“Well, I hope you get it.” “Well, I hope we both do.”
Afterward, as he crossed the darkening courthouse square, pensively scuffing through dry mounds of un-raked leaves, Dewey wondered at his lack of elation. Why, when he now knew that the suspects were not forever lost in Alaska or Mexico or Timbuctoo, when the next second an arrest might be made – why was it he felt none of the excitement he ought to feel? The dream was at fault, for the treadmill mood of it had lingered, making him question Nye’s assertions – in a sense, disbelieve them. He did not believe that Hickock and Smith would be caught in Kansas City. They were invulnerable.
In Miami Beach, 335 Ocean Drive is the address of the Somerset Hotel, a small, square building painted more or less white, with many lavender touches, among them a lavender sign that reads, “VACANCY – LOWEST RATES – BEACH FACILITIES – ALWAYS A SEABREEZE.” It is one of a row of little stucco-and-cement hotels lining a white, melancholy street. In December, 1959, the Somerset’s “beach facilities” consisted of two beach umbrellas stuck in a strip of sand at the rear of-the hotel. One umbrella, pink, had written upon it, “We Serve Valentine Ice-Cream.” At noon on Christmas Day, a quartet of women lay under and around it, a transistor radio serenading them. The second umbrella, blue and bearing the command “Tan with Coppertone,” sheltered Dick and Perry, who for five days had been living at the Somerset, in a double room renting for eighteen dollars weekly.
Perry said, “You never wished me a Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas, honey. And a Happy New Year.” Dick wore bathing trunks, but Perry, as in Acapulco, refused to expose his injured legs – he feared the sight might “offend” other beach-goers – and therefore sat fully clothed, wearing even socks and shoes. Still, he was comparatively content, and when Dick stood up and started performing exercises – handstands, meant to impress the ladies beneath the pink umbrella – he occupied himself with the Miami Herald. Presently he came across an inner-page story that won his entire attention. It concerned murder, the slaying of a Florida family, a Mr. and Mrs. Clifford Walker, their four-year-old son, and their two-year-old daughter. Each of the victims, though not bound or gagged, had been shot through the head with a .22 weapon. The crime, clueless and apparently motiveless, had taken place Saturday night, December19, at the Walker home, on a cattle-raising ranch not far from Tallahassee.
Perry interrupted Dick’s athletics to read the story aloud, and said, “Where were we last Saturday night?”
“Tallahassee?” “I’m asking you.”
Dick concentrated. On Thursday night, taking turns at the wheel, they had driven out of Kansas and through Missouri into Arkansas and over the Ozarks, “up” to Louisiana, where a burned-out generator stopped them early Friday morning. (A second-hand replacement, bought in
Shreveport, cost twenty-two fifty.) That night they’d slept parked by the side of the road somewhere near the Alabama-Florida border. The next day’s journey was an un-hurried affair, had included several touristic diversions – visits to an alligator farm and a rattlesnake ranch, a ride in a glass-bottomed boat over a silvery-clear swamp lake, a late and long and costly broiled-lobster lunch at a roadside seafood restaurant. Delightful day! But both were exhausted when they arrived at Tallahassee, and decided to spend the night there. “Yes, Tallahassee,” Dick said. “Amazing!” Perry glanced through the article again. “Know what I wouldn’t be surprised? If this wasn’t done by a lunatic. Some nut that read about what happened out in Kansas.”
Dick, because he didn’t care to hear Perry “get going on that subject,” shrugged and grinned and trotted down to the ocean’s edge, where he ambled awhile over the surf-drenched sand, here and there stooping to collect a seashell.
As a boy he’d so envied the son of a neighbor who had gone to the Gulf Coast on holiday and returned with a box full of shells – so hated him – that he’d stolen the shells and one by one crushed them with a hammer. Envy was constantly with him; the Enemy was anyone who was someone he wanted to be or who had anything he wanted to have. For instance, the man he had seen by the pool at the Fontaine-bleau. Miles away, shrouded in a summery veil of heat-haze and sea-sparkle, he could see the towers of the pale, expensive hotels – the Fontaine bleau, the Eden Roc, the Roney Plaza. On their second day in Miami he had suggested to Perry that they invade these pleasure-domes. “Maybe pick up a coupla rich women,” he had said. Perry had been most reluctant; he felt people would stare at them because of their khaki trousers and T-shirts.
