A Fever in the Heart and Other True Cases

  Off the tape, Tuffy admitted that he had tried to tell Morris to leave Jerilee alone—for Gabby’s sake. He had confronted Morris that night in his yard and tried to reason with him. “He told me he wasn’t going to leave her alone,” Tuffy said, “because Jerilee was his wife.”

  He told Vern that he had lied to Morris and told him that he had run out of gas. Tuffy was edging closer and closer to the whole story, and he had not yet mentioned that anyone but he and Morris had been present when Morris died.

  Even so, it took two and a half hours before Tuffy was finally willing to commit his statement to tape. At 12:20, Bob Brimmer set the tape recorder up.

  “Okay.” Vern said. “Let’s go back to the beginning of a situation which involved Morris Blankenbaker. Angelo, you tell us in your own words how it came about, and what happened on that night, please.”

  Henderson had to remind himself that this was his job, an interrogation about a murder. He couldn’t allow himself to think of the Morris he had known, of all the football games in the autumn nights, all the problems and the confidences they had shared, of riding around with Morris and Les Rucker in the little white Volkswagen. Whatever he was about to hear, he had to remember that it was over. It had happened. For Morris, the pain was gone.

  But Vern Henderson had to know.

  Tuffy Pleasant was silent, wondering where to begin—far more nervous about this statement than he had been when he spoke of Gabby Moore’s death. He had already told Vern a great deal. It shouldn’t be this hard to tell it all.

  “Well,” Vern said, “just tell us about before the night it happened—tell us a little bit prior to that.”

  “Well,” Tuffy finally spoke, rambling at first: “I’ll just start. It was for a class. It was for a credit for this wrestling coaching class I was taking up there at Central Washington State College in Ellensburg. I needed to assist in a coaching class on a team, so I confronted my former head coach, Mr. Moore. So I saw him off and on there for a while. I was seeing him two or three times a week. And I noticed in this time the changes he was going through. We were tight, and like in my book he was Number One and I would do anything in the world for the man, you know, not to see him hurt—just not to see him hurt.”

  Henderson didn’t doubt that Tuffy was telling him the truth about that.

  “So he was talking about his wife most of the time. He was really upset over his wife, Jerilee. Jerilee this. Jerilee that. He was really caught up in her. And what really hurt him before their final divorce was when she moved back and started living with Morris again. That really broke him up. He couldn’t see it. Because he didn’t have that last chance, you know—that second chance he was always talking about.”

  Tuffy said that Gabby had begun to talk the way he did in coaching, about eliminating problems. “‘You eliminate your problems,’ he said, ‘and then you take it from there.’ So his problem was Morris, number one, because the second problem was Jerilee and she was with Morris. So therefore both problems were together so you eliminate one to get the other.”

  Tuffy laughed nervously, a harsh sound in the quiet room. He said that Gabby hadn’t been himself for a long time. “Every time I saw him he was just losing it. He was just losing it. And we were so close, [I felt] like what he felt. He shed a tear—I shed a tear. …”

  “And so then he started talking about who could he find to eliminate Morris and how it was [to be] done—to waste him … about who could I find? First, he wanted to see if I could find a hit man for him and he asked for a couple of names, and I gave him one name: Max Phillips. He asked me where he was and I told him the last time I heard Max was in Wenatchee doing his thing, whatever it might have been at the time.”

  That had satisfied Moore for a while. He had a name of an alleged hit-man, but he became restive when he couldn’t get Tuffy to contact Max. Gabby had begun to talk about Stoney Morton and Joey Watkins—two of his former wrestlers—as possible hired killers. That was a ridiculous idea, and Tuffy said he had just kept stalling, waiting for Gabby to turn to some other harebrained scheme. But all the while, he was still feeling Gabby’s agony. Even with the slight relief he achieved through alcohol, Gabby Moore was a walking, talking broken heart. Tuffy, who appreciated a good-looking female, was baffled that a man as strong as Gabby could be so humbled by the rejection of just one woman.

  “Okay, so then that dies out. This man, this man, he’s just tore up—he’s just not himself. He’s just bleeding inside and I could see it and I could feel it.”

