The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips (22 page)

“Pepsi, please,” Andy said.

“Is Coke all right?” she asked.

“Sure, Coke’s fine,” he said. “And I don’t need a menu. Give me a Grand Slam breakfast, eggs over medium.”

“Bacon or sausage?”

“Sausage.”

“All right, sir, we’ll get that right out to you,” she said, and walked away.

After she was gone, Andy opened up the paper and started to peel away the top few sections when a front-page story caught his eye. The headline read: “APPEAL PROCESS BEGINS FOR CONVICTED CHILD KILLER.” Andy decided the recap of yesterday’s Reds-Dodgers exhibition game could wait. He dropped the rest of the paper back onto the table and began reading. The story started off with a line that said something like, “The first of the state-mandated appeal hearings is scheduled to begin Monday in Indianapolis for John Phillips who was convicted of the June 1978 killing of his son, Gabriel Phillips.” What followed was a brief recap of the Phillips case, along with an explanation of the new death penalty laws the state had adopted to put it in compliance with recent Supreme Court rulings. Nothing in the story was particularly earth shattering, and Andy almost stopped reading until he came to a quote from a death penalty opponent who said something along the lines of, “John Phillips is a classic example of everything that is wrong with capital punishment. The poor guy got railroaded in the courts, and now he will hardly cooperate with his court-appointed attorneys who are fighting on his behalf. Since he won’t fight to save his own life, we’re going to fight to save it for him.”

Andy finished reading the story about the time his glass of Coke arrived. He took a long drink, grimaced (he much preferred Pepsi), and picked up the sports section. Before he got to the Reds score, he put the sports section back on the table, and went back to the quote from the death penalty opponent. “He won’t fight to save his own life,” he read again. “Who was there to fight for Gabe on the night he killed him?” Andy asked.

“Excuse me?” the coffee-and-cigarette-odor-emitting waitress asked as she passed by his table.

“Sorry, ma’am, I was just thinking out loud,” he said.

“Well, if you need anything, you just let me know,” she said.

“Don’t worry, I will,” he said.

The waitress walked away, and Andy went back to the quote. “He won’t fight to save his own life.” Those words seemed to jump off the page at him.
I wonder if he’s finally cracked? I mean, come on, how long can this guy live in denial?
A smile crossed his lips as he took another long drink of his Coke.
Maybe, just maybe . . .
The thought made the two eggs, two links of sausage, and two pancakes the waitress slid in front of him taste even better. For over a year Andy had convinced himself that justice had been served with John’s conviction, but now he realized he hadn’t so much convinced himself as he had pushed the whole case out of his mind. Once he started thinking about it again, he realized he still wanted to hear a confession. He still needed John Phillips to say the words “I did it and I deserve whatever happens to me now.” Gabe’s killer didn’t just need to be caught and convicted. He had to feel the full weight of the guilt for what he had done, and that weight had to break him in two.
A year on death row just might have been the trick,
he thought as he placed the eggs in between the pancakes and covered them with syrup.
And even if it didn’t, the sooner the appeal process runs its course, the sooner justice can be served.
He smiled and wolfed down his meal.

After Andy finished his afternoon breakfast, he told himself he wouldn’t give John Phillips another thought. And he didn’t. At least not while he wrote a ticket to the driver of a red 1966 Mustang convertible he clocked doing seventy-two in the southbound lanes of I-65.

And he didn’t think about John while he assisted a car filled with Indiana University coeds whose car had run out of gas just north of the Bloomington exit. Andy had to work hard to keep his eyes from wandering to places they shouldn’t go and to think like a cop. Their shorts were way too short and their shirts were way too tight and Andy was way too old to stare at eighteen-year-olds the way his eyes wanted. He called for a wrecker and stayed with them while they waited for it to arrive. However, he spent most of that time in his patrol car filling out paperwork, or doing anything to keep his mind on his job.

And Andy didn’t think about John Phillips or the events that caused him, Andy Myers, to completely remake his life at the age of thirty-two as he assisted the Brown County Sheriff’s Department search for twin four-year-old boys who had disappeared from a mobile home that sat at the end of a dirt road, which was at the end of a gravel road, which was at the end of a single-lane, barely paved road off a remote state highway. I guess what I am saying is, these people lived out in the middle of nowhere. An uncle was supposed to be watching the twins, but he fell asleep on the couch. When he woke up, the boys were gone. The house was surrounded by fields that might have grown corn if anyone had ever bothered to plow them. No one had in years, which meant the weeds were tall enough for anyone shorter than the minimum height required to ride the Beast roller coaster at Kings Island to get lost inside. A creek also meandered through the property. This time of year, the water ran high enough that it stretched from grassy bank to grassy bank. If the boys had wandered over close enough to it to fall in, they wouldn’t leave any footprints.

