A Fever in the Heart: And Other True Cases (13 page)

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. It hadn't been that way when they left.

Derek saw that someone had closed the kitchen window blinds during the time he'd been gone. They were always open, but now there were just thin slices of light coming through. Vaguely uneasy, he peered through the glass in the back door, and then he spun around with a premonition of trouble, and yelled to Janet who had been waiting tensely in her car.

"My dad's not in there!"

"Then he looked at the floor," Janet remembered, "and he said, Janet, Janet! Come here!'" As Janet rushed up the steps to join him, Derek cried, My dad is laying on the floor!"

"

Janet looked in and saw Gabby lying there. They both acknowledged that Derek's father drank a lot, but they had never seen him on the floor and that frightened them. "We didn't know what the deal was. .. we didn't know that he was passed out or anything," she said. "We just kind of stood there, didn't know what to do, and then Derek said, Come on, I'm going to my mom'st o get her to come down with us,' so we went to his mom's and she wasn't home, so we went to the assistant wrestling coach at Davisto his house and he wasn't home, so we went to the Seven-Eleven and I called the police." Most people don't have to work on Christmas, but cops do. Police departments never close down especially not during the "amateur drinking" season when holiday parties send intoxicated drivers out on the roads and trigger family brawls. Patrolman John Mitchell was working one of the least desirable shifts that Christmas in Yakima. Third shift from eight on Christmas Eve until four o'clock Christmas morning. It was very cold, the ground was covered with snow and the streets were a glare of ice. It was nearing two A.M. that Christmas morning when Mitchell's radio suddenly crackled, "Respond to eight-one six South Eighteenth Street. .. Unattended death. .." It was an especially sad call at Christmas time. An unattended death. Probably some elderly person, alone and ill, who had died all alone on Christmas Eve. It was a police matter in a sense, but it would probably prove to be a natural death. A stroke. A heart attack. Mitchell drove toward the address on South Eighteenth but he didn't use his whirling bubble lights or siren and he didn't speed over the slippery streets. Whatever had happened had already happened and there was no need to rush. He pulled his police cruiser up in front of the small frame house. He had been told someone would meet him there and he saw a young couple waiting in a parked car. They introduced themselves as Janet Whitman and Derek Moore.

They appeared to be in their teens and they both looked frightened. The boy said, "I think my father's dead. We have to go around to the rear to get into our place." Mitchell followed Derek Moore's car as he drove around to the back alley and parked. The screen door in the back of the place was held open by a large brick or building block. "He's in there," the boy said.

Mitchell walked up the steps and peered through the window in the door.

There was a light on in the kitchen just beyond the door. A counter, which seemed to serve as an eating area, ran parallel to the back wall.

Mitchell could see a man lying on the floor. He had fallen just where there was a passage between the counter and the wall, and his legs were toward the back door. Mitchell couldn't see the upper portion of the man's body because it extended into some room on the other side of the breakfast bar. Cautiously, the officer stepped into the kitchen. The apartment was quiet. He leaned over the fallen man, who was lying on his left side. Mitchell touched the side of the man's neck, just over the carotid artery. There was no encouraging pulse there, and the skin beneath his hand was already faintly cold. There were no signs of life at all. It looked as though the man had suffered a seizure of some sort and fallen forward, probably dead when he hit the floor. There was no blood, and no sign of struggle. The call seemed to be as the dispatcher had said, "an unattended death." Mitchell stepped outside and saw that the young girl Janet was waiting close by, while the boy was standing back by their car. "I'm afraid Derek's father is dead," he said quietly, and then he watched while she went over to the boy, put her hand on his arm, and spoke to him. John Mitchell was startled to hear Janet Whitman say, "Derek, they've shot your father." Why would she say that? As far as Mitchell knew, the man inside had died a natural death, he certainly hadn't seen anything to indicate that there had been a shooting. Janet was probably on the thin edge of hysteria, and, like all kids, she had undoubtedly seen too many violent movies. Mitchell didn't know at that point that Gabby had been telling everyone around him that he feared for his life, that someone was threatening to shoot him just as they had Morris Blankenbaker. Mitchell walked up to Derek Moore. The boy was shocked, but he was able to answer questions. "Did your dad have any medical problems that might have caused his death?" Derek nodded his head slowly. "He had high blood pressure, but he was feeling fine tonight when I left. He was in good health. .." Puzzled, Mitchell went back into the kitchen. He looked around the room and he caught a glint of light reflected from something on the floor. Leaning over, he saw that it was a. 22 caliber brass cartridge. He didn't touch it. He looked beyond the kitchen counter into the living room and noted that the telephone receiver was off the hook, and that a glass next to it had been tipped over. Still, the place seemed fairly normal. The dishes had been done and the rooms looked neat. Mitchell glanced around the kitchen. There was a broiler pan on the kitchen counter, but it wasn't sitting flat, it rested on a pair of eyeglasses. That was odd.

