Mockingbird (18 page)

*   *   *

She had accompanied Capote as his salaried “assistant researchist”—a term he invented for her. Their assignment was to take a six-inch news item in the
New York Times
about the murder of the farm family in Holcomb—just a pinprick on the map—and find the humanity buried beneath the crime. They would have to find out everything about the family—Herb and Bonnie Clutter, and their children, teenagers Nancy and Kenyon—so the Clutters would be real.

Capote wanted to accomplish this without the benefit of taking notes or tape-recording during interviews. He was convinced people were more guarded when they could see they were going on the record. He would just talk to people instead—conduct interviews as conversations. Her job was to listen and observe subtleties that Truman might be too busy to notice. Then they would return to the hotel and separately write down everything they could recall. Lee's gift for creating character sketches complemented Capote's ability to recall remarks. Many times over the next month, his telegraphic descriptions of a conversation would end with “See NL's notes” to remind him to use her insights later.

The hotel's Trail Room coffee shop became their unofficial office during the day for reviewing notes, or for keeping appointments with folks who could spare only enough time for a chat and a cup of coffee. If either Nelle or Truman drew a blank about a fact or a remark that had been made, they would prod each other's memories. In instances when key information was missing or unclear, they would have to go back and visit a person a second or a third time. “Together we would get it right,” Nelle said.
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That was the plan. Unfortunately, obstacles existed everywhere, it seemed.

To begin with, residents in both Garden City and Holcomb were afraid. With the killer or killers still at large, interviews were hard to get. When Capote went alone to the home of Mrs. Hideo Ashida, a neighbor of the Clutters, she refused to open the door until he could provide her with the name of someone to verify his identity.
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The Plains states were still reeling from the rampage the year before when two Nebraska teenagers, nineteen-year-old Charles Starkweather and his fourteen-year-old girlfriend, Caril Fugate, had killed ten people in five states. News of the Clutter murders had sent people in Garden City and Holcomb into a paranoid frenzy: farmers padlocked their gates and put combination locks on their sheds; homeowners installed deadbolt locks on doors; apartment dwellers added chain locks to their bedrooms. Some took the added precaution of fixing all the windows with ten-penny nails. Even though most folks said that the authorities should be looking for an outsider—a native would have known that Herb Clutter never had any cash on hand—neighbors kept an eye on one another, and porch lights burned until dawn. The KBI received three hundred letters with tips from anonymous sources, many of them postmarked Garden City, accusing local people by name.
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But Nelle and Truman were determined to get this story, and Truman was notoriously persistent. Sometimes, a little cash would buy an interview. Mrs. Ashida's son Robert and other residents said that Capote willingly paid, if necessary.
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In his list of expenses, written on the inside cover of a handsome gold-colored journal he had purchased in Italy, Truman itemized his Kansas expenses: car rental, meals on the train, and “farewell gifts,” but left one amount unidentified: “spent cash $1400.”
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Once invited into someone's home, however, he found a further stumbling block, a mundane problem that he and Nelle never anticipated, which was trying to keep the person's attention turned away from the TV. NBC had begun broadcasting from Garden City the year before, and the clear black-and-white picture on the screen seemed to hypnotize bored farming families trapped inside during the long winter. The nuisance of manic commercials in the background tested Nelle's and Truman's patience—neither of whom owned a television set—especially when the whole point of an interview was to try to talk intimately with someone.

Also interfering with getting good interviews was Truman himself—he just wasn't going over very well with people. “Nelle looked like normal folk. She was just a fantastic lady,” said Harold Nye, one of the principal KBI detectives running down leads on the Clutter case, “but Truman was an absolute flake.”
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Nye, who went five days and nights without sleep during the week after the murders, had no patience for fancy Johnny-come-latelies showing up on the scene.

Neither did postmistress Myrtle T. Clare: “Capote came walking around here real uppity and superior-like and acting so strange that I think people was scared of him. He was real foreign-like, and nobody would open their doors for him, afraid he'd knock them in the head.”
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“I thought Capote was queero,” said Gerald Van Vleet, Clutter's business partner. “He was nosy as hell and very, very rude. He came out to my farm on a few occasions to talk to me, and I tried to avoid him.”
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How they were going over was obvious to Nelle. “We were given the cold shoulder. Those people had never seen anyone like Truman—he was like someone coming off the moon.”
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In the end, there were key people who refused to be interviewed under any circumstances; they'd had their fill of reporters snooping around, hoping to sniff out the gory details of a crime that had hit close to home in the tight-knit town. The first to find Nancy Clutter's body had been teenagers Nancy Ewalt and Sue Kidwell, who had run screaming from the Clutters' house. When Nelle and Truman approached Nancy Ewalt'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.
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Fortunately, one resource available to them—and to everyone else—was the legwork being done by Kansas journalists on the scene. The
Garden City Telegram,
the
Hutchinson News,
the
Kansas City Star,
and other papers were following the manhunt closely. Dr. McCain, the president of Kansas State University, had recommended to Nelle and Truman that when they arrived in Garden City they introduce themselves to Bill Brown, the managing editor of the
Garden City Telegram.
They tried, but he brushed them off. The crime had taken place in his backyard, and he wasn't dealing in out-of-towners. The lights in the newspaper office burned late most nights: “I was busy putting out a newspaper,” he later said flatly.
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In her notes, Nelle dismissed him as a “Catonahottinroof.”
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Even if they had been able to enlist Brown's help, weaving a pastiche primarily from newspaper stories and secondhand reporting would have been unacceptable to the
New Yorker
's editor, William Shawn. He was expecting art, not paraphrased remarks, hearsay, and canned statements from press conferences. Nelle and Capote understood that, of course, but after a week in Kansas the truth was their spadework hadn't turned up anything beyond what reporters on the scene had already unearthed. The dozen or so interviews they had conducted yielded predictable responses: people were shocked by the murders; congregation members at the church the Clutters attended eulogized them as a fine family; and so on. Herb Clutter, everyone said, was a go-getter, always smiling. Nelle knew enough about Bonnie Clutter, the mother, and daughter Nancy to form sympathetic composite portraits of them. Kenyon was a bit of a mystery—a loner, more absorbed by projects that would appeal to an engineer than to a farmer. But these were just sketches in the corner of a canvas that needed to be much larger and more original.

