A Fever In The Heart

by Rule, Ann

  It hadn’t been that way when they left.

  Derek saw that someone had closed the kitchen window blinds during the time he’d been gone. They were always open, but now there were just thin slices of light coming through. Vaguely uneasy, he peered through the glass in the back door, and then he spun around with a premonition of trouble, and yelled to Janet who had been waiting tensely in her car. “My dad’s not in there!”

  “Then he looked at the floor,” Janet remembered, “and he said, ‘Janet, Janet! Come here!’” As Janet rushed up the steps to join him, Derek cried, ‘My dad is laying on the floor!’

  Janet looked in and saw Gabby lying there. They both acknowledged that Derek’s father drank a lot, but they had never seen him on the floor and that frightened them.

  “We didn’t know what the deal was … we didn’t know that he was passed out or anything,” she said. “We just kind of stood there, didn’t know what to do, and then Derek said, ‘Come on, I’m going to my mom’s—to get her to come down with us,’ so we went to his mom’s and she wasn’t home, so we went to the assistant wrestling coach at Davis—to his house—and he wasn’t home, so we went to the Seven-Eleven and I called the police.”

  Most people don’t have to work on Christmas, but cops do. Police departments never close down—especially not during the “amateur drinking” season when holiday parties send intoxicated drivers out on the roads and trigger family brawls.

  Patrolman John Mitchell was working one of the least desirable shifts that Christmas in Yakima—third shift. Third shift was from eight on Christmas Eve until four o’clock Christmas morning. It was very cold, the ground was covered with snow and the streets were a glare of ice. It was nearing two A.M. that Christmas morning when Mitchell’s radio suddenly crackled, “Respond to eight-one-six South Eighteenth Street … Unattended death …”

  It was an especially sad call at Christmastime. An unattended death. Probably some elderly person, alone and ill, who had died all alone on Christmas Eve. It was a police matter in a sense, but it would probably prove to be a natural death. A stroke. A heart attack.

  Mitchell drove toward the address on South Eighteenth but he didn’t use his whirling bubble lights or siren and he didn’t speed over the slippery streets. Whatever had happened had already happened and there was no need to rush. He pulled his police cruiser up in front of the small frame house. He had been told someone would meet him there and he saw a young couple waiting in a parked car. They introduced themselves as Janet Whitman and Derek Moore.

  They appeared to be in their teens and they both looked frightened. The boy said, “I think my father’s dead. We have to go around to the rear to get into our place.”

  Mitchell followed Derek Moore’s car as he drove around to the back alley and parked. The screen door in the back of the place was held open by a large brick or building block.

  “He’s in there,” the boy said.

  Mitchell walked up the steps and peered through the window in the door. There was a light on in the kitchen just beyond the door. A counter, which seemed to serve as an eating area, ran parallel to the back wall. Mitchell could see a man lying on the floor. He had fallen just where there was a passage between the counter and the wall, and his legs were toward the back door. Mitchell couldn’t see the upper portion of the man’s body because it extended into some room on the other side of the breakfast bar.

  Cautiously, the officer stepped into the kitchen. The apartment was quiet. He leaned over the fallen man, who was lying on his left side. Mitchell touched the side of the man’s neck, just over the carotid artery. There was no encouraging pulse there, and the skin beneath his hand was already faintly cold. There were no signs of life at all. It looked as though the man had suffered a seizure of some sort and fallen forward, probably dead when he hit the floor. There was no blood, and no sign of struggle.

  The call seemed to be as the dispatcher had said, “an unattended death.”

  Mitchell stepped outside and saw that the young girl—Janet—was waiting close by, while the boy was standing back by their car. “I’m afraid Derek’s father is dead,” he said quietly, and then he watched while she went over to the boy, put her hand on his arm, and spoke to him.

  John Mitchell was startled to hear Janet Whitman say, “Derek, they’ve shot your father.”

  Why would she say that? As far as Mitchell knew, the man inside had died a natural death; he certainly hadn’t seen anything to indicate that there had been a shooting. Janet was probably on the thin edge of hysteria, and, like all kids, she had undoubtedly seen too many violent movies.

