A Fever in the Heart: And Other True Cases (18 page)

Yes, Turfy had lived with him on and off during the previous autumn when Turfy came home from college on the weekends, except when he was staying at his girlfriend's house. Joey told Vern Henderson that he was with Turfy for the first part of the evening on November 21, until Turfy joined some people at the next table in the Red Lion two women and a man. Joey said he had gone home, visited with his girlfriend, and then gone to bed. He said he really didn't know when Turfy came home, or if he came home during the night. Turfy often went to his girlfriend Rene's house to stay overnight. He had his own key to Joey's place, so Joey couldn't say yes, no, or maybe about where Turfy had been after he last saw him at nine P.M. on the night of November However, Vern found it interesting that by Christmas Eve, Turfy no longer stayed with Joey Watkins on weekends. In fact, Joey said, they rarely saw each other after Morris's death. Joey agreed that he had seen Gabby Moore on Christmas Eve. Moore had come over to his house around 6:30 or 7:00 that evening. He had been looking for Turfy and Kenny Marino because they had his sports car. The coach had sat down and watched a football game with Joey for a while, and then Joey said he had driven Moore down to North Fourth Street where Kenny Marino lived. "Gabby's car was parked out there."

Joey said that was the last he saw of Gabby, he had picked up his girlfriend and gone out to Harrah, a tiny hamlet south of Yakima, where she worked at a halfway house for mentally disturbed adolescents. "We stayed there until Christmas morning," Watkins said. Joey said he had no idea that Gabby Moore had been shot until the next morning. "I stopped at Mrs. Pleasant's store and I was going to get something to eat and I just saw his picture in the headlines." In January, Sergeant Richard Nesary, the Yakima Police Department's polygraph examiner, ran four lie detector tests on Gabby Moore's associates including Turfy Pleasant in an effort to see if red flags might pop up. Nesary read the resulting strips and came up with only inconclusive readings. Despite Turfy's protestations that he had no idea who had shot Gabby Moore, Vern Henderson had heard enough through the grapevine to be more interested in the results of Turfy's polygraph than in the others. Turfy had been the closest to Gabby Moore by far. Turfy Pleasant had always called Gabby Moore "The Man." And that was exactly what Gabby had been to Turfy for the greater part of their relationship the perfect example of what a man should be. If Turfy had wanted one thing in this world, it was to go to college and graduate and be just like Gabby Moore. Vern heard that often enough as he asked around town. "It wasn't Joey Watkins who was driving around in The Man's' car all the time," Vern said. "It was Turfy in that little MG." Then how could it be Turfy who had killed his hero?

Everyone Vern talked to said that Turfy would have done anything to help Gabby. Vern Henderson realized that might be the answer to only half of the puzzle, and that if Turfy had killed Morris for Gabby, it made some kind of bleak sense. The other half didn't make any sense at all. Turfy might have killed for Gabby, but he would have died, Vern thought, before he would kill Gabby himself. Vern had begun following Turfy's car occasionally as he drove through Yakima. He knew that Turfy had gone up to Gabby Moore's grave just as Gabby had been seen standing silently over Morris's grave. Was Turfy's grief a normal sense of loss or was it combined with regret and guilt? Polygraph examinations can produce all kinds of results. Four recording "pens" glide smoothly along moving graph paper at the rate of six inches a minute. A subject's blood pressure, respiration (number of breaths per minute), galvanic skin response (sweating), and pulse are generally good indicators of reactions to stress-producing questions. All polygraph questions are answered either "Yes" or "No," and the operator establishes his subject's "normal" responses by asking innocuous questions such as "Do you live in the United States?"

"Is it Wednesday?" and "Is your shirt green?" He often will ask a deliberate lie question to check to see how a particular subject will react when he gives a dishonest response. With every decade, polygraph machines become more sophisticated just as their operators learn to look for more subtle signals. Beyond the accepted physiological reactions, there are minute chemical changes that today can alert a polygrapher that a subject may be evading the truth When Turfy Pleasant went on the polygraph on January 10, 1976, Dick Nesary was using what was then a near state-of-the-art system: a I 971 Arthur 11 polygraph machine. Nesary always double-checked the machine beforehand. Nesary explained his check-out procedure. "Well, it's very simple. You take a pop bottle and wrap the blood pressure cuff around it, pump up the pressure to eighty and leave it sit for five minutes and see if the pressure goes down. If it doesn't, then there's no leaks in the system." On January 10, as Nesary gave the lie detector test to Turfy Pleasant, he built up gradually to the vital questions: "Did you shoot Morris Blankenbaker?" and "Did you shoot Gabby Moore?" In Nesary's words, the results were "unreadable."

