Sutton looks at me. “But in reality, we just didn’t have much of a defense. That’s the reason. We put on no defense because we had no defense.”
* * *
•
The instant I introduce myself to Bob McCain’s widow, however, she tells me something entirely different.
“Jesse Tafero?” Michele McCain says. “Jesse Tafero was innocent.”
I’m standing at her front door over on Florida’s Gulf Coast. In addition to being married to Bob McCain, Michele was his secretary, and she helped him during Jesse’s trial. She’s vibrant, gray-haired, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. A long scar, blood-dark, fresh, runs across the left side of her throat. I don’t ask. A German shepherd bounces behind her, all teeth and nose and ears.
“Did Jesse tell you what happened?” I ask as we sit down in her living room.
“Jesse said he didn’t do it. He said it was Walter that did it. He kept proclaiming, ‘I didn’t do it, I couldn’t have done it.’ ”
The key, she says, was the autopsy photographs.
Nobody’s told me about autopsy photographs, I say.
Oh yes, Michele says. After the murders, the officers were taken to the morgue. There, examiners inserted metal rods into the officers’ wounds—through their bodies, from entry to exit—to show the angles of the bullets, and took pictures. Michele saw the photos herself.
“The angle of the bullets came straight down.” She takes a pillow and demonstrates, holding her hand up above the pillow, directly perpendicular to it. “That meant somebody tall had to be standing and shooting them. It was the angle of the bullets, that downward angle.”
Jesse was bent over the hood of the cruiser, so no way could he have done it, and Sunny was sitting in the car, so no way could she have done it, and therefore the only person who could have shot the officers from that downward angle was Walter, Michele says.
“Walter is six feet tall, isn’t he?” she asks.
“I think he is,” I say, remembering.
Michele only met Jesse Tafero once, but she talked to him on the phone many times. He was courteous but all business. When she saw him—in the courtroom, at his sentencing—the thing that struck her was his eyes.
“His eyes were cold. They were very, very cold,” she says.
As she says it, I see him again. He’s looking at me from the chair.
Locked in. One, two, three, four, five, six. Then his stare moves on.
Michele is still talking.
“It scared me, his eyes were that cold,” she is saying. “But that doesn’t mean he killed them.”
* * *
•
As I drive down Interstate 95 back to our bungalow, I tally it up.
John Sutton, partner of Tafero’s trial attorney: Jesse Tafero was guilty.
Michele McCain, widow of Tafero’s trial attorney: Jesse Tafero was innocent.
All the bullet casings and metal jackets recovered from the crime scene and the slain officers that could be ballistically matched came from one gun: A234895.
Jesse was arrested with that gun strapped to his waist. Sunny was sitting in the backseat of the car, where the eyewitnesses saw the shots coming from. Walter was the one who tested positive for having fired a gun.
Taser dart in the patrol car window.
Bullet hole in the patrol car’s metal windshield post. Trajectory: back to front, low to high.
Jesse: I saw Walter Rhodes in front of the Camaro….I saw him with a pistol in his hand….I saw a flash come from the muzzle of the pistol.
Sunny: I didn’t see, I didn’t see.
Walter: I actually witnessed the shots. When the gun first went off Sonia was the one holding the gun….I believe then Jesse pulled the gun from her and shot him one more time and then he shot the other cop twice.
I turn off the interstate toward our bungalow. Every day, I drive past the spot where the rest area was. Long gone now, taken over by the road. As I pass it, I glance over, as always. Wondering.
When I first figured out where the rest area had been, I was surprised. So I timed the drive from the rest area back to Walter’s apartment in Fort Lauderdale to be sure. Fifteen miles, seventeen minutes.
That’s what hits me now.
Walter’s apartment was pretty crappy. True. But it did have four walls and a roof.
Yet they spent the night just minutes away on the side of an interstate highway. Three adults and two young children in a small and rusty Camaro.
