Two Truths and a Lie

by Ellen McGarrahan

  * * *

  •

  That afternoon, I find a spot on a corduroy couch opposite the fireplace. Around me the room is candlelit and shadow-cast, with rain against the windows outside. Peter is out for a drive, down to the cliffs and the sea, and I have the place to myself—the lunch visitors have gone, dinner is still a few hours off. I order a pot of tea and as I wait, I decide to get out my notebook and go over the notes I took while talking to Sunny in her kitchen.

  As I read, a line catches my eye. It is something I completely missed the first one hundred million times around.

  We’re talking about the minutes leading up to 7:32 a.m., when Trooper Phillip Black shouted the code 10-24 into the radio and then the radio went dead.

  Here’s what Sunny says:

  They finally got Jesse out of the car, and they were kind of dancing around together, and then 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.

  I can hear her voice in my head. We were at the kitchen table. I had just popped the question about the Taser. Her eyes had just gone that flat hazel, locked into mine, and I was about to get her I have no clue response for the second time. I’d been so focused on her response about the Taser that this got lost.

  I flip back quickly through my notes, and see that she repeated this exact same statement, almost word for word, at least three times. Just before the shots that ended his life, Sunny told me, Trooper Black drew his weapon and said, Nobody move.

  The policeman drew his gun. He said, “Okay, nobody move.”…And then there was gunfire.

  * * *

  •

  The pot of tea has appeared in front of me, but I pay it no mind. My head is spinning. A uniformed policeman with a drawn weapon. How did I not see the significance of that before? This is by no means the first time I’ve heard this particular fact. Walter Rhodes told me this in 1990, and testified to it at trial. Both truck drivers swore they saw it as well. But even so, I wasn’t ever sure that it actually happened like that. That Black actually had drawn his gun and told everyone to freeze. According to Walter, Black said: If anybody moves, they’re dead.

  It just seemed too dramatic to have actually happened. I’d written it off as a bit of collective embellishment. Too many people who’d watched too many Westerns. But hearing Sunny say she too saw Trooper Black draw his gun just before the gunfire started—it makes me think, So it did go down like that. Black did draw his gun. Which means that whoever fired the shots that morning somehow got the better of an experienced uniformed police officer with a fully loaded and drawn weapon. How could that possibly have happened?

  I flip back through my notes again, with Trooper Black and his weapon in mind. Sunny told me that Jesse was “dancing” with Black, and that Black pushed Jesse and then Black drew his gun. The two truck drivers saw Jesse in the grip of Irwin, bent over the FHP cruiser. So how does Jesse break free of Irwin’s grip, get hold of a gun, and shoot Black, before Black—standing right there, with a drawn weapon—shoots him first?

  Sunny also told me that Walter had been ordered to the front of the car, and that Walter might have had a gun hidden in the waistband of his pants. The two truck drivers testified that they saw Walter standing with his hands in the air while the shots rang out. So if Walter did have a gun hidden somewhere on his person, how does Walter drop his hands, get the weapon out from its hiding place, and fire at Black before Black—again, standing right there with a drawn weapon—shoots him first?

  Black was a veteran police officer and a former U.S. Marine who had trained with the elite corps and who, as his widow said, liked to draw himself up to his full height and joke that he was “lean and mean.” How could Jesse, restrained by Irwin, or Walter, standing with his hands in the air, get the drop on Black? Exactly how Quick Draw McGraw could they be? Now that Sunny’s told me that Black had his gun drawn, the only thing that seems possible is that the first shot had to have caught Black by surprise. It had to have come from someone that Black was not pointing his weapon at. Someone that Black didn’t see, or didn’t see as a threat.

  In my mind’s eye, the last moments of Black’s life float into focus. The white winter fog, Black reaching into his holster, drawing his weapon, taking a step back and holding the gun out in front of him. Jesse struggling with Irwin just across from the open door of the Camaro. Walter, farther away, putting his hands in the air. Sunny and Eric and the baby inside the open door of the Camaro, in the backseat. Watching.

  Nobody move.

  If anybody moves, they’re dead.

  “It couldn’t have possibly come from me,” Sunny told me yesterday, about the shot that ripped through the windshield post of Black’s cruiser. “You couldn’t anyway. You could not, in the back of a two-door car, be able to do anything effective. Even if you had a gun or whatever.”

  Effective. Such a strange choice of a word.

  * * *

  •

  The Florida Highway Patrol Investigation Report for that morning, written by Corporal C. J. Wippel, ends with the following statement, capitals per the original:

  During the investigation, it was revealed that certain errors were made. These errors are in NO WAY POINTED OUT IN A DEROGATORY MANNER, but as an aid to the possibility of preventing another situation happening in the future….The greatest error made by Trooper Black was that he FAILED TO RECOGNIZE THE DANGER POSED BY THE WHITE FEMALE.

  I close my notebook, push it across the table away from me, and turn to look out the window at the rain.

