Guilt after the crime and fear of retribution

Guilt after the crime and fear of retribution become a pressure that neither Perry Smith nor Dick can keep entirely outside their conversation. In Mexico, Perry speaks of what they did as something fundamentally wrong and doubts they can escape consequence; Dick dismisses the subject, yet privately shares the fear. Their exchange makes the crime’s aftermath less a settled silence than a recurring struggle between denial, memory, and the expectation that something must happen.

The conversation in Mexico

The conflict surfaces during a noon picnic on a promontory. Dick looks through binoculars at mountains, hawks, and a dusty village; he is eating a cold tortilla and enjoying his second day in Mexico. The pair have crossed the border at Laredo on November 23, spent their first night in a brothel in San Luis Potosí, and are still two hundred miles north of Mexico City. Against this landscape of travel and apparent escape, Perry asks, “Know what I think?” and says, “I think there must be something wrong with us. To do what we did.” The question brings the crime back into a moment that Dick would rather treat as an ordinary stop on the road.

Dick’s response is irritation rather than discussion. He puts the binoculars into a leather case marked with the initials H.W.C. and thinks that the two men had more or less agreed not to talk about the crime. His anger reveals how deliberately he has tried to keep it out of speech: Perry’s words matter partly because they break a pact of avoidance. Dick asks what Perry means, but Perry will not reduce the admission to a specific technical question. He returns instead to the moral scale of the act, saying that someone who did such a thing must have something wrong with him.

Denial and the unstable claim of normality

Dick insists that the accusation does not apply to him. He calls himself normal and regards himself as balanced and perhaps smarter than average; in his view, Perry is the one with something wrong. His judgment draws on details he remembers from their time celling together at the Kansas State Penitentiary: Perry wetting the bed, crying out for his father in his sleep, sucking his thumb, and poring over treasure guides. Dick also remembers how Perry could shift into a fury while his outward manner remained cool. These recollections let Dick frame abnormality as Perry’s private condition rather than a shared consequence of their crime.

Yet Dick’s confidence is incomplete. He had once believed he could regulate Perry’s sudden rages, but learned that he could not; afterward, he became unsure of Perry and wondered why he was not more afraid of him. The conversation brings that uncertainty into the open without resolving it. Dick’s declaration of normality is a defense, not proof that he feels untouched. When Perry says he had never thought he could do “a thing like that,” Dick’s answer shifts toward a story Perry had told him about killing a Black man. Perry maintains the story, although the narrative later clarifies that he had known a man named King but had never harmed him and did not know whether King was dead. Dick’s reliance on the tale as evidence of Perry’s character therefore rests on a fiction Perry has continued to uphold.

Memory, remorse, and the expectation of consequence

Perry distinguishes the supposed earlier killing from the Clutter murders, but the distinction does not ease his fear. He says he cannot believe that anyone could commit such an act and get away with it, and that he cannot stop thinking something must happen. His fear is not expressed as a confession of legal exposure or as a specific prediction. It is an insistence that the crime cannot simply disappear into the past. Dick’s demand that he stop talking interrupts the exchange, but does not establish that Dick is free of the same thought.

The narration makes Perry’s difficulty in speaking more consequential by showing what returns when he remembers. He would prefer not to begin the conversation, yet experiences spells of helplessness in which images and sounds recur: blue light exploding in a black room, the glass eyes of a toy bear, a silver dollar rolling across a floor, boot steps on hardwood stairs, and a man’s gasping breaths. The remembered plea—“Oh, no! Oh, please! No! No! No! No! Don’t! Oh, please don’t, please!”—arrives as an involuntary repetition rather than a controlled account. Perry’s inability to keep the subject down gives his fear a sensory form: the crime returns in fragments even when he would rather avoid speaking of it.

His admission that something may be wrong with him also carries the burden of family history. He finds the possibility painful, especially if the defect were something he had been born with, and thinks of the deaths and losses in his family. His mother died after strangling on her own vomit; his sister Fern fell fifteen floors from a hotel window, a death Perry tried to believe was accidental; and his brother Jimmy killed himself after driving his wife to suicide. His surviving sister, Barbara, is the one sibling described as having married and begun raising a family. These histories do not explain away Perry’s actions, but they show the bleak pattern through which he tries to understand whether violence and catastrophe are inherited, fated, or chosen.

Shared dread and its limits

The narrative complicates the difference the men claim between them. Dick has not believed in God or been troubled by omens, whereas Perry is receptive to superstition; nevertheless, Perry’s question touches the doubt Dick cannot fully dismiss. The thought of whether they can truly get away with the crime circles in Dick’s mind too. He abruptly tells Perry to be quiet, starts the car, and backs away from the promontory. The movement ends the conversation physically, not intellectually: the narration has already disclosed that Perry’s fear has found an answering uncertainty in Dick.

Their disagreement also has an uneasy moral boundary. When Dick challenges Perry’s story about the man named King, Perry answers that killing a Black man was different, then returns to the concern that they cannot have escaped the Clutter murders without consequence. The distinction does not amount to a clear admission of remorse for the victims; it exposes the limited, unequal terms through which Perry discusses violence. Dick’s own response after ordering silence is not a confession either. He swerves toward an old, mangy dog and runs it down, then voices satisfaction. That act sharply contrasts with the fear of retribution hanging over the conversation: while the possibility of moral consequence troubles him, Dick continues to enact casual violence. The episode leaves guilt neither cleanly confessed nor convincingly extinguished. It persists instead as a returning question, a set of involuntary memories, and a dread that escape may not be the same as getting away.