In Cold Blood - Truman Capote [54]
wife to suicide and killed himself the next. Then he heard Dick say, "Deal me out, baby. I'm a normal." Wasn't that a horse's laugh? But never mind, let it pass. "Deep down," Perry continued, "way, way rock-bottom, I never thought I could do it. A thing like that." And at once he recognized his error: Dick would, of course, answer by asking, "How about the nigger?" When he'd told Dick that story, it was because he'd wanted Dick's friendship, wanted Dick to "respect" him, think him "hard," as much "the masculine type" as he had considered Dick to be. And so one day after they had both read and were discussing a Reader's Digest article entitled "How Good a Character Detective Are You?" ("As you wait in a dentist's office or a railway station, try studying the give-away signs in people around you. Watch the way they walk, for example. A stiff-legged gait can reveal a rigid, unbending personality; a shambling walk a lack of determination"), Perry had said "I've always been an outstanding character detective, otherwise I'd be dead today. Like if I couldn't judge when to trust somebody. You never can much. But I've come to trust you, Dick. You'll see I do, because I'm going to put myself in your power. I'm going to tell you something I never told anybody. Not even Willie-Jay. About the time I fixed a guy." And Perry saw, as he went on, that Dick was interested; he was really listening. "It was a couple of summers ago. Out in Vegas. I was living in this old boarding house - it used to be a fancy cathouse. But all the fancy was gone. It was a place they should have torn down ten years back; anyway, it was sort of coming down by itself. The cheapest rooms were in the attic, and I lived up there. So did this nigger. His name was King; he was a transient. We were the only two up there - us and a million cucarachas. King, he wasn't too young, but he'd done roadwork and other outdoor stuff - he had a good build. He wore glasses, and he read a lot. He never shut his door, time I passed by, he was always lying there buck-naked, was out of work, and said he'd saved a few dollars from his job, said he wanted to stay in bed awhile, read and fan himself and drink beer. The stuff he read, it was just junk - comic books and cowboy junk. He was O.K. Sometimes we'd have a beer together, and once he lent me ten dollars. I had no cause to hurt him. But one night we were sitting in the attic, it was so hot you couldn't sleep, so I said, 'Come on, King, let's go for a drive.' I had an old car I'd stripped and souped and painted silver - the Silver Ghost, I called it. We went for a long drive. Drove way out in the desert. Out there it was cool. We parked and drank a few more beers. King got out of the car, and I followed after him. He didn't see I'd picked up this chain. A bicycle chain I kept under the seat. Actually, I had no real idea to do it till I did it. I hit him across the face. Broke his glasses. I kept right on. Afterward, I didn't feel a thing. I left him there, and never heard a word about it. Maybe nobody ever found him. Just buzzards." There was some truth in the story. Perry had known, under the circumstances stated, a Negro named King. But if the man was dead today it was none of Perry's doing; he'd never raised a hand against him. For all he knew, King might still be lying a bed some-where, fanning himself and sipping beer.
"Or did you? Kill him like you said?" Dick asked. Perry was not a gifted liar, or a prolific one; however, once he had told a fiction he usually stuck by it. "Sure I did. Only - a nigger. It's not the same." Presently, he said, "Know what it is that really bugs me? About that other thing? It's just I don't believe it - that anyone can get away with a thing like that." And he suspected that Dick didn't, either. For Dick was at least partly inhabited by Perry's mystical-moral apprehensions. Thus: "Now, just shut up!" The car was moving. A hundred feet ahead, a dog trotted along the side of the road. Dick swerved toward it. It was an old half-dead mongrel, brittle-boned and mangy, and the impact, as it met the car,