Two Truths and a Lie

by Ellen McGarrahan

  “One of them is lying about the murders,” I tell my husband, when I get home. Peter is making dinner. He’s a private detective too. That’s not how we met, though, or why we’re together. “It’s either Walter or Sunny. I am going to find out who.”

  “Holy God,” Peter says. He has stopped cooking.

  “It’s not entirely impossible,” I say. No reason for him to look so shocked.

  “No, outside. Behind you. Turn around. That building right behind us is on—”

  I whip around.

  “Fire,” I say.

  In the distance, a high wail. Sirens. Getting closer.

  2

  By Glue and by Dream

  Two fifty-seven the next morning. I am wide awake. It was past midnight when the fire trucks and their flashing lights departed, and I’ve given up on sleep and come into the living room. A breeze has picked up off the ocean and the air smells of salt. Before turning in last night, I started watching a movie, and when I open my laptop here it is, onscreen. Paul Newman in a prison uniform. Cool Hand Luke, from the book by Donn Pearce. Yesterday at the courthouse, I saw Donn Pearce’s name in the case file. For forty days in 1976, the file said, Donn Pearce worked on the case. He was Jesse Tafero’s private investigator.

  Each of our days is connected to the other by all sorts of personal artifacts, attached together by glue and by dream. That’s from his book. Donn Pearce lives in Fort Lauderdale. I am going to talk to him later today. To try, anyway. And those lives, long since dead, sound like a distant melody played on a muted saxophone.

  * * *

  •

  Nineteen years ago, after I went for that first interview with the detective in his mansion in San Francisco, he sent me down to Los Angeles and out into the desert alone. It was a test. I had a rental car, a list of names, a paper map, and some quarters for the pay phone. To call back to the office, not to call ahead. We never call ahead, the detective said. Get out to the house, ring the bell, tell them you’re a private detective, and ask for a moment of their time. Don’t lie. Don’t make promises. No bribes. No favors. No threats. All of that shit will backfire in the courtroom. There are so many ways to fuck up. Do not fuck up.

  Right away I hated it. Standing there on the front doormat in my polka-dot dress, business card in hand. The witnesses on my list were retired mechanics who’d built fighter planes during World War II, and I needed to ask them about the toxic chemicals used in the factory. Chemicals that had dripped down through the sand and polluted the water underneath the entire basin. No. Not interested. Not willing to get involved. With the sun beating down through my windshield, I got turned around in the glare, and did not even notice that I’d driven farther out into the desert until the dust cloud in my mirror got too big to ignore.

  I braked hard, came to a halt, and stepped out of the car into the heat. I took my map and spread it across the hood of the car. Back to the main street, turn right, down two more and right again—I was concentrating so hard that it took me a moment to feel it.

  This. The big emptiness. Sand and sky, arcing, the low roar of the road in the distance, the echo. I stood up straight and took a better look around.

  Nothing. As far as I could see.

  I felt a rush of awe. Rising, alive. And surprise. I could not believe it. I had finally, finally found it. The place I’d been searching for since the day I saw Jesse Tafero die.

  Away.

  * * *

  •

  I spent the next two decades on the road.

  Grand Bahama Island: sawgrass and pine, wild dogs in the underbrush, and half-built buildings falling down, gray like bone. Seattle: caviar at a marble-topped bar in a candlelit restaurant, the waterfront outside rain-swept and lavender beneath a lowering sky. Biloxi: boiled peanuts out of the can for dinner in my motel room as I tried not to look at the floral bedspreads, the same dark roses as there had been at Starke. I learned that you can’t tail someone by driving in front of them, that it’s a bad idea to fall asleep in your car when you’re trying to serve a subpoena, and to always make sure you stay between the witness and the door. There were four of us operatives working for the detective, and sometimes we did cases together—getting our instructions over a speakerphone like a scene out of Charlie’s Angels—but mainly I was out on my own. Days upon days, I spoke to no one but the people I’d been assigned to and my boss the detective, who yelled. The detective yelled when I did a bad job and when I did well too. It was strangely motivating. When I started out, cellphones were a new luxury technology, email was not oxygen yet, and at home I was living alone. But the solitude suited me. And the velocity. That felt necessary, like rain.

