After all, it was “painful” to imagine that one might be “not just right” -particularly if whatever was wrong was not your own fault but “maybe a thing you were born with.” Look at his family! Look at what had happened there! His mother, an alcoholic, had strangled to death on her own vomit. Of her children, two sons and two daughters, only the younger girl, Barbara, had entered ordinary life, married, begun raising a family. Fern, the other daughter, jumped out of a window of a San Francisco hotel. (Perry had ever since “tried to believe she slipped,” for he’d loved Fern. She was “such a sweet person,” so “artistic,” a “terrific” dancer, and she could sing, too. “If she’d ever had any luck at all, with her looks and all, she could have got somewhere, been somebody” It was sad to think of her climbing over a window sill and falling fifteen floors.) And there was Jimmy, the older boy – Jimmy, who had one day driven his wife to suicide and killed himself the next.
Then he heard Dick say, “Deal me out, baby. I’m a normal.” Wasn’t that a horse’s laugh? But never mind, let it pass. “Deep down,” Perry continued, “way, way rock-bottom, I never thought I could do it. A thing like that.” And at once he recognized his error: Dick would, of course, answer by asking, “How about the nigger?” When he’d told Dick that story, it was because he’d wanted Dick’s friendship, wanted Dick to “respect” him, think him “hard,” as much “the masculine type” as he had considered Dick to be. And so one day after they had both read and were discussing a Reader’s Digest article entitled “How Good a Character Detective Are You?” (“As you wait in a dentist’s office or a railway station, try studying the give-away signs in people around you. Watch the way they walk, for example.
A stiff-legged gait can reveal a rigid, unbending personality; a shambling walk a lack of determination”), Perry had said “I’ve always been an outstanding character detective, otherwise I’d be dead today. Like if I couldn’t judge when to trust somebody. You never can much. But I’ve come to trust you, Dick. You’ll see I do, because I’m going to put myself in your power. I’m going to tell you something I never told anybody. Not even Willie-Jay.
About the time I fixed a guy.” And Perry saw, as he went on, that Dick was interested; he was really listening. “It was a couple of summers ago. Out in Vegas. I was living in this old boarding house – it used to be a fancy cathouse. But all the fancy was gone. It was a place they should have torn down ten years back; anyway, it was sort of coming down by itself. The cheapest rooms were in the attic, and I lived up there. So did this nigger. His name was King; he was a transient. We were the only two up there – us and a million cucarachas.
King, he wasn’t too young, but he’d done roadwork and other outdoor stuff – he had a good build. He wore glasses, and he read a lot. He never shut his door, time I passed by, he was always lying there buck-naked, was out of work, and said he’d saved a few dollars from his job, said he wanted to stay in bed awhile, read and fan himself and drink beer. The stuff he read, it was just junk – comic books and cowboy junk. He was O.K. Sometimes we’d have a beer together, and once he lent me ten dollars. I had no cause to hurt him. But one night we were sitting in the attic, it was so hot you couldn’t sleep, so I said, ‘Come on, King, let’s go for a drive.’
I had an old car I’d stripped and souped and painted silver – the Silver Ghost, I called it. We went for a long drive. Drove way out in the desert. Out there it was cool. We parked and drank a few more beers. King got out of the car, and I followed after him. He didn’t see I’d picked up this chain. A bicycle chain I kept under the seat. Actually, I had no real idea to do it till I did it. I hit him across the face. Broke his glasses. I kept right on. Afterward, I didn’t feel a thing. I left him there, and never heard a word about it. Maybe nobody ever found him. Just buzzards.”
There was some truth in the story. Perry had known, under the circumstances stated, a Negro named King. But if the man was dead today it was none of Perry’s doing; he’d never raised a hand against him. For all he knew, King might still be lying a bed some-where, fanning himself and sipping beer.
“Or did you? Kill him like you said?” Dick asked.
Perry was not a gifted liar, or a prolific one; however, once he had told a fiction he usually stuck by it. “Sure I did. Only – a nigger. It’s not the same.” Presently, he said, “Know what it is that really
bugs me? About that other thing? It’s just I don’t believe it – that anyone can get away with a thing like that.” And he suspected that Dick didn’t, either. For Dick was at least partly inhabited by Perry’s mystical-moral apprehensions. Thus: “Now, just shut up!”
The car was moving. A hundred feet ahead, a dog trotted along the side of the road. Dick swerved toward it. It was an old half-dead mongrel, brittle-boned and mangy, and the impact, as it met the car, was little more than what a bird might make. But Dick was satisfied. “Boy!” he said -and it was what he always said after running down a dog, which was something he did whenever the opportunity arose. “Boy! We sure splattered him!”
Thanksgiving passed, and the pheasant season came to a halt, but not the beautiful Indian summer, with its flow of clear, pure days. The last of the out-of-town newsmen, convinced that the case was never going to be solved, left Garden City. But the case was by no means closed for the people of Finney County, and least of all for those who patronized Holcomb’s favorite meeting place, Hartman’s Cafe.
“Since the trouble started, we’ve been doing all the business we can handle,” Mrs. Hartman said, gazing around her snug domain, every scrap of which was being sat or stood or leaned upon by tobacco-scented, coffee-drinking farmers, farm helpers, and ranch hands. “Just a bunch of old women,” added Mrs. Hartman’s cousin, Postmistress Clare, who happened to be on the premises. “If it was spring and work to be done, they wouldn’t be here.
But wheat’s winter’s on the way, they got nothing to do but sit around and scare each other. You know Bill Brown, down to the Telegram? See the editorial he wrote? That one he called it ‘Another Crime’? Said, ‘It’s time for everyone to stop wagging loose tongues.’ Because that’s a crime, too – telling plain-out lies. But what can you expect? Look around you. Rattlesnakes. Varmints. Rumor-mongers. See anything else? Ha! Like dash you do.”
One rumor originating in Hartman’s Cafe involved Taylor Jones, a rancher whose property adjoins River Valley Farm. In the opinion of a good part of the cafe’s clientele, Mr. Jones and his family, not the Clutters, were the murderer’s intended victims. “It makes harder sense,” argued one of those who held this view.” Taylor Jones, he’s a richer man than Herb Clutter ever was. Now, pretend the fellow who done it wasn’t anyone from here-abouts. Pretend he’d been maybe hired to kill, and all he had was instructions on how to get to the house. Well, it would be mighty easy to make a mistake – take a wrong turn – and end up at Herb’s place ‘stead of Taylor’s.” The “Jones Theory” was much repeated – especially to the Joneses, a dignified and sensible family, who refused to be flustered.
A lunch counter, a few tables, an alcove harboring a hot grill, and an icebox and a radio – that’s all there is to Hartman’s Cafe. “But our customers like it,” says the proprietress. “Got to. Nowhere else for them to go. ‘Less they drive seven miles one direction or fifteen the other. Anyway, we run a friendly place, and the coffee’s good since Mable came to work” – Mabel being Mrs. Helm. “After the tragedy, I said, ‘Mabel, now that you’re out of a job, why don’t you come give me a hand at the cafe? Cook a little. Wait counter.’ How it turned out – the only bad feature is, everybody comes in here, they pester her with questions.
About the tragedy. But Mabel’s not like Cousin Myrt. Or me. She’s shy. Besides, she doesn’t know anything special. No more than anybody else.” But by and large the Hartman congregation continued to suspect that Mabel Helm knew a thing or two that she was holding back. And, of course, she did. Dewey had had several conversations with her and had requested that everything they said be kept secret. Particularly, she was not to
