Portraits And Observations (2013) - Plot & Excerpts
“Oh, nothing,” I said, but the truth was that I’d remembered a long-ago question by Perry Smith, one of the two murderers whose trial was being reenacted here. He had been captured a few days before, and his question was, “Were there any representatives of the cinema there?” I wondered what he would have thought of the present scene: the huge arc lights arranged inside the courtroom where he and Richard Hickock had been tried, the jury box filled with the very same men who had convicted them, the purring generators, whirring cameras, the whispering technicians dancing in and out among thick coils of electric cable. The first conversation I ever had with Perry Smith was at the beginning of January, 1960. It was a cold day, glittery as an icicle; Smith and I talked together at the sheriff’s office in a room where prairie winds pressed against the windows, sucked the glass, rattled it. I was fairly rattled myself, for I had been working for more than a month on a book about the murder of Herbert Clutter and his family, In Cold Blood, and unless I could establish close contact with this half-Irish, half-Indian young man, I would have to abandon the project.
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