by Walter Kirn
“So who killed John Sohus?”
Out came the secret pencil. He didn’t use it right away. First, he denigrated his attorneys, particularly Denner, who he said was too old and frail to practice law. He lowered his voice conspiratorially and leaned closer to the glass. “He may have had a stroke during the trial.” The charge was horrible and patently false; the act of speaking it left a ratty ring around his mouth. His next target was Linda Sohus. She’d killed her husband, he said, and fled the country, probably to Mexico. “We’ve turned up some leads,” he said. We. The pronoun fit. There were many of him, all sharing the same skull. The psychotic “we.” He started writing. Block letters again, like on a ransom note. He held up the scrap of paper so I could read them:
“Occult Witch.”
I spoke the words aloud, for the bugged phone. I wasn’t supposed to, which was why I did it.
“You’re a very good guesser,” he said. “That’s what she was.”
We’d run out of drama but not out of time; the minutes must have subdivided themselves. He used this to his favor, turning off the nastiness and smoothing his way toward a less disgusting exit by talking about his hopes for an appeal and the chance that he might see his daughter again, somehow. He wrote her a letter every day, he said. He didn’t send them, but someday she’d get all of them. It might be soon. The trial had been a farce. The verdict would be overturned.
“So this is all temporary?” I swept my hand around.
“Absolutely,” he said. “A minor inconvenience.”
I had another question, a writer’s question, imprecise and difficult to phrase but essential, I felt, if I could just define it. “I’m curious how you see people,” I said. “I’m curious what your career—your life, I mean, you know, succeeding as an impostor—has taught you about—”
“What?”
“Human nature, I guess.”
“I really don’t understand.”
“I’m making it too complicated. What is it you look for in people? What’s the key? The key to manipulating people?”
He almost laughed. “Too easy. That’s too easy.” Then nothing. A long, bored sigh. To make me beg.
“Fine, but I want to hear it from the expert.”
He liked this; it drew fresh black ink into his pupils.
“I think you know,” he said.
“I’m asking you, though.”
“Vanity, vanity, vanity,” he said.
But it still wasn’t over. I couldn’t make it end. We talked about prison life. I asked about the food. He told me that the trick was insisting on eating kosher. Finally, right before the phones turned off—I still don’t know how he timed it, but he did—he thanked me for coming and asked when I’d be back.
SIXTEEN
HE KNEW BETTER than I did what I’d do next, not because he understood me personally—a conceited, reflexive belief of mine that turned out to be the source of the whole spell—but because he viewed me mechanically, impersonally, as a mind infatuated with its own energy.
From a purely epistemological standpoint, involving yourself in the life of a great liar, once you understand that he’s a liar but go on seeking the truth from him, is a swan dive through a mirror into a whirlpool. In the past Clark had merely left me clueless, convincing me that he was someone he wasn’t, but now that I knew to expect him to misinform me, he could drive me to the brink. On April 19, the night after our jailhouse conversation, I typed in the name he’d given me—the supposed art dealer who allegedly had supplied Clark with the fake paintings—along with “Peru,” the hypothetical man’s purported nation of residence. Out came a number of news stories in Spanish dating to 2012 about a Canadian expatriate who was accused of abducting his young daughter after pushing the mother of the girl to sign some sort of document or contract. I flashed back immediately to Clark’s repellent scheme for breeding children in the Third World. He’d said he had a partner; it seemed I’d found him. In a video clip from a Peruvian news show, the mother of the missing child explicitly linked the Canadian man to Clark, whom she said she knew to be a murderer and appeared to fear. I remembered that when he had kidnapped Snooks, he’d prepared certain people for his absence by telling them he might visit Peru. To rendezvous with the Canadian? Now it looked that way. One reason the Internet fosters conspiracy theories is that its system of branching, crossing tunnels is shaped like paranoid reasoning itself, and once inside the shadow maze you find yourself tracking elusive glimmers of light that recede as fast as you can follow them. When I added the words “Fake” and “Rothko” to my search, I learned of an ongoing federal investigation centered on New York City’s Knoedler Gallery, which had shut its doors a few years earlier after being sued by art collectors for peddling scores of bogus paintings (eighty million dollars’ worth in all) by the very same abstract expressionists whose works I’d seen hanging in Clark’s apartment. According to stories in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and other publications, the gallery bought the paintings through the back door for a fraction of their value from a woman, Glafira Rosales, who claimed that they came from a so-called Mr. X, the secretive heir to a major family fortune. I immediately thought of Clark. Delving deeper, I came across an excerpt from Mark Seal’s The Man in the Rockefeller Suit, a fascinating 2011 book about Clark’s life and exploits, that showed he’d frequented the gallery, often pretending to shop for art. The Canadian art dealer also appeared, identified as a friend of Clark’s, although the forgery scandal wasn’t mentioned, likely because it hadn’t fully emerged.
