She didn’t stop yelling until Andy got to the stairway leading up the outside of building three. He did his best to ignore her. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but you’re going to have to stay down here,” he said to her as he reached the stairs. “Don’t get too far away because I will need a full statement from you as soon as I check everything out.”
Andy went about the business at hand. He went up the stairs of building three in search of apartment 323. Another neighbor waited for him at the top of the stairs. “Oh, Officer, I’m glad you’re here,” the woman said. To Andy, she looked like she may have been maybe twenty. As it turns out, she was a twenty-four-year-old single mother. Seems like half the population at Madison Park has always been made up of single moms. “My son came running into my room scared and crying, which is why I called,” she continued. “I started to go over and knock on the door myself, but I was a little nervous about doing it. I’ve met the guy a few times. Our boys play together when his son stays with him, but I don’t know him well enough to knock on his door in the middle of the night, especially after what my son heard.”
“That’s probably wise, ma’am,” Andy said. He felt a little funny about calling someone “ma’am” who looked like she had just graduated from high school. “You said your son heard something that shook him up?”
“Yes, sir. My son, he’s eight. He came running into my room. He was shaking, he was so scared.”
“I’ll check it out. You should go back to your apartment, miss. I’m sure everything is fine. There’s probably nothing here for your son to be afraid of, but if there is, I will take care of it. Which apartment are you in, just in case I need to get a statement from you?”
“I’m right next door in 325.”
With that, the woman went back into her apartment. Andy heard the dead bolt turn and the slide of the chain into the extra lock. “These people sure are jittery,” Andy said with a sigh. He’d never seen so many people get so shook up over a blaring television. Calls like this at this hour always turned out to be someone asleep in front of a blaring television stuck on the late, late show. Even before twenty-four-hour cable networks, local stations broadcast late into the night, usually filling the dead air with old movies. Andy walked over to apartment 323 and listened at the door. He didn’t hear anything. No yelling. No banging. Nothing. He looked at his watch: 2:17 a.m. All the local stations would have switched from movies to test patterns by now. No wonder it was quiet. “Police department,” he called out as he knocked on the door. No response. He could see a light shining through the peephole. He knocked again, with more authority this time, and called out even louder to wake up the sleeper in front of the television, “Police. I need you to open the door, please.” As he waited for a response, he heard the muffled sound of a man’s voice on the other side.
Andy reached up to bang on the door again, when it opened. A man in his mid-thirties motioned him inside as he continued talking on the phone. “Yes. Yes,” the man said, “thank you, Father.” The man turned his back and continued talking on the phone as though no one else was in the room. Andy took a quick glance around. A brown couch with oversized cushions, along with a ratty recliner, were the only furniture in the room. Andy also noticed the living room didn’t have a television. He looked closely at the man on the phone. He was wearing a faded polo-type shirt and a pair of Levi 501’s, but no shoes or socks. He was walking around barefoot on the linoleum tile of his apartment.
“Sir,” Andy said, “I need you to get off the phone.”
“Amen. Thanks, Eli. Hey, I gotta go. The police are here now. Thanks for praying. Keep it up.” The man spun around to untangle himself from the extra long cord, then hung up the phone. “I’m sorry, Officer. I was just about to call. You were next on my list. He’s back here.” The man turned down the narrow hall toward the smaller of the two bedrooms. “It happened so fast,” he said with a matter-of-fact tone, “there just wasn’t any time. I ran in there as fast as I could, but by the time I got to him, it was already too late. I just had time to tell him good-bye and then he was gone.” Andy felt like he’d walked into the middle of a conversation. The guy’s words didn’t make any sense and his demeanor just didn’t seem right. At least that’s how Andy remembered it when he told me about that night. He had trouble reading the guy, which set Andy’s nerves on edge. As a policeman, he prided himself on his ability to figure people out in an instant. I never thought he was as good at it as he did. “He’s in here,” the man said as he motioned into a small bedroom. Andy thought it odd that the man wouldn’t move past the doorway.
