Blood Will Out

by Walter Kirn

  “Of course he did.”

  “Did you ever have suspicions?”

  Did I? As a college English major, I’d learned the phrase “suspension of disbelief,” but with Clark you contributed belief, wiring it from your personal account into the account you held with him. He showed you a hollow tree; you added the bees. He slipped you the phone number of the president; you added the voice that would greet you if you dialed it and the faces of the Secret Service agents who would show up at your door a few days later. He gave you an envelope with a check inside; you filled in the amount.

  Magazine stories were being written and friends from the press were calling, wanting anecdotes. I spoke off the record and not at length, still constrained by vestigial loyalty. You don’t hear that someone you’ve known for years is bad and instantly pivot to dump on them; it feels opportunistic and debased, a breach of faith with the concept of faith itself. We’re brought up to trust and could hardly function otherwise. The cop who pulls us over to write a ticket must be a cop because he wears the uniform; the bank teller to whom we hand our paycheck is depositing it, not stealing it, because he works behind a marble counter; the nurse who places our newborn in our arms is really a nurse because she’s holding our baby, and our baby is our baby because she’s holding it. When trust is abused, the need for it persists.

  Trust was crumbling everywhere just then. In August and September 2008, Lehman Brothers, the Bernie Madoff investment fund, the market in mortgages and their fancy derivatives were all exposed as Clark Rockefellers writ large. Who were the Lehman brothers, anyway? Letterhead fodder. And what were mortgage-backed securities, those infamous instruments of mass insolvency? They brought to mind the old joke about the man who asks what’s holding up the world and is told that it rests on the broad back of an elephant. But what supports the elephant? Another elephant. And under that one? Elephants the whole way down. No wonder Clark, when he was in a pinch, sought to camouflage himself on Wall Street. A swindler alone is nothing but a crook, but a swindler surrounded by thousands of other swindlers is a dealer-broker.

  It took several months for my bond with Clark to dissipate, but once it did I resolved to write about him. I remember the very day. I was sitting in the same office at the same desk where we’d arranged the delivery of Shelby. I had a new girlfriend by then, Amanda, a writer from Los Angeles, who’d come back to Livingston with me after a winter of romance in California that left me homesick for my kids. Out in the hallway Charlie was shooting free throws at a mesh hoop I’d mounted above a doorway. Maisie was blasting her Hello Kitty boom box and pretending to read Tom Sawyer, my idea, while actually reading a teenage vampire saga, popular culture’s idea. Amanda was trying to nap using earplugs, resting up after our frolic in Saint Louis, where a movie of one of my novels was being shot. We’d hung out with George Clooney, a terrifying charmer, and had even been asked up to his hotel room—an invitation I’d declined for both of us in the interest of keeping our relationship and preserving my tenuous sobriety. On my desk was a fresh white legal pad with the optimistic heading “Projects.” Magazine writing, my major source of income, was swiftly dissolving in an online acid bath of unpaid content. I needed a book idea.

  Sorry, Clark. You asked for it, old sport. You knew who I was, and deep down I knew who you were, even if I played dumb there for a time—so dumb that I didn’t realize I was playing, which, looking back, was a fairly cunning strategy. You were material. Surprise, surprise. Look in your wallet; it’s empty. Now look in mine.

  SANDRA BOSS’S TESTIMONY TOOK all day, and before she could be cross-examined the clock ran out. My daughter lost interest about halfway through and started glancing at her turned-off phone, anxious to resume her online social life. Her lapse of focus disappointed me, but I blamed modernity, not her. The center had not only failed to hold, it had ceased to exist as a viable idea, even as a memory. We hurried away from downtown to beat the traffic and drove up and over the pass into the Valley where Charlie and Maggie were staying at a hotel. Maggie had remarried a few months earlier. Her new husband mixed sound for the pop singer John Mayer; Maisie was set to see him that night at a big group dinner. Dad bids a murder trial, Mom bids rock and roll; Mom wins by a point, or maybe several. It was fine. It was life’s reciprocating engine of displeasure and acceptance, imperfection and compromise. Clark had rejected this cycle; he inclined toward absolutism. He’d pursued another program: triumph. Salty soup, mashed potatoes, and bread again for him tonight. I’d heard that he didn’t mind prison, that it suited him.

