by Walter Kirn
The process of choosing this jury went on all day. Waiting in the hallway outside the courtroom, the pool of a few dozen prospects blended well with the associates of local gang lords whose trials were taking place in the same building. Not one of the candidates resembled Clark or someone he might have relaxed with at the Lotos Club, but many of them had the class and ethnic markers of “service people,” the folks he’d probably engaged as cleaners and gardeners. The euphemism that sprang to mind was “urban.” One middle-aged Latino man with a lordly stomach, a curled, waxed mustache with twisted points, and a sizable tattoo partially visible above his collarline, wore his straw hat and dark shades into the courtroom when the bailiff called his name. “Clark’s defense will definitely want that guy,” whispered Frank Girardot, the editor of the Pasadena Star News and a veteran trial reporter who’d covered the Simpson case. Girardot was right; the big fellow made the cut.
Judge George Lomeli worked his way through the long procession of candidates, many of whom spoke halting English, while others seemed past their prime as alert, analytic intellects. Lomeli appeared well-suited for the case, a handsome man with a sharp but genial manner that combined authority and wit and even a hint of debonair Old Hollywood. He looked good in his robe, which matched his hair and mustache, and he appealed to the candidates’ sporting sides by promising an “interesting” trial. Lots of folks tried to beg off anyway, citing work conflicts, family difficulties, and religious holidays. Of those who seemed most inclined to do their duty, some appeared to have little else going on. This bothered me. If I, the Princeton and Oxford graduate, had fallen for Clark’s ingenious stratagems, how would these people penetrate the veil? With some jurors, I feared a culture clash. I’d seen a list of the prosecution’s witnesses, among whom were several white-shoe finance types who’d known Clark in his late-1980s guise as Christopher Crowe, a hungry Wall Street bond guy. The working-class jurors might find these smoothies baffling, or loathe them on sight. Would it matter? No idea. I’d never attended a murder trial before. I’d certainly never had a stake in one.
My stake in this one was hard to formulate. The harm Clark had caused me wasn’t grave enough to instill a lust for vengeance, but I hardly wished him well. The murder aside, he had a lot to answer for, and the trial was likely to offer him many rebukes, even if it spared him the ultimate one. Gratifying and fascinating viewing. I hoped my time here would educate me, toughen me. Having been beguiled by his magic show, I would now be able to go backstage and see the tricks he’d played explained. “That Walter Kirn is one shrewd judge of character”—this had never been said of me. Maybe the trial would wake me up.
As the potential jurors faced the judge, Clark turned around and watched them from his chair. Now and then he’d offer them sad smiles, affecting sympathy for their complaints, but mostly he wore the detached, attentive look of an anthropologist in the field. Who were all these people, so many of them so brown? What was this ritual unfolding around him? I’d never seen a German look as German as Clark did when he assessed his likely assessors. His eyes were like small blue coins behind his glasses. One sockless foot tapped away beneath his chair. In his right hand he held a pencil stub poised above a yellow legal pad. I’d heard he’d been writing a novel while in prison, a multipart epic of European politics that began at the close of World War One and ended in the 1960s. It was competent but dull, I’d heard, well researched but inert.
That Clark was guilty I had little doubt. Twenty-eight years ago, here in California, he’d killed his landlady’s adopted son and his life ever since had been a masquerade. The trial would permit the prosecution to color in and substantiate this story, but I already knew it in outline and found it credible. What I didn’t find credible anymore was me. When I’d learned that Clark might be a murderer and instinctively found the notion plausible, the effect on me was Galilean. It humbled me. It reoriented everything. It revealed to me the size and power of my ignorance and vanity.
About two hours into jury selection, while scrutinizing another would-be juror, Clark glanced to the side and saw me sitting there. I nodded at him. I thought he might nod back. I was, after all, a face from better days. He sneered at me instead, arching his eyebrows, wrinkling his nose, and twisting up his lips into a horrible, prissy little knot. The look was vicious and contemptuous and indicated that he viewed my presence as a betrayal of our relationship, as conduct unbecoming a gentleman. I viewed things differently, of course. To me our relationship was the betrayal. Nor did I care anymore to be a gentleman.
