A Fever In The Heart

by Rule, Ann

  Tuffy said he was thinking then of “bookin” (leaving) and letting his friend Kenny deal with their old coach. But then he had remembered the gun was in the house. “I can’t leave without the gun. My keys are in the house, my coat was in the house, so I says, I’m going to go back in there. I’m going to talk to this man one more time and if he doesn’t come around, I’m leaving.”

  “And so,” Tuffy continued, his voice taut, “as I went stepping through the door— I just opened the door— there was a shot. Mr. Moore was on the floor and Kenny was just lowering the gun.”

  In hours and hours of testimony, Tuffy had explained away all of the blood on his hands. His brother Anthony had killed Morris; his best friend Kenny had killed Gabby. He himself had just happened to be in close proximity to both murders.

  Pleasant’s attorneys called for the noon break, and Judge Loy agreed but cautioned the spectators in the gallery to sit in their seats and say nothing until the jury filed out.

  When the jury room door was shut tight, Adam Moore and Chris Tait voiced their concern about the way Jeff Sullivan would present testimony on the defendant’s recanting of his original confessions. Without the jury present, Tuffy took the stand again and said he felt that Vern Henderson and Jeff Sullivan had been dishonest with him by pretending to believe him when he implicated Anthony and Kenny as the guilty ones. Now, he felt he had been tricked.

  Sullivan reminded Tuffy he had always told him that— if he was not telling them the truth— Tuffy would be tried for the murders. The defendant’s attorneys had been present and aware of every step of the case. Faced with Sullivan’s questions, Tuffy backed up, admitting that he had been warned what would happen if he was lying to the detectives and the prosecuting attorney.

  In truth, Jeff Sullivan and Vern Henderson had believed Tuffy’s recanting, enough so that Anthony Pleasant and Kenny Marino had been arrested. But, as witnesses and forensic evidence failed to validate Tuffy’s version and did nothing to connect the other two suspects, they had changed their minds.

  Tuffy Pleasant’s direct testimony continued for hours. Adam Moore ended it on a poignant, dramatic note. He asked Tuffy to tell the jury about Gabby Moore’s trophy case.

  “[He had] wrestling trophies, trophies he had received from different teams that were sentimental to him as a coach, pictures of his different teams, pictures of his different companions throughout the years that he was coaching there at Davis High School. Pictures of his son, the baseball team he played on and their national team that they had last summer.”

  “What did Gabby tell you Christmas Eve about the trophy case?”

  “He said, ‘Some people live and strive for what I have here’-and he pointed to his trophy case-‘to have a lot of trophies to really make something out of themselves, but I have a whole trophy case full and I have what I wanted in that department and in my other department I would like Jerilee.’ What he wanted was Jerilee; that was his biggest goal.”

  “How old were you at the time?”

  “I was twenty-one.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Approximately forty-four.”

  “Did you shoot Morris Blankenbaker?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “Did you at any time intend for him to die?”

  “No, not at any time in my mind did I intend for Morris Blankenbaker to die.”

  “Did you know that your brother was going to kill him?”

  “Not at no time did I know that my brother, Anthony Pleasant, was going to shoot Morris Blankenbaker.”

  “Did you shoot Talmadge Glynn Moore?”

  “No, at no time did I shoot Mr. Moore.”

  “Did you want Mr. Moore to be dead?”

  “No, I did not.”

  Angelo Pleasant and his attorneys had taken a calculated risk when he decided to testify. Now, the danger was at hand. Jeff Sullivan rose to cross-examine Tuffy.

  There were so many lies and half-truths to cut out of the defendant’s direct testimony and hold up for the jury to see. Within the first few minutes of Sullivan’s cross-examination, the first lie popped up. Tuffy admitted that he had lied to police about the time he had left Gabby Moore’s house on Christmas Eve.

  “Actually,” Sullivan moved in, “the first three or four or five contacts that you had with the police you admitted whatever you thought they already knew. Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  Regarding the February 27 and 28 taped confessions, the prosecutor asked. “Anybody beat you or force you to make those statements’?”

