I mean it. Why don’t you arrest somebody? That’s what you’re paid
for.»
«Hush your meanness,» said Mrs. Hartman. «We’re all in the same boat. Alvin’s doing good as he
can.»
Dewey winked at her. «You tell him, ma’am. And much obliged for the coffee.»
The ranch hand waited until his quarry had reached the door, then fired a farewell volley: «If you
ever run for sheriff again, just forget my vote. ‘Cause you ain’t gonna get it.»
«Hush your meanness,» said Mrs. Hartman.
A mile separates River Valley Farm from Hartman’s Cafe. Dewey decided to walk it. He enjoyed
hiking across wheat fields. Normally, once or twice a week he went for long walks on his own
land, the well-loved piece of prairie where he had always hoped to build a house, plant trees,
eventually entertain great-grandchildren. That was the dream, but it was one his wife had lately
warned him she no longer shared; she had told him that never now would she consider living all
alone «way out there in the country.» Dewey knew that even if he were to snare the murderers the
next day, Marie would not change her mind — for once an awful fate had befallen friends who lived
in a lonely country house.
Of course, the Clutter family were not the first persons ever murdered in Finney County, or even
in Holcomb. Senior members of that small community can recall «a wild goings-on» of more than
forty years ago — the Hefner Slaying. Mrs. Sadie Truitt, the hamlet’s septuagenarian mail
messenger, who is the mother of Postmistress Clare, is expert on this fabled affair: «August, it was. 1920. Hot as Hades. A fellow called Tunif was working on the Finnup ranch. Walter Tunif.
He had a car, turned out to be stolen. Turned out he was a soldier AWOL from Fort Bliss, over
there in Texas. He was a rascal, sure enough, and a lot of people suspected him. So one evening
the sheriff — them days that was Orlie Hefner, such a fine singer, don’t you know he’s part of the
Heavenly Choir? — one evening he rode out to the Finnup ranch to ask Tunif a few straight
forward questions. Third of August. Hot as Hades. Outcome of it was, Walter Tunif shot the sheriff
right through the heart. Poor Orlie was gone ‘fore he hit the ground. The devil who done it, he lit
out of there on one of the Finnup horses, rode east along the river. Word spread, and men for
miles around made up a posse. Along about the next morning, they caught up with him; old
Walter Tunif. He didn’t get the chance to say how d’you do? On account of the boys were pretty
irate. They just let the buckshot fly.»
Dewey’s own initial contact with foul play in Finney County occurred in 1947. The incident is
noted in his files as follows: «John Carlyle Polk, a Creek Indian, 32 years of age, resident
Muskogee, Okla., killed Mary Kay Finley, white female, 40 years of age, a waitress residing in
Garden City. Polk stabbed her with the jagged neck of a beer bottle in a room in the Copeland
Hotel, Garden City, Kansas, 5-9-47.» A cut-and-dried description of an open-and-shut case. Of
three other murders Dewey had since investigated, two were equally obvious (a pair of railroad
workers robbed and killed an elderly farmer, 11-1-52; a drunken husband beat and kicked his wife
to death, 6-17-56), but the third case, as it was once conversationally narrated by Dewey, was not
without several original touches: «It all started out at Stevens Park. Where they have a bandstand,
and under the bandstand a men’s room. Well, this man named Mooney was walking around the
park. He was from North Carolina somewhere, just a stranger passing through town. Anyway, he
went to the rest room, and somebody followed him inside — a boy from here abouts, Wilmer Lee
Stebbins, twenty years old. Afterward, Wilmer Lee always claimed Mr. Mooney made him an
unnatural suggestion. And that was why he robbed Mr. Mooney, and knocked him down, and
banged
his head on the cement floor, and why, when that didn’t finish him, he stuck Mr. Mooney’s head in
a toilet bowl and kept on flushing till he drowned him. Maybe so. But nothing can explain the rest
of Wilmer Lee’s behavior. First off, he buried the body a couple of miles northeast of Garden City.
Next day he dug it up and put it down fourteen miles the other direction. Well, it went on like that,
burying and reburying. Wilmer Lee was like a dog with a bone — he just wouldn’t let Mr. Mooney
rest in peace. Finally, he dug one grave too many; somebody saw him.» Prior to the Clutter
mystery, the four cases cited were the sum of Dewey’s experience with murder, and measured
against the case confronting him, were as squalls preceding a hurricane.
