In Cold Blood - Truman Capote [42]
"Not a thing," she assured him. "Only, when you come home tonight, you'll have to ring the bell. I've had all the locks changed." Now he understood, and said, "Don't worry, honey. Just lock the doors and turn on the porch light." After he'd hung up, a colleague asked, "What's wrong? Marie scared?"
"Hell, yes," Dewey said. "Her, and everybody else."
Not everybody. Certainly not Holcomb's widowed postmistress, the intrepid Mrs. Myrtle Clare, who scorned her fellow townsmen as "a lily-livered lot, shaking in their boots afraid to shut their eyes," and said of herself, "This old girl, she's sleeping good as ever. Anybody wants to play a trick on me, let 'em try." (Eleven months later a gun-toting team of masked bandits took her at her word by invading the post office and relieving the lady of nine hundred and fifty dollars.) As usual, Mrs. Clare's notions conformed with those of very few. "Around here," according to the proprietor of one Garden City hardware store, "locks and bolts are the fastest-going item. Folks ain't particular what brand they buy; they just want them to hold." Imagination, of course, can open any door - turn the key and let terror walk right in. Tuesday, at dawn, a carload of pheasant hunters from Colorado - strangers, ignorant of the local disaster - were startled by what they saw as they crossed the prairies and passed through Holcomb: windows ablaze, almost every window in almost every house, and, in the brightly lit rooms, fully clothed people, even entire families, who had sat the whole night wide awake, watchful, listening. Of what were they frightened? "It might happen again." That, with variations, was the customary response, however, one woman, a schoolteacher, observed, "Feeling wouldn't run half so high if this had happened to anyone except the Clutters. Anyone less admired. Prosperous. Secure. But that family represented everything people hereabouts really value and respect, and that such a thing could happen to them - well, it's like being told there is no God. It makes life seem pointless. I don't think people are so much frightened as they are deeply depressed." Another reason, the simplest, the ugliest, was that this hitherto peaceful congregation of neighbors and old friends had suddenly to endure the unique experience of distrusting each other; understandably, they believed that the murderer was among themselves, and, to the last man, endorsed an opinion advanced by Arthur Clutter, a brother of the deceased, who, while talking to journalists in the lobby of a Garden City hotel on November 17, had said, "When this is cleared up, I'll wager whoever did it was someone within ten miles of where we now stand."
Approximately four hundred miles east of where Arthur Clutter then stood, two young men were sharing a booth in the Eagle Buffet, a Kansas City diner. One - narrow-faced, and with a blue cat tattooed on his right hand - had polished off several chicken-salad sandwiches and was now eying his companion's meal: an untouched hamburger and a glass of root beer in which three aspirin were dissolving.
"Perry, baby," Dick said, "you don't want that burger. I'll take it." Perry shoved the plate across the table. "Christ! Can't you let me concentrate?"
"You don't have to read it fifty times." The reference was to a front-page article in the November 17 edition of the Kansas City Star. Headlined Clues are few in slaying of 4, the article, which was a follow-up of the previous day's initial announcement of the murders, ended with a summarizing paragraph: The investigators are left faced with a search for a killer or killers whose cunning is apparent if his (or their) motive is not. For this killer or killers: 'Carefully cut the telephone cords of the home's two telephones. Bound and gagged their victims expertly, with no evidence of a struggle with