"My opinion was that he had knowledge of the situation, but I could not arrive at an opinion as to whether or not he was the actual one involved in it." Those January results dampened Vern Henderson's enthusiasm for Turfy Pleasant as a viable suspect, at least until he talked again to Joey Watkins. Watkins wasn't happy about becoming even a long-shot murder suspect, and he was quite willing to talk with Vern. He pointed out that he was not the one who had always been seen with Gabby Moore that it was Turfy who was Gabby's buddy. "Who do you think was running around with Gabby?" Watkins asked Henderson. "It was Turfy, not me. I didn't run around with that man."

"That's true," Vern agreed. "You didn't."

Vern Henderson realized, however, that Joey Watkins might be the vital link between himself and Turfy Pleasant. With every meeting he had with Watkins, Vern learned more. "Turfy didn't know what Joey Watkins was saying to me," Vern recalled. "But from talking with Watkins, I knew that when I eventually got to Turfy, he would be able to tell me what had gone on." Joey Watkins had taken his time about trusting Vern Henderson, and he had debated how much to tell him. Finally, he blurted out information that was of tremendous importance to the double-murder probe. Vern remembered the moment. "Joey said, Hey, look Turfyi saw Turfy with a gun." And I said, What kind of a gun?" and he said, A German-type twenty-two with a long barrel and a long handle that was wrapped with tape."" Vern asked Watkins if the gun had been an automatic, and Watkins nodded. "Yeah, one of those German Luger type guns."

"But I heard you had a gun like that," Vern hedged.

"It was in my house, all right," Watkins agreed, "but it wasn't mine. It belonged to Turfy." Watkins said he didn't know where the gun had come from and he had no idea where it might be at the present moment.

Although he desperately wanted to solve Morris's and Gabby's murders, Vern Henderson had been halfway hoping that he wouldn't hear information that placed Turfy Pleasant squarely as the focal point in his investigation. He would far rather have had the suspect be a stranger.

There were too many ties between them, these two young black men in a town where they were in such a minority. Vern and Turfy were both athletes who had excelled and made their school and their town proud.

Vern liked Turfy, even though he could be a wise guy at times, and Vern deeply admired Turfy's father, Andrew Pleasant, Sr. The last thing Vern wanted to do was humiliate and grieve that man who had struggled so hard to see his children do better in the world than he had. Andrew had worked two jobs all his life and he had just about seen his dreams come true, all but one of Andrew and Coydell's children were in college by the midseventies. But the word was out that Turfy Pleasant might be a suspect in the two shooting snot officially, but in an undercurrent of gossip and Andrew, Sr came to Vern, just as Olive Blankenbaker had once come to him. They were each pleading for justice for their children, and their requests left Vern Henderson torn in two. "When Morris's mother asked me to find who had killed him, I told her that I would," Vern said. "I didn't know what else to say. It was very emotional, and I just wanted to hug her. It was the same with Turfy's father.

"Turfy's father came to me and he said, Look, Vern you're working this case. I want to know if my son actually did this or not. I know we can trust you." I knew right then that I was going to be in trouble because who really wants to know that his son committed murder? I knew right then that if I found out Turfy had something to do with it, our friendship would be over." It was a solid friendship going back to when Andrew Pleasant came to watch Vern play football and continuing when they worked in the Sanitation Department while Vern was going to Yakima Valley Community College. Vern didn't know Turfy Pleasant as well as he did Turfy's father, but he was about to. He drove up to Ellensburg and went to the rooming house where Turfy was living while he was going to Central Washington University. Turfy met him outside, and the two began what would be a tentative, edgy, continuing dialogue. From that point on, Turfy Pleasant would always sense that someone was waiting and watching his movements. He could count on seeing Vern Henderson often.

He suspectedcorrectlythat Vern was somewhere around, even when he didn't see him. It didn't matter that Turfy had walked out of the lie detector test with an unreadable graph, leaving the polygrapher Dick Nesary shaking his head. It didn't matter that Turfy felt he had aced his meeting with Brimmer and the other detectives in January. He still felt uneasy. It seemed to Turfy that Vern knew too much about him, and that he wasn't ever going to leave him alone until he proved it. The hell of it was that Turfy kind of liked Vern Henderson. In other circumstances, he would have been glad to talk with him, but, for the moment, Vern made him nervous. And that was exactly the reaction Vern was trying for.