Why were they in that Camaro?
11
Everything. It Was All Gone.
“The Camaro,” I tell Peter, walking into the house and straight past him to the back bedroom, where my files have been taking up more and more space.
Forest green, two-door, bashed up. In police photos, the Camaro’s paint is rusting, its hood and trunk don’t close, its bumpers are twisted, half its front grille is missing—one running light askew like a boxer’s blacked-out eye—and its side-view mirrors are totally gone.
“Check out this car.” I’m holding the photos. Peter has followed me in here and is leaning against the doorframe. “This piece-of-shit car is the key.”
“You look tired,” I add, noticing.
For more than two months now, Peter and I have been talking only about the murders. Michigan seems like distant memory—the hush as snow falls, red cardinals in the icy woods, the warmth of hearth and candlelight on a cold clear night. Here in the sunshine, every conversation ends up at the rest area in 1976. At breakfast, at dinner. On walks to the grocery store. At the beach, on the couch, at night in bed. Peter is a great listener. He’s my best friend. He’s a private detective with a decade of experience too.
Detective work is not just search and retrieval. An algorithm can do that. Detective work is finding something you didn’t know you were looking for. Pattern recognition with unknown unknowns. Freya’s approach was blazingly exact. I hopscotch. That was a great combination, but we still sometimes got stumped. Over the years, we hired a lot of different people to work with us—a lawyer, a construction worker, a bartender, a journalist, a librarian, a brilliant medical student—and they were all great in different ways, but I came to believe that the capacity for detective work has much more to do with how a person experiences the world than with anything it is possible to teach, aside from Do not fuck up. Peter had worked as an actor, a director, a waiter, an editor, and a writer, but it was just luck that, as Freya and I discovered when we asked him to help us out, he was a natural detective as well. A client needed early drafts of an artwork for a copyright dispute, but the artist had died. Peter tracked down the person who had inherited the artist’s computer, and she handed over not just one or two early drafts of the artwork but the computer’s entire hard drive. Handsome and charming, right there on the doorstep. Peter’s main strength, though, is honesty. Transparency. It’s an odd asset for a private eye, but it works. Because good news or bad, he just wants to know what’s really going on. He’ll tell you, too.
Later, when we’re on our way back home to Michigan, on the first night we spend driving north, in the safety and solidity of our friends’ house in Savannah—no rattling windows, no curtains billowing in the wind off the sea—Peter will tell me that he was so lonely here in Florida that he wondered if he even still existed. That he worried about me. About us. That he feared I might be disappearing into these murders, never to find my way back. That he locked himself into the bathroom one evening and wept.
Right now, though, it’s eleven o’clock at night and we’re both exhausted. I am scrambling through my file boxes for the transcript of my prison interview with Walter Rhodes and for my collection of news interviews with Sunny. Peter, shadows under his eyes, is studying a blurry xeroxed picture of the crime scene and the car.
“Here, read these too,” I say, handing him more
papers from my files.
According to Sunny, she and Jesse and the kids were in the Camaro because her “old clunker” of a car broke down and “we were just kind of stuck.” That’s what she told 20/20, back in 1992. And so, the show reported, “for two hundred dollars, Walter Rhodes agreed to drive Jesse and his family north, to West Palm Beach. At three a.m., the Camaro pulled into the rest area.”
But when I interviewed Walter in 1990, he had a whole different explanation.
According to Walter, they were in the Camaro in the rest area because Jesse and Sunny were paying him to drive them around to do drug deals. He said they’d been riding around earlier in his red Ford Fairlane, all three adults plus the two kids, dealing drugs, and some “gangsters” had chased them, so they dropped by a friend’s house and borrowed the Camaro to throw the gangsters off the trail.
Me: Where was the car? Where was this that you swapped cars?
Rhodes: This was at some guy’s house named Steve Addis.
A new path has appeared. Sunny says they were simply catching a ride from a friend up to West Palm Beach. Walter says they were driving around to deal drugs.
