Helping him kind of shop around for the clothes he’ll want. Ha-ha, what you might say his – ha-ha – trousseau.” The salesman “ate it up,” and soon Perry, stripped of his denim trousers, was trying on a gloomy suit that the clerk considered “ideal for an informal ceremony.” After commenting on the customer’s oddly proportioned figure – the oversized torso supported by the undersized legs – he added, “I’m afraid we haven’t anything that would fit without alteration.” Oh, said Dick, that was O.K., there was plenty of time – the wedding was “a week tomorrow.” That settled, they then selected a gaudy array of jackets and slacks regarded as appropriate for what was to be, according to Dick, a Florida honeymoon. “You know the Eden Roc?” Dick said to the salesman. “In Miami Beach? They got reservations.
A present from her folks – two weeks at forty bucks a day. How about that? An ugly runt like him, he’s making it with a honey she’s not only built but loaded. While guys like you and me, good-lookin’ guys . . .” The clerk presented the bill. Dick reached in his hip pocket, frowned, snapped his fingers, and said, “Hot damn! I forgot my wallet.” Which to his partner seemed a ploy so feeble that it couldn’t possibly “fool a day-old nigger.” The clerk, apparently, was not of that opinion, for he produced a blank check, and when Dick made it out for eighty dollars more than the bill totaled, instantly paid over the difference in cash.
Outside, Dick said, “So you’re going to get married next week? Well, you’ll need a ring.” Moments later, riding in Dick’s aged Chevrolet, they arrived at a store named Best Jewelry. From there, after purchasing by check a diamond engagement ring and diamond wedding band, they drove to a pawnshop to dispose of these items. Perry was sorry to see them go. He’d begun to half credit the make-believe bride, though in his conception of her, as opposed to Dick’s, she was not rich, not beautiful; rather, she was nicely groomed, gently spoken, was conceivably “a college graduate,” in any event “a very intellectual type” – a sort of girl he’d always wanted to meet but in fact never had.
Unless you counted Cookie, the nurse he’d known when he was hospitalized as a result of his motorcycle accident. A swell kid, Cookie, and she had liked him, pitied him, babied him, inspired him to read “serious literature” – Gone with the Wind, This Is My Beloved. Sexual episodes of a strange and stealthy nature had occurred, and love had been mentioned, and marriage, too, but eventually, when his injuries had mended, he’d told her goodbye and given her, by way of explanation, a poem he pretended to have written:
There’s a race of men that don’t fit in, A race that can’t stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin; And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and they rove the flood, And they climb the mountain’s crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood, And they don’t know how to rest.
If they just went straight they might go far; They are strong and brave and true;
But they’re always tired of the things that are, And they want the strange and new.
He had not seen her again, or ever heard from or of her, yet several years later he’d had her name tattooed on his arm, and once, when Dick asked who “Cookie” was, he’d said, “Nobody. A girl I almost married.” (That Dick had been married – married twice – and had fathered three sons was something he envied. A wife, children – those were experiences “a man ought to have,” even if, as with Dick, they didn’t “make him happy or do him any good.”)
The rings were pawned for a hundred and fifty dollars. They visited another jewelry store, Goldman’s, and sauntered out of there with a man’s gold wristwatch. Next stop, an Elko Camera Store, where they “bought” an elaborate motion-picture camera.” Cameras are your best investment,” Dick informed Perry. “Easiest thing to hock or sell. Cameras and TV sets.” This being the case, they decided to obtain several of the latter, and, having completed the mission, went on to attack a few more clothing emporiums – Sheperd & Foster’s, Rothschild’s, Shopper’s Paradise.
By sundown, when the stores were closing, their pockets were filled with cash and the car was heaped with salable, pawnable wares. Surveying this harvest of shirts and cigarette lighters, expensive machinery and cheap cuff links, Perry felt elatedly tall – now Mexico, a new chance, a “really living” life. But Dick seemed depressed. He shrugged off Perry’s praises (“I mean it, Dick. You were amazing. Half the time I believed you myself”). And Perry was puzzled; he could not fathom why Dick, usually so full of himself, should suddenly, when he had good cause to gloat, be meek, look wilted and sad. Perry said, “I’ll stand you a drink.”
