That was when he confessed he had not given Perry all the money he found in the Clutter house. I yelled at him then, thinking he might have found the ten thousand dollars we thought was there, and was holding out on us. But he said he had found a lot, not as much as ten grand, but he would share it with us if we would take him to Mexico with us when we went. He said he would not show me where the money was until we were on the road there, and he wanted Perry to know in advance so I didn’t try to kill him.

No one really knows about the money. We celebrated that night, and I felt much better.

Perry talked about his mother who ran out on him when he was a little boy, and about his father who raised him. Perry had helped his father build a tourist cabin up in Alaska but nobody came.

Jerry said he was born in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and had a little brother who he killed with his pop’s hunting rifle when he was twelve and his brother was eight. He said it was an accident but he still got sent to a reformatory. When he got out two years later his parents did not want him anymore. That was how he ended up walking across country with his grandfather.

Perry wiped away a tear when he heard this story. I figured some parts of this story might be true, but there was no way of telling which ones. All I could see is that it seemed unfair to kill the one person who stood by you, even if he did so for dirty reasons, but I kept this thought to myself because I could already feel the rift that was forming between Perry and me because of that boy.

They both looked at me so I told about my life, my parents, and my marriages that did not work, and about my four boys who I thought were doing pretty well though I never saw them very much. That’s how the kid found out about their names and where they live.

Jerry now told us where he had buried the money, about a mile outside of Olathe. He said it was more than six thousand dollars and he had found it in Mr. Clutter’s office, in one of the file cabinet drawers where we hadn’t looked yet because Mr. Clutter interrupted our search. He had found it when we were busy with the Clutters. He repeated that if we took him with us he would share it.

The kid is very generous Perry said. He could have just taken off with the cash instead of funding our getaway.

It would take me nearly two years to earn that much money at the garage. So we headed south through Oklahoma to the Mexico border.