I Am Scout (15 page)

At the curb, two dark mud-splashed sedans rolled to a halt. Al Dewey got out of the back seat of the first car. Quickly a handful of other men exited both cars, as if on cue. The figures strode quickly up the sidewalk toward the courthouse. It had grown so dark that the photographers' flashbulbs acted like strobe lights and caught them in midstep.

There were no jeers, no catcalls from the crowd. Everyone seemed strangely struck dumb. Detective Dewey had the arm of Perry Smith, who was a head shorter and wearing dungarees and a black leather jacket. Richard Hickock came next, also accompanied by a detective, but Nelle couldn't see him because a broad-backed policeman suddenly stepped in front of her. When the platoon of suspects and detectives sprinted up the courthouse steps, Nelle, Truman, and the reporters surged after them.

A press conference was held while the suspects were placed in their cells upstairs. Dewey sat behind a microphone to answer questions, but his remarks gave away nothing important—only that no one would be allowed to talk to the suspects. After half an hour, the television newsmen turned off their lights, and the press conference sputtered to an end.

Outside the courthouse, the crowd had dispersed, leaving pop bottles and candy wrappers in the grass. Truman was disgusted. He had expected the return of the killers to be dramatic. Why had everyone just stood there gawking? And that press conference! The whole thing, he complained to Nelle on the walk back to the Warren Hotel, was “a debacle.”
25

*   *   *

Despite Al Dewey's announcement to the press that no one would be allowed to interview the suspects or listen to their tape-recorded confessions, all it took was a pair of $
50
checks made out separately to Perry Smith and Richard Hickock for Nelle and Truman to talk to them on Monday, January
11
, with the suspects' lawyers present.

Al scooted a couple of extra chairs into his office. Perry Smith came in first. Seeing that Nelle was standing, he waited for her to be seated. He acted as solemn as a “small deacon in his preciseness of posture,” she wrote in her notes, “feet together, back straight, hands together: could almost see a celluloid collar and black narrow tie, so prim he was.”
26
Truman was ready with handwritten questions: “What is your feeling about marriage?” “Have you ever wished to be married?” “Would you say that you had a father complex—a combination of love and dislike and longing and fear?”
27

Gently, Smith waved aside the questions after he heard the first few. His attorney hadn't briefed him about this meeting. “What's the purpose of your story?” he wanted to know. Nelle was taken aback by his superior tone. Its purpose, they assured him, was to give him a chance to tell his side of the story. Nelle smiled at Smith several times, but his large dark eyes kept flicking away from hers.
28
He clearly felt “cornered and suspicious,” Truman realized. To everything they asked over the next
20
minutes, Smith countered with “I decline,” “I do not care to,” or “I will think it over.” Some kind of cat-and-mouse game was under way. After he returned to his cell, Nelle commented in her notes, “Rough going.”
29

Richard Hickock, on the other hand, breezed in, ready for a good bull session. He plunked down in a chair before Nelle was seated. “Never seen anyone so poised, relaxed, free & easy in the face of four
1
st-degree murder charges,” Nelle marveled. “Can't decide whether H. thinks he's gonna get away with it; or has not realized the depth and futility of the trouble he's in. Speaks of the future as if he'll walk out tomorrow.”
30

She and Truman expressed admiration for Hickock's tattoos, which worked like a charm in unlocking his friendliness. Soon he was talking about his favorite reading matter (motors or engineering; his vision of the good life (well-done steaks, mixed drinks, dance music, and Camel cigarettes—he bummed five smokes from Nelle's pack); how often he liked to eat (three times a day, but in jail it was only two); how he'd like to get a good job in an auto shop and pay off the bad checks he'd written and live in the country. It was practically more than Nelle and Truman could absorb. Truman said Hickock was “like someone you meet on a train, immensely garrulous, who starts up a conversation and is only too obliged to tell you
everything
.”
31
Nelle tried to get questions in edgewise, to which Hickock would reply, “Yes, ma'am,” and then commence spinning another yarn.

He would have extended his stay, except that Al had something he wanted to share with Nelle and Truman, so Hickock was taken back to his cell.

*   *   *

After Hickock had gone, Dewey reassured Nelle and Truman, telling them not to worry if Smith wanted to play it cagey. Reaching into the Clutter case file in his office, he produced for them the pièce de résistance: the transcripts of Smith's interrogations. Like dialogue from a play, the pages of transcribed conversation between Smith and the two KBI detectives, Dewey and Duntz, contained everything said in the
9
′-×-
10
′ interrogation room during the three and a half hours that Smith was questioned in Las Vegas. The transcript couldn't leave the courthouse, and was too much for Nelle to copy, so she targeted key passages. As she worked, Dewey added visual descriptions that weren't evident on the tape. Thus:

Al:
Perry, you have been lying to us, you haven't been telling the truth. We know where you were on that weekend—you were out at Holcomb, Kansas, seven miles west of Garden City, murdering the Clutter family.

(Perry white; swallowed a couple of times. Long pause.)

Perry:
I don't know anybody named Clutter, I don't know where Garden City or Holcomb is—

Al:
You'd better get straightened out on this deal and tell us the truth—

Perry:
I don't know what you're talking about … I don't know what you're talking about.

(Al & Duntz rise to go.)

