Things hadn’t changed much. Perry was twenty-odd years older and a hundred pounds heavier, and yet his material situation had improved not at all. He was still (and wasn’t it incredible, a person of his intelligence, his talents?) an urchin dependent, so to say, on stolen coins.
A clock on the wall kept catching his eye. At half past ten he began to worry; by eleven his legs were pulsing with pain, which was always, with him, a sign of approaching panic—“bubbles in my blood.” He ate an aspirin, and tried to blot out—blur, at least—the brilliantly vivid cavalcade gliding across his mind, a procession of dire visions: Dick in the hands of the law, perhaps arrested while writing a phony check, or for committing a minor traffic violation (and found to be driving a “hot” car). Very likely, at this very instant Dick sat trapped inside a circle of red-necked detectives. And they weren’t discussing trivialities—bad checks or stolen automobiles. Murder, that was the topic, for somehow the connection that Dick had been so certain no one could make had been made. And right now a carload of Kansas City police were on their way to the Washateria.
But, no, he was imagining too much. Dick would never do that—“spill his guts.” Think of how often he had heard him say, “They can beat me blind, I’ll never tell them anything.” Of course, Dick was a “blowhard”; his toughness, as Perry had come to know, existed solely in situations where he unarguably had the upper hand. Suddenly, gratefully, he thought of a less desperate reason for Dick’s prolonged absence. He’d gone to visit his parents. A risky thing to do, but Dick was “devoted” to them, or claimed to be, and last night during the long rainy ride he had told Perry, “I’d sure like to see my folks. They wouldn’t mention it. I mean, they wouldn’t tell the parole officer—do anything to get us into trouble. Only I’m ashamed to. I’m afraid of what my mother would say. About the checks. And going off like we did. But I wish I could call them, hear how they are.” However, that was not possible, for the Hickock home was without a telephone; otherwise, Perry would have rung up to see if Dick was there.
Another few minutes, and he was again convinced that Dick was under arrest. His leg pains flared up, flashed through his body, and the laundry odors, the steamy stench, all at once sickened him, picked him up and propelled him out the door. He stood at the curb retching like “a drunk with the dry heaves.” Kansas City! Hadn’t he known Kansas City was bad luck, and begged Dick to keep away? Now, maybe now, Dick was sorry he hadn’t listened. And he wondered: But what about me, “with a dime or two and a bunch of lead slugs in my pocket”? Where could he go? Who would help him? Bobo? Fat chance! But her husband might. If Fred Johnson had followed his own inclination, he would have guaranteed employment for Perry after he left prison, thus helping him obtain a parole. But Bobo wouldn’t permit it; she had said it would only lead to trouble, and possibly danger. Then she had written to Perry to tell him precisely that. One fine day he’d pay her back, have a little fun—talk to her, advertise his abilities, spell out in detail the things he was capable of doing to people like her, respectable people, safe and smug people, exactly like Bobo. Yes, let her know just how dangerous he could be, and watch her eyes. Surely that was worth a trip to Denver? Which was what he’d do—go to Denver and visit the Johnsons. Fred Johnson would stake him to a new start in life; he’d have to, if he wanted ever to be rid of him.
Then Dick came up to him at the curb. “Hey, Perry,” he said. “You sick?”
The sound of Dick’s voice was like an injection of some potent narcotic, a drug that, invading his veins, produced a delirium of colliding sensations: tension and relief, fury and affection. He advanced toward Dick with clenched fists. “You sonofabitch,” he said.
Dick grinned, and said, “Come on. We’re eating again.”
But explanations were in order—apologies, too—and over a bowl of chili at the Kansas City hash house that Dick liked best, the Eagle Buffet, Dick supplied them. “I’m sorry, honey. I knew you’d get the bends. Think I’d tangled with a bull. But I was having such a run of luck it seemed like I ought to let it ride.” He explained that after leaving Perry he had gone to the Markl Buick Company, the firm that had once employed him, hoping to find a set of license plates to substitute for the hazardous Iowa plates on the abducted Chevrolet. “Nobody saw me come or go. Marki used to do a considerable wrecked-car trade. Sure enough, out back there was a smashed-up De Soto with Kansas tags.” And where were they now? “On our buggy, pal.”
