I Am Scout (14 page)

Alvin Dewey, a detective on the Clutter case, helped Nelle and Truman gain inside information about the investigation as it unfolded. (Corbis)

And there were key people who refused to be interviewed under any circumstances; they'd had their fill of reporters describing the gory details of a crime involving a respected family. For example, the first witnesses to find Nancy Clutter's body had been teenagers Nancy Ewalt and her friend Sue Kidwell, who had run screaming from the Clutters' house. When Nelle and Truman approached Nancy's father, Clarence, and asked for a moment of his time, he fixed them with his watery blue eyes, framed in a red, weather-beaten face, and said evenly three times to their questions, “I'm a busy man,” and finally turned away.
12

After several days of this, Truman began to believe that coming out to Kansas had been a mistake all around. “I cannot get any rapport with these people,” he told Nelle. “I can't get a handle on them.” Except for two high school English teachers who had read some of his work, no one knew him from the man in the moon. How many more times was he going to be called “Mr. Cappuchi” or “Ka-poat”?

“Hang on,” Nelle said. “You
will
penetrate this place.”
13

A few days later they got their big break.

*   *   *

On Sunday, December
20
, Nelle and Truman were waiting to be picked up in the lobby of the Warren Hotel by Herb Clutter's former estate attorney, Cliff Hope. Hope was on Dr. McCain's list of people to get to know, and Truman had been pestering him for several days. Finally, he had agreed to drive the pair out to the Clutter farm. The KBI had placed the farm off-limits, but Hope agreed to intercede with the family's executor, Kenneth Lyon, explaining that Nelle and Truman were friends of Dr. McCain's. Mr. Lyon acquiesced, but insisted on being present and drove the
200
miles from Wichita to meet them there.
14

The farmhouse was at the end of a quarter-mile lane in Holcomb. Hope parked near the side. The yellow brick and white clapboard home with
14
rooms,
3
baths, and
2
wood fireplaces had been built in the late
1940
s, at a time when many homes in the county went without running water. Surrounded by a lawn landscaped with pointed, jade green bushes, the big house had been the crown of Mr. Clutter's
4
,
000
-acre farm. When Kenneth Lyon unlocked the front door, everyone started up the hedge-lined walk. The heat in the house was off, but the scent of lemon furniture polish hung in the chilly air.

In a way, Nelle and Truman had come full circle from their childhoods in Monroeville. They were figuratively once again on South Alabama Avenue where they had lived next door to each other and fantasized that a madman lived down the street in the tumbledown house owned by the Boleware family. They had spied on that house, speculated about the goings-on inside, and dared each other to sneak inside that lair. Nelle had used it, with some embellishments, as the home of Boo Radley in
To Kill a Mockingbird.
By contrast, this successful Kansas farmer's house, perched in a breezy, sunny spot, didn't have creaking hinges, broken shutters, and flickering shadows, or any of the lurid conventions associated with horror. But by exploring it, they were embarking once again on a hunt for something monstrous.

It took them about an hour to comb the house and the outside. They went room by room, noting the furnishings, their color, the art on the walls, and even the books on the bookshelves. Nelle drew a detailed floor plan of the house to help jog Truman's memory when he was back in New York. In every respect, the house looked normal inside. The KBI had erased most of the gruesome evidence of the murders and returned the Clutter home to its almost museumlike emptiness and silence. Except for a bloodstain on the basement floor, there was no sign that four innocent people, two teenagers and their parents, had been murdered in the middle of the night. And for what? According to investigators, the only thing missing was a portable radio.

Nelle and Truman thanked Mr. Hope and Mr. Lyon for making the house available to them. Van Vleet, Clutter's business partner, had arrived for the inspection, too, but he expressed his disapproval by sitting off by himself most of the time.