For the rest of his trial, until we met again, he pretended that I wasn’t there.
FIVE
CHRISTOPHER CHICHESTER WAS a baronet, a species of minor British aristocrat. It said so on the vellum card that he passed out at church socials and Rotary meetings, a card that also bore a Latin motto whose English translation—if anyone cared to check—was “Firm in Faith.” He told people that he was distantly related to Sir Francis Chichester, a figure of lofty nautical renown who’d circled the globe on a sailboat, the Gipsy Moth. In what would become a lifelong habit of claiming involvement with whichever movies happened to be foremost in the headlines, he also told people that he knew George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars.
It was the early 1980s, around the time I was studying at Oxford with actual English nobles, and America was rekindling its romance with hierarchy and pedigree and pomp after a long spell of earthy, druggy populism. Not that stuffy San Marino, a wealthy enclave near Pasadena settled by General George S. Patton’s grandfather, had ever fallen for the hippie gospel. The town was a fanciful fortress for the privileged whose houses aped, with that California fondness for the air-conditioned copy over the poorly ventilated original, Tudor manors, French chateaus, and other overbearing Old World domiciles. Its shade trees were prodigies of photosynthesis, a smog-scrubbing, heat-shielding canopy of verdure. The cars in its driveways were showroom glossy. The Chandlers lived there. They published the LA Times. John McCone lived there. He’d run the CIA once. The Huntington Library, founded by a railroad baron, held one of only eleven existing vellum copies of the Gutenberg Bible, several quarto editions of Hamlet, and perhaps the world’s finest collection of eighteenth-century British portrait art, including Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy.
Chichester had found his Oz, his Xanadu, and his West Egg. He’d come a long way, and by a zigzag route. The son of a housepainter and a part-time seamstress, he’d grown up in Roman Catholic rural Bavaria in a village called Bergen, the German equivalent of those stifling small American towns in country western songs. The locals remembered him as bright, dissatisfied, infatuated with Hollywood, and rude—a child who once blew pepper into a teacher’s face and was given to picking fights. In an article in the Boston Globe that ran after the kidnapping of Snooks, his younger brother, Alexander, said: “I think Germany was too small for him. He wanted to live in the big country and maybe get famous.” Out hitchhiking one stormy day, he caught a ride with a couple on vacation, a California dentist and his wife, whom he thought might aid him in his plan. He invited them home to eat dinner with his family and pumped them for information about America. Just days or weeks later he called them on the phone and announced that he’d made the crossing.
The gateway he chose was Berlin, Connecticut, perhaps because it rang a bell. Through an advertisement in the paper, he found a local family that was willing to host a foreign exchange student. He enrolled in high school. He told people that his father was an industrialist and set about fashioning a manner based on a pop-culture travesty of wealth: Thurston Howell III of Gilligan’s Island, one of his favorite television shows. When his host family tired of his peculiar pretensions, he skipped off to Wisconsin and settled in Milwaukee, a city of breweries and bratwurst and an appropriate haven for a young German who was still in the process of denaturalizing himself. He studied communications at a local state university. He shortened his last name to “Gerhart.” He arranged a quickie marriage for a green card.
Ready for another leap, he ditched his new wife and friends and his old name and lit out for California.
There, he burrowed into the white side of Los Angeles, up against the mountains. South Pasadena was his entry point, specifically its Episcopal church, St. James. He understood the power of God as a character reference. He ushered on Sundays, cultivated the priest, and rented a series of lodgings from parishioners, never lasting long in any one place. He claimed to be studying film at USC and blamed stingy parents for his lack of funds. He moved up the ladder of zip codes to San Marino and leased a backyard guesthouse from Didi Sohus, a lonesome woman in late middle age who drank and smoked and drank and smoked and failed to maintain her yard and drank and smoked. Didi’s type—propertied, isolated, out of it—was a type that his type prized.