Having made the switch, Dick had dropped the Iowa plates in a municipal reservoir. Then he’d stopped at a filling station where a friend worked, a former high-school classmate named Steve, and persuaded Steve to cash a check for fifty dollars, which was something he’d not done before—“rob a buddy.” Well, he’d never see Steve again. He was “cutting out” of Kansas City tonight, this time really forever. So why not fleece a few old friends? With that in mind, he’d called on another ex-classmate, a drugstore clerk. The take was thereby increased to seventy-five dollars. “Now, this afternoon, we’ll roll that up to a couple hundred. I’ve made a list of places to hit. Six or seven, starting right here,” he said, meaning the Eagle Buffet, where everybody—the bartender and waiters—knew and liked him, and called him Pickles (in honor of his favorite food). “Then Florida, here we come. How about it, honey? Didn’t I promise you we’d spend Christmas in Miami? Just like all the millionaires?”
Dewey and his colleague K.B.I. Agent Clarence stood waiting for a free table in the Trail Room. Looking around at the customary exhibit of lunch-hour faces—soft-fleshed businessmen and ranchers with sun-branded, coarse complexions—Dewey acknowledged particular acquaintances: the county coroner, Dr. Fenton; the manager of the Warren, Tom Mahar; Harrison Smith, who had run for county attorney last year and lost the election to Duane West; and also Herbert W. Clutter, the owner of River Valley Farm and a member of Dewey’s Sunday School class. Wait a minute! Wasn’t Herb Clutter dead? And hadn’t Dewey attended his funeral? Yet there he was, sitting in the Trail Room’s circular corner booth, his lively brown eyes, his square-jawed, genial good looks unchanged by death. But Herb was not alone. Sharing the table were two young men, and Dewey, recognizing them, nudged Agent Duntz.
“Look.”
“Where?”
“The corner.”
“I’ll be damned.”
Hickock and Smith! But the moment of recognition was mutual. Those boys smelled danger. Feet first, they crashed through the Trail Room’s plate-glass window, and with Duntz and Dewey leaping after them, sped along Main Street, past Palmer Jewelry, Norris Drugs, the Garden Café, then around the corner and down to the depot and in and out, hide-and-seek, among a congregation of white grain-storage towers. Dewey drew a pistol, and so did Duntz, but as they took aim, the supernatural intervened. Abruptly, mysteriously (it was like a dream!), everyone was swimming—the pursued, the pursuers—stroking the awesome width of water that the Garden City Chamber of Commerce claims is the “World’s Largest FREE Swimpool.” As the detectives drew abreast of their quarry, why, once more (How did it happen? Could he be dreaming?) the scene faded out, and faded in upon another landscape: Valley View Cemetery, that gray-and-green island of tombs and trees and flowered paths, a restful, leafy, whispering oasis lying like a cool piece of cloud shade on the luminous wheat plains north of town. But now Duntz had disappeared, and Dewey was alone with the hunted men. Though he could not see them, he was certain they were hiding among the dead, crouching there behind a headstone, perhaps the headstone of his own father: “Alvin Adams Dewey, September 6, 1879—January 26, 1948.” Gun drawn, he crept along the solemn lanes until, hearing laughter and tracing its sound, he saw that Hickock and Smith were not hiding at all but standing astride the as yet unmarked mass grave of Herb and Bonnie and Nancy and Kenyon, standing legs apart, hands on hips, heads flung back, laughing. Dewey fired . . . and again . . . and again . . . Neither man fell, though each had been shot through the heart three times; they simply rather slowly turned transparent, by degrees grew i
nvisible, evaporated, though the loud laughter expanded until Dewey bowed before it, ran from it, filled with a despair so mournfully intense that it awakened him.
When he awoke, it was as though he were a feverish, frightened ten-year-old; his hair was wet, his shirt cold-damp and clinging. The room—a room in the sheriff’s office, into which he’d locked himself before falling asleep at a desk—was dull with near-darkness. Listening, he could hear Mrs. Richardson’s telephone ringing in the adjacent office. But she was not there to answer it; the office was closed. On his way out he walked past the ringing phone with determined indifference, and then hesitated. It might be Marie, calling to ask if he was still working and should she wait dinner.
“Mr. A. A. Dewey, please. Kansas City calling.”
“This is Mr. Dewey.”
“Go ahead, Kansas City. Your party is on the line.”
“Al? Brother Nye.”
“Yes, Brother.”
“Get ready for some very big news.”
“I’m ready.”
“Our friends are here. Right here in Kansas City.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, they aren’t exactly keeping it a secret. Hickock’s written checks from one side of town to the other. Using his own name.”
“His own name. That must mean he doesn’t plan to hang around long—either that or he’s feeling awful damn sure of himself. So Smith’s still with him?”
“Oh, they’re together O.K. But driving a different car. A 1956 Chevy—black-and-white two-door job.”
“Kansas tags?”
