A Fever in the Heart and Other True Cases Page 9

  “You’ll never guess who Jerilee’s moved in with,” Morris said. Vern thought he was kidding. “What do you mean moved in with? Jerilee isn’t going anywhere.”

  But then the look on Morris’s face stopped him. He was dead serious. “She’s left me and moved in with Gabby.”

  “With Gabby?”

  It was the most unlikely thing Vern Henderson could ever have imagined. He stared at Morris, expecting him to break into a grin at any moment and tell him that it was all a joke. Why on earth would Jerilee leave Morris for Gabby? Gabby was on the skids, and Morris was younger, handsomer, and more dependable. Morris would have given Jerilee the moon if he could have pulled it down for her. Vern shook his head, trying to picture Jerilee Blankenbaker living with Gabby Moore.

  In time, Vern accepted that impossible circumstance. And, like all Morris’s friends, Vern tried to cheer him up. Nothing much helped, of course. Morris’s wife and his two little kids were gone from his home. His life had been turned inside out, and now he was the one who was all alone.

  Vern Henderson was relieved when he heard that Jerilee was back for a trial reconciliation with Morris. He expected that it would work out for Morris after all. But then he learned that she had gone back to Gabby. It seemed as though the woman were torn between her first husband and her second, and that her indecision was driving all three of them crazy. Finally, in the summer of 1975, Morris told Vern that Jerilee was truly back with him—that she had filed for divorce from Gabby and that they were going to remarry as soon as they could.

  Vern Henderson was happy for his old friend. Morris had always been so kind to everyone that it ate at Vern to think of the pain his friend had endured. Vern was not so serene, however, when he spotted Jerilee’s car and Gabby’s little brown MG parked close together near a city park.

  “There I am in a detective’s car going up Lincoln Avenue and I see Jerilee over in a parking lot on the West Side with Gabby. They were sitting in one of the cars—talking,” Vern said. “And I’m saying to myself, ‘Why is she talking to him?’ What she was doing was giving him a ray of hope yet. I saw them a couple of times, and I thought, ‘Can’t the woman make up her mind? She’s got no business talking to Gabby and giving him any kind of idea that she might go back to him.’”

  “I didn’t mention anything about seeing them to Morris. For one thing, I didn’t know what she was talking to Gabby about. It wasn’t my business. For another, I learned a long time ago that you don’t get involved in somebody else’s relationship. I liked Jerilee and I loved Morris. Me and Morris were kind of like brothers. … You side with one or another—or you tell what you’ve seen—and then they get back together, and they’re both mad at you.”

  Everyone who had ever known Gabby knew by then that he was carrying a torch for Jerilee that could light up a whole street. Vern felt that Jerilee should have cut it off clean, and never agreed to meet or talk to Gabby. Vern knew how stubborn Gabby was; he had always taught his athletes never to quit. And Vern worried because it didn’t seem like Gabby was about to let Jerilee walk away from him. …

  Still, it never crossed Vern Henderson’s mind to worry that there would be any physical confrontation between Morris and Gabby. “There was never any thought that Gabby would do something at the house—not with the kids there. Morris still respected Gabby as his coach. Morris was not going to fight Gabby unless he had to. That’s the way Morris was. He would never have hurt Gabby,” Vern said. “And Gabby—he knew that Morris was so strong he would destroy him. He was too smart to ever take Morris on.”

  Vern could see that there might be more heartbreak on the horizon for his best friend and his former coach, but he never thought either of them was in danger.

  Never.

  Two decades later, a cloud passed ever Vern Henderson’s face as he remembered the night of November 21, 1975. Apparently Morris had had more misgivings than he himself had had. Vern remembered a conversation he had with Morris, one he had sloughed off at the time. “Morris said to me about a month and a half before he died, ‘If anything should ever happen to me, Vern, you be sure you check out Gabby.’ I told him, ‘Don’t be talking this stupidness because this is not going to happen.’ I didn’t want to visualize anything like that happening.” I said, ‘You two guys—you gotta get straight with each other.’

