K.C. serves as more than a stop on the fugitives’ route: it is where Dick’s improvised schemes finance their escape, where poverty draws them back despite Perry Smith’s warnings, and where Dick’s renewed check-writing makes their presence known to the authorities. Its importance lies in this reversal. The city promises money, familiar contacts, and another departure; each return instead brings the risk of recognition closer.

A Market for the Escape

Dick makes K.C. the starting point of a forged-check shopping spree. At a clothing store, he instructs Perry to stand by and not react, then presents him to the clerk as a friend about to marry. Dick invents a wedding, a honeymoon in Florida, and an elaborate story about the bride’s wealth, turning an ordinary purchase into a performance designed to disarm the salesman. Perry is uneasy and doubts the wallet excuse Dick uses when the bill arrives. The clerk nevertheless supplies a blank check; Dick writes it for more than the purchase price and receives the difference in cash. The scene establishes the method that will shape their movements: Dick supplies the story and confidence, while Perry watches, participates, and doubts whether the deception can hold.

The proceeds give the pair what Perry regards as a substantial stake, enough to make Mexico seem reachable. But the money is not simply a resource for travel. It depends on repeated encounters with clerks and acquaintances, and so ties the escape to the places and people the fugitives hope to leave behind. K.C. is both their launch point and the setting where their need for cash begins to expose them.

Departure and Return

On Saturday night, November 21, Dick drives the old Chevrolet out of K.C. The overloaded car makes the departure tangible: luggage is roped to the roof and fenders, the trunk will not close, and two television sets occupy the back seat. Perry clutches his Gibson guitar, his most cherished possession. His other belongings include a cardboard suitcase, a Zenith portable radio, root-beer syrup, and boxes of books, manuscripts, and memorabilia. Dick has already cursed and kicked at those boxes, which he considers useless bulk. The packed vehicle holds their sharply different priorities as well as their possessions.

Around midnight they cross into Oklahoma. Perry is relieved to be out of Kansas and thinks of the departure as final; unlike Dick, he believes he has no one or anything important to leave behind. Dick, by contrast, has parents, a brother, and three sons to whom he has not said goodbye. The route away from K.C. therefore marks an unequal break: Perry embraces disappearance, while Dick carries unspoken family attachments with him.

Lack of money eventually reverses their direction. In a cold, rainy stop, the two share chewing gum after a day of meager food. Dick presses for a return to K.C., arguing that he can pass forged checks there quickly and raise enough money to continue toward Florida. Perry objects that Dick may already be wanted for violating parole and fears that another connection to their earlier crimes could bring the ultimate penalty. Dick dismisses that danger and insists they can move fast. Their return is thus not a confident homecoming but a gamble forced by empty pockets, with Perry’s fear set against Dick’s faith in his ability to deceive.

Familiar Streets, New Risks

Back in K.C., the pair arrive at sunrise after driving through rain in a Chevrolet taken in Iowa. They have stopped twice to siphon gas from vehicles in small towns. Dick drops Perry at a self-service laundry and promises to return within an hour. Perry washes and dries their clothes, using lead slugs bought in Mexico to operate the machine. The ordinary errand sits uneasily beside their circumstances: they are broke, travelling in a stolen car, and trying to resume criminal activity while making themselves presentable.

As Dick remains away, Perry imagines that he has been arrested. He is in pain, and the laundry’s odors make him retch outside. He thinks about how little money he has and where he could go alone, then considers visiting the Johnsons in Denver. His thoughts turn from a possible fresh start to revenge against Bobo, who had opposed arranging employment for him after prison and had warned him of the trouble it could cause. The episode makes K.C. a place where the prospect of abandonment forces Perry to confront both his dependence on Dick and his own capacity for menace.

Dick returns with an explanation and a new supply of money. After leaving Perry, he went to the Markl Buick Company, where he had once worked, and found Kansas license plates on a wrecked De Soto. He discarded the Chevrolet’s Iowa plates in a municipal reservoir, then persuaded a former schoolmate at a filling station to cash a check for fifty dollars. A visit to another former classmate, a drugstore clerk, brought the total to seventy-five dollars. Dick intends to continue visiting people and establishments that know him, including the Eagle Buffet, where staff call him Pickles. His familiarity gives him access, but also makes his return more conspicuous: the social ease that helps him obtain money depends on being recognized and trusted.

A Location That Gives Them Away

The risk becomes explicit when investigators learn that the fugitives are in K.C. Dick has written checks across town using his own name. What he treats as an efficient way to raise cash overturns the advantage of moving quickly and quietly: the checks themselves announce his presence. The city that had supplied an opening for the escape and then a means to replenish it has become a trail for the investigators.

Other recollections place K.C. within the pair’s continuing movements rather than as a single, closed episode. Dick recalls meeting Perry at the bus station after Perry showed up perhaps a month later. On another occasion, after walking around and having a beer, they drove back to K.C., stopped at the Zesto Drive-In for hamburgers, and tried Cherry Row, a stretch of park Dick associates with sexual encounters. These returns extend the city’s role beyond the initial shopping spree: it is a familiar point to which their movements repeatedly bend, even as the practical habits that make it useful—reusing contacts, writing checks, and returning to known places—make concealment increasingly fragile.