by Rule, Ann
In this case, it was beginning to look as though luck were walking with the Yakima police. Still, the detectives had no way of knowing how convoluted this case would become. They had some promising ballistics evidence. They had a lot of rumors, but they had no idea what the motive behind the two murders was. That had all blown up on Christmas Eve when their likeliest killer had turned out to be their second victim.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Prosecutor Jeff Sullivan met with Bob Brimmer and Vern Henderson. The gun might prove to be vital to the case. At this point, they had no idea who that gun belonged to or through whose hands it might have passed. But they suspected someone out there would be sweating if he—or she—knew that the weapon was now in the hands of the Yakima police. Most people have seen enough television mysteries to know that guns can be traced, but they don’t understand the finer points of forensic ballistics.
For the moment, the gun was mentioned to no one outside the investigation. But when a reporter from the Yakima Herald-Republic made his usual police department rounds on that Monday, February 23, he asked, as always, whether there was anything new on the Blankenbaker-Moore case. There wasn’t much, but Chief Jack La Rue casually mentioned that someone had brought in a .22 that had been found underneath the Twin Bridges.
That news story galvanized at least three readers into a panic. Each felt that the police would know who had thrown the gun in the river as surely as if they had scratched their names and addresses on the side of the barrel.
In the meantime, Vern Henderson was wearing a groove in the road up to Ellensburg. Tuffy Pleasant was growing used to looking up and seeing Vern heading his way. It bugged him that Vern seemed to know what was going on in his head. And the detective had picked up a lot of things on the streets in Yakima, rumors and remarks made by some of the guys Tuffy ran with.
Henderson had felt for weeks now that Tuffy was somehow connected with the two shootings, but he wasn’t sure how or why. When they talked, they talked in circles, fencing and feinting. Sometimes, Vern thought he saw sweat bead up along Tuffy’s forehead, especially when Vern confirmed that they had, indeed, found a .22 in the Naches River.
“I told him how much we could tell from a gun,” Henderson recalled. “He didn’t know we couldn’t trace it unless someone came forward, and he believed me that we were right next door to knowing who the killer was.”
Tuffy had brazened it out. He told Vern that he had talked to a lawyer, and he “knew his rights. I don’t have to talk to you or Brimmer if I don’t want to.”
“That’s right.”
“What would you do if you were in my position?” Tuffy asked suddenly.
“Well,” Vern Henderson said slowly, “if I was in your position. I don’t know just what I would do. I might—I would get myself an attorney and I wouldn’t say anything.”
Henderson figured he’d just put his foot in his own mouth, but the kid asked him, and he answered him straight. Tuffy stared back at him, weighing something in his mind.
“No,” Tuffy said. “I want to talk with you. I want to help clear this up.”
And they kept talking until it grew cold and dark and Vern had to head back to Yakima. Whatever Tuffy had been about to say, he didn’t say anything definitive. He just wanted to know more about what police could tell from a gun.
Driving home, Vern was convinced Tuffy knew who had killed both Morris and Gabby. He wondered if Tuffy had done it himself. And then, as always, he wondered, if he did, why?
Actually, the Yakima investigators were both further and closer than they suspected from finding the gun’s owner. They didn’t know it yet, but the old Colt had come back from Vietnam and there was virtually no way to trace it. It was of no more use than a “drop gun,” a gun deliberately left at the scene of some crimes to throw police off because the person who left it behind knows it has no identifying marks. They might be able to show that the deadly bullets had been fired from the gun in the river, but unless the investigators could find a link between the gun and Tuffy—or whoever the shooter was—they couldn’t prove he had used it to commit murder.
During that third week in February, a very attractive twenty-seven-year-old woman named Loretta Scott read the paper and felt her heart constrict. She had been panicky since Christmas Day, worrying about that gun, although she had nothing whatsoever to do with killing Morris Blankenbaker or Gabby Moore. She hadn’t even known them except by sight.