  No wonder she wanted me to agree that the truth is subjective. To accept that there is no way ever to know what actually happened. That first shot must have come from the back of the Camaro, is how it looks to me now. I can’t see any other plausible explanation. Not if Trooper Black had his weapon drawn, which of course he did. It’s in the case record. Walter Rhodes saw it. The truck drivers saw it. And Sunny Jacobs herself just admitted it to me.

  So now I know what comes next. Since Sunny cannot or will not tell me, I am going to have to go find her son.

  In Australia.

  20

  The Playground

  Dawn, the Indian Ocean.

  The jet shakes as it descends and in the thin morning light the trees on the streets of Adelaide below are dull brown. It’s fall here. That seems impossible. Yesterday we were in Singapore, looking out the window of our high-rise hotel at two tall buildings that stood between us and the harbor. One, blue glass, shone with the reflected light of the rooftop pools scattered like sapphires far below; the other, its twin, was an abandoned shell, construction dust blowing off its balconies and trees growing up through the top floors. Two versions of the same stories. Before that, London, Dublin, the ephemeral green of County Clare.

  We land hard and taxi to the terminal. Drug dogs in the jetway, leashed, panting; soldiers with guns at the luggage carousel. The airport lobby is tiny, a chrome-shiny postage stamp with a coffee shop. Peter and I walk across an empty plaza to the rental car kiosk, leaves skittering ahead of us, pushed by a brittle wind. I fumble in my pockets for my gloves and then remember that I ditched them days ago as we were leaving Ireland. The regret I feel about this is enormous, as if the very fabric of my life has been torn.

  * * *

  •

  I have a photograph of Eric that police took after the murders. Eric is nine years old, wearing a white T-shirt that is too large for him. It hangs off his thin collarbones. He has dark eyes, long eyelashes, dark hair, and his expression—he’s looking right into the camera—is hard to read. Stunned. Suspicious. Or as if he has just seen something terrible. Which is why I am here. Eric was sitting next to his mother in the back of the Camaro at the rest area. I want to know what Eric saw.

  * * *

 
•

  At the airport exit, we turn south, toward a place on the map called Encounter Bay. We’ve decided to try the addresses we’ve found online for Eric right away, so we know what we’re in for. Eric moved Down Under after falling in love with an Australian woman, the Internet tells me. But there will be no knocking on the doors of isolated farmhouses here, that is immediately clear. No genealogical yarns. The outskirts of Adelaide are a mishmash of strip malls, office buildings, apartment complexes, and eucalyptus trees. The road is wide and well marked; the hills up ahead are low, covered in pale gold grass and evergreen shrubs. Except for the roundabouts and the fact that we’re driving on the left, it looks like—

  “San Mateo,” I say, leaning forward, gesturing. “That’s what this is. The stretch south of the airport, west of the 101.” Twenty miles from where I used to live in San Francisco.

  “Or Hayward,” Peter agrees. Twenty miles from his old house in Oakland.

  Hayward is a fine place. It’s just weird, to have come all this way to find a world so exactly the same, only upside down.

  * * *

  •

  On the morning of the murders, the police made note of Eric’s cool demeanor, particularly in view of the blood on his shirt and the photographs they found in Jesse’s briefcase, the snapshots of Eric brandishing a pistol and cradling a machine gun. Gunshot residue tests on Eric’s hands came back positive for having handled a recently discharged weapon—same as Sunny’s test results—and there was talk about charging him with first-degree murder. But that did not happen. Instead, the county kept Eric in juvenile detention for two months and then sent him to live with his grandparents. During the entire time he was in custody, Eric does not appear to have told anyone anything at all. Some of the police took a very dim view of that behavior: “The boy had the attitude of a hardened criminal,” Captain Valjean Haley said. But other people who came in contact with Eric were more sympathetic. Eric’s social worker described him as innocent, lovable, and “brainwashed” in her report. “I get the impression that Eric honestly wants to be a child and yet he can’t,” the worker wrote. A teacher called him “extremely intelligent and sensitive,” an imaginative daydreamer who knew “a great deal more about adult life than most children his age.” Police detective Fred Mascaro, who was in charge of Eric during the time Eric was in state custody, told me he thought Eric was scared of his mother.

  You don’t have to talk to these people, Sunny told Eric at the police station that morning. Tell them you want a lawyer. Several officers and the social worker heard Sunny say that to Eric, and Sunny wrote it in her book. Sunny’s family did hire a lawyer for Eric, and he handed out the lawyer’s business card when anyone asked him a question. But I hope Eric will talk to me now. He is my last chance to fill in the missing pixels. I’ve spoken to every other person who might have seen what happened at the rest area on February 20, 1976, and is still alive, and to friends of Jesse Tafero too, and they’ve all had something different to say.

  Time passes. Memories fail. I don’t expect any one person to remember everything. I tell witnesses so right up front. But I do want the truth. I once did a case in which a patient was suing her psychiatrist for implanting false memories. My assignment was to go to talk to the patient’s ex-husband and ask if he had assaulted her, as the patient now believed. I can’t remember, the husband said. If that was a lie, it was a savvy one. I had no way to know.

