A Fever in the Heart: And Other True Cases (19 page)

What mattered were the extractor and ejector marks made by the gun mechanism and the firing pin mark. "They both had that moon-shape on the bottom," Vern remembered.

"Just alike."

He tagged the casing from the apartment fence and locked it in his desk.

On Monday, Bob Brimmer would send it to the lab to verify what both he and Henderson had seen with their naked eyes. When and if the murder weapon was located, the casing from the bullet that had killed Gabby Moore could be matched to the lands and grooves inside the barrel. Not so with the weather-beaten shell Vern had found ten feet from where Morris died. But the marks left by the gun on its base would be enough.

Henderson suspected that the other two casings from bullets fired at Morris had ejected to the right too, but had traveled farther than this one, they probably had landed on the well-traveled path and been stepped on or kicked aside long ago by residents of the apartment house. He didn't need them. Even so, he and another detective returned to North Sixth Street with a shovel and a screen. They pulled up grass and weeds and dug up shovelfuls of dirt and sifted them through the screen on the off-chance they would find the other shell casings. They didn't find them. They never would.

The chance of finding the gun that had killed both Morris Blankenbaker and Gabby Moore was minute. Whoever the killer was, he would have been a fool not to have gotten rid of it after the second murder. There were so many places around Yakima to dispose of a weapon. Canyons, endless miles of barren desert, mountains, rivers. There was a huge military training reservation east of town where thousands of Washington State National Guardsmen, reserve officers, and troops from Fort Lewis went on maneuvers. For that matter, the gun could have been sold or given to someone on "The Coast a term residents of eastern Washington use when referring to Seattle. The latter assumption seemed the most likely. The Yakima Herald-Republic reported that Yakima County authorities were arranging for divers to search for the missing. 22 in rivers and lakes on "The Coast." As it turned out that wasn't necessary. Some unseen force seemed to be dictating that there would be justice in this murder puzzle. The discovery of the missing weapon was too perfect, any editor in his right mind would have penciled it out of a fictional murder mystery. But this was real life.

On February 21, five weeks after Vern Henderson had walked unerringly to the shell beneath the fence, John and Paul Klingele, aged fifteen and sixteen, went off to pursue their favorite hobby15shing. They headed for the Naches River just where it flowed into the Vakima River right under the Twin Bridges, two double green steel arches over both the north and south lanes where interstate 82 now helds north toward Ellensburg out of Yakima, or south into Yakima itself. John Klingele would remember that day for a long time, not because of the fishing, but because of what he found in the river. The rains and melting snow runoff had been heavy that winter and the river had actually rushed in a tumult over a little island that sticks out into the Naches beneath the Twin Bridges. But now, the water had receded until it was very shallow and John was able to wade underneath the bridges from the west side to the east. It was about noon when he looked down and saw a cylindrical metal object in the water. Peering closer, he realized it was the long barrel of a handgun.

He called to his brother, Paul, who was fishing about fifteen feet away.

The boys pulled the gun from about three inches of water and saw that the grips were wrapped with white masking tape. The gun was a. 22

caliber automatic. They washed it off in the river and Paul checked to see if it was loaded. The clip was empty. Still curious, they unwound the tape. John Klingele was more interested in fishing than m guns, and he gave the. 22 to his brother to take home. They would ask their dad about it when he came home for lunch. Wayne Klingele, a printer for the Yakima Herald-Republic, knew a lot about guns. He was a hunter and a trap-shooter, and he kept his own guns in good shape. The elder Klingele was not too happy to hear that his teenaged sons had been fiddling around with a gun. He looked at it, saw it was unloaded, and recognized it as a. 22 Colt Woodsman with a six-inch barrel. It was an older model, somewhat rusted from being in the river. He supposed it could have been in the Naches for years Klingele had to go back to work, but he was dead serious when he instructed Paul to put the gun high up on the Klingele trophy shelf and to remember that neither he nor John were to touch it.

