Hickock had learned about the Clutter family from a jail mate, an ex-employee of Herb Clutter's named Floyd Wells. In prison, Wells had casually mentioned how his former boss spent $10,000 a week to keep his farm going, and speculated that there must be a safe somewhere on Clutter's considerable spread. Hickock took this wishful information and recruited Smith, a man he figured to be a natural-born killer. (This, too, was somewhat divorced from reality: Smith bragged about having once killed a man just because he felt like it, but it was a lie.)

After the two got out of prison, they drove 400 miles out to the Clutter ranch, hogtied the family members in separate rooms and demanded to know where the safe was. There was none. Hickock and Smith shot each of the four Clutters in the head and left the ranch with $40, a radio and a pair of binoculars. Two months later, Wells' information led the police to Hickock and Smith as the two pulled into Las Vegas, broke and on the run. Five years after that, both men died on the same night on the gallows of the Kansas state prison. Finally, the story had an ending. Capote could finish his book.

After "In Cold Blood" was published, Capote's friends and detractors (and he had plenty of both) would remark on the parallels between the author and Perry Smith, the more sensitive and guilt-ridden of the two killers. Possibly, Capote felt a physical kinship to Smith: His body, as one of his "swans" would later recount in George Plimpton's "Truman Capote," combined a boyish face and torso with "the legs of a truck driver." More likely he simply understood that what separated him from Smith, more than anything, was luck.

Capote, like Smith, had been born to absent, unreliable parents. Both had suicide and alcoholism in the family. Both were desperate for acceptance, but they also had ironclad estimations of their own importance -- Perry, in his words, was "special"; Capote, in his own, "a genius." Were it not for his mother's second marriage and his own considerable charms and angelic good looks (and his keen ability to ingratiate himself to his benefactors), Capote might have ended up as alone and desperate as Smith did. Like Smith, Capote knew exactly what he wanted to be, and he constructed himself accordingly. Capote's ambitions were realized; Smith's weren't.

Another claim, this one circulated by one of the detectives Capote interviewed in Kansas, had Capote involved in a sexual affair with Smith, carried out during Capote's visits to the penitentiary. That one's pretty dubious, but Capote's sympathies are clear, and his ear for Smith, and for all the disappointments of Smith's life, are part of what make the book work so well. Through Capote, we hear of Smith's studious attempts at self-improvement, his handwritten vocabulary lists full of words like "ostensibly" and "depredate."

We hear how the elementary school dropout taught himself beautiful handwriting, and an appreciation of Thoreau. This is where Capote's journalism -- not his writing, but his reporting -- comes alive: when we hear Perry Smith remembering what it was like to be reunited with his itinerant, absent father, "like when the ball hits the bat really solid. Di Maggio."

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