The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips

by Stephen Baldwin

  “Sure, sure, sure,” Andy said. “Tell you what. Why don’t I walk out to your car with you. It will give us a chance to talk. I have a couple of questions I would like to ask you.”

  “Yeah, that’ll be fine. But I really have to hurry,” John said. He picked up his pace as he went out the door. Andy followed. “So what do you need to know, Officer?”

  “Oh, nothing big. Nothing official, that is. Just wanted to check on you. You know, find out how you are doing since your son died,” Andy said.

  “I’m fine. I already told you, Officer, I have a hope that is bigger than death.” John moved quickly down the building three stairs and started toward his car. “It’s you I’m concerned about. How are you doing? You didn’t look so good at Gabe’s funeral.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m doing great. But back to you, if you are doing so well, why did you move out of your apartment so fast?”

  With that, John stopped a few feet short of his car. He turned to Andy, raised his palms, and said, “The apartment reminds me of a reality that isn’t real. My son isn’t dead. He’s more alive than you or me. Like Jesus said, I don’t need to look for the living among the dead.” None of this made any sense to my old man. John’s talk of his son being alive made Andy think the guy was mental or something. “Now, really, Officer, I have to run. I’m too late already,” John said as he turned and started walking to his car.

  About the time John reached the car door handle, Andy called out to him, “Why would your ex-wife say you killed your son?” The second the words left his lips, Andy wished he could reel them back in, but he couldn’t help himself. That question had been gnawing on him for days and he couldn’t keep it in any longer.

  To hear Andy tell it, what happened next was huge. Me, I didn’t read too much into it, but then again, I wasn’t there. Still, I think that even if I had been, I wouldn’t have leaped to the same conclusion my old man did. Anyway, Andy threw out his stupid question to John, told him that his wife had accused him of murdering his child. And John’s only response was to turn, look Andy right square in the eye, smile, and shake his head. Then he climbed into his car and drove off. Andy took it as a smug, smart-ass, Oh, wouldn’t you like to know? kind of thing. Keep in mind, Andy thought he had a knack for reading people. The cop in him said he noticed subtle little things other people missed, and he could figure out pretty quickly what someone was all about. And the things that made John look guilty weren’t so subtle. From the moment John answered the door talking on the phone, Andy’s suspicions were aroused. Then the guy didn’t act that upset over his son being dead. To Andy, that just seemed flat-out weird. I don’t know what he expected John to do, maybe go jump off a bridge or something. I’m not sure. But remaining calm and quoting Bible verses was not, in Andy’s mind, the appropriate response to the death of a child. And neither were a lot of things Andy saw in John and heard him say.

  Andy still didn’t have an answer as to why a father would kill his own son, but watching John drive off from the Madison Park Apartments, his gut told him Loraine was right. Proving it would be a much harder proposition. But then again, Andy always liked challenges.

  After leaving the apartment complex, Andy drove back to his house, stripped out of his uniform, and climbed into the shower. He didn’t have to report to work for several more hours. On his way from the front door to the bathroom, he made one detour. He picked up his beloved Big Chief pad and turned to the only page on which he hadn’t done any brainstorming, the “how” page. Quickly he scribbled two sentences. The first simply said: “How did he do it?” The second said: “How can I prove it?” Tossing the pad onto the living-room sofa, he walked back to his bathroom, climbed into the shower, and let the hot water wash over him until his fingers were pruney. The water lubricated the gears in his brain. As he stood there soaking, he kept asking himself, How am I going to nail you, John Phillips? How am I going to prove you did it?

  As he stood there soaking, another “how” question came to him in the shower. He jumped out and didn’t even wait to dry off before finding his Big Chief pad. Water dripped onto the floor as he stood there naked and wrote, “HOW CAN I GET HIM TO ADMIT WHAT I KNOW HE DID?!!!!” Proving he did it wasn’t enough for Andy. He wanted to hear with his own ears the sweet sound of John admitting his guilt. Andy wasn’t interested in framing an innocent man. No. He was out for justice. And true justice demanded that the guilty man take full responsibility for his crime, and suffer the consequences. Andy needed a confession to feel satisfied that he’d done enough for Gabriel Phillips, and he would not rest until he made it happen.