How he paid the rent has never been clear. After his trial, when we finally met again, he would feed me a story about importing tea directly from Asia, from a grand estate, and peddling it to churches and VFW halls, but I had no more reason to believe this than his neighbors in California did when he told them he owned a talking car. (Knight Rider, a TV show of the period, happened to feature just such a verbal vehicle.) What is known, however, is how he paid for meals. He didn’t. He’d post himself at the local barbershop, Jann of Sweden, and listen in on customers—among them the Chandler men on whose conservative haircuts he modeled his own—while drinking free coffee and browsing the free papers. At the right moment, he’d comment or ask a question, slipping into the stream of conversation. An invitation to lunch or breakfast might follow. He’d accept. When the bill arrived, no wallet. He hadn’t been planning to eat. He’d get it next time. Perpetual postponement became his method. He thrived in the gap between actions and their consequences, concealment and discovery.
“He didn’t know much,” Jann told me after court one day, “but he knew enough to make people think he did.”
The baronet didn’t deign to speak to everyone. One person he ignored, by most accounts, was geeky John Sohus, then in his mid-twenties. John, who lived with his mother in the main house, was diabetic and adopted. He played Dungeons and Dragons. He loved Tolkien. He knew how to program an Apple II computer back when such knowledge was not a route to millions but a pursuit whose prestige among his peer group lay somewhere between thumbsucking and juggling. John was a little guy. His girlfriend, Linda, who worked in a San Fernando Valley fantasy bookstore, Dangerous Visions, had a good six inches and fifty pounds on him. Her hobby was painting unicorns and centaurs; she hoped to make a career of it someday. For their wedding, the couple threw a costume party—one guest was a robot, another a horned demon—and held it on a doubly spooky date: Halloween, 1984.
A few months later, the prosecution charged, the film student who wasn’t enrolled in film school and didn’t appear to be flourishing in Hollywood despite his supposed connections to top directors, bashed in John’s skull with three blows from a blunt object and stabbed him repeatedly in the back and arms with something razor-like and piercing. No motive for the crime was given in court (California law does not require one), but it may have involved a modest inheritance destined for John that Chichester coveted. Detectives would later interview a woman from whom he extracted, the woman said, a forty-thousand-dollar ‘“finder’s fee” for her right to nurse an ailing Didi, who felt abandoned by her missing son. In 1987, with John still gone, Didi put the woman in her will and perished soon afterward while in her care. Chichester showed up to split the take but there wasn’t much left, the woman told police, and she sent him away unsatisfied. The story was inadmissable in court because the night before the woman was set to be formally deposed, she died.
So Chichester may have killed John Sohus for nothing. He may also have done the following for nothing:
Cut the body up into three sections, possibly with an electric chain saw he borrowed from a neighbor around this time.
Placed the head inside two plastic shopping bags, both of them from college bookstores, one at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, the other at USC.
Wrapped the hands in plastic grocery bags.
Wound the torso in plastic sheets.
Dug a three-foot-deep pit in the backyard, stuffed at least a portion of the remains into a fiberglass drum, and buried them. Wiped up the blood in the guesthouse and burned the carpet.
Returned the chain saw. Arranged to have forwarded from France a series of postcards written either by Linda or by a forger familiar with her handwriting—possibly the baronet himself—informing her mother-in-law and several friends that she and John were enjoying a holiday abroad.
But Linda wasn’t in Europe. She was gone. She never returned to work at Dangerous Visions. She never answered the phone calls from the man who’d bought a couple of her paintings—her first sale!—and she never drove out to Phoenix with her best friend for the big science fiction and fantasy convention that they’d been planning to attend. She also missed the little garden party that Chichester organized a few months later, setting up a table in the backyard next to the dirt mound atop her husband’s grave.