“Kansas tags. And listen, Al—are we lucky! They bought a television set, see? Hickock gave the salesman a check. Just as they were driving off, the guy had the sense to write down the license number. Jot it on the back of the check. Johnson County License 16212.”
“Checked the registration?”
“Guess what?”
“It’s a stolen car.”
“Undoubtedly. But the tags were definitely lifted. Our friends took them off a wrecked De Soto in a K.C. garage.”
“Know when?”
“Yesterday morning. The boss [Logan Sanford] sent out an alert with the new license number and a description of the car.”
“How about the Hickock farm? If they’re still in the area, it seems to me sooner or later they’ll go there.”
“Don’t worry. We’re watching it. Al—”
“I’m here.”
“That’s what I want for Christmas. All I want. To wrap this up. Wrap it up and sleep till New Year’s. Wouldn’t that be one hell of a present?”
“Well, I hope you get it.”
“Well, I hope we both do.”
Afterward, as he crossed the darkening courthouse square, pensively scuffing through dry mounds of unraked leaves, Dewey wondered at his lack of elation. Why, when he now knew that the suspects were not forever lost in Alaska or Mexico or Timbuctoo, when the next second an arrest might be made—why was it he felt none of the excitement he ought to feel? The dream was at fault, for the treadmill mood of it had lingered, making him question Nye’s assertions—in a sense, disbelieve them. He did not believe that Hickock and Smith would be caught in Kansas City. They were invulnerable.
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—headstands, 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, December 19, 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 secondhand 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, an unhurried 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 Enemy was anyone who was someone he wanted to be or who had anything he wanted to have.
For instance, the man he had seen by the pool at the Fontainebleau. Miles away, shrouded in a summery veil of heat-haze and sea-sparkle, he could see the towers of the pale, expensive hotels—the Fontainebleau, the Eden Roc, the Roney Plaza. On their second day in Miami he had suggested to Perry that they invade these pleasure-domes. “Maybe pick up a coupla rich women,” he had said. Perry had been most reluctant; he felt people would stare at them because of their khaki trousers and T-shirts. Actually, their tour of the Fontainebleau’s gaudy premises went unnoticed, amid the men striding about in Bermuda shorts of candy-striped raw silk, and the women wearing bathing suits and mink stoles simultaneously. The trespassers had loitered in the lobby, strolled in the garden, lounged by the swimming pool. It was there that Dick saw the man, who was his own age—twenty-eight or thirty. He could have been a “gambler or lawyer or maybe a gangster from Chicago.” Whatever he was, he looked as though he knew the glories of money and power. A blonde who resembled Marilyn Monroe was kneading him with suntan oil, and his lazy, beringed hand reached for a tumbler of iced orange juice. All that belonged to him, Dick, but he would never have it. Why should that sonofabitch have everything, while he had nothing? Why should that “big-shot bastard” have all the luck? With a knife in his hand, he, Dick, had power. Bigshot bastards like that had better be careful or he mig
ht “open them up and let a little of their luck spill on the floor.” But Dick’s day was ruined. The beautiful blonde rubbing on the suntan oil had ruined it. He’d said to Perry, “Let’s pull the hell out of here.”
Now a young girl, probably twelve, was drawing figures in the sand, carving out big, crude faces with a piece of driftwood. Dick, pretending to admire her art, offered the shells he had gathered. “They make good eyes,” he said. The child accepted the gift, whereupon Dick smiled and winked at her. He was sorry he felt as he did about her, for his sexual interest in female children was a failing of which he was “sincerely ashamed”—a secret he’d not confessed to anyone and hoped no one suspected (though he was aware that Perry had reason to), because other people might not think it “normal.” That, to be sure, was something he was certain he was—“a normal.” Seducing pubescent girls, as he had done “eight or nine” times in the last several years, did not disprove it, for if the truth were known, most real men had the same desires he had. He took the child’s hand and said, “You’re my baby girl. My little sweetheart.” But she objected. Her hand, held by his, twitched like a fish on a hook, and he recognized the astounded expression in her eyes from earlier incidents in his career. He let go, laughed lightly, and said, “Just a game. Don’t you like games?”
Perry, still reclining under the blue umbrella, had observed the scene and realized Dick’s purpose at once, and despised him for it; he had “no respect for people who can’t control themselves sexually,” especially when the lack of control involved what he called “pervertiness”—“bothering kids,” “queer stuff,” rape. And he thought he had made his views obvious to Dick; indeed, hadn’t they almost had a fist fight when quite recently he had prevented Dick from raping a terrified young girl? However, he wouldn’t care to repeat that particular test of strength. He was relieved when he saw the child walk away from Dick.
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