  Vern believed him. Tuffy had loved Gabby. Gabby had been on him, Tuffy said, to find a gun. He delayed that too, as long as he could. “Time elapsed,” Tuffy continued, “so much has been said I couldn’t really say right now—not to the fact I don’t want to—that I can’t really remember it all word for word … He said if I could find somebody, he would offer them seven hundred dollars, but five hundred dollars was all he could handle right at that time. Okay, so then he offers it to me, and I says, ‘No five hundred dollars.’ I couldn’t take no life for that amount of money or any amount of money for that fact.”

  Tuffy said he was beginning to dread the visits with his old coach. He explained he had no choice but to go on seeing Gabby. He wanted to see him because he was worried about him, but he also was taking the coaching course and he needed the credit. More important, Gabby had simply allowed Tuffy to become the “head coach.” Tuffy didn’t feel competent to handle it all on his own, and even though he got no backup from Gabby, he still felt better talking with him. Sometimes in the first hour or so of their conversations—before Gabby was really intoxicated—they still talked about the sport they both loved.

  “He never showed for the matches,” Tuffy said. “I helped take out the mats. I’d even make the starting lineup. I had that much authority…and”, he admitted, “I was digging it.”

  For a little while, Tuffy was living his dream—the dream that Gabby had promised him. If he got his college degree, Gabby had said, Tuffy would be the head coach. He would take Gabby’s place one day.

  Sitting in the interrogation room, Tuffy kept talking with little prompting, his words flowing out as if they had finally been released from tremendous pressure. Tuffy had held them in for a long time, and it seemed a relief to him to be telling it all. He told Brimmer and Henderson about getting the gun from his cousin, Loretta, and test-shooting it into a potato.

  “I took it … and brought it back and took it to Mr. Moore. Then we tried it out. If you go up there to the house, you will see, between his bedroom and a divider and the living room, there is a hole right there in the rug. What we did was I went outside to listen for the shot, and he took a wastepaper basket full of water and set it right down there in that spot and shot it a couple of times. I was listening for the noise outside and he was seeing how fast and how deep it would go—how powerful the gun was altogether. Well, you couldn’t hear it too good outside, just like a cap gun. And so we figured that would be the gun.”

  Suddenly, Tuffy Pleasant sighed deeply. “And I just did it for the man …”

  Vern Henderson managed to keep his voice steady as he asked, “Did you get any money for it?”

  “No, I didn’t get any money for it.”

  “You did it for him as a favor?”

  “It was for him, the man, ” Tuffy said. “He mentioned the fact of money, but he said I would never have to worry about money again.”

  “That he would give you things?”

  “Yeah, whatever. Over a long-term situation.”

  They had not yet come to the moments just before Morris had died, and Vern knew he had to get there.

  “Was a plan ever mentioned to you about perhaps sneaking up on Mr. Blankenbaker in the morning and shooting him while he was in the bathroom or someplace in his house, like it was a burglary or something like that?”

  Tuffy said that Gabby Moore had thought up and then discarded several plans; he was always refining the method of his “problem’s” death. He
had suggested that Tuffy knock on Morris’s door, and he thought that Tuesday would be a good day. Then he changed his mind again.

  “Every Tuesday he [Morris] went to the ‘Y,’ and so it was when he went to the ‘Y’ that he wanted him to be hit. He had the time schedule down, see, and what it was. He wanted the hit in front of Rick [Morris’s little boy] … I was supposed to do it right there, and I was supposed to snatch his wallet and make it look like a robbery.”

  A brazen daylight robbery in downtown Yakima on a weekday was a remarkably stupid plan, and even Gabby Moore in his drunken scheming had realized that. He devised another scenario and then another.

  “Who came up with the idea of waiting for him by the garage when he got off work at the Lion’s Share?” Vern asked.

  “He did. Everything was his idea.”

  “Mr. Moore had this plan laid out, right?”

  “Yes, he had it all laid out. To the bone. To the bone.”

