Capote in Kansas

by Kim Powers

  He was wearing a negligee, no other word for it.

  It was a drapey silk kimono thing, and in all the nights they’d gathered to write up their notes, she’d never seen it. Turquoise and pink and silver, with little geishas crossing bridges and serving tea, and doing things the Kama Sutra only hinted at.

  “Better change. We’re here to write about murder, not get murdered.”

  “You’d have the suit to be buried in if we do.”

  “You said wear something nice; this is the nicest thing I have.”

  “You need color. This whole drab town needs color. If I wasn’t so exhausted from researchin’ this damn book, I’d buy a few buckets of red paint and splash ’em everywhere.”

  “I s’pose that explains your getup.”

  “Laugh, you dreary people, laugh, but what will you do for fun when I’m gone?”

  Truman’s eyes went almost dead when he said it, as if he very much knew what was being said about him, as if he had already practiced his good-bye speech, long before he’d made his good-byes.

  For a second Nelle felt sorry for him, but then the light seemed to come back into his eyes and he grabbed her by her freckled wrist, pulling her into his suite as he kept talking.

  “I am most certainly not wearin’ this. Number one, it’s not warm enough, and number two, it’s more than these people deserve. I’ll give these people what they deserve . . .”

  “Truman, what do you have up that danglin’ kimono sleeve of yours?”

  “Nothin’. Just a night away from murder, like you’re cravin’. I’ve already called ahead and had the sommelier put his finest champagne on reserve; his only champagne, I think, the one and only bottle in the entire fruited plains. It should be appropriately chilled by the time we get there, just like moi.”

  Still pulling Nelle by the wrist, Truman marched to an open trunk in his room and pulled the perfect scarf from it, a flash of color like a bouquet of bright flowers from underneath a magician’s dull handkerchief. He whipped it around her neck so fast she got whiplash.

  “There, the corpse gets accessorized.”

  He then shook the kimono from his shoulders, a perfectly timed shimmy, and the whole thing slid off to reveal a natty little wool suit underneath, with red pinstripes, and a bow tie.

  “Now we’re ready for a night you’ll never forget . . .”

  Outside the hotel, their driver waited behind the wheel: Ray Cosgrove, a teenage bellhop from the hotel, with acne, glasses, and his hair pomaded into a peak, not that different from Kenyon Clutter. In place of the hotel uniform they usually saw him in—which made him look like one of the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz—he even wore a letter jacket.

  Ray would remain Truman’s chauffeur of choice during his many trips to Kansas; on Truman’s very last trip there, Ray would drive him back from the prison in a pelting rain, just after he’d witnessed Dick and Perry hang.Truman would cry all the way; by then, Ray had learned not to say a word. At the end of his career, decades later, Ray would be in charge of the Muehlebach’s bellhops, still wearing the same uniforms.

  But this was just the start of their relationship: Truman waved a fifty under Ray’s nose, and said its twin would be waiting on the other side of the witching hour of midnight if Ray would stay on call the entire night.

  Before Nelle could say, “Midnight? How long does dinner . . .” Truman had moved on.

  “Raymond, d’you know Nelly ’n me, we’re married?”

  Ray was young; it was 1961, but he wasn’t dumb. In the rearview mirror, Nelle saw his face shape into a question mark.

  Her face would have, too, had she not remembered the quickie marriage so vividly. Truman had been seven, she six; a child bride, to say the least. Her brother Ed had officiated, and Truman had volunteered Sook and Old John from his side of the family to serve as best man and woman. Sook had performed refreshment duty, making a cake with royal frosting, and Nelle had dragged her mother’s wedding dress and veil out of the attic. That was another reason they had to get it done in a hurry; Lord help her if Amasa had come home and found her traipsing through the red Alabama dirt in her mother’s wedding dress. But surprisingly, her mother thought it was cute; she even played “The Twelfth of Never” and “Ave Maria” on the piano for the young couple. Never mind that it was something of a shotgun wedding—Nelle being the one who held her BB gun on Truman and forced him to marry her, just an hour or so before his relatives took him to the train station to go back north for the fall. Truman had slipped a paper band from the cigars his new step-father manufactured on her ring finger, and she said she would wear it always. She did, until her next good bath soaked it off, and the bits of shiny colored paper floated down the drain.