  “The thing is,” Vern remembered, “I drove right by Morris’s house that last night. It was five minutes after one in the morning, and I drove by and I looked at the house because I’d heard Gabby had been coming over, but everything was fine. And an hour later, Morris was dead—shot.”

  One got the sense that Vern Henderson had lived with some unnecessary guilt, a vague feeling that if only he had stopped to see Jerilee that night, if only he had parked and waited for Morris to get home, if only …

  When Morris Blankenbaker was buried on November 25, 1975, Vern Henderson was one of his pallbearers. So was Les Rucker. The service in the Shaw and Sons Chapel was conducted by Priest Charles Benedict of the Reorganized Church of the Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and the chapel was full to overflowing. Neither Olive nor Morris were Mormons, and many years later, Olive wasn’t sure just why Morris had a Mormon funeral. That terrible week was a blur in her mind.

  The news stories described Jerilee as Morris’s ex-wife, but the funeral notices all omitted the “Moore” from Jerilee’s name and listed her as Morris’s widow, Jerilee Blankenbaker. And she would have been Morris’s wife again within a matter of weeks if someone had not shot him execution style in his own backyard. Now, Jerilee was left in a kind of never-never land. She was legally free of Gabby, but nothing mattered much anymore. There would be no marriage ceremony and no future with Morris. Her children would have no father to guide them as they grew up.

  Olive Blankenbaker didn’t die, although her grief was so overwhelming that she wanted to. When Vern Henderson visited her to offer his condolences, she took his hand and looked into his eyes, “Vern,” she said, “I know you’ll find out who killed my son.”

  Vern looked back at her and made a promise he had every intention of keeping. “Yes,” he said quietly and convincingly, “yes, I will.”

  The newspapers noted that there were “no suspects” in Morris Blankenbaker’s murder. That wasn’t technically true. The investigators were looking hard at Gabby. The very fact that Gabby Moore refused to talk to detectives and said he would not take a lie detector test made him a suspect in the investigators’ minds. That didn’t mean they could arrest him. Far from it. They had no physical evidence linking him to the crime scene, and they certainly had no eyewitnesses.

  Since Vern Henderson was still with the Youth Division, he was not assigned to the investigation of his good friend’s murder. Even so, Vern had been notified of Morris’s shooting at five A.M. on the morning of November 22 by Sergeant Green. Pleas Green knew how close Vern and Morris were and he didn’t want him to hear it on the radio.

  Vern had steeled himself to be at Morris’s autopsy. Vern owed Morris that—not that Morris knew any longer that his friend was there for him, just as he had always been. More than that, Vern Henderson had wanted to know how Morris had died, and then maybe he would know why. It wasn’t his case, it wasn’t his assignment, but he had left the postmortem knowing that there was a good chance that there might be some .22 bullet casings lying somewhere in Morris’s yard or close by. He didn’t know if the gun was an automatic or not. If it was an automatic, he didn’t know if it ejected casings to the right or left. But he knew that casings ejected from an automatic would be left with very distinctive, individual marks both from the extractor and the ejector. That would be a start. Still, even if he found the casings, they would be of help only if they could be matched to a specific weapon.

  A lot of people have guns, especially around Yakima. Most of them are unfamiliar with the science of ballistics and the damning evidence that can be detected in slugs, casings, pellets, wadding, gunpowder, the lands and grooves of a gun barre
l. Bullets, once fired, are not unlike fingerprints, rife with unique individual markings.

  If Morris Blankenbaker’s killer wasn’t arrested immediately and if a confession didn’t follow soon after, it was likely that it would take direct physical evidence to find and convict the killer. And the only really compelling evidence Henderson hoped to find was a couple of bullet casings.

