The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips

by Stephen Baldwin

  The appeals courtroom wasn’t set up like the traffic courts and district courts he was used to. There was no jury box, nor were there seats for a gallery. Instead, a large table sat at the front of the room, with three large chairs behind it, one for each of the appeals judges. Across from the judges’ table sat another shorter table, where those testifying would sit. On either side were other tables for the attorneys for both the state and the one making the appeal. I think there’s some fancy name for the one appealing his case. It’s not defendant, I don’t think. But then again, I guess it doesn’t really matter what anyone was called. The point was, Andy had to go up in front of these appeals judges and answer their questions under oath.

  He didn’t so much walk into the courtroom as hobble. If I had to guess, I would say he limped and winced and acted all in pain just a little more than normal, just to make sure everyone in the room understood how difficult it was for him to come in and testify. Unfortunately, I have no idea whether his tactic worked. No matter how much I badgered him, he never told me what he was asked or what he said. He said it didn’t matter. He told me, “When the appellate court issued its ruling, John was still on death row and one step closer to being strapped into a chair and having two thousand volts shot through him. That was all that mattered to me at the time.” Sure, I wanted details, but, hey, you can’t make someone talk when they don’t want to. Me, that’s never been much of a problem. Once you get me talking, I can hardly shut up.

  What made Andy’s trip to the appeals court very interesting wasn’t the testimony he gave inside, but what was waiting for him as he left the building. Going down the stone stairs on crutches with a bum shoulder wasn’t easy. Every step made him cringe with pain and curse under his breath. With all his cringing and cursing and slowly moving down the stairs, he did not notice the very large man moving up the stairs toward him until he slid his broken foot right on top of the man’s shoe.

  “I’m sorry, excuse me,” Andy said, his eyes still more focused on where his foot should land than on anyone around him.

  “God heard your prayer in that ditch,” the man connected to the foot said. Andy’s head snapped up, which made him sick with pain from his broken collarbone. The first thing he noticed about the source of the voice was the scar right below his Adam’s apple. His eyes fixated on the scar and could not move higher until the man said again, “God heard your prayer in that ditch, and He will if you let Him.”

  “What?” Andy asked as his eyes moved on up to the man’s face. He recognized him as the man who sat behind John during his sentencing hearing. Standing close up, the man appeared much larger than he had in the courtroom. Although he and Andy were about the same height, this man had at least fifty pounds on Andy, and all of it solid muscle. “He w-will . . . ?” Andy stammered. “He will what?”

  “Help,” the man said, then turned and walked down the stairs.

  Andy tried to follow him, but he couldn’t at the “step, cringe, and curse” pace he had to use to go down the stairs. By the time Andy made it down two steps, the man with the message had disappeared. Andy looked right and left, trying to spot where the man might have gone, or at least the car he’d climbed into, but he didn’t see a thing. It was almost as though the man had vanished. “Dammit,” he growled.

  “I see you have the same eloquent vocabulary you’ve always had,” Ted Jackson said as he came down the stairs behind Andy. “You always were the smooth talker.”

  Andy smiled at the sound of Ted’s voice. He tried turning around quickly, which made him curse again from the pain.

  “It’s good to see you, too,” Ted said.

  “Sorry, Ted,” Andy said. “Didn’t mean to cuss you. I’m a little busted-up right now.”

  “Yeah, you look like crap. What happened? Some jealous husband finally catch you in the act.”

  “Yeah, yeah, very funny,” Andy said, although he felt a little uneasy about how close Ted had come to the truth. “Long story. Basically, I was out running too late in the evening and a car clipped me.”

  “Running? You?”

  “Yep. It’s what keeps me sober. Haven’t had a drink since I left Trask.”

  “Good for you. Good for you. Man, I was worried about you there for a while. It looked like you were trying to commit slow suicide. Glad you stopped. I don’t like funerals any better than you do.” Then, suddenly changing gears, Ted said, “So what were you talking to Eli Williams about?”

  “Who?”

