The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips (6 page)

“Yeah, thanks,” Andy said as he took the tape. His voice cracked just a little. Or at least he thought it did. A shot of fear went down his spine. It surprised him. Suddenly he realized that Loraine might not only throw the entire investigation for a loop if she got too specific about him, but that she could also cost him his job if she made it look like he’d crossed a line. “Want to give me the
Reader’s Digest
version?” he asked.

“I think you will really want to hear it in her own words,” Ted replied. “Anyway, I gotta go. I was supposed to be off duty an hour ago. My kid’s got a ball game tonight. I can’t miss another one or my wife will kill me.” With that, he walked toward the door to leave. “If you do go see John Phillips, be careful. Don’t let yourself get too wrapped up in the emotions of all this, Andy, or it might come around and bite you in the ass.”

“Got it. Enjoy the game. Tell Janey I said hello,” Andy said.

A
S SOON AS
the door closed behind Ted Jackson, Andy locked the file and the tape in his locker. He went back to the Madison Park Apartments to try to find John Phillips, but John wasn’t there. The police tape designating the Phillips apartment as a crime scene had been removed the day after Gabe’s death. Detectives come in and get their work done quickly so people can get their lives back into gear. They only mark off crime scenes for weeks at a time in the movies. Andy banged on the door several times without an answer. Under normal circumstances Andy would have walked away and come back at a later time. But normalcy had long since disappeared when it came to this case. When John wouldn’t answer his door, Andy went to the complex office, where he found Jeanine Martin, the fifty-something, heavyset, very matronly-looking apartment manager. For a place like Madison Park, she was the perfect fit. She came across as a very caring, very compassionate grandmother type, but she wasn’t afraid to boot people out of their apartments when they became delinquent on their rent (which happened all the time). All Andy had to say was “Gabriel Phillips,” while wearing his police uniform, and Martin did anything he asked.

She grabbed her master key and led Andy back to John’s apartment. The entire time she talked about what a sweet little boy little Gabriel was and how tragic the accident was and how much poor John Phillips must be hurting. Andy didn’t say much in response. When they reached John’s apartment, she turned the key in the lock, pushed the door open, then said, “Oh, my.” The apartment was empty. What little furniture had been there the night of Gabe’s death was now gone. “But he still had three months left on his lease,” she said. “Looks like he won’t be getting his deposit back.”

“You mean you didn’t know he’d moved out?” Andy asked.

“Heavens no. Not until right now,” she said.

Andy muttered some profanities under his breath.

“Listen, would you do me a favor?” Andy reached into his uniform shirt pocket. “Here’s my card. If you hear from John Phillips, or anyone connected to him who might come by, would you give me a call. I’ll put my home number on the back in case he comes in while I’m off duty.”

Jeanine Martin looked at the card, turned it over a couple of times, and gripped it tight with her right hand. “Of course. Whatever you need.”

Andy asked if he could look around for a few minutes. “Stay as long as you need to,” the manager said, and left.

As he walked around the apartment, Andy tried to replay the night of Gabe’s death in his head. Without the furniture, the entire place seemed much smaller than it did on that night. He walked down the hallway, which now turned out to be little more than three or four steps long. The two bedrooms were barely offset from each other on opposite sides of the hall. Four nights earlier, the distance appeared to be much greater. Andy paused at the doorway of Gabe’s bedroom, standing in the same place where John stood that night. He looked down. The floor, no longer red, now glistened. The white linoleum tiles with brown and black streaks looked as if they had been waxed. Both the bunk beds and the dresser were gone, as were the piles of clothes and toys that had been scattered across the floor. The room seemed very bright. The sun shone in the room’s western window. Andy hadn’t noticed the window that night.

There were a lot of things he hadn’t noticed, including the closet on the wall perpendicular to the window. He opened it and looked around. It was empty. That is, almost empty. Andy noticed something atop the closet’s wooden shelf, a photograph lying facedown. The developer’s date stamp on the back read, “August 17, 1977,” which made the picture just over a year old. Flipping it over, Andy saw Gabe sitting on his mother’s lap, her arms wrapped around him, a huge smile on his face. Loraine’s slight smile appeared forced, at least it looked forced to Andy. He recognized the background as the front gate of Kings Island amusement park. Andy stood and stared at the picture for a long time before placing it in his pocket and walking out of the apartment. “Where is that son of a bitch?” he said as he returned to his patrol car.