  * * *

  •

  Today I arrive at the courthouse to find that the clerks have stacked my tattered file boxes next to a spare desk and reserved it for me. I am still going through the documents, learning the basics of the case. “See? We try to keep it nice here. Try to keep it positive,” a court clerk says. A long scar runs across the back of his head, baseball-stitched, as if someone had cut his skull open, lifted it off, and sewed it back on.

  * * *

  •

  10-24 Lauderdale.

  As Black’s shout sparks out across the airwaves, the Florida Highway Patrol rushes to his rescue. Lauderdale, all units. But the first trooper who reaches the rest area finds Trooper Black and Constable Irwin unconscious on the ground next to the Camaro, bleeding hard from gunshot wounds to their heads. “Send some help,” the trooper pleads, into the radio. He’s weeping. Black’s cruiser is gone. Stolen.

  A short distance north, a security guard is waving the police cruiser through the entrance gate of a retirement village, not noticing that it’s Walter Rhodes in his groovy shirt at the wheel. In the village parking lot, a kindly gentleman in horn-rimmed eyeglasses sees the police cruiser come in. Someone in the village is having a medical problem, he thinks. He starts over to see if he can help. He is holding the keys to a late-model orange and cream Cadillac. The cruiser rolls up to him, and Walter and Jesse step out, guns drawn. “We have to get a child to the hospital,” Jesse says, taking the keys from his hand.

  Fifteen minutes later, out on the far western edge of the county, the Cadillac bears down on a police roadblock. Walter is at the wheel again. Sunny and the two children are in the front seat. Jesse is in the back, next to the frightened owner of the Cadillac, now a hostage. They don’t see the roadblock—three police cruisers, sharpshooters leaning on the hoods of the cars—until they’re right on top of it.

  As everyone else in the Cadillac ducks down, Walter accelerates straight into the gunfire. A rifle shot hits the left front tire and the car starts to spin. Then a shotgun blast tears through the driver’s-side door of the Cadillac and slams into Walter’s left knee. The Cadillac veers off the road, crashes headfirst into a dump truck, and comes to a halt surrounded by police officers who have their rifles drawn.

  The officers pull Walter and Jesse out of the car, throw them to the ground, handcuff them, and place them under arrest.

  On Walter Rhodes, officers find a fully loaded handgun stuffed down the back of his pants. “I didn’t shoot anybody,” Walter says.

  On Jesse Tafero, officers find a fully loaded handgun in a holster on his right hip, along with two clips of ammunition. “I didn’t kill nobody, I don’t know nothing,” Jesse says. “Oh shit.”

  Leonard Levinson, the Cadillac’s owner, the hostage, tries to get out of the car but a trooper raps his shotgun sharply on the window and Levinson stays where he is. The officer thinks Levinson is “terrified.”

  The officers at first treat Sunny as a hostage as well, but as they are leading her and the children away from the Cadillac, Sunny bursts over to where Jesse is lying handcuffed on the ground. “I’m with this man,” she tells a trooper. The trooper frisks her and puts her and the children in the back of a police car. The r
oadblock commander confiscates Sunny’s designer purse from the Cadillac. Inside is a loaded .38 caliber revolver. “Please don’t kill me,” Sunny pleads.

  * * *

  •

  Westbound from the courthouse, the Fort Lauderdale traffic heads directly into the sun. I still don’t remember this city. A few tiny flashes here and there, maybe. That thatched-roof bar on Dixie Highway—was that where those pool parties happened on Sunday afternoons? Now the route to the address I found for Donn Pearce is threading through an anywhere landscape of gas stations and strip malls as the residue from my window wash turns the world blind. Jesse and Walter both had loaded guns on them when they were arrested that morning. And Sunny had a loaded gun in her purse. Interesting. I had not known that. I hang a left onto a street shaded by live oak trees; entering the gray-green light beneath their branches is like diving below the surface of a pond. I don’t need to look at the house numbers to know which belongs to Donn Pearce. On this block of lookalike bungalows, his must be the mansion built of coral rock and draped in Spanish moss, ethereal, fantastic, alive.