When Andy looked into the room, the entire floor appeared to be painted red. The room was pretty small, maybe seven feet by nine feet, and most of that was filled with furniture and toys, which made the scene look bloodier than it really was. The remains of a shattered goldfish bowl lay near the dresser, the bottom drawer of which stood open. A small boy, maybe eight years of age, was on the bottom bunk. His skin had a bluish gray tint to it. Even before he got to him, Andy knew the boy was dead. Blood soaked the pillow under the child’s head, with a smear running along the side of the mattress up from the floor. Andy’s feet slipped as he hurried across the room, his adrenaline kicking into high gear. Instinctively, he knelt down beside the child and felt for a pulse in his neck. Nothing. Then he laid his head on the boy’s chest and listened for sounds of breath, but didn’t hear a thing. “How long has he been out?” Andy shouted toward the boy’s father.
“Ten . . . maybe fifteen minutes. I . . . I’m not sure,” the man replied. “I don’t know how to do mouth-to-mouth, but I didn’t think it would do any good. I knew he was gone right after I got to him.” The man’s voice cracked just a little as he spoke. He swallowed hard and said, “I just knew he had already gone home.”
Andy shook his head and muttered something under his breath that questioned the man’s emotional stability. He reached under the boy’s body to lift him off the bed and start CPR. As he raised him up, the boy’s limbs hung limp and lifeless. Most of the bleeding had stopped, although a few drips fell from the back of the boy’s head. The pillow was soaked crimson and the boy’s hair and shirt were wet. “My God,” Andy said as he looked for a place to lay the boy on the floor. About the only time my old man ever mentioned God or Jesus was when he was really upset. Even then, they were nothing but words, not divine beings. “Holy, holy Christ,” he said as he laid the boy on the floor and squared himself around to try to revive him. He reached under the boy’s neck to raise his head up for the three quick breaths he had only performed on Resusci Anne, the CPR dummy, up until that day.
Only then did Andy take a close look at the boy. He looked him right in the face and it hit him. “Wait a minute. No . . . Gabe?” he said. Suddenly adrenaline gave way to nausea. A lump of bile hit him in the back of the throat as Andy fought to keep his composure. “Gabe?” he repeated.
“You knew my son?” Gabe’s father asked. “How?”
Andy kept staring into the boy’s face. “I’m a friend of his mother,” he replied but didn’t elaborate. “How did . . .” Andy cleared his throat and tried to speak again. I guess in all the excitement he forgot about trying CPR, not that it would have done any good. The kid’s lips had already turned blue and his body was slightly cool to the touch. “How did this happen?”
“I—I . . . I’m not exactly sure,” the boy’s father replied. “It all happened so fast. My boy had night terrors, and he would wake up screaming all the time. I guess you sort of get used to things like that after a while. They got even worse after his mother and I split up a while ago. I heard him screaming, but I thought I was the one having the bad dream. I woke up just in time to hear him fall. I ran in here, but I couldn’t do anything. I tried. Really, I tried, but I could feel his life slipping out of him, felt his spirit leaving. All I could do was kiss him good-bye and promise I would see him soon. Then he went home.” The boy’s father paused, then said, “Do you know what my son’s name means, Officer?”
>
That last question really got to my pop. He didn’t know what the meaning of a kid’s name had to do with anything, especially with the man’s kid lying dead on a cold, bloody linoleum floor. My old man also found the dad’s lack of emotion rather odd. This was far from the first time Andy had dealt with a family member after a death, but this was the first time he’d seen a parent show so few signs of grief. A couple of years earlier he’d had to break the news to a couple closing in on retirement age that their thirty-seven-year-old son had died in a car crash. A doctor had to come to the house to sedate them both. But this guy was calmer than a televangelist during a tax audit. Maybe he was in shock. Everyone responds to death in different ways, that’s what I think. My old man, he wasn’t so sure.