  “Yep, had to marry her before the baby was born.” Truman let loose with a high-pitched cackle.

  “Step on it!”

  Either in fear, shock, or disgust, Ray did, and they lurched into the snow and the night.

  In the darkness of the backseat:

  “You still love me, Nellybelle?”

  “’Course I do, long as you keep the checks comin’ from Mr. Shawn.”

  “No, I mean it. D’you love me? D’you know I’d never hurt you?” For all his frivolity earlier in the evening—how seriously could she take a man in a kimono?—he seemed deadly serious now. But she couldn’t answer him in kind.

  “’Course I do. ‘I do.’ That’s what I said under our tree when I was six, and I repeat it now.”

  But Truman wouldn’t take her joking. All this looking and thinking on death must have set him on a different path; she’d never seen him so solemn, as he looked at her with those same ancient eyes she’d known since childhood. Eyes that now looked hurt, or scared, or already apologetic.

  She slapped his hand.

  “Truman, stop it, you’re spookin’ me. I put on the nicest getup I have; what else do you want?”

  Truman was silent.

  He was getting stranger and stranger, and they left Ray thinking the same thing, as he drove them just a block and a half away to The Grill, between Thirty-fifth and Thirty-sixth streets. They could have walked it, even in the snow and slush, but Truman announced that people didn’t walk to a night on the town.

  The restaurant was the only building on the downtown block that still had its lights on, glowing through the vaporous cold. It was beautiful; it could have been Victorian London instead of Kansas. Maybe it was going to be a nice night after all, when Nelle could sit back and forget about murder.

  Outside, in the front seat of the car he had borrowed from his parents, Ray Cosgrove snuggled deeper in his letter jacket, wrapped his arms around himself, and took a swig from the apple brandy Mr. Truman had slipped him earlier in the evening.

  It was the most exciting night of his life.

  As Truman stepped inside the nicest restaurant in town, he felt a chemical change take place on his face—the roasting cold of the outside meeting the cozy warmth of the inside, where a fireplace blazed. At the exact spot high on his cheekbones where the two temperatures met, one of the few places on his body uncovered at that moment, Truman’s skin felt red hot and roaring-white cold at the exact same time, almost canceling each other out, but each tingling and fighting for dominance. He stood still, trying to sear the exact sensation into his memory, and into words. It was the description he had been looking for all day, the exact feeling the Clutters must have experienced when the scorching heat of the bullets had entered the paralyzed cold of their flesh:

  Fire meets ice.

  There it was.

  He was glad he had come, thinking a night off had already served what a full day of questions and grim photographs had not been able to accomplish.

  And then he returned to more mundane matters, and worried whether he had ruined his shoes in the snow. Oh, well, it didn’t matter; now he knew what it felt like to get shot to death.

  Even Nelle, who could give a tinker’s damn about her shoes, was already thinking ahead to ho
w she’d get the circle of crusty salt and ice off them in the morning.

  But there was no time for either of them to dwell on their shoes, because the Nyes were already standing up at their table and waving them in.

  Truman plonked himself down and said to the waiter, “I’ll have a stiff one, and then I’ll have a drink.”

  The Nyes didn’t laugh.

  They didn’t get it.

  Under the table, Nelle slapped Truman on the knee and gave him a look that said, Behave yourself.

  She got it.

  That’s the kind of evening it was going to be.

  With a crook of his forefinger, Truman signaled for the champagne; Joyce, who rarely had champagne, sneezed when she sniffed the bubbles, and thought, “Now I’m drunk. There goes my chance at the society column.”

  Nelle came to her defense.

  “You don’t have to drink it if you don’t want to; I’m sure Truman’ll lap up whatever goes untouched.”

