Suppose they got two or three hundred for the old Chevrolet. Dick, if he knew Dick, and he did -now he did – would spend it right away on vodka and women.
While Perry sang, Otto sketched him in a sketchbook. It was a passable likeness, and the artist perceived one not very obvious aspect of the sitter’s countenance – its mischief, an amused, babyish malice that suggested some unkind cupid aiming envenomed arrows. He was naked to the waist. (Perry was “ashamed” to take off his trousers, “ashamed” to wear swimming trunks, for he was afraid that the sight of his injured legs would “disgust people,” and so, despite his underwater reveries, all the talk about skin-diving, he hadn’t once gone into the water.) Otto reproduced a number of the tattoos ornamenting the subject’s over muscled chest, arms, and small and calloused but girlish hands. The sketch-book, which Otto gave Perry as a parting gift, contained several drawings of Dick – “nude studies.”
Otto shut his sketchbook, Perry put down his guitar, and the Cowboy raised anchor, started the engine. It was time to go. They were ten miles out, and the water was darkening.
Perry urged Dick to fish. “We may never have another chance,” he said. “Chance?”
“To catch a big one.”
“Jesus, I’ve got the bastard kind,” Dick said. “I’m sick.” Dick often had headaches of migraine intensity – “the bastard kind. “He thought they were the result of his automobile accident. “Please, baby. Let’s be very, very quiet.”
Moments later Dick had forgotten his pain. He was on his feet, shouting with excitement. Otto and the Cowboy were shouting, too. Perry had hooked “a big one.” Ten feet of soaring, plunging sailfish, it leaped, arched like a rainbow, dived, sank deep, tugged the line taut, rose, flew, fell, rose. An hour passed, and part of another, before the sweat-soaked sportsman reeled it in.
There is an old man with an ancient wooden box camera who hangs around the harbor in Acapulco, and when the Estrellita docked, Otto commissioned him to do six portraits of Perry posed beside his catch. Technically, the old man’s work turned out badly – brown and streaked. Still, they were remarkable photographs, and what made them so was Perry’s expression, his look of unflawed fulfillment, of beatitude, as though at last, and as in one of his dreams, a tall yellow bird had hauled him to heaven.
One December afternoon Paul Helm was pruning the patch of floral odds and ends that had entitled Bonnie Clutter to membership in the 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, wild-haired, 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
