by Walter Kirn
After the trial, when I finally learned about his search for a guest place on a ranch, he seemed to fit the model better. His lust for “rough play” with people he perceived to have no brains hadn’t left him, it appeared, but arranging and getting to the games was a tricky, daunting problem for someone who didn’t legally exist and had long been ducking the authorities. He couldn’t open a bank account or present ID to airlines. He couldn’t even risk a traffic violation. When he fled with Snooks to Baltimore, his plan, I’m convinced, was to meet a boat or ship—dispatched, perhaps, by his friend in Peru, who apparently had started a shipping company since leaving the art world—and depart from the United States by sea. The leaky old catamaran he’d bought would be found in the ocean, probably, sinking and adrift, making it seem that he and Snooks had drowned. The manhunt would be over.
But then, while at my desk one night reading the documents the Pipers had sent me, I grew convinced that Clark had murdered again—and that I’d known his victim personally. He chose her well. She was trusting, easily manipulated, and his inferior, socially and mentally, which Clark knew by his old test: she considered him a friend.
“The Shelby Report” was my first clue. Clark’s professed romance with his dogs seemed histrionic, as bogus as the rest of him, and the way he exploited the dogs’ alleged breakdowns and spasms of viciousness for moldy pathos, shoddy laughs, and sighing admiration (how adorable that he let them lick his art, and how princely that he owned so much of it that he could remain sanguine when they puked on it) felt icily theatrical. How he’d whipsawed the poor Pipers with all his melodramatic crap.
“Mary,” I said, when I finally shared with her my conclusions about Clark’s treatment of her and Harry, “I looked up Leslie Titmuss, from the e-mails.” As soon as I said this, I wished I hadn’t called; I saw the shadow of my motives. I was trying to show off to her, bragging about my cryptographic acumen. But I’d already done it, so I did the rest. “Titmuss is from a novel. He was a trick.”
“I’m not surprised,” she said. She did sound disappointed, though. Perhaps that’s how it was to be a priest: you remained ever hopeful even about the worst of us, and bad news about the soul of any one of us struck you as bad news about us all.
Mary then repeated the story I’d heard from Clark: Shelby was run over by a car. I asked her why she believed this to be true and she told me about a visit to Clark’s Cornish house in November or December 2000. Her description of the weekend reminded me of my time there, the same cold bedroom, the same paucity of food, except that the Pipers had gotten much closer than I had to meeting J. D. Salinger. They went to his house, or a house Clark said was his. Clark knocked on his door while they hung back. No one answered, Mary said. She remembered the weekend as creepy and uncomfortable except for the pleasure of seeing Shelby again. She seemed healthy, and was walking without her wheelchair. They watched her run and play on Clark’s broad lawn.
A week or two later the phone call came. Shelby had been struck down on the road. Clark sounded distraught. “I’m devastated. Just devastated,” he said.
“This might seem odd, but I have to ask,” I said to Mary. “Did Clark ask for anything? Before you left? Any kind of favor?”
Mary didn’t think so. Then something clicked. Well, yes, as it happened, Clark had asked for Harry’s help. He wanted Harry to write a letter to the membership committee of the Lotos Club in support of his application to join.
“What was weird,” Mary said, “is that Harry’s not in that club. I think Clark overestimated his influence.”
“But Harry agreed to write the letter?”
“He did,” she said.
“And then, not all that long after he agreed, Clark called and told you Shelby was dead?”
“If you’re saying what I think you’re saying, I don’t think I can do this now,” said Mary. Whether what she thought I was saying was probable, possible, unknowable, ridiculous, or wicked of me even to suggest, I couldn’t quite tell, and I didn’t plan to ask.
THE LAST TIME I saw Clark was in Judge Lomeli’s empty courtroom, with no one to watch us but Lincoln and Washington. During the trial I’d used their portraits as targets for the focal readjustments that I practiced to ward off headaches. Lincoln sat, one fist propped under his chin. He was the thinker, inclined to skepticism. Washington stood moon-faced and broad-chested as though atop a captured hill. He was the hero, prone to secret backaches. The American flag in the corner hung straight down, wilted and exhausted. Clark had been sentenced to life without parole that day. He’d represented himself, and done it poorly. He opened by asking to read a motion he’d written, a ragged sheaf of pages that he carried into court the way that fleeing bank robbers do, in movies only, I’m certain, hugging slipping wads of loot against their bodies. The judge refused his request to hold us spellbound, and Clark looked even more mortified than when he’d heard the verdict read. To spite us all, he withdrew the unheard motion, which I saw was written in pencil. The judge said reporters who wished to interview Clark could do so privately, and take their turns.
