in-cold-blood-truman-capote

was wide awake now; he sat up and said, 'Who is it? What do you want?' Dick told him,
very polite, like we were a couple of door-to-door salesmen, 'We want to talk to you,
sir. In your office, please.' And Mr. Clutter, barefoot, just wearing pajamas, he went
with us to the office and we turned on the office lights.
"Up till then he hadn't been able to see us very good. I think what he saw hit him
hard. Dick says, 'Now, sir, all we want you to do is show us where you keep that safe.'
But Mr. Clutter says, 'What safe?' He says he don't have any safe. I knew right then it
was true. He had that kind of face. You just knew whatever he told you was pretty much
the truth. But Dick shouted at him, 'Don't lie to me, you sonofabitch! I know goddam
well you got a safe!' My feeling was nobody had ever spoken to Mr. Clutter like that.
But he looked Dick straight in the eye and told him, being very mild about it - said,
well, he was sorry but he just didn't have any safe. Dick tapped him on the chest with
the knife, says, 'Show us where that safe is or you're gonna be a good bit sorrier.' But
Mr. Clutter - oh, you could see he was scared, but his voice stayed mild and steady - he
went on denying he had a safe.
"Sometime along in there, I fixed the telephone. The one in the office. I ripped
out the wires. And I asked Mr. Clutter if there were any other telephones in the house.
He said yes, there was one in the kitchen. So I took the flashlight and went to the
kitchen - it was quite a distance from the office. When I found the telephone, I removed
the receiver and cut the line with a pair of pliers. Then, heading back, I heard a noise. A
creaking over-head. I stopped at the foot of the stairs leading to the second floor. It was
dark, and I didn't dare use the flashlight. But I could tell there was someone there. At
the top of the stairs, silhouetted; against a window. A figure. Then it moved away."
Dewey imagines it must have been Nancy. He'd often theorized, on the basis of
the gold wristwatch found tucked in the toe of a shoe in her closet, that Nancy had
awakened, heard persons in the house, thought they might be thieves, and prudently
hidden the watch, her most valuable property.
"For all I knew, maybe it was somebody with a gun. But Dick wouldn't even
listen to me. He was so busy playing tough boy. Bossing Mr. Clutter around. Now he'd
brought him back to the bedroom. He was counting the money in Mr. Clutter's billfold.
There was about thirty dollars. He threw the billfold on the bed and told him, 'You've
got more money in this house than that. A rich man like you. Living on a spread like
this.' Mr. Clutter said that was all the cash he had, and explained he always did business
by check. He offered to write us a check. Dick just blew up - 'What kind of Mongolians
do you think we are?' - and I thought Dick was ready to smash him, so I said, 'Dick.
Listen to me. There's somebody awake upstairs.' Mr. Clutter told us the only people
upstairs were his wife and a son and daughter. Dick wanted to know if the wife had any
money, and Mr. Clutter said if she did, it would be very little, a few dollars, and he
asked us - really kind of broke down - please not to bother her, because she was an
invalid, she'd been very ill for a long time. But Dick insisted on going upstairs. He made
Mr. Clutter lead the way.
"At the foot of the stairs, Mr. Clutter switched on lights that lighted the hall
above, and as we were going up, he said, 'I don't know why you boys want to do this.