  Mitchell didn’t know at that point that Gabby had been telling everyone around him that he feared for his life, that someone was threatening to shoot him just as they had Morris Blankenbaker.

  Mitchell walked up to Derek Moore. The boy was shocked, but he was able to answer questions.

  “Did your dad have any medical problems that might have caused his death?”

  Derek nodded his head slowly. “He had high blood pressure, but he was feeling fine tonight when I left. He was in good health …”

  Puzzled, Mitchell went back into the kitchen. He looked around the room and he caught a glint of light reflected from something on the floor. Leaning over, he saw that it was a .22 caliber brass cartridge. He didn’t touch it. He looked beyond the kitchen counter into the living room and noted that the telephone receiver was off the hook, and that a glass next to it had been tipped over.

  Still, the place seemed fairly normal. The dishes had been done and the rooms looked neat. Mitchell glanced around the kitchen. There was a broiler pan on the kitchen counter, but it wasn’t sitting flat; it rested on a pair of eyeglasses.

  That was odd.

  Back outside, Mitchell learned that the man who lay dead on the kitchen floor was Glynn “Gabby” Moore, the coach … from Davis High School. That made the second coach in Yakima to be found dead at two A.M. in less than five weeks. What were the chances of that happening? Mitchell radioed for his sergeant, Mike Bamsmer, to respond to the scene. While he waited, he advised the watch commander, Lt. Roy Capen, that he thought he might have a possible homicide and requested a detective team too.

  Since Moore was lying there in a white T-shirt and there wasn’t a speck of blood on him, Mitchell still believed that Gabby had died of a heart attack. The bullet casing on the floor was a little out of place, but it could have been lying there for a long time. The phone off the hook and the glass being knocked over didn’t concern Mitchell. If Moore had felt the first twinges of a coronary, he might have tried to call for help, left the phone off the hook, knocked over the glass, and then staggered toward the kitchen—maybe to open the door for the ambulance attendants. Of course, he had fallen with his head in the living room and his feet toward the back door, and it seemed as if he should have fallen in the other direction if he had been coming from the living room.

  During the fifteen minutes it took for the detectives and his supervisor to arrive, Mitchell planted himself at the back door to keep the scene from being contaminated.

  Sergeant Robert Brimmer and Detective Howard Cyr had been wakened from sleep and they had hastily thrown on their clothes to get to Gabby Moore’s apartment as quickly as possible. When they arrived at 816 South Eighteenth Avenue, they saw Sergeant Bamsmer and a Dr. A. W. Stevenson standing out in the street on Arlington on the south side of the residence. Stevenson was very active with the athletic teams in Yakima, and Derek Moore had called him to tell him that his father was dead. He had gotten dressed and come over to help in any way he could.

  Bob Brimmer stepped into the kitchen and observed Gabby Moore lying on his side between a counter and a wall in the kitchen. His feet and legs were up against the south wall of the kitchen and his back was against the end of the counter. There was a small throw rug beneath his body.

  As Brimmer started to enter the kitchen, Mitchell warned him not to step on the shell casing lying on the floor just inside the door
about two feet from Moore’s feet. The casing was already slightly crimped as if someone had accidentally stepped on it. Mitchell was sure he had not. It was impossible to say how long the casing had been there.

  The death scene was photographed, a not entirely silent tableau, because Brimmer became aware of the sound of a record someplace in the apartment, a record that had come to the end, with a needle still wobbling on it: bi-bipp … bibipp … bi-bipp …

  The apartment looked like any bachelor pad that lacked a woman’s touch. One end of the living room was being used as a bedroom, blocked off from the rest of the room by a chest of drawers. The king-sized bed was unmade, and a television set and a pair of trousers with the belt still in the loops rested atop the tangled covers.

  Brimmer saw that there was a photo album lying open on the floor beside the bed. Bending closer, he recognized pictures of Gabby Moore and Jerilee Blankenbaker Moore. Someone had apparently lain on his stomach on the unmade bed and gazed at the photographs of a once-happy couple—as a record played.