  “Eli Williams, the guy you were just talking to. I didn’t realize you knew him,” Ted said.

  “I don’t. Who is he?” Andy asked.

  “You’re kidding me? I thought you knew everything there was to know about John Phillips. Eli Williams was the guy John nearly killed in Pendleton, but ended up saving his life.”

  “That guy?!” Andy said. “You’re telling me that John Phillips took that guy? How? And what’s he doing here now?”

  “Hey, I don’t explain ’em, I just report ’em. All I know is that is the guy who tried to mess up Phillips in prison, but Phillips turned the tables on him and nearly killed the guy. But then again, Eli wouldn’t be alive right now if it weren’t for John. He stays pretty close to any courtroom where Phillips’s case is being discussed. I don’t know why,” Ted said.

  “I saw him at the sentencing hearing,” Andy said. “To me, looked like he was praying through the whole thing.”

  “Yeah, that fits what I’ve heard about him. So what were you talking to him about?” Andy didn’t answer with words, but the look on his face must have given something away because Ted said, “Did he threaten you? I know the guy is really upset about Phillips being on death row.”

  “No . . .” Andy dragged out his answer. “No, it was nothing like that.”

  “What then?” Ted asked.

  “I don’t really know.” Andy looked around as if he expected the guy to return. “He . . . uh . . .” Andy couldn’t find the right words. Finally he said, “You know, it’s nothing. The guy must be a friend of Phillips because the two are both pretty strange.” I think Andy was trying to convince himself more than Ted with his answer.

  Ted took a close look at Andy. “You have time to go somewhere where we can sit down and talk. You don’t look like you’re going to be able to stand up much longer.”

  “Ya think,” Andy said. Ted helped him down the steps and down the street to a small diner a block or so from the courthouse complex. The place was pretty much empty. The two walked inside and found a spot in a back booth. They spent the next half hour drinking bad coffee and getting caught up on the three years since Andy had moved away. Eventually Andy asked, “So, did they bring you in for the appeal hearing as well?”

  “What appeal hearing?” Ted asked.

  “You know damn good and well what appeal hearing, and don’t tell me you don’t,” Andy said.

  “You mean Phillips? Yeah. I had to answer a bunch of procedural questions, how we gathered our evidence, how we found our witnesses, that sort of thing. You?”

  “Yep.”

  “So, did you ever get over your obsession with getting a confession?” Ted asked.

  “I wrote him a letter a little over a year ago,” Andy said.

  “You what?”

  “Yeah. I wrote him a letter basically asking the same thing I always ask him.” That wasn’t entirely true, but Andy didn’t want anyone else to know what he’d really written.

  “Why?” Ted asked. “Aren’t you ever going to let this thing go?”

  “I thought I had, but something made me start thinking about it again. So I wrote. I figured it was better than driving all the way up to Michigan City. I really don’t ever want to see that guy’s face again.”

  “So, did you get your confession?”

  “Nah,” Andy said. “It’s like you always say, they don’t call these guys cons for nothing.” Andy didn’t see much point in telling Ted how he couldn’t bring himself to read John’s response. He did not wan
t to admit to Ted, or to himself, that he wasn’t nearly as certain about John as he once had been.

  Ted leaned back in the booth, took a drink of his coffee, and said, “Did you really think he would?”

  “Yeah,” Andy said with a laugh, “I did. I know, I’m naïve. I spent too many hours, growing up, watching Perry Mason. By the way, that’s not a problem anymore. I can’t get but one station at my place down in Brown County.” He paused for a moment, then said, “So what do you think motivates a guy to keep claiming he’s innocent even when he’s about to fry? I mean, this has to be his last appeal, right? And I know the governor’s not going to lift a finger to save the guy’s sorry ass. Chambliss has to be salivating at signing the death order, since this is the case that got him elected.”

  “I don’t know, Andy. Honestly, I don’t ever think about it. We proved he was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Case closed. Life goes on. I mean, look at you. You’ve moved on.” Then another thought hit Ted, one it appeared he’d rather not entertain, because he stopped talking and looked down at his cup of coffee.

