A Fever In The Heart

by Rule, Ann

  “We got everything going again, now,” Vern told him.

  “Okay,” Tuffy continued. “So I went and got the gun. I went to my cousin’s house. She was having a little party, so I had a drink or two and then I asked her if I could get the gun and she didn’t ask me for what or nothing. You know, my cousin is unaware of what is going on.”

  “So I got the gun from her and I went back by Mr. Moore’s place and I honked twice. He was supposed to be ready, see, and he was supposed to come to the door, drunk, you know—trying to get drunk so he wouldn’t feel too much pain.”

  Henderson was hesitant to slow down this outpouring of confession, but he wanted to be sure that he understood what Tuffy was talking about. Why would Gabby have wanted Tuffy to shoot him in the first place? He had to have known it was going to hurt like hell.

  Tuffy Pleasant had known about Gabby’s plan to make Jerilee believe that someone was after him, trying to kill him—just as they had killed Morris. Gabby had seen that she suspected him of being behind Morris’s murder, and he believed he had to convince her otherwise or she would never marry him again. Tuffy knew that Gabby had told Jerilee about mysterious phone calls and broken windows. He knew she hadn’t believed a word of it, and that she had hung up on Gabby, making him more despondent.

  On Christmas Eve, in his obsessive, desperate fool-for-love state, Gabby had demanded that Tuffy help him carry out a wild, ill-conceived, tragic plan.

  Gabby had had it all figured out. If he were to be shot—not actually killed—but just injured by a bullet fired from the gun that had killed Morris, then he was sure Jerilee would relent. He would become a victim himself, and no longer a suspect. He didn’t care how much it hurt; nothing could hurt him more than being without Jerilee. Besides Gabby planned to drink enough while Tuffy was picking up the gun so that the pain wouldn’t get to him.

  Jerilee. Jerilee was why Gabby had threatened Tuffy and sent him out into that icy Christmas Eve to find the .22 that had killed Morris. If Loretta hadn’t moved from Walla Walla back to Yakima the month before, it would have been impossible to carry out Gabby’s plan. Walla Walla was at least a four-hour round trip. Tuffy could never had retrieved the gun and come back to Yakima before Derek Moore got home from his date.

  But Loretta was only blocks away, and Gabby had convinced Tuffy that he would turn him into the Yakima police and say he had shot Morris unless Tuffy did exactly what he ordered.

  Vern Henderson could sense that Tuffy Pleasant must have been driven by two tremendously compelling and powerful emotions that night. He loved Gabby Moore—his coach, his alternate father, the man who had told him he could do anything and be anything he wanted to be, the man whose guidance had already taken him to heights of glory he could never have imagined. He must have wanted to bring back the old Gabby again, the happy, joking, confident Gabby. He had seen the man’s heart break over the loss of Jerilee, and he wanted Gabby to have her. After months of listening to his coach talk about Jerilee and break down in tears, Tuffy had finally believed that nothing else was going to make him happy. Tuffy couldn’t see it, he’d said, but Gabby Moore was a one-woman man.

  Tuffy’s second emotion was probably even stronger—the instinct to survive that bubbles to the surface of any human being in danger. Gabby had scared him when he picked up the phone and dialed the police. If Gabby turned him in and said he had shot Morris, Tuffy knew they would come and arrest him, and he would do heavy hard time.

  When Gabby was drunk, there was no telling what he would do. And he was drinking heavily on Christmas Eve.

  And so, Tuffy had gone to get the .22 from his cousin Loretta. He explained Gabby’s plan in more detail.

  “He was trying to get drunk so he wouldn’t feel too much pain. [He would] come to the door, and I was supposed to hit him in his left shoulder. I was supposed to hit him—just nick him in his left shoulder.” (Tuffy had no way of knowing about Gabby’s conversation with Dr. Myers. He didn’t know Gabby had researched just where the bullet should go in so it would wound but not kill him.)

  There were tears in Tuffy’s eyes as he moved through the scene in Gabby’s apartment on Christmas Eve in his mind. He shook his head almost imperceptibly as he brought it all back, as if he could not believe that it had really happened.