  “So what did you think?” I asked my daughter. I could see the hotel up ahead, its spotlit palm trees, the valet line of German sports cars and convertibles. The trial was set to wind up in a few days, but then I would have to hunker down and write and possibly look for a way to speak with Clark, particularly if he wound up safely jailed. I wouldn’t see my kids for weeks.

  “It’s surprising how much like TV it is,” she said. “It’s a little more boring, but that’s the only difference. Also, I think he’ll get off. Too circumstantial.” She pulled the last rubber band out of her hair and shook it out smooth and straight and long, getting ready for her rock-star dinner. “Did you like him, Dad?” she asked me.

  I gave this some thought. One owes this to a child. They think about everything, the world is new to them, and the effort they make deserves to be returned.

  “I did,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “He was smart. I like smart people. Plus, he has a certain hypnotic way of talking. It pulls you along and lulls you and draws you in.”

  “You’re lucky he didn’t kill you too,” she said. She leaned over and kissed my cheek but barely grazed it—her custom lately, no contact, the gesture only—then got out of the car and walked toward the hotel. Maggie and Charlie were waiting there. They waved. Their waves might have been for Maisie, but I waved back at them. I don’t think they noticed, though. They were too far away.

  THIRTEEN

  WE ALL UNDERSTAND that you can’t predict the future, but getting to know an old friend, however perversely, through his murder trial, reveals a truth less commonly acknowledged: you can’t predict the past. It can change at any time. As Balian called his last few witnesses and reporters placed their bets, anticipating a hung jury, it occurred to me that my life’s road had forked behind me. When fresh information discredits past perceptions, the underlying memories remain but they no longer hold their old positions; you’re left to draw a new map with displaced landmarks. You thought you were found but you realize that you were lost, and someday you may discover that you’re lost now.

  This distressing idea solidified for me when one of Clark’s New Hampshire neighbors, a blueberry farmer named Christopher Kuzma, repeated a number of stories Clark had told him that I had once swallowed as readily as he had. The one about the jet propulsion lab in Canada, whose existence Clark sought to render credible by giving Kuzma an arm patch from a Shuttle mission and by sending him e-mails containing photos of a satellite. The one about harvesting wild honey. The one about having influential contacts inside the British government. Kuzma’s best story, though, was new to me. On a trip to New York City, while touring the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Clark got on his phone in front of Kuzma and ordered the museum to return several multimillion-dollar paintings that he’d supposedly lent the institution. One might have been a Rothko. Kuzma wasn’t sure.

  Balian concluded with a question intended to show that Clark had hidden from Kuzma his links to California. “Did he ever mention the names of any other cities that he was connected to in the United States?”

  “Umm, Montana, at one point . . .”

  My sinuses drained, an effect of spiking adrenaline. I’d heard here and there that Clark sometimes referred to a ranch he owned somewhere—in Wyoming, according to one source, near a spread belonging to Dick Cheney, who Clark said had asked him to marry one of his daughters and was crestfallen when he married Sandy instead. This source sa
id Clark seemed fairly knowledgeable about the ranch’s operations, the machinery required, the irrigation methods. I was sure this knowledge came from me. Among the very few questions Clark ever asked me were several about western agriculture. One, I recalled, was exceedingly specific. “You mentioned an off-road utility vehicle that you haul tools and supplies in? Its name again?”

  “A Gator,” I replied. “Like ‘Alligator.’”

  “Manufactured by?”

  “John Deere.”

  “A John Deere Gator. Excellent. I’m buying one, Walter, for my Cornish place tomorrow. Can it go in the water?”

  “Above its axles? I don’t quite understand.”

  “Does it convert to a watercraft?” he asked.

  “You’re thinking of something I think they call a ‘Duck.’”

  “A ‘Duck.’ Very good. I’ll buy one of those as well.”

  The man was a brain tick. He crawled into your hair and fed on your life through a puncture in your scalp. Montana. If he had ever showed up there, the first thing he would have done, the record indicated, was ask to be addressed by a new name. Security. Privacy. You understand, Walter. The name would have had a western, campfire quality to go with its aroma of eastern breeding. Buck Vanderbilt? Slim Whitney? Maybe he would have styled himself a Bush, a lost Bush sent packing by his Texas elders for setting fire to his private school or running over a child in downtown Houston. Buddy Bush. Buffalo Bush.

