A Fever in the Heart and Other True Cases Read online

  It would be impossible to explain the siege Jerilee Blankenbaker was enduring to anyone but another woman who has had a man fixate on her. It is akin to being in a glass house where none of your movements are entirely free, where someone is always watching.

  Both Jerilee and Morris were working; in fact Morris was working two jobs. He taught at Wapato Intermediate School and he worked three evenings a week at the Lion’s Share Lounge as a bouncer. That meant leaving Jerilee alone at night, but they had “Hike,” their big black Labrador who was very protective of Jerilee and the children.

  Gabby had come three times to Morris’s home in his desperate battle to get Jerilee to come back. Morris wasn’t really worried that Gabby would do anything crazy. Despite everything, Gabby was still “Coach” to him. Morris figured that in time everything would work out.

  Late one night in mid-November when Morris was working at the Lion’s Share, Jerilee woke to hear someone walking around inside the house. There were no locks on the exterior doors. In a big city, that would have seemed foolhardy, but this was Yakima, where the crime rate was low. People didn’t lock their doors, even when they lived as the Blankenbakers did—only a few blocks from the downtown business district. Morris and Jerilee had a lock on their bedroom door though, to keep the kids from walking in.

  Now, Jerilee, her children asleep beside her, lay frozen in bed as she heard heavy footsteps and crashing sounds. She was grateful for the bedroom door lock as she heard someone call her name and then unintelligible grumbling and muttering. It was Gabby. “He had been drinking,” Jerilee remembered, “and he threatened if I didn’t come out into the living room area that he would kick in the door and come after me. He wasn’t very rational at the time; he was quite drunk.” She had a phone in the bedroom and she reached for it quietly and dialed the number at the Lion’s Share.

  “Morris,” she whispered, when he came to the phone. “Gabby’s here. He’s out in the living room and he’s threatening to kick my door in.”

  Morris left the Lion’s Share and headed for the house on North Sixth. It wasn’t far; the bar was on Second Street.

  Jerilee stayed quiet in her bedroom, listening, expecting to hear the crash of a foot through the thin bedroom door at any moment. She knew how Gabby could be when he was this drunk, and she was afraid, remembering some of the threats he had made.

  It had become very quiet in the living room. Jerilee hoped that Gabby had given up and left. But then, suddenly, there was a banging crash on her window. Gabby was outside, yelling at her through the closed window. He was determined to get to her, to talk to her, to hold her in his arms.

  Maybe this was the night he was going to kill himself in front of her …

  Joey Watkins* had known both Morris and Gabby for a long time. Seven or eight years before, when he was at Davis, Morris was an assistant coach on the teams Joey turned out for. Joey was a big guy—one of the heavyweights that Morris had helped coach. And, of course, Gabby was head wrestling coach when Joey wrestled.

  Later, Joey, twenty-two, recalled the incident that night in November. “Well, I was sitting in the Lion’s Share with Morris and we was talking, and like here the phone rang and a lady answers and said, ‘It’s for you, Morris,’ and so Morris got the phone and it was his wife and she said that Mr. Moore was banging around on her house and stuff, and he said he would be over and he asked me to go with him, so I went over there with him. … Mr. Moore was ‘banging’ on the windows.”

  It was apparent that Gabby Moore was drunk, and Joey Watkins half-expected Morris to start fighting with him. After all, it was Morris’s house, and Morris’s woman, and she had sounded scared half to death when she called the Lion’s Share.

  “Morris got out of the car and went over there. But he said to me, ‘Joey, you know what? I would hit him in the mouth, but he was my coach too. I can’t do it.’ So they just went over there and started talking. Mr. Moore and Morris was talking, and I guess Morris told him something and he just left.”

  Joey Watkins stared at his former coach. Gabby was so intoxicated that he had been staggering as he moved from window to window, beating on the glass with his fists. Like most of the young men who had turned out for sports at Davis High, Watkins had been flabbergasted at the change in Gabby.