  Pay attention to what the house looks like, the detective in San Francisco told us. Write it down. It’s not because your house is a window to your soul. It’s because that way, if you claim you’ve never met me, I can ask: Is there a collection of vintage Coke cans in your kitchen? Do you have a three-legged dog? It’s habit by now. I’ve knocked on a lot of doors. Hi, your name, my name, I’m a private investigator, can we talk. But low-key, mild-mannered. A mirror. A blank slate.

  Four years after I started as a private eye, I founded my own firm with my friend Freya. That’s not her real name. We’d worked together for the detective in San Francisco. Freya is a diplomat’s daughter, brought up all over the world, effortlessly elegant in her faded Levi’s, brilliant at talking to absolutely anyone anywhere. Married to a rocket scientist, a real one. Right away, we were busy. We never advertised. Our clients found us strictly by word of mouth. Big, complicated cases—ships catching fire in the middle of the night, cigarettes spirited across state lines, secrets stolen from companies and offered for sale—that had us flying off to Alaska and counting mile markers along two-lane blacktops in Texas and being waved past security guards inside skyscrapers in New York City, Hello I’m so sorry I just need one minute of your time.

  We worked on criminal cases. On murder cases. An investigator on a murder case gets to know the whole show. The trial facts, yes, but the secrets too, details so high-octane and hideous that they never make it anywhere near the courtroom. Donn Pearce was Jesse Tafero’s private investigator. If I can convince Donn Pearce to talk to me, I’m figuring, I’ll have my answers and be off back home tomorrow to the snow and my pajamas, where I belong.

  Okay, I tell myself. Notebook. Pen. Keys. Hello, Mr. Pearce? My name is—and, right, here it is, the fast stab of pure dread I feel every time I face a new door. Every single time, for almost twenty years. I jumped out of an airplane once—skydiving—and it feels just like that: Oh God why am I up here what am I doing what happens next? I never know what happens next. But I realized a long time ago that the trick is to just jump anyway. Don’t spend too long looking. It’s a long way down.

  * * *

  •

  A calico cat is at the front door as I climb the steps. I ring the bell. I hear the sound of a heavy object being dragged over gravel. I turn around. A large man is coming up the driveway, sweating. He is lugging a garbage can.

  “Hi,” I say, walking back down the steps toward him. “Is this the address for Donn Pearce?”

  “Why?” the man says.

  Instantly a rotor blade starts up inside my rib cage. Metal, sharp. It’s my usual anxiety plus—a lot. Shit. I have spent the last decade trying not to say Jesse Tafero’s name out loud to anyone. Ever. Part of my failed attempt to not care. Now I have to say it. Right now. It feels absurdly personal. Confessing my obsession, to this stranger. Welcome to my ghost story.

  * * *

  •

  Inside, Donn Pearce is having lunch at his kitchen table. With him is Big Momma, a tabby cat. Donn’s best-screenplay Oscar nomination for Cool Hand Luke hangs on the wall behind him, signed by Gregory Peck.

  “This lady is here to talk to you about a case you investigated,” the man from outside says. He’s Donn’s son.

  “I just saw you on To Tell the Truth,” I tell Donn, slipping into a chair and getting my notebook out. I found the old TV show online, from 1966, watched it before coming over here. Donn handsome and self-assured in a dark suit. Merchant seaman, short-order cook, safecracker, convict who spent two years on a chain gang—that’s how the show described his career, pre-Luke. And after Cool Hand Luke, Donn was a private detective in South Florida for two decades. He got a special dispensation from the governor to carry a gun.

  Outside in the driveway, Donn’s son had warned me that his father’s memory is not so great anymore. Now he writes Jesse Tafero and 1976 on a piece of paper and slides it across the table to his father.

  Donn studies the paper intently. I watch him, hoping. But then he shakes his head.