  Bailey’s cross-examination of Kuzma followed the tart, sardonic, established approach that seemed to play poorly with the jury. Mock the witness for tolerating Clark’s blarney, implying that the witness was full of it himself. Had Kuzma ever seen the private jet that Clark claimed to have at his disposal? No. Had Clark mentioned Kevin Costner? Yes. “And if you pardon my crudity,” said Bailey, who’d already pardoned himself for it long ago, “on another level you kind of thought he was full of crap, right?”

  “No.”

  This answer convinced me of Kuzma’s honesty. So did his guileless response when Bailey asked him why he “hung around” with the defendant. “Because he was entertaining,” Kuzma said. I would have answered the same way. Clark was diverting, and now we all knew why—because there was something he wanted to divert us from, a grave marked with an X on our new maps.

  Vertigo. That sense of falling while standing still, that illusion of standing still while falling. The relevant movie reference was also Vertigo, about a man who falls in love with a woman who doesn’t exist. I felt it most keenly the day of Kuzma’s testimony because it might have been me there on the stand retelling some of the same tales and reminding the combative, literal Bailey that True and False are not the salient categories when it comes to life outside the courtroom. Try Lively and Dull. Exciting and Exhausting. Intriguing and Tedious. No wonder the press was expecting a hung jury—not only was the evidence circumstantial, so was the defendant. He was the sum of the stories that he’d told and the reactions they’d produced. To be a murderer one must be a person, but other than the German passport that the police were lucky to have found, there was no hard proof of this in Clark’s case.

  I glanced at them sitting up sober in their box, the jurors who’d soon be required to pass judgment on someone the rest of us had just let pass, concerned with our amusement, not his veracity. They were wearing the earnest masks of civic duty, but after all they’d heard these past few weeks—the adventures of a film noir baronet; how to succeed in business without really existing; the country husband from outer space—my guess was that they found Clark entertaining too.

  FOURTEEN

  THE NIGHT AFTER Balian made his closing statement, an impassioned reprise of his opening remarks that was largely delivered from behind Clark’s chair and ended on a potent note of apparently long-suppressed, sarcastic contempt (“Yes, I said he’s a master manipulator. I have never said he was a master murderer”), I rented a movie that I’d been meaning to watch and Clark might have seen in one of his classes. Its English title is Purple Noon. Its original French title is Plein soleil. Made in 1960, the year before Christian Gerhartsreiter was born, it is the first film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley.

  Alain Delon plays the social-climbing shape-shifter. He stabs rich Philippe Greenleaf (Dickie in the novel) while they’re out sailing in the Mediterranean, dumps his body into the sea, and then goes about impersonating him, concealing the crime by forging his victim’s signature on some letters written on his typewriter. Ripley sends them, postmarked Italy, to Greenleaf’s family. (The postcards supposedly written by Linda Sohus and sent from Paris after her disappearance appeared to be Clark’s homage to Ripley’s ploy.) Many other evasions and maneuvers follow, including the murder of Greenleaf’s snoopy college chum, but just when Ripley thinks he’s in the clear, the body turns up in a freak way, snagged on the sailboat’s anchor cable, and the game is up. This isn’t how Highsmith’s book ends. In the novel, Ripley gets away. He returns in a sequel, Ripley Under Ground, married to a woman of means and involved in a plot to counterfeit the work of a painter who committed suicide.

  Some people kill for love and some for money, but Clark, I’d grown convinced, had killed for literature. To be a part of it. To live inside it. To test it in the most direct ways possible. This wasn’t a motive most juries would find intelligible, and when I’d tried it out one day on Balian, walking beside him in the hall as he pushed his rolling file cart toward the elevators, he awarded me not a flicker of agreement, let alone comprehension. I understood. He was seeking a conviction, not an epiphany or a literary exegesis.

