Two Truths and a Lie

by Ellen McGarrahan

  A choking, gurgling, strangly, coughing, howling, full-throttle scream.

  I opened my eyes. It was dark.

  Another scream, the same sound as the first, but higher pitched now. It was outside the windows just at the head of the couch. Getting closer.

  That afternoon down at the rowboat, Walter had said something that fucking freaked me out. When he was released from prison, he’d said, he was a ball of rage, and he had made a list of everybody who’d ever crossed him. A list of people he wanted to hunt down and kill. He knew how to use the Internet, he told me. He was good at finding people.

  Suddenly Walter and Sara burst screaming into the living room, in the dark.

  “The other door, get the other door!” Sara shouted.

  “You are a bad cat!” Walter shouted. To Amador, hissing on the porch.

  I tried to fall back asleep, but no dice. The cat’s air-raid-siren scream rattled inside my head, an echoing ricochet. I pulled the blankets over myself and slid down into the couch cushions, trying to hide. I could feel a darkness suddenly that was unlike anything I’d ever been near before. Empty, erasing, obliterating. Carnivorous. It was coming for me.

  * * *

  •

  In the morning, I got up early and slipped out of the house. The woods had the cool of the night still on them as I walked down to the pay phone.

  Peter picked up instantly. “My God, are you okay?”

  “You are talking to the world’s dumbest detective,” I whispered into the phone. “I can’t get into it right now. I’ll be home soon.”

  Up at the house, Walter and Sara were cheery. Over a breakfast of ricotta omelets with blueberries, they mentioned an investigator named Walt LaGraves who had been very helpful to them; he’d shown up at Walter’s parole hearing and vouched for Walter’s release, they said. I made a mental note of the name, and I stepped outside to smoke a cigarette before hitting the road.

  Walter joined me.

  “You know, The Shawshank Redemption, it’s accurate, but those were the old days. Prison is even worse than that now,” he said.

  Even in this sunshine, I could feel the fear from last night. Ice, inside my spine.

  “I do not want to go back to prison,” Walter said. He was looking at me closely. “But then I think, maybe going back to prison would be worth it if it would clear my name.”

  A pause.

  “Why did you come here?”

  “I need to know the truth about what happened,” I said.

  “The truth? What does the truth matter? The truth is just what the most people believe.”

  * * *

  •

  A couple of months after my trip to Washington, Peter and I went on our honeymoon. Just days earlier we’d been in San Francisco, in a bar filled with flowers and family and friends, holding hands while our friend John read our wedding vows and pronounced us—it was unbelievable—married. Now we were in the sea off the southern coast of Spain, clear waves breaking over us, aquamarine, dazzling in the light. The drums were starting again on the top of the cliff, and soon we would be toweling off, climbing the stairs, and heading to a club lounge in a tent overlooking the coast of Africa to sit and watch the night arrive.

  “This is here all the time, this paradise,” Peter said, with a wide sweep of his arm that took in—everything. The beach, the sand, the wind, the water, our wedding rings, the sunlight, me. “Now that I know about it, I’m always going to want to be here, always.”

  “You can’t look at things that way.” I laughed. “You have to look at it like you will always have it, just because we have ever been here at all.”

  Traveling with you in your heart. In your memory. In who you are. It’s not just sorrow that carries forward. Joy does too.

  “Don’t you think?” I asked. I wanted it to be true.

  * * *

  •

  We were just back from our honeymoon when the phone rang. Suitcases still in the front hall, mail stacked on the dining room table.

  “It’s Sara,” Peter said, holding the phone out to me.

  “Who?” But I felt a chill.

  Peter and I had talked about my trip up to Washington State, of course. But not in detail. I didn’t want to put him in peril by telling him too much—it can be dangerous to know what you know—and I also so regretted ever having gone there, the recklessness of that trip and how completely I had underestimated what I’d be getting into. Dropping in on an escaped convict, la-di-da. I just wanted to pretend the trip hadn’t happened. “You were right,” I’d told Peter, as soon as I got back. “I should never have gone.”

