In Cold Blood - Truman Capote [37]
the elm-shaded lane leading to the Clutter house. Alfred Stoecklein, the only employee who actually lived on the property, was waiting to admit them. They went first to the furnace room in the basement, where the pajama-clad Mr. Clutter had been found sprawled atop the card board mattress box. Finishing there, they moved on to the playroom in which Kenyon had been shot to death. The couch, a relic that Kenyon had rescued and mended and that Nancy had slip-covered and piled with mottoed pillows, was a blood-splashed ruin; like the mattress box, it would have to be burned. Gradually, as the cleaning party progressed from the basement to the second-floor bedrooms where Nancy and her mother had been murdered in their beds, they acquired additional fuel for the impending fire - blood-soiled bedclothes, mattresses, a bedside rug, a Teddy-bear doll. Alfred Stoecklein, not usually a talkative man, had much to say as he fetched hot water and otherwise assisted in the cleaning-up. He wished "folks would stop yappin' and try to understand" why he and his wife, though they lived scarcely a hundred yards from the Clutter home, had heard "nary a nothin'" - not the slightest echo of gun thunder - of the violence taking place. "Sheriff and all them fellas been out here finger printin' and scratchin' around, they got good sense, they understand how it was. How come we didn't hear. For one thing, the wind. A west wind, like it was, would carry the sound t'other way. Another thing, there's that big milo barn 'tween this house and our'n. That old barn 'ud soak up a lotta racket 'fore it reached us. And did you ever think of this? Him that done it, he must've knowed we wouldn't hear. Else he wouldn't have took the chance - shootin' off a shotgun four times in the middle of the night! Why, he'd be crazy. Course, you might say he must be crazy anyhow. To go doing what he did. But my opinion, him that done it had it figured out to the final T. He knowed. And there's one thing I know, too. Me and the Missis, we've slept our last night on this place. We're movin’ out to a house alongside the highway." The men worked from noon to dusk. When the time came to burn what they had collected, they piled it on a pickup truck with Stoecklein at the wheel, drove deep into the farm's north field, a flat place full of color, though a single color - the shimmering tawny yellow of November wheat stubble. They unloaded the truck and made a pyramid of Nancy's pillows, the bedclothes, the mattresses, the playroom couch; Stoecklein sprinkled it with kerosene and struck a match. Of those present, none had been closer to the Clutter family than Andy Erhart. Gentle, genially dignified, a scholar with work-calloused hands and sunburned neck, he'd been a classmate of Herb's at Kansas State University. "We were friends for thirty years," he said some time afterward, and during those decades Erhart had seen his friend evolve from a poorly paid County Agricultural Agent into one of the region's most widely known and respected farm ranchers: "Everything Herb had, he earned - with the help of God. He was a modest man but a proud man as he had a right to be. He raised a fine family. He made something of his life." But that life, and what he'd made of it - how could it happen, Erhart wondered as he watched the bonfire catch. How was it possible that such effort, such plain virtue, could overnight be reduced to this - smoke, thinning as it rose and was received by the big, annihilating sky?
The Kansas Bureau of Investigation, a state-wide organization with headquarters in Topeka, had a staff of nineteen experienced detectives scattered through the state, and the services of these men are available whenever a case seems beyond the competence of local authorities. The Bureau's Garden City representative, and the agent responsible for a sizable portion of western Kansas, is a lean and handsome fourth-generation Kansan of forty-seven named Alvin Adams Dewey. It was inevitable that Earl Robinson, the sheriff of Finney County, should ask Al Dewey to take charge of the Clutter case.