Walter Kirn - Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

For Amanda Fortini, my love, and in
memory of my mother, Millie Kirn

He was versatile, and the world was wide!

PATRICIA HIGHSMITH, The Talented Mr. Ripley

A writer not writing is practically a maniac within himself.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Blood Will Out

I T FELT LIKE a noble gesture at the time, and I was in the mood for an adventure. The summer my wife was pregnant with our first child and President Clinton was slipping toward impeachment, I volunteered to drive a crippled dog from my home in Montana, where it was being cared for by patrons of our local Humane Society, to the New York City apartment of a rich young man, a Rockefeller, who had adopted it on the Internet.

His first name was Clark. We met over the phone. I called him as a favor to my wife, Maggie, the Humane Societys president, who was trying to help out Harry and Mary Piper, the people who had rescued the poor creature after she was run over by a car. Theyd paid for the surgery that saved her life, arranged for her to be treated with Reiki massage, and taught her to use a canine wheelchair whose tires did the work of her paralyzed hind legs. The heirs to a Minnesota banking fortune and devout Episcopalians (Mary was in training to become a priest), the Pipers had recently taken Maggie and me to dinner and complained about the difficulty of transporting the dog to the East Coast. They feared entrusting her to a commercial airline because of her perilous condition, and though Clark had told them that he owned a plane, he said it was tied up in China with his wife, Sandra, an international management consultant. When I heard about this, I offered to play the middleman, in part as a way of assuaging my guilty conscience over the death of one of Maggies shelter dogs Id hit with my pickup truck a few months earlier. But I had another reason altogether for wanting to speak with Clark: I was a writer, even more importantly, a writer between books, and I had a hunch I was going to meet a character.

Clark opened our initial call with the story of the adoption. He told me hed learned of the dog, whose name was Shelby, through a Web site devoted to finding owners for homeless Gordon setters, a breed that he prized for its links to British royalty and for its bounding, avid temperament. He knew instantly that he wanted her, he said, and had been trading e-mails with the Pipers in his quest to convince them that he should have her. His building was only a block from Central Park, meaning that Shelby would have ample room to exercise and engage in morning squirrel hunts. Whats more, Clark volunteered, in the apartment under his lived Manhattans top veterinary acupuncturist. He said hed already spoken with this healer and felt confident that, with his help, Shelby would someday make a full recovery.

Im afraid thats unlikely, I said. Her spine was crushed. Im not sure you know this, but theres a possibility that somebody shot her before she was run over.

Have you ever been treated with acupuncture?

Well, no, I stammered.

Then you remain unacquainted with its magic.

The call lasted over an hour, derailing my day. I was on deadline that morning for Time magazine, working in my small office above a western-clothing store to convert a stack of raw reporting produced by various stringers around the country into an intelligible story about some matter of popular sociologyTV violence, children of divorcethat couldnt be dealt with in a hundred pages but that I had to summarize in four. I didnt particularly like the job but I was in dire need of money just then, having recently borrowed half a million dollars to buy a five-hundred-acre ranch ten miles north of the town of Livingston in what a poetic realtor had described as the shadows of the Crazy Mountains. The place was a picturesque ruin of sagging fences, overgrazed pastures, and broken-down corrals whose hayfields were irrigated by shallow ditches riddled with rattlesnake dens and badger holes. The house had a kitchen with a toilet in it, out in the open, not far from the sink, and its top floor was abandoned and boarded shut. Id bought the place to fulfill a dream of self-sufficient country living, but I was discovering that paying for it would mean working harder than I ever had at assignments much drearier than I could bear. The scariest part was that my loana private contract with the ranchs old owner, a podiatrist from Billingsstipulated that I could lose the place if I missed even a single monthly payment.

Clark did most of the talking during the call. He told me a lot about himself, and much of what he told me was hard to process without the ability to see his face and know if he was joking or exaggerating. He told me hed never gone to high school. He told me he collected modern art but that he found it ugly: Pure puke on canvas. He told me he only ate bread he baked himself. He told me he owned another Gordon setter named Yates on whom he lavished three-course meals prepared from fresh ingredients by his private chef. He asked for the number of my fax machine so he could send me copies of the recipes.

You actually write these recipes out? I asked him.

My people do, he said.

While I waited for the document, drinking cold coffee at my cluttered desk and ignoring the beeping of my phone line (my editors at Time were trying to reach me), I asked Clark what he did for work. My hunch was that he did nothing at all.

At present, he said, Im a freelance central banker.

I asked him to explain.

Think of a countrys money supply, he said, as a lake or a river behind a dam. Think of me as the keeper of that dam. I decide how much water flows over its turbines at what velocity, and for what duration. The trick is to let through sufficient water to nourish and sustain a countrys crops but not so much that it floods the fields and drowns them.

Which countries, I asked Clark, do you do this for?

At the moment? Thailand.

Thats a lot of responsibility.

Its fun.

Which countries before Thailand?

Thats confidential.

This cant be a common profession.

We invented it. My company did, I mean. Asterisk LLC.

He spoke with an accent, clipped and international, and occasionally tossed in a word, like erstwhile or improprietous, that seemed to tie a bow on the sentence that included it. I judged his peculiar manner to be the product of a profoundly insulated upbringing. I recalled meeting a few people like him in college at Princetonpedigreed, boastful, overschooled eccentrics who spoke like cousins of Katharine Hepburnbut Id been raised in rural Minnesota, deep in manure-scented dairy country, and Id never succeeded in getting close to them. Their clubs wouldnt have me, I didnt play their sports, and I found them a bit repulsive physically, what with their prematurely thinning hair and delicate, intestinal-pink skin. After college, while studying at Oxford on a fellowship, Id managed to mix with some of their British counterparts, even Princess Dianas younger brother, but I was just a novelty to them, a vulgar New World entertainment. When my time at Oxford ended, I hung on in London for several months doing clerical work at a small law firm and tearing around with a crew of titled party boys. In truth, I couldnt keep up with them. The cabs. The bar tabs. Eventually I flew back to America and landed a job at Vanity Fair writing punning headlines for fluffy stories about Nancy Reagans Italian gown designer and Stings wifes charity activities, but my boss didnt like that I stayed in at night instead of throwing myself into the social scene and I was fired within a year.

But Clark seemed to like me, and to want me to like him. When the dog menu started creeping from the fax machine, it persuaded me of his eagerness.