  Vern Henderson moved to Friday, November 21. “The night Mr. Blankenbaker was shot, okay now, in detail. Whatever time it was, were you actually with Joey Watkins?”

  “Yeah, I was with Joey Watkins.”

  “From that point on, tell me in detail.”

  As Tuffy spoke, Vern could see Morris’s house on North Sixth—the alley, the gate, the picture of Morris lying there in death, his eyes unseeing as the snow fell. Vern had stood where the shooter—had it really been Tuffy? —stood. Vern had walked to where the bullet casing landed. If Tuffy wasn’t leveling with him, he would know it in an instant. He didn’t want to hear the details, but he had to hear them.

  “Well,” Tuffy began again. “About nine-thirty, we took off—Joey Watkins and I, Angelo Pleasant—we took off to go girl chasing, but not to go girl chasing because we figured we looked good enough for them to chase us.” Pleasant grinned as if this had been any other night, but his voice was taut. He had had two agendas that night.

  “We hit the Lion’s Share a little after nine-thirty. Joey went in for a few minutes and then he came out and said it was kind of slow. So we left there and went to the Red Lion for a while. We were there for about an hour or so. Then we parted company, and I was invited to this other table.”

  Tuffy said he had to back up a little. He had been at his girlfriend’s house (the mother of his child, pregnant with his second baby) earlier in the evening. “He [Gabby] has the number to my girlfriend’s house and he called earlier that night. He called about seven; and I was there. He was in the hospital—”

  “Gabby called you?”

  “Yeah, he called from the hospital. And he said, ‘Well, if you are going to do it, tonight is the night’—while he was up there—for an alibi.”

  Of course. It was the perfect alibi. According to Dr. Myers, Gabby hadn’t wanted to be hospitalized, and he’d gone in dragging his feet. But, once there, he must have realized that nobody could accuse him of murder if he could prove he was in the hospital.

  Since Gabby hadn’t called for someone to bring the phone to his room, Henderson figured he had strolled down the hall to the public phone.

  Tuffy Pleasant had gone on out, obviously with his mind always focused on Gabby’s orders. He and Joey Watkins had cruised around, looking for pretty women. Maybe Tuffy had even told himself that, if he got lucky, that would be a sign that he wasn’t meant to carry out Gabby’s plan.

  And Tuffy had gotten lucky. A couple with an extra woman in tow had introduced themselves to him and pulled out a chair at their table. It could have been a reprieve for Tuffy—and for Morris. Vern tried not to think about that.

  “So, okay,” Tuffy continued. “I was invited to this table with these other people. This single lady, you know. I was there maybe about ten minutes, and I told them I would be back, to excuse me. [They were] unaware. They didn’t know what I was going to do or where I was going. I went to my folks’ house and got a little money from my mom, and I went back to the Red Lion and reunited with the people who invited me over to their table. We went from there to the Holiday Inn, and we went to the Thunderbird, and back to the Red Lion. Then we parted company just a little bit before two o’clock A.M.”

  Thinking about it years later, Vern Henderson commented, “He left because he had a job to do for Gabby. Any other night, I can’t imagine he would walk away from a willing woman who was ready to stay the night with him. He must have been looking at his watch. He left the Red Lion a little before two o’clock A.M. He had something he had to do.”

  A little after 2:00 a.m. was when Morris was due to drive into his parking space off the alley after he had finished his Lion’s Share job.

  “You know, I wasn’t going to do it if I didn’t have time, because I was going to party,” Tuffy said softly, perhaps regretting his final decision. “My intentions were that I had caught a lady for the night, and I was going to be with the lady the rest of the night, see, but we happened to part company before two … and I just went on over to Lincoln and waited until Morris came up the alley. As soon as he was coming up the alley and pulled in his yard, I ran up the alley and drew his attention. I drew and fired and ran back down the alley and took off …”

  Vern wasn’t buying it, not the whole package. He believed now that Tuffy had shot Morris but he did not think for one moment he had heard the whole story. It was too simple, and Tuffy had glossed over it too quickly as if he were ashamed to linger over the deliberate deception that had thrown Morris so completely off guard. Vern knew that Morris had to have been completely relaxed. Otherwise, he would have tried to defend himself.

