interview.
Nye was right. For Dewey and Duntz, patient professionals, had gradually narrowed the prisoner’s life story to the events of the last seven weeks, then reduced those to a concentrated recapitulation of the crucial week- end—Saturday noon to Sunday noon, November 14 to 15. Now, having spent three hours preparing the way, they were not far from coming to the point.
Dewey said, “Perry, let’s review our position. Now, when you received parole, it was on condition that you never return to Kansas.
“The Sunflower State. I cried my eyes out.”
“Feeling that way, why did you go back? You must have had some very strong reason.”
“I told you. To see my sister. To get the money she was holding for me.”
“Oh, yes. The sister you and Hickock tried to find in Fort Scott. Perry, how far is Fort Scott from Kansas City?”
Smith shook his head. He didn’t know.
“Well, how long did it take you to drive there?”
No response.
“One hour? Two? Three? Four?”
The prisoner said he couldn’t remember.
“Of course you can’t. Because you’ve never in your life been to Fort Scott.”
Until then, neither of the detectives had challenged any part of Smith’s statement. He shifted in his chair; with the tip of his tongue he wet his lips.
“The fact is, nothing you’ve told us is true. You never set foot in Fort Scott. You never picked up any two girls and never took them to any motel—“
“We did. No kidding.”
“What were their names?”
“I never asked.”
“You and Hickock spent the night with these women and never asked their names?”
“They were just prostitutes.”
“Tell us the name of the motel.”
“Ask Dick. He’ll know. I never remember junk like that.”
Dewey addressed his colleague. “Clarence, I think it’s time we straightened Perry out.”
Duntz hunched forward. He is a heavyweight with a welter-weight’s spontaneous agility, but his eyes are hooded and lazy. He drawls; each word, formed reluctantly and framed in a cattle-country accent, lasts awhile. “Yes, sir,” he said. “ ‘Bout time.”
“Listen good, Perry. Because Mr. Duntz is going to tell you where you really were that Saturday night. Where you were and what you were doing.”
Duntz said, “You were killing the Clutter family.”
Smith swallowed. He began to rub his knees.
“You were out in Holcomb, Kansas. In the home of Mr. Herbert W. Clutter. And before you left that house you killed all the people in it.”
“Never. I never.”
“Never what?”
“Knew anybody by that name. Clutter.”
Dewey called him a liar, and then, conjuring a card that in prior consultation the four detectives had agreed to play face down, told him, “We have a living witness, Perry. Somebody you boys overlooked.”
A full minute elapsed, and Dewey exulted in Smith’s silence, for an innocent man would ask who was this witness, and who were these Clutters, and why did they think he’d murdered them—would, at any rate, say something. But Smith sat quiet, squeezing his knees.
“Well, Perry?”
“You got an aspirin? They took away my aspirin.” .
“Feeling bad?”
“My legs do.”
It was five-thirty. Dewey, intentionally abrupt, terminated the interview. “We’ll take this up again tomorrow,” he said. “By the way, do you know what tomorrow is? Nancy Clutter’s birthday. She would have been seventeen.”
“She would have been seventeen.” Perry, sleepless in the dawn hours, wondered (he later recalled) if it was true that today was the girl’s birthday, and decided no, that it was just another way of getting under his skin, like that phony business about a witness—“a living witness.” There couldn’t be. Or did they mean– If only he could talk to Dick! But he and Dick were being kept apart; Dick was locked in a cell on another floor. “Listen good, Perry. Because Mr. Duntz is going to tell you where you really were…” Midway in the questioning, after he’d begun to notice the number of allusions to a particular November weekend, he’d nerved himself for what he knew was coming, yet when it did, when the big cowboy with the sleepy voice said, “You were killing the Clutter family”—well, he’d damn near died, that’s all. He must have lost ten pounds in two seconds. Thank God he hadn’t let them see it. Or hoped he hadn’t. And Dick? Presumably they’d pulled the same stunt on him. Dick was smart, a convincing performer, but his “guts” were unreliable, he panicked too easily. Even so, and however much they pressured him, Perry was sure Dick would hold out. Unless he wanted to hang. “And before you left that house you killed all the people in it.” It wouldn’t amaze him if every Old Grad in Kansas had heard that line. They must have questioned hundreds of men, and no doubt accused dozens; he and Dick were merely two more. On the other hand—well, would Kansas send four Special Agents a thousand miles to pick up a small-time pair of parole violators? Maybe somehow they had stumbled on something, somebody—“a living witness.” But that was impossible. Except– He’d give an arm, a leg to talk to Dick for just five minutes.
And Dick, awake in a cell on the floor below, was (he later recalled) equally eager to converse with Perry— find out what the punk had told them. Christ, you couldn’t trust him to remember even the outline of the Fun Haven alibi—though they had discussed it often enough. And when those bastards threatened him with a witness! Ten to one the little spook had thought they meant an eyewitness. Whereas he, Dick, had known at once who the so-called witness must be: Floyd Wells, his old friend and former cellmate. While serving the last weeks of his sentence, Dick had plotted to knife Floyd—stab him through the heart with a handmade “shiv”—and what a fool he was not to have done it. Except for Perry, Floyd Wells was the one human being who could link the names Hickock and Clutter. Floyd, with his sloping shoulders and inclining chin—Dick had thought he’d be too afraid. The sonofabitch was probably expecting some fancy reward—a parole or money, or both. But hell would freeze before he got it. Because a convict’s tattle wasn’t proof. Proof is foot-prints, fingerprints, witnesses, a confession. Hell, if all those cowboys had to go on was some story Floyd Wells had told, then there wasn’t a lot to worry about. Come right down to it, Floyd wasn’t half as dangerous as Perry. Perry, if he lost his nerve and let fly, could put them both in The Corner. And suddenly he saw the truth: It was Perry he ought to have silenced. On a mountain road in Mexico. Or while walking across the Mojave. Why had it never occurred to him until now? For now, now was much too late.
Ultimately, at five minutes past three that afternoon, Smith admitted the falsity of the Fort Scott tale. “ That was only something Dick told his family. So he could stay out overnight. Do some drinking. See, Dick’s dad watched him pretty close—afraid he’d break parole. So we made up an excuse about my sister. It was just to pacify Mr. Hickock.” Otherwise, he repeated the same story again and again, and Duntz and Dewey, regardless of how often they corrected him and accused him of lying, could not make him change it—except to add fresh details. The names of the prostitutes, he recalled today, were Mildred and Jane (or Joan). “They rolled us,” he now remembered. “Walked off with all our dough while we were asleep.” And though even Duntz had forfeited his composure—had shed, along with tie and coat, his enigmatic drowsy dignity—the suspect seemed content and serene; he refused to budge. He’d never heard of the Clutters or Holcomb, or even Garden City.
Across the hall, in the smoke-choked room where Hickock was undergoing his second interrogation, Church and Nye were methodically applying a more roundabout strategy. Not once during this interview, now almost three hours old, had either of them mentioned murder—an omission that kept the prisoner edgy, expectant. They talked
