by Walter Kirn
My posing grew more serious when I transferred to Princeton. It was my father’s old school, but it was also the City on a Hill for a Minnesota kid with literary tendencies who’d read F. Scott Fitzgerald. When the cab from the airport dropped me at the gate and I beheld the oxidized green tigers guarding the worn stone steps of Nassau Hall, a building that briefly housed the nation’s capital back when the nation was governed by a men’s club small enough to gather on its steps, I knew that rebellion and artsy nonconformity were my only viable social paths. Acceptance by Princeton’s golden elites—the kids who knew “The Vineyard” from “The Cape” and understood in some thoughtless, genetic way that the best clothes are those that disintegrate with character, not the ones that forever look brand new—would require a full-scale brown-nosing campaign that I didn’t feel equipped for. My resentments would show; I’d give myself away. No, I would have to break in from the outside.
“Being myself” at Princeton involved some guesswork, but eventually I settled on a persona. I bought a black thrift-store raincoat and wore it everywhere, rarely taking my hands out my pockets except when I had a chance to startle someone by whipping out my silver Zippo and lighting his cigarette with its oily flame. I wrote and helped direct a trio of imitation Beckett plays whose characters stood at strange angles to one another as they spoke their stiff, emphatic lines, which weren’t to be confused with natural speech because there is no such thing as natural speech, not in the theater and certainly not in life, the most artificial form of theater because it denies being theater at all. These were maxims I took from books by Frenchmen. The duty of the artist, I read somewhere, probably while I was smoking hash, which is when books about the artist’s duty most appealed to me, is to show that artifice is all. That’s why I wore my raincoat on clear days. That’s why I ate Hershey bars for breakfast, dipping them in tea. That’s why I told my actors to face the EXIT signs when they said, “I love you” to each other before walking off in opposite directions. That’s why I wasn’t surprised when certain classmates from rich New York families and stern New England prep schools began to nod and smile at me at parties, sometimes even slipping off to talk to me once their real friends were too drunk to notice. I was approachable for an angry loner. As the approaches grew more frequent, I wasn’t even that angry anymore; the ugly raincoat just made it seem that way. The fact was that I yearned to ditch the thing—it bored me—but by then it was part of my brooding-playwright image, which was bringing me success with girls, especially the girls that I liked best: rich ones who’d spent years in therapy and treated sex as naked theater.
In time I would graduate from Princeton with highest honors, in part because I learned to speak the language of prestigious cultural subversion; the language of paradox, of endless loops, of ever-receding, ever-dissolving everything, of “truth claims” instead of truths, of paradigms lost. I left the place not knowing who I was or what I was or why I ought to care, since selfhood, I’d learned, is nothing more than this: a pronoun (“I”), a verb (“to be”), a tense (the present), and any grammatical sentence that starts this way about which one cares to make a special truth claim:
“I am Walter Kirn.”
By the time I left college, I questioned even that one.
Repairing my deconstructed world took years. One thing that helped was writing about my past in the voice of my pre-Princeton self, the Minnesota kid who believed that language belonged to people, not the other way around. I wrote about the farmers I grew up around, old friends at the Mormon church that I’d attended, a beautiful girl who used to cause me problems, my thumbsucking habit, my family, and my dog. I kept it small. I kept it fairly short. I didn’t want to spiral off again. I published a book that a critic called faux naive, which I took to mean “intentionally simple” or “innocent on purpose.” He seemed dismissive of this approach, almost as though it amounted to dishonesty, but I disagreed, since what could be more honest than trying to recover from insanity?
At thirty, having published two books of fiction and moved out west in a fit of populist yearning, I betrayed myself again. One winter night in Montana, alone and drunk, I noticed a fetching author’s photo on the back of a book of short stories in my bathroom. (I’ll call her Ellen Moore.) I liked her bow-shaped lips, her taunting eyes. Her stories, about her big New England family and her adventurous sex life in New York, had made her famous. I wrote her a note, reminding her that we’d met once at a party and telling her that I was coming to the city and would like to take her out.
