A Fever in the Heart: And Other True Cases (20 page)

"What happened to the potato?" Prosecutor Jeff Sullivan asked.

"It went all over. It hit me in the eye."

Turfy had tried shooting a potato twice and then, satisfied, he said he would buy the gun. He didn't give her any money at the time, but offered to pay her later. Loretta didn't know what he needed a gun for, and he didn't offer any explanation. He was a good kid who'd never been in any trouble, so she wasn't concerned. Loretta said she had never checked for a serial number on the gun, but she remembered it had a clip in it, and that she had given Turfy some bullets that came with it. On November 10, Loretta Scott had moved back to Yakima. Sometime in the next few weeks, she had seen Turfy again over at her sister's house. He didn't have the gun with him, and he had never paid her. Thirty-five dollars wasn't that much, but he had promised. On November 29, Loretta decided to confront him about getting either the gun or the money back, and she went to the apartment he shared with his girlfriend when he was home from college.

Turfy was outside working on his car when she drove up and he grinned at her and sauntered over to her car. "I went over there and I said could I have it back?"

Loretta said. "He gave the gun back. He went to his car and wrapped the gun up in a cloth and gave it to me." Loretta said she had stuck it in her purse and then put it in a closet at her apartment. That seemed to be the end of the matter. She wasn't mad because her cousin hadn't paid her for the gun and she had it back. As far as she knew, he had just wanted to carry it to look like a big man. He was going to college, he wasn't in any trouble, and the whole transaction was no big deal.

Loretta Scott paused as she answered the detectives' and the prosecutor's questions. She was still nervous, but she felt better now that she'd started to tell the story. "Okay," Jeff Sullivan asked her, "did Angelo [Turfy] ever come to you again asking for the gun?"

"Yes, he did," she said. "On the twenty-fourth... Christmas."

It was Christmas Eve and she and her sister were alone when he came over and said, "Can I get that from you again, Cousin?" He didn't say the word gun at first but she knew what he meant. She asked him what he wanted it for, but he didn't really answer. All he would say was, "You'll read about it in the paper." She stared at him. That didn't sound so good. But he seemed to be in a hurry, and he was Turfyher "Cur," her longtime friend. She gave him the. 22 again and he asked about ammunition. "I told him I only had one bullet left in the bathroom in the medicine cabinet. We were in there already and I just had to turn around to get it for him." She remembered that she had put the lone bullet in a medicine vial when she cleaned the cabinet. It was there with a single aspirin, a bobby pin, and a penny. When Turfy left, her sister had looked at her and shook her head.

"You shouldn't have done that, Loretta," she said flatly.

Loretta had wondered briefly why her sister hadn't objected while Turfy was in the house. Whatever he wanted the gun for, it was too late now.

She moved about her kitchen, getting ready for a family Christmas Eve party. All over Yakima, people were celebrating the holiday The first time Loretta Scott had given Turfy her gun, she had had to go and ask for it. That's probably why Loretta's sister had told her she had done a dumb thing. Oddly, she didn't have to ask for the gun this time. Turfy was back before she knew it.

Loretta had been bewildered to see Turfy again at about l :30 A.M. Christmas morning. Her Christmas Eve party was in full swing when he and his girlfriend, Rene, showed up unexpectedly. But he hadn't come to the party, he had come to give her the. 22. She thought that was kind of strange his bothering to come to her house on Christmas Eve. "Did you have any conversation with him?" Jeff Sullivan asked Loretta. "No, he just gave it to me. I put it in a drawer."

Loretta had no idea what Turfy had wanted with the gun that he had kept for only five hours. Not, at least, until Christmas morning.

"We had opened our Christmas gifts and we were supposed to have dinner at my mother's house," Loretta said nervously. "When I came in the door, my sister said, Loretta, I have something to tell you."" Loretta Scott had thought her sister was just joking and she moved toward the buffet to fill her plate. But her sister was adamant that she stop and listen to her news before she ate. "Okay," Loretta said. "Before I fix my plate. What?"

"Mr. Moore is dead."

"Aww, girl, go on." Loretta laughed.

"No," her sister said urgently. "He's dead. He was shot last night."

Suddenly, Loretta Scott had lost her appetite and any Christmas spirit.

"He was shot last night?" she whispered. "Yeah, he was shot last night with a twenty-two."

