A Fever in the Heart: And Other True Cases (16 page)

Gabby didn't like his athletes to have girlfriends. "I tried to observe his requirements," Turfy said with a grin. "To the best of my ability."

Since Turfy had always been a ladies' man, the "best of his ability" was none too pristine when it came to sex. It was probably natural that Turfy Pleasant and Gabby Moore were already more than coach and athlete while Turfy was in high school. Gabby visited a few times at the Pleasant family home, and he still dropped by the Shopper Market often.

The man and the boy went out to dinner where Gabby preached to Turfy about what his future could be. "He talked to me," Turfy said. "He told me to keep on moving.

Don't let your education stop here,' he said. He told me to carry it on through, and I could probably be the head coach here at Davis myself."

Head wrestling coach at Davis! The very thought of something so wonderful made Turfy's chest swell. That became Turfy's ambition, the goal he looked toward all through college. One day, he would pick up the torch that Gabby handed down. Looking back, Turfy said he considered Gabby a "second father," who was always there for him. "I would go over to his house. I would get the best treatment, and I felt like he just treated me like one of his own kids." During Turfy's senior year in high school, he was wrestling in three or four matches a week. Gabby, Gay, and their three children shared a big two-story house, and Turfy was often invited to stay in the basement guest room. There was a wrestling mat down there, and after a workout, the young champion and several of the others on the squad kenny Marino and Joey Watkins, and some of the others would head for Gabby's house where they would go through another workout. They were young, in peak form, and tireless. They and their coach were eating, breathing, and sleeping wrestling. There was no drinking. Not even beer. The teenagers on his squad got caught drinking beer once and Gabby had a fit. "He just wouldn't allow it," Turfy said.

"Because you get to messing with all of that stuff and you can't get in as good a shape as you need to be for that type of sport." Gabby himself wasn't drinking then either. None of them could even picture Gabby drinking. When his boys had to "cut weight," he did too. Turfy smiled again, remembering. "He would have him a little stomach too, you see, and he would lose weight right along with us. We had to have our hair cut, he would cut his." Sometimes the wrestlers, including Turfy Pleasant, had trouble with their grades. Gabby saw to it that they had tutors to help them. And if they needed extra credits, he made them "assistants" in his driver-training classes. How much actual work they did is questionable, but they made up for lost credits. It wasn't that he made life too easy for them though. It was more that he was always there to solve their problems, to make them feel confident, to tell them that their hopes for the future were attainable. He was a benevolent tyrant, far more benevolent than tyrant. Gabby Moore seemed to his athletes to have it all, everything that they hoped to have one day. He had a beautiful wife and a long-standing, apparently happy marriage. He had three great kids and a nice house. And he had the job that most of them thought would be the best job in the world. Most of them wanted to be just like him.

The peak experience of Turfy Pleasant's life and his athletic career to date was in the summer of 1972. He had just graduated from high school and was looking forward to college. Four wrestlers the best in the state of Washington would be chosen to go to Japan and Hawaii in the exchange program that Gabby had worked so hard on. Turfy yearned to be one of them. Turfy had put on some weight not much. By his senior year, he was wrestling at 158 pounds. There would be only one wrestler in that weight category chosen for the Japan trip. It was going to be difficult to pick the best from the whole state of Washington. All the contenders went to wrestling camp in Moses Lake, Washington. Turfy roomed with his best friend and teammate, Kenny Marino, knowing how much both of them wanted to win the trip to the Far East. Kenny made it to the semifinals and then he was dropped. Turfy made it all the way. He was on top of the world. He had a memorable time in Japan and Hawaii, and then came home to a hero's welcome in Yakima. He was proud and happy. No matter what happened to him later in his life, he would always talk about his shining moments in the summer of 1972. "[I was] very happy and always will be too," he would say, almost defiantly. Turfy soon came back to earth after the glory of his triumph in Japan. The rest of the summer of 1972 he worked for the Yakima City Sanitation Department hauling brush, to save money for college. With Gabby's hearty recommendation, he had been recruited by the wrestling coach at Columbia Basin College in Pasco, Washington. Turfy attended Columbia Basin from September 1972, through the winter quarter in 1975. His best friend, Kenny Marino, started his freshman year at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Turfy's brother Anthony was still in high school. Gabby kept track of his "boys" even after they were in college.

