Blood Will Out

by Walter Kirn

  And so we were. The trial had proved Clark right, at least about the people who’d known him best: bankers, brokers, degree-holding professionals, and several published writers, including me. I lay in bed next to the open Ripley novel and the computer on which I’d watched the movie. Clark, a composite being of ink and celluloid, utterly transparent to me now, had cloaked himself in the stuff of my own literacy. The instant familiarity I felt with him—this consummate immigrant, this immigrant with a vengeance—was my familiarity with my own culture. Of course he’d fooled me. Of course he’d held me spellbound. He spoke from inside my own American mind.

  IN THE WINDOWLESS LIMBO of the ninth-floor’s hallway, waiting for a verdict that might take days, I stood eating Fritos and gossiping with Frank Girardot while Clark’s attorneys paced and used their phones, ignoring each other and looking miffed, as though they’d already concluded the case was lost and had traded bitter words of blame. I had gotten to know them a bit during the trial. Denner was the cool, recessive strategist, hooded and impassive in the courtroom but brimming with cheerful blarney in the hall, forever reminding me that he’d gone to Yale and ribbing me—ha, ha—about Princeton. The insults depended on hoary, in-group stereotypes that I would have thought had died out fifty years ago, but apparently they’d lived on in Denner’s New England, the rarefied snob heaven that Clark had travestied and finally humiliated. I sensed that defending him embarassed Denner, who, rumor had it, had pushed for an insanity plea. I doubted that a loss would bother him, but I suspected it would crush his partner. Bailey, the lantern-jawed, rhyming barrister, had literally changed complexion over the trial, turning redder by the day. His ritual “Good morning”s to the jury were being returned with a smirking choral disdain that seemed ominously uniform. Not once had the jurors shown any visible interest in his insinuations about Linda, the allegedly dangerous Dungeons and Dragons enthusiast.

  The one-hour warning to the press that the jury had reached a verdict came to me via a phone call from Girardot while I was eating at a taco stand on Cesar Chavez Avenue, a couple of miles from the courthouse. The men around me, workers on their breaks, reminded me of the two Latino jurors whom I’d been scrutinizing during the trial: the big fellow with the hat and the dark shades and a younger guy, just as broad and muscular, who sat beside him, sometimes asking questions, and seemed to be under his sway. I’d assumed they would vote as one, and until recently, having profiled them in my callow way as hostile to the powers that be, I’d expected them to vote for an acquittal. Then, a few days ago, something switched in me. I saw the dark-glasses man, chewing gum as usual, train his shielded eyes toward Clark, who was working his co-investigator act—Sherlock, the accidentally accused—and hold the gaze for five seconds, ten, fifteen. Clark didn’t look up at him—too busy scribbling, pretending to sort and analyze the clues. Two worlds were meeting, but one was unaware of it—the world for which the other had never existed except as a faceless labor pool. I knew then what would happen and told Girardot, who understood his city better than I did and wasn’t convinced I’d drawn the right conclusion.

  The defendant strolled into the courtroom, took his seat, crossed his sockless ankles, squared his narrow shoulders, and pleasantly, politely, faced the judge, wearing a faintly downturned smile in which I detected a coiled confidence; the smile would turn suddenly upward for the cameras at the moment of exoneration, creating an arresting bit of footage. Denner leaned back in his chair and trained his eyes on an unseen, abstract object floating beween him and the stenographer, while Bailey threw an arm around the client who, according to a courthouse loiterer, he’d once referred to in the hallway as “our Bavarian prick.”

  Endings. You long for them, speculating, anticipating, but as they draw near their magic dims: just another event occurring inside a room, its thermostat set to a certain temperature, its lights adjusted to a certain brightness, and, in the adjacent rooms, people who don’t care, preoccupied with endings of their own. I pitied Clark as the verdict was read aloud and time neither slowed nor swerved, just dripped along. He’d fashioned a life of cinematic moments, of victims’ startled faces, of stressful getaways, of white-gloved welcomes into gorgeous parlors, of ringing phones that must not be picked up. Once, a few weeks after the murder, a policeman rang the guesthouse doorbell, perhaps before all the gore had been sponged up. Tight spot. No time to think. But Clark surpassed himself. He answered the door naked, completely naked, proclaiming himself a nudist when asked to dress, as though he were resisting on religious grounds. The flustered policeman excused himself and said he’d stop by later. Clark shut the door, resuming the form he took behind shut doors. Reveals, dissolves, blackouts. He controlled the final cut. Then the studio took away his picture.