*   *   *

The day following the visit to the farm began the workweek leading up to Christmas, on Friday, which would mean an enforced break from gathering interviews. The courthouse, library, and post office would be closed; even local law-enforcement authorities would be hard to reach. To celebrate Christmas Day, Nelle and Truman would probably have to fall back on a holiday dinner special in the Warren Hotel coffee shop—turkey, gravy, instant potatoes, and canned cranberry sauce. It sounded bleak.

On Christmas Eve, Nelle spent part of the day assembling a description of the Clutters' last evening, based on several interviews with Nancy's boyfriend, Bobby Rupp, who had stayed at their house watching television until
10
:
00
P
.
M
. on November
14
. Sometime after that, police estimated, the killers had arrived.

The phone rang in Nelle's room. It was Cliff Hope. “You and Truman going to be in town tomorrow?” he asked.

Nelle said they were.

“Any plans?”

None that she knew of.

“How about coming over for Christmas dinner?” He mentioned that he and his wife, Dolores, were having another couple over: Detective Alvin Dewey and his wife, Marie.

She and Truman accepted.
15

*   *   *

The Hopes lived in a cream-colored, two-story house built in
1908
in Garden City—an old house by western standards—on Gillespie Place, a block-long street with a sign announcing
PRIVATE
DRIVE
at either end.

Truman and Nelle arrived half an hour late because first he had to locate a gift bottle of J&B scotch, his favorite brand. During the introductions, Detective Al Dewey's wife, Marie, an attractive, dark-haired woman, explained her southern accent by saying she was Kansan by marriage but Deep South by birth and upbringing—New Orleans, in fact; to which Truman replied that he had been born in New Orleans and Nelle was from Alabama. “It was instant old home week,” said Al Dewey.
17
Nelle, shaking hands, insisted everyone call her by her first name.

“Can I help in the kitchen?” she asked Dolores Hope.

“This way,” Dolores replied happily. As the two women took twice-baked potatoes from the oven and put condiments in bowls to go with roast duck, the main course, Dolores found herself liking Nelle right away. “After you talked to her for three minutes, you felt like you'd known her for years. She was ‘just folks'—interested in others, kind, and humorous.”
18

Dolores announced that dinner was ready and the adults seated themselves in the dining room. The Hopes' four children—Christine, Nancy, Quentin, and Holly—sat at a miniature version of the grown-ups' table.

Looking around the scene, Truman realized it was a breakthrough in eliminating the town's suspicions about them, and he also knew Nelle deserved the thanks: “She was extremely helpful in the beginning when we weren't making much headway with the towns people, by making friends with the wives of the people I wanted to meet,” he said later. “She is a gifted woman, courageous, and with a warmth that instantly kindles most people, however suspicious or dour.”
19

One of the Hopes' daughters, Holly, later author of
Garden City: Dreams in a Kansas Town,
said Christmas dinner that night brought together six people who became lifetime friends because they met on an intellectual level. “My experience in a small town is that there are always some people who have been involved in the arts and they like to keep up, but they might not have much opportunity. So when someone like Lee and Capote come through, it's a big deal. You just have to tap into it.”
20

By the end of the evening, Marie Dewey had invited Truman and Nelle to dinner at their house for red beans and rice—a real Southern dinner. It was music to their ears.

“Truman didn't fit in and nobody was talking to him,” said KBI detective Harold Nye, who by now was logging thousands of miles chasing down leads. “But Nelle got out there and laid some foundations with people. She worked her way around and finally got some contacts with the locals and was able to bring Truman in.”
21

They had penetrated Garden City, just as Nelle promised Truman they would.

*   *   *

Nelle and Truman arrived at the Deweys' the following Wednesday night about
6
:
30
P
.
M
. Marie had planned quite a spread: a shrimp-and-avocado salad, red beans and rice cooked with bacon, corn bread, country-fried steak, and a bottle of a sweet white wine. Al introduced the guests to the rest of the family: Alvin III,
12
; Paul,
9
; and Courthouse Pete, a fat, one-eyed,
14
-pound striped cat.