  “He was my football coach and wrestling coach ever since I was a sophomore in high school … I seen Mr. Moore the first time [in a bar] when I was in the Lion’s Share and he was wild, you know … like he just changed from the coach that we used to see because he was strict, you know, on us. He wasn’t the same person. For one thing, his hair was longer and he just didn’t dress like he used to.”

  After Joey saw Gabby in the bar the first time, he had seen him often. Gabby had always been with a crowd of friends, and he was drinking like there was no tomorrow. That just wasn’t the coach Joey remembered. Gabby had always demanded that his athletes train hard. “If you got beat,” Watkins said, “he knows why—because you didn’t work out hard enough.”

  Joey Watkins couldn’t hear what Morris had said to Gabby, but whatever it was it was effective. He saw Gabby stagger away, and then he heard the sound of a car starting up. He knew the sound of that engine; it was Gabby’s little caramel-colored MG sports car.

  Inside, Jerilee had listened to Morris’s voice trying to reason with Gabby. She could make out only the faint mumble of deep voices and then the sound of a car leaving.

  “Morris and Joey Watkins came into the house,” Jerilee said. “And then Morris called the police department and told them the story and they said they would send a patrol car just to go by off and on during the night. Morris went back to work.”

  And, apparently, Gabby went home to sleep it off. No one seemed to take the incident too seriously. Half the police department had taken a class from him, or played ball for him, or wrestled for him. Some had gone to school with him when he was a star himself. Gabby wasn’t a threat—not really. Gabby was “Coach” and one of the finest teachers Davis High ever had.

  He just had to get hold of himself.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Everyone who knew Gabby Moore believed that he would come to his senses. He had far too much to lose to let himself go over a woman. There were plenty of women in Yakima who would have been delighted to go out with him. But he wasn’t interested any more than Morris had been interested when he was left alone the year before. When men fell in love with Jerilee, they didn’t seem able to forget her.

  That bitter fall, Gabby was living in an apartment with his son, Derek, out on South Eighteenth Street. He didn’t want to live in the house where he had lived with Jerilee, and put it up for sale. The apartment he shared with seventeen-year-old Derek wasn’t fancy, but it worked for two guys “batching it.” Derek had the small bedroom off the kitchen. They ate what meals they took at home at the kitchen counter that separated that room from the rest of the apartment. Gabby turned the living room into a combination bedroom/living room by putting his bed in there and blocking the front door with a wardrobe. They parked out in back on the alley side and used the back door as the only entrance.

  Gabby was still coaching and teaching although his contract would be up at the end of the school year. He was almost “phoning in” his participation at school, simply going through the motions, and mostly he didn’t even bother with that. Gabby’s wrestling team still turned out for practice and showed up at matches even if their coach wasn’t the fireball he had once been. Sometimes it seemed they almost coached themselves, but they loved Gabby and covered for him.

  In an unspoken pact, some of the athletes who had graduated from Davis started showing up after school to take over Gabby’s duties. He had made his wrestlers champions and they would do anything for him. Between the alumni and the kids on the squad, the wrestling matches went on—mostly without Gabby.

  Derek Moore was doing well in school, and he was a first team starter for the Davis High School “Pirates” football team. Any other time, his father would ha
ve been bursting with pride over his accomplishments in the athletic world. But now, nothing mattered to Gabby but getting Jerilee back.

  Derek cut his dad a lot of slack. Like everyone else who knew Gabby Moore, he believed that things were going to be better in time. Derek was a strong kid who had a lot of emotional support—his grandparents, his mother, his new stepfather Larry Pryse, who was an assistant football coach at Davis.

  At seventeen, Derek Moore’s whole world was wrapped up in Yakima, in high school athletics, and in his girlfriend. Loyally, he lived with his dad and hoped for better days.