Back outside, Mitchell learned that the man who lay dead on the kitchen floor was Glynn "Gabby" Moore, the coach from Davis High School. That made the second coach in Yakima to be found dead at two A.M. in less than five weeks. What were the chances of that happening? Mitchell radioed for his sergeant, Mike Bamsmer, to respond to the scene. While he waited, he advised the watch commander, It. Roy Capen, that he thought he might have a possible homicide and requested a detective team too. Since Moore was lying there in a white T-shirt and there wasn't a speck of blood on him, Mitchell still believed that Gabby had died of a heart attack. The bullet casing on the floor was a little out of place, but it could have been lying there for a long time. The phone off the hook and the glass being knocked over didn't concern Mitchell. If Moore had felt the first twinges of a coronary, he might have tried to call for help, left the phone off the hook, knocked over the glass, and then staggered toward the kitchen maybe to open the door for the ambulance attendants. Of course, he had fallen with his head in the living room and his feet toward the back door, and it seemed as if he should have fallen in the other direction if he had been coming from the living room. During the fifteen minutes it took for the detectives and his supervisor to arrive, Mitchell planted himself at the back door to keep the scene from being contaminated. Sergeant Robert Brimmer and Detective Howard Cyr had been wakened from sleep and they had hastily thrown on their clothes to get to Gabby Moore's apartment as quickly as possible.

When they arrived at 816 South Eighteenth Avenue, they saw Sergeant Bamsmer and a Dr. A. W.

Stevenson standing out in the street on Arlington on the south side of the residence. Stevenson was very active with the athletic teams in Yakima, and Derek Moore had called him to tell him that his father was dead. He had gotten dressed and come over to help in any way he could.

Bob Brimmer stepped into the kitchen and observed Gabby Moore lying on his side between a counter and a wall in the kitchen. His feet and legs were up against the south wall of the kitchen and his back was against the end of the counter. There was a small throw rug beneath his body. As Brimmer started to enter the kitchen, Mitchell warned him not to step on the shell casing lying on the floor just inside the door about two feet from Moore's feet. The casing was already slightly crimped as if someone had accidentally stepped on it. Mitchell was sure he had not. It was impossible to say how long the casing had been there. The death scene was photographed, a not entirely silent tableau, because Brimmer became aware of the sound of a record someplace in the apartment, a record that had come to the end, with a needle still wobbling on it: hi-bipp. ..

bibipp. .. hi-bipp. ..

The apartment looked like any bachelor pad that lacked a woman's touch.

One end of the living room was being used as a bedroom, blocked off from the rest of the room by a chest of drawers. The king-sized bed was unmade, and a television set and a pair of trousers with the belt still in the loops rested atop the tangled covers. Brimmer saw that there was a photo album lying open on the floor beside the bed. Bending closer, he recognized pictures of Gabby Moore and Jerilee Blankenbaker Moore.

Someone had apparently lain on his stomach on the unmade bed and gazed at the photographs of a once-happy coup leas a record played. As Brimmer's eyes and camera swept over the room in segments, recording everything, he saw a series of file cabinets that were stuffed with wrestling records and coaching plans. There was a solid cabinet blocking the front door, an overstuffed chair, a couch, a small coffee table.

There was a single bathroom, and a small bedroom near the kitchen where sixteen-year-old Derek Moore apparently slept. The wallpaper was patterned like a simulated oldfashioned piecework quilt, and there were knickknacks here and there and a few prints on the walls, the decor seemed to be a combination of what a previous tenant might have left and the necessary items that Moore and his teenaged son had moved in. Above the bed was a Renoir print of a long ago Parisian woman with a shadow-box of miniatures beside it hardly something Gabby would have placed there. There was a concrete building block beside the rumpled bed, with a box of Kleenex on it, a shoe rack with men's shoes lined up with a precision that seemed ironic now, an alarm clock, and a stack of paperback books. The phone receiver was on the floor. A portable stereo sat on a table in a corner. The record still revolved, but the arm and needle were at the inside center groove, so that no music played any longer. The record on the turntable was Ray Price's "For the Good Times."