The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips (7 page)

“How can falling out of bed produce enough force to do that kind of damage?” Andy asked.

“From the top bunk, it’s possible. At least I think it is possible. To say for sure, I probably need to drop some weighted dummies onto empty wooden drawers.”

“When you gonna do that?” Andy asked.

“Later this evening,” Duncan said.

“Don’t you ever go home?” Andy questioned.

“What the hell for? There’s nothing there,” Duncan replied. Shifting the conversation back to the evidence in the room, he said, “Another thing about this drawer. It was empty when we pulled it out of the apartment.”

“So?” Andy replied.

“So the dad said that this drawer doubled as his kid’s toy box.”

“Yeah?”

“Where were the toys?” Duncan asked.

“Scattered across the floor. When I walked into the room, there were clothes and toys all over the room. I don’t have a lot of experience with kids,” Andy said in a classic understatement, “but that seems pretty normal to me.”

“Could be. Probably is,” Duncan said. “But in his statement the other night, the dad said the boy had to pick up all his toys and put them away before he went to bed.”

“From what I recall, it didn’t look like much of anything was put away in the room that night.”

Duncan nodded his head. “Yeah, I’ve seen the pictures. The room was a mess. Do you remember whether or not the toys were all close together or if they were spread out when you walked in?”

Andy shrugged his shoulders. “When there’s a bleeding child lying on the bed, who notices anything else? Why do you ask?”

“If everything was in one place, then that could mean the drawer was dumped out all at once. If they were spread out across the floor, then that would indicate the boy took them out a few at a time as he played with them,” Duncan said.

“Does that matter?” Andy asked.

“Maybe,” Duncan said. “Take a look at the back of the drawer.” Mike Duncan slipped a pair of gloves on his hands and spun the drawer around, where Andy could see the part of the drawer that was stuck inside the chest. The dovetail joint had clearly been repaired. “This thing’s been busted and glued back together very recently. The glue is still soft in places. John Phillips even admits that. He says these drawers were constantly breaking and he had to glue them back together. He claims he fixed it the day before the accident. His prints are in the glue.”

“So he fixed a busted drawer?”

“We didn’t pick this up until the next day. It was so late the night of the accident that we walked out and forgot it. That means we have no way of knowing when he fixed it,” Duncan said. “But his prints aren’t just in the glue. We lifted handprints off both sides toward the back.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning he picked it up like this”—Mike Duncan turned the drawer upside down and grabbed it on the sides. His fingers curled around on the inside of the drawer, while his palms pressed hard on the outside—“and when he did, he gripped it pretty tight. We pulled nice wide prints off this part of the drawer, the kind that comes when someone applies a great deal of pressure.”

“I’m missing something here,” Andy said.

“The drawer killed the kid, just like the dad said. It’s possible that it could have happened more than one way. The boy may well have fallen out of bed and landed on the corner of the drawer, which is the father’s explanation. Or, the drawer may have fallen onto the child’s head, with added force, if you know what I mean,” Duncan said. “It’s all in the way you look at the evidence. Of course, you would think if he’d slammed it down hard enough to crack the kid’s skull, the whole damn drawer would have busted apart.”

“What?! Are you telling me that John Phillips pulled this drawer out and used it to crack open his son’s skull?” A rush of anger swept over Andy.

“I’m just saying it’s possible. That’s all,” Duncan replied. “Don’t go jumping to any conclusions. We’ve got to keep a clear head and go where the evidence takes us, not force it in a direction it doesn’t want to go. Bottom line here, Andy: the mother said the guy killed the boy. The evidence says the drawer delivered the fatal blow, which makes the dad’s story a very plausible explanation. All I’m trying to do is figure out if there is any way the woman’s charges could be true. And with the way the fingerprints line up on the back of the drawer, I would have to say, yes, it is possible that our guy used a dresser drawer to kill the boy. If it weren’t, this whole investigation would now be over and the cause of death would most definitely be accidental. That doesn’t mean the dad killed the boy. I’m only saying it’s an interesting coincidence that the drawer with the dad’s fingerprints all over it is the same drawer that cracked this kid’s head open.

