Sparkles's Book Club -- Part III of In Cold Blood (Answer)

Floyd Wells.

If not for Mr. Wells, the Clutter slayings might to this day remain unsolved. A former employee of Herb Clutter's and cellmate of Richard Hickock, it was Floyd Wells who informed Hickock of the Clutter estate while they were sharing quarters; and it was Floyd Wells who, after hearing of a thousand-dollar reward for the arrest and capture of the killers, ultimately turned the wanted men in.

And I ask, what's the world coming to? If you can't trust a criminal to keep a secret, who can you trust?

The hunt begins, and the K.B.I. (the main focus is on detective Harold Nye), careful not to nab Smith and Hickock before suitable evidence (word to Dilated Peoples) is assembled, travel about questioning the suspects' family and acquaintances. Nye's visits include Richard Hickock's family (who are ignorant that their son is wanted for murder, instead led to believe that he's wanted for parole violation) and Perry Smith's sister, where again we are reminded of the Smith siblings' haunting legacy:

Before she was twenty, Fern-Joy was beginning the day with a bottle of beer.
Then, one summer night, she fell from the window of a hotel room. Falling she
struck a theater marquee, bounced off it, and rolled under the wheels of a taxi.
Above, in the vacated room, police found her shoes, a moneyless purse, an empty
wiskey bottle.

One could understand Fern and forgive her, but Jimmy was a different matter.
Mrs. Johnson was looking at a picture of him in which he was dressed as a
sailor; during the war he had served in the Navy. Slender, a pale young seafarer
with an elongated face of slightly dour saintliness, he stood with an arm around
the waist of the girl he had married and, in Mrs. Johnson's estimation, ought
not to have, for they had nothing in common -- the serious Jimmy and his
teen-age San Diego fleet-follower whose glass beads reflected a now long-faded
sun. And yet what Jimmy had felt for her was beyond normal love; it was passion
-- a passion that was in part pathological. As for the girl, she must
have loved him, and loved him completely, or she would not have done as she did.
If only Jimmy had believed that! Or been capable of believing it. But jealousy
imprisoned him. He was mortified by thoughts of the men she had slept with
before their marriage; he was convinced, moreover, that she remained promiscuous
-- that every time he went to sea, or even left her alone for the day, she
betrayed him with a multitude of lovers, whose existence he unendingly demanded
that she admit. Then she aimed a shotgun at a point between her eyes and pressed
the trigger with her toe [word to Kurt Cobain]. When Jimmy
found her, he didn't call the police. He picked her up and put her on the bed
and lay down beside her. Sometime around dawn of the next day, he reloaded the
gun and killed himself.

Meanwhile, Smith and Hickock, destitute after failing to make their dreams come true south of the border, stand at the side of a stretch of deserted California highway, their grizzly plan to rob and kill and steal the car of the first suitable Good Samaritan to offer them a lift. A man does pick up the two strangers, but his life is spared by a miraculous circumstance.

The pair finally make it back to Kansas City, unaware that they are wanted for the Clutter murders, and it is Hickock who goes on another of his patented bad check-passing sprees. The K.B.I. is alerted...but the criminals slip away just in time.

Which leads to the biggest misstep of the book: a clumsy, cliche-ridden dream sequence in which Alvin Dewey pursues the wanted men. Although Capote doesn't try to fool the reader, cynically writing asides such as it was like a dream! and How did this happen? Could he be dreaming?, the account of Dewey's dream could have been condensed thusly to better effect:

Alvin Dewey, so driven and obsessed with capturing the men to whom only recently he could put faces and names, had even vividly dreamt of their capture; or, more precisely, their near capture, for in Dewey's dream the suspects vanished into thin air before they could be apprehended.

(More succinct, less trite, non? But it was the 60's; people did a lot of drugs back in those days.)

Smith and Hickock wind up in Miami, on Christmas. It is here that Perry reads in a newspaper about the slaying of a Tallahassee family, the motive behind the killings unknown. Though the murder of the Clutter and Tallahassee families were nearly identical (shotguns the primary murder weapon, the victims tied up, four members of each family slain) and the presence of Smith and Hickock in Tallahassee at the time the latter occurred are extremely suspicious, both men adamantly denied having anything to do with the Florida case, a mystery which to this day remains unsolved.

And I'm inclined to believe them, based on how quickly they confessed (read: sang like fucking birds) to the Clutter murders after finally getting nabbed in Las Vegas.

The two interrogation sessions are terrific, specifically the almost tantric questioning methods -- Roy Church's handling of Hickock foremost -- the K.B.I. agents utilize to throw the pair off their game, culminating in Hickock's confession that "Perry Smith killed the Clutters...It was Perry. I couldn't stop him. He killed them all."

Yet Answer's most chilling confession is reserved for Perry Smith, who, handcuffed en route to Garden City, divulges the gruesome details of the early morning hours of November 15, 1959 when the Clutters, Herb and Bonnie, their children Nancy and Kenyon, were tied up and then brutally murdered. Hickock believed, based on the word of Floyd Wells, that the Clutter home contained a safe bearing approximately ten thousand dollars in cash, though no such safe existed. In fact, Herb Clutter was notoriously known for never keeping cash either on his person or in his home.

(A convicted fellon lie? Truth really is stranger than fiction.)

Smith's most stunning admission is that he never wanted to harm any member of the Clutter household, despite Dick Hickock's mantra "no witnesses!" In fact, he even went so far as to stop Dick from raping the girl, Nancy. But like a vengeful deus ex machina, something was conjured that erased Perry Smith's skewed altruism:

Just before I taped him, Mr. Clutter asked me -- and these were his last words -- wanted to know how his wife was, if she was all right, and I said she was fine, she was ready to go to sleep, and I told him it wasn't long till morning, and how in the morning somebody would find them, and then all of it, me and Dick and all, would seem like something they dreamed. I wasn't kidding him. I didn't want to harm the man. I thought he was a very nice gentleman. Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.

The section ends with Smith and Hickock arriving in Garden City to await trial. This blog entry ends with me smoking a square and cursing indigestion.

Next: the final part, The Corner.