  “What?” Andy asked.

  “You probably don’t take the Adamsburg paper anymore, do you?”

  “Hell no. I didn’t take it when I lived in Trask. Why?” Andy asked.

  “You probably haven’t heard then,” Ted said.

  “Heard what?”

  “About Loraine Phillips. She, uh . . .” Ted stumbled over his words. “Hell, I don’t know how to put it, so I might as well just say it. About three months ago we got called out to her place. The man she was apparently living with walked in and found her body lying on the floor. She h-had,” Ted stammered, “she had . . . uh . . . blown her brains out. Suicide. A snub-nosed .38 was in her hand, and the powder burns left no doubt. She killed herself. Left a note with only four words on it. She wrote, ‘What have we done?’ Didn’t make any sense to any of us. The tox screen on her came back like a science fair exhibit, so it must have been the chemicals in her system doing the talking. I don’t know. Anyway, I thought you might want to know about her. You were pretty close to her at one time,” Ted said.

  Andy couldn’t say anything for several minutes. His mind raced back to the day he’d given her that gun. She wanted something for protection. He’d planned to show her how to use it, but their relationship fell apart before he could. “Wow,” he finally said. He had trouble catching his breath. “Wow,” he said again. Inside his head the words “what have we done?” replayed over and over. She’d said it to Andy the night Gabe died and again in his dream in the ditch. Andy took a deep breath, then said, “Man. I had no idea. Why uh . . . why . . . didn’t you call me when . . . uh?”

  “Are you okay, man?” Ted said. “You look like you’re about to pass out.”

  Andy did. Pass out, that is. He blamed it on his injuries from getting hit by the car. His little trip to Indy was, he claimed, the most activity he’d tried since he got out of the hospital. “I just overdid it,” he said when he came to a few moments after passing out. Ted didn’t buy his excuse, although he didn’t press the issue. He waited a few minutes for Andy to get his bearings, then found his ride back to Brown County. As Ted loaded Andy into the trooper’s car, he told him, “Take care of yourself” and “Keep in touch.” Andy slept most of the trip back down south. At least he pretended to be asleep. It had been a very long day.

  Once he was finally home, Andy tried to get comfortable on the couch in his cabin, but he couldn’t. His shoulder hurt. His ribs ached. And his leg screamed with pain. He welcomed the pain from all three because they helped distract him, just a little, from the thoughts that closed in around him. “What have we done?” he said to himself, repeating the words of Loraine’s suicide note. “H-how . . . ,” he stammered, then swallowed hard. “How . . . I mean, she only said it that once. How in the hell . . . ?” Nervous energy welled up inside him. He wanted to get up and walk around, but he couldn’t. He could barely move. He wasn’t lying when he told Ted that he’d overdone it with the trip to Indy. Now he didn’t have the energy to do much more than sit on the couch and wish he had turned on the television before he sat down.

  Andy leaned his head back and tried to go to sleep. As soon as he closed his eyes, he found himself in Trask, back at apartment 323 of the Madison Park Apartments, back in a small bedroom. He could see John standing in the doorway, and Gabe on the floor. “You knew my son? How?” he could hear John say. “I wish I’d never known him,” Andy said aloud. “I wish I’d run away from that crazy lady the minute I met her and I wish I’d never talked with that kid of hers and I wish I could forget about the lot of them and never think about them again as long as I live.” “God will, if you let him” flashed in his mind. “Good God, that’s all I need, more voices in my head.” Andy picked up the throw pillow closest to him and did just that. He threw it across the room, where it knocked the rabbit ears off the top of his television. “God will help? Help what? Is he going to help me like he helped Gabe? Is he going to help me like he helped John Phillips?! God gave him a screwball of a wife who emptied his house while he was out doing God’s work and left him with nothing. Hell, if I’d been married to her, I might have been driven to kill as well. But I sure as hell wouldn’t have killed my son if I had a son . . .”

