Las Vegas, Nevada

Las Vegas, Nevada is a recurring biographical and narrative landmark in the lives of Dick and Perry Smith. The book identifies it as Dick’s hometown and the setting of his imagined future as a performer; it also enters Perry’s story through a claimed killing, a return undertaken before he joined Dick in Kansas, and Alvin Dewey’s later recollection of meeting him at police headquarters. The city is not developed through a broad portrait of its streets or institutions. Instead, its importance gathers around these sharply different associations: aspiration, mobility, violence, and the first encounter between suspect and investigator.

A City in the Narrative

Las Vegas, Nevada appears less as a continuous backdrop than as a location recalled from different stages of the characters’ lives. For Dick, it is home and the imagined site of a successful singing career. For Perry Smith, it is bound to a story about his past and to a practical decision made after parole, when he sold his car and set out for Kansas. In Alvin Dewey’s memory, it is where he first saw Perry in an interrogation room. These strands do not make the city a single, stable symbol: they show how one place can hold a private fantasy, a criminal self-presentation, a change of direction, and a law-enforcement memory.

The narrative’s movement between those associations also gives Las Vegas a particular temporal function. Dick’s performance is an imagined future; Perry’s return belongs to the unsettled months after his release; the police headquarters scene is remembered later, at the end of the investigation and at the execution. The city recurs across these different moments without being described as though the characters shared one experience of it. Its significance comes from the paths that lead away from it and the memories that lead back.

Dick’s Hometown and Imagined Stage

Dick’s connection to Las Vegas, Nevada is explicit: it is his hometown. While waiting for Perry, he pictures himself singing before an audience in an elegant nightclub there, with celebrities watching and a musical arrangement supporting his performance. He imagines not merely being present in a club but becoming its celebrated new attraction, performing a familiar song and then offering one of his own. The scene belongs to fantasy, not to a reported engagement or an actual performance in the city.

The imagined nightclub gives Dick a self-fashioned identity distinct from the practical ambitions he otherwise expresses. In his reverie, he is a star with original songs and an attentive audience. One of those songs imagines parrots arriving with spring; Perry’s response to the idea that parrots could sing underscores the difference between Perry’s imaginative inwardness and Dick’s literal-mindedness. Las Vegas is thus the setting Dick supplies for an ideal version of himself, though the book offers no evidence that this imagined career ever becomes real.

That fantasy sits alongside Dick’s more conventional stated hopes. He wants a business, a house, a horse, a new car, and a settled life, while Perry is drawn to adventure and visions of buried treasure. Dick’s hometown becomes the imagined venue for public acclaim, but it does not resolve the gap between the two men’s ambitions. The contrast matters because Dick encourages Perry’s dreams when doing so helps secure his partnership, even though those dreams are not his own.

Perry Smith’s Return and Departure

After parole, Perry Smith spends four months moving about in an inexpensive, dilapidated Ford. His route carries him from Reno to Las Vegas, Nevada, and from Bellingham to Buhl, Idaho, where he finds temporary work as a truck driver. There, a letter from Dick proposes a venture in Kansas. Perry had not expected to see Dick again, but he had continued to think about both Dick and Willie-Jay. His response to the invitation therefore emerges from a period of drift and from competing hopes for renewed connection.

Perry decides to travel to Las Vegas, Nevada, sell his worn-out car, and prepare for the journey east. He packs maps, old letters, manuscripts, and books before buying a Greyhound ticket. At this point, he still hopes to reunite with Willie-Jay, whose judgment and appreciation have come to matter greatly to him during his solitary months. Dick’s proposed arrival date in Kansas roughly coincides with Willie-Jay’s expected release, so Perry treats the trip as a chance to pursue that reunion first and Dick’s proposal if it fails.

The hoped-for meeting is already impossible by the time Perry reaches Kansas City on the evening of November 12. Willie-Jay has left the same terminal five hours earlier, and the chaplain declines to disclose his destination beyond saying he is headed east. Perry is left angry and disappointed; when that feeling subsides, he recognizes that freedom has separated the two men and that they would not have made a practical criminal team. In retrospect, Las Vegas marks the point from which Perry commits himself to the journey that brings him to Dick, even though the reunion he most wants has vanished before he can reach it.

A Claimed Past and Dick’s Judgment

Las Vegas, Nevada also enters the relationship between Dick and Perry through a story Perry tells in Lansing. He describes having killed a Black man there, presenting the act as something done for its own sake. The book establishes the effect of the story on Dick’s assessment of Perry, not independent confirmation of the claim. Dick had initially considered Perry likable but self-involved and sentimental; the account changes his view and leads him to regard Perry as unusually capable of killing without an ordinary motive or restraint.

Dick turns that judgment into a reason to cultivate Perry. He flatters him and pretends to share his interest in buried treasure, sea travel, and adventure, although Dick himself prefers the prospect of property, business, and material comfort. In Dick’s calculation, Perry’s supposed capacity for violence could advance his own plans. The city’s role in this episode is therefore mediated through Perry’s account and Dick’s response: Las Vegas supplies the setting of the story that helps transform Perry, in Dick’s eyes, from an interesting acquaintance into a partner whose perceived abilities might be exploited.

The City in Dewey’s Recollection

At the execution, Alvin Dewey’s recollection returns to his first meeting with Perry Smith in an interrogation room at Police Headquarters in Las Vegas, Nevada. He remembers Perry seated in a metal chair, his small booted feet not quite reaching the floor. When Dewey opens his eyes during the execution, he sees the same childlike feet in memory. The image connects the formal end of the case to the investigator’s earliest encounter with the man he had come to know through the investigation.

Dewey’s response distinguishes Perry from Dick. He had little regard for Dick, whom he considered an unworthy small-time criminal, but Perry arouses a more complicated feeling: Dewey sees him as wounded and vulnerable even while recognizing that he was the actual murderer. The recollection does not undo the crime or the judgment against him. Instead, the Las Vegas interrogation-room image persists beside the execution, preventing the case’s legal conclusion from becoming, for Dewey, a simple sense of completion. The city remains present at the end not as a place revisited physically, but as the remembered scene through which he sees Perry once more.