by Laurel Dewey
I don’t question how a woman can do that to a baby. I know that evil lingers in the minds of everyone. It just takes the right fuse to ignite it. I know that people looked at my own father and thought he was a great man. I also know that I didn’t have a chance in hell of convincing anyone that he was a monster and that my brother and I were at his mercy. You can’t judge a book by its cover.
And I don’t question how a fourteen-year-old boy can emerge from the bowels of hell with only a small part of his brain functioning and be able to speak to me with his mind. I don’t question the “coincidence” of being chosen that day to speak at Fletcher’s school or the “synchronicity” that he “just happened” to be warehoused in the classroom I was in at that time.
And I never question my gut. Because my gut has gotten me where I am today. My gut allowed me to survive my own childhood hell and it’s led me to solve homicide case after homicide case for more than seven years.
Writing about this whole ordeal has been cathartic for me. I feel a bit lighter right now. Maybe Sergeant Weyler was onto something when he suggested I do this. It sure as hell beats being psychoanalyzed by a Freud-loving woman with a mauve toilet.
YOU’RE ONLY AS SICK AS YOUR SECRETS
My younger brother, Mike, is engaged to be married. Good for him. But the wedding won’t be for an entire year. I personally don’t understand long engagements. To me, it’s either do it or don’t do it, but don’t keep me in suspense. I have to get him a present, and if he thinks it’s not going to work with his fiancée, I’d like him to give me a heads-up so I don’t have to keep track of the sales receipt in case I have to return his gift.
To further complicate my brother’s whole engagement, he and his fiancée, Lisa, decided that they needed to drag it out by first having a “spiritual blessing” by a “shaman.” Mike, if you’re reading this (and I know you’re reading this), why in the hell did we have to drag our asses across two states and end up in Sedona? If the attraction was the New Agers, we could have packed a lunch and driven over the hill to the Socialist Republic of Boulder, Colorado. It’s infinitely closer than Sedona and I could have escaped the gathering sooner.
I hope Mike doesn’t hire this “shaman” to marry him because I don’t think that quack has a license to do anything except wave a turkey feather and blow sweetgrass smoke in your face. I keep putting “shaman” in quotes because when I think of a real shaman, I think of a four-foot, ten-inch, oilyskinned Peruvian male wearing nothing but a loincloth and a piercing stare and carrying a humble walking stick. I don’t think of a bloated, sixty-year-old Jew who looks like Jack Klugman, wearing a Budweiser T-shirt and a pressed pair of dark denim jeans. Seriously. They were ironed. Who irons their jeans? Oh, that’s right. Bloated, sixty-year-old Jewish “shamans” who drink Bud.
I know, I know. I come off as an abrasive cynic. But it comes with my job. I don’t think anyone else at Mike’s spiritual blessing gave this “shaman” a second thought. They just accepted him for whatever he said he was and left it at that. But not me. I looked at the “shaman” and pondered what thought process it took for him to craft this odd little image. I wondered what his distraught Jewish mother must think. “My son, the SHAman,” I could hear her crying, with a roll of her eyes. Did he scour the Internet looking for “shaman props” to incorporate into his shtick? How many New Age workshops did he sit through in order to develop this ridiculous persona?
People are always saying I’m judgmental. Screw ‘em. It’s not judgmental; it’s called observation. I suggest you learn it. If more people would take the time to observe other people and not just accept what they see on the surface as fact, they wouldn’t have so many damn problems. I’m not saying they’d be happier; I’m saying their lives wouldn’t be so complicated. As a cop, I can’t help it. It’s in my blood to probe beneath the surface. Once you learn the basics of reading body language, posturing, intonations and all the other subtle diagnostic tools good cops use to discern what’s in front of them, you gotta go to the next level, and that next level is unexplainable. It’s a knowing that grips you and leads you toward the truth.