  As Brimmer’s eyes and camera swept over the room in segments, recording everything, he saw a series of file cabinets that were stuffed with wrestling records and coaching plans. There was a solid cabinet blocking the front door, an overstuffed chair, a couch, and a small coffee table. There was a single bathroom, and a small bedroom near the kitchen where sixteen-year-old Derek Moore apparently slept.

  The wallpaper was patterned like a simulated old-fashioned piecework quilt, and there were knickknacks here and there and a few prints on the walls; the decor seemed to be a combination of what a previous tenant might have left and the necessary items that Moore and his teenaged son had moved in. Above the bed was a Renoir print of a long-ago Parisian woman with a shadow-box of miniatures beside it—hardly something Gabby would have placed there.

  There was a concrete building block beside the rumpled bed, with a box of Kleenex on it, a shoe rack with men’s shoes lined up with a precision that seemed ironic now, an alarm clock, and a stack of paperback books. The phone receiver was on the floor. A portable stereo sat on a table in a corner. The record still revolved, but the arm and needle were at the inside center groove, so that no music played any longer. The record on the turntable was Ray Price’s “For the Good Times.”

  Brimmer found two guns in the bedroom section of the living room. A loaded shotgun leaned against the wall, and a 30-30 lever-action rifle, a Marlin, was lying under the bed. It too was loaded.

  “I unloaded both of the weapons.” Brimmer said later. “ I smelled the barrels. There were no empty rounds in the chambers, and there was no odor of fresh burnt gunpowder in either.”

  All the while the detectives moved around the Moore apartment, taking pictures, measuring, Gabby Moore’s body lay on the little throw rug. They all assumed he had suffered a fatal heart attack. But, because of the recent murder of Morris Blankenbaker, they were taking extra care as they processed the apartment.

  They looked in a trash can in the kitchen and saw the TenHigh whiskey bottle with perhaps a “finger” of liquor in the bottom. Brimmer was unable to bring up any usable prints, only prints on top of other prints that left unreadable smudges.

  Brimmer and Detective Howard Cyr stood over Gabby Moore’s body. He looked quite peaceful now in the darkest moments of the long Christmas Eve-Christmas Day night. Whatever had killed him, he had died, it appeared, almost instantly. It was time to have his body removed. Chances were that there might not even be an autopsy—not with his history of high blood pressure. Brimmer knew, of course, that Gabby had been hospitalized for hypertension only a month before.

  “We had taken measurements, we photographed the scene, and there was absolutely no evidence,” Brimmer recalled, “and then I got down on my hands and knees and I was looking at this small rug on which he was lying—and I detected a small spot.”

  Brimmer enlisted Cyr to help him roll Gabby’s body over so that he could investigate the speck of red on the rug. Probably catsup or something.

  “We moved Mr. Moore from his original position,” Brimmer said. “At that point in time, a quantity of blood oozed from the body through this opening in the left shoulder area.”

  The detectives, who were rarely startled by anything, were shocked. Even with their combined years of experience in investigating deaths, they couldn’t believe that there could be this much free blood and not one spot on Gabby Moore’s white T-shirt. They could see now, however, what had happened.

  Gabby Moore had been shot in the side beneath his left armpit. As long as he lay on the cold linoleum floor of his kitchen with his own considerable weight compressing the wound, the blood was walled back. There had been no sign at all that a bullet had pierced his body. But once they changed the position of his body, the huge amount of blood inside his chest had begun to seep through the wound beneath his left shoulder. It didn’t gush as it would from a live person whose heart’s beating would pump it out in geysers. The blood only leaked as any fluid would through an inanimate object with a hole in it.

  Somewhere along the way, the tangled skein of Gabby’s and Morris’s personal relationships seemed to have caught them up and trapped them until they had come to a place where they could not get free.

  And now neither of them ever would.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It was eleven A.M. on Christmas Day. But it did not seem like a holiday in the clean white room where a bright light illuminated the metal table and the air smelled of dried blood and disinfectant. Dr. Richard Muzzall bent once again to perform an autopsy on a most unlikely murder victim. Thirty-three days to the hour since Morris Blankenbaker’s postmortem exam, it was Gabby Moore’s turn.