Andy didn’t get the opportunity to go looking for him. The moment he put his car into reverse to back out of the parking lot, the dispatcher called. “Trask, 52-2, we have a 10-16 at 117 South Adams. That’s one-one-seven South Adams, report of a 10-16. Time out, 18:02.”

“10-4 dispatch. Trask 52-2 is 10-8,” Andy radioed back. “Not another one,” he groaned to himself as he placed the mic back in its holder. The last 10-16 he’d responded to left him trying to revive Gabe Phillips’s dead body. He flipped on the lights and sirens and flew out of the Madison Park Apartments. Adams was on the opposite side of town, a little less than ten minutes away, depending on the stoplights; even less when you don’t have to bother with such things. Turning right on State Street, he shot through four lights to Main, hung a left, and proceeded to Adams, on the far eastern end of town. A couple of neighbors stood on their porch across the street as he pulled up in front of the house with the reported domestic disturbance. Walking up to the door, he could hear the domestics in full disturbance mode. If the couple inside wanted to keep this private, they should have closed the windows and doors. Andy banged on the screen door and identified himself.

“I told you someone would call the police!” came the shout of a woman’s voice from inside. “Now you’re going to get yours, you sorry bastard.”

The man in the house yelled something back, like, “shut your f-ing piehole,” along with another long string of profanity. All in all, it was a great way for a husband and wife to communicate. When the guy pushed the screen open, he pulled a Jekyll and Hyde. “Yes, may I help you, Officer?” He sounded like Eddie Haskell charming Mrs. Cleaver right out of her pearls.

“Is everything all right in there, sir?” Andy asked.

“Sure. Everything is under control. I’m sorry you—”

“Like hell it is,” the woman’s yell interrupted. The shriek of the woman’s voice made the guy forget there was a cop at his door. He turned around and started yelling at the woman, who sat in an oversized chair with her legs pulled up to her body. The argument took off again. The louder they shouted, the closer the man moved to the woman until he was in her face. Andy pushed his way into the room and tried raising his voice to get their attention, not that it did any good. Neither seemed to notice anyone else was in their living room. Finally he stuck his index fingers in the sides of his mouth and whistled so loud, it was surprising he didn’t shatter a mirror. Both people’s heads snapped around and looked at him.

“Enough,” he shouted. “Sir, I need you to step over to the opposite side of the room.” The man moved toward the far side of the living room. Andy then turned to the woman, who, he now saw, had a butter knife in her right hand. “Ma’am, has he physically harmed or threatened you?”

“I didn’t do nothing to that fat bitch!” the man yelled, and took two or three steps toward her.

“Sir, I told you to stay on the other side of the room. I suggest you comply,” Andy said.

The man walked closer to the woman. “Don’t listen to anything she tells you. She’s a lying bitch. Ain’t that right, YOU BITCH!” he yelled. The whole time the guy’s yelling at his wife, she’s yelling back at him using every bit of profanity in the book.

“Sir, I am not going to tell you again. Move to the other side of the room. Now,” Andy said with a firm, loud voice.

“Why don’t you shut up!” the woman yelled back at the man.

“Like hell I will,” the man screamed back. Once again he moved toward the woman, screaming at the top of his lungs, completely oblivious to Andy’s presence.

“Sir,” Andy said. He took two steps toward the man, and in one motion, he swept his right leg under the man’s legs, sending the guy sprawling up in the air, then flat on his back. “Comply,” Andy said as he sprang onto the man, spinning him over onto his stomach and planting his knee into the middle of the man’s back. Andy then yanked the man’s left arm behind his back with such force that it nearly pulled the guy’s elbow out of joint. “I told you to step away from your wife,” he said as he pulled the man’s right arm behind him and handcuffed them together. “I’ve had just about all of your crap that I intend to put up with.” As Andy said this, he grabbed the man’s head with his right hand and planted the guy’s face into the carpet. The man let out a gurgled yelp as he bit down hard on his tongue. Blood began flowing out of the man’s mouth and onto the carpet. I have to say, my old man was not a violent person, but he could be if someone pushed him hard enough. And on that day, all of the frustration that had been building for four days exploded. But even though the man had his face planted in the carpet, Andy’s problems still weren’t over.

“Get the hell off my husband!” the woman shrieked. “What are you doing to him?” she yelled as she started toward Andy, the butter knife in hand.

“Ma’am, I suggest you drop your weapon and sit back down,” he said. She took another step toward Andy, until she saw him reach for his gun. Immediately she plopped back into the chair.