  Chapter 5

  THE WAY I’VE HEARD the story, and I’ve heard it many, many times, Loraine Phillips strikes me as the kind of person who never does anything without first thinking it out long and hard. In her taped statement to the police—a copy of which, by the way, I have tucked away in a drawer in my home in Trask—she never once mentioned Andy by name. She talks about going out and finding herself a “real man,” but she never says who that real man might be, or how many real men she found. Andy may have been the only one. I don’t think he was, although Andy does. Not that it matters. She wasn’t looking for anything more than a way to completely emasculate John. I’ve heard of bitter ex-wives with a taste for conflict, but she outdoes them all.

  Whether or not Andy was the only man in her life (and her bed) matters less than the fact that he believed her when she said John killed Gabe as an act of cold-blooded revenge. Any doubts he may have had drove off with John that morning at the Madison Park Apartments.

  Andy believed Loraine. But believing something and having the proof to back it up are two different things entirely. Andy had some circumstantial evidence and a gut feeling, but that’s not enough to indict a man, much less convict him. The whole case came down to a “he said, she said” kind of thing. Loraine said John killed their son; John said the boy fell out of bed and hit his head on an open drawer. The evidence could go either way, depending on whose version you believed. Andy also faced the problem that this wasn’t his case to prove. He may have been a part of the investigative team, but the sheriff’s department took the lead in these things. Their analysis carried far more weight with the district attorney than the opinion of a small-town cop. Andy had friends over there who were working on the case, but they didn’t have the same fire for it that he did. Nor had they made up their minds about John’s guilt or innocence. Honestly, I think the whole thing would have gone away if not for my dad’s persistence. I know it would have. But Andy wouldn’t let it go, and he wouldn’t let Ted Jackson, Mike Duncan, or anyone else on the Harris County Sheriff’s Department forget about it, either.

  Andy’s search for proof took him back to the Madison Park Apartments. He knew he wouldn’t find any new physical evidence there. Anything the initial investigative team might have missed was scrubbed away by the team of women from John’s church who descended on his apartment two days after John moved out. Or should I say, after he was moved out. Aside from the brief visit when he encountered Andy there, John never went back to his apartment after Gabe’s death. The way I heard it, he didn’t want to go back there with all the blood tracked all over the apartment. A friend from church offered to let him move in with him over in Crosse, and John took him up on it. A group of men moved all his stuff out, while their wives cleaned the apartment like it had never been cleaned before. Moving out of Trask came easy for John. It wasn’t like he’d put down any roots in the six months he’d lived there. No one from Madison Park puts down roots. Everyone out there was pretty much invisible until some tragedy forced the rest of the town to take notice. Nothing has changed. It’s still that way today.

  With no physical evidence to search for, Andy started looking for witnesses who would back up his theory about how Gabe died. In his mind, getting them to talk wouldn’t be a problem. Andy once told me that he could get anyone to do just about anything he wanted. Considering how his story ended up, I would have to agree w
ith him. So he went to work on the people of Madison Park. By the time he was done, he must have interviewed every man, woman, and child in the entire place. He didn’t find exactly what he was looking for, but what he discovered came close enough.

  The interviewing process began at the epicenter of the whole affair, apartment 323. On his first day of playing Perry Mason, Andy went to the apartment next door, where the woman lived who’d called the police the night Gabe died. He already knew from the case file that a sheriff’s department team had taken a statement from the woman on the night of Gabe’s death, but that didn’t stop him. They’d only asked about the noises she’d heard on that night. Andy wanted to know more about John and Gabe’s relationship, and whether she’d seen the fits of rage Loraine had described. He had a hunch she had. After all, she was scared to go to John’s apartment by herself that night.

  Andy knocked a couple of times before the door of apartment 325 slowly opened wide enough for a pair of eyes standing about four-and-a-half feet off the ground to look out. The chain lock was still latched. The eyes behind the chain didn’t say a word.