With me, what you see is what you get. No illusions here. But I’m an odd bird in a flock of fakers. I looked around the crowd in Sedona as our “shaman” floated another cloud of sweetgrass across the air. God, what a motley bunch. Those who weren’t standing in bare feet were wearing flip-flops. Who in the hell wears flip-flops to a damn “spiritual blessing”? I even spotted one guy wearing a tenement T-shirt. You know? Those sleeveless numbers that are ribbed and so thin you can see the outline of the guy’s nipples if a cold wind blows? I thought this guy was waiting around to load up the folding chairs before we left for the “honoring of the elements” down by the water feature, but apparently he was a cousin of Lisa’s. America, say hello to your future: It’s wearing a damn tenement tee and flip-flops.
We’re standing around this stagnant fountain that supposedly symbolizes “emotional freedom” as Mike and his future bride are repeating their “intentions” to each other and I can’t take my eyes off this guy in the tenement tee. Lisa’s cousin. I’m starting to wonder if maybe I busted him for doobie years ago. I’ve got a good memory for faces, and I can remember most of the boneheads I’ve taken down over the last two decades. But I can’t figure this one out. Then he looks over at me and nods his head like he’s acknowledging me. Now I’m really confused and I can’t focus that much, especially after Mike and Lisa jump on their road bikes to cruise down the hill to the eco-friendly reception where all the food is green…even the cake. (I’m serious. I can’t make up this shit.) I start to move toward the crowd and this wingnut in the tenement tee makes a beeline for me.
“Hey, Jane,” he says in a hushed voice, his orange flip-flops collecting another layer of dirt and gravel with each step.
He’s looking more familiar at this point, but I still can’t place him. I nod to him but keep up the wall around me.
“I guess we’re gonna be related by marriage now,” he says with a smile, “me the cousin of the bride, you the sister of the groom.”
God help me, I’m thinking.
“This’ll be a different kind of wedding for you and me, huh?” he says.
I bite. “Different in what way?”
“Well, for one, we’ll remember it, and for another, we won’t make asses of ourselves.”
And that is when I knew where I’ve seen this guy. He sits across from me on the plaid couch with the bad springs in the basement of the Methodist church where they hold the weekly AA meeting.
For those of you who didn’t get the memo, I’m sober. (I’m also back working in Denver Homicide after some “negotiations” with Sergeant Weyler. Now I’m Sergeant Detective Jane Perry, for what it’s worth.)
I’m still getting used to regarding myself as a recovering alcoholic instead of a drunk. There’s so much more to explain when you’re recovering than when you’re just another tedious, piss-ass alcoholic. People are more likely to accept you when you say you’re a drinker, but when you’re recovering, there are the inevitable questions of how long you’ve been sober, what prompted you to get sober, how does it feel to be sober, blah, blah, blah. If I made a habit out of indulging in all that shit, I’d have to get a load on just to suffer through it. I’m a very private person. I don’t feel a need to wear my addiction on my sleeve and regurgitate my dramas to everyone in earshot. I prefer to stand outside the group and recover alone. But they say you need to have those fellow recovering drunk shoulders to lean on when you start, so I play the game…to a point. I don’t have a sponsor. I just can’t bring myself to get cozy with some well-meaning ex-alky who keeps insisting that I meet her for coffee so we can “chat.” For me, it would feel like an Amway sales ambush. “Do you have a few minutes, Jane? I’d like to talk to you about your sobriety!” No thanks.
Am I keeping my sobriety a secret? Well, no, obviously not, since I’m writing about it and you’re reading it. Did I keep my drinking
a secret? Well, yes, in fact, I sure as hell tried. But I had a little trouble keeping the hangovers under wraps and my frequently bloodshot eyes tended to tip my drunken hat. But even so, there were still a few acquaintances who didn’t quite appreciate how far I’d fallen into the bottle. But I’ll say it again: they weren’t observant. Just like Mike’s Jewish “shaman,” all I had to do was come up with a good cover story and more than one schmo bought this shiksa’s lame excuses.