Actually, their tour, of the Fontaine bleau’s gaudy premises went unnoticed, amid the men striding about in Bermuda shorts of candy-striped raw silk, and the women wearing bathing suits and mink simultaneously. The trespassers had loitered in the lobby, in the garden, lounged by the swimming pool. It was there that Dick saw the man, who was his own age – twenty-eight or thirty. He could have been a “gambler or lawyer or maybe a gangster from Chicago.” Whatever he was, he looked as though he knew the glories of money and power. A blonde who resembled Marilyn Monroe was kneading him with suntan oil, and his lazy, beringed hand reached for a tumbler of iced orange juice. All that belonged to him, Dick, but he would never have it. Why should that sonofabitch have everything, while he had nothing? Why should that “big-shot bastard” have all the luck? With a knife in his hand, he, Dick, had power.
Big-shot bastards like that had better be careful or he might “open them up and let a little of their hick spill on the floor ” But Dick’s day was ruined. The beautiful blonde rubbing on the suntan oil had ruined it. He’d said to Perry, “Let’s pull the hell out of here.”
Now a young girl, probably twelve, was drawing figures in the sand, carving out big, crude faces with a piece of driftwood. Dick, pausing to admire her art, offered the shells he had gathered. “They make good eyes,” he said. The child accepted the gift, where upon Dick smiled and winked at her, He was sorry he felt as he did about her, for his sexual interest in female children was a failing of which he was “sincerely ashamed” – a secret he’d not confessed to anyone and hoped no one suspected (though he was aware that Perry had reason to), because other people might not think it “normal.” That, to be sure, was something he was certain he was – “a normal.” Seducing pubescent girls, as he had done “eight or nine” times in the last several years, did not disprove it, for if the truth were known, most real men had the same desires he had. He took the child’s hand and said, “You’re my baby girl. My little sweetheart.” But she objected. Her hand, held by his, twitched like a fish on a hook, and he recognized the astounded expression in her eyes from earlier incidents in his career. He let go, laughed lightly, and said, “Just a game. Don’t you like games?”
Perry, still reclining under the blue umbrella, had observed the scene and realized Dick’s purpose at once, and despised him for it; he had “no respect for people who can’t control themselves sexually,” especially when the lack of control involved what he called “pervertiness” – “bothering kids,” “queer stuff,” rape. And he thought he had made his views obvious to Dick; indeed, hadn’t they almost had a fist fight when quite recently he had prevented Dick from raping a terrified young girl? However, he wouldn’t care to repeat that particular test of strength. He was relieved when he saw the child walk away from Dick.
Christmas carols were in the air; they issued from the radio of the four women and mixed strangely with Miami’s sunshine and the cries of the querulous, never thoroughly silent seagulls. “Oh, come let us adore Him, Oh, come let us adore Him” : a cathedral choir, an exalted music that moved Perry to tears – which refused to stop, even after the music did. And as was not
uncommon when he was thus afflicted, he dwelt upon a possibility that had for him “tremendous fascination” : suicide. As a child he had often thought of killing himself, but those were sentimental reveries born of a wish to punish his father and mother and other enemies. From young manhood onward, however, the prospect of ending his life had more and more lost its fantastic quality. That, he must remember, was Jimmy’s “solution,” and Fern’s, too. And lately it had come to seem not just an alternative but the specific death awaiting him.
Anyway, he couldn’t see that he had “a lot to live for.”
Hot islands and buried gold, diving deep in fire-blue seas toward sunken treasure – such dreams were gone. Gone, too, was “Perry O’Parsons,” the name invented for the singing sensation of stage and screen that he’d half-seriously hoped some day to be. Perry O’Parsons had died without having ever lived. What was there to look forward to? He and Dick were “running a race without a finish line” – that was how it struck him. And now, after
