The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips (23 page)

But on this particular hot August day, Andy pulled his police cruiser off the interstate and parked underneath a Chambliss billboard. He kept the engine running, and the AC cranked up on high. Pulling out his radar gun, he started clocking southbound motorists. Traffic was light, and he’d parked in a rather conspicuous place, which meant most people slowed down before they ever got to him. The red digital numbers that flashed on the gun dropped as the cars came closer to his location. He didn’t really feel like getting out in the heat anyway, which meant he let anything under sixty-four miles per hour slide. The gun registered a couple of sixty-fives and one 66, but those numbers dropped so fast that by the time the cars reached him, they were down to fifty-three or fifty-four. He figured they got the point without having to be pulled over, so Andy left them alone.

All of a sudden, a green Ford Maverick went flying by. A large 8-3 flashed on his radar gun. “Holy crap, I didn’t think those cars could go that fast,” Andy said. He dropped the radar gun onto the passenger seat and reached down to turn on his lights and sirens. Suddenly a black blur flew past that had to be going at least ninety. He yanked the shifter down to drive and pulled out after them. In a matter of moments Andy had his cruiser up to nearly one hundred and was closing in fast on the black blur, which he could now see was some kind of Plymouth. While Andy closed in on the Plymouth, the Plymouth closed in on the Maverick. It pulled up to the side of the green car and started trying to force it off the road. Andy couldn’t see anyone but the driver in the Maverick, and from the way his hands were flying around, he looked to be scared out of his mind. Suddenly the Maverick slowed down and pulled over onto the shoulder, which Andy assumed was because the driver had spotted him in his mirror. The Plymouth stomped on the gas and took off. Andy stayed on its tail.

“Columbus dispatch, this is Indiana 2-3. I am in pursuit of a black Plymouth Fury, Indiana license three-three-C-one-eight-zero-three. We’re southbound on I-65, mile marker five-two. I need another unit to check on a green Ford Maverick on the shoulder approximately one half mile north of this location.”

“10-4, Indiana 2-3.”

The Fury yanked from the passing lane to the right-hand lane to avoid hitting a VW Bug in the left lane, then swerved back left. Andy had to slow down due to the Bug’s interference. Andy passed it on the left-hand side, his tires throwing up gravel from the edge of the median. He closed in on the Fury’s bumper again, his siren blaring. Up ahead, Andy could see traffic starting to build just past a road construction sign. The Fury’s brake lights lit up, and the right-hand blinker came on. It slowed and pulled over onto the right-hand shoulder, then stopped.

Andy pulled his cruiser behind the stopped car, and turned off his siren. Over his PA mic he called out to the driver of the Plymouth, “Get out of the vehicle and lie down on the ground behind your car.” Slowly the driver’s-side door opened, and a heavyset man, who looked to be in his forties, climbed out, his hands shaking as he held them up in the air over his head. “Facedown on the ground, sir,” Andy called out again over the PA mic.

“Yes, sir. I will, sir,” the man said as he lowered himself to his knees and lay down on the hot asphalt highway shoulder.

Andy stepped out of his cruiser, his hand on the .38 pistol, waiting in its holster. “Place your hands behind your back, please, sir.”

“Yes, sir,” the man said, his voice cracking.

Pulling his handcuffs out of a compartment on his belt, Andy secured the man’s hands, then helped him to his feet. Bits of gravel stuck to the man’s cheeks and tears ran down his face. “Would you like to tell me what was going on back there?” Andy asked.

“I caught them together,” the man said. “I walked into my house after work and I found them in bed together, right there in my own bed.”

Andy already had a pretty good idea of the answer, but he asked anyway. “Who are ‘they,’ sir?”

“My wife. We’ve been married seven-and-a-half years, and I walk in and find her doing our next-door neighbor. If I could have caught up to him, I would have killed the son of a bitch.” Then he looked up at Andy, his shoulders slumped forward, his voice breaking. “I’m really sorry, Officer, running from you like that. I can’t believe this is happening. I thought the guy was my friend. I loaned him my Weedeater last week. If I’d known he was screwing my wife, I would have used it on him. Can you blame me?”

Andy patted the man on the shoulder as he led him to the back of his police cruiser. “What’s your name, sir?”

“Ken. Ken Chamberlain. I’m in a lot of trouble, aren’t I, Officer?”

“Yeah, I’m afraid so, Ken. Do you have your driver’s license on you?” Andy asked.

“In my back pocket,” the man replied.