  No, Tuffy had slid too rapidly over the actual murder. Vern had been there at Morris’s autopsy, and he had made himself look at every bit of it. Now, he would make himself listen to every word about the last few moments of Morris’s life.

  Once again, he backed up a little. “Okay, now you and your friends parted down at the Red Lion shortly before two, and then you drove down and parked your car where? On Lincoln Avenue? Or Naches?”

  “Lincoln.”

  “Lincoln Avenue … right up by the alleyway there?”

  “Right by the alley.”

  “By the apartments—the redbrick apartments?”

  “No, no—Lincoln. Okay,” Tuffy corrected himself. “There is a little apartment there, yeah.”

  That was right, Vern thought. It wasn’t the redbrick apartment next door to Morris’s house that was on Lincoln; it was the little duplex where Mrs. Lenberg lived.

  Tuffy denied that he had run into a garbage can as he ran down the alley, but Vern wondered if he would have even remembered in his state of panic, knowing what he was about to do.

  “What kind of shoes were you wearing?”

  “Platform type.”

  “Had a little bit of heel on them?”

  “Yeah, a little bit of heel.”

  So far, Tuffy Pleasant’s version of the night of the murder was meshing with Gerda Lenberg’s statement. Most of the young guys wore platform shoes, Afros, flared plaid trousers, and leather jackets. Those shoes made a heck of a lot of noise.

  “So you ran down the alley when you saw Morris’s car come up the alley?”

  “Yeah … like a trot.”

  “Okay, just a jog or whatever. And did you approach him from behind the garage?”

  “No.”

  “You came right up behind his car?”

  Vern could see it. He could see it in his mind, but he didn’t dare look away. Maybe he could forget it … sometime.

  “Yes.” Tuffy nodded. “He was almost all the way up to the front of his house, and I called him back. I said, ‘Morris! Morris!’ you know.”

  “He walked back?”

  Too late now to shout out a warning, but the impulse was there. Morris, Morris, keep going—up the front steps. Shut the door behind you. Don’t turn around. Don’t go back …

  Tuffy Pleasant shifted uncomfortably. “Yes, he walked back, and he had a bottle of beer in his hand, and the gate was open. And he walked back, and
had just, you know, kind of closed the gate. And I said, ‘My car stopped on me down the street,’ you know. And he says, ‘I can’t hear you.’ I says, ‘My car stopped on me down the street.’ Just to wait until I got close enough. Then I got close enough and I unloaded on him.”

  Amazingly, impossibly, Vern heard his own voice speaking in a calm, professional manner. “Okay, so actually when you shot him, it was at most a matter of like you and I are sitting here across the table, just a matter of inches really?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then he fell to the ground. Did you shoot him after he went down on the ground?”

  “No.” Tuffy said that he had just aimed at the big part of Morris’s head.

  He was lying. Vern knew that Morris had been shot once in the mouth to knock him down, and twice more behind the ear as he lay helpless on his stomach, dying. Vern didn’t call Tuffy on the inaccuracies—not then.

  ” … When he was standing up. Okay, now then, you ran back down the alley and got in your car, and then where did you go?”

  “I went back to Ellensburg.”

  “What did you do with the gun?”

  “I kept it.”

  “What happened to the clip?”

  “I don’t know. I lost it somewhere.”

  “And then you returned the gun to your cousin’s place some days later?”

  “Yes.”

  “The reason you did this, Angelo, is you talked to Gabby for a long time and you had these plans to shoot Morris. Is that right? You used one of his plans? Or did you think of this by yourself?”

  “It was his. It was all his idea.”

  Tuffy said he had received no money at all. None of it had been about money.”

  “You did it for him as a favor because you liked him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You were going to help him out? Ease some of the pain he was going through about losing his wife?”

  “Yeah.”

  Even knowing how close Gabby Moore had always been with his athletes, even haying once been one of Gabby’s athletes, it was almost impossible for Vern Henderson to imagine the control Gabby had obviously had over Tuffy.