dollars for information leading to the solution of the crime.)
«Alvin, are you lighting another cigarette? Honestly, Alvin, can’t you at least try to sleep?»
He was too tense to sleep, even if the telephone could be silenced — too fretful and frustrated.
None of his «leads» had led anywhere, except, perhaps, down a blind alley toward the blankest of
walls. Bobby Rupp? The polygraph machine had eliminated Bobby. And Mr. Smith, the farmer
who tied rope knots identical with those used by the murderer — he, too, was a discarded suspect,
having established that on the night of the crime he’d been «off in Oklahoma.» Which left the
Johns, father and son, but they had also submitted provable alibis. «So,» to quote Harold Nye, «it
all adds up to a nice round number. Zero.» Even the hunt for the grave of Nancy’s cat had come
to nothing.
Nevertheless, there had been one or two meaningful developments. First, while sorting Nancy’s
clothes, Mrs. Elaine Selsor, her aunt, had found tucked in the toe of a shoe a gold wristwatch.
Second, accompanied by a K.B.I. agent, Mrs. Helm had explored every room at River Valley
Farm, toured the house in the expectation that she might notice something awry or absent, and
she had. It happened in Kenyon’s room. Mrs. Helm looked and looked, paced round and round
the room with pursed lips, touching this and that — Kenyon’s old baseball mitt, Kenyon’s mudspattered work boots, his pathetic abandoned spectacles. All the while she kept whispering,
«Something here is wrong, I feel it, I know it, but I don’t know what it is.» And then she did know.
«It’s the radio! Where is Kenyon’s little radio?»
Taken together, these discoveries forced Dewey to consider again the possibility of «plain
robbery» as a motive. Surely that watch had not tumbled into Nancy’s shoe by accident? She
must, lying there in the dark, have heard sounds — footfalls, perhaps voices — that led her to
suppose thieves were in the house, and so believing must have hurriedly hidden the watch, a gift
from her father that she treasured. As for the radio, a gray portable made by Zenith — no doubt
about it, the radio was gone. All the same, Dewey could not accept the theory that the family had been slaughtered for paltry profit — «a few dollars and a radio. » To accept it would obliterate his
image of the killer — or, rather, killers. He and his associates had definitely decided to pluralize the
term. The expert execution of the crimes was proof enough that at least one of the pair
commanded an immoderate amount of cool-headed slyness, and was — must be — a person too
clever to have done such a deed without calculated motive. Then, too, Dewey had become aware
of several particulars that reinforced his conviction that at least one of the murderers was
emotionally involved with the victims, and felt for them, even as he destroyed them, a certain
twisted tenderness. How else explain the mattress box?
The business of the mattress box was one of the things that most tantalized Dewey. Why had the
murderers taken the trouble to move the box from the far end of the basement room and lay it on
the floor in front of the furnace, unless the intention had been to make Mr. Clutter more
comfortable — to provide him, while he contemplated the approaching knife, with a couch less rigid
than cold cement? And in studying the death-scene photographs Dewey had distinguished other
details that seemed to support his notion of a murderer now and again moved by considerate
impulses. «Or» — he could never quite find the word he wanted — «something fussy. And soft. Those
bedcovers. Now, what kind of person would do that — tie up two women, the way Bonnie and the
girl were tied, and then draw up the bedcovers, tuck them in, like sweet dreams and good night?
Or the pillow under Kenyon’s head. At first I thought maybe the pillow was put there to make his
head a simpler target. Now I think, No, it was done for the same reason the mattress box was
spread on the floor — to make the victim more comfortable.»
But speculation such as these, though they absorbed Dewey, did not gratify him or give him a
sense of «getting somewhere.» A case was seldom solved by «fancy theories»; he put his faith in
facts — «sweated for and sworn to.» The quantity of facts to be sought and sifted, and the agenda
planned to obtain them, promised perspiration a plenty, entailing, as it did, the tracking down, the
«checking out,» of hundreds of people, among them all former River Valley Farm employees,
friends and family, anyone with whom Mr. Clutter had done business, much or little — a tortoise
crawl into the past. For, as Dewey had told his team, «we have to keep going till we know the
Clutters better than they ever knew themselves. Until we see the connection between what we
found last Sunday morning and something that happened maybe five years ago. The link. Got to
be one. Got to.»