When Andy ran Chamberlain’s license, he found the man hadn’t had as much as a speeding ticket since he was sixteen. He was from Henry County, over sixty miles away. He’d been after the man in the Maverick for nearly an hour by the time they sped past Andy. As much as he hated to do it, Andy had to take the guy in. Later he learned the unit that responded to his call for help couldn’t find the green Maverick. Apparently, the driver headed toward home as soon as the black Fury left him alone.
That’s a hell of a way for your marriage to end,
Andy thought as he finished his reports and went back out on patrol.

Long after his shift ended, Andy walked out on his back deck, a Pepsi in his hand, and stared out, the daylight fading away from the trees. Believe me, there wasn’t much else for him to do. Cable television hadn’t arrived in Brown County, and the rabbit ears on his old black-and-white set could only pick up one channel. As he stood on his deck, watching the trees sway in the wind and listening to the tree frogs, he started thinking about Ken Chamberlain sitting in the Bartholomew County Jail.
The poor dumb bastard,
Andy thought. But he couldn’t leave it at that. He started pondering Ken’s question:
can you blame me?
It made Andy ask himself what he would have done in the guy’s place. And he had to admit he would have probably done the same thing. He still couldn’t stand the idea of my mom dating again, even though he’d dumped her years earlier, and he’d been with many women since then. I guess technically he didn’t dump her. He dumped me. The two of us just happened to be a package deal at the time.

So, as the sun died and the sky started turning dark, he stood there, sipping a Pepsi, thinking about what he would have done if he’d caught his wife with another man while they were married. He thought about it a little too long, which is one of the dangers of living by yourself in a remote area with poor television reception. He thought about Ken Chamberlain’s wife having sex with the next-door neighbor and about unfaithful wives in general, which naturally turned his thoughts to the unfaithful wife with whom he was most familiar, Loraine Phillips. And the more he thought about Loraine Phillips, the more he wondered why a man with a history of violence, like John Phillips, hadn’t come after him. Sure, Andy was quite a bit bigger than he was, but that hadn’t stopped John years earlier when he beat up a guy bad enough to earn himself three years in the state pen.

Andy took a long, last drink of the Pepsi in his hand and turned to his standard answer.
John took out his anger on his son,
he mused.
That was the best way he had to get back at Loraine for what she’d done to him. Besides, Gabe wasn’t even his son.
He paused as the last thought ran through his head.
Or was he?
Loraine had told him he wasn’t, but something didn’t seem quite right about that.
Gabe sure looked a lot like John. Same eyes. Same smile. Same build. John had to be his father. But if Loraine lied to me about that . . .?
A chorus of tree frogs serenaded him as he stood, lost in thought, on his deck.
Why, then, would he hurt his own son rather than coming after me?
He turned the Pepsi can up for another drink, but nothing came out. Shaking the can, he walked into his kitchen and grabbed another out of the refrigerator. Popping the top, he turned his thoughts back to Ken Chamberlain sitting in a jail cell.
Chamberlain’s actions made a lot more sense. You wouldn’t kill your kid to get back at your wife for screwing around on you. You’d go after her or the bastard who was nailing her
.

He walked back out onto his deck, with its chorus of tree frogs, and thought about jealous husbands and revenge.
Why the hell didn’t he come after me?
Andy asked himself.
That’s what I would have done.
He’s kind of a strange man, my biological father. Once his mind locks onto something, he can’t let it go, sort of like a mental snapping turtle. He might have asked the guy directly, but you can’t just pick up a phone and call someone on death row, and driving five hours for a question this small didn’t make a lot of sense. So Andy walked back into his cabin, fished out a piece of paper and a pen from a drawer in the kitchen, and sat down at his table and began writing. His letter was short and to the point. “Dear John,” he wrote, “If you knew your wife was sleeping around, why didn’t you do anything about it? Most men would have gone after whoever was having sex with their wife. Why didn’t you? Why did you take your anger out on your son instead?” He signed his name to the bottom, shoved it in an envelope, addressed it, stuck a stamp on it, and put it in the mail the next day on his way to work.

