Two Truths and a Lie

by Ellen McGarrahan

  The thing is, the tears were real. That was the part that I did not plan out. Twenty-five years of anger and sorrow and fear came pouring out of me. And she held my hands as I wept. She, the person who might have caused all of this, for everyone.

  * * *

  •

  That night I call Freya, my old friend and business partner. She suggests playing it cool with Sunny. Just go back there, don’t ask any questions, keep it nice. Because there is a secondary strategy here. If Sunny won’t talk to me about the murders, then maybe Eric will. The child who was in the backseat that morning. If Sunny really isn’t interested in talking, don’t give away your game, Freya says. Save it for Eric.

  Peter agrees. I’m going to be nice, keep it quick, and get the hell out of Dodge.

  That, in any case, is the plan.

  18

  But Which Truth?

  We are late. Late, late, late. It’s the next morning and we’ve stopped in the pretty little seaside town of Barna for pastries, and then dawdled north and west along the road to Oughterard, the wilderness around us changing color with each cloud overhead, the mountains in the distance a pale lavender line. I feel dread, pure and simple.

  “We’re just saying thank you and goodbye,” I say.

  “I don’t feel well,” Peter says.

  “Exactly.”

  “No, I actually don’t feel well.”

  “It won’t take long,” I promise. “Twenty minutes, tops.”

  Peter coughs roughly. Up ahead, the road unfurls, a black ribbon beneath the high wide sky.

  * * *

  •

  At the house, we let ourselves in the front gate and come around the back. The dogs bark our arrival, but no one comes out to greet us, so we step inside, into the kitchen, calling out our hellos. Sunny is in the kitchen, looking out the back window with a blank expression, and Pringle is standing in front of her, on the phone. Neither of them makes much of a move toward us. We have upset them with our lateness.

  Pringle is just hanging up the phone as I hand him the piece of paper I’d promised, the one showing the registration for the website. Pringle takes it and looks it over. I point out the town name to him, it’s right there in black and white.

  “My goodness, I didn’t think that was possible,” he says, reading it over. “Well done.” He seems mollified, so maybe he’s decided that Peter and I are not spies after all.

  “She’s an investigative reporter,” Sunny says.

  “I’m a private investigator, actually.”

  “And your husband? What does he do?” Pringle asks.

  “He’s my secret weapon.”

  Peter shoots me a What did you just say? look. Too late, I remember that he told Pringle yesterday that he worked in publishing.

  “I also work in publishing,” Peter adds, cheerfully, like it’s a mistake anybody could make, what his or her husband does for a living. “Who wants pastries?”

  * * *

  •

  Tea is brought out, plates are set, and soon we are back around the table where we sat for so many hours yesterday, chatting. The singer-songwriter and activist Steve Earle introduced them. The Shakespearean actor Mark Rylance is going to be at an event with them next week. The United States ambassador asked them to a luncheon, but Sunny decided not to go, it’s impossible to do everything. Golden Globe–winning actress Piper Laurie helped Sunny write her memoir. Singer-songwriter Judy Collins was a Sunny in The Exonerated. Roger Waters, of the rock band Pink Floyd, just performed at a benefit in New York for the Sunny Center. At that benefit—a star-studded party—Sunny had mentioned just casually to a few people that she and Pringle could use a new computer. The next day, two brand-new Apple laptops appeared, plus an iPad, which now they’re trying to learn.

  Peter coughs and coughs.

  Finally, after about an hour, it seems like it’s time.

  “Well, thank you so much,” I say, pushing back my chair and getting ready to stand up. “We’ll quit taking up so much of your afternoon—we’d love to stay but Peter’s not feeling well, unfortunately.”

  Peter makes a big show of getting his Kleenex out and blows his nose.

  But Sunny’s not budging. She keeps her seat and she motions for me to do the same. Her eyes are interesting—they’re green and hazel and brown, and they can seem sparkly, but they also go flat and blank, like those metal gates in front of store windows in New York City that roll down at the end of the day. Completely metallic. They’re metallic now.

