In Cold Blood

 "Si, senor. Yo comprendo"

 "A cinch," said Dick. "I promise you, honey, we'll blast hair all over them walls."

 " 'Those' walls," said Perry. A dictionary buff, a devotee of obscure words, he had been intent on improving his companion's grammar and expanding his vocabulary ever since they had celled together at Kansas State Penitentiary. Far from resenting these lessons, the pupil, to please his tutor, once composed a sheaf of poems, and though the verses were very obscene, Perry, who thought them nevertheless hilarious, had had the manuscript leather-bound in a prison shop and its title, Dirty Jokes, stamped in gold.

 Dick was wearing a blue jumper suit; lettering stitched across the back of it advertised Bob Sands' Body Shop. He and Perry drove along the main street of Olathe until they arrived at the Bob Sands establishment, an auto-repair garage, where Dick had been employed since his release from the penitentiary in mid-August. A capable mechanic, he earned sixty dollars a week. He deserved no salary for the work he pla

 "Because the old man was around," said Dick, answering Perry, who wanted to know why he had been late in meeting him at the Little Jewel. "I didn't want him to see me taking the gun out of the house. Christ, then he would have knowed I wasn't telling the truth."

 " 'Known.' But what did you say? Finally?"

 "Like we said. I said we'd be gone overnight - said we was going to visit your sister in Fort Scott. On account of she was holding money for you. Fifteen hundred dollars." Perry had a sister, and had once had two, but the surviving one did not live in Fort Scott, a Kansas town eighty-five miles from Olathe; in fact, he was uncertain of her present address.

 "And was he sore?"

 "Why should he be sore?"

 "Because he hates me," said Perry, whose voice was both gentle and prim - a voice that, though soft, manufactured each word exactly, ejected it like a smoke ring issuing from a parson's mouth. "So does your mother. I could see - the ineffable way they looked at me. "Dick shrugged. "Nothing to do with you. As such. It's just they don't like me seeing anybody from The Walls." Twice married, twice divorced, now twenty-eight and the father of three boys, Dick had received his parole on the condition that he reside with his parents; the family, which included a younger brother, lived on a small farm near Olathe. "Anybody wearing the fraternity pin," he added, and touched a blue dot tattooed under his left eye - an insigne, a visible password, by which certain former prison inmates could identify him.

 "I understand," said Perry. "I sympathize with that. They're good people. She's a real sweet person, your mother."

 Dick nodded; he thought so, too.

 At noon they put down their tools, and Dick, racing the engine, listening to the consistent hum, was satisfied that a thorough job had been done.

Nancy and her protegee, Jolene Katz, were also satisfied with their morning's work; indeed, the latter, a thin thirteen-year-old, was agog with pride. For the longest while she stared at the blue-ribbon wi

 Jolene urged that they sample the pie at once - no nonsense about leaving it to cool. "Please, let's both have a piece. And you, too," she said to Mrs. Clutter, who had come into the kitchen. Mrs. Clutter smiled - attempted to; her head ached - and said thank you, but she hadn't the appetite. As for Nancy, she hadn't the time; Roxie Lee Smith, and Roxie Lee's trumpet solo, awaited her, and afterward those errands for her mother, one of which concerned a bridal shower that some Garden City girls were organizing for Beverly, and another the Thanksgiving gala.

 "You go, dear, I'll keep Jolene company until her mother comes for her," Mrs. Clutter said, and then, addressing the child with unconquerable timidity, added, "If Jolene doesn't mind keeping me company." As a girl she had won an elocution prize; maturity, it seemed, had reduced her voice to a single tone, that of topology, and her personality to a series of gestures blurred by the fear that she might give offense, in some way displease. "I hope you understand," she continued after her daughter's departure. "I hope you won't think Nancy rude?"

 "Goodness, no. I just love her to death. Well, everybody does. There isn't anybody like Nancy. Do you know what Mrs. Stringer says?" said Jolene, naming her home-economics teacher.

 "One day she told the class, 'Nancy Clutter is always in a hurry, yet she always has time. And that's one definition of a lady.' "

 "Yes," replied Mrs. Clutter. "All my children are very efficient. They don't need me." Jolene had never before been alone with Nancy's "strange" mother, but despite discussions she had heard, she felt much at ease, for Mrs. Clutter, though unrelaxed herself, had a relaxing quality, as is generally true of defenseless persons who present no threat; even in Jolene, a very childlike child, Mrs. Clutter's heart-shaped, missionary's face, her look of helpless, homespun ethereality aroused protective compassion. But to think that she was Nancy's mother! An aunt - that seemed possible; a visiting spinster aunt, slightly odd, but nice.

 "No, they don't need me," she repeated, pouring herself a cup of coffee. Though all the other members of the family observed her husband's boycott of this beverage, she drank two cups every morning and often as not ate nothing else the rest of the day. She weighed ninety-eight pounds; rings - a wedding band and one set with a diamond modest to the point of meekness - wobbled on one of her bony hands.

 Jolene cut a piece of pie. "Boy!" she said, wolfing it down. "I'm going to make one of these every day seven days a week."

 "Well, you have all those little brothers, and boys can eat a lot of pie. Mr. Clutter and Kenyon, I know they never get tired of them. But the cook does - Nancy just turns up her nose. It'll be the same with you. No, no - why do I say that?" Mrs. Clutter, who wore rimless glasses, removed them and pressed her eyes. "Forgive me, dear. I'm sure you'll never know what it is to be tired. I'm sure you'll always be happy..."

 Jolene was silent. The note of panic in Mrs. Clutter's voice had caused her to have a shift of feeling; Jolene was confused, and wished that her mother, who had promised to call back for her at eleven, would come.

 Presently, more calmly, Mrs. Clutter asked, "Do you like miniature things? Tiny things?" and invited Jolene into the dining room to inspect the shelves of a whatnot on which were arranged assorted Lilliputian gewgaws - scissors, thimbles, crystal flower baskets, toy figurines, forks and knives. "I've had some of these since I was a child. Daddy and Mama - all of us - spent part of most years in California. By the ocean. And there was a shop that sold such precious little things. These cups." A set of doll-house teacups, anchored to a diminutive tray, trembled in the palm of her hand. "Daddy gave them to me; I had a lovely childhood."

 The only daughter of a prosperous wheat grower named Fox, the adored sister of three older brothers, she had not been spoiled but spared, led to suppose that life was a sequence of agreeable events - Kansas autumns, California summers, a round of teacup gifts. When she was eighteen, inflamed by a biography of Florence Nightingale, she enrolled as a student nurse at St. Rose's Hospital in Great Bend, Kansas. She was not meant to be a nurse, and after two years she confessed it: a hospital's realities - scenes, odors - sickened her. Yet to this day she regretted not having completed the course and received her diploma - "just to prove, "as she had told a friend, "that I once succeeded at something. "Instead, she had met and married Herb, a college classmate of her oldest brother, Gle