“I finally have a litmus test,” I tell Peter.
It all comes back to the Camaro. Who is telling the truth about that, Walter or Sunny?
One quick online search later, I find that Steve Addis is real.
But Steve Addis is dead.
* * *
•
South on Interstate 95, then a turn onto Sans Souci Boulevard. No worries, in French. A four-story apartment building from the 1970s, peach stucco and coral pebbledash, shaded by palm trees. Peter found this address last night after I gave up and fell asleep on the couch. At the building intercom, the directory is broken, so I take a guess and punch in the apartment number.
“Taliaferro?” a voice says. It’s a terrible connection, buzzy. “Never heard of him.”
“Tafero,” I shout.
“Jesse Tafero?”
“Did Jesse Tafero borrow your brother’s car?”
“My car,” the voice says. “Not my brother’s car. My car.”
Then he adds, “I can’t hear you.” And hangs up.
I call back.
“It’s not like I am going to talk to you, honey.”
“I witnessed Jesse’s execution,” I shout. Louder.
There is a pause.
The voice says: “I’ll be right down.”
* * *
•
The man who appears at the entrance to the building is tall and skinny in acid-washed jeans and iridescent mirrored sunglasses. I hand him a photo of the Camaro taken at the rest area crime scene. Gene Addis—he’s fifty-seven, the youngest Addis brother—stares at it. “That’s my car,” he says. He points to a light dusty line on the inside of the left front tire and says something about the axle coming undone and that the tires rode differently after that. He says he wasn’t there that night, he was out of state, visiting with Miss Teenage Kansas. “When I came back, my car was gone.”
“Did you ever see it again?”
“Nope,” he says, and invites me inside.
* * *
•
At the elevators, I hesitate. Gene seems nervous, which is making me nervous. I’m getting into a tiny elevator and going up to an apartment with a total stranger. Usually I’m outside on the doorstep when I first meet someone, not locked in a small box with them. In the elevator, Gene is telling me about his brother—not Steve, who loaned Walter the Camaro that night, but one of his other brothers—and he seems upset. He’d started talking about this other brother in the lobby and he seems incredulous and hurt about him. We get out on the fifth floor and start down the hallway. Gene is still talking a mile a minute about his asshole brother. Who happens to be Mickey Rourke. That is correct. The Hollywood actor.
Those magazine interviews Mickey gives, saying mean things about their dad? Never happened, according to Gene. Their dad was a police officer and tough, yes, but he never crossed any lines, and if there’s one thing that Gene cannot stand, it’s a liar, and do I want to know something else? Gene and Mickey haven’t spoken in eighteen years, since the night Gene was in Club Deuce in Miami Beach drinking and Mickey refused to be introduced to his friends. Still, “Mickey is not alone. I love him to death. He’s creating his own wilderness.” But if Gene ever catches him…
Actually, it’s not what I’m here for, and I am concentrating pretty hard on figuring out if walking down this long hallway is a good idea. So when Gene opens his apartment door and introduces me to his best friend, Adam—“We’ve been friends since we were six years old, we’re not gay” is what he says—I am relieved. Adam is a tidy, rosy-cheeked, non-nervous guy in a polo shirt and khaki shorts.
“Adam, she has a picture of the Camaro.”
I hand Adam the photograph.
“Oh, yeah, look at that tire. Remember how on the highway the whole thing used to shake like it was coming apart?”
They both laugh.
“Where were you then, Kansas?” Adam says.
They both laugh again.
“When I got back, all my stuff was gone,” Gene says, suddenly serious. All of the swords and coins he had collected. His knives. “Everything. It was all gone.”
