Two Truths and a Lie by Ellen McGarrahan

Author:Ellen McGarrahan [McGarrahan, Ellen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

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The next day, my last full day in Florida, I’m back in Room 407 at the Broward County courthouse. Evidence.

“Here, can you hold this for a second?” Dave the evidence chief is asking me.

It’s the jacket. His jacket. The one Jesse Tafero was wearing at the rest area that morning. The jacket both truck drivers saw him in. It is smaller than I would have thought, a mid-1970s tan, yellowish, not brownish, and belted, with a lapel collar and buttons. Among the photographs police found in the attaché case were a Polaroid of Jesse in this jacket, wearing a fedora, machine gun in one hand and pistol in the other. And a Polaroid of Jesse in this jacket with a ski mask covering his entire head. Faceless, eyeless, on his back on a bed, machine gun brandished at the ceiling, pistol toward the wall.

It’s not a scheduled part of my visit, my hands on this garment. Dave just needs the jacket out of the way for a second while he puts a cloth down on the table. I hold the jacket with as little contact as I possibly can, just thumb and forefinger on each hand, all others extended far out of the way. And afterwards, I feel odd. I have now touched an object that Jesse Tafero touched. Something he wore. Not just any day, but that very day. Those very instants.

Next is the purse that Sunny had with her, the one holding her loaded .38 revolver. A designer monogram is on the purse’s clasp: Oleg Cassini. When officers confiscated this purse at the roadblock, they found documents from the glove box of Trooper Black’s cruiser inside. His FHP individual trooper inventory and a recall notice. The officer who drove Sunny and the children from the roadblock to the stationhouse told me that Sunny tried to insist on having the purse with her in the backseat of the car, but he’d refused. “If I’d given her the purse like she wanted, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now talking to you,” Lieutenant Gary Hill said.

Next: ammunition. Nine millimeters and thirty-eights and twenty-twos, rattling inside white paper boxes. Teflon-coated bullets too, the kind retrieved from the bodies of Irwin and Black. The Teflon coating is bright green. The box is marked “National Police Supply Company.” These bullets were known as “cop-killers” because they could pierce armored vests.

But it’s when I see the holster that I think, Oh, okay.

The case documents state that Jesse was arrested with the murder weapon strapped to his hip in a holster, and all along I’ve been picturing something basic off a gun shop shelf. But the item Dave puts in front of me is a fancy belt. It’s tan leather, handmade it looks like, with an ornate image of a woman in a lotus position as its centerpiece, dyed with reds and greens and blues. A hand-tooled yoga-lady lotus hippie holster, if such a thing can be said. A leather pouch for two ammo clips is threaded onto the belt, plus a pancake holster, secured with just one snap.

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