  But I’d already had one: even as a fraud, Clark was a fraud. He’d never had an idea of his own, not about how to speak or how to dress or which science fiction TV show to obsess about or how to cover up a murder. He was wholly, impeccably derivative. On the Today show, “the aficionado of station wagons” spoke of an old Ford “woody” with “pop-up headlights” in which he’d taken those childhood vacations to Mount Rushmore and other spots that he never really visited but claimed to recall more clearly than his own name. After the clip was shown in court, Ellen Sohus, John’s sister, revealed to me that Clark was, in fact, describing the vintage station wagon, a quite distinctive model, used by her own family when they went on holidays. As for two television programs he’d boasted of associations with—Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the 1980s version, and Star Trek: The Next Generation—one was a subpar quasi-remake, the other a sequel (one of whose innovations was the “Holodeck,” the Starship Enterprise’s onboard generator of elaborate virtual realities). Even Snooks, his daughter’s pet name, was borrowed, lifted from the child of a family he’d known back in Connecticut.

  Everything was mimicked, appropriated, sampled, down to the haircut he copied from the Chandler men, the fancied ranch he took from me, and the markers of Wasp culture that he skimmed, I’m convinced, from a best-selling book that hit the stores months after he reached America: The Official Preppy Handbook: The first guide to The Tradition, Mannerisms, Etiquette, Dress Codes, The Family. How to Be Really Top Drawer. Its caption-filled front cover was his tip sheet, at least in matters of footwear and shirt selection. “The Crucial Element: Top-Siders, Loafers, Tassel. Cuffs a must. The Sock Controversy . . .” “The Virtues of Pink and Green.” It was marketed as a humor book, but Clark, whose immunity to facetious irony was, looking back, the diagnostic key I missed, never got the joke. Which didn’t harm him, as it happened, because he circulated among the snotty targets of the joke: the American gentry, itself a desperate reproduction of the British gentry, a prettified warrior class all spiffied up with the spoils of its conquests. The very last of which, of course (achieved with the help of its Yankee allies), was Germany.

  Buried under all the shams, the shame. Germany—it lost. But Clark liked to ride with winners. There is only one chapel in all America, or in all the world, where General George Patton is rendered in stained glass standing in the turret of a tank ringed by the names of captured
German towns: the chapel where Clark chose to worship in San Marino while using the surname of a British sailor who was also a hero of World War Two.

  Lebensraum, the word Clark couldn’t resist even though it risked giving him away. It meant room to spread out and manifest one’s destiny. Hitler sought it but failed to get it. Clark, the copycat, resumed the campaign on a minor level and succeeded, in America. Soon he was acting like he owned the place. He learned it responded well to being owned. Clubs closed to most of us stowed his wet umbrellas and counted out the ice cubes in his drinks. Skyscraper restaurants ushered him to tables with radiant, titanic, plunging views. The art of American postwar splash and swagger hung confident and colossal on his walls. His surname meant “Don’t ask. Now step aside.” It was quite an endeavor, quite an operation.

  The problem was that it was all done undercover, with borrowed gestures, borrowed language, borrowed clothes, and borrowed tropes, meaning that Clark, despite appearances, never truly rose at all; except for the odd Lebensraum, his real self never even broke the surface. Once he submerged himself in the persona that he began rehearsing at the Savios, the only progress left to him was downward, deeper into concealment and imitation. But deeper concealment required deeper secrets. He went looking for some and found, inevitably, the deepest one of all, and, to a certain type of mind—his type—the most prestigious: murder.

  But where could he borrow a murder plot?

  From books and movies, where he borrowed most things.

  But where could he borrow his victims?

  From right next door, where later he’d borrow the iced-tea supplies for his festive Trivial Pursuit night.

  It was two in the morning when the movie ended. I had to be at the courthouse by nine A.M., which meant I had to hit the road by seven. The jury might come back at at any time, and the prosecution’s powerful closing had changed the betting among the trial watchers, convincing them that a guilty verdict loomed. “He’s gotten away with it for twenty-eight years,” Balian told the jurors, whose faces wore a grim, determined cast. “He thinks he’s smarter than everyone. Do you remember what he told Ed Savio when he voted? He [Savio] said, ‘How did you vote? You don’t have a license?’ What did he [Clark] say? ‘People are so stupid.’ He thinks people are so stupid.”