Dewey asks if he remembers which one. “Believe it was a Phillips 66.”
“What time was this?”
“Around midnight. Dick said it was seven miles more to Holcomb. All the rest of the way, he kept talking to himself, saying this ought to be here and that ought to be there – according to the instructions he’d memorized. I hardly realized it when we went, through Holcomb, it was such a little settlement. We crossed a railroad track. Suddenly Dick said, ‘This is it, this has to be it.’ It was the entrance to a private road, lined with trees. We slowed down and turned off the lights. Didn’t need them. Account of the moon. There wasn’t nothing else up there – not a cloud, nothing. Just that full moon. It was like broad day, and when we started up the road, Dick said, ‘Look at this spread! The barns! That house! Don’t tell me this guy ain’t loaded.’ But I didn’t like the setup, the, atmosphere; it was sort of too impressive. We parked in the shadows of a tree. While we were sitting there, a light came on – not In the main house but a house maybe a hundred yards to the left. Dick said it was the hired man’s house; he knew because of the diagram. But he said it was a damn sight nearer the Clutter house than it was supposed to be. Then the light went off. Mr. Dewey – the witness you mentioned. Is that who you meant – the hired man?”
“No. He never heard a sound. But his wife was nursing a sick baby. He said they were up and down the whole night.”
“A sick baby. Well, I wondered. While we were still sitting there, it happened again – a light flashed on and off. And that really put bubbles in my blood. I told Dick to count me out. If he was determined to go ahead with it, he’d have to do it alone. He started the car, we were leaving, and I thought, Bless Jesus. I’ve always trusted my intuitions; they’ve saved my life more than once. But halfway down the road Dick stopped. He was sore as hell. I could see he was thinking, Here I’ve set up this big score, here we’ve come all this way, and now this punk wants to chicken out. He said, ‘Maybe you think I ain’t got the guts to do it alone. But, by God, I’ll show you who’s got guts.’ There was some liquor in the car. We each had a drink, and I told him, ‘O.K., Dick. I’m with you.’ So we turned back. Parked where we had before. In the shadows of a tree. Dick put on gloves; I’d already put on mine. He carried the knife and a flashlight. I had the gun. The house looked tremendous in the moonlight. Looked empty. I remember hoping there was nobody home -“
Dewey says, “But you saw a dog?” “No.”
“The family had an old gun-shy dog. We couldn’t understand why he didn’t bark. Unless he’d seen a gun and bolted.”
“Well, I didn’t see anything or nobody. That’s why I never believed it. About an eyewitness.” “Not eyewitness. Witness. Someone whose testimony associates you and Hickock with this case.”
“Oh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Him. And Dick always said he’d be too scared. Ha!”
Duntz, not to be diverted, reminds him, “Hickock had the knife. You had the gun. How did you get into the house?”
“The door was unlocked. A side door. It took us into Mr. Clutter’s office. Then we waited in the dark. Listening. But the only sound was the wind. There was quite a little wind outside. It made the trees move, and you could hear the leaves. The one window was curtained with Venetian blinds, but moonlight was coming through. I closed the blinds, and Dick turned on his flashlight. We saw the desk. The safe was supposed to be in the wall directly behind the desk, but we couldn’t find it. It was a paneled wall, and there were books and framed maps, and I noticed, on a shelf, a terrific pair of binoculars. I decided I was going to take them with me when we left there.” “Did you?” asks Dewey, for the binoculars had not been missed.
Smith nods. “We sold them in Mexico.” “Sorry. Go on.”
“Well, when we couldn’t find the safe, Dick doused the flashlight and we moved in darkness out of the office and across a parlor, a living room. Dick whispered to me couldn’t I walk quieter. But he was just as bad. Every step we took made a racket. We came to a hall and a door, and Dick, remembering the diagram, said it was a bedroom. He shined the flashlight and opened the door. A man said, ‘Honey?’ He’d been asleep, and he blinked and said, ‘Is that you, honey?’ Dick asked him, ‘Are you Mr. Clutter?’ He was wide awake now; he sat up and said, ‘Who is it? What do you want?’ Dick told him, very polite, like we were a couple of door-to-door salesmen, ‘We want to talk to you, sir. In your office, please.’ And Mr. Clutter, barefoot, just wearing pajamas, he went with us to the office and we turned on the office lights.
“Up till then he hadn’t been able to see us very good. I think what he saw hit him hard. Dick says, ‘Now, sir, all we want you to do is show us where you keep that safe.’ But Mr. Clutter says, ‘What safe?’ He says he don’t have any safe. I knew right then it was true. He had that kind of face. You just knew whatever he told you was pretty much the truth. But Dick shouted at him, ‘Don’t lie to me, you sonofabitch! I know goddam well you got a safe!’ My feeling was nobody had ever spoken to Mr. Clutter like that. But he looked Dick straight in the eye and told him, being very mild about it – said, well, he was sorry but he just didn’t have any safe. Dick tapped him on the chest with the knife, says, ‘Show us where that safe is or you’re gonna be a good bit sorrier.’ But Mr. Clutter – oh, you could see he was scared, but his voice stayed mild and steady – he went on denying he had a safe.
“Sometime along in there, I fixed the telephone. The one in the office. I ripped out the wires. And I asked Mr. Clutter if there were any other telephones in the house. He said yes, there was one in the kitchen. So I took the flashlight and went to the kitchen – it was quite a distance from the office. When I found the telephone, I removed the receiver and cut the line with a pair of pliers. Then, heading back, I heard a noise. A creaking over-head. I stopped at the foot of the stairs leading to the second floor. It was dark, and I didn’t dare use the flashlight. But I could tell there was someone there. At the top of the stairs, silhouetted; against a window. A figure. Then it moved away.”
Dewey imagines it must have been Nancy. He’d often theorized, on the basis of the gold wristwatch found tucked in the toe of a shoe in her closet, that Nancy had awakened, heard persons in the house, thought they might be thieves, and prudently hidden the watch, her most valuable property.
“For all I knew, maybe it was somebody with a gun. But Dick wouldn’t even listen to me. He was so busy playing tough boy. Bossing Mr. Clutter around. Now he’d brought him back to the bedroom. He was counting the money in Mr. Clutter’s billfold. There was about thirty dollars. He threw the billfold on the bed and told him, ‘You’ve got more money in this house than that. A rich man like you. Living on a spread like this.’ Mr. Clutter said that was all the cash he had, and explained he always did business by check.
He offered to write us a check. Dick just blew up – ‘What kind of Mongolians do you think we are?’ – and I thought Dick was ready to smash him, so I said, ‘Dick. Listen to me. There’s somebody awake upstairs.’ Mr. Clutter told us the only people upstairs were his wife and a son and daughter. Dick wanted to know if the wife had any money, and Mr. Clutter said if she did, it would be very little, a few dollars, and he asked us – really kind of broke down – please not to bother her, because she was an invalid, she’d been very ill for a long time. But Dick insisted on going upstairs. He made Mr. Clutter lead the way.
“At the foot of the stairs, Mr. Clutter switched on lights that lighted the hall above, and as we were going up, he said, ‘I don’t know why you boys want to do this. I’ve never done you any harm. I
never saw you before.’ That’s when Dick told him, ‘Shut up! When we want you to talk, we’ll tell you.’ Wasn’t anybody in the upstairs hall, and all the doors were shut. Mr. Clutter pointed out the rooms where the boy and girl were supposed to be sleeping, then opened his wife’s door. He lighted a lamp beside the bed and told her, ‘It’s all right, sweetheart.