  Dr. Myers, Gabby’s former father-in-law, was extremely concerned about him. Al had been treating Gabby for hypertension for a decade, and he suspected that he wasn’t taking his prescribed medication—a beta-blocker and a diuretic. Gabby would take the medicine Myers prescribed all right, but then he would begin to feel better and, like many patients with high blood pressure, he would stop taking his pills. It was a vicious circle. Hypertension is a silent disease with few symptoms. A lot of patients die of strokes or heart attacks because they “feel fine” and they have no hint that the push of blood against fragile blood vessels has become critical. Sometimes, extremely high blood pressure causes headaches. Not often. The only sure sign of trouble is a nosebleed. If that happens, the patient is lucky. It is far better to bleed from an artery in the nose than to bleed, silently and lethally, from an artery in the brain.

  Gabby was drinking heavily and he was stressed to the maximum. In addition, he wasn’t taking his medication. Dr. Myers met him for lunch in November and tried to talk some sense into him. He warned him that he was going to blowout an artery if he didn’t pay attention. But Gabby Moore didn’t seem to care. All he could talk about was Jerilee. If he couldn’t have her back, he didn’t want to live, anyway.

  Myers nodded. It didn’t matter that his daughter was Gabby’s first ex-wife since she was happily remarried. Now they were just two men talking as friends, and it was Gabby who was left out in the cold and in seeming agony over it.

  Myers hoped it wasn’t going to flat out kill him.

  It looked as though it might, when on the 18th of November, a few days after the incident at Jerilee and Morris’s house, Gabby showed up at Dr. Myers’s office and asked for an appointment.

  “He reported to me that he had had repeated nosebleeds for the past twenty-four hours—a total of four of them which were difficult to stop,” Myers said. “He appeared at my office following one of these … Because of his blood pressure and the history of four nosebleeds in twenty-four hours, I decided to hospitalize him.”

  It wouldn’t be the first time that Gabby’s hypertension became critical; Dr. Myers had been treating him for high blood pressure for ten years. He had had to hospitalize him for the same condition five years earlier, almost to the day. Now, Myers was really concerned; he could see that there was a clot on the arterial opening in the midsection of Gabby’s left nostril. Gabby was going to be in trouble if he didn’t get his blood pressure lowered and right away.

  Gabby didn’t want to go to the hospital; he just wanted Dr. Myers to give him something to stop the nosebleeds. Myers wouldn’t listen to his arguments—not with such sky-high pressure registering on his sphygmomanometer. It didn’t matter that Gabby was only forty-four; he was in danger of dying—and soon. With Gabby complaining all the way, Dr. Myers checked him into his own hospital, the Valley Osteopathic Hospital, at 3003 Tieton Drive.

  From November 18 until November 22, Gabby Moore stayed in his hospital bed in a room just across the hall from the nursing station. He tried to check himself out earlier, but Myers would not allow him to go.

  Jerilee knew that Gabby was in the hospital. His mother had called to tell her after he had been there for a day. Although she felt bad for his mother, she had disconnected emotionally from Gabby.

  In a way, Gabby’s illness and hospitalization gave Morris and Jerilee Blankenbaker a respite from his harassment. For two blissful days, he didn’t call and he didn’t show up to pound on windows or demand to be let in. They were back together for their first big holiday in this, the second phase of their marriage.

  Thanksgiving would mean so much more to them this year. They were fortunate to have salvaged what had been a good marriage, to be able to forgive and forget, and to start over.

  Morris taught all day, and then he was due at his moonlighting job at the Lion’s Share. Jerilee had to work all day at the bank, and Morris stayed home and looked after Rick and Amanda. He was so happy to have his kids back, to have her back. They needed time, but they would regain the comfortable, secure world they had known before Gabby moved in with them.

  While Jerilee didn’t know if Gabby was still in the hospital, she hadn’t heard from him and that was a good sign. “When I got home from work about six-thirty,” she said, “Morris and the children and I went out to Shakeys for dinner, and Morris then took us home and dropped us off before eight o’clock.”

  Jerilee had planned to stay home all evening on Friday, but a friend, Helen Crimin, dropped by around nine and asked her if she wanted to go and listen to Helen’s husband play in his band. He was an officer on the Yakima Police Department and he and some fellow policemen had formed a band that was playing at a cocktail lounge called the Country Cousin. Helen’s invitation sounded like fun. Jerilee called her mother-in-law and Olive said she’d be glad to look after Rick and Amanda if Jerilee would bring them over to her mobile home. Olive had bought the doublewide trailer to use as an office, and now she made her home there.