  She wants to hear the thing about Jesse again, what I said yesterday about him looking at everyone while he was being strapped into the electric chair, and then she wants to know what I thought of her book and the play The Exonerated.

  My plan is still to keep it nice and get out of here. It’s clear I’m not getting anywhere with Sunny, and I don’t want to say anything now that will tip her off that I hope to talk to Eric. In investigation, surprise is a basic element. Like hydrogen.

  “He just looked at everybody,” I say, about Jesse. “And I saw him looking at us, and I knew he was doing it, that he was going to look at everyone. It was very clearly like, ‘I see you, and I see you watching me.’ ”

  “Nothing was said?” Sunny asks.

  “At the end they gave him the microphone. And that’s when he said his last words. I don’t remember what all of them were, but I remember that he said, ‘The laws that go against me today can go against you tomorrow.’ ”

  “He said the laws that went against me can go against you tomorrow,” Pringle repeats. “Well, that’s so true.”

  “We’ve said that so often,” Sunny says.

  “So often we’ve said that,” Pringle says.

  Right. Can we go?

  Now Sunny wants to know what I thought of her book and of the play.

  “I think the book is really from your heart, it’s really very much your story,” I say, carefully. Actually, I think the book has a strange, maybe forty-five-degree tilt to the facts of the case, but I don’t tell her that.

  Sunny nods.

  “And I thought The Exonerated was a very, very effective, moving, emotional work of theater.”

  She nods again.

  “But very honestly, I think the play doesn’t tell the entire whole story of the case.”

  “Absolutely. It can’t, though. They had to condense it.” Sunny seems relieved, actually, that this is what I have to say about it.

  And I’m relieved too, because in 2003 I wrote a piece for the San Francisco Chronicle excoriating The Exonerated and calling Sunny Jacobs an unexonerated gun-owning convicted murderer, and a liar. Awkward! But she doesn’t seem to have read it, or if she has read it, she’s certainly taking it in stride.

  “I know that technically they don’t allow people to say they’re exonerated, you know, unless it was like DNA and they’re released,” Sunny says, as if she can read my mind. That was exactly the point I made in my Chronicle piece—the plea deal that got her out was a special kind of guilty plea called an Alford plea, not an exoneration. “But if you win your habeas corpus, you’re an innocent person from there on, right?” Sunny continues. “And so, at that point, you’re exonerated.”

  She then launches into a long description of her plea, which ends with Pringle grabbing that new free iPad of theirs and reading the Wikipedia entry about Alford pleas.

  It’s a really, really long Wikipedia, at once confusingly vague and teeth-grindingly repetitive. As Pringle makes his way through it word by word by word, I can feel myself start to shake, just like Roger Rabbit in that scene I was so know-it-all about with Peter last night.

  I’ve read Sunny’s Alford plea, obviously. I brought a copy of it with me to Ireland, in fact. Her Alford plea, while allowing her to maintain her claim of innocence, required her to agree under oath that the state could prov
e certain evidence against her in court, and one of those pieces of evidence was that she had “admitted that she fired a shot from the Camaro.” As Pringle drones on and on with the Wikipedia entry, the ask her ask her ask her from yesterday returns. It’s now or never, I can feel it. Now or never to ask Sunny about the Taser dart found in the weather stripping of Phillip Black’s cruiser.

  It’s a crucial piece of evidence. The Taser is what likely set the whole deadly rampage off, according to the prosecution. The state’s theory was that Sunny fired the Taser and the gun at Trooper Black while he was attempting to subdue Jesse, and that in the ensuing confusion, Jesse freed himself, grabbed the gun from Sunny, and continued firing at both Trooper Black and Constable Irwin. The fact that a Taser dart was found in the weather stripping of Black’s cruiser substantiates the theory, the prosecutors argue. But they have no evidence regarding who fired the Taser, or when. None of Walter’s confessions reference the Taser, and while it was featured prominently in news reports about the case circa 1976, it’s never mentioned these days. The Taser is mentioned ten times in Sunny’s Alford plea, however. That’s why I want to know what Sunny has to say about it now.