Andy had pretty much forgotten about writing John, when, a few weeks later, he pulled up to the mailbox next to his driveway. A padded manila envelope with a lump in the middle was mixed in with the usual assortment of bills and circulars. Up at the top of the envelope was John’s name, his inmate number, and a return address that ended with Michigan City, IN. “Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Andy said. “He wrote back. I wonder what else he crammed in there.” He tossed the envelope, along with the rest of the mail, onto the car seat and drove on up to his cabin. When he got out of his car, he purposefully left the mail where he’d laid it. It was still there the next morning when he went to work and the next evening when he returned home. He piled on a few more days’ worth of mail before finally carrying it into his house. Inside, he let it collect dust on his kitchen table for nearly a week before he finally pulled John’s letter out of the stack to open it. He shoved a pocketknife blade into the space at the top of the envelope, and started to rip it open, when he stopped himself. For some reason he couldn’t do it. He sat there like that for at least two or three minutes before pulling the knife away from the letter, closing the blade, and dropping the letter back onto his kitchen table. A week later he moved the envelope from his table to his mantel, where it remained, unopened, for at least a year, maybe more.

Even though he couldn’t bring himself to open the envelope to read John’s response to his question, the damage was done. I think it would have been easier on Andy if he’d read the letter and whatever else John stuck in the envelope, then tossed it into the trash. But, by allowing it to come into his house as a permanent resident, Andy now had a constant reminder of his past in his living room. Every time he walked from his kitchen to his bedroom, or vice versa, he had to go past it. And he always noticed it. The name John Phillips might as well have been written in that big type the newspapers used when the space shuttle blew up, which made this reminder even worse than those he would see in Trask every day. Instead of reminding him of a little boy who died needlessly and tragically, this letter reminded Andy of a man Andy helped put on death row, a man Andy could not figure out. A man who should have come after him, but didn’t.

And that unnerved him.

You would think Andy would have just thrown the letter away, but he couldn’t without reading it first, but he couldn’t bring himself to read it because he was afraid John’s answer might plant some seeds of doubt in his mind. And Andy didn’t need any doubts about John Phillips. “I wish they would just fry the bastard and get this over with,” he said early one Saturday morning as he stumbled from his bedroom toward the kitchen for a cup of coffee. By this point the letter had collected at least a year’s worth of dust. “How long is it supposed to take to execute a convicted child killer? Whatever it is, this is too damn long.”

A couple of weeks later another letter arrived. Instead of preprinted postage, this one came with a green “certified” sticker on the front and a return receipt card on the back. The return address read: “State Appeals Court, Indianapolis.” Andy had a pretty good idea what the letter was even before he opened it. He cursed under his breath as he tore the envelope open. The letter, written on official letterhead, requested he appear before the court as a witness exactly one month from the day he opened the letter. And, of course, the case was none other than John Phillips’s appeal. “Dammit,” he said as he read the first paragraph. “Damn it to hell.” According to the letter, Rachel Maris would argue the case for the state. That made Andy feel a little better. Although it had been a few years since he’d seen her, he remembered feeling a little chemistry between them. She, like Andy, no longer lived in Harris County. After Reginald Chambliss, Esquire, changed his title from county district attorney to governor, she picked up a new position in the state attorney general’s office. It was a pretty good gig for a woman under thirty. Andy wondered if her new position was in recognition of a job well done or a reward for a little something else. Yeah, his attitudes toward women needed a lot of work. He didn’t recognize the name of the attorney representing John. Old Donald Edmonds was long gone, apparently. Andy guessed that one of the anti-capital-punishment groups who’d been protesting John’s case for forever must have ponied up the money for this lawyer.

For the next week Andy did his best to forget he had to go up to Indianapolis to testify about a man he wished would go ahead and die already. Just like he always did, he poured himself into his job, and when he wasn’t working, he ran like he was training for a marathon.

One evening after returning home from work, thoughts of John and Gabe started closing in on him. They pushed so hard that he walked over to the locked drawer in the bottom of his gun cabinet and started to put the key into the keyhole. “What am I doing?” He stopped himself and said aloud, “I’m not blowing three years for this guy. Hell no!” Instead, he walked into his bedroom, stripped off his uniform, and pulled on an old Indiana University T-shirt and running shorts. The night of Gabe’s death still played in his head as he put on his new Nike running shoes, which made him start off running down his quarter-mile-long driveway without warming up or stretching first. Once he cleared the driveway, he turned right and ran down the road that leads toward the big city of Gnaw Bone (I wish I’d made up the name of that town, but I didn’t). He pushed through Gnaw Bone, and turned left onto Highway 46 and continued running down the very narrow strip of asphalt that passes for a shoulder on the right-hand side of the yellow line toward Nashville. The shadows had already grown dark by the time Andy hit Highway 46, but he didn’t notice. The sound of his feet on the asphalt and the hum of cars buzzing by couldn’t drown out the sound of John Phillips’s voice ringing in his ears. He could hear him on the night of Gabe’s death:
“It all happened so fast . . . I heard him screaming, but I thought I was the one having the bad dream.”