“And then there’s this,” Mike Duncan said as he pulled out another set of photographs. These were of Gabe’s abdomen and back. “A few were snapped at the scene before the body was moved.” Duncan slid three others closer to Andy. “These with the rulers in the shot, Warner took them during the autopsy. The bruises on his abdomen and chest appear to be several days old. The ones on his back,” he said as he fished out a couple of other photographs, “are from the night the boy died. They may have been made by the fall out of bed, if that’s how he died.”

“And if not?” Andy asked.

“Then someone had been beating the crap out of this little guy on a regular basis,” Duncan said. “We also found some fresh scratches on the backs of his hands, like he’d put up a fight against something.” Mike Duncan must have seen Andy’s face flush red, like he was about to pop his cork, because he immediately said, “Now settle down. That doesn’t mean the dad was the one abusing the boy.”

“Like hell it doesn’t.”

“Think about it, Andy,” Duncan said. “The kid was on the top bunk. The ceilings are pretty low in that dump of an apartment complex and they all have that blown-on, popcorn-looking texturing. You ever hit your hand against that crap? It can do some damage. And what do kids do when they have a bad dream? They roll around and fight the demons attacking them in the night. There’s a pretty good chance the kid scratched his hands on the ceiling.”

“If he fell out of bed while having a nightmare,” Andy said.

“Exactly.”

“And if he didn’t?”

“You tell me,” Duncan replied.

Andy paused and let that soak in for a moment. Duncan started putting the photographs away when Andy said, “You know the guy has already cleaned out the apartment, don’t you? Scrubbed it clean from top to bottom and moved out.”

“What?!” Duncan shook his head. “Holy crap. And right about the time I’m ready to give this guy the benefit of the doubt . . . Man, that’s quick. The kid’s been dead, what, three whole days?”

“Four,” Andy said.

“You clean out a place that fast, it sure looks like you have something to hide.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Andy said.

The rest of Andy’s shift went by without any major incidents. He made a few traffic stops, and was called out to a possible fire. The fire turned out to be nothing more than smoke wafting through a window from a neighbor burning trash. He cited the neighbor for burning after dark, and watched as the fire department dumped a few gallons of water into the trash barrel to douse the flames. Throughout his shift Andy kept an eye out for John Phillips, but he couldn’t go off searching for him. For that matter, he didn’t even know where to start looking. At 11:00 p.m., he dropped back by the station to clock out and brief the poor sap pulling the graveyard shift. Andy had to go back into the station a second time to retrieve the folder and cassette tape from his locker. Flipping the tape around in his right hand, he said, “God, I hope she didn’t talk too much.”

Chapter 4

I
’VE ALWAYS HEARD
that prison changes a man, but I never knew how true that really is. John changed while he was in the joint. By the time he got out, he wasn’t the man I married. Funny, I never really heard of people changing like he did. He came out sooooooo religious, it was nauseating. Don’t get me wrong, I liked some parts of the new John. He stopped drinking, which was good because he usually got violent when he got too drunk. But I didn’t think that meant I had to stop drinking. I wasn’t the one with the problem, so why should I quit? I’ve got to be honest. I missed hitting the bars together. Yeah, he got mean when he got drunk, but he was also fun. And funny. I know Jesus can change people. I just never knew God wanted ’em so dull.”

Fast-forward. It was Andy’s third time to listen to the tape. He wanted to hit the highlights one more time while it was all fresh in his mind. As he listened, he made notes in his Big Chief pad.

“. . . could take the personal changes. I could live with going to church on Sundays and not getting stoned at the occasional concert. You know, Gabe was getting old enough that we didn’t have any business doing that stuff anyways. And he really liked going to Sunday school. Gabe loved Sunday school. I think it was the favorite part of his week. I kept taking him even after his father and I split up. Gabe really loved Sunday school.”

Fast-forward.

“. . . so I don’t know a lot about God and Jesus. I mean, I went to church when I was a kid. My mother made me and my sister go to nearly every Vacation Bible School in town in the summers when we were kids. We had fun, and for her it was a week of free child care each time. So I know some things about God, not a lot, but enough to know that John wasn’t normal. Like I said, I didn’t have a problem with him cleaning up his act. He landed in prison, for Christ’s sake, he needed a little cleaning up. It’s when he started giving things away and bringing people home, that’s when the problems started.”

