miles of where we now stand.»
Approximately four hundred miles east of where Arthur Clutter then stood, two young men were
sharing a booth in the Eagle Buffet, a Kansas City diner. One — narrow-faced, and with a blue cat
tattooed on his right hand — had polished off several chicken-salad sandwiches and was now
eying his companion’s meal: an untouched hamburger and a glass of root beer in which three
aspirin were dissolving.
«Perry, baby,» Dick said, «you don’t want that burger. I’ll take it.»
Perry shoved the plate across the table. «Christ! Can’t you let me concentrate?»
«You don’t have to read it fifty times.»
The reference was to a front-page article in the November 17 edition of the Kansas City Star.
Headlined Clues are few in slaying of 4, the article, which was a follow-up of the previous day’s
initial announcement of the murders, ended with a summarizing paragraph:
The investigators are left faced with a search for a killer or killers whose cunning is
apparent if his (or their) motive is not. For this killer or killers: ‘Carefully cut the telephone cords of the home’s two telephones. Bound and gagged their victims expertly, with no
evidence of a struggle with any of them. Left nothing in the house amiss, left no indication
they had searched for anything with the possible exception of [Clutter’s] billfold. ‘Shot four
persons in different parts of the house, calmly picking up the expended shotgun shells.
Arrived and left the home, presumably with the murder weapon, without being seen.
Acted without a motive, if you care to discount an abortive robbery attempt, which the
investigators are wont to do.
» ‘For this killer or killers,'» said Perry, reading aloud. «That’s incorrect. The grammar is. It ought to
be ‘For this killer or these killers.'» Sipping his aspirin-spiked root beer, he went on, «Anyway, I
don’t believe it. Neither do you. Own up, Dick. Be honest. You don’t believe this no clue stuff?
Yesterday, after studying the papers, Perry had put the same question, and Dick, who thought
he’d disposed of it («Look. If those cowboys could make the slightest connection, we’d have heard
the sound of hoofs a hundred miles off»), was bored at hearing it again. Too bored to protest
when Perry once more pursued the matter: «I’ve always played my hunches. That’s why I’m alive
today. You know Willie-Jay? He said I was a natural-born ‘medium,’ and he knew about things
like that, he was interested. He said I had a high degree of ‘extrasensory perception.’ Sort of like
having built-in radar — you see things before you see them. The outlines of coming events. Take,
like, my brother and his wife. Jimmy and his wife. They were crazy about each other, but he was
jealous as hell, and he made her so miserable, being jealous and always thinking she was
passing it out behind his back, that she shot herself, and the next day Jimmy put a bullet through
his head. When it happened — this was 1949, and I was in Alaska with Dad up around Circle City I told Dad, ‘Jimmy’s dead.’ A week later we got the news. Lord’s truth. Another time, over in
Japan, I was helping load a ship, and I sat down to rest a minute. Suddenly a voice inside me
said, ‘Jump!’ I jumped I guess maybe ten feet, and just then, right where I’d been sitting, a ton of
stuff came crashing down. I could give you a hundred examples. I don’t care if you believe me or
not. For instance, right before I had my motorcycle accident I saw the whole thing happen: saw it
in my mind — the rain, the skid tracks, me lying there bleeding and my legs broken. That’s what
I’ve got now. A premonition. Something tells me this is a trap.» He tapped the newspaper. «A lot of
prevarications.»
Dick ordered another hamburger. During the past few days he’d known a hunger that nothing three successive steaks, a dozen Hershey bars, a pound of gumdrops — seemed to interrupt.
Perry, on the other hand, was without appetite; he subsisted on root beer, aspirin, and cigarettes.
«No wonder you got leaps,» Dick told him. «Aw, come on, baby. Get the bubbles out of your blood.
We scored. It was perfect.»
«I’m surprised to hear that, all things considered,» Perry said. The quietness of his tone italicized
the malice of his reply. But Dick took it, even smiled — and his smile was a skillful proposition.
Here, it said, wearing a kid grin, was a very personable character, clean-cut, affable, a fellow any
man might trust to shave him. «O.K.,» Dick said. «Maybe I had some wrong information.»
«Hallelujah.»
«But on the whole it was perfect. We hit the ball right out of park. It’s lost. And it’s gonna stay lost.
There isn’t a single connection.»
«I can think of one.»
