A Fever in the Heart and Other True Cases Page 10

  Jerilee’s sister Kit* owned the apartment where Gabby was living with his son, Derek, and she lived close by. There wasn’t even a proper street that separated their residences; it was more of a “lane,” and Kit could not avoid seeing Gabby. It seemed as though he were always there, wanting to talk to her.

  Moore wanted Kit to reason with Jerilee. He asked her all the time to try to persuade her sister to reconcile with him. When she stared at him, appalled, he looked back uncomprehendingly. Both Kit and Jerilee were horrified at Gabby’s easy assumption that it was completely logical Jerilee should come back to him now that Morris was dead.

  Gabby had a theory, which he propounded to anyone who would listen. He suspected that someone wanted both him and Morris out of the picture. He said he had had unsettling incidents himself—odd phone calls at all hours of the day and night. He said he couldn’t identify the voices. Some sounded Caucasian and some sounded black. But the gist of the calls was plain enough; the voices threatened him with death.

  He told people that he had found a windowpane shattered and it looked as though the damage were done with a bullet.

  Gabby told his intimates that he intended to find and expose Morris’s killer, and that he figured he must be getting awfully close because someone was trying to silence him before he “scored.” He was especially worried, he said, that one of his daughters had gotten a threatening call, and so had his mother.

  That was much too close for comfort, and he said he didn’t know what would happen next. He was a fatalist. He was going to do what he had to do without giving in.

  Gabby even went into great detail with his older daughter about plans for his funeral in case the person who was stalking him succeeded in killing him. Gabby described what kind of funeral he wanted, but when his daughter started to cry, he would laugh, as if he had been kidding all along. One can only imagine the emotional impact on a teenager who loved her father.

  Jerilee wasn’t buying any of it. “I thought he had something to do with killing Morris,” she recalled: “Just from different things he said. He had told my sister that he knew people that would do anything for him. All he had to do was ask. I just felt that he felt that if Morris wasn’t there, I would be back to him; he was very confident that I would be back.”

  Gabby Moore was so confident, in fact, that he continued to phone the now-widowed Jerilee as the Christmas season approached. He wanted her back. He needed her, and now, he pointed out, she really needed him too. Jerilee refused to talk to him. She would have her mother or someone else answer the phone and tell him that she was unavailable.

  Sometimes, Gabby would have his mother call. Jerilee would talk to her. She had nothing against Gabby’s mother. But then the older woman would say suddenly, “Just a minute, Glynn wants to talk to you. ”

  And then Jerilee would immediately say, “I’m sorry,” and hang up. Always before, Gabby had been persuasive enough to get her to meet him “just to talk.” No more. He had tried to confuse her in his campaign to get her to leave Morris. She was no longer confused; the bleak specter of Morris’s death had made everything all too clear. She could not afford to talk to Gabby.

  Finally, he stopped calling her parents’ home and her office every day. He no longer tried to speak to her in person, but she knew he hadn’t given up because he continued to send messages through his family.

  Only once after Morris’s murder did Jerilee agree to speak to Gabby on the phone. It happened approximately two-and-a-half weeks after Morris’s murder—in the middle of December. Gabby told her that the police were bothering him, that they had asked him to take a polygraph test. He didn’t tell her that he had hired an attorney.

  Jerilee couldn’t hold back her feelings. She told Gabby flat out that she believed he was involved in Morris’s murder.

  “He said he couldn’t have done something like that,” she recalled. “He insisted that he just couldn’t have done it. I didn’t believe him.”

  She told him it didn’t matter anyway. She would never come back to him, and he had to accept that. As always, he countered with what he wanted her to believe. He told her that he could prove to her that he had absolutely nothing to do with the murder. Before he could begin to expand on the weird threats he was receiving, she cut him off. She told him again that made no difference. She wasn’t coming back to him.

  He kept repeating that he could prove what happened to Morris might be connected to him, but that it had nothing to do with his feelings for her. He loved her. He suspected that there was someone who had been after both him and Morris, and he had reason to fear for his own life. Something strange was going on.