It worked; my boldness won her over. Ten days after arriving in New York I rented a one-room apartment a few blocks from hers so we could see each other more easily. I quit drinking, quit smoking, and tweeded up my wardrobe. Ellen had gone to prep school and college with the Kennedys, John and Caroline, whom we ran into now and then. The encounters dizzied me at first; I’d forgotten how New York can act as a social particle accelerator. John wore a trucker’s wallet on his belt, attached with a chain, and startled me with his earnestness; I’d expected him to be a smoothie, not a boyish idealist. Caroline was tough and wry and seemed like a link to some lost era of high adulthood, perhaps that of her parents. She intimidated me. I even met Jackie, with her cartoonish voice and aura of having known everybody worth knowing and tired of all but a few. Being among such people was a kick, but a kick that I got used to. I impressed myself by not dropping their names when I had the chance. Then Ellen broke up with me and instantly turned me from a semi-insider back into a fan, a gawker. There they were, John and Caroline, on television—the one in my mother’s living room, where I ate a lot of hot soup after the breakup—attending a formal-dress awards show named after their family and broadcast live from Washington, D.C. There they were on the covers of supermarket magazines back in Montana when I bought pancake syrup.
Ellen’s reasons for leaving me were simple: I didn’t have enough money or the right friends. She wanted a “bigger” life than I could give her. It crushed me. I’d feared that her circle would close me out someday. In my closet hung a collection of jackets and trousers that I’d bought for our courtship at a swank department store. I emptied their pockets and gave them to Goodwill and resumed my grassroots rebel act, with a vengeance. I’d been to the front and come back wounded; a grenade had blown up in my hand.
THE SAVIOS’ FOREIGN EXCHANGE student grew insufferable as he fashioned his newly tasteful, well-bred self. He compared the family, aloud, to “peasants,” and he disdained the mother’s simple cooking. This didn’t prevent him, of course, from enjoying their TV. The small screen was giving him big ideas about how fictional snobs behaved. He was like one of those unconventional pets, a ferret or a potbellied pig, that starts out small and manageable but fattens with every feeding until it’s no longer a pet but an invader, taking over the whole basement. The family finally tossed him out of the house. A few years later, in 1983, he again contacted Edward Savio by phone from California, where Savio had also moved to pursue the literary career that he had discussed with Clark when they were in high school together. Clark told him that he’d become a writer too. It wasn’t true, though perhaps he thought it was, making his trademark category error: confusing con artistry with actual artistry, duplicity with creativity. The boast was the last that Savio heard of him, but if I knew Clark, he kept track somehow of his school friend’s germinating career to use as a model for the development of one of his own speculative selves. The evidence would show—not just the trial evidence, but outside evidence that would later come to me—that Clark tended a flourishing secret garden grown from cloned bits of people he’d gained some knowledge of.
Savio’s testimony was much too brief for me; I wanted more dialogue and longer scenes from Clark’s youthful Frankenstein period in Connecticut. After Savio finished testifying, yet another former acquaintance of the defendant who’d had to relive decades-old experiences that had perhaps taken effort to live down, I thought of tracking him to the hallway, but my bench inside the courtr
oom was jam-packed and I was sitting in the middle. I filled in the scenes I wanted from him myself. I pictured a young Clark in my house, snarling about my mother’s cuisine. I pictured him hogging our TV and mimicking the voices of fake tycoons to formulate a voice that he’d present as his own a few weeks later. “This lasagna is a tad watery for my palate.” He would have been given fifteen minutes, if that, to pack his chinos and deck shoes and grab his passport. The mystery wasn’t just whether he’d killed John Sohus, but why no one had murdered him. That he hadn’t been was a credit to his host nation. We’re a more civilized people than I’d realized for having tolerated such a savage.