The hour of research that brought me to this point ballooned into days of frenzied investigation as I compared the timeline of the art fraud to Clark’s movements through the years. The fake paintings started to hit the market in the early 1990s, not long after Clark married Sandy and stepped up his New York social life. The paintings stopped arriving at Knoedler, from what I could learn, around the time he was assembling his Chip Smith act and preparing to go underground with Snooks. Most damning of all, however, it seemed to me, was something Sandy’s father, William Boss, had told me at lunch one day during the trial, that during one of his first meetings with his future son-in-law, Clark had asked him a peculiar question: How would a person sell a Rothko? Boss recalled being puzzled and having no answer. He knew very little about modern art and certainly wasn’t in the market for any.
Merely by giving me the art dealer’s name and hinting that he was engaged in shady business, Clark sent me into a labyrinth that recalled a nearly fatal adventure from Christmas Eve the year before. I was driving back to Montana through southern Idaho after a two-week visit to California, when it hit me that there was no Christmas tree at home. Maybe, I thought, I could cut one in the forest. It was almost midnight, the road was deserted, and in the car I happened to have a knife with a long, serrated blade that I imagined could saw through pitchy wood. I parked on the shoulder and walked down an embankment into the trees, which were mostly the same size, having been planted by the Forest Service to replace thousands that had died in a beetle infestation twenty years before. Thinking the job would take ten minutes, tops, I left my hat and mittens behind despite the windy, subzero weather.
I almost didn’t make it back. I don’t remember the moment I lost my way, but I do remember the moment afterward, when I gazed at the long, identical rows of trees laid out diagonally like veterans’ tombstones and realized that no direction back looked any more promising than any other. I fought off panic and chose a path at random, which led me in a circle. I chose a new path and stuck to it until I crossed my own boot tracks in the snow. I needed a new plan, except I had none. My phone was in the car and I was freezing, starting to think like a hypothermia victim, shuttling between images of death and cozy fantasies of domestic warmth. One second I saw my body blue and stiff, the next I was piping pink frosting onto sugar cookies. I lingered in this state; when I was accidentally led to safety by the blast of a truck horn passing on the highway, I discovered that my car was no more than
fifty yards away, screened by trees.
There were lessons there, perhaps too many to use, and they were of no help as I pursued the art fraud down the Web’s forever-forking corridors. At the trial, Clark’s attorneys had raised what I’d regarded as a good question, possibly the most baffling of them all: Why would a fugitive in a homicide case saddle himself with a surname so conspicuous that no one who met him could fail to spread the news? The question was offered as evidence of his innocence, but I saw it as either evidence of self-sabotage or of a penchant for arrogant effrontery. Now there was another explanation. His fabulous name had credentialed the phony art, and the art had returned the favor, credentialing him. Had the deal turned real profits? I sensed it had. But where had they gone? To Peru, perhaps, ahead of him.