  “We stopped by the Lion’s Share before we went to the Country Cousin so that I could tell Morris that I was going over there,” Jerilee recalled. “We left about a quarter to ten. Then my girlfriend and I went down to the cocktail lounge and listened to her husband play … oh, probably ten songs.”

  Although she went to the clubs with some trepidation, Jerilee was relieved to find that Gabby wasn’t in either of them. She and Helen had a good time and she began to breathe a little more easily. “We left and went to my mother-in-law’s to pick up the children and then we went straight home to Sixth Street. It was about eleven o’clock when we got home.”

  When Helen Crimin’s car pulled up in front of the Blankenbakers’ house, everything looked normal. Still, Helen sensed that Jerilee was a little nervous, and she walked her and the children to the front door to be sure they got in all right, and that nobody was hanging around.

  The house was quiet. Everything was just as Jerilee had left it. Hike seemed calm as he padded around, following her as she got Amanda and Rick ready for bed, a good sign that nobody had been in the house.

  Still, Jerilee felt a little jittery with Morris at work, and she tucked the children in bed with her. She could move them after two when Morris got home. She didn’t set an alarm clock; she knew she would wake up when she heard Morris come home.

  Something woke Jerilee at two. Some loud noise. She wasn’t sure what it was, but she rolled over and looked at the clock next to the bed. It was right around two. “I realized Morris would be coming home soon,” she said, “so I took the children out of the bed and put them in their own beds. Then I went back to bed myself.”

  It was cold, and she snuggled under the blankets. She didn’t fall back to sleep because it was only a few minutes before she heard Morris’s car drive in back in the alley, its tires crunching on the frozen ground. “I heard our car door shut. And then I thought that I heard two more car doors shut, and Morris didn’t come in.”

  She wasn’t worried. They had had three days without any trouble at all, and Morris had so many friends. Hike hadn’t even barked, as he would if a stranger were outside. She assumed that someone had asked Morris to go out for a couple of drinks after work and that they had followed him home to pick him up.

  She heard male voices coming from the back of the house someplace out toward the alley. They were excited sounding, high-pitched. She strained to hear what they were saying. It wasn’t mu
ch—maybe ten words or so.

  “I stayed in bed about a half hour,” Jerilee remembered. “And then I got up and went to the back window and looked out, and I saw that our car was there. So then I went outside and went to the car and looked inside the car, and nobody was there so I went back in the house—went back to bed.”

  Morris had actually been driving her car that night—the forest green Chevy Malibu. It was parked there, and it looked just the same as always. She didn’t expect Morris to be gone very long. While she was outside, Jerilee hadn’t looked around very much; she was very nearsighted and she had removed her contact lenses, so it wouldn’t have done much good to look around. But she did see her car parked in the back, and the Volkswagen that Morris usually drove was in the carport. They were both there, and that was enough to ease her mind.

  It was dark and it was cold and she could barely see her hand in front of her face. Once inside, Jerilee shivered at the thought of going back outside. Vaguely uneasy, she read for a while until she fell back to sleep. The children slept peacefully in the other bedroom, and Hike snoozed on the floor beside her.

  At five, Jerilee woke with a start. She was cold, and the other side of the bed was empty. Where was Morris? This wasn’t like him. She tried to remember if he’d said anything about going somewhere after work, and she couldn’t remember a thing. She was positive he had planned to come home after the Lion’s Share closed.

  She couldn’t very well call the police. What would she tell them? That her husband was three hours late getting home? There were probably a lot of husbands in Yakima who were a lot later than that.

  But Morris would have called her.

  Jerilee dialed the number she had for Mike Blankenbaker, Morris’s half brother. “I called Mike and asked him if he knew what Morris had planned to do after work,” Jerilee said. “He said that he was going to come straight home to me. So then I was worried and I said, ‘Well, the car is here but he hasn’t come in.’ And Mike said, ‘Well, just stay where you are and I’ll come down and check things out.’”