The guns?
“Both of those nine-millimeter pistols were owned and possessed by Rhodes,” Eric says, forcefully.
But I saw the sales receipt myself, in Room 407. A faded white rectangle with Sunny’s name written on it in blue ink, just above the serial numbers of the guns.
“One of the other things they made a big deal about was Jesse being arrested with the murder weapon. Do you remember how that happened?”
“Yes.” Eric takes a deep breath. He looks down at his hands, and then right at me. “After Rhodes made us get in the police car and we got to the parking lot, he closed the slide on the weapon—on the pistol that had been used—and handed it to Jess and made Jess take it while pointing his other gun, the loaded gun, at him.”
“This was in the parking lot?”
“Yes. Rhodes forced Jess to take the empty weapon and help him. Otherwise Rhodes was going to shoot him, he was going to shoot Jess, and shoot us.”
He pauses and takes another deep breath.
“That must have been terrifying,” I say, because Eric seems so upset.
“Yes.”
“Did you see that happen?”
“No, I didn’t.”
We look at each other, neither of us moving.
“But I’ll tell you what I did see. The entire time we were riding in the police car and the entire time we were riding in the old man’s car, Rhodes had me in the front seat with him and he had the gun pointed at my head. Literally like this.”
Eric pulls his left hand back, cocks his thumb and index finger into a pistol, and holds it point-blank against the side of his head.
His own imaginary head.
* * *
•
Everything Eric has told me so far, every single thing—who owned the guns, whether there were casings in the car, the gunshot residue tests—all of it is factually inaccurate. According to the case record, which means according to the police reports and everyone who testified under oath. And on the day of the murders, Eric never mentioned Walter having a gun, let alone that Walter had pointed that gun at his head. Not to the social worker who was following his every move and writing up everything he said, and not to the police officer who interviewed him on tape at the police station right after the arrests at the roadblock. I know this because I read the notes and transcript this winter at the Fort Lauderdale courthouse, and then I talked to the police officer myself.
Now Eric and I are sitting in silence.
Around us, the afternoon is getting colder. We’re in the shade of a big gum tree, in a blue shadow that feels stronger than the fall sunlight, dark-edged, deep. The shadow might be the reason I am shivering. Eric has edged away along the fence and he’s not looking at me.
“They held me without charging me,” he says suddenly, to the ground in front of him. He’s talking about the months after the murders when he was held in juvenile detention. “They threatened my mum and Jess that if one of them didn’t confess they were going to make a case against me at nine years old.” Late one night, police grabbed him, cranked his arms up hard behind his back, marched him in front of a judge, and interrogated him, Eric says. “They were trying to make me say what they wanted.”
“What did they want you to say?”
“They wanted me to say that my mum and Jess did it. And it was ridiculous. It was absolutely ridiculous.”
“Eric,” I say. “What do you remember about when the gunfire started?”
“My mum was holding my sister, and she put her arm around me and pulled me down like this and laid over us. And Jess was incapacitated like this.”
“You don’t remember anything about a Taser?”
“No. I have no memory of my mum ever buying or owning a Taser.”
“But do you remember hearing one or hearing about one from that morning?”
“No. When you mentioned it, it was the first mention I’ve ever heard about a Taser.”
“It’s the mystery piece of evidence. That’s what I don’t understand,” I tell him. “There’s a photograph of a Taser dart in the side of the patrol car and there were fired cartridges and they made a big deal out of it in the trial, they fired one in the courtroom—”
“I’ve never heard about that. I mean, honestly, they tried to say so many things. They tried to say so many things that are patently untrue. It’s just garbage.”
“You think the Taser was made up?”
“I think it was made up. I think they probably fired off one of their own Tasers and put it out there and put it in as evidence.”
So that’s where he’s at, I think.
“You know, I looked through a bunch of papers in the case,” I say. I am starting carefully, not entirely sure how to say this, even though I know that I have to ask. “And, Eric, there’s a report in those files that says you told your social worker at one point, quote, ‘My mother made me do it.’ ”
The sentence hangs in the air.
“That is such—that is such a load of fantasy horsecrap. Oh my God, which psychologist supposedly wrote that one?”
“It’s a report by your social worker.”
“I don’t even remember ever seeing a social worker at all. I would never have said that. That is an absolute lie.”
“So what do you think they were getting at, then?”
“They were trying to piece together any possible shred of a case to try them on. The fact was, they had no case.”
I suppose that if you take away the bullet hole through the windshield post, the ownership of the guns, the fact that Jesse Tafero was arrested with the murder weapon, the eyewitnesses who saw the shots coming from the car, the Taser dart in the police car, and all the drugs and weapons in the Camaro, then that might be true. I could sit here and punch through every single wrong fact that he’s told me, one by one. But I don’t. Because now he seems very upset.
“It’s been a real struggle not to be consumed by anger because of what Rhodes and Satz and the rest of them did,” Eric is saying. He knows the events of that morning affected him, he says. He’s pretty sure he has post-traumatic stress. He feels like maybe he will never be right again. As he talks, he’s looking at me with a steady, flat gaze. It’s the look his mother gave me in Ireland.