EIGHT
OBSERVING THE TRIAL reminded me of church, of those childhood Sundays spent sitting with my family facing our Mormon chapel’s holy end, where the sacrament was prepared and God hid out. I wanted Him to come forth and show Himself, a light, a mist, a shimmer, anything, but only when I grew drowsy and shut my eyes did the wished-for materialization seem at hand. At the trial what I longed for as I shifted in my pew, which I wasn’t allowed to rise from every few minutes for a refreshing song or pray-along, was a vision of the murder, the crime itself, that everyone up in front kept talking about. Only Clark could envision it, presumably, and perhaps it was all he envisioned as he sat there, obliged to appear to be thinking of something else. Had John been attacked from behind or from the front, or had the first blow descended from above, while he was in his sleep? From above, I imagined, knowing Clark, who wasn’t one to forgo an advantage. But that would mean he killed John in Didi’s house, in John and Linda’s bedroom, not in Clark’s detached apartment out back, where the detectives believed he’d done it. Shutting my eyes didn’t help me at the trial. Earthly scenes that inarguably took place but about which you lack essential facts are harder to summon to mind than divine emanations you aren’t sure are possible.
The expert witnesses came to help us see. They arrived at the trial equipped with skills and systems and pried at the tabernacle’s lid with science, sometimes achieving momentary leverage and freeing a ray or two of negative radiance. You had to look quickly, though, or the dark gleam dissipated. The act itself was hard to bring to life; the tomb, the relics, and the remains were shown repeatedly. These photographs were arresting if slightly confusing because of the circles and arrows drawn all over them, but they made the crime feel ancient, even older than it was, like an event reconstructed by Egyptologists. This allowed Clark to practice his scholarly demeanor, his pose of learned myopia. I found it absurd, as hammy and overplayed as his dithering art-collector act that first day I went to his apartment. Except, I’d bought that act, hadn’t I? It only seemed farcical in hindsight. The jury, however, was stuck with now-sight. Worrying.
Forensic investigator Lynn Herrold’s specialty was examining and interpreting trace evidence: fibers, plant matter, tire impressions, blood. She was a large woman with a nasal voice and voluminous long gray hair. She took up position in the witness box as though it were her headquarters, her cockpit. The evidence she’d analyzed included the bookstore bags that held the skull, perhaps the most damning exhibits at the trial. She’d used a sophisticated colored light to illuminate the faded print from three decades ago on the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee bag. The USC bag she read in daylight; as an alumna of the school, she’d had one just like it stored in her garage. She brought her bag into court and held it up. This particular version of the bag (“Trojan Stores, U.S.C.,” it read) had only been produced, she testified, from 1979 to 1984.
Herrold had also inspected the button-down shirt that covered John Sohus’s severed torso. Deliquescing tissue had soaked the cloth in so much fluid that she could find no blood on it. What interested her were the ruptures in the fabric. Some, she concluded, had been caused by tree or plant roots that penetrated the shirt during its nine years underground. (Roots “like decomposing bodies,” she testified, and seek out their “high nitrogen materials.”) Other rips and tears, to her trained eye, had been made by a sharp instrument. There were exactly six of these: two on one of the sleeves around the elbow and four on the back of the left shoulder. All six, she said, were the work of the same blade, and some were consistent with defensive wounds.
Herrold had scrutinized the guesthouse too, and removed a new carpet that had been laid, to search for blood evidence on the concrete floor. Because she found no visible stains, she painted the floor with Luminol, a chemical that reacts with hemoglobin to produce a soft blue glow—“the same reaction in a firefly.” Four areas of the floor lit up when treated and were photographed before they faded. The largest blood trace was two feet long and slightly less than two feet wide. The next largest trace was two feet long by one foot. The blood showed what Herrold called a “wiping pattern,” the possible result of an attempt to clean up the crime scene with rags or towels.