  But Vern Henderson wasn’t assigned to the Blankenbaker case and he didn’t try to insert himself into other detectives’ investigations. He went back to the Youth Division and the cases waiting for him there. But he didn’t forget. In fact, the more time that passed, the more he remembered that Morris’s killer was walking around free, perhaps smug in the belief that he had pulled it off.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Sergeant Robert Brimmer continued to direct the probe into Morris’s death. He and his detectives learned from Jerilee that Morris had been working at the Lion’s Share that Friday night. They checked to see if there had been any trouble at the tavern in the hours before Morris’s murder. But there had been nothing unusual—just the regulars and a few quiet strangers. Someone thought that two young men had been asking for Morris or talking to him an hour or so before the Lion’s Share closed for the night.

  What Brimmer learned from Jerilee that was the most intriguing were the details of her brief marriage and quick estrangement from Gabby Moore. In talking with Jerilee, and with others, it soon became evident to Brimmer that Moore had been totally beset by his passion for Jerilee. The Yakima police investigators and the new Yakima County Prosecutor, Jeff Sullivan, thought it quite possible that he had killed Morris in a jealous rage. It wouldn’t be the first time that they had seen jealousy spark murder.

  But that theory lost some plausibility when Jerilee told detectives that Gabby was in the hospital most of the week before Thanksgiving. She wasn’t sure when he was released. Nor did she think he was capable of shooting Morris. Pressed, she said she just didn’t know anymore.

  The Yakima investigators knew that Morris had been shot at approximately 2:05 A.M.—give or take five minutes—on November 22. They were betting that Gabby Moore had been out of the hospital by then. They had witnesses who would testify that Moore had come to the Blankenbaker house a week earlier in the middle of the night in a drunken attempt to talk to Jerilee. Perhaps he had come back again.

  It was easy enough to check on Gabby Moore’s hospitalization. Brimmer and Sullivan went to the Valley Osteopathic Hospital and asked to see records on Moore’s most recent stay there. Dr. A. J. Myers produced them at once.

  “He was hospitalized on November 18,” Myers said, explaining that he was concerned about his former son-in-law’s severe nosebleeds and he had advised him to go into the hospital until his blood pressure came down within normal limits.

  “How long did he remain in the hospital?” Brimmer asked.

  “Until November twenty-second.”

  For a moment, the detective’s interest flared, but then he reminded himself that the twenty-second had been twenty-four hours long. Morris had been shot two hours into the day, in the wee hours of the morning, and most hospitals discharged patients around noon. He asked Dr. Myers just when Gabby Moore had checked out.

  “He wanted to leave the night before—Friday—but I insisted he stay over to give me at least another night’s rest on the blood pressure problem. So he went out on the morning of the twenty-second with my knowledge and permission. ”

  “And what time did he check out?”

  “I would say in the neighborhood of around nine-thirty, a quarter of ten o’clock that morning.”

  That meant that officially at least Gabby Moore had been a patient at the Valley Osteopathic Hospital at the moment Morris Blankenbaker was shot to death. However, that didn’t mean that he had not left the hospital sometime during the night and returned later.

  Brimmer asked if Gabby had been confined to bed during his stay.

  “A large part of the time. I would say the last thirty-six hours I got him up. I was trying to hold him pretty quiet because I was having difficulty getting the blood pressure down.”

  Dr. Myers said he had changed his patient’s blood pressure medicine, but it would take ten days to see if it would be effective. The best thing he could do short-term was rest. “He spent most of the day reading and he was up to go to the bathroom. He visited the nurses at the desk, but most of the time he was reading or watching television.”

  “Did he have a phone in his room?”

  “No. We have room service for a telephone. Phones can be brought to the bedside, but they are not left in the room.”

  There was, however, a public phone at the far end of the corridor near the emergency entrance. Gabby could have walked down there and used it, but he would have been observed doing so.

  Bob Brimmer and Jeff Sullivan asked for a tour of the hospital, with a special trip to the room that Moore had occupied.

  The hospital, which Dr. Myers had had built in 1952 and which he had remodeled four times, faced Tieton Drive to the North. On Thirtieth Avenue South, there was an emergency entrance and the Central Services Area with a waiting room and hospital offices. On the west side of the building, the patients’ rooms opened off a wide corridor. There was an entrance from the waiting rooms on the south end of the hall, and a fire exit at the north end. There were a number of ways to get out of the hospital-—perhaps even without being detected because no alarm would sound—but there were precious few ways to get back in. And all of those were monitored or alarmed.”