  Jerilee hung up. That was the last time she spoke to Gabby before Christmas. He sent messages through her sister, or through his relatives, but she would never speak to him again.

  After Christmas, everything in Jerilee’s world would change once more. It was as if she had entered a “House of Horrors” at the county fair—only it was all real. With every step she took, something even more ghastly popped up.

  Bright lights lit up houses and lawns all over town, and deep snow fell. It got colder and the icy wind blew across the hills and plains of Yakima County, howling like the hounds of hell.

  There was someone following Gabby Moore, someone just beyond his awareness. It wasn’t anyone for Gabby to fear—at least not physically. But Vern Henderson was curious about Gabby Moore. He thought he had known the man; now he was not so sure. Although Vern wasn’t officially working Homicide, and he was not assigned to Morris’s case, he had promised Morris’s mother he would find her son’s killer.

  In his own mind, he had promised Morris too.

  From time to time, Vern spotted Gabby’s MG or his Jeep weaving through town. Sometimes, Vern followed him. On two occasions, Vern followed Gabby as he drove up to the Tahoma Cemetery where Morris was buried. While Vern watched undetected, Gabby stood looking down at Morris’s grave, his face a blank mask. What was he thinking? Vern wondered why he had come here to stand silent in the cold.

  “He looked as though he felt bad,” Vern remembered. “And I wondered if he had really loved Morris, his old friend, but maybe he’d wanted the woman more.”

  Inside the apartment Gabby Moore had rented with his sixteen-year-old son, there were no Christmas decorations. The two had been batching it for two months in an apartment that was nothing like the comfortable homes they were both used to. This was not a home; it was a stopping-off place for two males on their way to someplace else. They both had sports practice after school and games and wrestling matches. But Derek had a girlfriend, and his father had no one.

  When he was alone, the sound of Gabby’s stereo echoed through the empty rooms. He played the same record over and over and over again.

  “Lay your head upon my pillow, put your warm and tender body close to mine … ”

  It was one of the saddest—and most popular—of the country-western hits that year, Ray Price singing of lost love. The lyrics were far more accepting that the love affair was over, however, than Gabby was.

  “I’ll get along; you’ll find another,” Ray Price sang, “and I’ll be here in case you ever need me. Let’s just be glad we had some time to spend together. We don’t have to watch the bridges that we’re burning… ”

  Gabby had played “For the Good Times” so often that the record sometimes skipped where the needle had worn deep grooves. He was living almost entirely in the past, but he was planning for the future he was determined to have with Jerilee.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Although Jerilee could no longer be counted among that group, there were still many, many people who loved Gabby Moore. His three children tried to help him deal with his lost love. His ex-in-laws made him welcome, and Dr. A. J. Myers made an effort to keep track of Gabby’s health. Looking at Gabby’s bloated body and flushed face, Myers worried. He was clearly drinking too much and not eating right, and he didn’t appear to have been taking his medication. He looked like a he
art attack looking for a place to happen.

  Perhaps more than anyone, Gabby’s athletes—past and present—kept close tabs on him, making sure he wasn’t alone for too long, trying to stop by and visit with him. He was “the man” to his boys. He was the coach that had lifted many of them from mediocrity and made them champions.

  When Gabby was too distraught or too ill or even too intoxicated to show up for wrestling practice and wrestling matches, some of the star wrestlers who had graduated from Davis made sure that they were there to see that things ran smoothly. It was getting pretty bad. They had seen Gabby step out of the gym and go to his car and take a swig out of a bottle he kept there. They had often smelled alcohol on his breath inside Davis High School at practice.

  Still, not one of them could believe that the Davis High administrators would really fire Gabby. Sure, he said that he wouldn’t be teaching or coaching at Davis after next graduation, but that seemed impossible. When push came to shove, it couldn’t happen. Gabby was part of Davis, and Davis was part of him.