  “Guilty.”

  Clark nodded.

  The deputies led him out. Ellen Sohus, across the aisle from me, rose from her seat and relaxed her strict perimeter of inviolable pensiveness and torment to receive congratulations and condolences from reporters, lawyers, clerks, and strangers. Balian hurried away to do a press conference, his movements unconsciously elegant and preening, as though he’d traded souls with a white pony.

  The jurors departed through their private door, back to their closed room. I’d speak to a few of them later that day and learn that they reached their decision easily; the book bags around the skull had cinched the case for them. One middle-aged woman who’d studied Clark throughout had observed him talking to himself and thought “some mental issue was going on.” The mustache-and-sunglasses man, a truck driver, scoffed at the Parisian postcards ruse along with Clark’s whole repertoire of tricks, implying that he’d seen them all before, or at least some version of them, out on the road and around the neighborhood. “You meet guys like that. It’s not that strange,” he said. “Being rich is probably nice—I wouldn’t know—but it doesn’t make you smart.”

  Feeling smart at Clark’s expense, a gratification few had ever experienced, was the emotion of the hour. Once people had savored it, they started leaving. The trial’s improvised family was breaking up. The LA Times reporters crossed the plaza to their paper’s massive downtown headquarters, a building I’d passed a dozen times that month without seeing anyone go in or out. The impossibly true-blue Balian, whom my daughter had melted over on sight, and whom I expected to hear of next as a high municipal office holder, headed off to watch his child’s baseball game. Denner wrapped Ellen Sohus in a hug of hard-to-parse but genuine-looking feeling, his briefcase held high behind her back. I said goodbye to a pregnant German TV producer whose baby was due the next day. I didn’t want to leave yet. I felt like a barfly after closing time who’s still a few beers short of stiff. Some enormous formality had been concluded, but only on Clark’s side, not on mine. Plus there was too much schadenfreude around; the air was thick with sticky karmic residue. I mentioned this to Girardot on my way out—that I felt like I’d just taken pleasure in a stoning. Maybe we could grab a bite and talk? He couldn’t; too busy. He’d just thrown on his tie to do a spot for a TV morning show. The technicians and interviewer stood nearby, impatient for tape.

  “Why don’t you just go visit him?” he said.

  This tripped me up. I didn’t understand. Clark’s unavailability for visits was a long-established fact. Denner was adamant: no press, no friends. I’d asked him a year ago and then a month ago, a week before the trial. Not a chance.

  “They convicted his ass,” Girardot said. “It’s different now. Nobody cares, believe me. He’s on his own. Plus, I hear he’s firing his lawyers. You may as well try.” I told him I’d call him later that week, or possibly the next day if he were free, and we could discuss the matter further. This made him grin. Reporters, where he came from, weren’t further discussers. They acted; they plunged in.

  “This is all you have to do,” he said, and I knew as he said it, knew inwardly and sadly but with the strange exhilaration that comes of sacrificing pride to clarity, that I’d learned nothing of value at th
e trial. I was the risk to myself I’d always been, as readily intrigued and led as ever. “Just go online and put in a request—it’s Men’s Central Jail, Department of Corrections; Google it, they have a Web site—and I bet you see him this weekend, if you want. You can set it up now, on your phone. It’s all online.”

  FIFTEEN

  THERE WEREN’T MANY men in the line outside the jail; mostly it was young women, scores of them, most of them with children, quite a few with babies. I wanted to tell them to run away, and fast, and remind them that moving toward danger was perverse. The men they were here to see weren’t worth it, particularly not the boyfriends and the husbands. Ditch them while you still can, I wanted to say. But what did I know? My errand this Sunday morning was a one-time thing and purely voluntary, experimental. Surprisingly, I was underdressed. Maybe a lot of the women had come from church, or maybe they were headed to church afterward, but they had on their finest. I was wearing a T-shirt. I thought it would help me blend in. I wasn’t thinking straight. If you’re free and you visit a prison, you don’t blend in, and no one is looking at you anyway.