Wayne had no idea where it had come from, but he knew what he was going to do about it. Wayne Klingele kept guns in the house shotguns and rifles because he was such an avid trap-shooter. In fact, he would be trapshooting the next day, Sunday, with Jack La Rue, the chief of police of Yakima. When Klingele mentioned the gun from the river to La Rue, he found the chief was extremely interested in seeing it. Klingele promised to bring it to the station the next morning. "I took it down on Monday morning and Chief La Rue was waiting for me and took me right up to the second floor to see Sergeant Brimmer. I handed the gun to him." Brimmer and Henderson were fascinated with the gun that had lain in three inches of water where the Naches lapped up over the island. The caliber was right.

The long barrel was right.

It was an automatic. When they heard that the Klingele boys had unwrapped white tape from the grips, they began to grin. But cautiously.

Now they had two casings from two murder scenes casings that had tested as having been fired from the same gunand a. 22 caliber, long-barreled, automatic Colt Woodsman with vestiges of white tape on the grips. The crime lab would be able to tell them if the river gun had fired those bullets. They also had to try to trace the peregrinations of that weapon before it landed in the river. Whoever had tossed the gun into the Naches had probably been headed toward Ellensburg or was coming back from Ellensburg. And they surely had not known about the way the little island below projected out into the river. Had they known, they would have pitched the gun with a lot more force. Instead, the rusty old gun had just been waiting there for someone to find it, its barrel moving slightly with the tug of the current. It was almost eerie, when one considered how the bullet casing had been waiting for Vern Henderson to discover it. And now the gun had been found almost as easily. Murder sometimes does will out, after all.

In this case, it was beginning to look as though luck were walking with the Yakima police. Still, the detectives had no way of knowing how convoluted this case would become. They had some promising ballistics evidence. They had a lot of rumors, but they had no idea what the motive behind the two murders was. That had all blown up on Christmas Eve when their likeliest killer had turned out to be their second victim Prosecutor Jef Sullivan met with Bob Brimmer and Vern Henderson. The gun might prove to be vital to the case. At this point, they had no idea who that gun belonged to or through whose hands it might have passed. But they suspected someone out there would be sweating if heor she knew that the weapon was now in the hands of the Yakima police. Most people have seen enough television mysteries to know that guns can be traced, but they don't understand the finer points of forensic ballistics. For the moment, the gun was mentioned to no one outside the investigation. But when a reporter from the Yakima Herald-Republic made his usual police department rounds on that Monday, February 23, he asked, as always, whether there was anything new on the Blankenbaker Moore case. There wasn't much, but Chief Jack La Rue casually mentioned that someone had brought in a. 22 that had been found underneath the Twin Bridges. That news story galvanized at least three readers into a panic.

Each felt that the police would know who had thrown the gun in the river as surely as if they had scratched their names and addresses on the side of the barrel. In the meantime, Vern Henderson was wearing a groove in the road up to Ellensburg. Turfy Pleasant was growing used to looking up and seeing Vern heading his way. It bugged him that Vern seemed to know what was going on in his head. And the detective had picked up a lot of things on the streets in Yakima, rumors and remarks made by some of the guys Turfy ran with. Henderson had felt for weeks now that Turfy was somehow connected with the two shootings, but he wasn't sure how or why.

When they talked, they talked in circles fencing and feinting.

Sometimes, Vern thought he saw sweat bead up along Turfy's forehead, especially when Vern confirmed that they had, indeed, found a .22 in the Naches River. "I told him how much we could tell from a gun," Henderson recalled. "He didn't know we couldn't trace it unless someone came forward, and he believed me that we were right next door to knowing who the killer was." Turfy had brazened it out. He told Vern that he had talked to a lawyer, and he "knew his rights. I don't have to talk to you or Brimmer if I don't want to."

"That's right."

"What would you do if you were in my position?" Turfy asked suddenly.

"Well," Vern Henderson said slowly, "if I was in your position, I don't know just what I would do. I mighti would get myself an attorney and I wouldn't say anything." Henderson figured he'd just put his foot in his own mouth, but the kid asked him, and he answered him straight.