“God is my strength,” the father went on. “Gabriel means ‘God is my strength.’ His mother wanted to name him Keith, after Keith Moon, the drummer from the Who. She’s a big fan of the Who. The name just didn’t seem to fit. I took one look at him and knew I had to name him Gabriel. It took me a few years, but I finally figured out why. God had talked to me through my son, Officer. Didn’t know it at the time. God was telling me to make Him my strength. Right now I don’t know what I would do if I hadn’t listened.”
Andy made a mental note of how the father seemed to keep his distance from the boy. He never moved from the doorway as he spoke, while Andy stayed on his knees next to the body, his pants legs soaking up the liquid on the floor. As Andy looked down, Gabe seemed much younger to him than eight—younger and smaller. The boy’s mother had once said something about how the other kids picked on him because of his size. Now he seemed smaller still. Andy knew the boy was dead, but he felt a strong urge to reach out and protect him. He grabbed his radio with his left hand, the hand that was covered with blood from the back of the boy’s neck. “Trask dispatch, 52-2. I have a 10-100. Request you get the coroner and Harris County started out here right away.” 10-100 means a “dead body.”
“10-4, 52-2,” the radio crackled back. “Are you sure you want to make the call on the body, Andy? I can have a paramedic and ambulance to you in no time.”
Andy paused for a moment. I don’t know what he hoped to accomplish, but he told the dispatcher, “Okay. Do that. I guess it couldn’t hurt.” Maybe he wanted the kid to still have a chance. More than likely, he just didn’t want to be haunted by the “what-if” questions that follow emergency responders even when they do everything they possibly can. “What-ifs” are about as useful as wishful thinking, but they can sure be hard to shake in the middle of the night. Andy reached over and lightly stroked the boy’s head with his right hand, then stood to his feet. I think it was his way of telling Gabe good-bye. Once the paramedics and sheriff’s deputies showed up, he wouldn’t have another moment alone with the boy. Well, almost alone. The dad was still standing in the bedroom doorway.
“Did you know my son long, Officer?” the father asked.
“No, not too long,” Andy replied as he let out a long sigh. Turning from the boy, he scanned the bedroom. Toys were scattered across the floor, along with a variety of clothes. Typical kid’s room. The sheets and blankets of both bunk beds were strewn about, which seemed odd if Gabe slept in the room by himself. “Did you stay in this room with your son, sir?”
“No, he’s a big boy. He’s able to sleep in his room all by himself,” the dad smiled and said.
If my old man wasn’t already about to pop, that smile put him over the edge. He couldn’t figure out how any father worth a dime could carry on a normal conversation right after his son died in his arms. “Which bed was your son sleeping in?” Andy asked. He also wondered why such a small room had bunk beds if Gabe was the only child in the house.
“I tucked him into the bottom bunk, but I guess he climbed up on top sometime during the night. You know how kids are.” That’s just it. Andy didn’t know how kids were, but he nodded his head as if he did and kept studying the father. About that time he heard the dispatcher notifying the local ambulance service, which back then was run by the volunteer fire department.
“I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t catch your name,” Andy said.
“John, John Phillips. And you?” he replied with a smile as he stuck out his hand. Andy refused it, using the blood on his hand as a convenient excuse. Funny. I’ve never known anyone who shakes with his left hand.
“Officer Andrew Myers,” he replied.
“Are you the same Andy Myers who took my boy to a ball game a few weeks ago?” Andy nodded. “Oh, I have to tell you, my son never stopped talking about that game. He had the time of his life. Thank you for taking him.”
Andy didn’t reply. The ball game felt like a lifetime ago. I guess in a way it was, because nothing was ever the same after my dad walked into that apartment. Nothing.
Chapter 2
A LOT OF YEARS went by before my old man told me about that night. Called it the longest night of his life, when he did talk about it. He arrived at the apartment complex somewhere around two in the morning, and didn’t get back to his apartment until nearly noon. He tried to wash away the night with a thirty-minute shower, and when that didn’t do the trick, he tried to wash it away with a couple of bottles of Jack Daniel’s. That was his third time to fall off the wagon, but who’s counting? Jack didn’t help, which made the longest night of Andy’s life stretch out over a couple of days. He was pretty much sober by the time he reported to work the next evening at eleven, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
You’d think that finding the dead body of a little boy my dad was growing to love was what haunted him. That’s true, but that was only part of it. A small part of it. Finding the body was only the beginning of his problems that night.