  Our meeting started awkwardly. I hadn’t seen him from the front for years, and here he was on display for me, framed in a window of plate glass or plastic, seated in a long row of other men in identical loose blue smocks that made them look like hospital orderlies. The heavy, beige, old-fashioned plastic phone receivers that allowed for conversation through the glass didn’t switch on for a few minutes, forcing us to mouth inaudible greetings while gazing at each other from such close range that I could see light-colored, flecked irregularities in the iris of Clark’s left eye. The proximity felt uncomfortably intimate, and the temptation to stare was irresistible, so I compensated with a broad smile that felt falser and fiercer by the second. To keep it fresh, I shifted my lips and cheeks. Clark approached the problem differently. He tilted his head up at a submissive angle and fixed me with a dreamy, unblinking look that seemed sweet at first, then mildly terrifying. The standoff grew absurd. The planes and curves and hollows of his face became abstract, like a scaled-down Easter Island monolith, while my struggle to keep my own face meaningful felt animalistic and insane. Worse, a feeling of competition developed.

  “You’re my very first visitor,” he said when the phones came on. He asked after my children, now a creepy courtesy, and then, with two other prisoners crowding him from their adjacent conversation stations, he pushed his pale forehead up against the glass and asked for my help finding a literary agent. His new novel, written in pencil while in prison, was eight hundred thousand words long, he told me, and covered the entire swath of European history between the end of World War One and the 1960s. He outlined the story for me. It sounded boring, a monolith of insufferable pedantry born of unconscious aggression toward its readers, whoever Clark imagined them to be. I lied, and said I’d look into the agent thing. He seemed to believe me, which I found interesting. Pathological liars, I’d heard somewhere, could not be lied to, but I’d soon learn that the opposite was true, that they were avid consumers, not just producers.

  I’d arrived with questions, endless questions, but I put off asking them, preferring to let him run. The scratched slab between us seemed to magnify and fix him, turning him into a specimen, an exhibit, and bringing out the cold researcher in me. Prison, he said, had finally freed him as a writer, both by forcing him to write by hand (“the interference of screen and keyboard” had cramped his imagination, he’d concluded) and by minimizing interruptions. He said he particularly liked composing sonnets, both Petrarchan and Elizabethan, and he asked if I’d send him a book on sonnet structure or, if a book were too expensive, I could print out an article from the Internet. I promised a book.

  This seemed to energize him. He propped his hands under his chin and faced me squarely; the crow’s-feet around his pink-rimmed eyes appeared to be packed with fine black dust or soot. Did I know of “a good one-volume Shakespeare in paperback?” Not offhand, I said, but I could find one. “Walter, that would be wonderful,” he said. That’s when his face changed, like a creature in a fairy tale. It softened, blurred, grew candle-lit, adoring, the face of a good little German boy at Christmas. “Truly,” he said, “I would be forever grateful.”

  I pulled back from the trance. It helped that my right leg was numb; I must have been sitting tensely on my chair. Two spots down from me a teenage girl was pressing her squalling baby up to the glass, tilting it upright hospital-nursery style. I’d seen her in a kiosk in the waiting room swiping a credit card in a machine that transferred funds to inmates. I understood now: prison walls aren’t solid. They’re penetrable by persuasion, by attraction, which passes through them like gamma rays. The inmates beam their wills into the world, adjusting the intensities and wavelengths, tuning the dial until they get results.

  That soft, glowing face Clark had summoned out of nowhere must have worked on someone else once, but when and on whom I didn’t want to know. I resolved not to send the books; not a chance. His magic had to be thwarted, or it might spread.

  It was time to ask questions. I started with the most general: Why had he spent his life deceiving people, and why should anyone believe him now?