  “Is your mommy or daddy at home?” Andy asked.

  “My mom’s at work and I ain’t got no dad,” the boy said.

  “Are you here by yourself?”

  “I’m not supposed to say. My mother told me to tell anyone who called or came by that she was lying down with a headache and to please come back later,” the boy said through the crack of a door opening.

  “Is she?”

  “No,” the boy said. “That’s just what I’m supposed to say. Then I’m supposed to hang up or close the door. My mom don’t want me to talk to strangers.”

  “She’s a smart woman,” Andy said. “Then why are you talking to me?”

  “It’s okay to talk to a policeman. My mother told me that, too.”

  “That’s right. That’s right. You can talk to policemen,” Andy said as he crouched down to eye level with the boy on the other side of the door. “Can you tell me your name?” Andy asked.

  “Brian.”

  “What’s your last name, Brian?”

  “Paul. I have two first names,” Brian said.

  “I guess you do,” Andy said as he continued talking through the slit of the door opening. “Brian, did you know Gabe, the boy who used to live next door?” Brian nodded his head yes. As he did, tears started streaming down his face. “Were you friends with Gabe?”

  Brian sniffed, wiped his face with the back of his hand, and said very softly, “Best friends.”

  “Do you know what happened to Gabe?” Andy asked. On the other side of the door, Brian began shaking, his tears flowed even more freely. He didn’t say a word. I don’t think he could talk even if he wanted. “What’s wrong, Brian? Did you see or hear something the night Gabe died?” Brian nodded his head. “What did you see, son?”

  “I can’t talk no more,” Brian said as he shut the door.

  Andy could hear the fading sound of Brian crying. It sounded like the boy was running to the back of his apartment. Andy raised his hand and started to knock again, but thought better of it. The mother should have been there for even that small snippet of a conversation, and Andy knew it. Pressing an eight-year-old for information without a parent present could blow up in his face. He turned and walked to apartment 321, on the other side of 323. Before he knocked, he remembered who lived there. “I sure as hell don’t feel like talking to Crazy Cathy today,” he said to himself.

  He decided to check the neighbors who lived across the hall. But first, he wanted to go back into the Phillips apartment for another look around. He’d talked the apartment manager out of a key on his last visit, and let himself in. Like every other trip inside that apartment, he went down the short hall toward Gabe’s room. Before he’d taken a step, he heard a sound that nearly made him jump out of his skin. Somewhere in the apartment a child was crying, and it sounded like the child was in Gabe’s room. Andy walked slowly into the short hallway. The crying grew louder. When he reached the room, he stuck his head through the door, unsure of what he would find. The room was empty, just like always, but the cries were now louder than before. He stepped into the room, it was more like a tiptoe, and listened. The closer he went toward the closet, the louder the cries became. He opened the closet door, fully expecting to find a little boy in pain, but the closet was empty. The sound came from the opposite side of the apartment wall, from Brian Paul’s room. Andy smiled. If he could hear Brian now, then surely Brian heard everything that happened on the night of Gabe’s death. The boy may not be an eyewitness, but they didn’t get much closer. “Bingo,” he said to himself.

  Andy sped back to the police station to call Ted Jackson. “Jax,” he said when Ted answered the phone. “I think I found a witness to Gabriel Phillips’s death. Not really an eyewitness. More of an earwitness.”

  “A what?” Jackson said.

  “I know, it sounds crazy, but I think the kid in the apartment next door heard everything through the paper-thin dividers they call walls in those cheap-ass apartments,” Andy said.

  “If you are talking about who I think you are talking about, I already got a statement from the mother. The way she talked, something woke the boy, and he immediately woke her up. She said she didn’t hear anything more than the three other callers from the complex that night said, and the kid was with her almost the entire time,” Jackson said. “Did she tell you anything different?”

  “I haven’t talked to the mother, only the boy. And I think the kid knows more than his mother is letting on. Hell, she probably doesn’t know what he knows. All I did was mention Gabe’s name, and the kid fell apart. He started shaking and crying and ran away. I’m telling you, that kid heard more than his best friend falling out of bed. He heard something that scared the crap out of him,” Andy said.