  I feel crushed. Literally. It’s like two hands have taken my rib cage and are squeezing hard, one on each side.

  “Well,” I say, after a moment. “I really appreciate the—”

  “One second,” Donn’s son says. He leaves the room and returns holding a cardboard box. “There might be something in here,” he says, handing it to me.

  The box is full of paper, a couple of hundred pages total, typed and stacked in date order. Each sheet an investigative report written by Donn Pearce, every single one so sharp it could cut glass. It was clear that she does not want to testify, that she was frightened and she was lying. Another: The witness is likeable, but violent. Wait, here’s a report from 1976. In what feels like slow motion, I reach into the box.

  But it’s a divorce case involving an errant wife in a red dress, a set of translucent bedroom curtains, and a damp douche bag. Not Jesse Tafero.

  “How in the world did you get all this?” I ask Donn, looking up from the report.

  “It’s a game of playing dumb,” Donn Pearce says, about investigation. “I’m no dummy but I let people think I am—that’s the job. You know everything and you don’t know anything, and you have to decide when to flip the switch.”

  I nod.

  “But I never pulled a punch,” he continues. “There’s a lot of bullshit in the job, but there was no bullshit coming from me. I built a reputation on that. I hit the nail on the head. If it meant someone went to the electric chair, then they went to the electric chair.”

  “Right, but how do you know?” I ask him. Bullshit versus not-bullshit. “How can you tell one from the other?”

  Well, okay, Donn says. First off, he’s seen all of life, up, down, and sideways, and having been in prison himself, he knows how to handle even the toughest situations. But really, there is just one key. Do I want to know what it is?

  I do, yes.

  “I absorb,” Donn says, his eyes alight.

  As he says it, I can feel it. He’s absorbing right now. Everything in the room is running downhill toward him. I suddenly know how moths feel when the porch light comes on.

  “Also, you have to be tough with yourself, and what you know, and how you screwed up too,” Donn Pearce adds.

  * * *

  •

  Did I screw up? I must have. I know that.

  A thunderstorm shakes the house around midnight, and I wake early to sunlight as clear as rainwater. Out on the front lawn, white ibis stilt across on hairpin legs, stabbing the grass with curved beaks. It’s very odd, I tell Peter. We’re walking over to the beach along a sidewalk lined with hibiscus and bougainvillea, past tall hedges whose leaves shine in the breeze, evergreen. I was so scared of coming here and now I’m kicking myself for not doing it sooner, I say. Getting started feels
like such a relief. Even the ashes from the fire next door look fine in this light, just an anthracite incident, no harm done.

  At the ocean, Peter takes off for a run while I wade into the clear shallows. After reading the files yesterday at the courthouse, and spending time with Donn Pearce—you have to be tough with yourself—a memory has surfaced that I’d long ago put away.

  That morning, on the way out of the death chamber, I walked along the Plexiglas directly past Jesse in the electric chair. His body was sitting bolt upright, his head wrapped in a black leather hood. Dead. I’d just seen him struggling and staring at me and speaking his last words and, as the guards moved in to gag him, slowly closing his eyes. I got in the van with the other reporters and rode out past the barbed wire to the grass lot where we’d started. There, a small group of demonstrators was waiting, including a Catholic nun. I made my way over to interview her. She told me that executing people was not a solution to violence. I listened, I took notes. I wrote her name down. I was trying not to blink. Every time I blinked, I saw flames, and smoke.

  The nun reached out and put her hand on my shoulder.

  “What do I do now?” I asked her. Not as a reporter. As me.

  “Bear witness,” Sister Helen Prejean told me.

  * * *

  •

  Around me, the beach is starting to fill up with sunbathers. I’ve brought along some copies from the courthouse and I take them out now. They’re sworn statements from Jesse’s friends, part of a petition his legal team was putting together in 1989, trying to save his life. Other than seeing him die, I don’t know the first thing about Jesse Tafero. But to find out what happened in those split seconds at the rest area—to bear witness—I need to know everything. I need the permanent record. For Jesse, and for Sunny and Walter too.