  “So I banged on the door,” Tuffy remembered. “But it didn’t come to that. What happened was I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it and I tried to talk to the man. I tried to talk to him, so we went inside. He had a few more drinks and I kept telling him—talking to the man. I said, ‘Look, I can’t do it.”

  Vern Henderson tried to picture what it must have been like. He knew that Tuffy was a womanizing, party-going mischief-maker. He knew he had given his parents any number of gray hairs. But Tuffy wasn’t naturally a mean guy, and he had loved Gabby Moore like he loved Andrew, like he loved his natural father. Could Tuffy have fired a bullet into his own father? No. Could he have fired a bullet into Gabby?

  Maybe, but it must well nigh have killed him to do it. Vern waited while Tuffy took a deep breath and kept talking and the tape recorder lead circled around and around.

  “He said, ‘You are going to do it, whether you like it or not.’”

  “But what it was supposed to be,” Tuffy said desolately. “It was supposed to have just been a hit and a miss, and therefore the hit and the miss [would have meant] he could get to the phone and call up his girlfriend named Cathy so she could call the ambulance and then things start from there. There was supposed to have been only an attempt made on his life.”

  Tuffy said that Gabby kept insisting that he had to shoot him, and that he realized his own neck was “on the chopping block” for Morris Blankenbaker’s murder.

  “So, therefore, I took the gun, you know … I shot him, you know. I pointed the gun, you know. As soon as he turned his back—right here in his left shoulder … As he turned, I shot him in the shoulder, high in his left shoulder. Okay, well, it happened he turned and stumbled, but then I guess I hit him low and then that was it. I just left and took the gun back to my cousin.”

  Tuffy Pleasant made a point of releasing his cousin Loretta from any complicity in Gabby’s death. He stressed that she knew nothing at all about it.

  Henderson believed him. It was odd, he thought, the points of honor in the delicate dance around the crime of murder. The detective did not believe, however, that he had heard the true version of Gabby’s death. Tuffy had waffled too much over the sequence of events. He offered him another cup of coffee, and they changed the tape on the machine.

  There is a rhythm to an effective interrogation. Henderson fell back now into simple questions and answers. The emotion in the room was about to choke them both. He would have to back off and let Tuffy build up to the actual killing again. Bob Brimmer sat back, silently; he could see that Vern Henderson was doing a good job of drawing out Tuffy’s confession.

  “Okay, Angelo,” Vern said, “going back to the beginning of your story. You were talking about being over there Christmas Eve, the twenty-fourth. You were at Mr. Moore’s address on Eighteenth Avenue, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you get there?”

  “My car. I drove.”

  “Where did you park?”

  “I parked out front on the street.”

  “The reason I ask you this is isn’t it kind of normal that everybody comes around and parks in his backyard? Is that right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “A lot of people?”

  “Yes.”

  “Students?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, during the time that you were sitting there talking to Mr. Moore, did anybody else come and go from there?”

  “Yes, my brother, Anthony and Stoney Morton.”

  The story was already changing slightly. Vern Henderson’s voice betrayed no surprise.

  “About what time were they there?”

  “I would say they were there between nine-thirty and ten-thir
ty.”

  Tuffy said that he had stayed on visiting with his coach after the other two left.

  “Now had you already gone and got the gun by the time your brother and Stoney got there? Was the gun in the house at that time?”

  “Uh … yes.”

  “Where did you put it?”

  “It was on the other side of his daveno—in back of it.”

  “Okay. Now then, did you go out in your car and toot the horn or had you already done that?”

  “That was already done. It was supposed to come down after I honked the horn twice. I was supposed to wait five minutes and then knock on the door, and he was supposed to come to the door and then I was supposed to shoot him.”

  “Okay. Now what happened in the kitchen? There was a curtain pulled loose and the screen door was propped open by a cement block. How did this all come about?”

  “He did it.”

  “He wanted to make it look like a big deal?”

  “Yes, he did that himself.”

  “Did he ever say he had made any phone calls to himself or to his relatives about being threatened? Did he ever tell you anything?”

