The passage opens with Capote describing the killers, Dick and Perry. Capote’s choice of words to describe them provides his readers with a physical image and a chance to form an opinion about them. For example he writes that both, “were fastidious, very attentive to hygiene and the condition of their fingernails”(30). In other words, the killers are calculated in their actions and show that they contradict
the stereotype of dirty, careless killers. The quality of being “fastidious” is represented later in the novel that the killers picked up the bullet casings after each gunshot, something that the police were looking for but lacked to have as evidence. He then describes Dick’s face with his “left eye being truly serpentine, with a venomous, sickly-blue squint”(31). Capote uses the reference to a venomous snake to create a nervous tone forcing the readers recognize Dick and Perry as the killers. Capote leaves the readers with a lasting impression that the killers are capable of causing harm but do not yet know that they are capable of mercilessly killing an innocent family.