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

No other friend of Nancy’s would have presumed to make such suggestion. Susan, however, was privileged. When she had first appeared in Holcomb, a melancholy, imaginative child, willowy, wan and sensitive, then eight, a year younger than Nancy, the Clutters had so ardently adopted her that the fatherless little girl California soon came to seem a member of the family. For years the two friends had been inseparable, each, by virtue the rarity of similar and equal sensibilities, irreplaceable to the other. But then, this past September, Susan had transferred from local school to the vaster, supposedly superior one in Garden City. It was the usual procedure for Holcomb students who intended going on to college, but Mr. Clutter, a die-hard community booster, considered such defections an affront to community spirit; the Holcomb School was good enough for his children, and there they would remain. Thus, the girls were no longer always together, and Nancy deeply felt the daytime absence of her friend, the one person with whom she need be neither brave nor reticent.

“Well. But we’re all so happy about Mother—you heard the wonderful news.” Then Nancy said, “Listen,” and hesitated, as if summoning nerve to make an outrageous remark. “Why do I smelling smoke? Honestly, I think I’m losing my mind. I get into the car, I walk into a room, and it’s as though somebody had just been there, smoking a cigarette. It isn’t Mother, it can’t be Kenyon. Kenyon wouldn’t dare…”Nor, very likely, would any visitor to the Clutter home, which was pointedly devoid of ashtrays. Slowly, Susan grasped the implication, but it was ludicrous. Regardless of what his private anxieties might be, she could not believe that Mr. Clutter was finding secret solace in tobacco. Before she could ask if this was really what Nancy meant, Nancy cut her off: “Sorry, Susie. I’ve got to go. Mrs. Katz is here.”

Dick was driving a black 1949 Chevrolet sedan. As Perry got in, he checked the back seat to see if his guitar was safely there; the previous night, after playing for a party of Dick’s friends, he had forgotten and left it in the car. It was an old Gibson guitar, sandpapered and waxed to a honey-yellow finish. Another sort of instrument lay beside it—a twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun, brand-new, blue-barreled, and with a sportsman’s scene of pheasants in flight etched along the stock. A flashlight, a fishing knife, a pair of leather gloves, and a hunting vest fully packed with shells contributed further atmosphere to this curious still life.

“You wearing that?” Perry asked, indicating the vest.

Dick rapped his knuckles against the windshield. “Knock, knock. Excuse me, sir. We’ve been out hunting and lost our way. If we could use the phone …”

“Si, senor. Yo comprendo.”

“A cinch,” said Dick. “I promise you, honey, we’ll blast hair all over them walls.”

“ ‘Those’ walls,” said Perry. A dictionary buff, a devotee of obscure words, he had been intent on improving his companion’s grammar and expanding his vocabulary ever since they had celled together at Kansas State Penitentiary. Far from resenting these lessons, the pupil, to please his tutor, once composed a sheaf of poems, and though the verses were very obscene, Perry, who thought them nevertheless hilarious, had had the manuscript leather-bound in a prison shop and its title, Dirty Jokes, stamped in gold.

Dick was wearing a blue jumper suit; lettering stitched across the back of it advertised Bob Sands’ Body Shop. He and Perry drove along the main street of Olathe until they arrived at the Bob Sands establishment, an auto-repair garage, where Dick had been employed since his release from the penitentiary in mid-August. A capable mechanic, he earned sixty dollars a week. He deserved no salary for the work he planned to do this morning, but Mr. Sands, who left him in charge on Saturdays, would never know he had paid his hireling to overhaul his own car. With Perry assisting him, he went to work. They changed the oil, adjusted the clutch, recharged the battery, replaced a throw-outbearing, and put new tires on the rear wheels—all necessary undertakings, for between today and tomorrow the aged Chevrolet was expected to perform punishing feats.

“Because the old man was around,” said Dick, answering Perry, who wanted to know why he had been late in meeting him at the Little Jewel. “I didn’t want him to see me taking the gun out of the house. Christ, then he would have knowed I wasn’t telling the truth.”

“ ‘Known.’ But what did you say? Finally?”

