In Cold Blood - Truman Capote [39]
alone in the master bedroom on the ground floor, that Mrs. Clutter and the children occupied separate bedrooms on the second floor. This person, so Dewey imagined, approached the house on foot, probably around midnight. The windows were dark, the Clutters asleep, and as for Teddy, the farm's watchdog - well, Teddy was famously gun-shy. He would have cringed at the sight of the intruder's weapon, whimpered, and crept away. On entering the house, the killer first disposed of the telephone installations - one in Mr. Clutter's office, the other in the kitchen - and then, after cutting the wires, he went to Mr. Clutter's bedroom and awakened him. Mr. Clutter, at the mercy of the gun-bearing visitor, was forced to obey instructions - forced to accompany him to the second floor, where they aroused the rest of the family. Then, with cord and adhesive tape supplied by the killer, Mr. Clutter bound and gagged his wife, bound his daughter (who, inexplicably, had not been gagged), and roped them to their beds. Next, father and son were escorted to the basement, and there Mr. Clutter was made to tape Kenyon and tie him to the playroom couch. Then Mr. Clutter was taken into the furnace room, hit on the head, gagged, and trussed. Now free to do as he pleased, the murderer killed them one by one, each time carefully collecting the discharged shell. When he had finished, he turned out all the lights and left. It might have happened that way; if was just possible. But Dewey had doubts: "If Herb had thought his family was in danger, mortal danger, he would have fought like a tiger. And Herb was no ninny - a strong guy in top condition. Kenyon too - big as his dad, bigger, a big-shouldered boy. It's hard to see how one man, armed or not, could have handled the two of them." More over, there was reason to suppose that all four had been bound by the same person: in all four instances the same type of knot, a half hitch, was used. Dewey - and the majority of his colleagues, as well - favored the second hypothesis, which in many essentials followed the first, the important difference being that the killer was not alone but had an accomplice, who helped subdue the family, tape, and tie them. Still, as a theory, this, too, had its faults. Dewey, for example, found it difficult to understand "how two individuals could reach the same degree of rage, the kind of psychopathic rage it took to commit such a crime." He went on to explain: "Assuming murderer was someone known to the family, a member of this community; assuming that he was an ordinary man, ordinary except that he had a quirk, an insane grudge against the Clutters, or of the Clutters - where did he find a partner, someone crazy enough to help him? It doesn't add up. It doesn't make sense. But then, come right down to it, nothing does." After the news conference, Dewey retired to his office, a room the sheriff had temporarily lent him. It contained a desk and straight chairs. The desk was littered with what Dewey would some day constitute courtroom exhibits: the adhesive tape and the yards of cord removed from the victims and sealed in plastic sacks (as clues, neither item seemed very promising, for both were common-brand products, obtainable here in the United States), and photographs taken at the scene of the crime by a police photographer - twenty blown-up glossy-print pictures of Mr. Clutter's shattered skull, his son's demolished face, Nancy's bound hands, her mother's death-dulled, staring eyes, and so on. In days to come, Dewey was to spend hours examining these photographs, hoping that he might suddenly see something," that a meaningful detail would declare itself. "Like those puzzles. The ones that ask, 'How many animals can you find in this picture?' In a way, that's what I'm trying to do. Find the hidden animals. I feel they must be there - if only I could see them. " As a matter of fact, one of the photographs, a close-up of Mr. Clutter and the mattress box upon which he lay, already provided a valuable surprise: footprints, the dusty trackings of shoes with diamond-patterned soles.