  “Didn’t nobody beat me.”

  “Did they force you to make the statements?”

  “No force.”

  Grudgingly, Tuffy answered questions about Gabby Moore’s plans for murder.

  “He talked to you about those plans, didn’t he?’

  “He talked at me.”

  “But you listened, didn’t you?”

  “I was there in his house.”

  “He had a plan to kill Morris Blankenbaker when he came home from work, didn’t he? How many other plans did he have?”

  “Two other plans. Every Tuesday, Morris went to the ” Y ” with his son-and to have him shot in front of his son, Rick, but if Rick wasn’t with him to just shoot him going to the “Y” and to take out his wallet and make it look like a robbery. And another one that I remember was that Jerilee and Morris went to work about five minutes apart in the morning. After Jerilee went, [I was] to park off of Naches and to walk up to the house … and knock on the door.”

  “And actually shoot him at the front door?”

  “Or step into his house …”

  The final plan had been the one that transpired. Only Tuffy denied that he had been the shooter. He was certainly familiar with all the details. “He suggested to me that whoever did it-that he would like him shot once by the heart and once-if he fell, then to walk up to him and put one in the back of his head.”

  “And you shot him in the head?”

  “No,”

  “He was shot in the head?”

  “Yes.”

  “I mean he was shot just like that plan, wasn’t he?”

  “He wasn’t shot in the heart,” Tuffy blurted. “So I feel that’s not exactly like what he was talking to me about.”

  “I see,” Sullivan said sarcastically. “Just three times in the head. Is that right?”

  Sullivan’s cross-examination was adroit; at the first sign of an opening, he pounced. The defendant was so busy straining at gnats that he forgot to show “appropriate” emotion where he should have. The gallery could see that, and surely the jurors could.

  And the lies and semi-lies. There were so many.

  Tuffy admitted he could have easily reached Morris’s house from the Chinook Hotel in five minutes. He knew there had been three shots in Morris’s murder, but he could not remember how he knew. He gave three or four scenarios, weakening his impact with each new reason. He couldn’t remember what he had said in his taped confession. In retelling, he confused the order of his own statements.

  Jeff Sullivan was like a boxer looking for an opening. When he found one, he jabbed. He caught every hesitation, every contradiction. Tuffy Pleasant was on the ropes, confused and wobbling.

  “You are trying to tell me that he [Gabby] didn’t have it planned very well?”

  “I felt he didn’t—I’m right here this very day on charges.”

  “Oh, I see, I see. Your conception of the plan is that it is very good if you don’t get caught?”

  “No. I did not do it.”

  “He told you where he wanted the man shot … and he told you where you could park your car … And he told you the layout of the back of that house? Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “But he didn’t tell you where the house was. Is that right?”

  “Well … he mentioned where it was.”

  “Why did you testify here today … that you didn’t know where he lived? That it wasn’t un
til Anthony told you that you found out where Morris lived?”

  “I did not exactly know which house he lived in.”

  Suddenly, it was five o’clock. Sullivan would have happily continued all night, but Judge Loy would not. The rhythm was broken, but the prosecutor would pick it up in the morning.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  And so he did. If Angelo Pleasant had been engaged in a wrestling match, he could have detected where his opponent was going to move next. But he was not a debater and he seemed to have no inkling of when Jeff Sullivan was about to catch him up in yet another inconsistency in his testimony. Time and again, Sullivan winnowed out a lie.

  Adam Moore finally stood up and complained that he didn’t want Sullivan reading from Tuffy’s earlier statements and then pointing out that his client was lying. Judge Loy asked Sullivan to rephrase his questions.

  It didn’t matter. With each slip, Sullivan repeated what Tuffy had said-and repeated it incredulously, or derisively, or with amusement- and sometimes with a question mark. The carefully reconstructed events of Tuffy’s testimony began to buckle. It could be only a matter of time before the whole construction imploded and fell back on Tuffy.

  From time to time, Sullivan had Tuffy read his earlier confession silently to himself. Sweat beaded on the defendant’s forehead. There was no way to mesh what he had once said with what he was now claiming.

