Blood Will Out

by Walter Kirn

  Clark loved puzzles, everybody knew. Linda loved them too, perhaps, but this one, “Schus,” was probably beyond her as a monolingual high-school dropout. Even assuming she wasn’t dead—a stretch, since no one besides Clark’s “source” had heard a peep from her in decades—she’d obtained quite an education on that horse farm. The more fascinating puzzle, though, was this: why did he bother? And why did he keep bothering? The trial was over, good and over; his life was over too. Fine, he might choose to withhold the truth forever, but why all the anagrams, slipknots, and Kabuki? Why all the shadow-puppet Cheshire cats chasing their own disappearing tails? After my second jailhouse visit in April I pondered these questions on the beach at dusk, walking along the foam-marked tideline kicking a soggy yellow tennis ball that someone had been tossing to a dog. My own lies, and the lies that others told me, were usually fairly simple productions aimed at avoiding or defusing conflict. Few had ever required any rehearsal; I devised them on the spot, often without skill or subtlety, and frequently they were caught immediately or manufactured with so many flaws that I eventually recanted, tired of doing the repairs. The only lies that had ever brought me pleasure, mild pleasure, were those that righted or forestalled some perceived institutional injustice.

  But Clark lied to lie, it seemed, like songbirds warble. Or like surfers, serious Malibu surfers, surf, paddling wildly to reach the largest swells so they can hop up and execute their tricks, those long, knifing glides and spray-flinging reversals. So what if they crashed at the end? The ride was worth it. No crash, in fact, no decent ride. Clark, in the arch-wizard years when I first knew him, with his high-earning wife, his sitting, heeling mascots, his pupil-popping private Guggenheim, must have known he was swooshing toward a tumble, must have felt at his back the curling overhang massing to flop and pound him to the bottom. But hang on, hang on, through the shudders and the wobbles—that’s the giddy fun of it. Then, crunch. Kapow. Then stabilize and get back at it. Prison wasn’t the end for him at all. He could still pursue his passion there, machinating in his cell and prevaricating in the mess hall. A tidy setup for a master liar. Over dinner, Ellroy had voiced a theory about the psyches of the damned that struck me as slightly oversteeped in his bitter lemon, cold-water Protestantism. Men like Clark, he said, reached a state of such bewilderment that they unconsiously sought out imprisonment as a way of “radically limiting their choices.”

  Of all the sleights Clark had ever practiced on me, the one I would have wanted him to sign, had it been a painting or a sketch, occurred at the end of the dinner he didn’t pay for in 2002, during my visit to Cornish. After I grumpily gave the waitress my credit card, he’d asked me, as if to distract me from the bill, if I’d like to see a picture of his highly classified propulsion lab. He pulled a color photo from his jacket and laid it on the table beside the pepper shaker. The shot appeared to be taken from a plane and featured a dense, unbroken canopy of green deciduous treetops. I picked it up to get a closer look. All I saw was foliage, no laboratory. I squinted. “It’s there. Right there,” Clark said. “You’re looking at it. It’s under all those trees.”

  SEVENTEEN

  PART OF WHAT makes this a California story is that it proves the dime-store mystics right: when you give up pursuing the answers, the answers come, though not the ones you imagined were important, only the ones you never knew to ask for, the ones that ultimately matter, since once you have them you’ll never require more. Fifteen years to the week after climbing into my truck to deliver a crippled hunting dog to a man I believed to be a Rockefeller largely because I hoped to be the friend of one, an envelope stuffed with belated revelations arrived at my front door by courier. It came from the Reverend Mary Piper and her husband, Harry, the brokerage heir, who’d left Montana a few years earlier and whom I’d last seen in 1998 on the hot July day when I picked up Shelby, their beloved canine Lazarus. Aided by specialized surgeons, New Age healers, and the prayers of their church, the Pipers had virtually raised her from the dead. Mary was a deacon in those days, about to be ordained a priest, and ministering to homeless animals was central to her calling. A local Humane Society official described her once in print as “the Mother Teresa of Foster Care.”

