In Cold Blood - Truman Capote [97]
In Miami Beach, 335 Ocean Drive is the address of the Somerset Hotel, a small, square building painted more or less white, with many lavender touches, among them a lavender sign that reads, "VACANCY - LOWEST RATES - BEACH FACILITIES - ALWAYS A SEABREEZE." It is one of a row of little stucco-and-cement hotels lining a white, melancholy street. In December, 1959, the Somerset's "beach facilities" consisted of two beach umbrellas stuck in a strip of sand at the rear of-the hotel. One umbrella, pink, had written upon it, "We Serve Valentine Ice-Cream." At noon on Christmas Day, a quartet of women lay under and around it, a transistor radio serenading them. The second umbrella, blue and bearing the command "Tan with Coppertone," sheltered Dick and Perry, who for five days had been living at the Somerset, in a double room renting for eighteen dollars weekly. Perry said, "You never wished me a Merry Christmas."
"Merry Christmas, honey. And a Happy New Year." Dick wore bathing trunks, but Perry, as in Acapulco, refused to expose his injured legs - he feared the sight might "offend" other beach-goers - and therefore sat fully clothed, wearing even socks and shoes. Still, he was comparatively content, and when Dick stood up and started performing exercises - handstands, meant to impress the ladies beneath the pink umbrella - he occupied himself with the Miami Herald. Presently he came across an inner-page story that won his entire attention. It concerned murder, the slaying of a Florida family, a Mr. and Mrs. Clifford Walker, their four-year-old son, and their two-year-old daughter. Each of the victims, though not bound or gagged, had been shot through the head with a .22 weapon. The crime, clueless and apparently motiveless, had taken place Saturday night, December19, at the Walker home, on a cattle-raising ranch not far from Tallahassee. Perry interrupted Dick's athletics to read the story aloud, and said, "Where were we last Saturday night?"
"Tallahassee?"
"I'm asking you." Dick concentrated. On Thursday night, taking turns at the wheel, they had driven out of Kansas and through Missouri into Arkansas and over the Ozarks, "up" to Louisiana, where a burned-out generator stopped them early Friday morning. (A second-hand replacement, bought in Shreveport, cost twenty-two fifty.) That night they'd slept parked by the side of the road somewhere near the Alabama-Florida border. The next day's journey was an un-hurried affair, had included several touristic diversions - visits to an alligator farm and a rattlesnake ranch, a ride in a glass-bottomed boat over a silvery-clear swamp lake, a late and long and costly broiled-lobster lunch at a roadside seafood restaurant. Delightful day! But both were exhausted when they arrived at Tallahassee, and decided to spend the night there. "Yes, Tallahassee," Dick said.
"Amazing!" Perry glanced through the article again. "Know what I wouldn't be surprised? If this wasn't done by a lunatic. Some nut that read about what happened out in Kansas." Dick, because he didn't care to hear Perry "get going on that subject," shrugged and grinned and trotted down to the ocean's edge, where he ambled awhile over the surf-drenched sand, here and there stooping to collect a seashell. As a boy he'd so envied the son of a neighbor who had gone to the Gulf Coast on holiday and returned with a box full of shells - so hated him - that he'd stolen the shells and one by one crushed them with a hammer. Envy was constantly with him; the