From there, Nye steered his car northward along raw country roads. As he neared the Hickock farm, he stopped at several neighboring homesteads, ostensibly to ask directions, actually to make inquiries concerning the suspect. One farmer’s wife said, “Dick Hickock! Don’t talk to me about Dick Hickock! If ever I met the devil! Steal? Steal the weights off a dead man’s eyes! His mother, though, Eunice, she’s a fine woman. Heart big as a barn. His daddy, too. Both of them plain, honest people. Dick would’ve gone to jail more times than you can count, except nobody around here ever wanted to prosecute. Out of respect for his folks.”
Dusk had fallen when Nye knocked at the door of Walter Hickock’s weather-grayed four-room farmhouse. It was as though some such visit had been expected. Mr. Hickock invited the detective into the kitchen, and Mrs. Hickock offered him coffee. Perhaps if they had known the true meaning of the caller’s presence, the reception tendered him would have been less gracious, more guarded. But they did not know, and during the hours the three sat conversing, the name Clutter was never mentioned, or the word murder. The parents accepted what Nye implied – that parole violation and financial fraud were all that motivated his pursuit of their son.
“Dick brought him [Perry] home one evening, and told us he was a friend just off a bus from Las Vegas, and he wanted to know couldn’t he sleep here, stay here awhile,” Mrs. Hickock said. “No, sir, I wouldn’t have him in the house. One look and I saw what he was. With his perfume. And his oily hair. It was clear as day where Dick had met him. According to the conditions of his parole, he wasn’t supposed to associate with anybody he’d met up there [Lansing]. I warned Dick, but he wouldn’t listen. He found a room for his friend at the Hotel Olathe, in Olathe, and after that Dick was with him every spare minute. Once they went off on a weekend trip. Mr. Nye, certain as I’m sitting here, Perry Smith was the one put him up to writing them checks.”
Nye shut his notebook and put his pen in his pocket, and both his hands as well, for his hands were shaking from excitement. “Now, on this weekend trip. Where did they go?”
“Fort Scott,” Mr. Hickock said, naming a Kansas town with a military history. “The way I understood it, Perry Smith has a sister lives in Fort Scott. She was supposed to be holding a piece of money belonged to him. Fifteen hundred dollars was the sum mentioned. That was the main reason he’d come to Kansas, to collect this money his sister was holding. So Dick drove him down there to get it. It was only a overnight trip. He was back home a little before noon Sunday. Time for Sunday dinner.”
“I see,” said Nye. “An overnight trip. Which means they left here sometime Saturday. That would be Saturday, November fourteenth?”
The old man agreed.
“And returned Sunday, November fifteenth?” “Sunday noon.”
Nye pondered the mathematics involved, and was encouraged by the conclusion he came to: that within a time span of twenty or twenty-four hours, the suspects could have made a round-trip journey of rather more than eight hundred miles, and, in the process, murder four people.
“Now, Mr. Hickock,” Nye said. “On Sunday, when your son came home, was he alone? Or was Perry Smith with him?”
“No, he was alone. He said he’d left Perry off at the Hotel Olathe.”
Nye, whose normal voice is cuttingly nasal and naturally intimidating, was attempting a subdued timbre, a disarming, throw-away style. “And do you remember – did anything in his manner strike you as unusual? Different?”
“Who?” “Your son.” “When?”
“When he returned from Fort Scott.”
Mr. Hickock ruminated. Then he said, “He seemed the same as ever. Soon as he came in, we sat down to dinner. He was mighty hungry. Started piling his plate before I’d finished the blessing. I remarked on it, said, ‘Dick, you’re shoveling it in as fast as you can work your elbow. Don’t you mean to leave nothing for the rest of us?’ Course, he’s always been a big eater. Pickles. He can eat a whole tub of pickles.”
“And after dinner what did he do?”
“Fell asleep,” said Mr. Hickock, and appeared to be moderately taken aback by his own reply. “Fell fast asleep. And I guess you could say that was unusual. We’d gathered round to watch a basketball game. On the TV. Me and Dick and our other boy, David. Pretty soon Dick was snoring like a buzz saw, and I said to his brother, ‘Lord, I never thought I’d live to see the day Dick would go to sleep at a basketball game.’ Did, though. Slept straight through it. Only woke up long enough to eat some cold supper, and right after went off to bed.”
Mrs. Hickock rethreaded her darning needle; her husband rocked his rocker and sucked on an unlit pipe. The detective’s trained eyes roamed the scrubbed and humble room. In a corner, a gun stood propped against the wall; he had noticed it before. Rising, reaching for it, he said, “You do much hunting, Mr. Hickock?”
“That’s his gun. Dick’s. Him and David go out once in a while. After rabbits, mostly.”
It was a .12-gauge Savage shotgun, Model 300; a delicately etched scene of pheasants in flight ornamented the handle. “How long has Dick had it?”
The question aroused Mrs. Hickock. “That gun cost me over a hundred dollars. Dick bought it on credit, and now the store won’t have it back, even though it’s not hardly a month old and only been used the one time – the start of November, when him and David went to Grinnell on a pheasant shoot. He used ours names to buy it – his daddy let him – so here we are, liable for the payments, and when you think of Walter, sick as he is, and all the things we need, all we do without . . .” She held her breath, as though trying to halt an attack of hiccups. “Are you sure you won’t have a cup of coffee, Mr. Nye? It’s no trouble.”
The detective leaned the gun against the wall, relinquishing it, although he felt certain it was the weapon that had killed the Clutter family. “Thank you, but it’s late, and I have to drive to Topeka,” he said, and then, consulting his notebook, “Now, I’ll just run through this, see if I have it straight. Perry Smith arrived in Kansas Thursday, the twelfth of November. Your son claimed this person came here to collect a sum of money from a sister residing in Fort Scott. That Saturday the two drove to Fort Scott, where they remained overnight – I assume in the home of the sister?”
Mr. Hickock said, “No. They never could find her. Seems like she’d moved.”
Nye smiled. “Nevertheless, they stayed away overnight. And during the week that followed – that is, from the fifteenth to the twenty-first – Dick continued to see his friend Perry Smith, but otherwise, or as far as you know, he maintained a normal routine, lived at home and reported to work every day. On the twenty-first he disappeared, and so did Perry Smith. And since then you’ve not heard from him? He hasn’t written you?”
“He’s afraid to,” said Mrs. Hickock. “Ashamed and afraid.” “Ashamed?”
“Of what he’s done. Of how he’s hurt us again. And afraid because he thinks we won’t forgive him. Like we always have. I And will. You have children, Mr. Nye?”
He nodded.
“Then you know how it is.”
“One thing more. Have you any idea, any at all, where your son might have gone?” “Open a map,” said Mr. Hickock, “Point your finger – maybe that’s it.”
It was late afternoon, and the driver of the car, a middle-aged traveling salesman who shall here be known as Mr. Bell, was tired. He longed to stop for a short nap. However, he was only a hundred miles from his destination – Omaha; Nebraska, the headquarters of the large meat packing company for which he worked. A company rule forbade its salesmen to pick up hitchhikers, but Mr. Bell often disobeyed it, particularly if he was bored and drowsy, so when he saw the two young men standing
