Mockingbird (23 page)

“Would you like to have a preliminary hearing?” Judge Schrader asked.

“I'd like to waive a preliminary hearing,” replied Hickock, in a Kansas rural-accented voice that most people would associate with the way cowboys talk. With that, and a few additional perfunctory remarks from the judge, Hickock returned upstairs.

Smith entered moments later. A short man with a ginger complexion and coal-black hair, indicating his heritage as the son of a Native American mother, he wore clothes similar to Hickock's, except that Smith's jeans were rolled at the cuffs, and his black shoes had a high polish. Heavy sideburns seemed to be an attempt to add seriousness to a face that was feminine and winsome. His dark brown eyes under long lashes glanced around at the reporters.

“Look,” Truman whispered to Nelle as Smith sat back in the chair near the judge, “his feet don't touch the floor!”
100
It was an admiring remark that surprised her, but she understood its meaning: Truman was infatuated. Smith's size and demeanor seemed weirdly familiar. His dark coloring was a complement to Truman's fair skin and blond hair. Capote thought he was seeing his doppelgänger. “I think every time Truman looked at Perry he saw his own childhood,” Nelle told
Newsweek
later.
101
The composer and author Ned Rorem went further. Over dinner in 1963, Truman talked about his progress on
In Cold Blood.
To Rorem, who was gay, he “seemed clearly in love” with Smith.
102

Judge Schrader followed the same ponderous but necessary procedural reading of the charges against Smith. Nelle got the impression that Smith was pressing his lips together, trying not to cry. At the mention of Nancy Clutter's name, Hickock had reacted almost imperceptibly. Smith, on the other hand, sighed and squinted at the bright lights when the judge charged him with the murder of Herb Clutter. The last thing he had said to Clutter before killing him, Smith confessed to Dewey, was that “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'd dreamed.”
103

“I wish to waive my rights to a preliminary hearing,” Smith replied to Judge Schrader. Then, his appearance over, he pulled “himself up to his full minute height,” in Nelle's words, and walked briskly from the room.
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A reporter burst from his seat with the other newspeople and hurried after Smith, shooting photos. Prosecutor Duane West, watching the spectacle, angrily threw down a sheaf of papers.

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 fifty-dollar checks drawn on a New York bank and made out separately to Perry Smith and Richard Hickock for Nelle and Truman to talk to them on Monday, January 11. Dewey arranged for the meeting to take place in his office, with Smith's and Hickock's lawyers present.

Resting up at home the previous Saturday, Dewey had recounted for Nelle and Truman, step by step, what Smith had said during his interrogation. He “went into extraordinary detail about the crime,” Dewey said, paraphrasing as much of Smith's confession as he could recall. Hickock was in another room, being questioned, but Smith's descriptions re-created the night of the murders so thoroughly that Hickock was nailed, too.
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Thinking about what they would ask the killers, Nelle and Truman decided to skip over the crime, since that would become a matter of record anyway, and get them to talk about themselves instead.

On Monday morning, Dewey scooted a couple of extra chairs into his office. Smith came in first. Seeing that Nelle was standing, he waited for her to be seated. He acted as solemn as a “small deacon,” Nelle thought, “feet together, back straight, hands together: could almost see a celluloid collar and black narrow tie, so prim he was.”
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Truman was ready with handwritten questions. Reflecting the fashionable interest in Freudian psychology at the time, he wanted to launch into a series of prepared questions about Smith's attitudes toward marriage, his father, and other introspective topics.
107

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 condescending tone. Its purpose, they assured him, was to give him a chance to tell his side of the story. Nelle smiled at him several times, but his large eyes kept flicking away from hers.
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He clearly felt “cornered and suspicious,” Truman realized. To everything they asked over the next twenty 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.”
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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 1st-degree murder charges,” Nelle marveled. “He gave the impression of being completely in the moment, with no concern about tomorrow's troubles.”
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Nelle and Truman expressed admiration for Hickock's tattoos, which worked like a charm in unlocking his affability. Soon, he was talking about his favorite reading subject matter (motors or engineering); his vision of the good life (well-done steaks, gin rickeys, screwdrivers, 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. Then he segued to describing the high times he and Smith had had traveling around Mexico before they got caught in Las Vegas. 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.
”
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Nelle tried to get questions in edgeways, to which Hickock would reply, “Yes, ma'am,” and then commence spinning another yarn. “No trace of the Smith syndrome,” Nelle commented dryly in her notes.
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Hickock would have extended his stay, except that Dewey had something he wanted to share with Nelle and Truman, so the suspect was shut off like a valve and 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 desk, 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 Clarence Duntz, contained everything said in the nine-by-ten 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.