"He would come down and see me," Turfy said. "He was interested in how I did. When l left high school, he called my college coach and asked How's Pleasant doing?" If Pleasant' was not doing this well, the'd say] Have him do this,' or if Pleasant' is not responding to that, Well then, have him do that and he'll respond."" It was as if Turfy had team coaching.

Gabby was always around or on the phone to be sure that he was wrestling to his peak ability. It made Turfy happy to know that his old coach was still guiding him. They were as tight as ever. Turfy had not cut himself off from Yakima ties, even though he was living in Pasco. He made the 160-mile round trip twice a week once in the middle of the week, and again on the weekends. Kenny Marino, who hadn't gone back to the University of Washington after his freshman year, was living in Yakima.

"As soon as I would hit town, he [Kenny] would probably be the first person I would look up," Turfy remembered. "Before I even went to see my family." Kenny Marino was like another brother to Turfy. "l loved him just as much," he said. But neither Kenny nor Turfy's brother Anthony seemed to have the ambition that Turfy did. He and Kenny Marino had a social life together, but they didn't talk much about the future. And Turfy saw that his younger brother Anthony's main ambition was to "be come another Jimi Hendrix." Anthony was very good with the guitar, but Turfy knew what the odds were and sometimes he thought his younger brother was a dreamer. Anthony had dropped out of school, and both Turfy and Gabby were trying to get him back in. "Gabby was talking to the principal and some of his teachers trying to get some of his grades straightened out, and the classes straightened out." In college, Turfy's road suddenly developed detours. Although he had been a phenomenon in high school, Turfy Pleasant never quite saw his dreams of wrestling championships in college come to fruition. "I did good," he said of his career at Columbia Basin. "Except that I never did finish up at State'

because every time it got right down to it, something all the time happened to me not grade sit was either injury or sickness." But his grades weren't superior, Turfy had a hard time in college, and he didn't have Gabby close by to find tutors for him. In the spring of 1975, as Jerilee Blankenbaker Moore was trying to get up her courage to leave Gabby, Turfy Pleasant had decided to drop out of college for a quarter.

He stayed on in Pasco, though. He had a job with the Washington Fish and Game Department. "We planted fish, salmon, steelhead at certain dams," he explained. "We would go up the river and plant fish, and then we would go down the river to a lower level dam and wait and count how many came through. " Turfy planned to continue his college at Central Washington University in Ellensburg. He had enough credits to enter as a junior. He planned to bring his grades up so that he really would have a shot at being a teacher and coach back in Yakima. Gabby had told him he could do it. In September 1975 Turfy would move to Ellensburg and share an off-campus apartment with two roommates at 1501 Glen Drive. With the new freeway between Ellensburg and Yakima, Turfy could be in Yakima in thirty-five or forty minutes. And he had a number of reasons to make the trip often. For one thing, he had never been able to adhere absolutely to Gabby's "no girlfriends" rule. Turfy was engaged to a young woman named Rene Sandon*. More than engaged, really. They had a three-year-old daughter and Rene was pregnant again by late fall 1975, due to deliver in June. Turfy's second reason to travel often to Yakima was that he realized that Gabby Moore needed him. Gabby had been keeping an eye on Turfy's college wrestling, but Turfy had not visited Gabby's home as he used to. He knew that Gabby and Gay were divorced, and he knew about the merry-go-round involving Morris and Jerilee and Gabby, but he was shocked when he moved back closer to Yakima to find that Gabby had completely fallen apart after Jerilee left him. Beginning in August 1975, Turfy saw Gabby more often. "Usually," Turfy said, "I started seeing him other summers toward the end seeing how he's doing and talking to him about his team for the coming year, and about football."

But this summer was different. Sometime in August, Turfy went by the house that Gabby had bought to share with Jerilee and her children. He was surprised to find that Gabby didn't live there any longer.

He set out to find him.

"I kind of felt he would be the same old Mr. Moore," Turfy recalled. But he had heard rumors that Gabby's teams weren't doing well at all, and some of the wrestlers had told him, "It's Mr. Mooreit's not us."

