Two Truths and a Lie

by Ellen McGarrahan

  “Don’t tell her that,” Adam says, from his chair.

  “It doesn’t matter, they’re all dead.”

  “I already know about the robberies,” I bluff, from the couch. I do, kind of. Jesse’s name was on a police memo from 1974 about a robbery ring.

  “That’s what they were—robbers and drug dealers,” Gene says. “And nobody messed with them.”

  Jesse was a friend of Steve’s, Gene says. That’s why Steve lent him the Camaro—because if you were Steve’s friend, you were golden.

  “And Sunny used to date John Mulcahy, which is how we knew her,” Adam adds.

  I look up from my notebook.

  “You guys knew John?” I ask. Thinking of his brother Irish, the big guy who slammed the door on me when I asked to talk to their mother about her affidavit. Marion Mulcahy swore that on the night before the murders, Jesse and Sunny and Walter were in her house, visiting with her son John. Thinking too of what Walter told the DEA agents, that Sunny and Jesse bought cocaine and hash from a drug dealer who lived with his mother. His name’s John and his mother is, like, in it just as much as he. That’s what Walter said. Which might explain why Irish shut me down.

  I look at Gene now. “I tried to talk to John’s brother about all this, but he said no.”

  “Yeah, he’d never talk to you,” Gene says. “He’s a punk.”

  But yes, they were friends with John. And yes, Steve Addis was a robber and a drug dealer and he most definitely knew Jesse and Sunny too, Gene confirms.

  “It’s almost like a pack of dogs when you’re dealing with these types of people. If you walk into a room full of alpha dogs, you always take a look at the one you do not want to touch,” Gene says. In this group, the alpha dogs were Joe Rourke—the actor’s brother—and John, Sunny’s ex and Jesse’s close friend.

  “And then you got the people who are willing to do the really stupid shit and that’s where you get Jesse and his cohort,” Gene continues. “There were certain ones that were willing to go over certain lines. John, Jesse, my brother Steve. You just knew—no words needed to be spoken.”

  “You just had a sixth sense to be careful,” Adam says. “To watch your back.”

  After the murders, after the police came by and asked how the Camaro ended up as a prime piece of evidence in the roadside slaying of two officers, Gene tried to ask his brother Steve about it, but “he just shut down on it.” There was no going there, so Gene didn’t. Then everybody took off out of state for a while to wait until it all blew over.

  “To be honest with you, I believe the right people were executed, from what I’ve seen in my life,” Gene says. “I don’t believe in the death penalty, though. I believe if you put someone in a cell for the rest of your life, that’s the worst thing you could do.”

  “Living with that grief for all eternity,” Adam says.

  “Guilt, Adam,” Gene says. “Not grief, guilt.”

  “Guilt, grief,” Adam says.

  “Never touching a woman again,” Gene says.

  “Never being with a good friend,” Adam says.

  “Never touching a woman again,” Gene says.

  “To be lonely but never being alone,” Adam says.

  * * *

  •

  Out at my car, in the dark—it’s night now—I check my phone.

  Where are you? Peter has texted, about eight hundred billion times.

  The instant I get back to our bungalow, Peter hands me an envelope.

  It’s addressed to me in my own handwriting, with block capital letters stamped in red ink across the top: mailed from a state correctional institution. I’d sent Walter Rhodes a letter over a month ago, with a self-addressed stamped envelope. I had begun to wonder if he was going to write back.

  “Dear Ellen,” the letter begins, in Walter’s meticulous script. “I knew there was a major catalyst on the way, but had no idea it would come from you.”

  12

  The Personification of Death, If I Chose

  This is what a haunting feels like.

  A dark hum that starts as a shudder and turns into a tidal-wave single-note drone, hollowing out the bones of my spine.

  “We had both felt you were the catalyst that resulted in my arrest,” Walter’s letter says. He’s talking about my visit to his house in the north woods, twelve years ago. A stab-flash, ice-cold. Fear. “I was a wanted fugitive. It may be you had no choice….If you did it, I forgive you.”