  Pringle is still in his Wikipedia monologue. In Henry Alford’s case, he’s explaining, the prosecution had strong evidence for conviction, so the United States Supreme Court “held that his guilty plea was allowable” while Alford himself swore he was innocent.

  “But isn’t that like extracting a false confession?” Sunny asks.

  “Yes,” Pringle says.

  “Well,” I say. “The evidence in your plea that they made a big deal out of was, first of all, a Taser.”

  I put the question directly to Sunny, looking right at her. I want to see what her reaction to the word “Taser” is. And she does have one. It’s small, but when I say “Taser,” her upper hairline flinches back a tiny, tiny bit, and her eyes go absolutely flat.

  “Oh, yes,” Sunny says.

  “But the point is, Sunny, if I may interject here,” Pringle says. “At the time when you were coerced into accepting this Alford plea, there was no evidence upon which the state could have proven you guilty. So therefore, your Alford plea is false.”

  “But they do make quite a big deal about the Taser,” I say.

  “Because they didn’t have anything,” Sunny says.

  “Well, what do you remember about it?” I ask.

  “What is she asking about?” Pringle says, about me.

  “A Taser, there was a Taser,” Sunny says to him, pronouncing the word as if she personally had never heard of such a device before—What is this thing they call a Taser? Which is odd, given that she herself purchased the Taser, four months before the murders. She went to a weapons store in Tampa and told the owner she was a divorced nurse living with two small children out in the sugarcane fields and needed some protection for her home. Rita Pendel, that was the name she gave. The gun shop owner testified to it at trial.

  “All I know is, I was in the backseat of the car with the kids, and after the word came back that Rhodes was on parole, there was gunfire,” Sunny says, matter-of-factly. “The policeman drew his gun, he said, ‘Nobody move.’ I have no idea who started the gunfire. He was the only one I saw with a gun, was the policeman. But when I looked up, Rhodes had a gun, and was ordering Jesse to get us out of the car. So, I have no clue.”

  “When you looked up, what were Rhodes and Jesse doing?”

  “I don’t want to get too much into it,” Sunny says. “But anyway—and I don’t think it has relevance to whether or not Jesse should have been executed—when they ordered Rhodes out of the car and they took the gun from between his feet, they took his ID and then they had him stand sort of to the front of the cars.”

  “And you were—?”

  “I was still in the backseat with the kids.”

  “So you were in the backseat and you were watching this happen?”

  “Yeah. Then the cop came around to get Jesse’s ID. And Jesse didn’t want to give him his ID. And they argued about it. And then finally he got Jesse out of the car, and they were kind of dancing around together. And then, um, the word came back on the radio that Rhodes was on parole. And at that point, the cop pushed Jesse, took his gun out, and said, ‘Okay, nobody move. The next one to move is dead.’ And then there was gunfire.”

  “Were you looking out when it started? Were you already down?”

  “No. I was watching what was happening. And then as soon as the gunfire started, I covered the children. And there was firing, and I heard all the sounds.”

  “So there was a Taser fired at some point in that. Do you know where or when that happened?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “So when you say ‘dancing,’ were they—”

  I’m trying to zero in on the instants before the shots rang out. Trooper Black pushing Jesse away, reaching down, drawing his gun out of his holster.

  “I’m not doing that. I’m not doing that!” Sunny says, with sudden vehemence. She waves both of her hands in the air, as if she wants to block me out.

  “I want to know—”

  “I am not doing that.”