A
L:
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.)

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

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

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

(Al & Duntz rise to go.)

A
L:
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.
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When Nelle had finished copying as much as she could, Dewey let them see another piece of evidence: Nancy Clutter's diary, containing three years' worth of entries. Since the age of fourteen, Nancy had recorded, in three or four sentences every night, the day's events and her thoughts about family, friends, pets, and, later, her adolescent 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 Nancy's death. Nelle copied it down.
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With the seal on the KBI investigation broken, any pretense that Al Dewey was protecting the case from Nelle and Truman's prying eyes was dropped. They spent most of the rest of the week working out of his office. Harold Nye, shortly before his death in 2003, complained that Dewey was only supposed to “take care of the press, the news media, take our reports in, send them to the office, and be the office boy. But he was playing footsie with Truman and Nelle.” Apparently, however, Nye, too, was brought into the loop. He later said, “Nelle and I would just stand in the corner or sit down on a chair and casually talk. But she was good, she was good.”
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On Wednesday, January 13, Nye provided her with all the information he'd gleaned along the way while he pursued Hickock and Smith through the Plains and the Southwest, including his stop at the home of Smith's sister in San Francisco—disguised, he later wrote to Truman, as a local policeman pretending to be following up on Smith's parole violation. (“She was such a nice lady, and I always felt like a dirty dog for pulling that trick.”)
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In addition, he gave Nelle the inventory of items found in Smith and Hickock's stolen car; and finally, as Nelle copied Hickock's interrogation, or listened to a tape of it—it isn't clear which—Nye interrupted to add background or clarify the suspect's remarks. On Friday, Truman paid another fifty dollars each to Smith and Hickock to interview them, and this time Smith was much more forthcoming. He had decided, he said—once again exhibiting his strange sense of self-importance—to tell his story as a cautionary tale to others. Fortunately for those others, Nelle and Truman evidently resorted to hiding a tape recorder in the room, having been overwhelmed by Hickock's talkativeness. In her notes on Smith, Nelle says parenthetically, “I can hardly hear a word he says.”
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No one else outside the investigation was granted anything close to the access Nelle and Truman had. The
Hutchinson News
, for example, was the first newspaper permitted to interview the killers, and that was more than a week after Nelle and Truman had talked to them. Had it not been for their friendship with Al Dewey—brought about by Nelle's making a favorable impression with people when Truman was perceived as “an absolute flake” and “uppity”—they would have been stopped cold.

In fairness, they were not like the journalists on the scene, either. As Bill Brown of the
Garden City Telegram
pointed out, “My deadline was immediate; Capote's was years away.”
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(Actually, at that time, Capote was still thinking in terms of a magazine article.) Capote may have given Dewey and Nye his word that he would be working on his article for months, at least—well beyond the date of a trial. There would be no leaks. And in those days of speedier justice, Smith and Hickock went to trial in late March, only three months after being captured. Still, the risk Dewey took was enormous. Looking back, Harold Nye, who became director of the KBI in 1969, thought better about the extent of his involvement, too. Dusting over his tracks, he said later, “I really get upset when I know that Al gave them a full set of the reports. That was like committing the largest sin there was, because the bureau absolutely would not stand for that at all. If it would have been found out, he would have been discharged immediately from the bureau.”
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Dewey would never admit he'd let the cat out of the bag. “I never treated Truman any differently than I did any of the other news media after the case was solved. He kept coming back, and we naturally got better acquainted. But as far as showing him any favoritism or giving him any information, absolutely not. He went out on his own and dug it up. Of course, he got much of it when he bought the transcript of record, which was the whole court proceedings, and if you had that, you had the whole story.”
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*   *   *

Loaded with notes from interviews, transcribed interrogations, newspaper clippings, some photos Truman had snapped, sketches of the Clutter farmhouse, and any copies Dewey had given them, 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 forty-hour ride to Dearborn Street Station in Chicago. Over the course of approximately a month, they had gathered enough to lay the foundation of a solid magazine article for the
New Yorker.
They would have to return for Smith and Hickock's trial in March. If the two men were sentenced to death, should their execution be part of the story? It was a grisly thought. Before his ideas escaped him, Capote wrote some notes on a Santa Fe cocktail napkin.

Lee, 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. There was a small change she was thinking of making. The Kansas state motto, “Ad astra per aspera”—To the stars through difficulties—struck her as the right theme for the agricultural pageant that takes place in the fictional town of Maycomb at the end of the book. It sounded hopeful.