I Am Scout (13 page)

*   *   *

That fall, Nelle was biding her time waiting for galleys of the book to arrive when Truman phoned in mid-November. An item in
The New York Times
had caught his attention, headlined “Wealthy Farmer,
3
of Family Slain.” It read, in part:

Holcomb, Kan., Nov.
15
(UPI)—A wealthy wheat farmer, his wife and their two young children were found shot to death today in their home. They had been killed by shotgun blasts at close range after being bound and gagged.

The father,
48
-year-old Herbert W. Clutter, was found in the basement with his son, Kenyon,
15
. His wife Bonnie,
45
, and a daughter, Nancy,
16
, were in their beds.

There were no signs of a struggle, and nothing had been stolen. The telephone lines had been cut.

“This is apparently the case of a psychopathic killer,” Sheriff Earl Robinson said.
50

Harold Ross, editor of
The New Yorker
magazine, had assigned Truman to use the item as a springboard for writing about the impact of a quadruple murder on a small town. It was going to be a tough assignment. The Kansas story involved murder, and the killer or killers were still on the loose. Truman, slight, blond, bespectacled, was looking for someone to go with him.

His idea was to interview dozens of Holcomb residents and create a composite of the town's traumatized psyche. It sounded like an adventure that was poles apart from the drudgery of writing alone, and Nelle accepted instantly. “He said it would be a tremendously involved job and would take two people,” she explained. “The crime intrigued him, and I'm intrigued with crime—and, boy, I wanted to go. It was deep calling to deep.”
51

Before they could go, however, they needed a contact in Kansas who was influential, someone who could open doors. Bennett Cerf, Truman's publisher at Random House, happened to know the president of Kansas State University, James McCain. Mr. McCain offered that if Truman spoke to the English faculty, McCain would provide letters of introduction to key people in Garden City, Kansas, the nearest big town to Holcomb.

So, on the strength of this slim connection, Nelle and Truman prepared to travel by train to Kansas during the second week of December
1959
.

They met at Grand Central Terminal, the most convenient location for both of them, and at about
5
:
30
P
.
M
., walked to the gleaming
20
th Century Limited, one of the finest passenger trains in the country at that time. They had a pair of roomettes reserved for the
800
-mile run to Chicago, where they would catch the Santa Fe Super Chief going west. At
6
:
00
P
.
M
. sharp, the train pulled out, heading north along the Hudson River and west to Buffalo. Sometime during the night it would turn southwest, along the southern shore of Lake Erie, and head straight for Chicago.

Then it was south to St. Louis, where they changed trains and continued on to Manhattan, Kansas, and Kansas State University. Truman spoke to the English faculty at the university, as promised. For the trip to Garden City, Nelle and Truman rented a Chevrolet and settled in for the almost
300
-mile drive straight south.

Chapter 6

“See NL's Notes”

They arrived at twilight in garden city, a town of
11
,
000
on the high western Kansas wheat plain, as the sky was turning a deep icy green. The radio kept repeating the same bulletin at intervals: “Police authorities, continuing their investigation of the tragic Clutter slaying, have requested that anyone with pertinent information please contact the sheriff's office.”
1
Driving down North Main Street, Truman and Nelle glanced expectantly left and right for the Warren Hotel. It was supposed to be the best and closest accommodation to the Clutter farm in Holcomb, a village of
270
residents, seven miles west on US-
50
.

They registered for adjoining rooms and then took the elevator upstairs to rest. The drive from Manhattan, Kansas, was monotonous, the last
100
miles of it through country so flat and featureless that a willow tree by a pond seemed interesting.

The next day, December
16
, they walked a block to the Finney County Courthouse, the headquarters of the murder investigation. The person they needed to see was Kansas Bureau of Investigation detective Alvin Dewey, who had been appointed to coordinate the investigation by KBI chief Logan Sanford. Dewey was both a former Finney County sheriff and a former FBI agent. Chief Sanford had given him the additional responsibility of handling the press because he was not easily ruffled. In the field, a team of investigators was combing western Kansas for leads.

Nelle and Truman consulted a hand-painted directory on the first floor of the courthouse and took the stairs to the second. A secretary greeted them and escorted them to Dewey's office.

Alvin Dewey was “just plain handsome,” Nelle decided on the spot, and made a point of saying so in her notes.
2
Dark-haired and dressed in a blue suit, he was seated at a mahogany desk positioned catty-corner in a cramped room. His mission as a lawman seemed defined by two prominent items in the room: a large map of the United States on the wall, and a thick criminal statute book on the desk. Dewey's brown eyes sized Nelle up—“a tall brunette, a good looker,” he thought, indicating that Nelle had dressed well to help Truman make a favorable impression.
3

Dewey invited them to sit down. His curiosity was piqued: he hadn't seen either of them among the reporters who had been hanging around during the past three weeks.