“It took me years, quite literally it took me until about—when I moved to Australia, I finally was able to stop walking around armed. When I lived in America, I had to at least have two knives on me all the time. I had to be able to protect myself. Because no one else would. I mean, what do you do when your early years, when nine years, nine of the first years of your life, you’re taught that police are there to protect and serve you, that you can trust them, when anything happens run to a police officer, they won’t hurt you, they’re there to protect you, and then you have overwhelming proof positive that you can’t? That that’s not the case, that they’re there to take advantage of you, hurt you, try to kill you, take the people you love away from you, to hurt and kill them, to lie, to cheat?”
We sit there for a while after that, underneath the gum trees. Beside us, on the lawn, the knights in heavy combat cross swords, but their cries are muffled underneath their masks, and all that I hear is a dog barking in the distance and a radio from one of the limestone cottages, tinny and faint, as if from long ago.
22
Investigator Strait
In the kitchen, Peter turns on the kettle. It’s gray this morning—gray sea, gray sky. This echoing apartment is on the edge of the ocean, and a brittle wind rattles through. I’m raking over my notes. And kicking myself, because I am sure I fucked up.
It was intense with Eric yesterday. I should have pressed him more. I should have backed off earlier. Did he really not know about the Taser? Or that the Camaro was full of drugs? He is so sure now that Walter had a gun—Rhodes was the only person with a gun—but that is not what he said on the
morning of the murders. Fresh out of the Camaro and the Cadillac, he told police he did not see anyone with a gun. “I wasn’t looking,” he told a detective at the police station. Did Eric tell the truth now, or then? And my unbearable trembling while he was talking. Racking, painful, and freezing cold. Why?
At the end of our interview, I asked Eric for his phone number in case I had follow-up questions. Now I punch the numbers in carefully. Standard procedure would be to drop by his house, but I feel like it’s okay to give him some advance notice, given that we talked for two hours and wound up shaking hands.
“Who is this?”
“It’s Ellen, I talked with you yesterday. How are you?”
Eric is silent. That is never, and I mean never, a good sign.
“Eric?”
“Yeah, yesterday was really upsetting for me.”
“Oh God, I’m so sorry.”
Silence.
“Eric, I am so sorry, but this is important. There are some photos I’d like to show you and—”
“No,” Eric says. And hangs up.
* * *
•
In the living room, I find Peter sitting at a little table that’s been built into one wall, like a two-top diner booth. I slide in opposite him.
“It’s not like the detective’s oath is ‘First, do no harm,’ ” I tell Peter.
“But if he’s told you no, isn’t that harassment?” Peter says.
“No. It’s persistence.”
“Anyway, what does it get you? He doesn’t remember.”
“But what if I can get him to remember?”
“How? By breaking him apart?”
* * *
•
I spend the afternoon in an empty bathtub on the phone. The apartment is so cold that I have two sweaters on, but from the tub I can at least look out the window at the seafront and its Norfolk Island pines, tall cylindrical evergreens whose rigid fringes mock the breeze.
“It’s his life, and maybe this is how he’s chosen to deal with this,” Freya is telling me from the other side of the world.
“By not knowing anything?”
“That could be the choice he’s made.”
I want to let it go. I want to let it go. I want to let it go.
* * *
•
But at four o’clock, with the light fading, I decide I must try. Peter has come up with a new address for Eric—found it on a website registration—and so I collect my case documents and photographs and we take off. I feel dread. All the way across the city, I’m hoping the address is going to be a bust like the others, but then we pass a sign announcing the town line of his suburb and there it is, his house number, shiny in brass on a tall fence with a closed gate. I ask Peter to drive past the house, and he does, pulling in down the road a bit.
I try to imagine walking over there.
The conversation yesterday was so tumultuous—the gun Eric remembers being pointed at his head by Walter, the Taser he is sure was planted by police. As we sat together in his Renaissance kingdom, he’d also told me that as the carjacked Cadillac barreled down on the roadblock that morning, it did so in a blaze of gunfire from two hundred police officers armed with automatic weapons and as helicopters “stitched the top of the car” with gunshots from above. “They wanted a riddled car with six dead bodies in it so there would be no one who could say what happened,” Eric told me. “So they could say whatever they wanted.”
Back in Florida, I’d talked to Corporal Jack Harden, is the thing. Harden was the Florida Highway Patrol officer who commanded the roadblock that morning. It was Harden who fired the double-aught buckshot through the Cadillac door into Walter Rhodes’s left leg, crashing the Cadillac and resulting in the arrests. There were no helicopter gunships that morning, just three police sharpshooters on the ground and a fixed-wing airplane keeping an eye from above, Harden told me. The pilot, Trooper D. G. McDermid, had been assigned to do routine traffic patrols that day and had been at the airport when the call came in that Black and Irwin were down. He’d shadowed that getaway Cadillac from a thousand feet up, coordinating all the officers who were trailing the car. McDermid was the reason that nobody in the Cadillac knew they were being followed. They were trapped at the roadblock by a decorated Vietnam War veteran pilot and the element of surprise. Not by strafing automatic overhead gunfire.