As they say in AA: “You’re only as sick as your secrets.” And let me tell you, there are a lot of people out there keeping a whole helluva lot of secrets. Our secrets often stalk us, continually reminding us that we’re one revelation away from having our human frailties or youthful transgressions laid bare. Some of our secrets are minor, but other secrets take on their own identity, framing and defining an individual’s cloaked life. For those souls, their secrets haunt them, holding them hostage to the fear that one day they will be discovered. The mere thought of being exposed is enough for a few of them to kill; for others, it’s enough to make them take their own lives rather than face disgrace.
As I’ve commented many times while working in Homicide, people kill for one of three reasons: sex, money or gettin’ even. When you think about it, secrets inhabit each of those motives: Sexual secrets, financial secrets and sundry secrets that force a person to seek revenge. I had to keep all of that in mind when I worked a case recently involving Mr. Winston Gambrel.
I was paged at 2:22 a.m. a few weeks ago and summoned to Mr. Gambrel’s upscale home after Mr. Gambrel hysterically called 9-1-1 to get help for his wife. She had fallen down their circular staircase and sprawled in her lilac nightgown on the Italian tile near their front door. When the paramedics arrived, 65-year-old Gambrel answered the door nude, hyperventilating and sweating profusely. His 59-year-old wife, Abbey, showed signs of serious trauma on her chest and shoulders. Tossed across the entryway, under an 18thcentury secretary from Britain, Abbey’s lacy white underwear lay torn and slightly bloody around the lace edge. Mr. Gambrel had surface cuts on his upper thighs. He told the paramedics he didn’t know how he got them but assumed it was from scraping against the bedroom furniture as he sleepily made his way through the darkness after he heard a loud thump outside the upstairs bedroom door.
When his wife was pronounced dead, Mr. Gambrel went into what I would best describe as catatonic shock. A deep and soulful wail that cannot be manufactured by anyone except those who honestly feel it in their bones followed that. “She’s my world,” he wept. As I stood there in the entryway, sealing the torn and bloodied lacy white underwear in a plastic Kapak evidence bag, I watched the world he knew crumble around him. Amid his grief, a gallery of suspicious eyes observed his every move. Among the paramedics and the other cops on the scene there was a sense that everything was not what it seemed. Mr. Gambrel’s story of what happened also changed.
First he said he had awakened to a loud thump outside their bedroom, stumbled in the darkness toward the landing, turned on the light and saw his wife sprawled on the entryway tile floor. At that point, he claimed to have raced down the stairs and begun CPR, tearing off and discarding her underwear in the process because he thought he saw a puncture wound in her pelvis. The problem was that her lilac nightgown was not torn or bloodied, only her panties. There was also the question of the distance between where her body lay and the location of the panties under the secretary. When you fling lacy panties aside, they tend not to travel far, due to their weight. Also, a rough tile floor, such as the one in the Gambrels’ entryway, prevents items such as lacy panties from scooting too far. Additionally, when I recovered said panties, they were pretty well hidden under the piece of furniture. It was that observation that generated a change in Mr. Gambrel’s telling of the story.
With head bowed and eyes never locking with mine, Mr. Gambrel said that the lights in the house were already turned on when he awakened to find his wife missing from their bed. While he still maintained that he cut his nude body en route to the landing because of being half asleep, he claimed that when he descended the stairs, he had no recollection of removing her panties and tossing them aside. All he recalled was doing CPR and frantically trying to revive her. When I pressed him, asking why her panties were bloodied and seemingly hidden under the secretary, he maintained that he had no memory of removing them.
No memory. That’s never a good answer, especially after you’ve already stated something else. But I’m patently aware of shock and how it can wreak havoc with recall. Shock can also create gaps in stories big enough for trains to chug through. Furthermore, interviewing a shock victim — especially someone who has just witnessed a loved one’s death — can be problematic, since the shock tends to suspend one’s reality, often making a person feel as if he is viewing the event from outside his body. The story is told from a more generalized point of view, rather than rife with detail, simply because shock creates a cloudy wash over the trauma. The mind says that “this can’t be happening” and, thus, detachment begins to shield an individual from further emotional damage. It’s the body’s way of protecting itself, but it creates huge problems for a detective who is trying to piece together the puzzle.
