In Cold Blood: Part Two

But the diary notation that most tantalized Dewey was unrelated to the Clutter-Rupp, Methodist-Catholic impasse.

Certainly not Holcomb’s widowed postmistress, the intrepid Mrs. Myrtle Clare, who scorned her fellow townsmen as “a lily-livered lot, shaking in their boots afraid to shut their eyes,” and said of herself, “This old girl, she’s sleeping good as ever. Anybody wants to play a trick on me, let ’em try.”

He tapped the newspaper. “A lot of prevarications.”

He breezed in, breezily introduced Perry to the clerk as “a friend of mine about to get married,” and went on, “I’m his best man. Helping him kind of shop around for the clothes he’ll want. Ha-ha, what you might say his—ha-ha—trousseau.”

It was buried there back in 1821—Peruvian bullion, jewelry. Sixty million dollars—that’s what they say it’s worth.

The car was parked on a promontory where Perry and Dick had stopped to picnic.

Unlike Perry, he was not convinced that a broken mirror meant seven years’ misfortune, or that a young moon if glimpsed through glass portended evil.

His name was King; he was a transient.

Perry was not a gifted liar, or a prolific one; however, once he had told a fiction he usually stuck by it.

Still, they were remarkable photographs, and what made them so was Perry’s expression, his look of unflawed fulfillment, of beatitude, as though at last, and as in one of his dreams, a tall yellow bird had hauled him to heaven.

On their last night in Acapulco, a thief had stolen the Gibson guitar—absconded with it from a waterfront café where he, Otto, Dick, and the Cowboy had been bidding one another a highly alcoholic goodbye.

The point came we were downright hungry. Which is what we fell out over. Ostensibly. A biscuit.

Arrested me at the hotel. Bang!—I was extradited back to Kansas.

The previous midnight, when Dick had brought her to the room and told Perry that she was going to sleep there, Perry, though disapproving, had acquiesced, but if they imagined that their conduct stimulated him, or seemed to him anything other than a “nuisance,” they were wrong.

His suits fitted as though he had borrowed them from a stout friend, and his face, seldom suggestive of his profession, was now not at all so; it could have been that of an ascetic absorbed in occult pursuits.