  He forgives me. Walter Rhodes forgives me.

  A TNT python, coiled inside my chest.

  And now the sensation of falling backwards, of spinning down. Darkness. This is so fucking stupid. I don’t want to feel this. I can’t help it. When I was a child, I read The Lord of the Rings, but only until I got to the Ringwraiths, merciless cloaked horsemen with glowing hypnotic eyes. They scared me so much I had to stop. Those horsemen are coming for me now.

  * * *

  •

  “Even after all these years, I can still hear that cat screaming,” I’m saying to Peter. We are driving west across Florida so I can meet a friend of Walter’s. That is what the letter has instructed me to do. Walter has written an autobiography. This friend has it. I need it. The buzzing has started again. Resonant, consuming, from the death chamber that morning. I cannot hear myself think. I have blocked Walter Rhodes out of my life for more than a decade. Deliberately. Assiduously. And now he’s back. Because I invited him back. Because I am not going to be able to solve this mystery without talking to him again.

  Walter and Sunny and Jesse did borrow a car that night. They borrowed that Camaro from a drug dealer who was the son of a police officer, just like Walter said. Which means that the story Sunny has been telling all these years—it was only a ride—is incomplete, at best. And it means that whatever else Walter Rhodes may be, he’s not one hundred percent pure liar. He told me the truth about how he and Sunny and Jesse came to be in that Camaro. A credibility point in his favor. But does that mean he told me the truth about the murders of Trooper Black and Constable Irwin?

  “At some point, you do have to make peace with yourself,” I said to Walter Rhodes, in that prison conference room the week before Jesse Tafero’s execution. Now here I am, a quarter century later, taking my own advice. Driving across Florida in the hopes of getting hundreds of memoir pages written by a man who has spent half of his life behind bars for murder. A “magnum opus,” as Walter called it in his letter. I’m interested in what it will tell me about Walter. But maybe I need it in order to understand my own life too. You have to be tough with yourself, and what you know, and how you screwed up too. That is what Donn Pearce told me. Admitting I never have known much—not anywhere near enough—about Walter Rhodes is a start.

  * * *

  •

  “What’s that around your neck?”

  It’s ten o’clock the next morning, and I’m sitting at a kitchen table with a man who calls himself Z. We’re in his airy condominium near the Gulf of Mexico. At Z’s elbow is a thick stack of loose-leaf pages. I recognize Walter’s handwriting. His beautiful copperplate script.

  “This?” I say, raising my fingers to my throat. “I think it’s a smoky quartz.”

  “I love quartz.”

  Z is the friend that Walter Rhodes’s letter instructed me to call. “I believe you are a god(dess)send at this point in my life because of the many things you don’t know,” Walter’s letter said.

  I have to be honest. I’m nervous. “I am walking into my own darkness here,” I told Peter this morning as I left our beachside motel. Aside from Walter’s wife up there in the Washington woods and Walt LaGraves, the law-enforcement investigator in the Keys, I’ve never met anyone who knows Walter Rhodes, and I’ve had no idea what to expect. But Z has turned out to be a super-mellow guy in a cream guayabera, a marketing executive in his sixties with a
gentle inquisitive vibe.

  “Very powerful!” Z’s wife says, from the doorway. She’s talking about smoky quartz too. She is toned and barefoot in yoga tights, with a mane of dark curls and huge amber eyes. A professional astrologer and a seller of water deionizers, she tells me.

  “So how do you two know Walter?” I say.

  “We met through an online message board devoted to Ra,” Z says.

  I must look blank.

  The Law of One, Z explains. A series of channelings received by a Kentucky librarian and her partner, a college engineering professor–turned–commercial airline pilot, from a sixth-density social memory complex—an “extraterrestrial missionary”—who landed on earth eleven thousand years ago “with the objective of helping Earthman with his mental evolution,” according to the Ra website. Ra speaks in English, answers questions, and provides guidance to the higher realms as well as factual information about our own planet, including the revelation that the United States has 573 psychotronic particle-beam spacecraft that are made in Mexico, used “in many cases” to change the weather, and hidden in bases on the moon, beneath the sea, and in the skies.

