In Cold Blood - Truman Capote [108]
"Next morning we woke up to find they'd rolled us and beat it," said Hickock. "Didn't get much off me. But Perry lost his wallet, with forty or fifty dollars."
"What did you do about it?"
"There wasn't nothing to do."
"You could've notified the police."
"Aw, come on. Quit it. Notify the police. For your information, a guy on parole's not allowed to booze. Or associate with another Old Grad - "
"All right, Dick. It's Sunday. The fifteenth of November. Tell us what you did that day from the moment you checked out of Fun Haven."
"Well, we ate breakfast at a truck stop near Happy Hill. Then we drove to Olathe, and I dropped Perry off at the hotel where he was living. I'd say that was around eleven. Afterward, I went home and had dinner with the family. Same as every Sunday-Watched TV - a basketball game, or maybe it was football. I was pretty tired."
"When did you next see Perry Smith?"
"Monday. He came by where I worked. Bob Sands' Body Shop."
"And what did you talk about? Mexico?"
"Well, we still liked the idea, even if we hadn't got hold of the money to do all we had in mind - put ourselves in business down there. But we wanted to go, and it seemed worth the risk."
"Worth another stretch in Lansing?"
"That didn't figure. See, we never intended coming Stateside again." Nye, who had been jotting notes in a notebook, said, "On the day following the check spree - that would be the twenty-first - you and your friend Smith disappeared. Now, Dick, please out-line your movements between then and the time of your arrest here in Las Vegas. Just a rough idea." Hickock whistled and rolled his eyes. "Wow!" he said, and then, then, summoning his talent for something very like total recall, he began an account of the long ride - the approximately ten thousand miles he and Smith had covered in the past six weeks. He talked for an hour and twenty-five minutes - from two-fifty to four-fifteen - and told, while Nye attempted to list them, of highways and hotels, motels, rivers, towns, and cities, a chorus of entwining names: Apache, El Paso, Corpus Christi, Santillo, San Luis Potosi, Acapulco, San Diego, Dallas, Omaha, Sweetwater, Stillwater, Tenville Junction, Tallahassee, Needles, Miami, Hotel Nuevo Waldorf, Somerset Hotel, Hotel Simone, Arrowhead Motel, Cherokee Motel, and many, many more. He gave them the name of the man in Mexico to whom he'd sold his own old 1949 Chevrolet, and confessed that he had stolen a newer model in Iowa. He described persons he and his partner had met: a Mexican widow, rich and sexy; Otto, a German "millionaire"; a "swish" pair of Negro prizefighters driving a "swish" lavender Cadillac; the blind proprietor of a Florida rattlesnake farm; a dying old man and his grandson; and others. And when he had finished he sat with folded arms and a pleased smile, as though waiting to be commended for the humor, the clarity, and the candor of his traveler's tale. But Nye, in pursuit of the narrative, raced his pen, and Church, lazily slamming a shut hand against an open palm, said nothing - until suddenly he said. "I guess you know why we're here." Hickock's mouth straightened - his posture, too.
"I guess you realize we wouldn't have come all the way to Nevada just to chat with a couple of two-bit check chiselers." Nye had closed the notebook. He, too, stared at the prisoner, and observed that a cluster of veins had appeared in his left temple.
"Would we, Dick?"
"What?"
"Come this far to talk about a bunch of checks."
"I can't think of any other reason." Nye