Dewey’s wife dozed, but she awakened when she felt him leave their bed, heard him once more
answering the telephone, and heard, from the nearby room where her sons slept, sobs, a small
boy crying. «Paul?» Ordinarily, Paul was neither troubled nor troublesome — not a whiner, ever. He
was too busy digging tunnels in the backyard or practicing to be «the fastest runner in Finney
County.» But at breakfast that morning he’d burst into tears. His mother had not needed to ask
him why; she knew that although he understood only hazily the reasons for the uproar around
him, he felt endangered by it — by the harassing telephone, and the strangers at the door, and his
father’s worry-wearied eyes. She went to comfort Paul. His brother, three years older, helped.
«Paul,» he said, «you take it easy now, and tomorrow I’ll teach you to play poker.»
Dewey was in the kitchen; Marie, searching for him, found him there, waiting for a pot of coffee to
percolate and with the murder-scene photographs spread before him on the kitchen table — bleak
stains, spoiling the table’s pretty fruit-patterned oil cloth. (Once he had offered to let her look at
the pictures. She had declined. She had said, «I want to remember Bonnie the way Bonnie was and all of them.») He said, «Maybe the boys ought to stay with Mother.» His mother, a widow, lived
not far off, in a house she thought too spacious and silent; the grandchildren were always
welcome. «For just a few days. Until — well, until.»
«Alvin, do you think we’ll ever get back to normal living?» Mrs. Dewey asked.
Their normal life was like this: both worked, Mrs. Dewey as an office secretary, and they divided
between them the household chores, taking turns at the stove and the sink. («When Alvin was
sheriff, I know some of the boys teased him. Used to say, ‘Look over yonder! Here comes Sheriff
Dewey! Tough guy! Totes a six-shooter! But once he gets home, off comes the gun and on goes
the apron!'») At that time they were saving to build a home on a farm that Dewey had bought in
1951 — two hundred and forty acres several miles north of Garden City. If the weather was fine,
and especially when the days were hot and the wheat was high and ripe, he liked to drive out
there and practice his draw — shoot crows, tin cans — or in his imagination roam through the house
he hoped to have, and through the garden he meant to plant, and under trees yet to be seeded. He was very certain that some day his own oasis of oaks and elms would stand upon those
shadeless plains: «Some day. God willing.»
A belief in God and the rituals surrounding that belief — church every Sunday, grace before meals,
prayers before bed — were an important part of the Deweys’ existence. «I don’t see how anyone
can sit down to table without wanting to bless it,» Mrs. Dewey once said. «Sometimes, when I
come home from work — well, I’m tired. But there’s always coffee on the stove, and sometimes a
steak in the icebox. The boys make a fire to cook the steak, and we talk, and tell each other our
day, and by the time supper’s ready I know we have good cause to be happy and grateful. So I
say, Thank you, Lord. Not just because I should — because I want to.»
Now Mrs. Dewey said, «Alvin, answer me. Do you think we’ll ever have a normal life again?» He
started to reply, but the telephone stopped him.
The old Chevrolet left Kansas City November 21, Saturday night. Luggage was lashed to the
fenders and roped to the roof; the trunk was so stuffed it could not be shut; inside, on the back
seat, two television sets stood, one atop the other. It was a tight fit for the passengers: Dick, who
was driving, and Perry, who sat clutching the old Gibson guitar, his most beloved possession. As
for Perry’s other belongings — a card-board suitcase, a gray Zenith portable radio, a gallon jug of
root-beer syrup (he feared that his favorite beverage might not be available in Mexico), and two
big boxes containing books, manuscripts, cherished memorabilia (and hadn’t Dick raised hell!
Cursed, kicked the boxes, called them «five hundred pounds of pig slop!») — these, too, were part
of the car’s untidy interior.
Around midnight they crossed the border into Oklahoma. Perry, glad to be out of Kansas, at last
relaxed. Now it was true — they were on their way. On their way, and never coming back — without
regret, as far as he was concerned, for he was leaving nothing behind, and no one who might
deeply wonder into what thin air he’d spiraled. The same could not be said of Dick. There were
those Dick claimed to love: three sons, a