Capote in Kansas

by Kim Powers

  The first night she did it, she took her picture and ran. She didn’t know what had gotten into her. And how stupid she’d been—she’d left a big greasy streak on the glass where her face had been.

  It was as good as a fingerprint.

  She went back the very same night, armed with Windex, to wipe it off.

  As soon as she realized she could get rid of the evidence, she did it again: put her head down on the glass, almost like she was taking a nap, closed her eyes, and waited. The light felt so warm on her cheek, she didn’t want to wake up. She always wiped down the plate glass when she left, so nobody else would get the idea of doing it, too.

  This was hers and hers alone, and soon enough, it might be the only record that she’d been here at all.

  By now, she had a regular gallery of portraits: The Many Moods of Myrtle, she liked to call them. The photos showed every squishy, haggard line in her face, but she embraced them as works of art, badges of honor. Rather than avoid the age lines, she tried to divine her future in them, see on her face what most fortune tellers would look to her palms for.

  With what she suspected was bad news on the way, she needed to see what the future held.

  Myrtle heard the word “Next,” then felt a nudge in her back and opened her eyes.

  She wasn’t having her picture taken, as she’d been daydreaming away, but standing in the slow-boat-to-China line at the PO. She stumbled up to the clerk and handed over the package.

  Let it be that other woman’s burden now; Myrtle had burdens enough of her own, and was glad to get rid of it.

  The cashier weighed it, stamped it, and dumped it in an outgoing bin, without ever looking up.

  Myrtle was safe: no one had sniffed out her secrets, her snake in the box or her night life at the post office.

  She was safe, for now.

  For now, until the next stop she had to make.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Another box, another coffin, another picture had come.

  And something else, something that had once been alive: a piece of skeleton, shreds of flesh still adhering to the rings of a snake’s rattle.

  Thank God Nelle had been at the front door when it came; if Alice had opened this package, Nelle would be looking for a new housemate.

  This would have killed her.

  Nelle sat at her desk, four newly revealed objects lined up in front of her, from largest to smallest, container to contained: the decorated snakebite kit; the tiny, hand-carved coffin that had been inside; a photograph; and snake remains. If these things were supposed to tell her something, add up to something, she had no clue what.

  For the first time, there was something dead, the snake; would the deliveries keep escalating in that direction, until the dead thing was her? Truman wasn’t a killer; he wrote about killers, or he and Nelle had together, once upon a time. Was he warning her that she was about to be killed by someone? Someone he had hired, whom it was too late to call off? Some other assassin, whose plot Truman had uncovered? What if Truman wasn’t behind the packages at all? What if it was The Reverend? He had killed not once, but five times; he could kill again . . .

  . . . except he was already dead.

  Sorry.

  Focus.

  WHY was somebody doing this? She hadn’t done anything to hurt anybody. Hadn’t they read her book? This was just like killing a mockingbird, all over again. A mockingbird didn’t hurt anybody . . .

  Sorry.

  Focus.

  She pushed the first two snake boxes and their contents to the side, then brought the newest addition to the edge of the desk. The objects at hand, literally—her hands shook as she touched each one in turn, trying to fit the puzzle pieces into some kind of order that made sense.

  The collage on the newest box seemed like a continuation of the previous one, the one that had been buried at Ed’s grave. A photo of an ancient tombstone, into which the beatific face of a Victorian cherub had been carved, was on the front, but a separate panel, a sort of hieroglyphics, had been pasted over where the name should be. On the lid of the box, positioned as if looking down at the tombstone, were two figures—a boy and girl from the 1920s, paper dolls with idyllic, smiling faces. Just out of view on the back of the box, as if it were sneaking up on the children, was a drawing of a snake’s head, its mouth stretched open, baring fangs and a slithering tongue. And on one of the side panels, another horse, with a man’s naked torso stretched out on top, as if riding it.

  Nelle wanted to ball up her fist and smash it down on the thing.

  It was pornographic.

  If this was Truman’s handiwork, he could go to Hell.

  She’d never wished that on anyone.

  Was the box supposed to say something about their ill-fated meeting at Nancy Clutter’s grave, to which Truman had ridden Nancy’s horse? There wasn’t any snake there, unless you counted Truman.

  He’d gone missing, and Nelle had found him, on a horse, at the grave plot where the Clutters were buried.

  Truman had never been on a horse in his life.

  It was their second trip to Kansas, weeks after the murders. Truman hadn’t been able to bring himself there any earlier. When Nelle asked what he was doing, he said he’d found out this was what Nancy did all the time; it was even Nancy’s horse, Babe, that he’d ridden there. “I wanted to see what it felt like. Makes me think she was a lonely girl.”

  “Makes me think she was a scary girl.”

  This was years before Nelle would come to find solace in the same kinds of trips, years before people would start calling Nelle a scary girl, too.

  Then, the Clutters’ graves were still fresh, four long mounds of dirt covered by a light dusting of snow. Soon enough, they’d be completely covered, by the winter storm that had been predicted. Truman would be there through that storm and many more before the book would be finished; he would make many more solitary visits, through every season, to that graveyard.

