In Cold Blood - Truman Capote [50]
shoe by accident? She must, lying there in the dark, have heard sounds - footfalls, perhaps voices - that led her to suppose thieves were in the house, and so believing must have hurriedly hidden the watch, a gift from her father that she treasured. As for the radio, a gray portable made by Zenith - no doubt about it, the radio was gone. All the same, Dewey could not accept the theory that the family had been slaughtered for paltry profit - "a few dollars and a radio. " To accept it would obliterate his image of the killer - or, rather, killers. He and his associates had definitely decided to pluralize the term. The expert execution of the crimes was proof enough that at least one of the pair commanded an immoderate amount of cool-headed slyness, and was - must be - a person too clever to have done such a deed without calculated motive. Then, too, Dewey had become aware of several particulars that reinforced his conviction that at least one of the murderers was emotionally involved with the victims, and felt for them, even as he destroyed them, a certain twisted tenderness. How else explain the mattress box? The business of the mattress box was one of the things that most tantalized Dewey. Why had the murderers taken the trouble to move the box from the far end of the basement room and lay it on the floor in front of the furnace, unless the intention had been to make Mr. Clutter more comfortable - to provide him, while he contemplated the approaching knife, with a couch less rigid than cold cement? And in studying the death-scene photographs Dewey had distinguished other details that seemed to support his notion of a murderer now and again moved by considerate impulses. "Or" - he could never quite find the word he wanted - "something fussy. And soft. Those bedcovers. Now, what kind of person would do that - tie up two women, the way Bonnie and the girl were tied, and then draw up the bedcovers, tuck them in, like sweet dreams and good night? Or the pillow under Kenyon's head. At first I thought maybe the pillow was put there to make his head a simpler target. Now I think, No, it was done for the same reason the mattress box was spread on the floor - to make the victim more comfortable." But speculation such as these, though they absorbed Dewey, did not gratify him or give him a sense of "getting somewhere." A case was seldom solved by "fancy theories"; he put his faith in facts - "sweated for and sworn to." The quantity of facts to be sought and sifted, and the agenda planned to obtain them, promised perspiration a plenty, entailing, as it did, the tracking down, the "checking out," of hundreds of people, among them all former River Valley Farm employees, friends and family, anyone with whom Mr. Clutter had done business, much or little - a tortoise crawl into the past. For, as Dewey had told his team, "we have to keep going till we know the Clutters better than they ever knew themselves. Until we see the connection between what we found last Sunday morning and something that happened maybe five years ago. The link. Got to be one. Got to." Dewey's wife dozed, but she awakened when she felt him leave their bed, heard him once more answering the telephone, and heard, from the nearby room where her sons slept, sobs, a small boy crying. "Paul?" Ordinarily, Paul was neither troubled nor troublesome - not a whiner, ever. He was too busy digging tunnels in the backyard or practicing to be "the fastest runner in Finney County." But at breakfast that morning he'd burst into tears. His mother had not needed to ask him why; she knew that although he understood only hazily the reasons for the uproar around him, he felt endangered by it - by the harassing telephone, and the strangers at the door, and his father's worry-wearied eyes. She went to comfort Paul. His brother, three years older, helped. "Paul," he said, "you take it easy now, and tomorrow I'll teach you to play poker." Dewey was in the kitchen; Marie, searching for him, found him there, waiting for a pot of coffee to percolate and with the murder-scene photographs spread before