  Gabby was as low as they had ever seen him. He was getting more reclusive, and he spent a lot of time in his apartment. Gabby’s boys didn’t see him around town in his snappy little MG sports car as much as they used to. Sometimes he showed up at the bars and the lounges, but not often. He bought bottles and took them home to drink.

  Gabby urged his former athletes to come over to his apartment. That meant they would have to have a drink with him and listen to him talk about Jerilee. They had heard about how wonderful Jerilee was and how beautiful and how she was meant to be with Gabby so many times that they could practically recite chapter and verse, but they listened attentively and tried to say something that would make their old coach feel better. They urged him just to “give the woman some time,” because he wouldn’t listen to them when they suggested he should forget her and find a woman who appreciated him. He would not allow them to say one word against Jerilee.

  Nothing could make him feel better. Gabby wallowed in self-pity and in his memories. He had albums full of pictures of himself and Jerilee when their lives together were happy, and he had the record of their song. At some point during the long evenings, when he had just enough bourbon in his system to blur the emotional pain he felt, he would pore over his photographs and tell himself that Jerilee would be coming back. She didn’t have any reason not to now. She had no husband, and no other boyfriend. Gabby still believed she was meant to be his.

  On Saturday, December 13, Yakima Officer Michael Bartleson received a radio call to an address on South Fourth Street. It was one A.M. He was to meet officers in a two-man unit at the address. En route, they got a second complaint, “Possible child neglect at this address.”

  The officers had had calls to this address before and they knew that a teenage girl was baby-sitting her younger brothers and sisters while their mother was at work.

  When the girl answered the door, she appeared to have been drinking.

  “Everything’s all right,” the girl mumbled.

  “Is there anybody else in the house besides you and your brothers and sisters?” Bartleson asked.

  “Maybe two … ”

  “Does your mother know that?” he asked.

  “Yeah, she doesn’t care,” the girl said.

  Bartleson doubted this, and he asked the station to call the mother and tell her that things didn’t look good at home. She said she was on her way. The worried mother arrived after the patrolmen had been there for about half an hour. She wanted to go inside, and Bartleson went with her while Officers Ehmer and Beaulaurier circled around and waited at the back door on the alley side of the house.

  As Bartleson and the mother went through the front door, they heard loud running sounds headed for the back door and something crashing in the rear of the house. “The two subjects—three subjects actually, were stopped at the back door by Ehmer and Beaulaurier,” Bartleson recalled. “There was one young white male about fifteen or sixteen who was a cousin of the family, and a Kenny Marino* and a Glynn Moore—known to us as ‘Gabby.’”

  Marino was carrying a half-gallon of Ten-High whiskey, and the coach the officers all knew well was so under the influence that he didn’t recognize them. “He was very intoxicated,” Bartleson said with regret in his voice. “Leaning against the side of the house. He had no shoes on, in his stocking feet; there was snow on the ground. His pants were unbuckled, snapped at the top and unzipped … ”

  Inside the house, the teenage girl had gone to bed in the basement. She was fully dressed, and there was no indication that she had been harmed.

  Still, it was a disturbing incident. It was just one more step down for Gabby Moore, shocking to the officers who had confronted him.

  ***

  Jerilee tried to pull some kind of Christmas together for the children. They knew their father was gone, but they were far too young to understand that he was never coming back. Their grandparents tried to help, even though everyone was heartbroken. There is never a good time to lose someone to a senseless murder, but the holiday season is somehow worse than any other; none of them would ever see a Christmas tree again or a Thanksgiving turkey without thinking of Morris. Morris should have been with them for another fifty years.

  Christmas Eve was the hardest. For everyone. The year before, Gabby had been with Jerilee, their only Christmas together. And now he was alone again.

  On Christmas Eve afternoon, Gay—Gabby’s first ex-wife—came over to the apartment on Eighteenth Avenue and cleaned it up, doing the dishes, vacuuming, and trying to make it look a little more livable. Her son lived there too, of course, but even she felt sorry for Gabby. Gay had gone on with her life, but Gabby still seemed to be caught up in his obsessive jealousy; only the object of it had changed.

