Garden City Garden Club. It was a melancholy task,
for he was reminded of another afternoon when he’d done the same chore. Kenyon had helped
him that day, and it was the last time he’d seen Kenyon alive, or Nancy, or any of them. The
weeks between had been hard on Mr. Helm. He was «in poor health» (poorer than he knew; he
had less than four months to live), and he was worried about a lot of things. His job, for one. He
doubted he would have it much longer. Nobody seemed really to know, but he understood that
«the girls,» Beverly and Eveanna, intended to sell the property — though, as he’d heard one of the
boys at the cafe remark, «ain’t nobody gonna buy that spread, long as the mystery lasts.» It «didn’t
do» to think about strangers here, harvesting «our» land. Mr. Helm minded — he minded for Herb’s
sake. This was a place, he said, that «ought to be kept in a man’s family.» Once Herb had said to
him, «I hope there’ll always be a Clutter here, and a Helm, too.» It was only a year ago Herb had
said that. Lord, what was
he to do if the farm got sold? He felt «too old to fit in somewhere different.»
Still, he must work, and he wanted to. He wasn’t, he said, the kind to kick off his shoes and sit by
the stove. And yet it was true that the farm nowadays made him uneasy: the locked house,
Nancy’s horse forlornly waiting in a field, the odor of windfall apples rotting under the apple trees,
and the absence of voices — Kenyon calling Nancy to the telephone, Herb whistling, his glad
«Good morning, Paul.» He and Herb had «got along grand» — never a cross word between them.
Why, then, did the men from the sheriff’s office continue to question him? Unless they thought he
had «something to hide»? Maybe he ought never to have mentioned the Mexicans. He had
informed Al Dewey that at approximately four o’clock on Saturday, November 14, the day of the
murders, a pair of Mexicans, one mustachioed and the other pockmarked, appeared at River
Valley Farm. Mr. Helm had seen them knock on the door of «the office,» seen Herb step outside
and talk to them on the lawn, and, possibly ten minutes later, watched the strangers walk away,
«looking sulky.» Mr. Helm figured that they had come asking for work and had been told there was
none. Unfortunately, though he’d been called upon to recount his version of that day’s events
many times, he had not spoken of the incident until two weeks after the crime, because, as he
explained to Dewey, «I just suddenly recalled it.» But Dewey, and some of the other investigators,
seemed not to credit his story, and behaved as though it were a tale he’d invented to mislead
them. They preferred to believe Bob Johnson, the insurance salesman, who had spent all of
Saturday afternoon conferring with Mr. Clutter in the latter’s office, and who was «absolutely
positive» that from two to ten past six he had been Herb’s sole visitor. Mr. Helm was equally
definite: Mexicans, a mustache, pockmarks, four o’clock. Herb would have told them that he was
speaking the truth, convinced them that he, Paul Helm, was a man who «said his prayers and
earned his bread.» But Herb was gone.
Gone. And Bonnie, too. Her bedroom window overlooked the garden, and now and then, usually
when she was «having a bad spell,» Mr. Helm had seen her stand long hours gazing into the
garden, as though what she saw bewitched her. («When I was a girl,» she had once told a friend, »I was terribly sure trees and flowers were the same as birds or people. That they thought things,
and talked among themselves. And we could hear them if we really tried. It was just a matter of
emptying your head of all other sounds. Being very quiet and listening very hard. Sometimes I still
believe that. But one can never get quiet enough . . .»)
Remembering Bonnie at the window, Mr. Helm looked up, as though he expected to see her, a
ghost behind the glass. If he had, it could not have amazed him more than what he did in fact
discern — a hand holding back a curtain, and eyes. «But,» as he subsequently described it, «the
sun was hitting that side of the house» — it made the window glass waver, shimmeringly twisted
what hung beyond it — and by the time Mr. Helm had shielded his eyes, then looked again, the
curtains had swung closed, the window was vacant. «My eyes aren’t too good, and I wondered if
they had played me a trick,» he recalled. «But I was pretty darn certain that they hadn’t. And I was
pretty darn certain it wasn’t any spook. Because I don’t believe in spooks. So who could it be?
Sneaking around in there. Where nobody’s got a right to go, except the law. And how did they get
in? With everything locked up like the radio was advertising tornadoes. That’s what I wondered.