  And then he remembered me. “If I had a son . . .” That phrase stuck in his head. For the first time ever, he thought of me as an actual flesh-and-blood human being. Until then all I had been was a name attached to a child support payment some judge ordered him to make every month. Nothing more. Then he heard John Phillips say, “The truth is I loved my son more than you can understand.”

  “Then how could you have hurt him?!” Andy yelled. Loraine’s voice answered his question. Andy could hear her say, “You have a son. Is a father’s love so strong that he would never do anything to harm his precious child?”

  “But I never hurt my son . . . ,” Andy protested. The foolishness of his words hit him even before they fell from his lips. “Oh, God,” he said. “He will, if you let him,” he could hear the guy on the courthouse steps say. Andy let out a long groan. He forced himself up from his couch. The pain was excruciating, but it didn’t matter. He stumbled across his cabin over to his gun cabinet. His hand shook as he forced the key into the keyhole. Opening the drawer, he pulled out the bottle he’d stashed there long ago. If ever there was a time to pull out the emergency bender kit, he thought this was it. Shoving the bottle under his arm, he made his way back to the sofa, opened the bottle, and did his best to silence the voices from his past.

  When he awoke, he found himself on his bed. His service revolver lay next to his right hand, a box of shells spilled out over the comforter. Andy tried to rise up with only limited success. “Oooohhhhhh,” he groaned. He reached up to rub his head with his left hand, only to find it clutched tightly to something. Pulling his hand up in front of his face ever so carefully, he tried to focus. “A Bible? When did I get a Bible?” It wasn’t like it was a whole Bible. This was a small, thin New Testament. The cover had what looked to Andy to be a pot of some sort printed on it, with the words “A gift from the Gideons” printed right above it. “I don’t know anyone named Gideon. Where did this come from?”

  As he stared at the small Bible in his hand, he noticed his thumb held a page open. “What the hell?” he said. His eyes scanned over the page when a weird-looking name jumped out at him, Zacchaeus. Then his eyes hit a verse in the story of Zacchaeus that seemed to leap off the page, “. . . and if I have taken any thing from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold.*” Andy stared at the verse for several minutes. He couldn’t seem to pull his eyes off it. Finally he managed to toss the Bible out of his hand. He raised himself up on the bed, .38 shells sticking to his side, where his shirt had pulled up revealing bare skin. Brushing them off, he said, “What is all this?” Then he saw the bullet holes in the wall on the left side of his bed. “What the . . . ,” he said. He let out a long groan. “Now I remember,” he said.r />
  Slowly Andy pushed himself from his bed. He limped into the living room. His two table lamps were both smashed on the floor and he noticed that he’d apparently given his television the Elvis treatment. (In case you don’t remember, Elvis once shot his television. So did Andy.) Shuffling slowly into the room, his right foot nearly slipped on some torn-up pieces of paper lying on his hardwood floor next to the mantel. He looked down and saw the padded envelope from John there, ripped open. “Ouch, dammit!” he growled as he lowered himself to the floor. “Man, I am a world-class idiot,” he said as he gathered each of the small pieces of paper. He wadded them in his hand and reached over to toss them into the fireplace, but stopped himself. Instead, he moved over to the couch and spread the papers out on the coffee table.

  Now, I’ve heard this part of the story many, many times, but I never cease to be amazed at how calm Andy was through all this. Think about it. His house is wrecked. There are gunshot holes in his television and in the wall near his bedroom. The way the ammunition was spread out on his bed, you would think he had been under attack the night before, and from the looks of his living room, that would be a pretty good guess. But Andy didn’t react to any of it. He couldn’t remember much after he took his first drink, he downed that bottle so fast, but somehow he could recall that all the damage to his house was self-inflicted. He’d never been a violent drunk before, so something had to set him off, and that something was probably in pieces on top of his coffee table. Yet he sat down and started putting the letter back together like he was working on a jigsaw puzzle. Go figure.