Perry had gone too far. He went further: «Floyd — is that the name?» A bit below the belt, but then
Dick deserved it, his confidence was like a kite that needed reeling in. Nevertheless, Perry
observed with some misgiving the symptoms of fury rearranging Dick’s expression: jaw, lips, the
whole face slackened; saliva bubbles appeared at the corners of his mouth. Well, if it came to it
Perry could defend himself. He was short, several inches shorter than Dick, and his runty,
damaged legs were unreliable, but he outweighed his friend, was thicker, had arms that could
squeeze the breath out of a bear. To prove it, however — have a fight, a real falling-out — was far
from desirable. Like Dick or not (and he didn’t dislike Dick, though once he’d liked him better,
respected him more), it was obvious they could not now safely separate. On that point they were
in accord, for Dick had said, «If we get caught, let’s get caught together. Then we can back each
other up. When they start pulling the confession crap, saying you said and I said.» Moreover, if he
broke with Dick, it meant the end of plans still attractive to Perry, and still, despite recent
reverses, deemed possible by both — a skin-diving, treasure-hunting life lived together among
islands or along coasts south of the border. Dick said, «Mr. Wells!» He picked up a fork. «It’d be worth it. Like if I was nabbed on a check
charge, it’d be worth it. Just to get back in there.» The fork came down and stabbed the table.
«Right through the heart, honey.»
«I’m not saying he would,» said Perry, willing to make a concession now that Dick’s anger had
soared past him and struck elsewhere. «He’d be too scared.»
«Sure,» said Dick. «Sure. He’d be too scared.» A marvel, really, the ease with which Dick
negotiated changes of mood; in a trice, all trace of meanness, of sullen bravura, had evaporated.
He said, «About that premonition stuff. Tell me this: If you were so damn sure you were gonna
crack up, why didn’t you call it quits? It wouldn’t have happened if you’d stayed off your bike right?»
That was a riddle that Perry had pondered. He felt he’d solved it, but the solution, while simple,
was also somewhat hazy: «No. Because once a thing is set to happen, all you can do is hope it
won’t. Or will — depending. As long as you live, there’s always something waiting, and even if it’s
bad, and you know it’s bad, what can you do? You can’t stop living. Like my dream. Since I was a
kid, I’ve had this same dream. Where I’m in Africa. A jungle. I’m moving through the trees toward
a tree standing all alone. Jesus, it smells bad, that tree; it kind of makes me sick, the way it stinks.
Only, it’s beautiful to look at — it has blue leaves and diamonds hanging everywhere. Diamonds
like oranges. That’s why I’m there — to pick myself a bushel of diamonds. But I know the minute I
try to, the minute I reach up, a snake is gonna fall on me. A snake that guards the tree. This fat
son of a bitch living in the branches. I know this before hand, see? And Jesus, I don’t know how
to fight a snake. But I figure, Well, I’ll take my chances. What it comes down to is I want the
diamonds more than I’m afraid of the snake. So I go to pick one, I have the diamond in my hand,
I’m pulling at it, when the snake lands on top of me. We wrestle around, but he’s a slippery
sonofabitch and I can’t get a hold, he’s crushing me, you can hear my legs cracking. Now comes
the part it makes me sweat even to think about. See, he starts to swallow me. Feet first. Like
going down in quicksand. «Perry hesitated. He could not help noticing that Dick, busy gouging
under his fingernails with a fork prong, was uninterested in his dream. Dick said, «So? The snake
swallows you? Or what?»
«Never mind. It’s not important.» (But it was! The finale was of great importance, a source of
private joy. He’d once told it to his friend Willie-Jay; he had described to him the towering bird, the
yellow «sort of parrot.» Of course, Willie-Jay was different — -delicate-minded, «a saint.» He’d
understood. But Dick? Dick might laugh. And that Perry could not abide: anyone’s ridiculing the
parrot, which had first flown into his dreams when he was seven years old, a hated, hating halfbreed child living in a California orphanage run by nuns — shrouded disciplinarians who whipped
him for wetting his bed. It was after one of these beatings, one he could never forget («She woke
me up. She had a flashlight, and she hit me with it. Hit me and hit me. And when the flashlight
broke, she went on hitting me in the dark»),that the parrot appeared, arrived while he slept, a bird
«taller than Jesus, yellow like a sunflower,» a warrior-angel who blinded nuns with its beak, fed
upon their eyes, slaughtered them as they «pleaded for mercy,»