“I don’t trust you. You betrayed me,” he said, when I sat down with him at the defense table, a couple of hours later, after the bailiff had cleared the room and the reporters in line ahead of me had finished up and gone away. Clark had heard that I was writing about him; I’d never mentioned it to him myself.
“I don’t trust you either,” I said to Clark once he tired of scolding me. It was the perfect, only retort, of course. His face looked rubbed away somehow, tired and indistinct, like a document that had been photocopied a few too many times. Only around his mouth did some liveliness remain.
“Listen, I’m sorry you feel betrayed,” I said, “but I’m writing about you because that’s what I do. I’m a writer. You always knew that. And you’re a fascinating human being.”
“I absolutely am not,” he said. Not human? For a moment, that’s what it had sounded like to me. It would have been a good joke, though an unlikely one from a stranger to self-deprecating irony. He couldn’t discern it when others used it, either; I’d noticed that about him early on, whenever I poked fun at myself with some light story of a screw-up or minor failure. He’d just stare and wait for me to finish. There were blanks in him.
“What happened to Shelby, anyway?” I said. ”I know she died, but what exactly happened?” I feigned a forgetful, absent manner, as though I’d recently started growing old.
“She was hit by a car,” he said. “Run over.”
“When?”
“2000, 2001. Somewhere in there. I can tell you who did it. His name is Peter Burling, a senator. A state senator, not federal. You can ask him. He hit her. Peter Burling.”
He strained at the handcuffs that locked him to his chair. It was his way of saying he’d write the name down for me if only all this—the trial, jail, Los Angeles, society, morality, rotten luck, crews of laborers digging in the earth, the durability of bone, stupid people, humiliated Germany, black-and-white movies, suspenseful books, voyages beyond the stars, Jehovah, a man with a mustache, ex-wives and girlfriends, and steel—weren’t stopping him from moving his silly arms.
THREE OR FOUR DAYS later I called Peter Burling at his home in Cornish. He said he’d read my piece about the trial, liked it, and was glad to help me. He told me the whole story. He began by acknowledging that he disliked Clark intensely, and he explained why. When Clark moved to Cornish in 1999, Burling was influential in the village, a prominent local leader, and Clark, he said, seemed resentful of him, jealous. For example, Burling had owned a local church—an old and historic Episcopal chapel—and when he tried to grant it to the town, Clark paid the town to turn it over to him. In another strong-arm move, he sought to have the public road that ran beside his house condemned so he could use it as private driveway. Burling said Clark was so intent on hurting him that he once tried to bribe a housekeeper to rifle through his personal files. Burling also believed Clark was a burglar who would enter neighbors’
unlocked homes on the pretext of delivering gifts of wild honey. A selfish, secretive, malicious fellow. That Clark had accused him of running down his dog didn’t surprise him, Burling said. The truth was, no one had run it over. He knew this because a neighbor woman and he had been the ones to find the body, he said. Shelby was lying peacefully on her side at precisely the spot where Clark’s driveway joined the road. No blood. No wrenched limbs. No ruffled fur. “No indicia of trauma of any kind. I thought that maybe it had a heart attack.”
“Could she have been poisoned?”
“Possibly,” Burling said. “All I know is that she wasn’t run over. It looked like she had just laid down to sleep.”
Burling excused himself for an appointment and we said goodbye. I sat and thought for a while at my desk. Shelby lay on the spot where Clark’s driveway joined the road. The road he wanted condemned? The road that he felt compromised his privacy? The road the town refused to let him have, and which he then blamed for killing his precious setter? I e-mailed Burling to ask if this road feud was running hot at the time of Shelby’s death. His response was prompt and slightly formal.
“Platt Road,” read his e-mail, “is where the dog’s body was, and the talk about closing the road was contemporaneous with the poor dog’s death.”
Clark had put the setter to good use. Portraying himself as the savior of her health had helped him secure a letter from Harry Piper commending him to the Lotos Club. And by killing her promptly after that was handled, as I was almost certain he’d done, he’d bolstered his case for closing a public road that bothered him and which he thought should be his.
Though maybe he had another motive. Or ten of them. Because Clark had no shortage of motives for murder. To take. To diminish. To win. To mock. To silence. To supplant. To not be bored. To create another absence so as not to be left with your own. Infinite motives, but just one super-motive: to gain an advantage or lose a disadvantage. This was also the motive for lying, the very same, although lying was quicker, cleaner, and much less strenuous. No chopping, no sawing, no shoveling, no mopping. Clark must have loathed such demeaning physical drudgery, and there was no evidence that he’d ever stooped to it—other than those one or two times. Lies, those little murders, were more his style. Big murders, he’d learned the hard way, were perhaps more trouble than they were worth.