They stopped at a bar. Dick drank three Orange Blossoms. After the third, he abruptly asked, “What about Dad? I feel – oh, Jesus, he’s such a good old guy. And my mother – well, you saw her. What about them? Me, I’ll be off in Mexico. Or wherever. But they’ll be right here when those checks start to bounce. I know Dad. He’ll want to make them good. Like he tried to before. And he can’t – he’s old and he’s sick, he ain’t got anything.”
“I sympathize with that,” said Perry truthfully. Without being kind, he was sentimental, and Dick’s affection for his parents, his professed concern for them, did indeed touch him. “But hell, Dick. It’s very simple,” Perry said. “We can pay off the checks. Once we’re in Mexico, once we get started down there, we’ll make money. Lots of it.”
“How?”
“How?” – what could Dick mean? The question dazed Perry. After all, such a rich assortment of ventures had been discussed. Prospecting for gold, skin-diving for sunken treasure – these were but two of the projects Perry had ardently proposed. And there were others. The boat, for instance. They had often talked of a deep-sea-fishing boat, which they would buy, man themselves, and rent to vacationers – this though neither had ever skippered a canoe or hooked a guppy. Then, too. there was quick money to be made chauffeuring stolen cars across South American borders.(“You get paid five hundred bucks a trip or so Perry had read somewhere.)
But of the many replies he might have made, he chose to remind Dick of the fortune awaiting them on Cocos Island, a land speck off the coast of Costa Rica. “No fooling, Dick,” Perry said. “This is authentic. I’ve got a map. I’ve got the whole history. It was buried there back in 1821 – Peruvian bullion, jewelry. Sixty million dollars – that’s what they say it’s worth. Even if we didn’t find all of it, even if we found only some of it – Are you with me, Dick?” Heretofore, Dick had always encouraged him, listened attentively to his talk of maps, tales of treasure, but now – and it had not occurred to him before – he wondered if all along Dick had only been pretending, just kidding him. The thought, acutely painful, passed, for Dick, with a wink and a playful jab, said, “Sure, honey. I’m with you. All the way.”
It was three in the morning, and the telephone rang again. Not that the hour mattered. Al Dewey was wide awake anyway, and so were Marie and their sons, nine-year-old Paul and twelve-year-old Alvin Adams Dewey, Jr. For who could sleep in a house – a modest one-story house – where all night the telephone had been sounding every few minutes? As he got out of bed, Dewey promised his wife, “This time I’ll leave it off the hook.” But it was not a promise he dared keep.
True, many of the calls came from news-hunting journalists, or would-be humorists, or theorists (“Al? Listen, fella, I’ve got this deal figured. It’s suicide and murder. I happen to know Herb was in a bad way financially. He was spread pretty thin. So what does he do? He takes out this big insurance policy, shoots Bonnie and the kids, and kills himself with a bomb. A hand grenade stuffed with buckshot”), or anonymous persons with poison-pen minds (“Know them Ls? Foreigners? Don’t work? Give parties? Serve cocktails? Where’s the money come from? Wouldn’t surprise me a darn if they ain’t at the roots of this Clutter trouble”), or nervous ladies alarmed by the gossip going around, rumors that knew neither ceiling nor cellar (“Alvin, now, I’ve known you since you were a boy. And I want you to tell me straight out whether it’s so. I loved and respected Mr. Clutter, and I refuse to believe that that man, that Christian – I refuse to believe he was chasing after women …”).
But most of those who telephoned were responsible citizens wanting to be helpful (“I wonder if you’ve interviewed Nancy’s friend, Sue Kidwell? I was talking to the child, and she said something that struck me. She said the last time she ever spoke to Nancy, Nancy told her Mr. Clutter was in a real bad mood. Had been the past three weeks. That she thought he was very worried about something, so worried he’d taken to smoking cigarettes . . .”).
Either that or the callers were people officially concerned – law officers and sheriffs from other parts of
