Square, squat, in the earlier forties, an English woman fitted out with an accent almost incoherently upper-class, Mrs. Archibald William Warren-Browne did not at all resemble the cafe’s other frequenters, and seemed, within that setting, like a peacock trapped in a turkey pen. Once, explaining to an acquaintance why she and her husband had abandoned “family estates in the North of England,” exchanging the hereditary home – “the jolliest, oh, the prettiest old priory” – for an old and highly un-jolly farm-house on the plains of western Kansas, Mrs. Warren-Browne said: “Taxes, my dear. Death duties. Enormous, criminal death duties. That’s what drove us out of England. Yes, we left a year ago. Without regrets. None. We love it here, Just adore it. Though, of course, it’s very different from our other life. The life we’ve always known. Paris and Rome.
Monte. London. I do – occasionally – think of London. Oh, I don’t really miss it – the frenzy, and never a cab, and always worrying how one looks. Positively not. We love it here. I suppose some people – those aware of our past, the life we’ve led – wonder aren’t we the tiniest bit lonely, out there in the wheat fields. Out West is where we meant to settle. Wyoming or Neveda – la vraie chose. We hoped when we got there some oil might stick to us. But on our way we stopped to visit friends in Garden City – friends of friends, actually. But they couldn’t have been kinder. Insisted we linger on. And we thought, Well, why not?
Why not hire a bit of land and start ranching? Or farming. Which is a decision we still haven’t come to – whether to ranch or farm. Dr. Austin asked if we didn’t find it perhaps too quiet. Actually, no. Actually, I’ve never known such bedlam. It’s noisier than a bomb raid. Train whistles. Coyotes. Monsters howling the bloody night long. A horrid racket. And since the murders it seems to bother me more. So many things do.
Our house – what an old creaker it is! Mark you, I’m not complaining. Really, it’s quite a serviceable house – has all the mod. cons. – but, oh, how it coughs and grunts! And after dark, when the wind commences, that hateful prairie wind, one hears the most appalling moans. I mean, if one’s a bit nervy, one can’t help imagining – silly things. Dear God! That poor family! No, we never met them. I saw Mr. Clutter once. In the Federal Building.”
Early in December, in the course of a single afternoon, two of the cafe’s steadiest customers announced plans to pack up and leave not merely Finney County but the state. The first was a tenant farmer who worked for Lester McCoy, a well-known western-Kansas landowner and businessman. He said, “I had my-self a talk with Mr. McCoy. Tried to let him know what’s going on out here in Holcomb and here abouts. How a body can’t sleep. My wife can’t sleep, and she won’t allow me. So I told Mr. McCoy I like his place fine but he better hunt up another man. ‘Count if we’re movin’ on. Down to east Colorado. Maybe then I’ll get some rest.”
The second announcement was made by Mrs. Hideo Ashida, who stopped by the cafe” with three of her four red-cheeked children. She lined them up at the counter and told Mrs. Hartman, “Give Bruce a box of Cracker Jack. Bobby wants a Coke. Bonnie Jean? We know how you feel, Bonnie Jean, but come on, have a treat.” Bonnie Jean shook her head, and Mrs. Ashida said, “Bonnie Jean’s sort of blue. She don’t want to leave here. The school here. And all her friends.”
“Why, say,” said Mrs. Hartman, smiling at Bonnie Jean. “That’s nothing to be sad over. Transferring from Holcomb to Garden City High. Lots more boys – “
Bonnie Jean said, “You don’t understand. Daddy’s taking us away. To Nebraska.”
Bess Hartman looked at the mother, as if expecting her to deny the daughter’s allegation. “It’s true, Bess,” Mrs. Ashida said.
“I don’t know what to say,” said Mrs. Hartman, her voice indignantly astonished, and also despairing. The Ashidas were a part of the Holcomb community everyone appreciated – a family likably high-spirited, yet hard-working and neighborly and generous, though they didn’t have much to be generous with.
Mrs. Ashida said, “We’ve been talking on it a long time. Hideo, he thinks we can do better somewhere else.” “When you plan to go?”
“Soon as we sell up. But anyway not before Christmas. On account of a deal we’ve worked out with the dentist. About Hideo’s Christmas present. Me and the kids, we’re giving him three gold teeth. For Christmas.”