One of the local cops on the scene made a comment out of Gambrel’s hearing about what a “fine, upstanding guy” Gambrel was and how it was “too damn bad” that this event would fuck up that reputation. It was then that I realized who in the hell Winston Gambrel was. He and his wife owned and operated Abbey’s Road Pub, a Denver downtown landmark. The name of the place was a play on words, combining the title of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album with the name of Gambrel’s wife, Abbey. The couple had no children and so their business became their “baby.” Abbey’s Road Pub celebrated all things British, from the ceiling that sported a painted wall-to-wall Union Jack to the bevy of commemorative plates that adorned each booth, with the Queen, Prince Charles, the Queen Mother and Princess Diana featured. But what I remembered most about his pub was the incredible collection of Beatles memorabilia that Winston Gambrel had assembled over the years. You knew it had to be worth something because he had all of it in cases, protected behind heavy glass.
The Gambrels, both British, came to the States in early 1970 and opened their popular pub initially for tourists and British transplants so they’d have a home away from home… or pub away from pub. But the establishment quickly found American fans who loved the Beatles’ motif, imported ales and lively atmosphere. In recent decades, Abbey’s Road Pub was the epicenter of all things charitable — from Run for the Cure events to feeding the homeless on Thanksgiving Day. They sponsored scholarships for adult literacy programs and were well known for their annual Halloween festivities, where they awarded a one-hundred-dollar cash prize to each of the four people whose costumes and appearance best matched George, Paul, Ringo and John.
While Winston Gambrel looked nothing like John Lennon — his muscular and manly six-foot, four-inch frame would have dwarfed the thinner and slighter Lennon — Gambrel traditionally wore his John Lennon garb, circa 1969, to each year’s Halloween party. His wife, Abbey, of course, dressed like Yoko Ono. Photos of the pair in their costumes were a regular feature every November 1 in the “People” section of The Denver Post. As I walked up the staircase that led to the master bedroom, I studied the vast array of photographs that lined the wall. The shots chronicled Winston and Abbey’s cherished moments at their pub over the last forty years. Amid the crush of photos were forty shots — one for each year of the pub’s operation — of their popular Beatles-themed Halloween parties. In the first shots, taken in the early 1970s, Winston obviously really had long, straggly hair that looked identical to Lennon’s unkempt mane, along with the beard and mustache to complete the Lennon-like vibe. But as the 1970s melted into the 1980s and then the 1990s, it looked as if Winston cut his locks and switched to a John Lennon wig and paste-on facial hair. As each year passed, I noted, Winston’s frame got a little heavier but his John Lennon costume never chan
ged. From the cream-colored bell-bottom pants to the matching cream jacket and shoes, Winston Gambrel perfectly re-created the outfit Lennon wore on the Abbey Road album cover.
I checked downstairs and saw that Mr. Gambrel was seated on a chair, head in hands, as the paramedics zipped his wife’s body into a black plastic bag and summarily lifted her onto a wheeled cart. There was no dignity to the whole thing, I thought. Here was the grieving husband and there was his wife, cold and dead, being zipped up like leftovers into a plastic baggie. Everything they shared before that moment was brutally truncated by fate and punctuated by the irreverent rip of a metal zipper. Every dream they dreamed ended at that moment; every knowing glance they shared across the breakfast table would be at the mercy of Mr. Gambrel’s heartbroken memory. Shattered. That’s the best way I can describe that man at that moment. Gutted. That’s what he looked like as he reached out and achingly touched the plastic bag one last time as they carted Abbey’s body out the door.
I knew what the cops were thinking downstairs. Nice acting job, asshole. We’re all skeptics at any death scene. We always see the worst in everyone because we’ve seen the shithooks of humanity and what they are capable of doing to their loved ones. To most of us, you’re not innocent until proven guilty; you’re a suspect until we can find the real perpetrator. And when I find a pair of your wife’s panties with bloodstains hidden under a piece of furniture…well, what can I say? It’s not leaning in your favor.