  The Pipers had contacted me by phone after reading my New Yorker story about Clark’s trial. They thought I might be interested in perusing a file on Shelby that they’d assembled in 1998 and saved for all these years, a sort of scrapbook in her memory. It included printouts of dozens of e-mails that they’d exchanged with Clark that summer and that told the story of Shelby’s adoption, beginning with Clark’s campaign to win their trust by portraying himself as a caring animal owner. The file also contained a second set of documents: copies of “The Shelby Report,” a collection of unsigned postings that Clark had written in his distinctive fabulist style and published on a Web site for Gordon setter fanciers. The first posting was dated July 19, the day after I brought Shelby to LaGuardia Airport, and the last one was dated September 3, when Clark informed his “readers” (who may have dwindled to the Pipers alone by then, if indeed there had ever existed any others) that he was suspending the “Report” and hoped that people would keep him in their prayers. His reasons for this wistful, sudden sign-off were left unstated, but anyone who’d followed the “Report” already knew what they were and was unlikely ever to forget them.

  First, I studied the e-mails. Read with illuminated eyes, they told the tale of a predatory snot—a lip-smacking smoothie with arachnid blood. I pictured him perched before his keyboard slurping milky English tea and sniffing the fumes from his drying yellow hair color, nimbly courting and cornering two strangers of pearly faith and optimism. Clark knew how to manipulate the Pipers because he’d presumably read and analyzed “Shelby’s Story—Angel in our Midst,” Mary’s fond account of Shelby’s recovery. She’d written it for the Gordon Setter Club’s Web site. It had reached Clark’s attention, the e-mails indicated, through a friend of his, one Leslie Titmuss, a Maine antiques dealer and private pilot who’d also contacted the Pipers separately about adopting Shelby. Since Leslie had learned of Shelby first, “he should have first pick,” Clark wrote, though he wasted no time in denigrating his friend as a reckless boob: “He almost got all of us killed last year flying home from Maine when another jet soared above us a mere 250 feet away on an identical course going the other way. On the same trip he also bounced three times when landing in Caldwell, N.J., and then took off again for another loop.” Clark, by contrast, was a prudent fellow, and something of an armchair veterinarian. He flooded the Pipers’ inbox with rarefied canine health-food recipes heavy on brewer’s yeast and wheat germ, nudging advice on Shelby’s thyroid problems (“You might want to go easy on the medication . . . Even trying kelp tablets or powder might work”), and swearing solemn vows of guardianship should the Pipers entrust him with the dog. He promised, for instance, to keep her at his side for all but five hours a week, taking her to work with him at Asterisk LLC, his banking firm, and on his vacations. For those few hours they couldn’t be together, she would be safe with his “Spanish housekeeper.”

  The Pipers were charmed. How could they not be by someone so attuned to canine thinking and behavior that he could ask, “Does she have the same manipulative tendencies that Yates has? I mean the excellent begging skills all Gordons have—deep brown eyes that seem to say, ‘Stilton Cheese . . . Just a little more, please.’” And how could they not be further charmed by a dog owner so magnanimous that he let Yates freely lick and slobber on his peerless modern art collection? In case the Pipers should doubt this, Clark directed them to a lively piece that had run the year before in ArtNews. Its title was “Spitting Image.” His wife had written it. Clark urged the Pipers to look it up.

  The e-mail correspondence, begun in June, had moved right along; by July Shelby’s adoption by Clark was nearly settled. The Pipers had found in him, or thought they had, the figure whom they’d been praying for: Shelby’s “great lifetime match.” Clark seemed perfect, inc
onceivably perfect, and thanks to his frisky, detailed letters the Pipers had a fairly thorough sketch of him: a rich, good-natured, nutritionally scrupulous, naturopathically informed, flexibly scheduled, aesthetically advanced, hilariously daft, happily married Christian gentleman whose other religion was dogs.