He was an artful liar, it was true, and he had tried to be an artful murderer, but he wasn’t a real artist, and he knew it. He wasn’t even a real artiste, just a simulated man of taste. He wasn’t a real forger, just a collector of forgeries. He wasn’t a translator of anything, just a would-be “corrector” of others’ translations—from languages he didn’t know. So what was he? That was his whole predicament: he worked in a form that didn’t exist.
Back in fictional 1985 (meaning 2013, when Clark invented the “memory”) during his fabled meeting with the great director Robert Wise, Clark self-diagnosed himself about as well as a human being can. “You have industry, but no talent,” Wise supposedly told him. I’m confident that Clark believed it, that it represents his true self-image.
After his sentencing, he told me he’d always wanted to write, and he had written, in fact—dog stories on computers, a novel of stupefying length, in pencil—but he’d never had an audience. I suppose that this left him only dupes and victims, a kind of captive audience unaware of its role or its captivity. And dogs, of course, who are similar. And me. I was part of his audience, he thought. But in truth I was acting much of the time. He was conning me, but I was also conning him. The liar and murderer and heaven knows what else was correct about the writer: I betrayed him.
In the empty courtroom after his sentencing, the last time in this life that I would sit with my old friend, and just a few minutes before a guard walked over to unlock him from his chair and guide him by the elbow through a door, I asked him about his other dog, Yates. I was running low on questions by then, and I’d already run out of interest. Liars are exhausting people. Conversing with him was aging me, depleting me. All my questions drew the same response from him, just phrased in different ways. His evil was his prodigious, devouring appetite for other people’s vitality and time, which he consumed with words, words, words, word, words. Clark loved to talk but had nothing much to say, nothing of his own, which was surely another reason that he lied, and plagiarized lies, and recycled his old lies. He had ten thousand ways to tell you nothing. I felt like I’d heard all of them.
“Whatever happened to Yates?” I asked.
“Oh, same idea,” Clark said, because it was always the same idea with him. “He was old anyway. But he was also run over. It was very sad.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With thanks to Robert Weil, Eric Simonoff, Henry Finder, Frank Girardot, James Ellroy, Will Dana, Frank Foer, Michael Lustig, Curtis Cooke, William Menaker, and CBS News. You tried to keep me on track and mostly succeeded. With special gratitude to Harry and Mary Piper for making themselves vulnerable to me after being so horribly fooled by him. And with loving appreciation for Maisie and Charlie Kirn, who didn’t ask to be the children of a writer but do a wonderful job anyway.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Walter Kirn is the author of Thumbsucker and Up in the Air, both made into major films. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair, GQ, Esquire, and Rolling Stone. He is the national correspondent for the New Republic. He lives in Livingston, Montana.
FURTHER PRAISE FOR BLOOD WILL OUT
“Walter Kirn’s portrait of a confidence man is as rich, nuanced, and jaw-dropping as any I’ve ever encountered. A chilling and utterly fascinating read.”
—T. C. BOYLE
“The incredible tale of ‘Clark Rockefeller,’ a suave con man and killer who modeled himself on fictional villains, now has its perfect chronicler: the brilliant and bracingly honest journalist and memoirist and novelist Walter Kirn, who for a decade happened to be one of this villain’s suckers. As I read Blood Will Out in one sitting—riveted, entertained, disturbed, wondering if I’d have been so charmed and hoodwinked—I couldn’t help thinking of The Talented Mr. Ripley and The Great Gatsby, and had to keep reminding myself that it all really happened.”
—KURT ANDERSEN
ALSO BY WALTER KIRN
My Mother’s Bible (e-book)
Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever
The Unbinding
Mission to America
Up in the Air
Thumbsucker
She Needed Me
My Hard Bargain: Stories
Copyright © 2014 by Walter Kirn
All rights reserved
First Edition
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kirn, Walter, 1962–
Blood will out : the true story of a murder, a mystery,
and a masquerade / Walter Kirn. — First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-87140-451-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-87140-733-7 (e-book)
1. Gerhartsreiter, Christian, 1961– 2. Kirn, Walter, 1962–
3. Impostors and imposture—United States—Case studies.
4. Murderers—United States—Case studies. I. Title.
HV6760.G47K57 2014
364.152'3092—dc23
2013046327
Liveright Publishing Corporation
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Walter Kirn, Blood Will Out