  “Yes,” Tuffy said. “He told me he had. There were a couple of phone calls about threats being made on his life.”

  But Tuffy said he really didn’t know if Gabby had made the calls himself or not.

  On Christmas Eve, Tuffy thought there had been a phone call for Gabby about 10:15. Vern knew that would have been Gabby’s daughter, but believed she had called him a little later.

  They were approaching Gabby Moore’s horrific death again, and the room crackled with tension.

  “Okay then,” Vern began, “did you go over and pick up the phone after you shot him?”

  “No. He took the phone off the receiver.”

  “He did? This was before you shot him? Why? So there wouldn’t be any phone calls or something?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know,” Tuffy said, distressed. “But I think it was because that way it was off the receiver and all he had to do was dial the number like he planned. He could take the shock and just crawl to the phone and just dial with one hand. That way he wouldn’t have to fumble with the receiver… “

  It wouldn’t have worked, of course. After twenty seconds or so, the phone would have lost its dial tone and Gabby would have had to hang it up. That would have been harder for him than to leave it on the hook all along. It sounded crazy, but maybe he didn’t want the sound of a phone jangling as he braced himself for the bullet he had apparently ordered Tuffy to fire into his body.

  But Vern knew that Gabby had done one more thing before he prepared to stop a bullet. He had turned on his stereo, set the needle on his record of “Lay Your Head Upon My Pillow,” and turned the volume up high. Ray Price’s words of lost love had floated through his apartment long after he died—until the needle wore a groove it couldn’t get out of.

  “The whole plan revolved around the fact that he wanted Jerilee to come back?” Vern asked again. “Is that right?”

  “Jerilee…” Tuffy Pleasant made the name sound like a swear word. “Yes. He wanted to prove the fact that he had nothing to do with Morris Blankenbaker’s death and that he wanted her that bad—enough to go all the way.”

  “After you shot him and he fell to the floor, how did you leave the place?” Henderson asked.

  Tuffy looked down at the floor. Then he gazed straight into Vern’s eyes. “Uhhhhh. I didn’t shoot him and he didn’t fall on the floor. I shot him when he was already on the floor in what we call in wrestling terms the ‘referee position,’ both hands on the floor with your palms down.”

  The room was silent for a full minute. What a travesty of everything that the shooter and the dead man had been to each other and to the sport they had both loved. Gabby Moore had taught Tuffy everything he knew about wrestling. In the end, in the last moment of time they would spend together in this lifetime, Gabby had dropped to his hands and knees, drunk from a full bottle of whiskey, and assumed the “referee position”—after instructing Tuffy exactly where to shoot.

  It made an awful picture, but it explained more how Gabby could have lain there without so much as a tiny spray of blood on his T-shirt. The .22 that went in beneath his left armpit had done its damage as he dropped the last few inches to the floor and his full weight compressed his chest, holding back the quarts of blood that were already drowning his ruined heart and lungs.

  “How far away were you when you shot him?” Henderson asked.

  “How far is that table, there?”

  “Two feet,” Vern answered, and then understanding what Tuffy meant, he asked, “You mean from where you are sitting from the wall of this room? Oh, we are talking about seven feet—or something.”

  Tuffy indicated that he had been six or seven feet from Gabby when he pulled the trigger, with Gabby’s voice repeating, “Shoot … shoot … shoot … ”

  “Did you point the gun, aim the gun, or just pull it up and shoot?”

  Vern knew that Tuffy had had only one bullet. Only one. If he had missed, in all likelihood Gabby would still he alive.

  “I pointed it at his shoulder,” Tuffy said. “But then he moved … I believe he fell against the refrigerator … I guess from the effects of the alcohol.”

  “Are you sure he was down on his hands and knees?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you try to bend over to shoot him?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t just walk up and shoot straight down, did you?”

  “No, … I was off to the side.”

  “And did he just fall to the floor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you say anything to him?”

  “No.”

  “You just got out of there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was this the plan after you shot him? You were to run out of there and leave?”