  “Sara?” I said now, into the phone.

  “So, you turned us in,” Sara said.

  I felt myself freeze.

  “Walter was arrested last week,” Sara continued. For parole violation. For being a fugitive from the law. Sara and Walter had been on a quick trip to a local junkyard when they got pulled over and surrounded by armed policemen. Walter was back behind bars and facing a long term in state prison. Again.

  “Are you happy now?” Sara asked me.

  “Sara, I’ve been in Spain on my honeymoon. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “You haven’t been on your honeymoon, Ellen. You’ve been with Sunny Jacobs. You’ve been doing this for her all along. I warned Walter about you but he didn’t listen.”

  I glanced over at Peter, who was singing along to the radio as he sorted our mail on the dining room table. I thought of what Walter had said about his kill list of people who’d crossed him. I looked at the open front door of our little house, on its completely unprotected street in Berkeley, California, where nobody would ever call the cops on anyone “suspicious” lest they accidentally violate someone’s civil rights.

  After I got off the phone, I looked it up online. “FHP Captures Parolee Wanted Since ’94 Using Computer Database Proficiency” was the headline of an article about Walter’s arrest on the Florida Highway Patrol website. After seeing Walter’s picture on the Florida’s Most Wanted website, an FHP lieutenant ran some searches, found Walter at the same address I had, and notified the Washington State Police, who swooped in with weapons drawn.

  Florida’s Most Wanted. And me on the doorstep, so confident that my quest for the truth would protect me, like a magic shield.

  A few months later, I came across Sara’s new website, a compendium of documents from Walter’s case. A “news/update” let her followers know that Lord Michael Andronicus was in prison, and stated as a fact that I had turned him in.

  I was no match for these people, I could see that.

  Walter’s arrest coming so soon after my visit—it was a coincidence. That’s all. True, I had been careful not to tip Walter and Sara off about just how easily I’d found them. I’d said it had been super hard work to track them down. I had not wanted to drive them further underground. Clearly, though, they did not believe in coincidences. Walter had probably already added my name to his kill list. He’d probably inked me in right at the top.

  This was too much for me. I’d waded too far in and realized, much too late, that I had gotten in way over my head. And now I was getting out. Whatever happened, whoever was guilty, it wasn’t my business. Working as a private detective had taught me to mask my own emotions—be a mirror, be a blank slate—and now I was going to use that job skill for my own benefit. In fact, I was going to take it one level deeper, and simply not feel anything about this at all. I was absolutely confident about my ability to carry that off. From here on, I promised myself, my policy was: I don’t fucking care.

  That December I wrote a short opinion piece for the San Francisco Chronicle about The Exonerated, the play that had spurred my rash trip in the first place, listing my intellectual concerns about the way it presented some of the facts of the case. Then I boxed up all my notes and court doc
uments and drove over to the shredding plant. I put the two cassette tapes of my 1990 prison interview with Walter in the boxes too, but at the very last moment I pulled them out. Then I watched as every piece of paper I had about Walter and Jesse and Sunny got turned into dust.

  7

  Don’t You Worry That Someone Is Going to Kill You?

  “What is that? Is that the wind?”

  Peter and I are still at the dining room table in our rented Florida bungalow. The news clips about the Cravero gang are still in front of us. The police photos of Walter’s apartment too. It’s midnight now. I hear rustling. There is someone in the hedge. Or on the roof.

  “That’s the wind,” Peter says.

  The bungalow came furnished in midcentury modern décor, aqua and ivory. The floor is cold, bare, white. One whole wall of the living room is windows. Thin glass in aluminum frames. The curtains are sheer, billowing in the breeze. A person walking past could see right in. This house is exposed. How did I not notice that before?