"With a twenty-two?" Loretta repeated like an automaton. She kept hearing Turfy say, "You'll read about it in the paper." She stayed at her mother's house so her children could enjoy the day, but her mind had been going ninety miles an hour. She could not believe that Turfy had had anything to do with shooting Mr. Moore. Mr. Moore had made Turfy a champion. Still, on Monday, she was waiting for the paper boy at five.

She took the paper in carefully but was afraid to open it. She set it down on the kitchen table. "I let it sit there until about eight-thirty and I started thinking. I was trying to get my mind clear." Loretta still could not imagine that Turfy would hurt anyone, much less Mr. Moore. She turned to her boyfriend "G," and the look on her face made him ask, "What's wrong?"

"I've got a gun," she answered. "And I've got a feeling something is wrong." Loretta picked up the paper and started reading about Gabby Moore s murder. "When I got to the twenty-two caliber part, I panicked." The paper said the bullet had been a. 22

caliber long bullet, and that was the same kind of bullet she had given to Turfy. She asked "G" if she could borrow his car, a brand new Oldsmobile. He handed her the keys. Whatever was going on, he didn't particularly care to know the details. "I went to my mother's house," Loretta told the investigators who were listening to her recollections avidly. "I had forgotten that she had left and went to Seattle, and there was no one there but my brother, Charles. He was having a little party. I called him into the bedroom, and I said Chucky, I did something terrible. I don't know what to do about it. I'm panicky and I'm scared and I don't want to believe it. I think it's a dream."" Seeing how upset Loretta was, Chucky Pleasant was scared too. "He panicked right along with me," Loretta said. "We started talking about, Let's bury the gun,'

and we started acting like Columba trying to pick apart a puzzle and everything. And so we got into the car and so we decided to throw it in the river."

"Where did you throw it in the river?" Jeff sullivan asked "The Naches." They had been heading south toward Yakima when they approached the Twin Bridges. If they hadn't been so frightened and if the reason for their mission hadn't been so deadly serious, their efforts to get rid of the. 22 might have been humorous. It was like a snake lying between them on the car seat, and neither of them was adept at stealthy games. Chucky Pleasant, nineteen, who was also Turfy's first cousin, had flung the gun from the car, aiming at the Naches River.

Instead, he hit the bridge railing and the gun bounced back into the road. Loretta told him to get out and throw it far, far out into the swiftest, deepest part of the river. She would circle around and pick him up on the other side of the road. It was very dark and cold.

December 26. They were both scared to death that someone would see them.

They didn't want the gun, but they didn't want to implicate their cousin in a murder. It was almost as if they could throw the gun away, the whole ugly business could be over and forgotten. Chucky picked up the gun and threw it where it looked like the river was deep and running fast. He didn't know that he had only tossed it onto the little island below the bridge where the water would not be deep for long. It was ironic, Jeff Sullivan realized. If Chucky Pleasant hadn't missed with his first throw, the gun would have gone into such a deep part of the river that no one would ever have found it. The second throw was the one that hit the water over the island. Loretta Scott was still afraid as she poured out her story, but telling it to the police and the prosecutor made her feel a little better. She still fully expected to go to jail. She said her brother hadn't told her exactly where he had thrown the gun, but he had assured her it was "deep."

"What did you do after you threw the gun in the river?" Sullivan asked. "I went home and went to sleep."

Loretta had read the papers, seen all the stories about Mr. Moore and Mr. Blankenbaker, but she had tried to put it all out of her mind. She didn't want to know what had happened. It was exactly two months latera few days before she came to the prosecutor loretta said, when her cousin Turfy had showed up at her new apartment. He was the last person she wanted to see. He seemed jittery. He was jittery, and that just wasn't like Turfy. He always had fun and saw the happy side of things. But he had been having too many visits from Vern Henderson, and Vern had told him how much the police could tell if they ever found the gun that shot Gabby and Morris. And Turfy had read about the Klingele boys finding a.

22 automatic in the Naches River. He wanted to make sure that it wasn't the gun Turfy and Loretta talked around the subject. They had known such happy family times together in the past, and each of them wanted so much to go back to those days. But it was too late. Finally, Turfy blurted out a question, "Where's the gun?"

