Then she threw her drink in his face, chest heaving, pupils dilated. She had a twisted grin of triumph on her cherry-streaked lips. “You don’t fool me, you little queer. You’re just as pathetic as I am. Maybe more pathetic.”
“You’ll regret this,” he assured her calmly, as she was hastily ushered away, cackling wildly, by one of Wallis’s lapdogs. He was already starting to plot his revenge….
But that was for later. After. Right now, the only thing he wanted to work on, could work on, was his party. Throwing this party meant he didn’t have to worry about what to write next. He’d worked himself raw, scraped his soul to the marrow, writing In Cold Blood. At first it was just a diversion, a small article in the Times about a murdered Kansas family that piqued his interest. He thought it might make a nice little piece for The New Yorker—something about a murder in a small town, the shocking randomness of it, the reverberations. So he convinced William Shawn, the editor, to send him out to Kansas so he could report on it. That was all.
But from the moment he laid eyes on Dick—stupid, blustering Dick—and Perry—mesmerizing, charismatic Perry—at the tiny Kansas courthouse, the night the two men were arrested for the murders of the Clutter family, he knew that he had something more. His masterpiece. A case study, a brilliant piece of journalism, written with the lyricism of a novel. “In fact, I’ve invented a new genre. The nonfiction novel,” he never tired of telling anyone who would listen, back in 1959, when the whole thing started. He spent endless weeks in Holcomb, Kansas, gathering the material, interviewing the townsfolk, trying to understand the doomed Clutters, getting cozy with the lead detective, granite-faced Alvin Dewey, and his adorable wife, Marie, getting even cozier with the arrested and then convicted murderers, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith—and understanding the latter better, more intimately, than he ever did the Clutters.
When he returned to New York and settled down with his notebooks to write, it had been easy, for a change. The manuscript flowed from his fingertips on its own, and he told absolutely everyone about it, and soon everyone in New York was salivating to read it, and he would give them glimpses, little performances of certain scenes, at parties and dinners. But then the waiting; the everlasting, tortuous waiting for the end. The End–oh, how he longed to write it, but he couldn’t, not for years, agonizing years that dragged on while Dick and Perry were granted stay after stay, pleading with him, Truman—their great hope, their chronicler—to help them. Years in which all he could do was talk about this great opus, not finish it, even while he had to watch Nelle Harper Lee win all the prizes for her story about their childhood, To Kill a Mockingbird. Oh, Christ, the pain of watching that happen to Nelle, of all people! Clumsy, inarticulate Nelle! And the fear—shocking, jolting him awake at night so that his heart raced, his body swam in clammy sweat—that people would lose interest in the story—and him. And then he would be just another writer. And not the greatest of all time.
But finally, there were no more stays, no more last-minute calls from the governor, and the executions—oh, God, oh, Jesus, oh, Mama. They’d shamed him into being there, Dick and Perry and, yes, Nelle, who’d helped him research it, and William Shawn, who expected blood, no less, for what he was paying Truman. So he’d gone to see Perry and Dick only an hour before their execution. They were white as sheets, were still trying to be brave, flippant, but obviously terrified, poor boys! What had Truman felt, talking to them this last time? He hadn’t processed it all; he wasn’t brave enough for that. Truman knew he was a coward in many ways; it was, he believed, one of the most charming things about him. That night—it was near midnight, dark, raining, a horrible, bone-chilling nightmare that he knew had seeped into his very being, and that he would carry with him forever—his cowardice and bravery, both, astonished him. The cowardice that had kept him from going to Dick and Perry despite their pleas, until the very last moment when there would be no time for them to say what he knew they would, that he had deserted them, given up on them—used them. But he had come, after all, and his bravery overwhelmed him; the courage to stay when the two murderers asked him to witness their final moments—the barbaric ritual, the last words, the hoods over the heads, the knees buckling, the tortured writhing at the end of the noose, and then, finally, the eerie stillness, the absence of breathing, the one less person in the cavernous barn despite the fact that there were still the same number of bodies. The subtraction of a soul. The tragic waste of lives not unlike his own, if he was being honest—lives of men abandoned by their parents, treated like crap, like dirt, like fungus, all their lives. Men who had taken one turn while he had taken another, and that simple act of a change in direction, in wind, in air, of one foot in front of another, was all that separated the two of them, killer and artist.