  But then something troubling occurred. Clark told one rambunctious tale too many, and the Pipers went on alert. The anecdote was set in Houston a few years earlier, when Clark was supposedly running an oil company there and living with Yates in the Four Seasons hotel, which was situated, he said, beside a “Bayou.” One blustery day the setter and his master went out for a stroll along this swampy inlet and somehow the animal fell into the water. Clark pulled on the dog’s leash—apparently a long one—and hauled him back onto dry land just as a “snake-like thing” swam swiftly toward them. A juvenile alligator.

  Clark’s account of this close call on the bayou left Mary highly unamused. “Maybe I should have screened you guys more about your extracurricular activities,” she wrote in response. “Gotta redo the rescue placement form . . . do you have a vet? Fenced area? Do you allow the dog to chase alligators for fun?” She voiced her concern to the Gordon Setter Club, asking a woman there if she could vouch for Clark. No, in fact, the woman couldn’t. Here’s why: Clark, under a different name (a privacy measure, he had claimed), had looked at a litter of puppies a few years earlier and said, according to the puppies’ owner, “some bizarre things.”

  The Pipers grew fretful, trading nervous e-mails with the setter folks about whether to pay Clark a “home visit” and inspect him at close range. It was mid-July, and the weeks-long adoption talks had stalled. That’s when Leslie Titmuss, the man from Maine, who hadn’t written the Pipers for a while, glided back into view. The antiquarian and aviator sent them an e-mail officially confirming his loss of interest in Shelby. He’d fallen for a younger dog, he wrote—an abandoned puppy from Illinois. He did, however, have two friends, he said, under whose roof Shelby was sure to thrive. Mary asked if these people were the Rockefellers. “Yes, they are Clark and Sandy,” Titmuss replied. “I couldn’t imagine better owners for your dog. They are total dog fanatics.” This glowing character reference revived the Pipers’ confidence in Clark. It also, apparently, strengthened Mary’s religious faith.

  “Clark,” Mary wrote, no longer wary, “another miracle, God incidence, whatever you name it . . . We had dinner last night with Walter and Maggie Kirn who were planning to escort her on the plane. The evening ended with Walter planning to drive her out this week.”

  The packet of e-mails, which I’d heavily checkmarked, underlined, and annotated (“Weird,” “Shut up!,” “Particularly nauseating”), lay spread out on my desk for days. Leslie Titmuss bothered me. His name, it made me want to sneeze. I also thought I recognized it. I typed it into my laptop, a procedure that had lately held far too much suspense for me. Among the top results the search returned was a page from GoodReads, a literary Web site. It was a capsule summary of a novel, Paradise Postponed, by the British writer John Mortimer: “Ultraliberal clergyman Simeon Simcox, rector of the village of Rapstone Fanner, leaves his entire fortune to Leslie Titmuss, a social-climbing conservative politician.”

  I DIDN’T CALL THE Pipers right away, inclined to treat them tenderly after learning how callously Clark had treated them, without their knowledge, in 1998. The bratty literary psychopath hadn’t merely toyed with them, he’d mocked them, luring them into a novelistic board game whose rules, objectives, characters, and themes—particularly the rooking of a priest by a ruthless Tory—had been set before they joined the game. They didn’t need to reflect upon the fact that the last married couple Clark had fastened on while dreaming of a Titmussian inheritance had suffered the harshest of permanent separations: the husband packed in plastic book bags with tree roots poking through them, and the wife, detectives speculated, dumped off a ledge on the Angeles Crest Highway that sinuously links suburban Los Angeles with the high-desert scrublands around Palmdale.