Dewey fitted a key into the front door of the Clutter house. Inside, the house was warm, for the
heat had not been turned off, and the shiny-floored rooms, smelling of a lemon-scented polish,
seemed only temporarily untenanted; it was as though today were Sunday and the family might at
any moment return from church. The heirs, Mrs. English and Mrs. Jarchow, had removed a van
load of clothing and furniture, yet the atmosphere of a house still humanly inhabited had not
thereby been diminished. In the parlor, a sheet of music, «Comin’ Thro’ the Rye,» stood open on
the piano rack. In the hall, a sweat-stained gray Stetson hat — Herb’s — hung on a hat peg. Upstairs
in Kenyon’s room, on a shelf above his bed, the lenses of the dead boy’s spectacles gleamed
with reflected light.
The detective moved from room to room. He had toured the house many times; indeed, he went
out there almost every day, and, in one sense, could be said to find these visits pleasurable, for
the place, unlike his own home, or the sheriff’s office, with its hullabaloo, was peaceful. The
telephones, their wires still severed,
were silent. The great quiet of the prairies surrounded him. He could sit in Herb’s parlor rocking
chair, and rock and think. A few of his conclusions were unshakable: he believed that the death of
Herb Clutter had been the criminals’ main objective. The motive being a psychopathic hatred, or
possibly a combination of hatred and thievery, and he believed that the commission of the
murders had been a leisurely labor, with perhaps two or more hours elapsing between the
entrance of the killers and their exit. (The coroner, Dr. Robert Fenton, reported an appreciable
difference in the body temperatures of the victims, and, on this basis, theorized that the order of
execution had been: Mrs. Clutter, Nancy, Kenyon, and Mr. Clutter.) Attendant upon these beliefs was his conviction that the family had known very well the persons who destroyed them.
During this visit Dewey paused at an upstairs window, his attention caught by something seen in
the near distance — a scare-crow amid the wheat stubble. The scarecrow wore a man’s huntingcap and a dress of weather-faded flowered calico. (Surely an old dress of Bonnie Clutter’s?) Wind
frolicked the skirt and made the scarecrow sway — made it seem a creature forlornly dancing in
the cold December field. And Dewey was somehow reminded of Marie’s dream. One recent
morning she had served him a bungled breakfast of sugared eggs and salted coffee, then blamed
it all on «a silly dream» — but a dream the power of daylight had not dispersed. «It was so real,
Alvin,» she said. «As real as this kitchen. That’s where I was. Here in the kitchen. I was cooking
supper, and suddenly Bonnie walked through the door. She was wearing a blue angora sweater,
and she looked so sweet and pretty. And I said, ‘Oh, Bonnie . . . Bonnie, dear … I haven’t seen
you since that terrible thing happened.’ But she didn’t answer, only looked at me in that shy way
of hers, and I didn’t know how to go on. Under the circumstances. So I said, ‘Honey, come see
what I’m making Alvin for his supper. A pot of gumbo. With shrimp and fresh crabs. It’s just about
ready. Come on, honey, have a taste.’ But she wouldn’t. She stayed by the door looking at me.
And then — I don’t know how to tell you exactly, but she shut her eyes, she began to shake her
head, very slowly, and wring her hands, very slowly, and to whimper, or whisper. I couldn’t
understand what she was saying. But it broke my heart, I never felt so sorry for anyone, and I
hugged her. I said, ‘Please, Bonnie! Oh, don’t, darling, don’t! If ever anyone was prepared to go to
God, it was you, Bonnie.’ But I couldn’t comfort her. She shook her head, and wrung her hands,
and then I heard what she was saying. She was saying, ‘To be murdered. To be murdered. No.
No. There’s nothing worse. Nothing worse than that. Nothing.»
It was midday deep in the Mojave Desert. Perry, sitting on a straw suitcase, was playing a
harmonica. Dick was standing at the side of a black-surfaced high-way, Route 66, his eyes fixed
upon the immaculate emptiness as though the fervor of his gaze could force motorists to
materialize. Few did, and none of those stopped for the hitchhikers. One truck driver, bound for
Needles, California, had offered a lift, but Dick had declined. That was not the sort of «setup» he
and Perry wanted. They were waiting for some solitary traveler in a decent car and with money in
his billfold — a stranger to rob, strangle, discard on the desert.
In the desert, sound often precedes sight. Dick heard the dim vibrations of an oncoming, not yet
visible car. Perry heard it, too; he put the harmonica in his pocket, picked up the straw suitcase
(this, their only luggage, bulged and sagged with the weight of Perry’s souvenirs, plus three shirts,
five pairs of white socks, a box of aspirin, a bottle of