  They could see that no one could come into the area of the patients’ rooms except from the waiting room. The fire exit on the north end of the same corridor was locked on the interior side with a bar. “There’s no way to open this from the outside,” Myers demonstrated, “with a key or otherwise.” In case of fire, all a patient had to do was push on the door and it would swing open. But then the bar lock inside would click back in place.

  There was another door to the outside through the kitchen and dining room area, but that too was locked unless an actual delivery was being made.

  “The nurses’ desk is here at the apex of the ell in order that all of the rooms are under observation from the nurses’ desk—in addition to communication—so that there is an unobstructed view to the waiting room’s inside door,” Myers pointed out. “And an unobstructed view in this direction down to where you go out of the exit.”

  “Where was Mr. Moore’s room?”

  “His room was directly across from the nurses’ desk,” Myers said. “This just happened to be a vacant bed I put him in.”

  Myers said that there had been three nurses on duty on the night of November 21-22, at least one of whom would always be at the desk. It began to sound almost impossible for Gabby Moore to have left his hospital room without a nurse or hospital employee observing him. The corridors were brightly lit and well within the nurses’ line of sight.

  “What about the emergency room door?” Brimmer asked, speculating on another egress and reentry for the suspect.

  Dr. Myers said that they had had a problem with theft of equipment when the ER door was left open. “That’s locked now throughout a twenty-four-hour period, and it’s not opened except by signal. There’s a two-way speaker there. That door can be opened immediately from the inside, but not from the outside.”

  The visitors’ room door was locked after 8:00 P.M. and no one could get back into the hospital from the outside after 8:00 P.M.

  Myers repeated that it would be highly unlikely that a patient could slip out. “With three nurses on duty, you have one at the desk to watch the monitoring equipment and for patient calls, to write orders as they are telephoned or brought in, to chart the care … this desk is seldom unoccupied.”

  The investigators reasoned that even if Gabby somehow managed to leave the hospital unobserved, there was no way he could have gotten back in without someone seeing him. … No possible way.

  If Gabby Moore had wanted to
get out of the hospital, it looked as though the only way he could have done it and be sure he wasn’t observed would have been to go through the window in his room. But that proved to be impossible too; when Brimmer checked the outside of the hospital, he saw that the patients’ windows were locked from the outside with a cylinder that slipped into a slot and was then held firmly by a screw.

  Unless Gabby Moore had perfected the art of astral projection, the most viable suspect in the murder of Morris Blankenbaker had just been eliminated from the list of possibles. Gabby might have resented Morris and blamed him for Jerilee’s departure, and he might have refused to talk to the police, but he couldn’t have pulled the trigger on the gun that killed Morris; he had been in the hospital under medical watch at two A.M. on November 22. He had been there until 9:00 or 9:30 the next morning, seven hours after the murder.

  Jerilee and her children moved in with her parents. She couldn’t imagine staying in the house on North Sixth, not with the memory of Morris lying there in the snow, his blood staining the ground.

  As far as Jerilee was concerned, the fact that Gabby had been in the hospital when someone killed Morris didn’t lessen her suspicions one bit. But as much as she thought about it, she couldn’t come up with one person, other than Gabby, who had a reason to want Morris dead. He had said often enough that Morris was the only reason she wouldn’t come back to him.

  Morris had only been dead a week when Jerilee learned that Gabby was trying to manipulate people so they would convince her to come back to him. It was as if he didn’t care that Morris was dead. He couldn’t even wait for a decent period of mourning. It didn’t really matter to Jerilee how long he waited, though; she was never going back to him. Somehow, in some way that she didn’t yet understand, she knew that Gabby was the cause of Morris’s death. She would never forgive him; much less consider being with him again.

  The thought made her skin crawl.