Turfy stared back at him, weighing something in his mind. "No," Turfy said. "I want to talk with you. I want to help clear this up." And they kept talking until it grew cold and dark and Vern had to head back to Yakima. Whatever Turfy had been about to say, he didn't say anything definitive. He just wanted to know more about what police could tell from a gun. Driving home, Vern was convinced Turfy knew who had killed both Morris and Gabby. He wondered if Turfy had done it himself. And then, as always, he wondered, if he did, why.2 Actually, the Yakima investigators were both further and closer than they suspected from finding the gun's owner. They didn't know it yet, but the old Colt had come back from Vietnam and there was virtually no way to trace it. It was of no more use than a "drop gun," a gun deliberately left at the scene of some crimes to throw police off because the person who left it behind knows it has no identifying marks. They might be able to show that the deadly bullets had been fired from the gun in the river, but unless the investigators could find a link between the gun and Turfy or whoever the shooter was they couldn't prove he had used it to commit murder. During that third week in February, a very attractive twenty-seven-year-old woman named Loretta Scott read the paper and felt her heart constrict. She had been panicky since Christmas Day, worrying about that gun, although she had nothing whatsoever to do with killing Morris Blankenbaker or Gabby Moore. She hadn't even known them except by sight. But Loretta Scott had been drawn into a most bizarre sequence of events, all because she wanted to help out a relative. Now Loretta was apprehensive as she contacted a public defender and said she might have a legal problem. She told him that she might know something about a gun that had possibly been involved in a murder. She didn't want to believe that it was, but she confessed that she and her brother had thrown it into the Naches River. "Could I be in trouble?" she asked.

The public defender pulled no punches. "You could. I think you should tell the prosecuting attorney what you know." First, though, the attorney from the Public Defender's office placed a call to Jeff Sullivan and gave him the plot of a theoretical set of circumstances involving a bystander who had inadvertently become involved in a murderor two murders' after the fact." The Yakima County prosecutor understood immediately what he was hearing. They had just hit paydirt.

He asked the attorney to bring his client into the courthouse. Together, Loretta Scott and her attorney appeared at Jeff Sullivan's office in the Yakima County Courthouse. Tall and slender with huge sloe eyes, Loretta could have been a model. But not on the day she came in to tell her story- she was trembling too badly. Loretta Scott explained that she was Turfy Pleasant's first cousin on his father's side. For seven months of the previous year, she had lived with her three small children in Walla Walla, Washington, over a hundred miles southeast of Yakima. She said that she and Turfy had been close growing up but she had seen little of him in the past few years The Pleasant clan was large and cherished family loyalty, but Turfy hadn't been around much, and then she had moved out of Yakima for a while herself. Loretta said she had been surprised when Turfy visited her in Walla Walla around Halloween. He had not called her first, he just showed up on a Thursday afternoon. She was startled, but she was happy to see him too. "We sat down and rapped and went to the store and got some food and ate. .. and then," she continued, "and I don't know how the conversation really came about he asked me, Hey, Cur, do you have any weapons? Do you have a gun? "I said, Yeah, I have a gun,' and he asked, Can I see it?"

" Loretta Scott said she had an old. 22 that someone had given to one of her brothers and then he had given it to a friend, who had given it to her. She had been having trouble with an old boyfriend who wouldn't let go. Having the gun around made her feel a little safer. She had no idea where it had come from in the beginning. When she had bad times with her ex, somebody gave it to her. When Turfy asked about a gun, she retrieved it from where she kept it hidden from her children and showed it to him.

Asked to describe it, Loretta remembered that the gun had a long barrel and some kind of white tape around the grips. Turfy had told her that he might buy it from her, but he would have to test it first. He told her that he needed it for "protection."

"You can have that old gun for thirty-five dollars," Loretta told him.

Turfy had played with her kids and visited and then stayed the night at her home. Just before he left for Yakima the next day, he asked her if he could try the gun out. Then he asked for a potato. She had looked at him as if he were crazy, but she handed him one.

"And so we went out into the backyard," she said, "and he took the potato and held it in his hand and he fired the gun off into the potato to see how much power it had."