In Cold Blood - Truman Capote [87]
"Gosh! Now, there's a tall order," said the clerk in response to Nye's request for a description of the elder Smith. "The guy's out of a book. He calls himself the Lone Wolf. A lot of his mail comes addressed that way - the Lone Wolf. He doesn't receive many letters, no, but bales of catalogues and advertising pamphlets. You'd be surprised the number of people send away for that stuff - just to get some mail, must be. How old? I'd say sixty. Dresses Western - cowboy boots and a big ten-gallon hat. He told me he used to be with the rodeo. I've talked to him quite a bit. He's been in here almost every day the last few years. Once in a while he'd disappear, stay away a month or so - always claimed he'd been off prospecting. One day last August a young man came here to the window. He said he was looking for his father, Tex John Smith, and did I know where he could find him. He didn't look much like his dad; the Wolf is so thin-lipped and Irish, and this boy looked almost pure Indian - hair black as boot polish, with eyes to match. But next morning in walks the Wolf and confirms it; he told me his son had just got out of the Army and that they were going to Alaska. He's an old Alaska hand. I think he once owned a hotel there, or some kind of hunting lodge. He said he expected to be gone about two years. Nope, never seen him since, him or his boy."
T he Johnson family were recent arrivals in their San Francisco community - a middle-class, middle-income real-estate development high in the hills north of the city. On the afternoon of December 18, 1959, young Mrs. Johnson was expecting guests; three women of the neighborhood were coming by for coffee and cake and perhaps a game of cards. The hostess was tense; it would be the first time she had entertained in her new home. Now, while she was listening for the doorbell, she made a final tour, pausing to dispose of a speck of lint or alter an arrangement of Christmas poinsettias. The house, like the others on the slanting hillside street, was a conventional suburban ranch house, pleasant and common place. Mrs. Johnson loved it; she was in love with the redwood paneling, the wall-to-wall carpeting, the picture windows fore and aft, the view that the rear window provided - hills, a valley, then sky and ocean. And she was proud of the small back garden; her husband - by profession an insurance salesman, by inclination a carpenter - had built around it a white picket fence, and inside it a house for the family dog, and a sand-box and swings for the children. At the moment, all four - dog, two little boys, and a girl - were playing there under a mild sky; she hoped they would be happy in the garden until the guests had gone. When the doorbell sounded and Mrs. Johnson went to the door, she was wearing what she considered her most becoming dress, a yellow knit that hugged her figure and heightened the pale-tea shine of her Cherokee coloring and the blackness of her feather-bobbed hair. She opened the door, prepared to admit three neighbors; instead, she discovered two strangers - men who tipped their hats and flipped open badge-studded billfolds. "Mrs. Johnson?" one of them said. "My name is Nye. This is Inspector Guthrie. We're attached to the San Francisco police, and we've just received an inquiry from Kansas concerning your brother, Perry Edward Smith. It seems he hasn't been reporting to his parole officer, and we wondered if you could tell us anything of his present whereabouts." Mrs. Johnson was not distressed - and definitely not surprised to learn that the police were once more interested in her brother's activities.