  “Wait a minute. You talked to the kid without a parent around. Don’t you know anything about real police work?” Jackson said.

  “Whoa. Whoa. It wasn’t like that. I went by the apartment to talk to the mother, and the kid opened the door. I just asked if he knew the kid who used to live next door. That’s all. The rest came from him. I swear. But, even then, it wasn’t much. Whole conversation lasted maybe a minute, minute and a half tops,” Andy said. “I swear.”

  Ted Jackson let out a sigh in response.

  “But here’s the deal,” Andy said, “here’s what you didn’t know. The boy’s bedroom butts right up against Gabe’s. When I was out there just a little bit ago, I could hear the kid crying through the wall, almost like there wasn’t a wall there to begin with. Now, if I could hear this kid crying today, I guarantee you he had a front-row seat to everything that happened the night Gabriel Phillips was killed. We need to bring in this kid and his mother together and find out what he knows.”

  “We? What’s this we business?” Jackson said.

  “We, as in we’re on the case and this is my witness, so I ought to be there when you talk to him,” Andy said. “This kid might know a few other things, too. He said he and Gabe were best friends. He’s probably a good place to start to find out what kind of a father this Phillips guy really was. Loraine Phillips said John used to beat her. If anyone knows whether he had ever hurt Gabe, it would be this kid.”

  “Possibly. Possibly. But this we business still isn’t going to happen. Let me set up a time to talk to the boy. Hell, I’ll even try to get them to come in here so you can listen from the other side of the glass if you want. But that’s as much as I can give you. You seem way too gung ho about this case, almost like it was your kid who died. Like I told you, you need to check your emotions at the door on this one, Andy,” Jackson said.

  “Come on, Jax. You know me,” Andy said.

  “Yeah, that’s the problem,” Jackson replied. “Let me see what I can get set up and I will keep you posted.”

  “Good enough,” Andy said. Then, shifting gears, he asked, “So what’s the status on the case? Is this a full homicide investigat
ion yet? I’m curious as to what the D.A. thinks about what you’ve shown him so far.”

  “We’ve notified his office about what’s going on, but we are nowhere close to delivering a prosecutable case to him. The investigation has only just started. I know this may sound a little strange to you native Traskites, but we have these little things called rules and procedures we have to go by. We don’t have the luxury of making it up as we go along,” Jackson said.

  “Come on, Jax. You have a guy who acts guilty as hell from the get-go. You have a witness who says he did it. You have his fingerprints on the murder weapon. To top it off, your ex-con suspect has a history of beating his wife. It’s not much of a stretch to go from hitting your wife to hitting your kid. What are you waiting on?” Andy said.

  “Loraine Phillips doesn’t fly as a star witness. Hell, I’ve got an ex-wife. I know what they’re capable of. My ex-wife would make me the evil genius behind the Manson Family if she thought anyone would believe her. All you’ve got is a bunch of maybe’s and could be’s. Every bit of evidence we have so far is completely subjective. Sure, it makes Phillips look guilty, if you already think he did it. I’ve got to give the D.A. more than that or he will hand me my ass on a platter,” Jackson said.

  “I just gave you a real witness,” Andy said. “Talk to the kid, then make up your mind. I’m telling you, Jax, my gut tells me this Phillips guy has blood on his hands. You can’t let him get away with killing a little boy who couldn’t defend himself.”

  “Depending on what he says, the kid may be a start, but I’m not about to pin my entire case on the testimony of an eight-year-old. Any defense attorney worth a damn would have a field day with a little kid on cross-examination,” Jackson said. I think he heard Andy clicking his tongue or sighing or something over the phone because he went on to say, “Patience, man. Don’t rush it. Let the evidence do the talking. Listen to what it says. And if it says John Phillips did it, then we will nail his sorry ass to the wall. But if it doesn’t and we still try to nail him, we end up looking like a lynch mob rather than professional law enforcement officers,” Jackson said.