  “Well, it wasn’t a plan. I just did it.”

  Vern Henderson asked the next question quite deliberately. He needed to know which emotion had prevailed in the end: Gabby’s power over Tuffy, or Tuffy’s own fight to survive as a free man? “Now, did you do this because he had you up against the wall or did you do this because this was the plan he had?”

  “I mainly did it because he had me up against the wall. I really believed he had me …”

  With those words, Tuffy Pleasant probably sealed his own fate. When Tuffy left Gabby’s apartment, he could not have known if Gabby was alive or dead. He ran into the frigid night with the music still playing behind him, “Don’t look so sad … I know it’s over. Let’s just be glad we had some time to spend together. There’s no need to watch the bridges that we’re burning …”

  Vern Henderson and Bob Brimmer knew what had happened; they had been present at Gabby’s autopsy. That single .22 bullet had hit a rib and gone crazy. All of Gabby’s planning and careful questions to Doc Myers had been for nothing; you can’t trust a .22 slug to go where its intended anymore than you can throw a knife with your eyes closed and expect it to hit a target.

  Tuffy Pleasant was drained. He knew that he would have to tell Bob Brimmer and Vern Henderson about the night that Morris Blankenbaker died.

  But that could wait until tomorrow. In his mind, he had to be seeing the kitchen where Gabby Moore lay, unmoving, and hearing that song again, over and over and over.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Even under ordinary circumstances, February 29 is a special date, but on this Sunday, February 29, Vern Henderson and Bob Brimmer were about to experience—at least, they hoped they were—the culmination of an intensive investigation, the last answer to the last question. Who had shot Morris Blankenbaker?

  Angelo “Tuffy” Pleasant sat once more in the interrogation room of the Yakima Police Department. They began by talking, the pas de deux that takes place in every well orchestrated interrogation. Almost always, everything in the suspect makes him want to keep silent. Often he is appalled at what he (or she)
has done. It is difficult when the words finally burst forth, to be frozen forever on a tape recorder. Tuffy’s confession to shooting Gabby Moore had been hard, but it was obvious that he had been cajoled, ordered, blackmailed, and threatened to shoot by the victim himself. There was every reason to think that he had shot in the belief that he would only wound—that he never intended to kill his hero.

  When Tuffy Pleasant had confessed to shooting Gabby Moore, he had conveyed his shock and his grief. When he said that Gabby had had him “up against the wall” it was apparent that Tuffy meant just that. At the time of the shooting on Christmas Eve, he had felt he had no other choice.

  But Morris’s death was something else again, something to be ashamed of. The victim had not participated in his shooting, and he hadn’t braced for the bullet. Vern knew from the blood “blowback” on Morris’s hand that all he had had time to do was throw up that hand, a flesh-and-blood barrier against death, and he only did that at the last moment when he finally recognized his enemy. Morris’s murder had been the result of a cowardly and treacherous plot.

  It had been the ultimate act of poor sportsmanship, something that both Vern and his prisoner deplored. It was no wonder that this was the murder that was hardest for Tuffy to discuss.

  They took their positions across the table from one another: Vern on one side and Tuffy on the other. Way back in the beginning of the probe, Vern had told Tuffy that he would eventually find out the truth, and he had compared their verbal jousting to a “game.” It was a game of deadly seriousness, and they had now come to the last period of play.

  Once again, Vern would do the questioning. All three of the men in the room acknowledged why Tuffy had shot Gabby Moore. It was simple and terrible: Gabby had had Tuffy backed into a corner. Tuffy had told them the day before that he feared he would take the fall for Morris’s murder, even though he hadn’t done it.

  Well, then, who had? Maybe now they would know, Vern thought he already did. “I was always honest with Angelo,” he recalled, “I told him the things that I knew to be true, and I said, ‘This is how I knew you did it.’”

  Off the tape, Tuffy admitted that he had tried to tell Morris to leave Jerilee alone—for Gabby’s sake. He had confronted Morris that night in his yard and tried to reason with him. “He told me he wasn’t going to leave her alone,” Tuffy said, “because Jerilee was his wife.”