"It's odd about tattoos. I've talked to several hundred men convicted of homicide---multiple homicide, in most cases. The only common denominator I could find among them was tattoos. A good eighty percent of them were heavily tattooed. Richard Speck. York and Latham. Smith and Hickock. P. 209
Capote should know, for in this collection of writings you see that he spent a lot time over the years investigating true crimes and not just Smith and Hickock, the subjects of his classic In Cold Blood.
The quote above comes from his prison interview of one of the Manson gang.
It's hard to know how to take this collection Capote writings. I suppose they are nonfiction, but I suspect he blends fiction and nonfiction seamlessly.
In a story called "Derring-do" Capote is running from authorities in California to avoid testifying in a murder case. At the LA airport detectives are stationed at the gate to keep him from boarding a plane to New York. He runs into legendary singer Pearl Bailey who helps to disguise him and he boards the plane with her. Hard to believe this happened as he describes it, but I will never know for sure, will I?
At a funeral he encounters Marilyn Monroe. The two of them end of running around Manhattan that night. How naive really was Marilyn Monroe?
"I'd say you are a beautiful child." P. 233
The story called "A Lamp in the Window" is hard to swallow. Capote catches a ride to a wedding in Connecticut. On the way back to Manhattan he sees that his driver is drunk and so he abandons the car on a country road. He wanders up to a house with a lamp in the window where a widow lives with her cat. It turns that she is an avid reader and she loves cats. He notices a freezer in the kitchen. Before he leaves the lady shows him the freezer where she keeps her prior dead cats. Gothic? You bet.
The title story is about a lady in Martinique who sees chameleons on her property. Whose to know how to take this story.
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