Turfy had wanted to see for himself, and he found that the scuttlebutt was all true. Gabby was doing a lot of drinking, sitting there in front of Turfy and the other guys and pouring one drink after another. Gabby had always told Turfy and the other athletes, "I don't care what you do out of season, but during season I care a lot what you do." Now, Turfy tried to tell himself that it wasn't as if school had started. Gabby wasn't really coaching yet, and when September came and the wrestlers turned out, he would shape up. Turfy was sure Gabby would quit drinking then.

From the moment Turfy Pleasant renewed his contacts with Gabby Moore in the summer of 1975, he saw him every day for a month. It seemed essential to Gabby that Turfy be thereto listen. Gabby was morose, all the old spark had gone out of him. He told Turfy that he was selling the house he had just bought the year before. No reason to keep it. He had only bought it for Jerilee and her kids. He couldn't live in it alone.

He thought it would sell quicker if he put in a concrete driveway.

Laying concrete was at least something solid Turfy could do to help Gabby, so he and a couple of his cousins put the driveway in. "We finished it off after Labor Day." School started and Gabby kept right on drinking.

Turfy and Kenny Marino and some of the other members of Gabby's earlier teams talked it out and set up a schedule where they could cover for him at after-school practice and even at wrestling meets. They knew that if they weren't there to oversee things, the school administration would see how bad things really were with Gabby. There are few things more shocking for the very young than to discover that their heroes have feet of clay. Gabby Moore had been everything to them, and he had had it all.

Now, their old coach didn't have the perfect life any longer. Both his marriages were history. His first wife, Gay, was married to one of the football coaches at Davis. Gabby's marriage to Jerilee had been over before it began. And soon his athletes heard that, despite their help, Gabby's job was in jeopardy. This news only made them redouble their efforts to save it for him. Sometimes Gabby showed up for practice, and sometimes he didn't.

It was really better when he didn't better than the occasions when he had liquor on his breath, or when he went out to his car to sneak a drink from a bottle he kept there. He just hadn't seemed to care anymore about anything except getting Jerilee to come back to him. Gabby's athletes had tried to save him. ll it was a matter of trying and wanting and wishing on their parts, he would have somehow come around to being his old self again. Right up to the end, they had been visiting him and trying to cheer him up. But now Gabby Moore was dead, and none of that mattered anymore.

Vern Henderson had not been officially assigned to the Morris Blankenbaker murder case, but now, with Gabby Moore's murder, Vern was transferred to the homicide team investigating both the Blankenbaker and Moore murders. There was no way that Vern could keep from working on the growing mystery. He couldn't stand on the outside any longer. He had to be there to find the answer to what was proving to be a more and more inscrutable puzzle. But first, he needed some key to find his way in some piece of physical evidence that could start him in the right direction. The loss and grief Vern had felt when Morris Blankenbaker was murdered had not diminished, and it never would until he found his friend's killer. "I don't have many friends," he said. "No, that's not what I meani know lots of people but people who really know me, know how I'm feeling, no... I don't let many people get close to me. Morris was like that. Rucker was like that too. We had bonds. Just some people you get the feeling with and others you don't.... I always learned you can't let people get that close to you because then they know your weaknesses.

In a fatherless home, you learn to grow up quick, you don't really have a childhood.... Morris's mother and my mother kept telling us, You gotta do something with your life. You can't just be running around the streets."" Both Morris and Vern had been aware that people said mothers couldn't do a good job of raising sons, and they strived to excel to prove them wrong. "I always wanted to do something to make my mother proud of me," Vern Henderson said. Now Vern would never be proud of himself, not really, until he found Morris's killer. Morris had been so kind to everyone. "If Morris Blankenbaker liked you, he would do anything for you. He was like a bull on the football field," Vern said.

"He could run right over anybody. He could have whipped half the school, but he wasn't a bully, he wasn't like that." Everyone on the Yakima Police Department wanted to solve the bizarre double murders of the two popular coaches, but not one of them felt the impetus to do so in his gut the way Vern Henderson did. In that dismal period between a bloody Christmas and a cheerless New Year, Vern thought about all that had happened and wondered where to start. Which brick could he remove from the wall that a killer had built up around himself? How could he make that wall tumble? Bob Brimmer was Vern's sergeant upstairs in the detectives'