But Loretta Scott had been drawn into a most bizarre sequence of events, all because she wanted to help out a relative. Now Loretta was apprehensive as she contacted a public defender and said she might have a legal problem. She told him that she might know something about a gun that had possibly been involved in a murder. She didn’t want to believe that it was, but she confessed that she and her brother had thrown it into the Naches River.
“Could I be in trouble?” she asked.
The public defender pulled no punches. “You could. I think you should tell the prosecuting attorney what you know.”
First, though, the attorney from the Public Defender’s office placed a call to Jeff Sullivan and gave him the plot of a theoretical set of circumstances involving a bystander who had inadvertently become involved in a murder—or two murders—“after the fact.”
The Yakima County prosecutor understood immediately what he was hearing. They had just hit paydirt. He asked the attorney to bring his client into the courthouse.
Together, Loretta Scott and her attorney appeared at Jeff Sullivan’s office in the Yakima County Courthouse. Tall and slender with huge sloe eyes, Loretta could have been a model. But not on the day she came in to tell her story; she was trembling too badly.
Loretta Scott explained that she was Tuffy Pleasant’s first cousin on his father’s side. For seven months of the previous year, she had lived with her three small children in Walla Walla, Washington, over a hundred miles southeast of Yakima. She said that she and Tuffy had been close growing up but she had seen little of him in the past few years. The Pleasant clan was large and cherished family loyalty, but Tuffy hadn’t been around much, and then she had moved out of Yakima for a while herself.
Loretta said she had been surprised when Tuffy visited her in Walla Walla around Halloween. He had not called her first; he just showed up on a Thursday afternoon. She was startled, but she was happy to see him too.
“We sat down and rapped and went to the store and got some food and ate … and then,” she continued, “and I don’t know how the conversation really came about—he asked me, ‘Hey, Cuz, do you have any weapons? Do you have a gun?’”.
“I said, ‘Yeah, I have a gun,’ and he asked, ‘Can I see it?’”
Loretta Scott said she had an old .22 that someone had given to one of her brothers and then he had given it to a friend, who had given it to her. She had been having trouble with an old boyfriend who wouldn’t let go. Having the gun around made her feel a little safer. She had no idea where it had come from in the beginning. When she had bad times with her ex, somebody gave it to her. When Tuffy asked about a gun, she retrieved it from where she kept it hidden from her children and showed it to him.
Asked to describe it. Loretta remembered that the gun had a long barrel and some kind of white tape around the grips. Tuffy had told her that he might buy it from her, but he would have to test it first. He told her that he needed it for “protection.”
“You can have that old gun for thirty-five dollars,” Loretta told him.
Tuffy had played with her kids and visited and then stayed the night at her home. Just before he left for Yakima the next day, he asked her if he could try the gun out. Then he asked for a potato. She had looked at him as if he were crazy, but she handed him one.
“And so we went out into the backyard,” she said, “and he took the potato and held it in his hand and he fired the gun off into the potato to see how much power it had.”
“What happened to the potato?” Prosecutor Jeff Sullivan asked.
&n
bsp; “It went all over. It hit me in the eye.”
Tuffy had tried shooting a potato twice and then, satisfied, he said he would buy the gun. He didn’t give her any money at the time, but offered to pay her later. Loretta didn’t know what he needed a gun for and he didn’t offer any explanation. He was a good kid who’d never been in any trouble, so she wasn’t concerned.
Loretta said she had never checked for a serial number on the gun, but she remembered it had a clip in it, and that she had given Tuffy some bullets that came with it.
On November 10, Loretta Scott had moved back to Yakima. Sometime in the next few weeks, she had seen Tuffy again over at her sister’s house. He didn’t have the gun with him, and he had never paid her. Thirty-five dollars wasn’t that much, but he had promised. On November 29, Loretta decided to confront him about getting either the gun or the money back and she went to the apartment he shared with his girlfriend when he was home from college.
Tuffy was outside working on his car when she drove up and he grinned at her and sauntered over to her car.
“I went over there and I said could I have it back?”