The first cop to arrive on a crime scene cannot leave until dismissed by a superior officer, who then assumes control of the situation. In the middle of the night in Trask, the superior officer usually meant someone from the sheriff’s department, at least in a case like this with a dead body and more blood than any one child should have been able to produce. As it turns out, there wasn’t nearly as much blood as it appeared. The water from the broken goldfish bowl made the scene look a lot worse. None of the first responders made the connection—not my dad, and not the volunteer firemen who came in with the paramedics. Those guys, God bless them, only made matters worse. The first two in the room immediately recognized Gabe. Apparently, he played on the same Little League baseball team as their sons. As soon as they made the connection, they lost it. Add vomit to the blood and you have a real mess on your hands. They also tracked blood all over the apartment. That caused a lot of confusion later on when the district attorney got involved. Andy could not remember seeing bloody footprints leading out of the room when he first arrived, although investigators found some bloody house shoes and pajamas in the bathroom, both of which belonged to the father. The first responders also shoved the small chest of drawers next to the bed out of their way when they started working on the body. Like I said, the bedroom was really small.
The room was small, and bloody. Very bloody. But, as I already mentioned, the water from the shattered fishbowl made it worse. No one caught that little detail until Dr. Daniel Warner, the county coroner, showed up. Warner was a royal pain in the butt, but he knew his stuff. He was already in a bad mood when he arrived. “Christ,” he said as he walked into the apartment, “I think the whole town turned out for this little party. It looks like a freaking carnival out there. I nearly ran over a couple of little kids chasing each other around the freakin’ parking lot. And did we really have to call in every emergency vehicle in the entire county for a dead kid? Holy crap.”
Before he could take another step, a young rookie sheriff’s deputy with a clipboard stopped him. Unfortunately for her, she was both a rookie and a woman, a bad combination when it came to Warner. “I’m sorry, sir,” she said. “Authorized personnel only in this area. I’m afraid you cannot come in here.”
“What the hell is this, amateur hour?” he
growled. “Do you think I would venture into this little slice of heaven if I didn’t have to be here, sweetheart?” Then he looked over toward Andy, who was sitting on the couch next to John Phillips. “Hey, Barney Fife, you running this show? You wanna tell Farrah Fawcett here who I am?”
Before Andy could respond, the lead detective for Harris County stepped out from the hallway. “Sorry, Dan,” Deputy Ted Jackson said. “It’s okay,” he said to the rookie with the clipboard, “he’s the coroner.” Jackson then took Warner by the arm and said, “Good to see you. Sorry to have to get you out in the middle of the night.” Jackson was a twelve-year veteran of the sheriff’s department and had been a detective for the past two.
“Whatever,” Warner replied. “What have we got?”
“Eight-year-old boy, dead. Father claims it was an accident. Says the kid fell out of bed and hit his head.”
“It’s always an accident, isn’t it?” Warner said. “Pronounced a woman dead once, bullet hole right in the middle of her forehead, back half of her skull blown off completely. Husband claimed it was an accident. Said he only wanted to scare her by popping a couple of rounds over her head, but his aim was low. True story. Accident. Hell, no one ever does anything on purpose. It’s always an accident. Like that dead baby last week up in Middletown. Mom had shaken the crap out of the kid, turned its brains into scrambled eggs. By the time I got there, the woman’s crying like there’s no tomorrow. Can’t believe her baby is dead. All an accident, she said. Says she was just trying to get the kid to stop crying. Yeah, she stopped it, all right. Friggin’ idiot. Some accident. Just once I’d like to meet someone who’d say, ‘Yeah, I killed the bastard. What of it?’ But, no, it’s always an accident. No one ever means to do nothing. So where’s this accident?” Andy told me that Warner’s rant was the only thing that made him smile all night.
The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips Page 2