Mockingbird (21 page)

At one point, Nelle got up to admire photographs of Dr. Fenton's three children on a wall. He switched on the office light so she could get a better look.
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As Nelle kept him busy, Truman slipped around the desk and read Fenton's Dictaphone transcript for himself. Hurriedly, he memorized as much as he could, and scribbled down a passage about Mrs. Clutter in particular: “The bed covers are thrown back as though the patient had been in bed and awakened, put the robe on; lying on a stool in front of the dresser is a heating pad and a small bottle of Vicks nose drops. No sign of struggle seen.”
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Returning to his seat, he joined Nelle in asking Fenton a few more questions; finally, they thanked him for his time.

During the whole cloak-and-dagger episode with the transcript, Detective Dewey said nothing.
69

*   *   *

Nelle and Truman arrived at the Deweys' the following Wednesday night, December 30, at about 6:30
P.M.
Marie Dewey had planned quite a spread: a shrimp-and-avocado salad (her mother had sent the avocados from New Orleans), red beans and rice cooked with bacon, cornbread, country-fried steak, and a bottle of sweet white wine. Al introduced the guests to the rest of the family: Alvin Dewey III, twelve; and Paul Dewey, nine.

Marie offered to get drinks for everyone—scotch and soda for Al, vodka and tonic for Nelle and Truman. Nelle invited little Alvin to sit beside her at the spinet piano and learn the bottom half of “Chopsticks,” which he picked up immediately. Paul, not to be outdone, played “Auld Lang Syne” and “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” one of his father's favorites.

For about an hour, the adults sat in the living room, getting better acquainted. (Two days earlier, Nelle and Marie had met for lunch at the Trail Room coffee shop and traded “girl talk” about how Marie and Al courted during World War II.) Al tried to play the role of good host, getting up from his easy chair to refresh drinks, but clearly the strain of seven weeks of relentless investigation was getting to him. His clothes hung loose; he drank three scotches, one right after the other. There was hardly a moment when a cigarette wasn't between his lips. Since the murders in mid-November, the KBI had received 700 tips; of those, he'd followed up on 205 on his own. Ninety-nine percent were worthless.

At about 8:00
P.M
., dinner was ready. As everyone pulled up to the table, the phone rang for the sixth or seventh time since Nelle and Truman had arrived. Marie said it rang at all hours ever since the murders—always a call for Al about some aspect of the case. He got up to answer while they waited to begin eating. From his office down the hall, they could hear him talking louder and louder. When he returned a few minutes later, his voice crackled with excitement.

“Well, if you can keep a secret, this is
it
: our agent out in Las Vegas said they just nabbed those two guys … Smith and Hickock.”

Marie started to cry. “Oh, honey … honey, I can't believe it.”
70

For Nelle and Truman, the news squared with what they had deduced on their own. A rumor had been percolating among the reporters at the Finney County Courthouse about a prisoner, Floyd Wells, in Lansing State Penitentiary, in Kansas, who read in the newspapers about the Clutter murders. Hoping to win a break from the prison authorities and claim the thousand-dollar reward offered by the
Hutchinson News
, Wells had told the warden about a former cellmate of his, Richard Hickock, who had planned to hook up with another guy, Perry Smith, and rob the Clutters. Hickock was convinced that Clutter must have plenty of cash because Wells, a former farmhand on the Clutter place, had told him that there was a safe in the house. After Truman had found out as many details as he could about the rumor, he had written it up as incontrovertible fact, and carefully read a statement to Dewey one day at the courthouse to test his reaction. “Say, Dewey, I hear you've got a good lead going.… What do you think of this story out of the state prison?”
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The bluff worked. Dewey shot Nelle a sharp look, lit a fresh cigarette, and refused to confirm or deny anything. But it was plain that they had hit the mark.

