In Cold Blood - Truman Capote [43]
" 'For this killer or killers,'" said Perry, reading aloud. "That's incorrect. The grammar is. It ought to be 'For this killer or these killers.'" Sipping his aspirin-spiked root beer, he went on, "Anyway, I don't believe it. Neither do you. Own up, Dick. Be honest. You don't believe this no clue stuff? Yesterday, after studying the papers, Perry had put the same question, and Dick, who thought he'd disposed of it ("Look. If those cowboys could make the slightest connection, we'd have heard the sound of hoofs a hundred miles off"), was bored at hearing it again. Too bored to protest when Perry once more pursued the matter: "I've always played my hunches. That's why I'm alive today. You know Willie-Jay? He said I was a natural-born 'medium,' and he knew about things like that, he was interested. He said I had a high degree of 'extrasensory perception.' Sort of like having built-in radar - you see things before you see them. The outlines of coming events. Take, like, my brother and his wife. Jimmy and his wife. They were crazy about each other, but he was jealous as hell, and he made her so miserable, being jealous and always thinking she was passing it out behind his back, that she shot herself, and the next day Jimmy put a bullet through his head. When it happened - this was 1949, and I was in Alaska with Dad up around Circle City - I told Dad, 'Jimmy's dead.' A week later we got the news. Lord's truth. Another time, over in Japan, I was helping load a ship, and I sat down to rest a minute. Suddenly a voice inside me said, 'Jump!' I jumped I guess maybe ten feet, and just then, right where I'd been sitting, a ton of stuff came crashing down. I could give you a hundred examples. I don't care if you believe me or not. For instance, right before I had my motorcycle accident I saw the whole thing happen: saw it in my mind - the rain, the skid tracks, me lying there bleeding and my legs broken. That's what I've got now. A premonition. Something tells me this is a trap." He tapped the newspaper. "A lot of prevarications." Dick ordered another hamburger. During the past few days he'd known a hunger that nothing - three successive steaks, a dozen Hershey bars, a pound of gumdrops - seemed to interrupt. Perry, on the other hand, was without appetite; he subsisted on root beer, aspirin, and cigarettes. "No wonder you got leaps," Dick told him. "Aw, come on, baby. Get the bubbles out of your blood. We scored. It was perfect."
"I'm surprised to hear that, all things considered," Perry said. The quietness of his tone italicized the malice of his reply. But Dick took it, even smiled - and his smile was a skillful proposition. Here, it said, wearing a kid grin, was a very personable character, clean-cut, affable, a fellow any man might trust to shave him. "O.K.," Dick said. "Maybe I had some wrong information."
"Hallelujah."
"But on the whole it was perfect. We hit the ball right out of park. It's lost. And it's gonna stay lost. There isn't a single connection."
"I can think of one." Perry had gone too far. He went further: "Floyd - is that the name?" A bit below the belt, but then Dick deserved it, his confidence was like a kite that needed reeling in. Nevertheless, Perry observed with some misgiving the symptoms of fury rearranging Dick's expression: jaw, lips, the whole face slackened; saliva bubbles appeared at the corners of his mouth. Well, if it came to it Perry could defend himself. He was short, several inches shorter than Dick, and his runty, damaged legs were unreliable, but he outweighed his friend, was thicker, had arms that could squeeze the breath out of a bear. To prove it, however