“O.K. The first show was called ‘The Man and the Challenge.’ Channel 11. About some fellows in the Arctic. Then we saw a Western, and after that a spy adventure – ‘Five Fingers.’ ‘Mike Hammer’ came on at nine-thirty. Then the news. But Kenyon didn’t like anything, mostly because we wouldn’t let him pick the programs. He criticized everything and Nancy kept telling him to hush up. They always quibbled, but actually they were very close – closer than most brothers and sisters. I guess partly it was because they’d been alone together so much, what with Mrs. Clutter away and Mr. Clutter gone to Washington, or wherever.
I know Nancy loved Kenyon very specially, but I don’t think even she, or anybody, exactly understood him. He seemed to be off somewhere. You never knew what he was thinking, never even knew if he was looking at you -on account of he was slightly cockeyed. Some people said he was a genius, and maybe it was true. He sure did read a lot. But, like I say, he was restless; he didn’t want to watch the TV, he wanted to practice his horn, and when Nancy wouldn’t let him, I remember Mr. Clutter told him why didn’t he go down to the basement, the recreation room, where nobody could hear him. But he didn’t want to do that, either.
“The phone rang once. Twice? Gosh, I can’t remember. Except that once the phone rang and Mr. Clutter answered it in his office. The door was open – that sliding door between the living room and the office – and I heard him say ‘Van,’ so I knew he was talking to his partner, Mr. Van Vleet, and I heard him say that he had a headache but that it was getting better. And said he’d see Mr. Van Vleet on Monday. When he came back – yes, the Mike Hammer was just over. Five minutes of news. Then the weather report. Mr. Clutter always perked up when the weather report came on. It’s all he ever really waited for. Like the only thing that interested me was the sports – which came on next.
After the sports ended, that was ten-thirty, and I got up to go. Nancy walked me out. We talked a while, and made a date to go to the movies Sunday night – a picture all the girls were looking forward to, Blue Denim. Then she ran back in the house, and I drove away. It was as clear as day – the moon was so bright – and cold and kind of windy; a lot of tumbleweed blowing about. But that’s all I saw. Only now when I think back, I think somebody must have been hiding there. Maybe down among the trees. Somebody just waiting for me to leave.”
The travelers stopped for dinner at a restaurant in Great Bend. Perry, down to his last fifteen dollars, was ready to settle for root beer and a sandwich, but Dick said no, they needed a solid “tuck-in,” and never mind the cost, the tab was his. They ordered two steaks medium rare, baked potatoes, French fries, fried onions, succotash, side dish of macaroni and hominy, salad with Thousand Island dressing, cinnamon rolls, apple pie and ice cream, and coffee. To top it off, they visited a drugstore and selected cigars; in the same drugstore, they also bought two thick rolls of adhesive tape.
As the black Chevrolet regained the highway and hurried on across a country side imperceptibly ascending toward the colder, cracker-dry climate of the high wheat plains, Perry closed his eyes and dozed off into a food-dazed semi-slumber, from which he woke to hear a voice reading the eleven-o’clock news. He rolled down a window and bathed his face in the flood of frosty air. Dick told him they were in Finney County. “We crossed the line ten miles back,” he said. The car was going very fast. Signs, their messages ignited by the car’s headlights, flared up, flew by: “See the Polar Bears,” “Burris Motors,” “World’s Largest FREE Swim pool,” “Wheat Lands Motel,” and, finally, a bit before street lamps began, “Howdy, Stranger! Welcome to Garden City. A Friendly Place.”
They skirted the northern rim of the town. No one was abroad at this nearly midnight hour, and nothing was open except a string of desolately brilliant service stations. Dick turned into one -Kurd’s Phillips 66. A youngster appeared, and asked, “Fill her up?” Dick nodded, and Perry, getting out of the car, went inside the station, where he locked himself in the men’s room. His legs pained him, as they often did; they hurt as though his old accident had happened five minutes before. He shook three aspirins out of a bottle, chewed them slowly (for he liked the taste), and then drank water from the basin tap. He sat down on the toilet, stretched out his legs and rubbed them, massaging the almost unbendable knees. Dick had said they were almost there – “only seven miles more.” He unzippered a pocket of his windbreaker and brought out a paper sack;
inside it were the recently purchased rubber gloves. They were glue-covered, sticky and thin, and as he inched them on, one tore – not a dangerous tear, just a split between the fingers, but it seemed to him an omen.
