Truman Capote: In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences

“Mrs. Katz? Will you hold the line a moment, please?” She walked the length of the house to her father’s office. The office, which had an outside entrance for ordinary visitors, was separated from the parlor by a sliding door; though Mr. Clutter occasionally shared the office with Gerald Van Vleet, a young man who assisted him with the management of the farm, it was fundamentally his retreat—an orderly sanctuary, paneled in walnut veneer, where, surrounded by weather barometers, rain charts, a pair of binoculars, he sat like a captain in his cabin, a navigator piloting River Valley’s sometimes risky passage through the seasons.

“Never mind,” he said, responding to Nancy’s problem, “Skip 4-H. I’ll take Kenyon instead.”

And so, lifting the office phone, Nancy told Mrs. Katz yes, fine, bring Jolene right on over. But she hung up with a frown. “It’s peculiar,” she said as she looked around the room and saw in it her father helping Kenyon add a column of figures, and, at his desk by the window, Mr. Van Vleet, who had a kind of brooding, tugged good looks that led her to call him Heathcliff behind hit back. “But I keep smelling cigarette smoke.” “On your breath?” inquired Kenyon.

“No, funny one. Yours.” That quieted him, for Kenyon, as he knew she knew, did once in a while sneak a puff—but, then, so did Nancy. Mr. Clutter clapped his hands. “That’s all. This is an office.” Now, upstairs, she changed into faded Levis and a green sweater, and fastened round her wrist her third most valued belonging, a gold watch; her closest cat friend, Evinrude, ranked above it, and surmounting even Evinrude was Bobby’s signet ring, cumbersome proof of her “going-steady” status, which she wore (when she wore it; the least flare-up and off it came) on a thumb, for even with the use of adhesive tape its man-size girth could not, be made to fit a more suitable finger. Nancy was a pretty girl, lean and boyishly agile, and the prettiest things about her were her short-bobbed, shining chestnut hair (brushed a hundred strokes each morning, the same number at night) and her soap-polished complexion, still faintly freckled and rose-brown from last summer’s sun. But it was her eyes, wide apart, darkly translucent, like ale held to the light, that made her immediately likable, that at once announced her lack of suspicion, her considered and yet so easily triggered kindliness. “Nancy!” Kenyon called. “Susan on the phone.”

Susan Kidwell, her confidante. Again she answered in the kitchen.

“Tell,” said Susan, who invariably launched a telephone session this command. “And, to begin, tell why you were flirting with Jerry Roth.” Like Bobby, Jerry Roth was a school basket-ball star.

“Last night? Good grief, I wasn’t flirting. You mean because we were holding hands? He just came backstage during the show. And I was so nervous. So he held my hand. To give me courage.”

“Very sweet. Then what?”

“Bobby took me to the spook movie. And we held hands.”

“Was it scary? Not Bobby. The movie.”

“He didn’t think so; he just laughed. But you know me. Boo!—and I fall off the seat.”

“What are you eating?”

“Nothing.”

“I know—your fingernails,” said Susan, guessing correctly. Much as Nancy tried, she could not break the habit of nibbling her nails, and, whenever she was troubled, chewing them right to the quick. “Tell. Something wrong?”

“No.”

“Nancy. C’est moi… ” Susan was studying French. “Well—Daddy. He’s been in an awful mood the last three weeks. Awful. At least, around me. And when I got home last night he started that again.”

“ That needed no amplification; it was a subject that the two friends had discussed completely, and upon which they agreed. Susan, summarizing the problem from Nancy’s viewpoint, had once said, “You love Bobby now, and you need him. But deep down even Bobby knows there isn’t any future in it. Later on, when we go off to Manhattan, everything will seem a new world.” Kansas State University is in Manhattan, and the two girls planned to enroll there as art students, and to room together. “Everything will change, whether you want it to or not. But you can’t change it now, living here in Holcomb, seeing Bobby everyday, sitting in the same classes—and there’s no reason to. Because you and Bobby are a very happy thing. And it will be something happy to think back about—if you’re left alone. Can’t you make your father understand that?” No, she could not. “Because,” as he explained it to Susan, “whenever I start to say something, he looks at me as though I must not love him. Or as though I loved him less. And suddenly I’m tongue-tied; I just want to be his daughter and do as he wishes.” To this Susan had no reply it embodied emotions, a relationship, beyond her experience. She lived alone with her mother, who taught music at the Holcomb School, and she did not remember her own father very clearly, for years ago, in their native California, Mr. Kidwell had one day left home and not come back.

“And, anyway,” Nancy continued now, “I’m not sure it’s me. That’s making him grouchy. Something else—he’s really worried about something.” “Your mother?”

No other friend of Nancy’s would have presumed to make such suggestion. Susan, however, was privileged. When she had first appeared in Holcomb, a melancholy, imaginative child, willowy, wan and sensitive, then eight, a year younger than Nancy, the Clutters had so ardently adopted her that the fatherless little girl California soon came to seem a member of the family. For years the two friends had been inseparable, each, by virtue the rarity of similar and equal sensibilities, irreplaceable to the other. But then, this past September, Susan had transferred from local school to the vaster, supposedly superior one in Garden City. It was the usual procedure for Holcomb students who intended going on to college, but Mr. Clutter, a die-hard community booster, considered such defections an affront to community spirit; the Holcomb School was good enough for his children, and there they would remain. Thus, the girls were no longer always together, and Nancy deeply felt the daytime absence of her friend, the one person with whom she need be neither brave nor reticent.

“Well. But we’re all so happy about Mother—you heard the wonderful news.” Then Nancy said, “Listen,” and hesitated, as if summoning nerve to make an outrageous remark. “ Why do I smelling smoke? Honestly, I think I’m losing my mind. I get into the car, I walk into a room, and it’s as though somebody had just been there, smoking a cigarette. It isn’t Mother, it can’t be Kenyon. Kenyon wouldn’t dare…”Nor, very likely, would any visitor to the Clutter home, which was pointedly devoid of ashtrays. Slowly, Susan grasped the implication, but it was ludicrous. Regardless of what his private anxieties might be, she could not believe that Mr. Clutter was finding secret solace in tobacco. Before she could ask if this was really what Nancy meant, Nancy cut her off: “Sorry, Susie. I’ve got to go. Mrs. Katz is here.”

Dick was driving a black 1949 Chevrolet sedan. As Perry got in, he checked the back seat to see if his guitar was safely there; the previous night, after playing for a party of Dick’s friends, he had forgotten and left it in the car. It was an old Gibson guitar, sandpapered and waxed to a honey-yellow finish. Another sort of instrument lay beside it—a twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun, brand-new, blue-barreled, and with a sportsman’s scene of pheasants in flight etched along the stock. A flashlight, a fishing knife, a pair of leather gloves, and a hunting vest fully packed with shells contributed further atmosphere to this curious still life.