  The horse bent down and nudged its snout at Nancy’s grave, as if it knew its mistress was there. If Truman had described it to Nelle instead of her seeing it with her very own eyes, she wouldn’t have believed it.

  “If you put that in the book, nobody’ll believe you,” she said.

  “I’ve got you as my witness.”

  As the horse moved around, nosing its snout at the other graves—maybe it was just rooting for food, pasture to graze on, and happened to pick Nancy’s grave first—Truman said, “It’s perfect. Better than I imagined. I won’t have snow coming down, of course, it’s gotta be spring, the time of rebirth, but this is where Alvin Dewey and Susan Kidwell will meet in the last chapter . . .”

  “Susan Kidwell?”

  “Nancy’s best friend. She and Dewey separately come here to lay flowers. They’re moving on with their lives. Saying good-bye . . .”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “It didn’t happen.”

  “But it’s dramatic. It’s perfect. I’m using it.”

  Nelle tried to keep her voice calm.

  “After all the work you’ve gone to, that we’ve gone to . . . trying to keep everything real, all the interviews we’ve done, the people we’ve met, they trust us . . . you can’t lie like that.”

  “It’s my book. I can do whatever I please.”

  She swore she’d heard him say the very same thing when he was just six years old.

  “You cannot do that to the Clutters.”

  “I don’t see them here to stop me.”

  “I do.”

  She saw their four graves, and a horse nudging at them in the snow.

  Nelle continued, “If you put that scene in, I’ll tell people not to talk to you anymore. I’m the one gets ’em buttered up. I’m the one they trust.”

  “If you dare tell people not to talk to me, I’ll take you off the list . . .”

  That was his weapon, as much as the gun and knife Dick and Perry had used.

  “. . . I won’t in
vite you to my party . . .”

  He’d barely begun the book, but was already planning the biggest party the world had ever seen to celebrate it.

  Black and white, just like the bleak landscape of a cemetery covered in snow.

  He put the scene in the book.

  Without her realizing it, Nelle’s hand had tightened around the box, and was squeezing the very life out of it. For an aging lady with arthritis, her grip was amazingly strong. She watched the figures of the tiny boy and girl collapse in on themselves, as if disappearing into a sinkhole . . .

  But she couldn’t do it.

  She couldn’t crush herself, destroy her childhood, and she felt sure that’s what Truman—somebody—meant the figures to represent.

  She took an extra-long breath, flexed her hand open and shut to get the feeling back, then moved on to the next object in front of her: the tiny coffin. She nudged its lid open; the inside was lined. It wasn’t pink satin, like her mother’s coffin, or white, like her brother’s, but red velvet—like the dress in which Nancy Clutter had been buried, the dress she and Susan Kidwell had just finished making before . . . The velvet in Nelle’s tiny coffin wasn’t new, but soiled and tattered, the plush worn down to a bare sheen, the purpley-blue color of blood under the skin, instead of red.

  Nelle’s hand jerked away: had the velvet actually come from Nancy Clutter’s dress? Had someone actually dug up her body and snatched a piece of cloth from the beautiful dress covering it? Not even Truman would have gone that far.

  Would he?

  Had Truman become a grave robber?

  It couldn’t be from Nancy’s grave; it couldn’t. It couldn’t . . .

  Breathe.

  Focus.

  Nestled inside the coffin, on top of the worn velvet, had been a single photograph.

  At first, Nelle didn’t realize she was staring at a group portrait that included herself: it could have been any four strangers, bundled up against the cold. But one of the four was a giant, and another a virtual midget, a scarf coiled around his neck so thick it looked like a snake strangling him.

  Nelle had to smile, now and then; she—the giantess in the picture—had warned Truman that that scarf would be the death of him. People in Kansas didn’t wear scarves like that, no matter how cold it got. Harold Nye, one of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation agents, and his wife, Joyce, sandwiched between Truman and Nelle, were used to cold weather; they didn’t have to wrinkle up their faces and squeeze their eyes against it, as Nelle did in the picture. But even with the cold, their faces were expectant, their eyes shining and dancing, their smiles open and wide, and their teeth gleaming—or maybe they were just chattering.

  This time, at least, Nelle remembered who was on the other side of the camera: Ray Cosgrove, the teenage bellhop from their hotel, whom Truman had hired to play chauffeur for the night. He took the picture with Truman’s own little Brownie camera, and shot it at an angle that revealed a patch of the sidewalk behind the four of them. Nelle could see their footprints in the snow, muddied and overlapping, leading from the restaurant to the car.

  It would be the longest night of her life, but it would have nothing to do with ghosts—except the ghost of the girl she used to be, long before Truman called and introduced his ghosts to her.

  It was the night at the end of a very long day, during which they had come face to face with the twenty crime-scene photos for the first time.

  Nelle had had to grip a desk and force herself to breathe when she looked at those, too.

  Photos so gruesome she had tried to turn their reality into vague, abstract shapes: turn pools of blood into fluid circles on a field of black and white, turn bodies and faces into geometry, not people whose names she now knew, who had been spared no dignity in death—and no further dignity as she and Truman bore witness to the last, and most intimate, moment of their lives.