  When Z first encountered Walter on that Ra message board, Z had no clue that Walter was a fugitive from a murder conviction. That piece of news came as a shock. But, Z adds, there is no way Walter Rhodes is a killer.

  “I’ve met him,” Z says. “I can tell.”

  That is so exactly what I once thought that I pause for a moment, watching Z. It is comforting to believe there is a rhyme and a reason to this world—and to other people—that you can discern simply by trusting yourself. But your gut instinct isn’t always right. Sooner or later, I have come to find out, everyone gets fooled.

  * * *

  •

  For the next two and a half hours, Z slowly reads aloud to me from Wikipedia entries about Jesse and Sunny that he’s printed out and highlighted in neon yellow. After Z reads each page, he hands it to me and watches to make sure I read it too. I pay full attention and take careful, respectful notes. “It will be up to his discretion whether he shares the M.O. with you,” Walter’s letter had said, about Z.

  Finally Z says yes, I can have a copy of Walter’s magnum opus.

  * * *

  •

  There is a tight traffic jam on the road off St. Pete Beach, a crush of construction equipment and elderly drivers. Peter is at the wheel now as we make our way to the copy shop. I hold Walter’s manuscript on my lap.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” I say, when Peter takes what I think is a wrong turn. We are heading across a tangle of stupid streets next to the beach instead of the way that I—having been here exactly never before in my whole life—think we should be going.

  “The Google Maps lady can go fuck herself,” I inform Peter. “I could get down on my hands and knees and crawl faster than this,” I tell him. I am shaking. So, so anxious and angry. I feel like I’m going out of my mind.

  I flip through the sheaf—it is 452 pages long—and stop at random: There was no question in my mind I would have little trouble becoming the personification of death if I chose to do so.

  I slap the pages back together and stare out the window.

  At Z’s condo, as I was taking my leave, I’d noticed a piece of paper on his kitchen table. Written on the paper was my full name—including my married last name—and the address of our house on its little country lane in Michigan. Neither of which I’ve given Z—or Walter Rhodes.

  * * *

  •

  That night, back in Fort Lauderdale, I sit down with my copy of Walter’s autobiography.

  “I was rather stupid or mentally defective,” Walter writes, by way of introduction.

  Walter Norman Rhodes Jr. Born in Alabama in September 1950 to Walter Senior, a sheet metal worker, and Joan, a housewife, Walter grew up in Maryland as the eldest of six.

  From the age of eleven, Walter was in trouble with the law. Shoplifting, housebreaking, auto theft, joyriding, larceny, and forgery. Twice as a juvenile, Walter was committed to the Maryland Training School for Boys, at fifteen he dropped out of high school, and at sixteen he stole a car and won a ticket to the Maryland House of Corrections. Walter served half his sentence, was released on parole, and fled. A warrant was issued for his arrest. Two armed robberies later, at the age of nineteen, he arrived at Florida State Prison. He’d been behind bars before, but this was the big time. A negative vortex of murderers and rapists and assorted “psychic vampires.” He was young and he was afraid.

  Walter got a pentagram tattoo on his hand and started wearing an upside-down crucifix. He called up demons. He studied black magic. He studied white magic. He tamed a rat snake and carried it in his shirt pocket. One night he woke in his cell to a tiny high-pitched sound. Looking over, he saw a spider gripping a fly. “The fly was screaming!” Shortly after that, he was at a drinking fountain about to take a sip of water when a vision flashed into his head. The fountain was next to a dayroom with a television, and as Walter watched, the vision he’d just seen in his own mind was broadcast to all on the TV. He had picked up a television commercial “before it was transmitted to the screen!”

  This is the man whose testimony put Jesse Tafero in the electric chair, I write in my notebook. This is the man I believed.