  For years after my visit to Walter in the woods, I startled awake in the night. What is that noise, I think there’s someone out there—quiet, be quiet, listen. I’d lie there in the dark, my heart racing. Trying to reason with my fear. Failing. It was a corporeal alarm that defied the promise I’d made to myself to not feel anything, and resisted my best efforts to think it away. So I did the only thing I could do. I buried it.

  Now it’s back.

  * * *

  •

  In the morning, I drive to Miami to look up Walter’s criminal history.

  In 1990, when I interviewed Walter in prison, I asked him about his past. He was on parole at the rest area that morning, and I wanted to know what for. “Was that armed robbery?” I asked. “Yeah,” he said. But with a toy pistol, he told me. “That’s the extent of me being a bad guy,” he said. I pictured a plastic water gun. Back then, I believed him. But today I need to know: Did Walter Rhodes have a motive to murder two officers that morning?

  Interstate 95 is jammed all the way down. The highway is paved out to the horizon, cars rushing and veering, sunlight bouncing off chrome. It takes me an hour and a half to go thirty miles. In 1976, when Trooper Black pulled into the rest area to begin his daily rounds—waking people up, moving them along—this road wasn’t even finished yet.

  * * *

  •

  At the rest area, Trooper Black and Constable Irwin step out of Black’s Florida Highway Patrol cruiser into the dawn mist. It was a chilly night that just passed, and Black is checking to make sure everyone in the rest area is okay. To his left, traffic on the new interstate highway is light, three mostly empty lanes in each direction separated by a wide grassy median. As Irwin hangs back to observe, Black walks over to a green two-door Camaro. It’s dented, this car, rusted, front bumper twisted, headlights held on with electrical tape. Two men are up front, in bucket seats. Asleep. A wisp of a woman in the back with two children. They’re asleep too. Black leans in to look more closely. A blue denim diaper bag is behind the driver’s seat. Baby food, baby pajamas. But a gun, down at the driver’s feet.

  To the south, a truck pulls into the rest area. A Food Fair driver, on his morning coffee break.

  Black has the gun from the Camaro now. He’s woken the driver up, taken his license, and he’s back at the cruiser requesting a criminal history check on one Walter Rhodes.

  Dispatcher: The middle name on Rhodes was Raymond?

  Trooper Black: It’s Walter Norman Rhodes Jr.

  Dispatcher: Walter Norman Rhodes, 9-2-50, does have a past, also possibly on probation.

  Trooper Black: Check Rhodes on his probation again. He was the one that was in possession of the weapon.

  It’s against the law in Florida for a convicted felon to possess a gun. Punishment: up to fifteen years in prison.

  Now Black is walking back over to the Camaro. Walter has gotten out of the Camaro and Black orders him up to the front of the patrol car. Next Black stands at the open door of the Camaro and talks to Jesse, who has moved over from the passenger’s side and is now sitting in the driver’s seat, and to Sunny, in the back. He’s asking them for their identification. Black spends some minutes there, bent over so he can get a good look inside the car. Then he backs out, straightens up, walks to the cruiser—and radios in again. He wants some advice.

  Trooper Black: OK. We got a car stopped up here at the rest area, woke them up, two white males, white female in the back with two infants, uh, recovered a weapon from under the driver seat. I believe he’s on parole. Uh, the male passenger in the front seat has no identification, he’s given me three different home residence addresses. The woman in the backseat claims to be his wife. She won’t give us any identification at all. They had a locked, uh, expensive looking attaché case up under the front seat. It’s locked by a combination lock. Uh, they hesitated, fiddled around with it, they both denied, denied ownership of it. 10-43?

  Dispatcher: 10-23 KIM 776.

  Trooper Black: We’ve run everything—given everything to the station we could finally put our hands on.

  But then Black calls out:

  Trooper Black: 10-24 Lauderdale.

  “When the report came back on the police radio that Walter Rhodes actually was on parole at that point, the shots rang out,” Sunny told NPR in 2003.