Fast-forward.

“. . . things like food, clothes, even money. It wasn’t like we had an overabundance. I’ll never forget the time he gave a hundred dollars to some person he hardly knew. I didn’t know them at all. Our rent was due in a few days, and he gave a huge chunk of it away. When I asked him what the hell he thought he was doing, he told me to ‘trust God.’ He said God wouldn’t let us down when we obey Him. Okay, I’m all for helping people out when they need it, but John’s helping others made us candidates for charity ourselves. I managed to juggle around some of our other bills to make rent, but it put a lot of stress on me. John took the fact that we didn’t lose our home as proof that God had come through. I didn’t see it that way.”

Fast-forward.

“. . . different people. Never anyone we knew. Sometimes they were homeless. I pleaded with him to stop. I told him that bringing strange people into our home put both me and Gabe in danger. John would just quote some Bible verse about ‘the least of these’ and tell me not to worry. I do not know or care what the least of these are. All I know is bringing a stranger into your home when you have a wife and small child is not safe. Period. He never understood why I would worry. Trust God, he would say. Trust God. Trust God. Just trust God. He said it so much that I thought it was just some cliché he hid behind when he didn’t want to take responsibility for what was going on.”

Fast-forward.

“. . . the prostitute was the last straw.”

Rewind.

“. . . but the prostitute was the last straw.”

Rewind.

“The down-and-out bums were bad enough, but the prostitute was the last straw. Yeah. He brought a prostitute into our home. Even introduced her to Gabe. Like all the other people he let sleep on our couch, John said she didn’t have anywhere else to stay. Said she’d just given her life to Jesus and she needed a safe place where her pimp wouldn’t find her. I shudder to think what might have happened if he had. I was furious. I threw out the sheets she slept on. I can only imagine what we might have caught from them. She stayed with us for three days until John found somewhere else that would take her. Three days. He even went out and bought her some new clothes. Like we could afford to buy some whore new clothes. I hadn’t had anything new in months, not that John noticed or cared.” Loraine let out a long sigh on the tape. “After that, I was done. I couldn’t take it anymore. Can you blame me?”

Fast-forward.

“. . . mission trip. Guatemala, I’m pretty sure it was Guatemala. I didn’t think ex-cons could leave the country. He did. He went with a group of men from his church for ten days in Guatemala. I think they built a church. Like I said, by that point I was done. I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to what he did. While he was on the mission trip, I loaded up Gabe and myself and all our stuff, and moved here. Our house was completely empty when he got back. John’s stuff? I gave it to the Salvation Army. I thought it only appropriate. I don’t know how he reacted when he found the house all empty. If I cared, I wouldn’t have done it like that.”

Fast-forward.

“Yes, I found someone else. I needed to be with a man. A real man, not some . . .”

Rewind.

“. . . needed to be with a man. A real man, not . . .”

Rewind.

“. . . found someone else. I needed to be with a man. A real man, not some, you know . . . When? The same week; while he was on his mission trip. No, I didn’t think that was fast. My husband had been gone for a couple of years. Like I told you, John was no longer the man I married. And I needed a man. I’m sure he knew what I’d done. He had to know. The way I see it, I did him a favor. Since I went out and ‘committed fornication,’ he’s free to find himself a woman more suited to his new tastes. Whatever. I really didn’t give a damn what he did. And, no, I never thought he would retaliate like this. Do you think I would have gone through with it if I thought he would kill my little boy to get back at me?”

Fast-forward.

“He’d threatened me on more than one occasion. You won’t have any trouble finding witnesses to back up what I am telling you. It should be in the transcripts from his trial. That’s why he went to prison. All I did was talk to the guy. He was nice, and I was just being polite. I’d felt ugly for a long time. I got really big with Gabe. It was our first time to go out after he was born, our first night of letting him stay with a babysitter. But John didn’t think the guy was being nice. He said he watched the guy staring at my boobs all night. Like I said, I got really big with Gabe, in more ways than one. The guy said something, I don’t even remember what, when I walked past him on my way back from the bathroom. Next thing I know, John has the guy on the ground and has to be drug off.”