  * * *

  •

  Peter and I are on the road toward Oughterard again. The road is taking us into a dark forest, so thick and dense that it is like a shadow on the hills. Around us, meadows tumble away from the road, sheep scattered across them like dice. It is now three o’clock in the afternoon. Sunny had a doctor’s appointment, and so Pringle has given us a set of keys to their house and told us to come back in two hours with a roast chicken.

  “Why are we going back there?” Peter says.

  “Because we said we would.”

  It’s the only reason. After Sunny shut me down about the Taser and about Jesse grappling with Trooper Black, we chatted quite a while longer, but mainly about Pringle’s theory that the warrant to transfer Sunny back to jail after the Eleventh Circuit overturned her conviction was improperly issued and therefore the entire legal basis for her Alford plea was void. It was a long bout of the kind of detail-mongering rabbit-holing that clogs up discussions in criminal cases, the logic that “if my conviction was illegal then I can’t possibly have committed the crime,” but Pringle was in his element, boasting about his jailhouse lawyer skills, which he says won thirteen people—“they weren’t all innocent”—freedom from the Irish prison system.

  When I agreed to return for dinner, my secret plan had been to buzz over to Galway, grab my copy of Sunny’s Alford plea, race back out here, and go over it with her line by line by line. Peter, though, disagrees.

  “You’ve already asked her what happened, she’s already said she doesn’t know,” Peter says. “She’s not going to go over that again. Come on, why don’t we just call them and say thanks but we have to be back in the city?”

  “We can’t.”

  Who am I, Miss Manners? Although I have a bad feeling about this too.

  “You should tell them about the Chronicle piece,” Peter says.

  “You don’t think they already know?”

  “Oh, no way,” Peter says. “If they knew, they’d have thrown you out of there. You need to be the one who brings it to them. That’s your best chance now.”

  “Well, they didn’t know their website registration was public. So maybe they aren’t too great at the whole Internet thing.” I say it to the trees outside the window. I can’t look at Peter, because I know he’s right. The thing is, I don’t want to tell them because I don’t want them to read it. Specifically, I don’t want them to read it in front of me.

  On the newsstand in the small roadside store we stop in, there is a headline in The Irish Times about the murder the previous day of a former IRA commander in Belfast. Nine o’clock in the morning, on a sidewalk, on his way to work, five shots: one to the back of the head, four to the face. He�
�d allegedly been involved in the murder of another man in a bar ten years earlier, and the IRA had wiped down the place afterwards so there’d be no forensic evidence. Seventy people in the bar when the murder occurred, and wouldn’t you know, nobody saw a thing.

  We can’t find a roast chicken, which seems like a fool’s errand out here anyway, so we get lamb chops and an apple tart and race back again. There’s construction on the road. We are late.

  * * *

  •

  At the house, Sunny is in the kitchen, bent over the desk along the far window, reading something on her iPhone. Pringle is nowhere to be seen.

  “Hi, Sunny,” I say, putting the groceries on the countertop next to the sink.

  Sunny does not look up or give any other indication that she’s heard me.

  “So sorry we’re late—that took much longer than we thought. But it’s beautiful!” I say.

  No response. It’s like we’re not here. Finally she puts the phone down and comes across the kitchen, toward the sink. She still has not acknowledged our presence in any way.

  “Everything okay?” I say as she passes me. She looks pale, and drawn, and grim.

  “I’m just tired,” she says.

  * * *

  •

  At dinner, Pringle breaks up a strained silence with a long story about the time all the prisoners on his wing threw their piss pots at the guards and shit dripped down the wire mesh along the stone walkways. And the time that the little Napoleonic guard made everyone watch the television channel that he wanted, not the channel the prisoners wanted, and later that same weekend the guard was leaving a boxing match and someone pulled up alongside him in a car and blew the back of his head off with a gun.

  “They didn’t kill him, though,” Pringle says, looking from me to Peter with a highly instructive expression. “They turned him into a vegetable for nearly a year. When the news came down, the whole prison erupted in cheers.”