Kansas City shopping spree with forged checks

The Kansas City shopping spree with forged checks shows Dick turning social performance into a means of escape, while Perry Smith moves between admiring his partner’s practical skill and investing the fraud with his own romantic fantasies. They left with cash and goods they could sell or pawn, enough, Perry believed, to reach Mexico. The day’s apparent success, however, ended not in uncomplicated celebration but in Dick’s anxiety about the consequences his parents might face when the checks failed.

Background and Stakes

By this point, Dick and Perry Smith were trying to assemble money for a journey to Mexico. Perry’s immediate circumstances had seemed bleak: he had begun the day with almost no money, but the prospect changed when Dick’s schemes produced what Perry regarded as a substantial stake. The shopping trip was therefore more than an effort to acquire clothes and valuables. Its proceeds offered the pair a possible route out, and the growing pile of goods gave Perry a momentary sense that a different life might be within reach.

The partnership depended on a contrast in temperament. Perry Smith was drawn to Dick’s practical, seemingly invulnerable manner, and Dick’s confidence made the proposed deception look manageable. Dick, in turn, took charge of the interactions with merchants. The spree displays that division of labor: Dick supplied the story and controlled the transactions, while Perry followed instructions, tried on clothes, and watched the performance work.

The Wedding Story and First Check

The first stop was a clothing store in Kansas City, Missouri. Dick introduced Perry Smith to the salesman as a friend who was about to marry, and presented himself as the best man helping him shop for the occasion. The invented wedding gave a reason for Perry to try on a suit and for the pair to discuss further clothes as part of a supposed Florida honeymoon. Dick even used the tale of an expensive stay at Miami Beach to make the story sound persuasive.

The salesman noted that Perry’s unusual proportions meant the suit would not fit without alteration. Dick treated the problem as unimportant, saying there was time before the invented wedding. After they selected additional jackets and slacks, Dick acted as if he had forgotten his wallet. The salesman produced a blank check; Dick wrote it for eighty dollars more than the bill, and the salesman paid the difference in cash. What Perry had expected to be an implausible ruse thus yielded money as well as clothing. The staged marriage also became more than a device in Perry’s imagination: he began to invest the fictitious bride with a character of his own, picturing her as gentle, well groomed, and intellectually minded rather than as the wealthy, glamorous woman Dick had described.

Rings, Watches, and Saleable Goods

After leaving the clothing store, Dick turned the same wedding pretext into another transaction. He suggested that the supposed groom needed a ring, and the pair drove to Best Jewelry. They bought a diamond engagement ring and a diamond wedding band by check, then took the rings to a pawnshop. Perry regretted seeing them sold, in part because he had half believed in the imagined marriage. The rings brought them one hundred and fifty dollars.

The pair continued to convert checks into items they could dispose of. At Goldman’s they obtained a man’s gold wristwatch. At an Elko camera store they acquired an elaborate motion-picture camera, which Dick considered easy to sell or pawn. They also decided to obtain several television sets. Their route then included more clothing stores: Shepherd & Foster’s, Rothschild’s, and Shopper’s Paradise. The purchases ranged from shirts and cigarette lighters to expensive equipment and inexpensive cuff links. By sundown, the stores were closing, their pockets held cash, and Dick’s car was loaded with wares that could be sold or pawned.

The success of the scheme rested on ordinary transactions made under false pretenses: a plausible account of a wedding, a check written in front of a trusting salesman, and purchases selected for their resale value. The sequence also depended on Dick’s ability to improvise. Perry had never previously tried to pass a check and was nervous, but Dick told him to remain present without drawing attention to himself. The contrast between Perry’s uncertainty and Dick’s ease helped establish the pattern that carried through the day.

The Haul and Its Reversal

Perry Smith felt elated as he surveyed the goods in the car. The haul seemed to put Mexico and the possibility of a new start closer at hand. He praised Dick’s performance, saying that it had been convincing enough to make even him believe the story. Dick did not share his satisfaction. Instead of gloating over the successful day, he looked subdued and sad.

At a bar, after drinking three Orange Blossoms, Dick explained what troubled him: his parents would remain behind when the checks began to bounce. He expected his father to try to make them good, although his father was old, sick, and unable to bear the cost. The concern altered the meaning of the day’s success. The cash and merchandise offered Dick and Perry Smith a way to leave, but the consequences of their fraud could fall on Dick’s family. The spree therefore ends on a divide between Perry’s exhilaration at the prospect of escape and Dick’s apprehension about the people he would leave to deal with the damage.

Narrative Significance

The episode makes deception visible as a practiced social performance rather than a single act of forgery. Dick’s invented wedding supplies a coherent explanation for the clothing, the rings, and the imagined honeymoon; each new purchase extends the original fiction and gives the pair another opportunity to obtain cash or goods. Perry Smith’s private investment in the fabricated bride complicates the transaction further: a story created to persuade a salesman briefly becomes a fantasy he does not want to surrender.

The final change in mood also qualifies the image of Dick as merely confident and calculating. His manipulation of the salesman succeeds, but the thought of his parents facing the bounced checks interrupts his satisfaction. For Perry, the full car and the money signify movement toward Mexico; for Dick, they also carry an unpaid consequence back toward home. That opposition gives the spree its decisive turn: the more successful the escape fund becomes, the more plainly its costs reach beyond the two men.