In Cold Blood - Truman Capote [60]
opened." Out walked a person no one present had ever seen before - a man in his middle thirties, dull-eyed, wild-haired, and wearing a hip holster stocked with a .38-caliper pistol. "I guess all of us there had the identical idea - this was him, the one who came and killed them," Mr. Helm continued. "He didn't make a move. Stood quiet. Kind of blinking. They took the gun away, and started asking questions." The man's name was Adrian - Jonathan Daniel Adrian. He was on his way to New Mexico, and at present had no fixed address. For what purpose had he broken into the Clutter house, and how, incidentally, had he managed it? He showed them how. (He had lifted a lid off a water well and crawled through a pipe tunnel that led into the basement.) As for why, he had read about the case and was curious, just wanted to see what the place looked like. "And then," according to Mr. Helm's memory of the episode, "somebody asked him was he a hitchhiker? Hitchhiking his way to New Mexico? No, he said, he was driving his own car. And it was parked down the lane a piece. So everybody went to look at the car. When they found what was inside it, one of the men - maybe it was Al Dewey - said to him, told this Jonathan Daniel Adrian, 'Well, mister, seems like we've got something to discuss.' Because, inside the car, what they'd found was a .12-gauge shotgun. And a hunting knife." A room in a hotel in Mexico City. In the room was an ugly modern bureau with a lavender-tinted mirror, and tucked into a corner of the mirror was a printed warning from the Management: Su dia termina a las 2 p.m. Your day ends at 2 p.m. Guests, in other words, must vacate the room by the stated hour or expect to be charged another day's rent - a luxury that the present occupants were not contemplating. They wondered only whether they could settle the sum already owed. For everything had evolved as Perry had prophesied: Dick had sold the car, and three days later the money, slightly less than two hundred dollars, had largely vanished. On the fourth day Dick had gone out hunting honest work, and that night he had announced to Perry, "Nuts! You know what they pay? What the wages are? For an expert mechanic? Two bucks a day. Mexico! Honey, I've had it. We got to make it out of here. Back to the States. No, now, I'm not going to listen. Diamonds. Buried treasure. Wakeup, little boy. There ain't no caskets of gold. No sunken ship. And even if there was - hell, you can't even swim." And the next day, having borrowed money from the richer of his two fiancés, the banker's widow, Dick bought bus tickets that would take them, via San Diego, as far as Barstow, California. "After that," he said, "we walk." Of course, Perry could have struck out on his own, stayed in Mexico, let Dick go where he damn well wanted. Why not? Hadn't he always been "a loner," and without any "real friends" (except the gray-haired, gray-eyed, and "brilliant" Willie-Jay)? But he was afraid to leave Dick; merely to consider it made him feel "sort of sick," as though he were trying to make up his mind to "jump off a train going ninety-nine miles an hour." The basis of his fear, or so he himself seemed to believe, was a newly grown superstitious certainty that "whatever had to happen won't happen" as long as he and Dick "stick together." Then, too, the severity of Dick's "wake-up" speech, the belligerence with which he proclaimed his theretofore concealed opinion of Perry's dreams and hopes - all this, perversity being what it is, appealed to Perry, hurt and shocked him but charmed him, almost revived his former faith in the tough, the "totally masculine," the pragmatic, the decisive Dick he'd once allowed to boss him. And so, since a sunrise hour on a chilly Mexico City morning in early December, Perry had been prowling about the unheated hotel room assembling and packing his possessions - stealthily, lest he waken the two sleeping shapes lying on one of the room's twin beds: Dick, and the younger of his betrotheds, Inez. There was one belonging of his that need no longer concern him. On their last night