  * * *

  •

  Walter dropped acid at Florida State Prison. He started meditating. He had visions that he was merging into gold flames that appeared on his cell wall. He got into fights. He saw a guy get stabbed in the neck and killed. He saw guys get hit with pipes and hit with hammers and set on fire. And every so often, he ran into Jesse—in the carpentry shop, where Jesse borrowed a piece of wood from him; in the bathroom, where Jesse was hitching up his belt and promising to kick some dude’s ass; in the electronics shop, where Jesse seemed to be in a blank trance. Walter felt that Jesse was different, and powerful, with a dangerous aura. One night Walter dreamed that he and Jesse shared a past life in which they were “Orientals. Probably Japanese.” And Walter and Jesse both practiced “this mysterious art called karate.” All the “baddest motherfuckers” in the prison system did, a select, sadistic group of deadly individuals determined to win and hold power at all costs. The stars. Jesse was very good at and very committed to karate. Walter practiced hard too. Punches, strikes, kicks, breaking each other’s forearms and shin bones with mop handles, breaking their own knuckles by punching concrete walls. “Crazy egotistic insanity,” Walter writes.

  During those first years at Florida State Prison, his 1969-to-1974 stint for armed robbery, Walter and Jesse had some friends in common. One of whom was Jack Murphy.

  Murph the Surf, the guy who stole the Star of India sapphire from the American Museum of Natural History, who was sent up to FSP for the bathing-suit murders on Whiskey Creek, and who later told the Florida Parole Commission that not only was Jesse Tafero innocent, but “I know the man who killed the officer.”

  “Murphy was a very likeable guy, and extremely intelligent,” Walter writes. “I knew him very well.”

  * * *

  •

  In 1974, Walter was paroled and went home to Maryland. He got married and in late 1975 he and his wife drove back down to Florida. As they were traveling late one night on a dark country road, a huge red glowing sphere the size of a small house zoomed up behind their car. The car engine quit, and Walter jumped out to get a better look.

  The sphere was floating like a soap bubble on the side of the road, luminous and fiery and perfectly round, Walter’s memoir says. The sphere seemed to be a vehicle, but it was not a machine, and within its round fiery luminousness there was an intelligence, an entity, who was looking right at Walter. Electrical sensations started running along Walter’s spine, and he could feel his hair standing on end. In a way that was neither pleasant nor unpleasant, Walter felt chills.

  This was not the first UFO he
had seen. As a teenager behind bars for stealing cars, he had yelled “Take me with you” out the window at lights zigzagging across the sky. And later, out in the Everglades, he would see a giant spacecraft landing in the middle of a dark highway. But encountering this burning, floating sphere was, Walter writes, the most significant event of his entire life—mystical, magical, supernatural. He knew that whatever it was, it was not from Earth. Walter felt awe. He was “thunderstruck. Amazed. Excited. And transfixed.”

  By February 1976, Walter—still on parole—and his wife were living in the garden apartment in Fort Lauderdale. One of the conditions of his parole was that he not set foot in Dade County, but Walter asked if he could please be allowed to go down to Miami. His parole officer told him no, but Walter went anyway, to big jams of Florida State Prison alumni out in the Everglades. “I’m talking about Party,” Walter writes—drugs and alcohol in a huge house with a great stereo, Jacuzzis, a sauna and a gymnasium, plus trail bikes, horses, and a trained attack dog. Walter snorted so much cocaine out there that he felt like “Superman and Einstein and Casanova all rolled into one” and ended one night face-up on the floor, unable to move.

  It was at one of these parties that Walter bumped into Jesse, who was out of prison too and on the run. That night, everyone got completely fucked up on weed, booze, and coke. A couple of days later, Walter’s wife found Walter in bed with another woman, they argued, he slapped her, and she split. Later the same day, Jesse called Walter and asked for a favor. Could Jesse pay Walter to drive him around? Walter said yes, jumped in his “bad ass, heat-seeking” red Ford Fairlane, and drove down to Miami to meet Jesse for a few drinks.