In Cold Blood - Truman Capote [10]
"You wearing that?" Perry asked, indicating the vest. Dick rapped his knuckles against the windshield. "Knock, knock. Excuse me, sir. We've been out hunting and lost our way. If we could use the phone ..."
"Si, senor. Yo comprendo"
"A cinch," said Dick. "I promise you, honey, we'll blast hair all over them walls."
" ‘Those' walls," said Perry. A dictionary buff, a devotee of obscure words, he had been intent on improving his companion's grammar and expanding his vocabulary ever since they had celled together at Kansas State Penitentiary. Far from resenting these lessons, the pupil, to please his tutor, once composed a sheaf of poems, and though the verses were very obscene, Perry, who thought them nevertheless hilarious, had had the manuscript leather-bound in a prison shop and its title, Dirty Jokes, stamped in gold. Dick was wearing a blue jumper suit; lettering stitched across the back of it advertised Bob Sands' Body Shop. He and Perry drove along the main street of Olathe until they arrived at the Bob Sands establishment, an auto-repair garage, where Dick had been employed since his release from the penitentiary in mid-August. A capable mechanic, he earned sixty dollars a week. He deserved no salary for the work he planned to do this morning, but Mr. Sands, who left him in charge on Saturdays, would never know he had paid his hireling to overhaul his own car. With Perry assisting him, he went to work. They changed the oil, adjusted the clutch, recharged the battery, replaced a throw-outbearing, and put new tires on the rear wheels - all necessary undertakings, for between today and tomorrow the aged Chevrolet was expected to perform punishing feats.
"Because the old man was around," said Dick, answering Perry, who wanted to know why he had been late in meeting him at the Little Jewel. "I didn't want him to see me taking the gun out of the house. Christ, then he would have knowed I wasn't telling the truth."
" ‘Known.' But what did you say? Finally?"
"Like we said. I said we'd be gone overnight - said we was going to visit your sister in Fort Scott. On account of she was holding money for you. Fifteen hundred dollars." Perry had a sister, and had once had two, but the surviving one did not live in Fort Scott, a Kansas town eighty-five miles from Olathe; in fact, he was uncertain of her present address.
"And was he sore?"
"Why should he be sore?"
"Because he hates me," said Perry, whose voice was both gentle and prim - a voice that, though soft, manufactured each word exactly, ejected it like a smoke ring issuing from a parson's mouth. "So does your mother. I could see - the ineffable way they looked at me. "Dick shrugged. "Nothing to do with you. As such. It's just they don't like me seeing anybody from The Walls." Twice married, twice divorced, now twenty-eight and the father of three boys, Dick had received his parole on the condition that he reside with his parents; the family, which included a younger brother, lived on a small farm near Olathe. "Anybody wearing the fraternity pin," he added, and touched a blue dot tattooed under his left eye - an insigne, a visible password, by which certain former prison inmates could identify him.
"I understand," said Perry. "I sympathize with that. They're good people. She's a real sweet person, your mother." Dick nodded; he thought so, too. At noon they put down their tools, and Dick, racing the engine, listening to the consistent hum, was satisfied that a thorough job had been done.
Nancy and her protegee, Jolene