I laid out some of these theories for James Ellroy when we finally met for our long-delayed dinner at his downtown hangout, Pacific Dining Car, a muffled warren of dim, connected rooms ideal for assignations and secret contract talks. Ellroy was already seated when I got there—a royal tipper amid a grateful staff—leaning back long-legged in his chair, all soaring, bald head and untucked Hawaiian shirt, an impeccably self-taught man of letters who looked like the bail-bond king of Tijuana. Critics compared him to Raymond Chandler for his brutal hipster prose that preserved, with Smithsonian Institution fidelity, the endangered American music of slurs and slams—racial, sexual, and every other kind. What his writing concealed, though, was his decorous soul; I’d come to him as a pilgrim several months ago, to tap both his criminological erudition and his literary savvy, and he’d received me with gentlemanly forbearance.
“You worried me on the phone today,” he said, scratching his nose with a crooked pinkie finger. “You sounded jittery.” I already knew his opinion on Clark: a case of the artistic temperament operating unrestrained by the strictures of honest intellectual labor. To Ellroy, no force was more destructive. Manson and Hitler, they were just the biggies. The small fry were everywhere, all over town: moochers, dopers, head cases, and creeps who’d come to LA to act or write or play, couldn’t cut it, made excuses, made a half-assed creed of their excuses, pulled a break-in, pimped their girl, and ended up in Griffith Park at night, dumping the body of someone they’d bugged out on, or being dumped by someone from their sick crowd.
“I know he’s involved with this forgery scam,” I said. “I just don’t have any way right now to prove it.”
“Drop it,” Ellroy said. “You never will.”
“It’s perfect, though. He’s a forgery himself.”
“That’s beautiful. Drop it. It’s a cruise to nowhere.”
“How do you know?”
“He doesn’t tell the truth.”
Ellroy was a veteran of wild goose chases. His mother was murdered when he was ten, strangled after a night out in the bars of El Monte, California, a working-class town in the San Gabriel Valley that he’d described to me as “shitsville.” In 1996 he published a memoir, My Dark Places, about his futile attempt to solve the crime decades after the case was closed. The fresh tips and leads he generated with the help of a retired detective were like the beehive in the hollow tree, beguiling but insubstantial.
Ellroy schooled me on LA over appetizers. Then the waiter brought our steaks: two sledge-hammer cuts of charred prime beef served on bare white plates.
“I’m going to see him in jail again,” I said. “Maybe it’s dumb, but I just want more from him.”
“More perfidious psycho-grifter bullshit?” Ellroy was one far-out breed of do-right white guy. His nickname was “Dog,” but his passion was Beethoven.
“Just more to work with,” I said. “I’m still not satisfied.”
“And that’s your affliction, pal.”
“Curiosity?”
“Wanting more. You want more than there is.”
CLARK WAS BULGING WITH lies when I saw him two weeks later. They danced out of his mouth as though they’d been cooped up there and were glad for a chance to stretch their legs. The first one described the origins of the Canadian research lab, Jet Propulsion Physics, which bore such an ominous resemblance to Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where John Sohus was working when he was murdered. Clark denied there was any connection. It went like this, he said: he was writing a novel about a man of mystery, “Rex Bradley” (a “Thomas Crown–like adventurer—not a thief—a person of independent means”), and he wanted to give the character a profession. He put the question to Sandra, who came up with rocket scientist. He then invented a Web site for Bradley’s company “as a way of exploring fictional ideas” and somehow the site leaped a metaphysical boundary and became, at least in the minds of others, a genuine defense contractor.
I’d come to confront him about the forgery scam, but since we were on the subject of the murder, I asked him why he’d left California that summer, so suddenly, and in the victim’s truck. “Why does anyone leave Los Angeles?” he said. He answered his own question with a tale about a depressing meeting with Robert Wise, the director of West Side Story, The Sound of Music, and Born to Kill. Clark had sent Wise a stack of scripts he’d written and Wise returned them in person, over coffee, with blunt advice: “You have industry but no talent.” Clark knew it was the truth and soon left town.
What were these scripts about? Clark hesitated, though not for as long as a normal liar would have, and he masked the pause with an exasperated look, suggesting that the question was impertinent. The scripts were adaptations, he said, of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, a quartet of novels about the decline of the British aristocracy after World War One. I told him I found this coincidental, since a BBC-produced version of the novels had aired just that winter on American television. “Oh really?” Clark said. His face turned vague.