What disappointed me about Herrold’s testimony was its failure to provoke a single discernible shiver in the defendant. In his head was a memory of slaughter and the hectic aftermath of slaughter that must have put lingering pressure on his consciousness. How had he handled living with such imagery? How had he managed to chitchat at the Lotos Club with such abominable scenes inside him? Not that the club was full of psychic triggers for such grisly memories; perhaps that’s why he found it such a refuge. (The Safari Club, which I’d passed by on the street in New York and pictured as full of mounted animal heads, would have been another matter.) I had a conjecture about how he’d kept his cool and was keeping it even now. He’d reframed and gentrified the ugly memories, acting them out in upscale contexts contrived to drain them of their horror. He’d met Sandy, for example, at a dress-up game of Clue, the murder-themed board game. The bloody Rothko might have functioned similarly, allowing him to talk about death and gory knife wounds as matters of cultural, not personal, history. Shelby in her faintly gruesome wheelchair might have served his reimagining project too. Maybe nursing poor, battered Shelby had been atonement. I’d seen other animal lovers work that program, smothering their pets with an affection quite unlike the cruelty they showed to people.
Then I remembered something else: in the burial pit the police had found a phone cord tied around the bags that held the head. When Balian first showed its photo in the courtroom I stared at it, thinking it out of place. Now I had a theory. Clark owned a fetish object: the old black telephone that he once described to me as the consummate example of twentieth-century industrial design. Bill Boss, Sandy’s father, a retired engineer whom I sometimes sat next to in the courtroom, told a story about a friend of his who’d used a phone of Clark’s without permission once. Clark exploded, raging at the man. It occurred to me that the phone might be the murder weapon. (The police never found one.) Its receiver was solid enough to crush a skull—I imagined him clutching the receiver and slamming it down on a head, a globe of bone—and the cord might have served to asphyxiate the victim, which was why Clark had buried it with the body. (There were certainly handier household items with which to secure a bag around a skull.) To keep the phone after the crime, to hold it close, would suit Clark’s film noir sensibilities. He might have treated it like the rope in Rope, which the killers hid in plain sight during their party.
I also thought back to a scene in another film noir, Detour, a cult movie that a cinephile buddy had pressed on me a few months earlier, in which the horrid femme fatale, Anne Savage, is accidentally asphyxiated when she passes out drunk, tangled up in a long phone cord. Anne Savage was a wise-cracking Hollywood bottle blond of a type that obsessed Clark, I’d been told by a woman who knew him in San Marino, went out with him to a noir or two, and once joined him for a game (not outdoors) of Trivial Pursuit, Silver Screen Edition. He “drooled over” Barbara Stanwyck, the woman said, “was hooked on” Gloria Graham, and adored Grace Kelly—the star, I recalled, of Dial M for Murder.
A woman named Linda Hausladen followed Herrold. Hausladen was “the licensee manager” for the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Her testimo
ny was brief but devastating. The design of the second book bag that wrapped the skull dated, she said, to a particular three-year period: 1979–82. I looked at Clark, who was writing on his pad almost as though he were taking down the dates. He was playing a role: the independent investigator diligently toiling to crack the case from the unique perspective of the accused. Because he might be suffering from amnesia, there was a chance, in this offbeat script of his, that the clues would lead right back to him. If so, he gave the impression that he’d cooperate in his own punishment. We weren’t quite there yet, however. Be patient, jurors—I’m working as hard to solve this thing as you are.
I was having his thoughts for him, fed up with having to stare at him and guess them. They came to me in the German accent of a character on Laugh-In, the old TV show from the early ’70s, played by Henry Gibson. Along with Werner Klemperer’s Colonel Klink from Hogan’s Heroes, another show of that era, he’d supplied my notion of Nazis as a child, when Nazis and Germans were the same to me. “Very interesting,” hissed Gibson, wearing a too-large helmet and rimless glasses and peering out from a leafy hiding place. “Very interesting,” went the line, renderered in a thick German accent, “but stupid.”