  Truman picked picked picked at the coroner, wanting to go inside the photographs. He wanted to travel inside the gunshots, speed with the bullets through flesh, and feel what the bullets had felt, the resistance that bone and cartilage and brain had offered. He wanted the perfect word to describe it—not scared or petrified; those were easy, obvious words—but a word of tactility and feeling, like hot or sharp; he wanted to stack words on top of words on the page to convey the 3-D, split-second immediacy and chaos of what had happened.

  Truman wanted to know what absolute fear felt like.

  He lobbed question after question at the coroner to get the answer:• How much adrenaline?

  • How fast were their hearts racing?

  • Was their breath hot or cold?

  • Did the fear anesthetize them?

  • Could they feel anything?

  Question after question, with split-second rapidity, but at the end of it all, after a torrent of words, there were still no answers.

  The coroner had to admit he had never been shot to death, so he couldn’t honestly describe how it felt.

  And that’s what Truman wanted: honesty.

  That thing in death, their deaths, that he had never had in his life.

  At the end of that long day, and their session with the coroner, Nelle was spent. Never shy about talking, she felt as if she couldn’t form another word for another soul, or keep her ears open a second longer to hear conversation in return. By five o’clock that day, it was dark outside. Downtown, merchants’ hands reached into windows and exchanged Open signs for ones that read Closed. Shades were pulled down, and newly installed metal grates slid across plate glass doors.

  That had never happened, before the killings.

  Nelle told Truman she was going to do the same, put out her Closed sign, and pull down her shades until the alarm clock rang the next morning.

  “I can’t talk to another person about this damn murder.Tonight is a night off from violence; I declare a moratorium on the very mention of it, until tomorrow morning—at the earliest.”

  Every night, Nelle and Truman gathered in his hotel room, next door to hers, to review the separate interviews they had conducted during the day. They didn’t use tape recorders, or take notes while they were talking to people; that would have scared them away. They took notes only in their heads, as Truman had taught Nelle to do when she was just five years old. He’d had her in training to be the good assistant ever since then. Truman claimed to have 93 percent accuracy in his recall; it’s that other 7 percent that should have been a warning to them all.

  But not tonight. Nelle wanted to talk, or think—or not think—about anything that wasn’t the Clutters, or Kansas corn-fields. She didn’t want to talk at all, but Truman had other plans for her.

  “Oh, no, Ma’am Missy, we’re hittin’ the town tonight, and takin’ the Nyes with us. So shinny and skinny back to the hotel, soak in a tub full of bubbles, then get up and dress nice, ’cause I’m takin’ you out for the surprise of your life.”

  Since she’d just seen pictures of a house where the blood of four people still coated the baseboards, it must be some surprise.

  “Truman, not tonight, I’m dead . . .”

  “So are the Clutters, so don’t ever use that expression again unless you really mean it. Now start soakin’ and don’t fall asleep or you’ll drown in the tub. I don’t wanna get my hands all pruney dippin’ ’em in just to save you.”

  And thus would begin their longest night together.

  At her house, Joyce Nye was as ebullient as Nelle was despondent: a night out with Capote would make her the envy of everyone in town. They were all clamoring for an audience with the strange little man.

  Joyce was wearing her nicest dress, and forced her husband to wear his best suit. She’d had to force him to go out, period—he didn’t like Capote. Harold snorted that Capote had already had his night on the town, then proceeded to tell his wife how he’d walked in on the writer in his hotel room and found him wearing a negligee. Joyce insisted her husband wouldn’t know a negligee from a nighthawk, not having bought her one anytime
recently, but Harold said, “No, Mother, I beg to differ,” and described something silky and loose-fitting. It sure sounded like a negligee. Maybe it’s what the fashionable people in New York were wearing these days, she told him, more to save the evening than anything else; she was willing to give Capote the benefit of the doubt. Harold wasn’t willing to give Capote the benefit of anything, but he went along for the sake of his wife.

  She was going to get a nice dinner out of her husband’s job—he’d missed plenty of dinners because of it, that’s for sure—and some stories for the girls at the club, maybe even an interview by the society editor of the Garden City Gazette. Maybe she could even write up the story herself, get Nelle Harper to help her put it together. They could be friends; as small-town as Joyce was, playing the piano at church, the go-to lady who put the crackers and Kool-Aid together for communion, Nelle had never made her feel like she was just being used to get a good story about the Clutters.

  Joyce’s only disappointment about the night was that the weather was so bad outside, she’d have to mess up the whole effect of her nice dress by putting her ugly gray coat on over it.

  Oh, well, life in the plains, where the cold winds blew through everything in their path.

  Back at the Muehlebach Hotel—the only choice in Kansas City for visiting dignitaries and famous writers like himself—Truman knocked on the door that separated his room from Nelle’s. She answered, a reluctant debutante, dressed for her night on the town in her best black suit.

  Truman gave her the once-over.

  “You’re not wearin’ that, are you? Looks like you’re dressed for a funeral.”

  “And you’re not wearin’ that, are you? Looks like you’re dressed for The World of Suzie Wong.”