  The Christmas before, Olive had had her son; the holidays had always been a happy time for her because Morris had been born just before Christmas.

  Derek Moore stayed home with Gabby and watched television during the early part of Christmas Eve. Gabby had no plans to celebrate the holiday, but Derek was going to go to his girlfriend Janet Whitman’s family to join in their Christmas Eve festivities. Her grandmother lived in the hamlet of Union Gap, a ten-minute drive from Derek’s apartment, and Janet had arranged to pick Derek up in her car around eight. Derek wasn’t sure what his dad was going to do. He probably would call Derek’s sisters who would be over at their grandparents, the Myers.

  When Derek and Janet left the apartment, Gabby was alone. Later, when Derek tried to remember, he said he didn’t think his father was drinking. It was kind of sad, though, leaving him behind in the apartment. No Christmas tree. No decorations. It could have been any other night in the year.

  No one in the family heard from Gabby that evening until sometime between eleven and midnight when he called over to Dr. Myers’s residence and talked to his eighteen-year-old daughter, Kate. They spoke for about fifteen minutes, a conversation that obviously upset Kate. After she hung up, she tried four times to call her father back. Each time, the line was busy. She wasn’t looking at the clock, but it seemed to her when she tried to remember later that her last attempt had been at about 12: 15 A.M.

  What Kate didn’t know was that her father had called her back after their first conversation, and that her grandfather had picked up the phone. He expected it to be his son, who was late in arriving for their Christmas Eve festivities, but when he heard Gabby’s voice, he decided to talk to him to forestall any scenes. He didn’t know until later that Kate had already talked to her father.

  All over America, families were tiptoeing through the holidays, avoiding confrontations about old resentments and grudges. Alcohol only adds to the potential for trouble, and Gabby Moore’s drinking was scaring his family.

  “I decided to occupy his time on the telephone with me, rather than to have any problem … to disturb Christmas Eve,” Dr. Myers remembered. “I visited with him and we made a date for the day following Christmas for him to appear
at my office—it would be closed … I wanted to examine him, and I suggested that I take him to lunch.”

  Gabby hadn’t asked for Kate and he thanked Dr. Myers for remembering his birthday three days before. Dr. Myers assumed that that had been the purpose for his call. As close as Myers could tell, it was about 11: 30. He was becoming quite concerned about his son, worrying that he might have had car trouble or a flat tire, so he had been glancing at the clock.

  Myers couldn’t be sure if Gabby was drinking. “He generally hid that pretty well from me … He told me he wasn’t drinking and I rather suspected that he might be bending the truth a bit with me,” Myers recalled. “That particular night, he gave very little trace of drinking except toward the end of the conversation. And I asked him then, and he said, ‘Oh, just a little bit.’”

  If Gabby had been imbibing, he did an excellent job of hiding any slur in his voice. It was easy for Myers to believe that he had had only a few drinks and that things would be all right. He would get Gabby into his office, check his blood pressure, take him out for a good lunch and they could talk things out. Gabby wasn’t even forty-five; he had so many good years ahead of him. He would pull out of this depression and get his life together.

  That night there were no more calls from Gabby Moore.

  Derek Moore and his girlfriend, Janet, had a great time at her family’s Christmas Eve, and it was late when they left Union Gap to head back to Derek’s apartment. Derek was driving Janet’s car and he estimated that he pulled into the backyard parking spot sometime between one and one thirty.

  They noticed right away that the back porch light was off; Gabby always left it on.

  “Derek,” Janet said, “I think something is wrong.”

  “We better get out of the car,” Derek answered. He had seen that both his dad’s MG and his own Jeep were parked in their usual spots. “I’ll look in the house,” he said, while Janet reached in the backseat to gather up his Christmas gifts.

  As Derek walked up to the back door, he noticed that the screen door in the back, which Gabby hadn’t gotten around to replacing with a storm door for winter, was propped open, held by a white brick.