Free In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

have,” said Dick, who claimed still to be in love with his honey-blond first wife though she had remarried.
    “There are these baths. One place called the Dream Pool. You stretch out, and beautiful, knockout-type girls come and scrub you head to toe.”
    “You told me.” Dick’s tone was curt.
    “So? Can’t I repeat myself?”
    “Later. Let’s talk about it later. Hell, man, I’ve got plenty on my mind.”
    Dick switched on the radio; Perry switched it off. Ignoring Dick’s protest, he strummed his guitar:
“I came to the garden alone, while the dew was still on the roses,
And the voice I hear, falling on my ear,
The Son of God discloses …”
    A full moon was forming at the edge of the sky.
    THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, WHILE giving evidence prior to taking a lie-detector test, young Bobby Rupp described his last visit to the Clutter home: “There was a full moon, and I thought maybe, if Nancy wanted to, we might go for a drive—drive out to McKinney Lake. Or go to the movies in Garden City. But when I called her—it must have been about ten of seven—she said she’d have to ask her father. Then she came back, and said the answer was no—because we’d stayed out so late the night before. But said why didn’t I come over and watch television. I’ve spent a lot of time at the Clutters’ watching television. See, Nancy’s the only girl I ever dated. I’d known her all my life; we’d gone to school together from the first grade. Always, as long as I can remember, she was pretty and popular—a person , even when she was a little kid. I mean, she just made everybody feel good about themselves. The first time I dated her was when we were in the eighth grade. Most of the boys in our class wanted to take her to the eighth-grade graduation dance, and I was surprised—I was pretty proud—when she said she would go with me. We were both twelve. My dad lent me the car, and I drove her to the dance. The more I saw her, the more I liked her; the whole family, too—there wasn’t any other family like them, not around here, not that I know of. Mr. Clutter may have been more strict about some things—religion, and so on—but he never tried to make you feel he was right and you were wrong.
    “We live three miles west of the Clutter place. I used to walk it back and forth, but I always worked summers, and last year I’d saved enough to buy my own car, a ’55 Ford. So I drove over there, got there a little after seven. I didn’t see anybody on the road or on the lane that leads up to the house, or anybody outside. Just old Teddy. He barked at me. The lights were on downstairs—in the living room and in Mr. Clutter’s office. The second floor was dark, and I figured Mrs. Clutter must be asleep—if she was home. You never knew whether she was or not, and I never asked. But I found out I was right, because later in the evening Kenyon wanted to practice his horn, he played baritone horn in the school band—and Nancy told him not to, because he would wakeup Mrs. Clutter. Anyway, when I got there they had finished supper and Nancy had cleaned up, put all the dishes in the dishwasher, and the three of them—the two kids and Mr. Clutter—were in the living room. So we sat around like any other night—Nancy and I on the couch, and Mr. Clutter in his chair, that stuffed rocker. He wasn’t watching the television so much as he was reading a book—a ‘Rover Boy,’ one of Kenyon’s books. Once he went out to the kitchen and came back with two apples; he offered one to me, but I didn’t want it, so he ate them both. He had very white teeth; he said apples were why. Nancy—Nancy was wearing socks and soft slippers, blue jeans, I think a green sweater; she was wearing a gold wristwatch and an I.D. bracelet I gave her last January for her sixteenth birthday—with her name on one side and mine on the other—and she had on a ring, some little silver thing she bought a summer ago, when she went to Colorado with the