  “Angelo,” Sullivan said, “are you saying that this statement was not true?”

  “Yes, I’m saying that.”

  “Even though you were telling your lawyers and telling me that this was the truth?”

  “Some of it.”

  “Some of it. Some of what you told us after you were arrested then was not true; is that what you are saying?”

  “Well, I was still on my own, Mr. Sullivan, I wasn’t nobody looking out for me but myself.”

  “So you chose to tell us something that wasn’t true!”

  “Well, I don’t know what my thinking was at the time.”

  Sullivan had elicited testimony that seemed to suggest that Tuffy had felt nothing about Morris Blankenbaker’s death but fear that he would be caught. But Gabby was another matter entirely. His coach had been so much a part of the defendant’s life for so long. Sullivan needed to focus on a heedlessness, a failure to grieve, on Tuffy’s part as Gabby lay dying.

  “Angelo,” he began, “at that time Glynn Moore was lying on the kitchen floor, you didn’t know whether he was dead or alive. You indicated to us he was one of your best friends, and you were no more concerned than just to go to a party. Is that right?”

  “Yes, I was concerned.”

  “But you went to a party?”

  “Later on, yes.”

  “Angelo, as you saw Mr. Moore lying there after ‘Kenny shot him,’ why didn’t you try and help him?”

  “Mr. Sullivan, I was scared and I didn’t want to be caught in the house; I had the gun in my hand.”

  “But you didn’t shoot him, did you?”

  ”No, I didn’t, but I had the gun in my hand.”

  “You didn’t call an ambulance for him?”

  “No.”

  ” … Now, Mr. Moore’s plan was that he would be wounded with that same gun, but he was supposed to get to a doctor soon, wasn’t he? So that he wouldn’t get injured seriously?”

  “He was going to call one of his lady friends-or he felt that he was strong enough to take the shot and go across the street and talk to the lady who owned the house-”

  “That was Jerilee’s sister?”

  “Yes … I was telling him, ‘You can’t do it.’ “

  “He’s laying there on the floor—not moving. Didn’t you say that you heard him groan or something?”

  “When I was leaving.”

  “When you were leaving?”

  “I heard a noise.”

  “Did you look back to see what was happening?”

  “No, I was trying to get out of there.”

  Stubbornly, despite being confronted with his oft-repeated statement that Gabby Moore had “his neck on the chopping block,” Tuffy denied that he had thought about the danger of Gabby exposing him as a killer. “I did not shoot Mr. Glynn Moore,” he insisted.

  “You intended to kill him, didn’t you, Angelo?”

  “I did not kill Glynn Moore. And it hurts me just to sit up here and to listen to you, Mr. Sullivan-with all due respect to you-and keep accusing me and accusing me and I didn’t do it. I really loved that man. But at the time when I did leave, when Kenny did shoot him, I was scared and confused and I just thought of leaving and not being caught on the premises.”

  When Jeff Sullivan turned away at last from Tuffy Pleasant, he had effectively revealed the truth. Tuffy had shot Morris and he had shot Gabby. But had he shot Gabby, intending to kill him’? Or had he merely been following Gabby’s orders’? It was still impossible to tell. But he had left. That much was clear. Perhaps Tuffy could not look that fact straight in the face. Perhaps he could not allow himself to recall stepping over Gabby’s body, hearing his last gasps for life, and walking away.

  In the end, Tuffy had deserted “The Man,” his mentor, his hero, his friend, his role model. In a sense, Gabby had deserted Tuffy too. Together, they had made wrestling championships their only goals. But Gabby had no longer cared about the glory of winning.

  On recross, Adam Moore asked Tuffy again about Gabby’s complete defection from all they had believed in.

  “Well, he was talking about the trophy case” Tuffy answered. “Some young men—also some young ladies— [he said] who are pretty good in sports and have pretty good ability to achieve, all they had to do was try hard. He said he was forty-four years old and that he felt he was over the hill. That trophies didn’t mean nothing anymore-his biggest goal and trophy in life was Jerilee … and that I was pretty young and I didn’t know what he meant, but when I was older, and time went on, I would realize what he meant.”

