A Fever in the Heart: And Other True Cases (4 page)

"The bank had a test they gave to everyone," Olive Blankenbaker recalled. "They handed Jerilee this great big stack of checks, and they said, There's one forgery in there. See if you can find it." And do you know, she found it and nobody ever had before. She is really bright.

You've got to give her credit." Jerilee was hired at once. Not only was her appearance an asset to the bank, but she was obviously smart. They hadn't guessed wrong on her. Although she had no training and was fresh out of high school, she was a quick study and she proved to be a very valuable employee. She began as a clerk, but she rose rapidly to a position of trust officer. Morris found a job at Western State Hospital in Steil acoom, Washington's state institution for people who are profoundly psychotic. He worked the late shift from three to eleven P.M. It was a demanding job. He was at work for the evening meal and then he helped medical personnel get patients settled down for the night with a variety of medications. He always had to be ready for trouble. The most placid patients sometimes had psychotic breaks with no warning at all.

Morris knew that one of the reasons he had been hired was his muscular build. But Morris's innate kindness and his calm manner seemed to soothe the more disturbed patients at Western State. No matter how difficult the night's work had been, Morris still had to study when he got home close to midnight. While he worked nights, Jerilee worked days. Her "banker's hours" ended just as his job began. In the little time they had together, they got along well. If they argued at all, their discussions were about money or in-laws. Jerilee had assumed that Olive would continue to send money to Morris until he got out of college, while Olive figured that he was a grown man now, and a married man as well. She had looked forward to cutting back on the heavy workload she had carried since he was a baby. Jerilee was upset about that, Olive remembered, but it wasn't a big problem. Mostly, Jerilee was homesick for Yakima and for her own mother and sister. She didn't know anyone in Tacoma, and she spent most evenings alone because Morris was working.

She was uneasy too, sometimes people escaped from Western State Hospital. PLUS campus had a lovely sweeping greensward and scores of huge trees, but the streets nearby quickly disintegrated into high-crime areas. When Morris was gone, it seemed to Jerilee that every sound was magnified. Morris had hoped to finish college at Pacific Lutheran, but Jerilee was so miserable and homesick that he finally agreed to move back to Yakima, find a job there, and attend Central Washington State College in Ellensburg on a part time basis. A move would mean that his degree would take a year or two longer than he had hoped. In truth, it would be six years before Morris Blankenbaker graduated from college.

Back in Yakima, Morris took a "temporary" job with the phone company as a telephone lineman. It wasn't his ultimate goal, but he liked scampering up poles with spiked boots and the camaraderie of the crews he worked with. And he was happy being back in the county where he was raised, back with his good friends. He had grown up in the big old house where his grandparents lived and he often stopped in for his coffee break, bringing his whole crew with him. His grandmother Esther looked forward to fussing over Morris and his fellow linemen, and she usually had something baking in the oven just in case. All the while, Morris plugged away at his college degree at Central Washington College. It was only thirty-five miles to Ellensburg, but it was a rough thirty-five miles before the freeway was built: across the Twin Bridges, and then along the riverbanks outside of Yakima and across great stretches of barren land and winding roads through hills that were more like mountains, past squared-off buttes. Eastern Washington is not at all like the rainy and mild western half of the state. In winter, blizzards often made State Road 821 virtually impassable while, in summer, sand storms full of tumbleweeds blinded drivers who headed north out of Yakima toward Ellensburg. It was a great road for sightseers, as it curved along the Yakima River, but it was a student commuter's nightmare. Gabby Moore, Morris's old track coach, was taking classes at Central Washington too, and he and Morris often car-pooled. They renewed their friendship, but it was a different kind of friendship now, they were both adults. In the spring of 1969, Gabby's and Gay's three kids were growing up and Jerilee was pregnant with her first baby. Sometimes, Gabby and Morris went hunting or spear fishing together on weekends.

They often went white water rafting and boating on the Yakima River.

Theirs was a male friendship, the Moores and the Blankenbakers didn't socialize. Jerilee scarcely knew Gabby. Rick* Blankenbaker was born on May 5, 1969, and Jerilee was swept up in first-time motherhood. Amanda*

was born a little over a year later on September I, 1970. The young Blankenbakers had it all: a happy marriage, a little boy, and a little girl. Old photographs show Jerilee and Morris posing happily with their babies: Morris hoisting his chunky young son high with one muscular arm, Jerilee riding on Morris's shoulders on a whirligig as the family plays in the park, Jerilee and the kids proudly presenting Morris with a birthday cake. Looking at the photos, it seems impossible that it could not have gone on that way forever. The young Blankenbakers had every reason to believe that they would grow old together and watch their children and grandchildren live out their lives in Yakima too. Olive Blankenbaker was in her midfifties when Morris married Jerilee. It seemed to her that it was too late then to find anyone marriageable who appealed to her. More out of habit than anything else, Olive kept up much the same heavy work pace she had set for herself so long before.