Morris s big old house on North Sixth Street had renters again, and life went on. Every time Vern Henderson passed the house, memories came back, good memories of visiting with Morris and Jerilee, of being welcome in their home and of his own pleasure at seeing Morris happy again. But in the end the bad memories always prevailed. Vern had not seen Morris lying there in the snow on that awful night when he died, but he had seen the pictures. He could half close his eyes and see just the way it had been. There had to be some evidence left in Morris's yard or in the alley, something that hadn't been found yet. The pressure to come up with enough evidence to charge a suspect had been incredibly hard on Sergeant Bob Brimmer. It was Friday, January 16, when he took his first day off in a long time and prepared to go fishing for three days just to get away from the case for a short time. Sitting in the detectives'

office alone, Vern Henderson felt an overwhelming urge to do something.

He threw on his coat and headed out to North Sixth Street. He knew from talking with Joey Watkins that Turfy Pleasant had had the German automatic in his possession during November and December. If Turfy was the guilty man, and if he had used that gun to shoot Morris, there would have to be some casings somewhere near where Morris had fallen.

Henderson decided to literally put himself in the shoes of the shooter.

He walked south from Lincoln down the alley behind the apartment house at 208 North Sixth Street where Gerda Lenberg had heard the sound of someone running the night after Thanksgiving. Her duplex was right where the sidewalk on Lincoln met the alleyway. Several houses down, Vern came to the parking area behind what once had been Morris's house. The little Volkswagen would have been in the carport, and the Chevelle that Morris had driven to work that night had been pulled right up onto the grass of the backyard. There were different cars there now, but Vern saw only the way it had been in November. The new apartment house where Rowland Seal and Dale Soost lived was very close to Morris's yard, probably not more than ten feet from the property line. "First, I walked up to the fence where I knew where I thought Morris would have been standing," Vern remembered, his eyes focusing on some time long ago. "I knew how the body was, because I knew how the bullets had entered from seeing the autopsy. .. and I'd seen the photographs." Now Vern Henderson became the shooter. He never doubted that there had only been one killer, Mrs. Lenberg was positive she had heard only one set of feet in clunky shoes running down the alley, and then, after the "firecrackers," back up the alley. Vern stood where the man whose face he couldn't yet know had stood facing Morris. It was almost as real to Henderson at that moment as if he had actually been there two months earlier. "I knew it was an automatic. I said to myself, those guns will kick to the right. I'd read in a book that the casings could kick up to fifteen to twenty feet when they eject out of that thing depending on what kind of spring it had in there. That shell could pop fifteen to twenty feet and it could go in either direction, directly back or out to the side. Well, so I said to myself, let's do a triangle. You're standing here when you shot him, so it went over to the right." Vern turned his head slowly and looked to the right. He saw the four-foot-tall chicken-wire fence that separated the apartment grounds from the lawn of Morris's house. There was a cement path with a curb just beyond the fence. He figured the fence was about ten feet from where he stood. Almost as if some hand were guiding him, Vern drew an imaginary arc in his mind to the right, and then he walked over to the fence. To himself, he muttered, "It should have landed right here." He looked down at a spot between the path and the fence on the apartment house side. And there it was. The shell lay in a puddle in the shadow of one of the cement posts, its shiny surface dulled now from lying out in the weather. Vern Henderson felt his heart beat faster as he crouched and picked up the single shell casing. It was more precious to him than if it had been made of solid gold. He knew in his gut that it had been there all along from the very moment Morris died. The slug from this casing had entered his best friend's head and shattered, and the casing had sailed through the freezing night air and landed so that it was hidden in plain sight. Cradling the shell carefully, Vern Henderson slipped it into an evidence envelope and drove to his sergeant's home. There, Bob Brimmer looked at it and said that he thought it would turn out to be almost identical in make and in markings left by the firing pin, extractor, and ejector to the casing found on the kitchen floor of Gabby Moore's apartment on Christmas Eve. They would have to send it to the state lab to be sure. Both men were excited but cautious. They didn't have a gun yet, but if the casings matched, they would know that the two shootings were connected. However, they still wouldn't know whose gun had fired them. Vern Henderson took the shell back to the Yakima Police Department. He compared it to the casing from the Moore murder. That shell was shinier, but that didn't matter.