  Some of the men in the room had been there on November 22: Besides Muzzall, there was Sergeant Brimmer and Detective Vern Henderson. Detective Howard Cyr was there too, and Jeff Sullivan joined them now. The young prosecuting attorney had been elected to office the year before. He and his seven deputy prosecutors took turns being on call to attend autopsies. Sullivan knew it was vital that someone from his office be present at postmortems. When Bob Brimmer had called him before dawn on this Christmas Day, he had elected to forego a celebration with his family. Moore’s death astonished him as much as the rest of them.

  “Up to that point,” Sullivan recalled, “I felt that Gabby was somehow involved in Morris’s death, but I’d been out to the hospital and I knew he couldn’t have done it himself. We figured maybe he had hired someone to do it. When Gabby was shot too, I didn’t know what to think.”

  All of them watched intently as Muzzall lifted his scalpel and made the initial cut. Muzzall’s first gross examination of the body of Gabby Moore, forty-four years and three days old, was that he had sustained a gunshot wound to the left posterior, lateral chest. That was all; there were no other Injuries.

  Muzzall made the first Y-shaped incision from shoulder to shoulder, and at the midpoint, a vertical cut down to the pubic bone. There had clearly been tremendous damage to the organs in the upper part of Moore’s body and it was necessary to remove the front ribs and the breastbone so that the coroner could examine the dead man’s heart and lungs.

  Gabby Moore had died from a massive hemorrhage “secondary to a bullet wound passing through both chest cavities and the heart,” Muzzall explained. “After entering the muscles of the left posterior chest, the bullet struck the fourth rib—here on the left,” he said, pointing. “Then it deflected. That changed the angle of its course so that it traveled transversely through the chest passing through the left lung, entering the left side of the heart—what we call the pulmonary outflow tract where the right ventricle pumps blood into the lungs.”

  Seldom had any of the men in the quiet room seen such damage from a lone bullet. Muzzall showed them where the slug had passed out the right side of the heart and through the right lung, lodging finally underneath the fourth rib on the victim’s right side.

  “There are approximately two thousand cc’s of blood in the left
chest,” he said. “That’s about four pints. I’d say fifteen hundred cc’s—three pints—in the right chest, and another three hundred cc’s in the pericardial sac—the membranous sac that surrounds the heart.”

  Half the blood in Moore’s body had gushed out into his chest cavities, and yet only a slight fleck of red had stained the rug beneath him. Muzzall likened the bullet’s effect on Moore’s heart to cutting a garden hose with an ax. “You hemorrhage out exceedingly rapidly,” he said. “I’m sure that he lost consciousness within less than a minute and was probably dead in three or four at the most.”

  Pathologists often use metal probes to figure the angle at which a bullet enters a body. Dr. Muzzall inserted the probe and showed the investigators watching that the bullet had entered directly below the victim’s left armpit at the fourth rib, a shot into his “side” in laymen’s terms. Had the bullet continued down at the angle it entered, forty-five degrees, Muzzall said that he doubted that it would have been a fatal wound. It probably would have gone through a portion of the left lung, but in all likelihood would have missed the heart and come out somewhere in the front of the chest. However, once it hit the fourth rib, it deflected. The probe went horizontally across the chest, following the path of the bullet that had penetrated the heart and both lungs.

  At this point, Muzzall’s conclusions didn’t seem as important as they would later. What did it matter the angle at which a bullet had entered? Or that it had traveled inside the body? Gabby Moore was dead; he had been dead almost from the moment he hit the kitchen floor.

  Muzzall retrieved only one bullet, a .22 caliber slug, that was very distorted after it had smashed into the fourth rib on the left. These bullets are notorious for their unpredictability. They are small caliber and if they pass only through soft tissue, they do minimal damage. However, .22s cut through the air with such velocity that they have been known to kill a target a half mile away. A larger caliber bullet stops a victim in his tracks and knocks him down, doing tremendous damage. The speeding .22 slug is given to tumbling when it hits a bone and is far more likely to ricochet than a larger bullet. A .22 slug that comes into contact with a bone is like a car without a driver—bouncing heedlessly from one obstacle in its path to the next.