  Over the years, the thing I’ve figured out is to talk to everyone about everything. That’s the only way to navigate the fallibility of memory. Because if we cannot or will not face the truth about ourselves, sometimes other people can—and do. The trick is to gather those stories together and see how they fit. Our lives live on in the stories other people share with us, in what they remember, in what they know.

  * * *

  •

  The address we have for Eric turns out to be a ranch house in a quiet suburb just south of the city line. Peter parks our rental car down the block. I walk up the steep short lawn to the house and knock. Nobody’s home.

  Then Peter and I sit in the car, looking out the windshield. What is today? Tuesday? Friday? It’s noon in any case, the sun sharp like a laser beam, but cold. The pine trees in the park across the way cast shade like pools of water on the dying grass. The blue shadows of the oncoming winter.

  * * *

  •

  The next morning, I set out alone.

  It’s Saturday and the roads are empty, the kind of gray-day fall weekend where everybody stays home and does laundry. Saturdays like this used to make me so lonely, this sense of everyone else being cozy at home, and this landscape is not helping: It’s the same low hills and open sky as the highways I spent way too much time on when I was first working as a detective. Back when I was starting to understand that we keep secrets not only from each other, but from ourselves.

  I was nine, as well. The same age as Eric was that morning. I never think about it, or talk about it. Even Peter didn’t know until I told him this winter, after I found the social worker’s report about Eric in the files of the Broward County State Attorney’s Office. I thought I’d put it all well behind me. But when I was nine years old, I was assaulted by a gang of boys in a Central Park playground. They backed me up against a wall and came at me. It hurt. I was afraid. It’s not one of those memories you hear about that someone has completely repressed. I remember it. But I never—I don’t know. Never thought it was that big a deal.

  Until now. Now, every time I think about Eric being nine years old that morning, when I think about what a nine-year-old might know, about what a nine-year-old might remember, might have felt—this old memory of mine, it comes to life. I’m right there again, and there’s nothing I can do but the same thing I did while it was happening. Which was to turn, pull myself up over the parapet on the high concrete bridge where they’d trapped me, and throw myself over the edge.

  Their hands, pulling, grabbing. The ground, so far below. I told myself: Go.

  Investigation is not about empathy. That’s a mistake people make. It’s about control.

  * * *

  •

  Eric doesn’t live at the ranch house address anymore, a young woman with blue hair and a tattooed throat tells me, when I find her at home. She looks like she’s going to burst out laughing. “Sorry! Wish I could help you!” she says, with an enormous smile.

  At the next address, down a hillside, another young woman smiles widely when I ask for Eric. “He used to live here,” she tells me, radiantly.

  Wow, people are nice here, I think, as I get back in the car again. Must be an Australian thing. Kindness to strangers.

  “Well, now, that’s an accent,” the woman who answers the door at my third and last address says. She’s never heard of Eric. “Where are you from, Canada?”

  * * *

  •

  As the light fades, I wind my way back through a whirl of wrong-side-of-the-road roundabouts and then down along a long stretch beside the sea, which is turning to silver as the sun sinks low. Maybe this thing about being nine—I’m just realizing—is why I feel hopeful about talking to Eric. That day in the park is something I remember so clearly, unerringly the same memory every single time—not in photo-perfect detail, but always the same—and maybe, I’m thinking, maybe it’s the same for him. Something gets cemented, and try as you might, there is no escaping it, even if you really want to. So maybe Eric really will have the answers that I’ve sought for so long, and from so far away.

  And I am pretty sure I know where Eric will be tomorrow. He’ll be visiting the sixteenth century, and my plan is to find him there.

  21

  The Kingdom of Lochac

  In Adelaide, the sixteenth century can be found most Sundays in a park off Brand Street, just around the corner from the motorsports shop and the McDonald’s. Here, on a rectangle of grass bordered by stone cottages
and shaded by gum trees, the gentle people of the Barony of Innilgard, Kingdom of Lochac, practice their arts: rapier fencing, arts and sewing, heavy combat. It’s a Renaissance Faire for serious history buffs. Among the participants, I hope, will be Eric. Or, as he is known here, Lord Marc de Montfault.

  It’s just past noon when Peter and I slip our rental car into a parking space opposite the jousting grounds. Already there are knights on the field. I can tell they are knights because they’re lurching around in long felt tunics, trying to whack each other with wooden swords. It is perhaps ironic that our information about Eric’s interest in the past comes from the most modern of media, but thanks to Facebook, we know that Eric and his partner and daughter are all members of the Society for Creative Anachronism, a worldwide celebration of all things medieval that was founded in Berkeley, California, in 1966. Here in the Kingdom, Lord Marc de Montfault is a Frenchman living outside Paris in the sixteenth century, and his partner is the lovely Bella Lucia da Verona, an expert seamstress who also runs a Yahoo chat group for those who, like herself, are medieval Venetian courtesans.

  I had resisted the idea of engaging Eric here in the Kingdom. Interviews conducted outdoors in crowded places—particularly, I’m guessing, those full of fellows fetched up in felt—are not usually conducive to intimate conversation. But Peter has insisted, saying that this is our best chance at finding Eric in Adelaide. We have only one photo to go on, from Facebook. A pirate in his late forties who looks something like Sunny.