  “Consider me a drug addict,” he said. “A drug addict who’s recovered. Not literally, of course; I don’t even drink coffee. But hiding and lying are just what addicts do.”

  The answer felt pat and tailored to its audience, me, the abstaining alcoholic, but I had to admire how quickly he’d come up with it. Not a pause, not a twitch, and full eye contact throughout. In what parallel, sped-up dimension did he perform his calculations and how did he send them so swiftly back to this one?

  I asked him next about his art, his gorgeous collection of Motherwells and Rothkos. “Fakes,” he said. “All fakes, Walter. But very good ones.” He gave me the name of a man who, so he claimed, had pressed the paintings on him in the belief that their possession by a Rockefeller would provide them with “provenance” and allow them to be sold as genuine. He said the man was living in Peru now and that they’d met at an “Old Masters cocktail hour.” Then, from a hidden fold in his green prison smock, he produced a scrap of paper—tiny, the torn-off corner of a page—and a pencil stub barely long enough to hold. He wrote the man’s name down and held it to the glass, a trick for bypassing the phones, which, he’d confided to me earlier, were bugged. Because I’d been forbidden to bring a notebook, I had to memorize the name, and I wondered why Clark was so eager for me to have it. Did he want me to contact the man? I cocked my head, inviting him to explain, in code if necessary.

  Instead, he made another request of me. The paintings, along with all his other possessions—most notably, some “very nice old furniture” and “all Snooks’s drawings”—were stored, he said, in a locker in Baltimore that he could no longer afford to pay the rent on. Would I be so kind as to keep them in Montana while he appealed his case? It wouldn’t cost me anything; a few of the antiques were going to auction soon and he’d reimburse me from the proceeds. If I wished to, I could also sell the paintings. They were worthless in themselves, he said, but perhaps their status as “Clark Rockefellers” (he spoke the words flatly, without irony) would lend them appeal for a certain type of buyer. I might get two thousand dollars apiece for them. Or I could keep them. It was up to me. The main thing was Snooks’s little drawings. And her toys. Would I think about it?

  I said I would. I was humoring him; the whole idea was both infuriating and mad. Though maybe it was appropriately mad. As a souvenir of our relationship, a phony Rothko might be nice. I could hang the thing in my office above my desk, a totem, a trophy, a conversation piece. There were all kinds of closure, most of them illusory, but this might be the rare exception. The notion, once again, was growing on me. I had to stop it.

  I’d lost track of time. We only had thirty minutes and I still hadn’t asked about the murder. There seemed no point. I’d fantasized on the drive over that I might get a confession—headline news!—but now
this seemed unlikely; Clark was still portraying the man I’d known, a patrician Lotos Club member, unceremoniously displaced. Also, I was shy. I’d never asked such a question of a person and wasn’t certain I could form the words. This bothered me. It seemed cowardly and weak. But what bothered me more was that if I didn’t ask, Clark would discern my weakness and might exploit it, in the psychic realm, if not the physical. Before today’s visit this might have seemed absurd—an astral assault conducted through the ether—but now that we were head to head, possibly near enough to generate crackles of blue static, I worried. I’d erred in coming; I wasn’t a materialist. My faith in glass partitions wasn’t strong enough. I blamed my years as a Mormon, a ghostly sect rife with otherworldly folklore—golden plates translated by second sight, plagues of crickets stopped by prayer—but I also blamed my mother’s recent death, which had opened holes in my reality. I’d seen an unusual number of crows since losing her, messenger birds that appeared at Poe-like moments, when I was alone and she was on my mind. Symbolic spoked wheels kept turning up as well, in songs, in poems, in art. They seemed to be versions of the Bighorn Medicine Wheel, an ancient Native American rock altar located on a mountain in Wyoming, that I was heading off to visit the day I got the news of her collapse.

  “Tell me about the murder.”

  There, I’d done it. I’d shown the devil I was brave.

  “Oh, that,” Clark said. “Well, there’s not much I can say. I’m innocent. It wasn’t me. That jury, you see, never liked me very much. They would have convicted me of anything. The Kennedy assassination. Anything. It was all a mistake. They’ll have to overturn it. I’m absolutely confident they will.”