Truman, about five foot four and wearing a sheepskin coat, a long scarf that reached the floor, and moccasins—his version of western wear, apparently—acted as though he thought he was pretty important. Nelle took her cue from Truman and waited for him to begin a carefully rehearsed introduction. Dewey concealed a smile behind a drag on his Winston cigarette when he heard the sound of his visitor's babyish voice.

“Mr. Dewey, I am Truman Capote and this is my friend, Nelle Harper Lee. She's a writer, too.”
The New Yorker
magazine, he explained, had assigned him to write an article about the Clutter case. Miss Lee was his assistant. Now they needed to get down to
business.
They were here to find out the facts about the murder, the family, and how the town was reacting.

Dewey listened noncommittally. They sounded like average reporters trying to get the inside scoop. “You're free to attend press conferences,” he said. “I hold them about once a day.”

“But I'm not a newspaperman,” Truman insisted. “I need to talk to
you
in depth.… What I'm going to write will take months. What I am here for is to do a very special story on the family up to and including the murders.”

Dewey indicated that he hadn't heard anything to make him change his original offer: they could attend press conferences with the rest of their kind.

“Look,” Truman said, struggling to separate himself from newspapermen with daily deadlines, “it really doesn't make any difference to me if the case is ever solved or not.”
4

Dewey's face darkened, and Nelle sensed immediately that Truman had just torpedoed the mission. In fact, privately Dewey had been worrying for three weeks about the trail growing cold, and the dread of defeat was starting to gnaw at him.
5

Anger suddenly got the better of him. “I'd like to see your press card, Mr. Cappuchi,” he snapped.
6

Truman let the mispronunciation pass, seeing that they were off on the wrong foot. “I don't have one,” he said mildly.

The get-to-know-you meeting had turned into a showdown. Deciding it was best to leave, Nelle rose. Both men got to their feet. Dewey bid them a stiff good-bye and, after they had gone, returned to his work.

“From then on,” Alvin Dewey said later, “he and his friend joined the news people at every conference. They were quiet, attentive, asked few questions, and, as far as I could tell, caused no commotion. I did hear they were hard at work, interviewing everyone, people said … in Holcomb, up and down Garden City's Main Street, in farm homes, in the coffee-drinking places, in the schools, everywhere.… Once Miss Lee broke the ice, I was told, Capote could get people to talking about the subject closest to their hearts, themselves.”
7

*   *   *

Nelle had accompanied Truman to Kansas as his salaried “assistant researchist”—a term he invented for her. Their assignment was to take a six-inch news item in the
New York Times
about the murder of the farm family in Holcomb, just a pinprick on the map, and find the humanity buried beneath the crime. They would have to find out everything about the family—Herb and Bonnie Clutter, and their children, teenagers Nancy and Kenyon—so the Clutters would be real. Truman wanted to accomplish all this without the benefit of taking notes or tape-recording during interviews. He was convinced that people were more guarded when they could see they were going on the record. He would just talk to people instead, conduct interviews as conversations.

Nelle's job was to listen and observe subtleties that Truman might be too busy to notice. Then they would return to the hotel and separately write down everything they could recall. Nelle's gift for creating character sketches turned out to complement Truman's ability to get people to open up. Many times over the next month, Truman's jottings would end with “See NL's notes,” to remind himself to use her insights later.

If they drew a blank about a fact or a remark, they would prod each other's memories. In instances when key information was missing or unclear, they would have to go back and visit a person a second or a third time. “Together we would get it right,” Nelle said.
8

*   *   *

Ironically, one of the biggest obstacles to getting good interviews was Truman himself. From the beginning, he just didn't go over very well with people. “Nelle looked like normal folk, she was just a fantastic lady,” said Harold Nye, one of the principal KBI detectives running down leads on the Clutter case, “but Truman was an absolute flake.”
9
Mr. Nye, who at one point went five days and nights without sleep during the week after the murders, had no patience for snoopers from the big city.

Neither did postmistress Myrtle T. Clare. “Capote came walking around here real uppity and superior-like and acting so strange that I think people was scared of him. He was real foreign-like, and nobody would open their doors for him, afraid he'd knock them in the head.”
10

“I thought Capote was queero,” said Gerald Van Vleet, Clutter's business partner. “He was nosy as hell and very, very rude. He came out to my farm on a few occasions to talk to me, and I tried to avoid him.”
11

Perry Smith (right), one of the Clutter family murderers, receiving a mental fitness examination in March 1960 before his trial. (AP photo)

Smith's partner Dick Hickock was talkative and friendly. “Never seen anyone so poised, relaxed, free & easy in the face of four 1st-degree murder charges,” Nelle marveled in her notes. (AP photo)