The doorknob turned, rattled. Dick said, “Want some candy? They got a candy machine out here.”
“No.”
“You O.K.?” “I’m fine.”
“Don’t be all night.”
Dick dropped a dime in a vending machine, pulled the lever, and picked up a bag of jelly beans; munching, he wandered back to the car and lounged there watching the young attendant’s efforts to rid the windshield of Kansas dust and the slime of battered insects. The attendant, whose name was James Spor, felt uneasy. Dick’s eyes and sullen expression and Perry’s strange, prolonged sojourn in the lavatory disturbed him. (The next day he reported to his employer, “We had some tough customers in here last night,” but he did not think, then or for the longest while, to connect the visitors with the tragedy in Holcomb.) Dick said, “Kind of slow around here.”
“Sure is,” James Spor said. “You’re the only body stopped here since two hours. Where you coming from?” “Kansas City.”
“Here to hunt?”
“Just passing through. On our way to Arizona. We got jobs waiting there. Construction work. Any idea the mileage between here and Tucumcari, New Mexico?”
“Can’t say I do. Three dollars six cents.” He accepted Dick’s money, made change, and said, “You’ll excuse me, sir? I’m doing a job. Putting a bumper on a truck.”
Dick waited, ate some jelly beans, impatiently gunned the motor, sounded the horn. Was it possible that he had misjudged Perry’s character? That Perry, of all people, was suffering a sudden case of “blood bubbles”? A year ago, when they first encountered each other, he’d thought Perry “a good guy,” if a bit stuck on himself, “sentimental,” too much “the dreamer.” He had liked him but not considered him especially worth cultivating until, one day, Perry described a murder, telling how, simply for the hell of it,” he had killed a colored man in Las Vegas – beaten him to death with a bicycle chain.
The anecdote elevated Dick’sopinion of Little Perry; he began to see more of him, and, like Willie-Jay, though for dissimilar reasons, gradually decided that Perry possessed unusual and valuable qualities. Several murderers, or men who boasted of murder or their willingness to commit it, circulated inside Lansing; but Dick became convinced that Perry was that rarity, “a natural killer” – absolutely sane, but conscienceless, and capable of dealing, with or without motive, the coldest-blooded deathblows.
It was Dick’s theory that such a gift could, under his supervision, be profitably exploited. Having reached this conclusion, he had proceeded to woo Perry, flatter him – pretend, for example, that he believed all the buried-treasure stuff and shared his beachcomber yearnings and seaport longings, none of which appealed to Dick, who wanted “a regular life,” with a business of his own, a house, a horse to ride, a new car, and “plenty of blond chicken. “It was important, however, that Perry not suspect this – not until Perry, with his gift, had helped further Dick’s ambitions. But perhaps it was Dick who had miscalculated, been duped; if so – if it developed that Perry was, after all, only an “ordinary punk” – then “the party” was over, the months of planning were wasted, there was nothing to do but turn and go. It mustn’t happen; Dick returned to the station.
The door to the men’s room was still bolted. He banged on it: “For Christ sake, Perry!” “In a minute.” .
“What’s the matter? You sick?”
Perry gripped the edge of the wash basin and hauled himself to a standing position. His legs trembled; the pain in his knees made him perspire. He wiped his face with a paper towel. He unlocked the door and said, “O.K. Let’s go.”
Nancy’s bedroom was the smallest, most personal room in the house – girlish, and as frothy as a ballerina’s tutu. Walls, ceiling, and everything else except a bureau and a writing desk, were pink or blue or white. The white-and-pink bed, piled with blue pillows, was dominated by a big pink-and-white Teddy bear – a shooting-gallery prize that Bobby had won at the county fair. A cork
bulletin board, painted pink, hung above
