain. He was on his feet, shouting with excitement. Otto and the Cowboy were shouting, too. Perry had hooked “a big one.” Ten feet of soaring, plunging sailfish, it leaped, arched like a rainbow, dived, sank deep, tugged the line taut, rose, flew, fell, rose. An hour passed, and part of another, before the sweat-soaked sportsman reeled it in.

There is an old man with an ancient wooden box camera who hangs around the harbor in Acapulco, and when the Estrellita docked, Otto commissioned him to do six portraits of Perry posed beside his catch. Technically,