In Cold Blood

 Hickock chuckled ruefully, shrugged, and said, "You know what I mean. Good - considering. Ro

 Hickock's uneven eyes turned toward a window in the visiting room; his face, puffy, pallid as a funeral lily, gleamed in the weak winter sunshine filtering through the bar-shrouded glass.

 "The poor lady. She wrote the warden, and asked him if she could speak to Perry the next time she came here. She wanted to hear from Perry himself how he killed those people, how I never fired shot one. All I can hope is that some day we'll get a new trial, and Perry will testify and tell the truth. Only I doubt it. He's plain determined that if he goes I go. Back to back. It's not right. Many a man has killed and never seen the inside of a death cell. And I never killed anybody. If you've got fifty thousand dollars to spend, you could bump off half of Kansas City and just laugh ha ha." A sudden grin obliterated his woeful indignation. "Uh-oh. There I go again. Old cry baby. You'd think I'd learn. But honest to God, I've done my damnedest to get along with Perry. Only he's so critical. Two-faced. So jealous of every little thing. Every letter I get, every visit. Nobody ever comes to see him except you," he said, nodding at the journalist, who was as equally well acquainted with Smith as he was with Hickock. "Or his lawyer. Remember when he was in the hospital? With that phony starvation routine? And his dad sent the postcard? Well, the warden wrote Perry's dad and said he was welcome to come here any time. But he never has showed up. I don't know. Sometimes you got to feel sorry for Perry. He must be one of the most alone people there ever was. But. Aw, the hell with him. It's mostly every bit his own fault."

 Hickock slipped another cigarette away from a package of Pall Malls, wrinkled his nose, and said, "I've tried to quit smoking. Then I figure what difference does it make under the circumstances. With a little luck, maybe I'll get cancer and beat the state at its own game. For a while there I was smoking cigars. Andy's. The morning after they hanged him, I woke up and called to him, 'Andy?' - the way I usually did. Then I remembered he was on his way to Missouri. With the aunt and uncle. I looked out in the corridor. His cell had been cleaned out, and all his junk was piled there. The mattress off his bunk, his slippers, and the scrapbook with all the food pictures - he called it his icebox. And this box of 'Macbeth' cigars. I told the guard Andy wanted me to have them, left them to me in his will. Actually, I never smoked them all. Maybe it was the idea of Andy, but somehow they gave me indigestion.

 "Well, what's there to say about capital punishment? I'm not against it. Revenge is all it is, but what's wrong with revenge? It's very important. If I was kin to the Clutters, or any of the parties York and Latham dispensed with, I couldn't rest in peace till the ones responsible had taken that ride on the Big Swing. These people that write letters to the newspapers. There were two in a Topeka paper the other day - one from a minister. Saying, in effect, what is all this legal farce, why haven't those sonsabitches Smith and Hickock got it in the neck, how come those murdering sonsabitches are still eating up the taxpayers' money? Well, I can see their side. They're mad 'cause they're not getting what they want - revenge. And they're not going to get it if I can help it. I believe in hanging. Just so long as I'm not the one being hanged."

But then he was.

 Another three years passed, and during those years two exceptionally skillful Kansas City lawyers, Joseph P. Jenkins and Robert Bingham, replaced Shultz, the latter having resigned from the case. Appointed by a Federal judge, and working without compensation (but motivated by a hard-held opinion that the defendants had been the victims of a "nightmarishly unfair trial"), Jenkins and Bingham filed numerous appeals within the framework of the Federal court system, thereby avoiding three execution dates: October 25, 1962, August 8, 1963, and February 18, 1965. The attorneys contended that their clients had been unjustly convicted because legal counsel had not been appointed them until after they had confessed and had waived preliminary hearings; and because they were not competently represented at their trial, were convicted with the help of evidence seized without a search warrant (the shotgun and knife taken from the Hickock home), were not granted a change of venue even though the environs of the trial had been "saturated" with publicity prejudicial to the accused.

 With these arguments, Jenkins and Bingham succeeded in carrying the case three times to the United States Supreme Court - the Big Boy, as many litigating prisoners refer to it - but on each occasion the Court, which never comments on its decisions in such instances, denied the appeals by refusing to grant the writs of certiorari that would have entitled the appellants to a full hearing before the Court. In March, 1965, after Smith and Hickock had been confined in their Death Row cells almost two thousand days, the Kansas Supreme Court decreed that their lives must end between midnight and 2: 00 a. m., Wednesday, April 14, 1965. Subsequently, a clemency appeal was presented to the newly elected Governor of Kansas, William Avery; but Avery, a rich farmer sensitive to public opinion, refused to intervene - a decision he felt to be in the "best interest of the people of Kansas." (Two months later, Avery also denied the clemency appeals of York and Latham, who were hanged on June 22, 1965.)

 And so it happened that in the daylight hours of that Wednesday morning, Alvin Dewey, breakfasting in the coffee shop of a Topeka hotel, read, on the first page of the Kansas City Star, a headline he had long awaited: die on rope for bloody crime. The story, written by an Associated Press reporter, began: "Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, partners in crime, died on the gallows at the state prison early today for one of the bloodiest murders in Kansas criminal a

Dewey had watched them die, for he had been among the twenty-odd witnesses invited to the ceremony. He had never attended an execution, and when on the midnight past he entered the cold warehouse, the scenery had surprised him: he had anticipated a setting of suitable dignity, not this bleakly lighted cavern cluttered with lumber and other debris. But the gallows itself, with its two pale nooses attached to a crossbeam, was imposing enough; and so, in an unexpected style, was the hangman, who cast a long shadow from his perch on the platform at the top of the wooden instrument's thirteen steps. The hangman, an anonymous, leathery gentleman who had been imported from Missouri for the event, for which he was paid six hundred dollars, was attired in an aged double-breasted pinstriped suit overly commodious for the narrow figure inside it - the coat came nearly to his knees; and on his head he wore a cowboy hat which, when first bought, had perhaps been bright green, but was now a weathered, sweat-stained oddity.

 Also, Dewey found the self-consciously casual conversation of his fellow witnesses, as they stood awaiting the start of what one witness termed "the festivities," disconcerting.

 "What I heard was, they was go