  I’d driven this road a couple of weeks before, on the day of a long-postponed memorial service for John and Linda Sohus put on by their families and friends. It happened that the service was being held in a park just a couple of miles away from the spot where the Angeles Crest begins. I noticed its name on a big sign and made a snap decision to explore it, partly to keep from thinking about the service, which was set to start in half an hour. I knew it would depress me. The Sohuses had died so long ago, and while living such circumscribed, low-paycheck lives, that very few people would be there to remember them; very few had known them in the first place. I expected lots of empty chairs. I expected much leftover snack dip and untouched punch. I’d find out after my drive that I was right. The only friend of John I’d see was Colonel Rayermann with his Star Trek pin. He delivered the saddest, most modern eulogy I ever expect to hear. It centered on all the cool consumer technology that John, the science nerd and Trekkie, would have loved but hadn’t lived to see. The colonel singled out the flip-up cell phone. Because it was based on Star Trek’s handheld “Communicator” (a toy version of which was set out on a table for mourners to gaze upon and handle), John would have adored it. He also would have adored the iPhone, for its mighty processing power and small size. The colonel predicted (if that’s the word for describing a future that never was) that John would have invented many amazing apps for it. This what-if speech had a time-travel effect. Instead of imagining John living on to use the devices of our day, I imagined technological progress halting at the moment of his death in 1985. I imagined John surviving, that is, and cell phones, laptops, Google, and all the rest of it never being born. This vision of a barely wired world filled me with a peaceful feeling, and it seemed very real for a couple of drifting minutes. Then came the eerie part: in the dusky woods around the park, a group of coyotes started howling. Their primordial wails and whines and yips were improbably close by, and louder than the colonel’s voice. My inner sense of historical direction and temporal location simply failed. Maybe coyotes had cell phones before we did. Maybe John was out there on a starship. Maybe Clark was the devil from the Bible. Maybe this was how California feels before plate tectonics break it like a cracker and everyone sighs and says “Finally” and drops straight down into the fissure, their gadgets and wallets spilling from their pockets.

  But before I fell into this reverie of slippage I drove the Angeles Crest Highway. I watched from my car for the first low-traffic curve, the first high-altitude turnout near a precipice, where a man in a truck with a body in the bed might feel safe backing up against a gorge and kicking his floppy cargo down the slope, into the stands of spiky yucca plants and ripping, snapping chaparral. Three or four miles farther up the road, the towers of downtown were smoggy columns visible in notches between brown hills, and I started to see beside me on the road evidence of that slothful, piggish streak that rises in people, not only bad ones, when they feel securely unobserved in places that seemingly belong to no one. Burst, spilling bags of diapers lay on the shoulder, empty six-packs, moldering wads of clothing, a busted-up computer monitor whose screen was a few broken fangs of smoky glass. It’s in all of us, that quick urge to toss a can, a Styrofoam burger carton, a cigarette butt into the great, no-consequences void. Out of sight, out of mind. But in Clark, I had a hunch, this childish conviction that an unwitnessed action doesn’t count operated as a prime directive. Underground to him meant gone. Behind a closed door or a wall meant nonexistent. Two plainly contradictory lies told to two different people were equally authoritative utterances. This thinking dies in most people as children, when mom comes around the corner to see the food we threw, the cat whose tail we wrapped with rubber bands, our brother’s toy truck sticking out from under our bed, but in Clark it bred a devious perfectionism. If the trick was correctly planned and deftly executed, the buried horror would never surface, the sealed container would never open, the dupes would never meet to compare notes. The world as he saw it was a concealment
mechanism; he didn’t carry inside him the constant watchman called conscience or society or God. He lived in two modes, the apparent and the veiled, and in two realms, the opera and the sewer, and he shuttled between them like a genie.

  To Frank Girardot, who visited him in jail after I quit paying such calls, he told a story from his Bavarian youth, about creeping out into his village late one night and disassembling several road and traffic signs, which he then attached to different signposts. Village drivers were confused for days, he said. They made wrong turns, set course for the wrong towns, slowed down where they were required to speed up. They couldn’t pin down the source of their bewilderment, and finally Clark—then Christian Gerhartsreiter—tired of his neighbors’ haplessness and put the signs back where they’d been. I asked Girardot, who’d visited the village while researching a book on Clark (Name Dropper, a comprehensive case file on the Sohus murder), if there was any talk of the boy trickster suffering the sort of family abuse that American TV talk shows and trauma memoirs blame for spawning such delinquency. No. Quite the opposite, Girardot said. All his reporting suggested that Christian’s parents excused and coddled their naughty son. An angry neighbor would alert them to some mean prank of Christian’s and his parents would laugh it off.