And Eric’s extraordinary admission, after his long recollection of Walter pointing a loaded gun at Jesse to make Jesse take the murder weapon. “Did you see that?” I’d asked Eric. “No, I did not,” Eric had responded. Yet the memory was so detailed, so specific. That’s what you’re supposed to look for in telling fact from fiction. Depth. Detail. Emotion. Complexity. Eric sounded as if he had lived it, but he’d dreamed that one up.
I watch the road around us for a while. The weeds on the median strip, the Monday rush-hour traffic, the traffic lights up ahead, changing, changing again. And it occurs to me, sitting here, all the way at the other end of the earth from my home, watching this intersection that could be anywhere, with its dinged-up streetlamps and battleship sky, that the man who was the boy in the backseat of that Camaro is not and never will be, in fact, my missing puzzle piece. My pixel. My grail.
And so this is it. This workhorse thoroughfare running down to a place on the map called Investigator Strait, a southernmost shore of a southernmost continent, out toward the ice, toward Antarctica, out across the water to where it’s always winter and sometimes never gets light. This, right here.
This is the end of the road.
PART THREE
Gone Ghost
23
The Boxes
At home, I walk from room to room, opening windows. The house is dusty and it feels cold. Outside, a beautiful Michigan summer day is under way, blue skies and birdsong and a freshwater breeze. When we left here for Florida in January, snowdrifts covered the fences, and when we left for Ireland six weeks ago, the trees had just the lightest lace of green. Now it’s June and the woods behind our house whisper with leaves.
It’s been two years since we traded the big city for this clapboard house amid the orchards of the Michigan lakeshore. Peaches, corn, garden tomatoes, blueberries, black raspberries, fresh cherry pies. Narrow roads stung into silence by the heat; afternoon thunderstorms and the way everything shines afterwards, sun-struck, rose and gold. It’s been a refuge for me. Now I’m back from the other side of the world and I don’t recognize a thing. This could be someone else’s house. Look, a couch. That’s a nice place for it, there by the fireplace. Sweet. Harmonious. No bullets or bloodstains. This must be someone else’s life.
This morning we were having breakfast on the porch and I started crying and I could not stop. It felt as if the bones along my back were going to break. Are you okay? Peter asked.
I guess so. I’m not sure. I don’t think so. No.
I’d been so certain I could find out.
Upstairs, on my office desk, the phone rings. Work comes in: a Fortune 500 company needing to know if employees are selling stolen goods on eBay; a multinational corporation worried about possible mob-related fraud in a major real estate deal. I’m glad to have the cases and I like my clients—I’ve worked for some of them for two decades, through bad times and good. But right now I feel like every ounce of whatever it is that makes me a private detective got lost somewhere along my travels overseas.
* * *
•
After that day outside Eric’s house in Australia, we did not come straight back home. We could not. In planning the trip, we’d had to allow plenty of time to find Eric, just in case, so our flight back to the United States wouldn’t be leaving for two more weeks. We were marooned at the far end of the earth. We fled north, to the Great Barrier Reef.
There, a sandy path led out the back door to the sea. At the beach the water was silty, rolling in one l
ong wave toward the shore. Mountains rose in the distance, pitchforked up against the high wide sky, and underfoot, translucent crabs spun sand into lace, an intricate pattern of perfect spheres. At night, orange-footed jungle fowl in the rainforest around us screamed in the dark, a series of piercing shrieks that ended in mad laughter, again and again. Every night, I lay awake in the pitch-black, obsessing. How could he really not know? How do I get him to remember? That’s the way police coerce confessions, I reminded myself. Tell me the things that I tell you are true. I did not know I had that in me. I did not want to. And from there it spiraled out and down, to every mistake I’d ever made and every bad relationship I’d ever been in to every pet I’d had and loved and lost. An assassin stalking me inside my own head. The Polaroid of him and Jesse and the machine gun, I should have—
At dinner on our last night there, at a restaurant on a deserted road out near the beach, I thought I saw birds in the sky as night fell, but then I realized they were bats. Under the streetlamps, their wings were translucent, veins through flesh, stretched tight from bone to bone.
Later, we walked out to the beach to look at the stars. The heavens glittered in the black velvet above us. I wanted to see the Southern Cross. I’d always wanted to see it. I waded into the sea and stared up at the sky. But all I could see was the spangle out over the open ocean, and the moon, a bright path across the dark water, out into the deep, leading away from the shore.
* * *
•
Today in Michigan, crows are calling in the woods surrounding our house. I can hear them in my office upstairs, where I am going over my notes.
What you are doing is pointless and hurtful. That is what Irish told me, at the very beginning. Quixotic is how investigator Walt LaGraves put it. Impossible, Sunny Jacobs said.
Two Truths and a Lie Page 25
