In Cold Blood - Truman Capote [40]
The prints, not noticeable to the naked eye, registered on film; indeed, the delineating glare of a flashbulb had revealed their presence with superb exactness. These prints, together with another footmark found on the same cardboard cover - the bold and bloody impression of a Cat's Paw half sole - were the only "serious clues" the investigators could claim. Not that they were claiming them; Dewey and his team had decided to keep secret the existence of this evidence. Among the other articles on Dewey's desk was Nancy Clutter's diary. He had glanced through it, no more than that, and now he settled down to an earnest reading of the day-by-day entries, which began on her thirteenth birthday and ended some two months short of her seventeenth; the unsensational confidings of an intelligent child who adored animals, who liked to read, cook, sew, dance, ride horseback - a popular, pretty, virginal girl who thought it "fun to flirt" but was nevertheless "only really and truly in love with Bobby." Dewey read the final entry first. It consisted of three lines written an hour or two before she died: "Jolene K. came over and I showed her how to make a cherry pie. Practiced with Roxie. Bobby here and we watched TV. Left at eleven." Young Rupp, the last person known to have seen the family alive, had already undergone one extensive interrogation, and although he'd told a straightforward story of having passed "just an ordinary evening" with the Clutters, he was scheduled for a second interview, at which time he was to be given a polygraph test. The plain fact was that the police were not quite ready to dismiss him as a suspect. Dewey himself, did not believe the boy had "anything to do with it"; still, it was true that at this early stage of the investigation, Bobby was the only person to whom a motive, however feeble, could be attributed. Here and there in the diary, Nancy referred to the situation that was supposed to have created the motive: her father's insistence that she and Bobby "break off," stop "seeing so much of each other," his objection being that the Clutters were Methodist, the Rupps Catholic - a circumstance that in his view completely canceled any hope the young couple might have of one day marrying. But the diary notation that most tantalized Dewey was unrelated to the Clutter-Rupp, Methodist-Catholic impasse. Rather, it concerned a cat, the mysterious demise of Nancy's favorite pet, Boobs, whom, according to an entry dated two weeks prior to her own death, she'd found "lying in the barn," the victim, or so she suspected (without saying why),of a poisoner: "Poor Boobs. I buried him in a special place." On reading this, Dewey felt it could be "very important." If the cat had been poisoned, might not this act have been a small, malicious prelude to the murders? He determined to find the "special place" where Nancy had buried her pet, even though it meant combing the vast whole of River Valley Farm. While Dewey was occupying himself with the diary, his principal assistants, the Agents Church, Duntz, and Nye, were crisscrossing the countryside, talking, as Duntz said, "to anyone who could tell us anything": the faculty of the Holcomb School, where both Nancy and Kenyon had been honor-roll, straight-A students; the employees of River Valley Farm (a staff that in spring and summer sometimes amounted to as many as eighteen men but in the present fallow season consisted of Gerald Van Vleet and three hired men, plus Mrs. Helm); friends of the victims; their neighbors; and, very particularly, their relatives. From far and near, some twenty of the last had arrived to attend the funeral services, which were to take place Wednesday morning. The youngest of the K.B.I. group, Harold Nye, who was a peppy little man of thirty-four with restless, distrustful eyes and a sharp nose, chin, and mind, had been assigned what he called "the damned delicate business" of interviewing the Clutter kinfolk: "It's painful for you and it's painful for them. When it comes to murder, you can't respect grief. Or privacy. Or personal feelings. You've