* * *
•
Four days after the murders, two federal narcotics agents visited Walter Rhodes in the hospital room where he was recovering from the amputation of his left leg. Walter told the agents that on the days immediately preceding the murders, he drove Jesse and Sunny around so they could buy and sell cocaine, marijuana, hashish, and Quaaludes. Walter claimed that among the people Jesse and Sunny bought cocaine from were a man named John and his mother. John and his mom had “pounds” of cocaine, Walter said. “Bags of coke” that they were weighing out on a machine. Steve Addis had a weighing machine too, Walter alleged. Whenever Jesse “would get a whole lot of coke, he’d either go to John’s or Steve’s to weigh it up.” The night before the murders, Walter said, they went to Steve Addis’s house, traded drugs for an ammunition clip and a knife, sold four grams of cocaine to some guys across the street, and swapped Walter’s red Ford Fairlane for the Camaro. Then they took off in the Camaro toward the rest area.
After the murders, police descended on the Addis household. Their father was a Miami Beach policeman, and the Teflon-coated bullets that had taken the lives of Trooper Black and Constable Irwin had come from a box in the attaché case marked “National Police Supply Company.”
But Steve Addis told the investigating officers he had no idea what they were talking about. Shown a mugshot of Walter, Steve Addis admitted that he had seen Walter before, but when shown booking photographs of Jesse and Sunny and asked “Do you know either one of these individuals by their correct name or by a nickname?” Steve Addis replied, “No, sir, I don’t.”
* * *
•
Now Gene Addis is smoking a doobie and letting the memories of old times flow over him. We’re in the living room, facing the palm fronds of Sans Souci through an open balcony door. The apartment is full of faded pictures of Miami Beach from the 1960s and 1970s. No neon lights, no glitter. Just Gene and Adam and their friends, squinting into the camera, in bathing suits, on deserted sidewalks in front of the old Art Deco hotels, partying up on the peeling rooftops, legs dangling off the roof edges, sea and sky and sun.
It’s been a long afternoon. Six hours, rounding into evening now. Every time I’ve asked a direct question, I’ve gotten “no” or “yes” or “I don’t know” as an answer. But I’m hearing a ton of stories. When Gene was little, his father married Mickey’s mother, and that made for a lot of kids under one roof. House rules: triple bunk beds, speak only if you are spoken to. Gene’s father was six foot three, 260 pounds, and twice a day he made his children line up in a row for an inspection, like in t
he military. Imperfections were punished with bare-ass whippings. But they had the run of the beach. Long afternoons crabbing off the jetties, blue crabs, stone crabs, tackle football games in the shallow water. There was no love, is the thing, Gene tells me. It would’ve been okay if there had been love. “If my elbows touched the table, I got a backhand literally into the wall.”
Later, Gene and his friends worked as pool boys at the Eden Roc, hanging out on their lunch breaks in the shade underneath the high diving board. He had a trick where he lay motionless on the bottom of the pool, scaring the tourists. He’s proud to say he can take a punch. He drank vodka one time until blood ran out his nose. Gene has scars on his forearm, on his collarbone, his elbow, his shins. He thinks I’m pretty. He thinks I look like his mom, whom he loved and who died.
* * *
•
There was one afternoon, after his mother died. Gene was fifteen. He was living with his dad and stepmother then in Miami Beach; the neighborhood is priced in the multimillions now, but back then, in the early 1970s, a policeman could buy in. His brother Steve had an apartment with friends nearby, and Gene went over to say hello. He knocked on the screen door, but nobody answered, and so he went around the side and peeked in the window. “I didn’t know that you don’t do that to drug dealers,” Gene says. At the window was the business end of a shotgun, pointed directly at his head.
His brother Steve was rough, Gene says now, as if the memory is shaking loose. Steve was one tough dude. A bad guy. A real bad guy. Steve was a biker. An Outlaw. When Gene was in sixth grade, Steve punched him into a glass door—split his upper lip almost right off his face—after Gene found Steve’s weed by accident. Nobody told Steve what to do. Steve and his friends, that whole group—they were robbers.
Two Truths and a Lie Page 14