  Tuffy Pleasant had been on the witness stand for three days. He had clung to his position that his brother and best friend were the true killers, but their testimony and the rebuttal testimony of more than a dozen witnesses would place both Kenny Marino and Anthony Pleasant well away from both crime scenes. Jeff Sullivan knew that, and he was not concerned.

  When Tuffy had stepped down from the stand, the trial began to wind down rapidly.

  On Saturday, August 28, Adam Moore and Chris Tait and Jeff Sullivan made their final arguments. Two weeks before, they had promised the jury that they would give them certain facts. And they had all stayed close to their opening statements.

  Prosecutor Jeff Sullivan’s voice boomed through the small courtroom and bounced off the walls as he reconstructed the entire trial, the evidence that had, he said, pointed to only one man. Sullivan focused on Tuffy’s taped confessions. “He learned from Glynn Moore that when you get a problem,” Sullivan said, “you eliminate the problem.” The prosecutor called Morris Blankenbaker’s murder a “contract killing.”

  “Gabby Moore was killed to shut him up.”

  Despite Tuffy Pleasant’s open and affable appearance, Jeff Sullivan said he was cold. “A man who could shoot two people and then go to a party … that’s callousness. That’s why he could come into this courtroom and say what he did. This man would have us believe that he missed [hitting Gabby high up in the shoulder] from twelve inches away. He shot him … and then where did he go? He picked up his girlfriend and went to a Christmas party.”

  Adam Moore for the defense said he had “utter contempt” for Gabby Moore for drawing Anthony and Angelo Pleasant and Kenny Marino “into the sewer.”

  Moore’s face and words were full of rage as he characterized Gabby as “vile and despicable.” Everyone in the courtroom jumped as Tuffy’s chief lawyer bellowed, “GOD! The worst tragedy of this is that he isn’t sitting here today. I blame him for the whole mess.”

  Adam Moore literally vibrated with anger. “I have for two weeks seen the p
rosecutor stand before you and tell you to convict this man on two counts of first-degree murder. I could puke,” Moore said as he slammed his fist on the table in front of him.

  The gallery jumped again.

  Adam Moore, an attorney with a courtroom demeanor that long predated the antics of a Johnny Cochran, grew suddenly calm. He walked to Tuffy Pleasant and placed his hands on his client’s shoulders. “I apologize for the emotion, but it’s real,” he said with his voice cracking. “It’s the way I feel.”

  As he asked for an acquittal on both counts, Moore pleaded, “Let it be done with. Let Gabby Moore’s end be his just reward.”

  It was over for the gallery, for the regulars who had shown up for the trial every day. Many of them would probably not have enough forewarning of the verdict to get to the courtroom in downtown Seattle in time to hear it read.

  Fourth Avenue, just outside the King County Courthouse, was quiet. It was a Saturday, and Saturday trial sessions were a rarity. Few cars headed north up the one-way street. There were no pedestrians. The courthouse was closed except for the trial just ended. It was still hot but the sun was blocked by the courthouse, and its warmth came up only from the sidewalks where it had baked all day while the lawyers inside talked on and on of death and blood and guilt.

  It didn’t seem possible that two weeks had gone by. All trials are engrossing, but this one had been more compelling than most, and the gallery straggled out, reluctant to have it over. All the players had been unknown entities when the trial started. Now, they were almost as exposed as family members sometimes are. So many secrets told.

  At the corner of Fourth and James Street, the sun blasted through the gap in the buildings built along James up from Eliott Bay, but the air suddenly felt sweet and cool.

  High up in his cell in the jail, Tuffy Pleasant waited to hear what his future would be. He thought of “time.”

  The eight-woman, four-man jury retired that Saturday evening and deliberated for close to five hours before stopping for the night. Judge Loy had instructed them that they had several options. They could consider first-degree and second-degree murder in the murder of Morris Blankenbaker. In Gabby Moore’s killing, they could choose between first-degree and second-degree murder, and manslaughter.