But now, in his euphoria, Dewey threw caution to the wind and put the pieces together for them. The call he had just received was from Detective Nye. The Las Vegas Police had taken into custody Smith, thirty-one, and Hickock, twenty-eight, for a minor traffic violation. Nye had been doing “setups” in several states, alerting the police to be on the lookout for them. As soon as Nye, Dewey, and a third KBI detective, Clarence Duntz, could get to Vegas, they would begin interrogating the suspects, who had been leaving a tantalizing trail of bad checks like bread crumbs all over the Southwest. Dewey got up from the table to retrieve photographs of Smith and Hickock taken during previous arrests.

“I've been carrying those faces around in my head for weeks,” Marie said.
72
One night she dreamed she saw Hickock and Smith at a booth in the Trail Room coffee shop. But she was so frightened she couldn't move.

Al handed around the black-and-white jailhouse portraits—front and side views.

Nelle thought Richard Hickock had a “ghastly face,” due to a disfiguration that made one eye off-center and larger than the other. He was tall and well built. Perry Smith's face, on the other hand, struck Nelle as having eyes that showed a “certain shrewdness and intelligent cunning.”
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The floor-to-ceiling ruler behind him indicated that he was five foot four—exactly Truman's height.

Once everyone had studied the pictures, Al laid out the next steps. Smith and Hickock had been arrested with pairs of boots that matched prints on the Clutters' basement floor—a “Cat's paw” sole and a diamond-tread heel—an early break in the investigation that had been kept secret. (Marie opened a hall closet to retrieve a rubber boot belonging to one of the children to show what Al meant about tread patterns.) The evidence of the boots, plus the Lansing State Penitentiary convict's story, formed a pretty good circumstantial case. But the gold standard in court was signed confessions; Al would have to get out to Las Vegas as quickly as possible to assist in the interrogations. He got out a map and estimated that it would take about a day and a half to drive to Las Vegas if he, Clarence Duntz, and Roy Church left at 7:00
A.M.
Nye had said he could fly there.

“There's a lot of desert between here and Las Vegas,” Dewey said, tapping the map with his finger. “On the way back, I don't care if we only make sixteen miles a day. We'll just drive around and around until we've made them talk. One or the other, whichever's the weaker, we'll kill him with kindness. We've already got them separated … it shouldn't be long before we get them hating each other.”

“Can I go with you?” Truman asked.

“Not this time, pardner.”

From one of the pine cabinets in the kitchen, Dewey got out a bottle of crème de menthe, Marie's “special treasure,” he said, and poured everyone a shot.
74

Years later, Dewey insisted, “Capote got the official word on developments at the press conferences along with everyone else. Some people thought then, and probably still do, that he got next to me and got in on every move of the law. That was not so. He was on his own to get the material for his story or book.… That's the way things were when the good news finally came on December 30.”
75

Marie backed him up: “Alvin refused to talk about the case. We just visited, that's all. Our friendship developed in that way, but the investigation wasn't talked about.”
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But Nelle's notes about everything that was said and done that night in the Deweys' home tell a different story.

*   *   *

The Associated Press and United Press International broke the news of the arrests the next day. The KBI's director, Logan Sanford, had been struggling to keep the investigation under wraps until the last possible moment. A few days earlier, he had met privately with a reporter whose hunches about the suspects' names and motives were correct. Sanford asked the reporter to hold his story until Smith and Hickock were in custody; otherwise, they would be tipped off before the KBI agents could nab them. In exchange for the favor, Sanford promised he would later share everything the bureau had on the case. The reporter said he would wait. When his gentlemen's agreement with Sanford came to light, his newspaper fired him.
77

Nelle and Truman, however, continued to receive updates about the case through their friendship with the Deweys. Marie kept them posted on Al's progress as he crawled over the plains through heavy snowstorms, calling on New Year's Eve while she kept busy taking down the Christmas tree. The travel situation was precarious, she told Nelle—timing was everything. The KBI detectives had to reach Smith and Hickock before they read about themselves in newspapers. The plan was to blindside them about the Clutter murders, then ratchet up the tension by mentioning the existence of an unnamed “living witness”—actually the convict who had bunked with Hickock in the Lansing State Penitentiary. Under pressure, Smith and Hickock might confess to the murders, figuring there was no use holding out. The day after New Year's, Marie felt so stressed she told Nelle she'd driven to the post office, realized she had forgotten the special air mail stamp she needed, and then run out of gas returning to get it.