Linda, whose new white Nissan pickup truck Chichester then drove back to the East Coast, where all the dog-loving freelance central bankers live.
TWO NIGHTS BEFORE THE trial proper began I slept in my car in a drugstore parking lot somewhere between the airport and downtown. I’d driven into the city from Malibu, where I was renting a studio apartment, to talk about the murder over dinner with a new friend, the novelist James Ellroy, author of LA Confidential, who viewed Clark as a stone psychopath. I missed my exit and wound up on a freeway—not the one I’d driven in on—cruising along through the dark with my attention fixed on the map application on my phone, which represented my car as a blue dot and my destination, a restaurant, as a red dot. For what I believed was twenty minutes but was actually an hour, I followed the dot instead of heeding the road signs, only realizing how lost I was when I reached a potholed dead-end street in a deserted warehouse district. Because Ellroy didn’t own a cell phone, I had to call the restaurant and ask for him. I described my location to him using landmarks, having turned off the phone app in disgust. “You’re not even in Los Angeles,” he said. “You’re way down in San Pedro. You fucked up.”
I told him to eat without me. Then my phone died. I tried to retrace my route from memory. Around midnight, I bought a map at a convenience store that looked like it was robbed weekly by armed junkies but carried on selling Red Bull and Camels anyway. Ninety minutes of driving, I discovered, had returned me to San Pedro. I gave up then—fatigue and urban sprawl had beaten me. My pillow was a rolled-up leather jacket. At four A.M. I woke up in a panic, convinced that Clark would go free after the trial and come for me somehow, possibly in disguise. Then I remembered the dream that spurred this thought. A police car had pulled me over on a dirt road and I was waiting to show my driver’s license to an officer who I could see approaching in my rearview mirror. His body grew larger with each step but his head kept shrinking. By the time he reached the car he had no head. He had a voice, however: Clark’s. He asked me for my ID and I woke up.
Behind the dream was a bad memory that I’d been living with for years, ever since I learned about the murder charge. It was late October 1998, a few months after I delivered Shelby. I opened an e-mail at my desk—a group e-mail to multiple recipients that included the Pipers—in which Clark described a nervous breakdown he’d suffered while supposedly attending a meeting at the United Nations. He blamed the pressures of his banking job. He blamed the demands of caring for a sick dog, who woke early, cutting short his sleep. Under a doctor’s orders to change his lifestyle, he planned to close his office and “go virtual” the following spring. He also mentioned a planned sabbatical. “I may either stay at a friend’s summerhouse in the Brittany/Normandy region,” he wrote, “or even visit Shelby’s former home state, Montana.”
This sentence jarred me. I couldn’t imagine a graver mismatch than Clark and Big Sky country. He couldn
’t be serious. I wondered if the plan involved the Pipers, with whom I’d fallen out of touch as I prepared for Maggie’s November due date.
The birth of my daughter, Maisie, a few weeks later pushed Clark and his e-mail from my mind. The morning after Maggie delivered her, a red, roaring baby who barreled into the world with a momentum still present fourteen years later, my agent sold a novel of mine that seventeen different publishers had passed on. Over the next month, on instructions from my new editor, I revised it at night in my unfinished kitchen, sitting on the floor with my computer perched on a five-gallon bucket of drywall compound. So Maggie could sleep, I laid Maisie in a laundry basket and watched her while I typed. It startled me every time I met her eyes, which still had the undifferentiated composure of small blue portals to another galaxy. They recognized everything and nothing. Their pupils were perfect black unblinking Buddhas.
At some point during this interlude Clark called. He opened with his accustomed greeting: “Long time, no speak.” (Most of his pet colloquialisms were like this—variations on familiar sayings that weren’t as witty as he seemed to think.) After I brought him current on my news, he retold the story of his breakdown, giving special attention to his lapse into unconsciousness and to his intention to rest up as he wound down his banking consultancy, which restructured Third World debt and strove to reinvigorate whole national economies whose ailments were untreatable, he feared.