“We didn’t do nothing,” she yelled.

About that time Andy noticed a girl that had to be all of three years old moving slowly from the hallway. He could barely see her because the chair in which the woman sat obstructed the view of the hall from the living room. Tears streaked down the little girl’s face and she trembled as she walked. Once she moved past the chair, her head turned first toward her mother, then her father. Her presence drained all the hostility out of the room, at least from the girl’s parents. Andy walked over and scooped the girl up in his arms. “It’s okay, sweetie, no one can hurt you now,” he said to her. I can’t even describe how weird that motion was. Like I’ve said about a thousand times, Andy Myers did not like kids. At all. Period. And here he was playing Captain America, rescuing a three-year-old damsel in distress. He grabbed his radio from his belt and said, “Trask dispatch, 52-2.”

“52-2, go ahead.”

“I’m going to need some backup. I have two prisoners to transport and I don’t want to transport them together. I also need someone from child protective services to meet me at this location.”

“But—but—but, Officer, we didn’t do nothing,” the woman protested. She tossed the butter knife on the floor. “The knife, it’s not what you think. I was just making him a sandwich, that’s all. He’s says I used mayonnaise, and he hates mayonnaise, but I said it was Miracle Whip. We have little arguments like this all the time. They don’t mean nothing. We’ll stop fighting now. I promise.” The man chimed in from on the floor and tried to talk Andy out of hauling them in. I think it’s hilarious how quickly people in these situations go from enemies to allies.

Andy just looked at them with disgust and said, “Save it for the judge.” He pulled the little girl tighter in his arms. She’d buried her face in his shoulder and continued crying. “That’s all right, sweetheart. Everything will be all right.” I jokingly refer to this as Andy’s superhero phase. Superman was out to save the world. Batman was there to protect Gotham City. And Andy Myers was going to save all the hurting children of Trask. You know,
No one else is going to die on my watch!
That sort of thing. It was like he now saw Gabe in the face of every at-risk child in the entire town. He never told me this, but I imagine there was a part of him that said,
I’m doing this for you, Gabe,
when he lifted that girl up to protect her from her angry parents. He started doing a lot of things for Gabe after that, which is weird since Gabe was dead and Andy hadn’t done that much for Gabe before, except hang out with him and treat him like a human being should treat a child. But for Andy, that was a pretty big step. After all, we’re talking about a guy who walked out on his wife because she was pregnant with his own child; a guy who, up until this point, had pretended he didn’t have a son. It was quite a step.

Hauling in the domestic disturbancers gave Andy the opportunity to check on the investigation into Gabe’s death. He walked into Mike Duncan’s office. “So, do you live at this place, or what?” Andy asked.

Mike looked up. “It feels like it. Let me tell you, it feels like it. So whadda you doing down here?”

“Had to bring in a couple I’d arrested and thought, since I was here, I would check in to see what’s happening in the Gabe Phillips case.”

“Well, I can tell you what killed him. It was the drawer. The dad was telling the truth. Autopsy shows the cause of death to be a blunt-force trauma to the back of the head. The cracks in the kid’s skull match the corner of the drawer exactly,” Duncan said.

Andy shook his head. “I still have trouble believing that falling out of bed can kill a kid.”

“We’re working on that. Want to have a look at what we’ve come up with so far?” Duncan asked.

“Hell yes,” Andy replied.

Duncan led Andy into the lab, where several items from John Phillips’s now-empty apartment sat on metal tables that were very much like those you find in a high school chemistry classroom. (You have to keep in mind that the lab wasn’t quite as sophisticated back then as it is today. They didn’t have DNA sequencers, computers, or other high-tech gadgets. Forensic science has come a long way in nearly thirty years.) Andy recognized a few of the items, others he did not. “So here’s what we know so far,” Duncan said. “The drawer over here, it delivered the fatal blow. There’s no doubt about it.” Pulling a pen out of his pocket, he pointed to the front corner that had been closest to Gabe’s bed in his room. “This part is pretty beat-up, and you can see hair and blood inside the grooves of the broken wood. The pattern here lines up exactly with the back of the kid’s skull. Here, check it out for yourself.” Duncan pulled an autopsy photograph of the back of Gabe’s head over from another table and held it up next to the drawer. The indentions in the photograph formed a perfect right angle. Andy was more than a little nervous about looking at the photograph. However, the image pulled so tight to the skull that nothing in it looked like Gabe, giving it all of the emotional impact of a photograph from a criminal pathology textbook.