She did, however, stop court reporting and accepted an offer to go to work for J. P. "Pete" Tonkoff of the Yakima firm of Tonkoff and Hoist.

It proved to be the best job she had ever had, a steady if intense schedule, with more benefits than any of her other positions. Pete Tonkoff, a native of Bulgaria, was a "great attorney," dynamic and dramatic in the courtroom. He was not in the least impressed with city lawyers. He once subpoenaed Eleanor Roosevelt as a witness in a case he was bringing against Fulton Lewis. Olive would work for Pete Tonkoff for ten years, driving in from her family's old homestead near the Yakima River in an "old jalopy." She loved the challenge of working for Tonkoff. She admired his brilliance, even his occasional bombasity.

The years passed. Olive was in her sixties, but she was as efficient as ever and indispensable to Tonkoff and Hoist. At some point, Pete Tonkoff took one look at the car she drove through blizzards and summer heat alike and bought her a new one, gruffly saying he didn't want her missing work because her old car had broken down. Olive's ideal job ended suddenly on July 18, 1973, when Pete Tonkoff was lost and presumed dead after the Beechcraft he owned and was piloting disappeared over Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana. Tonkoff had been flying in to handle a New Orleans case. He had been coming in for a landing when the tower ordered him to make another go round because the runway was occupied. He never came back. Later, his plane was found deep in the lake. His death was only the first blow that Olive Blankenbaker would suffer in the mid-1970s. "Up until then," she said, "everything was good. I thought it would last forever." All too often the falling-down of lives is like dominoes tumbling.

When one falls, it knocks over the next, and the next, and on and on until everything is flattened. In the early 1970s, Gabby Moore was at the very peak of his profession, with his athletes winning more honors every year. His own son, Derek, made the football team at Davis, and another generation of Moores played for the Pirates. His daughters, Sherry and Kate, were pretty girls and good students. Who can say what detours human beings from a smooth road ahead?

The "mid life crazies," maybe. Unfulfilled dreams? On occasion, it is a near-tragedy that serves as a wake-up call that life doesn't go on forever. Gabby Moore came so close to dying one summer day that he may well have reevaluated his life and realized that he had slid into middle age without ever seeing it looming on the horizon. Had it not been for Morris Blankenbaker, Gabby Moore never would have made it much past forty. It happened on one of the river trips that Morris and Gabby often took. The day began like any other. The two men had parked one of their cars near Olive's place close by the Yakima River and driven the other up to Ellensburg. There, they pushed off in a boat and headed down river toward Yakima. They had made this trip dozens of times before. But this time something went wrong, and their boat capsized in a powerful undercurrent, scattering its occupants and their gear alike. Both Morris and Gabby were plunged beneath the surface of the river, sucked deeper and deeper, down where the sunlight was swallowed up and they had to dodge floating debris and sunken logs in an underwater obstacle course.

Morris was the strong swimmer and he quickly fought his way to the surface. Somehow Gabby ended up beneath the bank along the river's edge, his feet entangled in the clutch of vines and roots that flourished in the deep water. There was no way he could ever have gotten out of their death grip by himself and he was virtually invisible from the surface of the river. Morris wasn't worried about himself, he was like an otter in the water. As a younger man, he had tormented his friends and his mother by swimming underwater so long they were sure he had drowned. But he was only "counting" until he was confident he had broken his own record for holding his breath. Satisfied, he then would burst up triumphantly just as they were all running for a lifeguard to pull him out. Now, in the white water that overturned their drift-boat, Morris dove again and again, looking for Gabby. Finally he saw him flailing his arms helplessly, his feet held in the vise of the underwater vegetation.

Morris wrenched Gabby free and took him to the top. Gabby flopped on the bank like a dying fish, throwing up. But he was breathing and he was alive. "I wish he'd never made it," Olive Blankenbaker would say with quiet bitterness many years later. "I wish Morris had left him there in the river." Olive would remember that she had felt an aversion to Gabby Moore from the first time she met him out there at her river place. She never said anything to Morris, because she couldn't put her finger on what it was about Gabby that set her teeth on edge. Morris was unaware that his mother didn't like Gabby. The two men remained fast friends.