  “No, I’m gonna be a good boy tonight. Nelle Harper has had it with me and said she’s gonna pack up her bags if I don’t give her a night off from murder. So that subject is verboten.”

  He paused dramatically, as only he could do, his voice, eyebrows, everything at a high pitch that left a question dangling in the air.

  “But then what the hell are we gonna talk about?”

  That broke the ice, and they all laughed, even churchgoing Joyce, and clinked their glasses.

  Two hours later, after Chateaubriand, which Truman ordered for them all—rare and don’t think about cooking it a second longer, he wanted it bloody, it was the only way to eat good meat—all they had talked about was the murder, and Nelle Harper had forgotten about wanting nothing to do with it. Harold Nye had become as mesmerizing a storyteller as Truman could be, telling them how he had gone to Mexico to retrieve the radio and binoculars the killers had stolen from the Clutters’ house, how he had searched from pawn shop to pawn shop to find them, how he had to pull over to the side of the road when he finally had them in hand, thinking about what had gone on in that house, and how the Clutters had once held these things.

  He had never even told his wife that; Truman drew it out of him. Joyce was amazed; this was a man who barely grunted yes or no. She was so proud of him; he was the best husband in the world, and Truman and Nelle would be their best new friends now.

  She didn’t want the night to end.

  For dessert, Truman ordered baked Alaska, the house specialty; the owner himself wheeled it out on a cart, the browned peaks of meringue as beckoning as the warm glow of lights inside the frosty windows had been when they first arrived. He struck a long-handled match and prepared to light it, but Truman held up his hand to halt the action: he took the match by the stem and presented it to Harold Nye, payment for a good story, another morsel for his book.

  Harold, who had never lit a dessert in his life and wasn’t about to start now—or eaten a dessert that was on fire, for that matter—passed the match on to Joyce, an Olympic relay runner passing the torch. She giggled—that champagne had gone down easily, after the first few sips—and blessed the frosty icing with the gift of fire.

  The flames whooshed into being, beautiful blue and orange and yellow and even green, and they all pulled back, then clapped—even Truman, the magician behind the trick, who knew it never failed to deliver.

  When the owner moved back in to cut the loaf,Truman shooed him away again. He took the knife himself and made the first cut; the blade went in so easily, a clean slice through the white peaks, then stopped when it hit the frozen brick of Neapolitan ice cream underneath. Soft, hard, ease, resistance, then give: Truman kept pushing until the knife went all the way in, stopping only when it hit the glass plate at the very bottom.

  Fire and ice indeed.

  This night was a blessing, and it was just starting.

  Oh, this night was young, and cold; there were places to see, and miles to go, before they slept.

  Truman teased his companions by letting them have a few bites of the frozen dessert before he threw a handful of bills, crisp and fresh from the bank, on the table, so close to the candle they almost went up in flames. In the breeze, the candle sputtered, just as the diners did, their forks in midair.

  They weren’t finished.

  Never mind; Truman was, or rather, he was just beginning, as he flung his scarf around his neck and it, too, almost caught the flame. Only Harold’s quick reflexes kept Truman from setting himself on fire, as he grabbed the fringed edges of the scarf and tamped them out on the table. Truman barely realized he’d just been saved, as he dragged them out of the restaurant, half in and half out of their coats, the scent of scorched wool trailing behind them.

  Outside, Truman insisted on taking a picture to commemorate the night, and hauled Ray out of the waiting car to snap it.

  “Say cheese!”

  “Say freeze!”

  The flash went off, freezing the four in a different way, for posterity. In a spontaneous moment, fueled by the champagne, they linked arms—Nelle, Harold, Joyce, and Truman.

  Truman began herding them into the back of the car, as Harold tried to resist.

  “But we’re parked down there . . .”

  “You didn’t think this was it, did you? Oh, no, sir, we’re just gettin’ started. The night is young, and so are we . . .”