While they waited for more news from Al, relayed by Marie, Nelle and Truman followed a routine they'd developed that was a far cry from their shaky start a little more than three weeks earlier. Usually they started the day by walking two blocks to radio station KIUL. The news director, Tony Jewell, didn't mind them sifting through the AP or UPI wire services stories that spooled through the clattering teletype machines. Eavesdropping on informal messages between reporters in Garden City and editors on faraway city desks sometimes provided leads for interviews. “Dave,” began one note, “Tell the New York Times man that the undertaker, whose name I'm no longer sure of but I rather believe it's Palmer, loves the sound of his own voice and obviously would like all the publicity he can get. I suggest he try to keep the undertaker's wife out of the picture—she tries to shush her husband all the time.”
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The loquacious mortician would end up on their list of people to see. Next, a stop at the courthouse was always mandatory, in case a press conference was scheduled. But as a result of their pipeline through the Deweys, they knew more than any of the reporters did. These preliminaries out of the way, they went out into the field like anthropologists to continue with their interviews.

By now, they could paint Garden City in broad strokes as a community, even its social hierarchy of respected old families (“determined by the amount of land their ancestors homesteaded,” Nelle noted).
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Next they needed to focus in particular on the Clutters' network of friends to re-create Herb, Bonnie, Nancy, and Kenyon, in order to flesh out the portraits Nelle had created after the visit to River Valley Farm. It was the only way to see them alive—through the eyes of those who had known them well.

On January 2, while Dewey, Duntz, and Church were still plowing their way through snowstorms and toward Las Vegas, Nelle and Truman interviewed Nancy Clutter's best friend, Susan Kidwell. Susan shared a tiny pink-and-yellow apartment with her mother, made more cramped by a huge Hammond organ against one wall.

As Nelle listened quietly to Susan and Truman talk, a vision of what Nancy Clutter valued in a friend became clear. Susan was “completely against the grain of the majority of her contemporaries and life in Holcomb and G. C. [Garden City],” Nelle realized. “Pathetically sensitive and lonely; stands out on landscape like a fine and well-wrought thumb. Girl of remarkable sensibility for 15.… Every cut, every pleasure, everything shows in her eyes.… Loved Nancy as she loved no other person.”
80

Truman used a more cinematic eye to describe Susan: “thin and extremely tall for her age.” “[S]he has a broad-boned but thin and very expressive face, and a poor complection [
sic
]; nevertheless, she is an attractive girl with a good-speaking voice (low, and with rather elegant inflections) and a nice sense of humor.… She has long sensitive fingers; her hair is long, a sort of greenish/brownish blonde, and rolled up at the bottom. She has had an unhappy life; her father deserted Mrs. Kidwell some years ago etc. She and her mother live in a kind of genteel poverty (Mrs. Kidwell, ‘Of course, it's easy for you to see that we once had money').”
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*   *   *

Occasionally, Nelle and Truman went their separate ways in Garden City, particularly when Nelle wanted to act as a listening post. “She became friendly with all the churchgoers,” Truman said.
82
The minutiae she heard from the gossipers in Garden City that he might not have heard contributed to the murmuring subtext that he later channeled into his narrative. “Nelle provided a number of insights and descriptions that Capote would have missed,” said Dolores Hope.
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For instance, Nelle found out that Nancy Clutter bit her nails when she was under stress; that the night of her starring role in the school play she held hands backstage with someone besides her boyfriend, Bobby Rupp (she liked to flirt, one of her teachers said); and afterward, she and Rupp went to a scary midnight movie because it was Friday the thirteenth. Truman later combined these details into a simulated phone conversation between Nancy and her best friend, Susan Kidwell:

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