They hunted and fished and sometimes worked out at the YMCA together. Morris was flattered when Gabby sought his advice on football plays. Morris attended a number of Gabby's teams's wrestling matches and he sometimes helped coach the heavyweight wrestlers. The two men talked often, almost every day. In December of 1973, Gabby confided to Morris the shocking news that he and Gay were getting a divorce. He said he would be moving out of his family home after Christmas. Morris was stunned. Gabby and Gay had been married almost two decades, and Morris had had no idea they were having problems. From what Gabby told him, it was Gay who wanted out of the marriage, and Gabby who was fighting to keep it together. Gabby asked Morris if he might move in with him and Jerilee for a few weeks, just until he and Gay tried to settle their problems. Morris was all for it if it would help Gabby salvage his marriage.

A "time-out" might be just what Gabby's marriage needed.

Jerilee Blankenbaker was definitely not enthusiastic when Morris approached her with the suggestion that they invite Gabby to stay with them until he pulled himself together. His divorce was hurting him bad and he wasn't taking it well, Morris explained. Gabby was lonesome and lost outside the family he had been used to. Jerilee didn't really know Gabby Moore. At twenty-seven she had two little children to take care of, not to mention her full-time job at a Yakima bank, she had more than enough to do without helping Morris baby-sit his old coach. It wasn't that she was selfish or uncaring, it was simply that she and Morris were just getting their own lives on track. Morris had his college degree, and he was teaching at last. She couldn't envision bringing Gabby into their home without incurring problems. She didn't have time to cook and clean up after another man, to do his laundry, and she didn't feel like giving up her privacy. Morris argued that it wouldn't be for very long.

Gabby was probably going to be getting back with Gay, if he didn't, he would soon be looking for his own place. Morris said he just couldn't turn the guy away in good conscience.

And that was typical of Morris. He had a conscience, and he cared a lot about Gabby. A future prosecuting attorney named Jeff Sullivan was Gay Moore's divorce attorney. Much later, Sullivan would scarcely recall the divorce proceedings, which led him to believe that the dissolution of the Moore marriage was uncomplicated. "No-fault" divorces had just come into effect in Washington State at that time and Sullivan cannot remember if Gabby was any more reluctant than the average man to get a divorce. In fact, it was Sullivan s impression that Gabby wanted the divorce. In any case, the proceedings were calm enough that they did not stand out in his mind. That was not the way Gabby described it to Morris, however.

Bereft, Gabby confided in his athletes and in his friends. He seemed lost, frightened of the future, and angry at the same time. Of all of Gabby's friends, Morris Blankenbaker was the one who worried the most about what would happen to Gabby when he didn't have Gay any longer. At first, it didn't occur to Morris that he was hearing only one side of the story: a side that showed Gabby in the best light. Morris had saved Gabby's life once, and he was ready to do it again. It was almost as if he were living out the Chinese proverb that says that once you save someone's life, it belongs to you forever after and you remain responsible for that person. Gabby was in bad shape and Morris was not a man to ever walk away from any of his friends when they were as down as Gabby seemed. Gabby had other friends, and his about-to-be ex-father in-law was still close to him, but that didn't make the long nights alone any easier. He needed to be around people. Morris saw Gabby as a victim, and Gabby did nothing to dissuade him. There were many things that Gabby did not confide in Morris. Certainly, Morris had no idea how much Gabby was drinking or how insanely jealous he was of Gay. Had Morris known, he might have rethought his offer to Gabby to move in. But he didn't know, and he worked hard to convince Jerilee that Gabby needed a place to stay where people cared about him. Finally, she gave in, and Gabby Moore moved in with the family in January of 1974. Whatever Gabby was doing to effect a reconciliation, it wasn't working. Gay Moore went ahead with her divorce action. She wasn't divorcing Gabby because there was another man, she just wanted a different kind of life. Gabby's moods were too unpredictable and he was almost paranoid, believing that she was interested in someone else. With a teaching job and three teenagers to raise, Gay had no time to think about a new relationship. Although Jerilee Blankenbaker had been against Gabby Moore's moving into her home, she soon changed her mind. She could see why Morris and he were such good friends. He was a nice guy, and he was fun to have around.