Mrs. Hartman sighed. “I don’t know what to say. Except I wish you wouldn’t. Just up and leave us.” She sighed again. “Seems like we’re losing everybody. One way and another.”
“Gosh, you think I want to leave?” Mrs. Ashida said. “Far as people go, this is the nicest place we ever lived. But Hideo, he’s the man, and he says we can get a better farm in Nebraska. And I’ll tell you something, Bess.” Mrs. Ashida attempted a frown, but her plump, round, smooth face could not quite manage It. “We used to argue about it. Then one night I said, ‘O.K., you’re the boss, let’s go.’ After what happened to Herb and his family, I felt something around here had come to an end. I mean personally.
For me. And so I quit arguing. I said O.K.” She dipped a hand into Bruce’s box of Cracker Jack. “Gosh, I can’t get over it. I can’t get it off my mind. I liked Herb. Did you know I was one of the last to see him alive? Uh-huh. Me and the kids. We been to the 4-H meeting in Garden City and he gave us a ride home. The last thing I said to Herb, I told him how I couldn’t imagine his ever being afraid. That no matter what the situation was, he could talk his way out of it.” Thoughtfully she nibbled a kernel of Cracker Jack, took a swig of Bobby’s Coke, then said, “Funny, but you know, Bess, I’ll bet he wasn’t afraid. I mean, however it happened, I’ll
bet right up to the last he didn’t believe it would. Because it couldn’t. Not to him.”
The sun was blazing. A small boat was riding at anchor in a mild sea: the Estrellita, with four persons aboard – Dick, Perry, a young Mexican, and Otto, a rich middle-aged German.
“Please. Again,” said Otto, and Perry, strumming his guitar, sang in a husky sweet voice a Smoky Mountains song:
“In this world today while we’re living Some folks say the worst of us they can, But when we’re dead and in our caskets, They always slip some lilies in our hand.
Won’t you give me flowers while I’m living . . .”
A week in Mexico City, and then he and Dick had driven south – Cuernavaca, Taxco, Acapulco. And it was in Acapulco, in a “jukebox honky-tonk,” that they had met the hairy-legged and hearty Otto. Dick had “picked him up.” But the gentleman, a vacationing Hamburg lawyer, “already had a friend” – a young native Acapulcan who called himself the Cowboy.* “He proved to be a trustworthy person,” Perry once said of the Cowboy. “Mean as Judas, some ways, but oh, man, a funny boy, a real fast jockey. Dick liked him, too. We got on great.”
The Cowboy found for the tattooed drifters a room in the house of an uncle, undertook to improve Perry’s Spanish, and shared the benefits of his liaison with the holiday maker from Hamburg, in whose company and at whose expense they drank and ate and bought women. The host seemed to think his pesos well spent, if only because he relished Dick’s jokes. Each day Otto hired the Estrellita, a deep-sea-fishing craft, and the four friends went trolling along the coast.
The Cowboy skippered the boat; Otto sketched and fished; Perry baited hooks, daydreamed, sang, and sometimes fished; Dick did nothing – only moaned, complained of the motion, lay about sun-drugged and listless, like a lizard at siesta. But Perry said, “This is finally it. The way it ought to be.” Still, he knew that it couldn’t continue – that it was, in fact, destined to stop that very day. The next day Otto was returning to Germany, and Perry and Dick were driving back to Mexico City – at Dick’s insistence. “Sure, baby,” he’d said when they were debating the matter. “It’s nice and all. With the sun on your back. But the dough’s going-going-gone. And after we’ve sold the car, what have we got left?”
The answer was that they had very little, for they had by now mostly disposed of the stuff acquired the day of the Kansas City check-passing spree – the camera, the cuff links, the television sets. Also, they had sold, to a Mexico City policeman with whom Dick had got acquainted, a pair of binoculars and a gray Zenith portable radio. “What we’ll do is, we’ll go back to Mex, sell the car, and maybe I can get a garage job. Anyway, it’s a better deal up there. Better opportunities.
Christ, I sure could use some more of that Inez.” Inez was a prostitute who had accosted Dick on the