For about an hour, the adults sat in the living room getting better acquainted. About
8
:
00
P
.
M
. dinner in the kitchen was ready. As everyone pulled up to the table, the phone rang again for the sixth or seventh time since Nelle and Truman had arrived. Marie said it rang at all hours ever since the murders—always a call for Al about some aspect of the case. He got up to answer while they waited to begin eating. From his office down the hall, they could hear him talking louder and louder. When he returned a few minutes later, his voice crackled with excitement.

“Well, if you can keep a secret, this is
it
: our agent out in Las Vegas said they just nabbed those two guys … Smith and Hickock.”

Marie started to cry. “Oh, honey … honey, I can't believe it.”
22

For Nelle and Truman, the news squared with what they had figured out on their own. A rumor had been circulating among the reporters at the Finney County Courthouse about a prisoner, Floyd Wells, in Lansing State Penitentiary in Kansas, who read in the newspapers about the Clutter murders. Hoping to win a break from the prison authorities and claim the $
1
,
000
reward offered by the
Hutchinson News,
Wells had told the warden about a former cellmate of his, Richard Hickock, who had planned to hook up with another guy, Perry Smith, and rob the Clutters. Hickock was convinced Clutter must have plenty of cash because Wells, a former farmhand on the Clutter place, had told him that there was a safe in the house.

All of this was supposed to be a secret, but now, in his euphoria, Al Dewey couldn't resist laying it all out for Nelle and Truman. The call he had just received was from Detective Nye. The Las Vegas Police had taken the two suspects into custody for a minor traffic violation. Mr. Nye had been doing “setups” in several states, alerting the police to be on the lookout for them. As soon as Nye, Dewey, and a third KBI detective, Clarence Duntz, could get to Las Vegas, they would begin interrogating the suspects, who had been leaving a tantalizing trail of bad checks all over the country.

“There's a lot of desert between here and Las Vegas,” Dewey said, tapping a map with his finger. “On the way back, I don't care if we only make sixteen miles a day. We'll just drive around and around until we've made them talk. One or the other, whichever's the weaker, we'll kill him with kindness. We've already got them separated … it shouldn't be long before we get them hating each other.”

“Can I go with you?” Truman asked.

“Not this time, pardner.”

Years later, Dewey insisted, “Capote got the official word on developments at the press conferences along with everyone else. Some people thought then, and probably still do, that he got next to me and got in on every move of the law. That was not so. He was on his own to get the material for his story or book.… That's the way things were when the good news finally came on December
30
.”
23

Marie backed him up: “Alvin refused to talk about the case. We just visited, that's all. Our friendship developed in that way, but the investigation wasn't talked about.”
24

But Nelle's notes about everything that was said and done that night in the Deweys' home tell a different story.

*   *   *

Hundreds of Garden City and Holcomb residents prepared to brave the blustery weather, cold enough to snow, on Tuesday, January
5
, the day scheduled for the arrival of the suspects from Las Vegas.

KBI chief Logan Sanford had said the suspects were due “late Tuesday afternoon,” so Nelle and Truman showed up at the courthouse around
3
:
00
P
.
M
. to wait for word from Sheriff Earl Robinson's office. The hallway was filled with bored newsmen smoking and waiting. Nelle found a Coors beer ashtray to crush out her cigarette butts, and settled in. A little after four, the radio dispatcher announced that the press conference would be delayed until
5
:
00
P
.
M
. A highway patrol captain appeared, chomping on a cigar, and gave instructions to the press to keep the sidewalk clear. Nelle and Truman assumed a big crowd must be gathering, and went outside to see it.

An hour dragged by and it got dark. By
6
:
00
P
.
M
. the crowd was four or five deep—teenagers, businessmen late for supper, and just curious townspeople. Newsmen stamped their freezing feet and blew on their hands. Nelle noticed Truman's ears were turning scarlet. Then suddenly someone shouted, “They're coming!”