Loretta said, “He gave the gun back. He went to his car and wrapped the gun up in a cloth and gave it to me.”
Loretta said she had stuck it in her purse and then put it in a closet at her apartment. That seemed to be the end of the matter. She wasn’t mad because her cousin hadn’t paid her for the gun and she had it back. As far as she knew, he had just wanted to carry it to look like a big man. He was going to college, he wasn’t in any trouble and the whole transaction was no big deal.
Loretta Scott paused as she answered the detectives’ and the prosecutor’s questions. She was still nervous, but she felt better now that she’d started to tell the story.
“Okay,” Jeff Sullivan asked her, “did Angelo [Tuffy] ever come to you again asking for the gun?”
“Yes, he did,” she said. “On the twenty-fourth … Christmas.”
It was Christmas Eve and she and her sister were alone when he came over and said, “Can I get that from you again, Cousin?” He didn’t say the word gun at first but she knew what he meant. She asked him what he wanted it for, but he didn’t really answer. All he would say was, “You’ll read about it in the paper.”
She stared at him. That didn’t sound so good. But he seemed to be in a hurry, and he was Tuffy—her “Cuz,” her longtime friend. She gave him the .22 again and he asked about ammunition. “I told him I only had one bullet left—in the bathroom in the medicine cabinet. We were in there already and I just had to turn around to get it for him.”
She remembered that she had put the lone bullet in a medicine vial when she cleaned the cabinet. It was there with a single aspirin, a bobby pin, and a penny.
When Tuffy left, her sister had looked at her and shook her head. “You shouldn’t have done that, Loretta,” she said flatly.
Loretta had wondered briefly why her sister hadn’t objected while Tuffy was in the house. Whatever he wanted the gun for, it was too late now. She moved about her kitchen, getting ready for a family Christmas Eve party.
All over Yakima, people were celebrating the holiday.
The first time Loretta Scott had given Tuffy her gun, she had had to go and ask for it. That’s probably why Loretta’s sister had told her she had done a dumb thing. Oddly, she didn’t have to ask for the gun this time. Tuffy was back before she knew it.
Loretta had been bewildered to see Tuffy again at about 1:30 A.M. Christmas morning. Her Christmas Eve party was in full swing when he and his girlfriend, Rene, showed up unexpectedly. But he hadn’t come to the party; he had come to give her the .22. She thought that was kind of strange—his bothering to come to her house on Christmas Eve.
“Did you have any conversation with him?” Jeff Sullivan asked Loretta.
“No, he just gave it to me. I put it in a drawer.”
Loretta had no idea what Tuffy had wanted with the gun that he had kept for only five hours. Not, at least, until Christmas morning.
“We had opened our Christmas gifts and we were supposed to have dinner at my mother’s house,” Loretta said nervously. “When I came in the door, my sister said, ‘Loretta, I have something to tell you.’”
Loretta Scott had thought her sister was just joking and she moved toward the buffet to fill her plate. But her sister was adamant that she stop and listen to her news before she ate.
“Okay,” Loretta said. “Before I fix my plate. What?”
“Mr. Moore is dead.”
“Aww, girl, go on.” Loretta laughed.
“No,” her sister said urgently. “He’s dead. He was shot last night.”
Suddenly, Loretta Scott had lost her appetite and any Christmas spirit. “He was shot last night?” she whispered.
“Yeah, he was shot last night with a twenty-two.”
“With a twenty-two?” Loretta repeated like an automaton. She kept hearing Tuffy say, “You’ll read about it in the paper.”
She stayed at her mother’s house so her children could enjoy the day, but her mind had been going ninety miles an hour. She could not believe that Tuffy had had anything to do with shooting Mr. Moore. Mr. Moore had made Tuffy a champion. Still, on Monday, she was waiting for the paperboy at five. She took the paper in carefully but was afraid to open it. She set it down on the kitchen table. “I let it sit there until about eight-thirty and I started thinking. I was trying to get my mind clear.”