“Like we said. I said we’d be gone overnight—said we was going to visit your sister in Fort Scott. On account of she was holding money for you. Fifteen hundred dollars.” Perry had a sister, and had once had two, but the surviving one did not live in Fort Scott, a Kansas town eighty-five miles from Olathe; in fact, he was uncertain of her present address.

“And was he sore?”

“Why should he be sore?”

“Because he hates me,” said Perry, whose voice was both gentle and prim—a voice that, though soft, manufactured each word exactly, ejected it like a smoke ring issuing from a parson’s mouth. “So does your mother. I could see—the ineffable way they looked at me. “Dick shrugged. “Nothing to do with you. As such. It’s just they don’t like me seeing anybody from The Walls.” Twice married, twice divorced, now twenty-eight and the father of three boys, Dick had received his parole on the condition that he reside with his parents; the family, which included a younger brother, lived on a small farm near Olathe. “Anybody wearing the fraternity pin,” he added, and touched a blue dot tattooed under his left eye—an insigne, a visible password, by which certain former prison inmates could identify him.

“I understand,” said Perry. “I sympathize with that. They’re good people. She’s a real sweet person, your mother.”

Dick nodded; he thought so, too.

At noon they put down their tools, and Dick, racing the engine, listening to the consistent hum, was satisfied that a thorough job had been done.

Nancy and her protegee, Jolene Katz, were also satisfied with their morning’s work; indeed, the latter, a thin thirteen-year-old, was agog with pride. For the longest while she stared at the blue-ribbon winner, the oven-hot cherries simmering under the crisp lattice crust, and then she was overcome, and hugging Nancy, asked, “Honest, did I really make it myself?” Nancy laughed, returned the embrace, and assured her that she had—with a little help.

Jolene urged that they sample the pie at once—no nonsense about leaving it to cool. “Please, let’s both have a piece. And you, too,” she said to Mrs. Clutter, who had come into the kitchen. Mrs. Clutter smiled— attempted to; her head ached—and said thank you, but she hadn’t the appetite. As for Nancy, she hadn’t the time; Roxie Lee Smith, and Roxie Lee’s trumpet solo, awaited her, and afterward those errands for her mother, one of which concerned a bridal shower that some Garden City girls were organizing for Beverly, and another the Thanksgiving gala.

“You go, dear, I’ll keep Jolene company until her mother comes for her,” Mrs. Clutter said, and then, addressing the child with unconquerable timidity, added, “If Jolene doesn’t mind keeping me company.” As a girl she had won an elocution prize; maturity, it seemed, had reduced her voice to a single tone, that of topology, and her personality to a series of gestures blurred by the fear that she might give offense, in some way displease. “I hope you understand,” she continued after her daughter’s departure. “I hope you won’t think Nancy rude?”

“Goodness, no. I just love her to death. Well, everybody does. There isn’t anybody like Nancy. Do you know what Mrs. Stringer says?” said Jolene, naming her home-economics teacher.

“One day she told the class, ‘Nancy Clutter is always in a hurry, yet she always has time. And that’s one definition of a lady.’ “ “Yes,” replied Mrs. Clutter. “All my children are very efficient. They don’t need me.” Jolene had never before been alone with Nancy’s “strange” mother, but despite discussions she had heard, she felt much at ease, for Mrs. Clutter, though unrelaxed herself, had a relaxing quality, as is generally true of defenseless persons who present no threat; even in Jolene, a very childlike child, Mrs. Clutter’s heart-shaped, missionary’s face, her look of helpless, homespun ethereality aroused protective compassion. But to think that she was Nancy’s mother! An aunt—that seemed possible; a visiting spinster aunt, slightly odd, but nice.

“No, they don’t need me,” she repeated, pouring herself a cup of coffee. Though all the other members of the family observed her husband’s boycott of this beverage, she drank two cups every morning and often as not ate nothing else the rest of the day. She weighed ninety-eight pounds; rings—a wedding band and one set with a diamond modest to the point of meekness—wobbled on one of her bony hands.

Jolene cut a piece of pie. “Boy!” she said, wolfing it down. “I’m going to make one of these every day seven