But I wasn’t expecting to find out — not by myself. I dropped what I was doing, and cut across the
fields to Holcomb. Soon as I got there, I phoned Sheriff Robinson. Explained that there was
somebody, prowling around inside the Clutter house. Well, they came raring right on out. State
troopers. The sheriff and his bunch. The K.B.I. fellows. Al Dewey. Just as they were stringing
themselves around the place, sort of getting ready for action, the front door opened.» Out walked
a person no one present had ever seen before — a man in his middle thirties, dull-eyed, wildhaired, and wearing a hip holster stocked with a .38-caliper pistol. «I guess all of us there had the
identical idea — this was him, the one who came and killed them,» Mr. Helm continued. «He didn’t
make a move. Stood quiet. Kind of blinking. They took the gun away, and started asking
questions.»
The man’s name was Adrian — Jonathan Daniel Adrian. He was on his way to New Mexico, and at
present had no fixed address. For what purpose had he broken into the Clutter house, and how,
incidentally, had he managed it? He showed them how. (He had lifted a lid off a water well and
crawled through a pipe tunnel that led into the basement.) As for why, he had read about the case
and was curious, just wanted to see what the place looked like. «And then,» according to Mr.
Helm’s memory of the episode, «somebody asked him was he a hitchhiker? Hitchhiking his way to
New Mexico? No, he said, he was driving his own car. And it was parked down the lane a piece.
So everybody went to look at the car. When they found what was inside it, one of the men maybe it was Al Dewey — said to him, told this Jonathan Daniel Adrian, ‘Well, mister, seems like
we’ve got something to discuss.’ Because, inside the car, what they’d found was a .12-gauge
shotgun. And a hunting knife.»
A room in a hotel in Mexico City. In the room was an ugly modern bureau with a lavender-tinted
mirror, and tucked into a corner of the mirror was a printed warning from the Management:
Su dia termina a las 2 p.m.
Your day ends at 2 p.m.
Guests, in other words, must vacate the room by the stated hour or expect to be charged another
day’s rent — a luxury that the present occupants were not contemplating. They wondered only
whether they could settle the sum already owed. For everything had evolved as Perry had
prophesied: Dick had sold the car, and three days later the money, slightly less than two hundred
dollars, had largely vanished. On the fourth day Dick had gone out hunting honest work, and that
night he had announced to Perry, «Nuts! You know what they pay? What the wages are? For an
expert mechanic? Two bucks a day. Mexico! Honey, I’ve had it. We got to make it out of here.
Back to the States. No, now, I’m not going to listen. Diamonds. Buried treasure. Wakeup, little
boy. There ain’t no caskets of gold. No sunken ship. And even if there was — hell, you can’t even
swim.» And the next day, having borrowed money from the richer of his two fiancés, the banker’s
widow, Dick bought bus tickets that would take them, via San Diego, as far as Barstow,
California. «After that,» he said, «we walk.»
Of course, Perry could have struck out on his own, stayed in Mexico, let Dick go where he damn
well wanted. Why not? Hadn’t he always been «a loner,» and without any «real friends» (except the
gray-haired, gray-eyed, and «brilliant» Willie-Jay)? But he was afraid to leave Dick; merely to
consider it made him feel «sort of sick,» as though he were trying to make up his mind to «jump off
a train going ninety-nine miles an hour.» The basis of his fear, or so he himself seemed to believe, was a newly grown superstitious certainty that «whatever had to happen won’t happen» as long as
he and Dick «stick together.» Then, too, the severity of Dick’s «wake-up» speech, the belligerence
with which he proclaimed his theretofore concealed opinion of Perry’s dreams and hopes — all
this, perversity being what it is, appealed to Perry, hurt and shocked him but charmed him, almost
revived his former faith in the tough, the «totally masculine,» the pragmatic, the decisive Dick he’d
once allowed to boss him. And so, since a sunrise hour on a chilly Mexico City morning in early
December, Perry had been prowling about the unheated hotel room assembling and packing his
possessions — stealthily, lest he waken the two sleeping shapes lying on one of the room’s twin
beds: Dick, and the younger of his betrotheds, Inez.
There was one belonging of his that need no longer concern him. On their last night in Acapulco,
a