Loretta studied his face, and she knew she had to find out what had really happened to Mr. Moore. Feeling a little guilty, she told Turfy a lie. "Oh, I gave it to some dude who lives down in Florida. I just gave it to him." Instantly, Turfy's face gleamed with relief. "Oh, Cousin, thank you," he said. "I love you for what you did." Turfy asked her if she had read in the papers about the little boy who had gone fishing and had pulled a gun from the river. He had been so worried when he read that, afraid it was the she had loaned him. But now he was relieved.

Softly, Loretta continued her story to the Yakima investigators.

"I saw the joy and the love he had for me on his face because he thought I had done this [sent the gun to Florida] and I said, No, Cur, that's a lie I told you." And I sat him down on the couch and I said I had thrown the gun away in the river." All the relief had drained from Turfy's face, Loretta said.

"How did he act when he found that you had thrown the gun into the Naches River?" Bob Brimmer asked. "Time. .."

"I don't understand."

"Time. He was talking about, you know, what he was going to have to go through."

"Go through?"

"Time" meant time in prison. Vern Henderson had convinced Turfy so completely that if that death gun should ever be found, it could be traced directly back to the man who shot Morris and Gabby. And at this moment, Turfy =- e _ ex _s Morris Blankenbaker, about 6, shows off his new cowboy outfit. (Olive Blankenbaker collection). Morris Blankenbaker at graduation from davis High School. He won a number of athletic awards and a football scholarship to Washington State University. He dated, but there was no special girlnotthen. (Olive Blankenbaker collection)

Morris's half brother, Mike, who resembled Morris and Ned, their father, so much around the eyes that he made Olive catch her breath whenever she saw him, was very good to her. He stopped by often to see if she was managing all right, even though he knew she would never really get over losing her only son. In the early months of 1976, Olive thought about how Mike had sold his car so he could go to Hawaii and comfort Morris when Jerilee divorced him. When was that? It seemed to her that a dozen years had passed, but she realized it had been less than two years ago.

That was hard to believe when so much had happened. Olive arranged to buy Morris's Volkswagen from his estate. She wanted Mike Blankenbaker to have it, it would make up for his giving up his first car for Morris, and it would be something of his big brother's that he could cherish.

Jerilee Blankenbaker-Moore-Blankenbaker, in some ways a double-widow now, kept working at the bank. If she moved through her days in a blur of shock, no one could fault her. She was brilliant on the job, it was a way to shut the world out for a while. Her children were small and they needed her, her own family was supportive, and so the months rolled by.

She was very lonely at first, adrift really. She had been married since she was eighteen years old, albeit to two men, but she had never been truly "single" during the past dozen years. One marriage had moved so seamlessly into the next that she had never learned to live alone. There was there had to bea distance between Morris's family and Jerilee.

Although no one ever said it aloud, the thought was always there: If Jerilee had not fallen in love with Gabby and gone off with him, if he had not become obsessed with her, Morris's family believed that Morris would be alive. They had no proof. Even the police had no proof. But it was just common sense. Except for the normal problems everyone has from time to time, all of their lives had moved along so smoothly until Gabby Moore moved in with Morris and Jerilee. In time, maybe they could work out their differences with Jerilee, but it was hard for Olive to look at her and not think of losing Morris. Olive didn't know exactly what had happened, but she vowed she would find out before she died. And Olive had learned that she probably would die soon. At sixty-five, she had been diagnosed with lung cancer. Wasn't that just her kind of luck? She didn't even smoke. Sometimes Olive wondered why she had had to take so many heavy hits in her life. She had lost her only husband, her only child, the best friend-and-boss she had ever had, and now it looked as if she were going to be one of the small percentage of nonsmokers to die of lung cancer. Yet there was a strength in Olive Blankenbaker that few women have. Maybe it was rage, and maybe it was only an ability to accept the unthinkable and go on. She planned her little garden for spring and was pleased that her cat was going to have kittens. Olive loved life and she was not going to give up easily. She knew what the odds werethe doctors had told her but it didn't matter that much to her any longer. "I just figured I wasn't going to live to be an old woman," she said quietly. Olive was determined, however, to stay alive long enough to attend the trial of Morris's murderer whoever that turned out to be. Vern Henderson wasn't telling her anything specific, he just kept reassuring her that he was working on the case, and for her not to worry. "I didn't sit around and cry," Olive said. "I went back to work.