  * * *

  •

  At the Miami courthouse, the clerk tells me Walter’s case file from his armed robbery conviction is in the archives, so I will not be able to see it today. The file for Jesse’s prior, however, is right at hand.

  In Stolen Time, Sunny mentions Jesse’s criminal record. “He had been in prison for seven years for robbery,” is how Sunny described it. “He was so wounded. It was just awful to think of how much he’d suffered, being put in prison at such a young age.”

  This case file, though, on a blurry microfilm reel I’m reading at the clerk’s front counter, says it was not just robbery that sent young Jesse away.

  In 1967, according to Case 67-4835, Jesse Tafero—then age twenty—and a friend broke into an apartment, ransacked it, and sexually assaulted two young women at gunpoint, I’m reading now. They stripped, hog-tied, blindfolded, slapped, and dragged their victims; stole jewelry, money, silver, furs, a radio, and underwear; and when a neighbor tried to come to the rescue, they shot him and jumped off a balcony to get away. The victims were an Avon lady and a go-go dancer, and they lived on an island called North Bay Village, out in the middle of Biscayne Bay.

  * * *

  •

  In 1967, North Bay Village—between Miami Beach and the mainland—had a lot going on. There were ten bombings, including the blast on John Clarence Cook’s boat, docked just across the water in Miami. “Open vice” flourished within the city borders, aided by a “deplorable lack of effective law enforcement,” a Florida Senate investigation reported. Anthony “Little Pussy” Russo, reportedly a top capo in the Genovese crime family, was among the village’s winter residents, dividing his time between a home there and his grand jury appearances up north, where his red corpuscles suffered in the cold weather, news reports said. Frank Sinatra hung out on the island at a nightclub called Jilly’s South. That’s where the young go-go dancer in Jesse’s case worked. Next door to Jilly’s South, Dean Martin owned Dino’s. Nearby was A Place for Steak, notorious for a mob hit on Halloween night in 1967, when Anthony “Big Tony” Esperti whacked Tommy “the Enforcer” Altamura in the lounge. Five shots to the head. Actress Eva Gabor kept a plush condo on the island, and one night Ms. Gabor was tied up, pistol-whipped, and robbed of a twenty-five-thousand-dollar diamond solitaire. She named as her assailant the same debonair Miami stunt diver who, a few years earlier, had made a big splash by stealing the 563.35-carat Star of India sapphire from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The diver’s name was Jack Murphy. A sun-and-fun beach boy—and
a buddy of John Clarence Cook.

  On March 4, 1967, the go-go dancer got home from her shift at Jilly’s South at about half past six in the morning. As she opened her front door, she heard a voice say “Hey, you.” A man was standing inside the door, nude, with a nylon stocking over his head, holding a gun. The nude man put the gun in her face, told her not to scream, and told her this wasn’t a joke. He forced her into the bedroom, forced her to lie down on the floor, tied her hands and feet, and then called someone named “Jessie” on the telephone and told him to come over.

  Jesse Tafero said it wasn’t him. But both women picked Jesse out of a lineup, and, as the jury heard during the trial, Jesse lived with his parents just ten minutes away over the causeway bridge. Mr. and Mrs. Tafero testified that Jesse had been at home that morning, but Jesse’s mother later phoned the Florida Department of Corrections to swear that the nude man had pointed a gun at Jesse and forced her son to commit the crimes. And while defense counsel did try to impugn the victims during the trial, the prosecutor wasn’t having it. “This is America, I thought,” prosecutor Edward Carhart told the jury. “I didn’t know we had reached a stage in this country where because someone dances for a living that they are sick in their mind and deserve whatever they get and should be beaten and raped at will.”

  Both victims took the stand to tell the jury what happened. First up was the young dancer, who testified that Jesse came into the apartment dressed in a gold jacket and wraparound sunglasses, put a gun to her head, and “told me not to resist and not to put up any fight.”

  By Mr. Carhart:

  Q: Did you put up any fight?

  A: I put up a little until he got serious with the gun.