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One of these barns was a mammoth Quonset hut; it brimmed with grain - Westland sorghum - and one of them housed a dark, pungent hill of milo grain worth considerable money - a hundred thousand dollars. That figure alone represented an almost four-thousand-percent advance over Mr. Clutter's entire income in 1934 - the year he married Bo
Mr. Clutter now fed Babe the core of his apple, calling good morning to a man raking debris inside the corral - Alfred Stoecklein, the sole resident employee. The Stoeckleins and their three children lived in a house not a hundred yards from the main house; except for them, the Clutters had no neighbors within half a mile. A long-faced man with long brown teeth, Stoecklein asked, "Have you some particular work in mind today? Cause we got a sick-un. The baby. Me and Missis been up and down with her most the night I been thinking to carry her to doctor." And Mr. Clutter, expressing sympathy, said by all means to take the morning off, and if there was any way he or his wife could help, please let them know. Then, with the dog ru
The river lay in this direction; near its bank stood a grove of fruit trees - peach, pear, cherry, and apple. Fifty years ago, according to native memory, it would have taken a lumberjack ten minutes to axe all the trees in western Kansas. Even today, only cottonwoods and Chinese elms - pere
Passing through the orchard, Mr. Clutter proceeded along beside the river, which was shallow here and strewn with islands - midstream beaches of soft sand, to which, on Sundays gone by, hot-weather Sabbaths when Bo
Like Mr. Clutter, the young man breakfasting in a cafe called the Little Jewel never drank coffee. He preferred root beer. Three aspirin, cold root beer, and a chain of Pall Mall cigarettes - that was his notion of a proper "chow-down." Sipping and smoking, he studied a map spread on the counter before him - a Phillips 66 map of Mexico - but it was difficult to concentrate, for he was expecting a friend, and the friend was late. He looked out a window at the silent small-town street, a street he had never seen until yesterday. Still no sign of Dick. But he was sure to show up; after all, the purpose of their meeting was Dick's idea, his "score." And when it was settled - Mexico. The map was ragged, so thumbed that it had grown as supple as a piece of chamois. Around the corner, in his room at the hotel where he was staying, were hundreds more like it - worn maps of every state in the Union, every Canadian province, every South American country - for the young man was an incessant conceiver of voyages, not a few of which he had actually taken: to Alaska, to Hawaii and Japan, to Hong Kong. Now, thanks to a letter, an invitation to a "score," here he was with all his worldly belongings: one cardboard suitcase, a guitar, and two big boxes of books and maps and songs, poems and old letters, weighing a quarter of a ton. (Dick's face when he saw those boxes! "Christ, Perry. You carry that junk everywhere?" And Perry had said, "What junk? One of them books cost me thirty bucks.") Here he was in little Olathe, Kansas. Kind of fu