In Cold Blood - Truman Capote [55]
Thanksgiving passed, and the pheasant season came to a halt, but not the beautiful Indian summer, with its flow of clear, pure days. The last of the out-of-town newsmen, convinced that the case was never going to be solved, left Garden City. But the case was by no means closed for the people of Finney County, and least of all for those who patronized Holcomb's favorite meeting place, Hartman's Cafe.
"Since the trouble started, we've been doing all the business we can handle," Mrs. Hartman said, gazing around her snug domain, every scrap of which was being sat or stood or leaned upon by tobacco-scented, coffee-drinking farmers, farm helpers, and ranch hands. "Just a bunch of old women," added Mrs. Hartman's cousin, Postmistress Clare, who happened to be on the premises. "If it was spring and work to be done, they wouldn't be here. But wheat's winter's on the way, they got nothing to do but sit around and scare each other. You know Bill Brown, down to the Telegram? See the editorial he wrote? That one he called it 'Another Crime'? Said, 'It's time for everyone to stop wagging loose tongues.' Because that's a crime, too - telling plain-out lies. But what can you expect? Look around you. Rattlesnakes. Varmints. Rumor-mongers. See anything else? Ha! Like dash you do." One rumor originating in Hartman's Cafe involved Taylor Jones, a rancher whose property adjoins River Valley Farm. In the opinion of a good part of the cafe's clientele, Mr. Jones and his family, not the Clutters, were the murderer's intended victims. "It makes harder sense," argued one of those who held this view." Taylor Jones, he's a richer man than Herb Clutter ever was. Now, pretend the fellow who done it wasn't anyone from here-abouts. Pretend he'd been maybe hired to kill, and all he had was instructions on how to get to the house. Well, it would be mighty easy to make a mistake - take a wrong turn - and end up at Herb's place 'stead of Taylor's." The "Jones Theory" was much repeated - especially to the Joneses, a dignified and sensible family, who refused to be flustered.
A lunch counter, a few tables, an alcove harboring a hot grill, and an icebox and a radio - that's all there is to Hartman's Cafe. "But our customers like it," says the proprietress. "Got to. Nowhere else for them to go. 'Less they drive seven miles one direction or fifteen the other. Anyway, we run a friendly place, and the coffee's good since Mable came to work" - Mabel being Mrs. Helm. "After the tragedy, I said, 'Mabel, now that you're out of a job, why don't you come give me a hand at the cafe? Cook a little. Wait counter.' How it turned out - the only bad feature is, everybody comes in here, they pester her with questions. About the tragedy. But Mabel's not like Cousin Myrt. Or me. She's shy. Besides, she doesn't know anything special. No more than anybody else." But by and large the Hartman congregation continued to suspect that Mabel Helm knew a thing or two that she was holding back. And, of course, she did. Dewey had had several conversations with her and had requested that everything they said be kept secret. Particularly, she was not to mention the missing radio or the watch found in Nancy's shoe. Which is why she said to Mrs. Archibald William Warren-Browne, "Anybody reads the papers knows as much as I do. More. Because I don't read them." Square, squat, in the earlier forties, an English woman fitted out with an accent almost incoherently upper-class, Mrs. Archibald William Warren-Browne did not at all resemble the cafe's other frequenters, and seemed, within that setting, like a peacock trapped in a turkey pen. Once, explaining to an acquaintance why she and her husband had abandoned "family estates in the North of England," exchanging the hereditary home - "the jolliest, oh, the prettiest old priory" - for an old and highly un-jolly farm-house