They didn't have much time to get the formula right. The Christmas and New Year's holidays were not far off, and then businesses would be closed and people would be occupied with family celebrations. No one would be interested in picking at the wound caused by the blow of the Clutter killings.

Capote 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.”
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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. Lyon acquiesced, but insisted on being present, driving the two hundred miles from Wichita to meet them there.
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When Detective Nye found out later about the visit, he wasn't pleased: “I was in charge of securing the house. [Detective] Roy Church was helping me. We examined the entire house for evidence, during which all was secured. And how they got in later, I don't know.”
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Cliff Hope turned out to be a lean, blond man who smoked a briar pipe; Kenneth Lyon was a “slim, dark” man and seemed to Nelle to have an “open honest face.”
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As Hope escorted them to the waiting car he mentioned that the trip out to the farm would take only about fifteen minutes. As they left downtown Garden City behind, the pavement ended with a thump and the road turned to gravel and gray dirt. Gray seemed to be the predominant color everywhere, bleeding into the sky, the leafless trees, and the frost-killed silvery grass. About a half mile south of Holcomb, they came to a lane leading off from the road. A “Road Closed” sign nailed to a sawhorse marked the entrance to the Clutters' River Valley Farm. Tacked to one end of the sawhorse, a limp red rag flapped disconsolately in the cold wind. Kenneth Lyon got out and turned the sawhorse aside to allow the car to pass.

The lane leading to the house was bordered on both sides by tall Chinese elms, their branches creating a spidery archway. The effect was graceful, but their aesthetic appeal was secondary to their practical purpose—they served as windbreaks for slowing the rate of dust or snow that whipped over the prairie during windy spells. Two years before, in 1957, a blizzard had buried Holcomb in snowdrifts twenty-seven feet deep in some places. A farmer lost in a snowstorm, or a motorist stopped on the road because the earth and sky were both a blur of white, could freeze to death within hailing distance of a house without a friendly landmark, such as a row of trees, to mark the way to shelter.

Isolation was always something to be on guard against in the vast, beguiling openness of the prairies. The night the Clutters were murdered, no one had heard the shots because the wind was blowing; not even employee Alfred Stoecklein, who lived with his wife and three children in a small house on the other side of the Clutters' enormous barn; and no one had seen anything suspicious in the utter darkness. The feeling of naked vulnerability translated into the dislike of strangers that had plagued Truman and Nelle thus far. As one old man had said in Mrs. Hartman's café on the day of the Clutter murders, “All we've got out here are our friends. There isn't anything else.”
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Reaching the end of the quarter-mile lane, Cliff Hope parked near the front door. The yellow brick and white clapboard home with fourteen rooms, three baths, and two wood fireplaces had been built in the late 1940s, a time when many homes in the county went without running water. Surrounded by a lawn landscaped with pointed jade-green arborvitae, the big house had been the diadem of Herb's four-thousand-acre farm.

At forty-eight, Clutter had been justifiably proud of his twenty-year rise from 1939, when his financial records indicated he was worth “$1000 I hope,” to his position as one of the wealthiest farmers in the state.
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With the help of half a dozen employees, sometimes as many as twenty, he had raised sorghum, milo grain, and certified grass seed. That day on the Clutter farm, Nelle noticed that hundreds of red-and-white Hereford cattle were still grazing peacefully in the pasture.
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Even as his wealth expanded, Herb Clutter could be stubborn about taking advice concerning his financial affairs, and he had foot-dragged about estate planning, despite dogged reminders from Cliff Hope. “Herb would come into my office with some Saturday errands written on the back of an envelope. He gave me a few minutes, checked me off, and [went] on his way.”
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Clutter had died without a will to protect his Kansas fiefdom; and in a few months, River Valley Farm would be auctioned off by sheriff's order.

From around the barn, Alfred Stoecklein came out to meet the group. Stoecklein had been the Clutters' odd-job man (“spectacles and yellow rotting teeth,” Capote noted; Nelle got the impression he drank, despite Herb Clutter's iron rule that he wouldn't abide drinkers).
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Emerging from a car nearby was Gerald Van Vleet, Clutter's business partner. He was a big man in khaki work clothes and heavy boots who seemed more interested in twisting an engine belt in his rough hands than in making conversation. When Kenneth Lyon signaled from the house that he'd 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. Van Vleet crossed the living room to Clutter's office and promptly sat down in his former partner's wooden swivel chair, rotating slowly back and forth. To every question Nelle put to him about the murder, he answered, “I wasn't here.”
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