Al:
We're talking to you sometime tomorrow. You'd better think this over tonight. Do you know what today is? Nancy Clutter's birthday. She would have been seventeen.
32

When Nelle had finished copying as much as she could, Dewey let her and Truman see another piece of evidence: Nancy Clutter's diary containing three years' worth of entries. Since the age of
14
, Nancy had recorded, in three or four sentences every night, the day's events and her thoughts about family, friends, pets, and, later, her teenage love affair with Bobby Rupp. Different colored ink identified the years. Nelle and Truman riffled through the pages. The final entry was made approximately an hour before her death. Nelle copied it down.
33

*   *   *

Loaded with notes from interviews, transcribed interrogations, newspaper clippings, some photos Truman had snapped, sketches of the Clutter farmhouse, and anything Dewey had given them copies of, Nelle and Truman boarded the luxury Santa Fe Super Chief on January
16
in Garden City. It was snowing hard, and they settled in for the
40
-hour ride to Dearborn Station, in Chicago. Over the course of approximately one month, they had gathered enough for a solid magazine article for
The New Yorker.
They would have to return for the trial in March. If the suspects were sentenced to death, should their execution be part of the story? It was a grisly thought. Before his ideas escaped him, Truman wrote some notes on a Santa Fe cocktail napkin.

Nelle, of course, had plenty of other things to think about. As soon as she returned to New York, she would have to go over the galleys of
To Kill a Mockingbird
—a painstaking but nevertheless thrilling task for a first-time novelist.

As she watched Truman in the seat opposite hers, musing out the window of the train about
The New Yorker
article, it probably seemed incredible that her novel would be in bookstores in a few months. Then she would have the right to call herself a writer, too, though not in his league by any means. All she hoped for was a “quick and merciful death at the hands of reviewers.”
34

The Super Chief was delayed for six hours along the route, and when they arrived in Chicago, they had already missed their New York Central connection. They stayed in the city overnight and departed again the next day, arriving in New York on Wednesday, January
20
.

“Returned yesterday—after nearly
2
months in Kansas: an extraordinary experience, in many ways the most interesting thing that's ever happened to me,” Truman wrote to his friend, the photographer Cecil Beaton. “But I will let you read about it—it may amount to a small book.”
35

That small book,
In Cold Blood,
would become one of the most highly regarded works of nonfiction ever published.

*   *   *

Two months later, Nelle and Truman were back in Kansas for the trial, scheduled to begin the third week of March. By coincidence, the Clutters' farm was going up for auction the same week.

They left behind a late snowy season in New York. A wet, warm spring had come to western Kansas. Nelle and Truman drove out to the Clutter farm on Sunday, March
21
, to witness the sale. Bumper-to-bumper traffic met them at the entrance to the lane up to the farmhouse. The sunny weather in the low
70
s had brought out more than
4
,
000
people for the largest farm auction in western Kansas history. There were cars and trucks from Colorado, Nebraska, and Oklahoma, and practically every county in Kansas west of Newton and Wichita. Auctioneer John Collins, his white shirt shining in the sun, sold everything of value to a swarm of men in coats and Stetsons—tools, tractors, and farm implements.

On Tuesday, jury selection began. For the first time since the courthouse was erected in
1929
, the varnished church-type pews were pushed to the sides and rear to leave room at the front for a special press table and
13
chairs. The newsmen sitting there, pleased to see Nelle back, had taken to calling her “Little Nelle.”
36

Just before ten o'clock, district judge Roland Tate entered. Overhead, the telltale metallic clunk of the jail door announced that the defendants were coming down.

The effects of sitting in jail for two months told on them. “Perry Smith is much heavier,” Nelle noted; Richard Hickock, “fatter, greener, and more gruesome.”
37
Outwardly, they seemed bored, covering perhaps for being stared at by the
44
prospective jurors who had assembled in the courtroom to be sworn in and questioned. District court clerk Mae Purdy called the prospective jurors' names in a droning voice. Only four were women.

By day's end, the jury was composed entirely of men, including the reserve of alternates. Half were farmers. Smith, an amateur artist, had passed the time sketching on a legal pad. Hickock chomped relentlessly on a wad of gum, his chin resting on his hand now and then. The two men had implicated each other in their confessions, but there seemed to be no break in their relationship. Nelle saw Hickock glance at Smith just once, “the briefest exchange of glances, and the old eye rolled coldly. This was when the lawyers huddled the last time and made their preemptory challenges on papers. Smith and Hickock were left alone at the table. Perry looked at him—gave Hickock one of his melting glances—really melting in its intensity—Hickcock felt eyes upon him, looked around and smiled the shadow of a smile.”
38

The turnout for the actual trial exceeded the courtroom's capacity of
160
persons. At the press table, Associated Press reporter Elon Torrence noticed that Truman, dressed in a blue sports jacket, khaki trousers, white shirt, and a bow tie, spent most of his time listening, while Nelle, bringing to bear her law school training, “took notes and did most of the work during the trial.”
39

There were no surprises. “How cheap!” exclaimed special prosecutor Logan Green in his closing argument to the jury. “The loot was only about $
80
, or $
20
a life.” Harrison Smith and Arthur Fleming, attorneys for the accused, did not contest the state's evidence but pleaded for life imprisonment. Harrison Smith argued capital punishment is “a miserable failure.” The jury deliberated less than two hours.

On Tuesday, March
29
, Judge Roland Tate sentenced both men to hang. “When the Judge was telling the jury what a good job they had done,” Hickock told
Male
magazine,

I thought that these pompous old ginks were the lousiest looking specimens of manhood I had ever seen; old cronies that acted like they were God or somebody. Right then I wished every one of them had been at the Clutter house that night and that included the Judge. I would have found out how much God they had in them! If they had been there and had any God in them I would have let it run out on the floor. I thought, boy, I'd like to do it right here. Now there was something that would have really stirred them up!

When the jury filed out of the courtroom not one of them would look at me. I looked each one in the face and I kept thinking, Look at me, look at me, look at me!

But none of them would.
40

This jury was no different from others in not looking at the defendants, Nelle wrote in her notes. “Why they never look at people they've sentenced to death, I'll never know, but they don't.”
41

Back in his cell, Smith slipped a note with his signature between two bricks in the wall: “To the gallows … May
13
,
1960
.”
42