“We never talked about film noir,” I said, adopting a brisker, more assertive tone meant to put him on notice that I was a free man with places to go and here to clarify certain matters, not to enjoy his ad-libbed reminiscences. “Have you ever thought part of your problem may have been your attraction to such a morbid form?”
“I never liked film noir,” he said. “I really don’t know where that idea came from.”
“Your trial,” I said. “It cropped up fairly often.”
“I prefer musicals. Singin’ in the Rain. It’s Always Fair Weather. That kind of thing.”
“Have you ever read Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley books?”
“Whose? I’m sorry,” he stammered. “I’ve never heard of them.”
I’d applied too much pressure; I retreated into small talk, hoping to make him comfortable again. Somehow this led him to offer his thoughts on the “terrible” Boston Marathon bombings, which had occurred the week before. The site of the explosions wasn’t far from one of his old haunts, he said, a coffee shop where he and several friends had held a cultural discussion group they called “Cafe Society.” Though the bombings did have a bright side, he volunteered. He’d heard that they had displaced his murder conviction as a topic of conversation in Boston.
“I looked up the name of that art dealer you gave me. It opened up quite a mystery.”
“Yes?” he said.
He gazed through the partition and seemed to fade, a subtle dissolve into interiority that camouflaged his glee, I sensed, at having snared me yet again. He offered me nothing useful about the art scam, sidestepping or deflecting all my questions and veering off into pat comments on art in general. The topic went flat and the visit got away from me. The next thing I knew he was talking about tea. He told me that his Chichester alias, the one he’d used in San Marino while living on the Sohus property, was a marketing ploy, invented to lend a British feel to a small tea-selling enterprise of his whose customers were “churches and VFW halls.” He purchased the tea in bulk and branded it Chichester, representing it as an Old World family firm. Demand for his product was cyclical, he said, and peaked in the months after Christmas, when churches were flush with holiday donations and tended to buy their entire year�
�s tea supply in a single big transaction. This was one more reason, he said, that he couldn’t have killed John Sohus in early February 1985: the tea-buying season was in full swing. He was racing all over the state to serve his clients, most of whom were up near San Francisco, hundreds of miles from San Marino.
“Do you have any sales records, maybe? Motel receipts?”
“I slept in my car mostly. It was long ago. The business was very casual,” he said. “I also wrote term papers for college students. That was my main thing. They were mostly Iranians.”
The phones were muted by whoever controlled them, or maybe they ran on timers. We rolled our eyes and mock-scowled at the receivers, miming our chagrin at being bullied by the jail’s peremptory protocols, their emasculating insults and rebuffs. Clark pointed a finger at my chest and then at his, the let’s-get-together-again sign. I shrugged while nodding, an intentionally ambiguous combination. Commanded by some figure I couldn’t see, he turned and followed a prescribed route out, falling in with the other departing inmates. Back to their drudgery and shamings, their god-awful toilets, their swill, their slit-like windows. At some point he’d said that what held the place together was the big TV inside the dayroom, usually tuned to sports and always mobbed. Clark shunned it. Nor did he participate in the occasional trips up to the roof, which offered a cycloramic view of palm-lined avenues, mountains, freeway systems, down-gliding and ascending jumbo jets. Until his release, he’d rather not see those things. He predicted that day was fast approaching. He was composing a motion for dismissal, giving all his hours to perfecting it; he said it would be irresistibly persuasive, exposing many key witnesses as liars and demonstrating that the legitimate evidence actually proved precisely the opposite of what Balian had claimed it proved. Someone needed to hunt down Linda Sohus, surprise her in her lair, and drag her back here. She wasn’t dead, she was out there, lying low. Three months from now, in August, at his sentencing, he’d even tell me she’d been sighted. In the Carolinas, at a stable, working as a horse groomer, possibly under the last name “Schus.” It would have been an ingenious alias: “Sohus” with the O switched to a C. A teasing, revealing alias, he said. If spoken aloud or if written with one more last S, it was the German word for “shot.”