Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [112]
The likely reason why Hollywood police had placed so little credence in what the Mayers had told them had to do with the timing, Matthews understood. Arlene had been sure that their trip to Kmart to place on a Friday or a Saturday night because those were the only nights they ever went shopping. But the fact that her husband wouldn’t go into the store with them because he had just gotten off work suggested to detectives that it had very likely been a Friday night when the Mayers had their frightening encounter. That, of course, would have ruled Toole out of the scenario, since he would have been on a bus somewhere between Newport News and Jacksonville at the time.
However, Matthews had since spoken with Susan Schindehette, coauthor of John Walsh’s Tears of Rage. She’d wondered about that seeming inconsistency, too, she told Matthews, until she asked Wayne Mayer a simple question, one that the detectives never had. Did he ever work at his construction job on Saturdays? “Oh, sure,” Wayne told her. “All the time.”
The simple questions, Matthews thought to himself, as he finished up his notes on the Mayers. When you forget to ask them during an investigation, that’s when things go south.
On the following Tuesday, February 28, Matthews got in touch with prison hospital administrator Barry Gemelli, who confirmed that he had overheard the unsolicited confession to the crime by Ottis Toole as he was lying on his deathbed. The two made arrangements to meet the following week.
In the meantime, Matthews conducted an interview with Kathy Shaffer, the Sears security guard who had ordered Adam Walsh out of the store that day. “His mom showed me two pictures of Adam that day,” Shaffer told Matthews, “and I really wasn’t sure about the first one. But then she made me look at another one, and I knew right then. I was chilled. One hundred and ten percent, I knew it was him.”
But she had lied to Revé that day and said she didn’t recognize Adam because she was just seventeen, and she was scared. She thought Revé would get mad at her for throwing Adam out of the store, Shaffer said, and besides, at first she thought he was just some kid wandering around and he was going to turn up just fine without any help from her.
By the time detectives arrived and were beginning to question her, she realized the enormity of what had happened. This child had really, truly disappeared. She couldn’t own up to what she had done by then, she said to Matthews. She had started to feel truly responsible for Adam’s disappearance. Eventually she came to feel responsible for his death.
“I still do,” she told Matthews, tearfully. “Not a day has gone by in twenty-five years that I haven’t thought about it. If I had just said, ‘Where’s your mama?’ he might still be here today.” She had to pause to gather herself before she could get her last words out, and even then Matthews had to ask her to repeat them. “I pray every night that his mom and dad will forgive me.”
Matthews tried to console Shaffer, but he felt like the little Dutch boy his mother used to tell him about, only this wasn’t some storybook problem where you could just plug your finger in the leak and wait for help to arrive. Woulda, coulda, shoulda. Once upon a time, what was so terrible about letting your kid play a video game while you walked fifty feet away to buy a frigging lamp? And yet Revé Walsh had been tying herself in knots ever since, thinking she was somehow responsible for what had happened. Or how about her husband John, who put the whole idea of going to Sears in her head in the first place—“Hey, honey, we can save a couple of bucks if we just act now”?
Or how about Joe Matthews, for that matter? Maybe if he had simply cold-cocked Jack Hoffman the first time the know-it-all SOB had insulted him, the guy would have ended up in the hospital and somebody else would have taken over the case. Which of course wouldn’t have changed anything, really,