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By Root 460 0

himself with a bomb. A hand grenade stuffed with buckshot"), or anonymous persons with poison-pen minds ("Know them Ls? Foreigners? Don't work? Give parties? Serve cocktails? Where's the money come from? Wouldn't surprise me a darn if they ain't at the roots of this Clutter trouble"), or nervous ladies alarmed by the gossip going around, rumors that knew neither ceiling nor cellar ("Alvin, now, I've known you since you were a boy. And I want you to tell me straight out whether it's so. I loved and respected Mr. Clutter, and I refuse to believe that that man, that Christian - I refuse to believe he was chasing after women ..."). But most of those who telephoned were responsible citizens wanting to be helpful ("I wonder if you've interviewed Nancy's friend, Sue Kidwell? I was talking to the child, and she said something that struck me. She said the last time she ever spoke to Nancy, Nancy told her Mr. Clutter was in a real bad mood. Had been the past three weeks. That she thought he was very worried about something, so worried he'd taken to smoking cigarettes . . ."). Either that or the callers were people officially concerned - law officers and sheriffs from other parts of the state ("This may be something, may not, but a bartender here says he over heard two fellows discussing the case in terms made it sound like they had a lot to do with it . . ."). And while none of these conversations had as yet done more than make extra work for the investigators, it was always possible that the next one might be, as Dewey put it, "the break that brings down the curtain." On answering the present call, Dewey immediately heard "I want to confess." He said, "To whom am I speaking, please?" The caller, a man, repeated his original assertion, and added, "I did it. I killed them all."

"Yes," said Dewey. "Now, if I could have your name and address . . ."

"Oh, no, you don't," said the man, his voice thick with inebriated indignation. "I'm not going to tell you anything. Not till I get the reward. You send the reward, then I'll tell you who I am. That's final." Dewey went back to bed. "No, honey," he said. "Nothing important. Just another drunk."

"What did he want?"

"Wanted to confess. Provided we sent the reward first." (Akansas paper, the Hutchinson News, had offered a thousand dollars for information leading to the solution of the crime.)

"Alvin, are you lighting another cigarette? Honestly, Alvin, can't you at least try to sleep?" He was too tense to sleep, even if the telephone could be silenced - too fretful and frustrated. None of his "leads" had led anywhere, except, perhaps, down a blind alley toward the blankest of walls. Bobby Rupp? The polygraph machine had eliminated Bobby. And Mr. Smith, the farmer who tied rope knots identical with those used by the murderer - he, too, was a discarded suspect, having established that on the night of the crime he'd been "off in Oklahoma." Which left the Johns, father and son, but they had also submitted provable alibis. "So," to quote Harold Nye, "it all adds up to a nice round number. Zero." Even the hunt for the grave of Nancy's cat had come to nothing. Nevertheless, there had been one or two meaningful developments. First, while sorting Nancy's clothes, Mrs. Elaine Selsor, her aunt, had found tucked in the toe of a shoe a gold wristwatch. Second, accompanied by a K.B.I. agent, Mrs. Helm had explored every room at River Valley Farm, toured the house in the expectation that she might notice something awry or absent, and she had. It happened in Kenyon's room. Mrs. Helm looked and looked, paced round and round the room with pursed lips, touching this and that - Kenyon's old baseball mitt, Kenyon's mud-spattered work boots, his pathetic abandoned spectacles. All the while she kept whispering, "Something here is wrong, I feel it, I know it, but I don't know what it is." And then she did know. "It's the radio! Where is Kenyon's little radio?" Taken together, these discoveries forced Dewey to consider again the possibility of "plain robbery" as a motive. Surely that watch had not tumbled into Nancy's