  The car was filled with the heady, thick aroma of grease and fried chicken and apple brandy, which Ray Cosgrove had dined on in their absence; it didn’t mix with Chateaubriand and champagne and baked Alaska. Joyce was trying to remember the taste of the flavors for her article, moving her tongue around in her mouth to lock them there, afraid the other smells would make her forget. For some reason, she gripped her husband’s hand tighter.

  Truman slid into the front seat, next to Ray.

  “Lake and High, and make it snappy.”

  It wasn’t a neighborhood nice people went to.

  “You sure you have that right?”

  “You sure you want that other fifty?”

  It was the end of the discussion, a question with a question.

  Nelle shifted around to press her face into the cool, sweaty damp of the back window; she needed the cold against her skin to wake her up, for whatever was in store. Somehow, she knew they were leaving something behind, and she wanted to look at it one last time, before everything changed.

  They stood outside what looked like a warehouse, on the outskirts of town; the street was paved with bricks. (And the road to hell . . . never mind.) There was a single door and no sign.

  They all stood outside the car, stamping their feet to try to stay warm.

  “Stay here.”

  Truman threw open the door and marched up a narrow staircase, to the light of a single unshielded bulb at the top landing.

  “The dark at the top of the stairs,”Truman said ominously, then giggled.

  “No, see, there’s a light up there,” Harold responded, and Truman’s giggle turned into a drunken roar.

  “Oh, it’s darker than you can imagine.”

  “Truman?”

  It was a command, not a question, from Nelle.

  His response was in kind.

  “Nelle?”

  She wanted back in the car, back to the smells of Ray’s home-cooked supper. She wanted back in a tree in Monroeville, back in a walk-up flat in Manhattan, back anywhere except here.

  Something wasn’t right.

  At the top of the stairs, Truman flicked off bills from a seemingly infinite roll.

  “One, two, three, four, five.”

  Money was the only way they were getting in, wherever they were.

  Truman motioned for the others to come up. Joyce turned back to her husband; in silence, her face asked the question, “Do I dare?”

  Harold turned to Nelle. “What’s your little friend up to?”

  “Buyin’ the keys to the city? I don’t know.”

  And she didn’t. But they went up anyway.


  At the top, a big man beckoned them inside.

  “Right this way, Mr. Capote, ladies.” Then, seeing Harold, he added, “Sir. Welcome to the Jewel Box.”

  He opened the door to a smoky haze; the lights were very low, but they could see men and women dancing. Joyce was the first to get excited.

  “Oh, look, Hally, dancing! We haven’t been dancing in years!”

  Truman encouraged them.

  “Yeah, ‘Hally,’ shake a leg.”

  “Need another drink for that, need to get my land legs before I shake ’em.”

  “Bet you could get a really stiff one here.”

  That was Truman, of course.

  “Truman, I don’t like this . . .”

  That was Nelle.

  “Oh, but you will, you will, just give it time . . .”

  As Harold walked toward the bar, he accidentally bumped into a woman whose drink splashed.

  “Oh, excu . . . Jesus.”

  The woman he had just knocked into was a man.

  In a dress.

  “Jesus Mary and Joseph . . .”

  “I think you took a wrong turn on Mill Street, honey,” the man/woman said, as he/she squeezed Harold’s bicep through the shiny cloth of his jacket. He/she wafted away into the blackness of the room, as Harold thought all the cleaning in the world would never get the taint out of his favorite suit. He’d never be able to wear it again.

  He grabbed his wife’s hand and started to pull her toward the door, but Truman materialized to block their way.

  “Don’t rush, we just got here. At least stay until you take the chill off. I personally find it very warm and invitin’ in here. And the stage show hasn’t even started.”

  “Capote, you little pansy, my wife is a good Christian woman, and I’m a good Christian man, and if you think you’re ever gonna get any more information out of me after a stunt like this . . . how dare you bring us to a place like this.”

  Harold wondered if he could arrest them all, starting with Truman. He was, after all, an officer of the law, but he didn’t want to touch them, let alone arrest them.