Loretta still could not imagine that Tuffy would hurt anyone, much less Mr. Moore. She turned to her boyfriend. “G,” and the look on her face made him ask, “What’s wrong?”
“I’ve got a gun,” she answered. “And I’ve got a feeling something is wrong.”
Loretta picked up the paper and started reading about Gabby Moore’s murder. “When I got to the twenty-two-caliber part, I panicked.”
The paper said the bullet had been a .22 caliber long bullet, and that was the same kind of bullet she had given to Tuffy. She asked “G” if she could borrow his car, a brand new Oldsmobile.
He handed her the keys. Whatever was going on, he didn’t particularly care to know the details.
“I went to my mother’s house,” Loretta told the investigators who were listening to her recollections avidly.
“I had forgotten that she had left and went to Seattle, and there was no one there but my brother, Charles. He was having a little party. I called him into the bedroom, and I said, ‘Chucky. I did something terrible. I don’t know what to do about it. I’m panicky and I’m scared and I don’t want to believe it. I think it’s a dream.’”
Seeing how upset Loretta was, Chucky Pleasant was scared too.
“He panicked right along with me,” Loretta said. “We started talking about, ‘Let’s bury the gun,’ and we started acting like Columbo—trying to pick apart a puzzle and everything. And so we got into the car and so we decided to throw it in the river.”
“Where did you throw it in the river?” Jeff Sullivan asked.
“The Naches.”
They had been heading south toward Yakima when they approached the Twin Bridges. If they hadn’t been so frightened and if the reason for their mission hadn’t been so deadly serious, their efforts to get rid of the .22 might have been humorous. It was like a snake lying between them on the car seat, and neither of them was adept at stealthy games.
Chucky Pleasant, nineteen, who was also Tuffy’s first cousin, had flung the gun from the car, aiming at the Naches River. Instead, he hit the bridge railing and the gun bounced back into the road. Loretta told him to get out and throw it far, far out into the swiftest, deepest part of the river. She would circle around and pick him up on the other side of the road.
It was very dark and cold. December 26. They were both scared to death that someone would see them. They didn’t want the gun, but they didn’t want to implicate their cousin in a murder. It was almost as if they could throw the gun away, the whole ugly business could be over and forgotten.<
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Chucky picked up the gun and threw it where it looked like the river was deep and running fast. He didn’t know that he had only tossed it onto the little island below the bridge where the water would not be deep for long.
It was ironic, Jeff Sullivan realized. If Chucky Pleasant hadn’t missed with his first throw, the gun would have gone into such a deep part of the river that no one would ever have found it. The second throw was the one that hit the water over the island.
Loretta Scott was still afraid as she poured out her story, but telling it to the police and the prosecutor made her feel a little better. She still fully expected to go to jail.
She said her brother hadn’t told her exactly where he had thrown the gun, but he had assured her it was “deep.”
“What did you do after you threw the gun in the river?” Sullivan asked.
“I went home and went to sleep.”
Loretta had read the papers, seen all the stories about Mr. Moore and Mr. Blankenbaker, but she had tried to put it all out of her mind. She didn’t want to know what had happened. It was exactly two months later—a few days before she came to the prosecutor—Loretta said, when her cousin Tuffy had showed up at her new apartment.
He was the last person she wanted to see. He seemed jittery. He was jittery, and that just wasn’t like Tuffy. He always had fun and saw the happy side of things. But he had been having too many visits from Vern Henderson, and Vern had told him how much the police could tell if they ever found the gun that shot Gabby and Morris. And Tuffy had read about the Klingele boys finding a .22 automatic in the Naches River. He wanted to make sure that it wasn’t the gun.
Tuffy and Loretta talked around the subject. They had known such happy family times together in the past, and each of them wanted so much to go back to those days. But it was too late. Finally, Tuffy blurted out a question, “Where’s the gun?”
Loretta studied his face, and she knew she had to find out what had really happened to Mr. Moore. Feeling a little guilty, she told Tuffy a lie. “Oh, I gave it to some dude who lives down in Florida. I just gave it to him.”