The volunteer fire departments from two local towns arrived to join in the search, as did the neighbors. Everyone wanted to help, but with so many people descending on such a small place at once, chaos ensued. Andy took charge of the scene. He broke the volunteers into groups. He sent one set of firemen to the fields to the south of the house, and another group to those on the north. Andy had them search in a grid pattern. Rescuers lined up an arm’s length from one another and walked through the field, side by side, first north to south, then east to west. If the boys were crouched down hiding, one of the volunteers would step on them if they didn’t see them first. He had a couple of the other groups of volunteers walk in the tall grass and ditches beside the road for a mile in each direction. A few men with fishing boats had already started cruising up and down the creek. The boys’ mother showed up at the house about forty-five minutes into the search, and she was hysterical. Andy switched gears from search coordinator to chaplain. He calmed her down the best that he could until a real chaplain arrived from one of the local police departments. “Thank God,” Andy said as he passed her off. Hysterical mothers were not his forte. No one had found as much as a lost shoe from the two boys after an hour and a half. About the time everyone began to fear the worst, a loud shout came up from behind the mobile home. “I’ve got ’em! I’ve got ’em!” he yelled.

All of the rescue workers moved quickly toward the house. Andy dropped his mic and ran over toward the yelling man, along with the sheriff. The boys’ uncle came out from around the corner of the mobile home, a boy in each arm. “They’d climbed into the shed out back of the house and were playing,” he said. “All of these police cars and fire trucks pulling in scared ’em so bad that they hid down under some boxes. That’s why no one seen ’em when we looked in there.”

The boys’ mother came running out of the mobile home, tears running down her face. “Mommy, Mommy,” the boys said as they reached out for their mother. She pulled them out of her brother’s arms, hugged them so tight Andy thought she might crack their ribs, and started kissing them repeatedly. The joy of finding them alive quickly gave way to her motherly instincts. “Don’t ever do that to me again,” she scolded. “You scared me half to death.” The boys started crying, and the mother cried even more, and even some of the crusty volunteers started tearing up.

Watching the mother with her sons, a random thought popped into Andy’s head, the kind of thought he hadn’t had for a long time. He thought,
I wish I could have given Loraine a reunion with her little boy
. Now, he hadn’t thought about Loraine since the day he turned in his resignation at the Trask police force. And he hadn’t really thought about Gabe since the last time he drove past the Adamsburg cemetery, right before he started his state police training. This one random thought, along with the sight of a grateful but frantic mother, opened a door and all of the old thoughts and feelings he’d successfully ignored for over a year came flooding back. He had his fresh start, all right, but deep down Andy Myers was still Andy Myers. And the old demons that haunted him in his former life hunted him down in his new one.

Just because they’d found him didn’t mean Andy surrendered willingly. He tried to push the feelings and obsession with Gabe’s case back out of his mind. Staying busy had held them at bay before, and that was the tactic he tried this time as well. He threw himself into his work and found extra tasks to keep himself busy. Even during the monotony of sitting alongside the highway pointing a radar gun at cars and trucks zipping down the highway, he created mind games to keep his thoughts busy. He calculated the time it would take a car to reach Indianapolis from his mile marker, dividing the mileage by the car’s speed. When the mind games didn’t work, he lowered his threshold of speed over the limit that would make him pull someone over. That month he wrote more speeding tickets than any trooper in the state of Indiana. On his off days he ran, but these weren’t little jogs in the park. Andy drove over to Brown County State Park and began running the hilly trails that leave ordinary, middle-aged weekend hikers sucking for air. When images of Gabe lying on a bloody floor tried to squeeze past Andy’s defenses, he ran harder and faster until he was too tired to think about anything at all.

His strategy worked for a while. One day, however, he was done in by the smallest of acts. During breakfast on June 3, he was sitting in his kitchen, eating a bowl of Wheaties, when he looked up and noticed he hadn’t changed his calendar since April. He had this cheap-looking calendar he picked up from the local hardware store hanging right next to the kitchen wall phone. So he slid his bowl of Wheaties aside, went over to the calendar, and pulled it off the nail sticking through the hole that was just above the landscape photo. He flipped from April to May just to look at the picture, which I think was some mountain scene from California. Then he turned the page from May to June and pushed it back on the nail. As he stepped back from the calendar, his eyes glanced down at the grid of days and one number popped out at him. Yeah, you guessed it. It was the second anniversary date of Gabe’s death. He stood staring at the square on the calendar with the number in the middle until he couldn’t see the number any longer because of the tears welling up in his eyes. “Two years. My God, has it really been
two
years?”

He sat back down at his table and kept staring up at the calendar, wiping tears away. Memories came flooding back, especially the memory of his last time with Gabe. Andy could see the two of them, sitting up high in the red seats of the upper deck in Cincinnati’s old Riverfront Stadium, munching on hot dogs, while the “Big Red Machine” played far down below. It was the longest continuous time Andy had spent with a child since he was a kid himself. For a guy who didn’t like children, he had the time of his life. Gabe kept peppering Andy with questions, most of them completely unrelated to one another. I like kids, but that kind of conversation gets old fast for me. Somehow, when it came to Gabe, nothing got old for Andy. Even two years later he could hear Gabe asking, “Why did you become a policeman, Andy?” A moment later it was “What do you think they put in hot dogs that make them taste so good?” Then it was “What was your favorite baseball team when you were my age?”

But the one question that Andy could now hear above all the others was Gabe asking, “Do you believe in God?”

“I guess so,” Andy said.

“I believe in God,” Gabe said, “but I don’t think my mom does.”

“Really? Why do you think that?”

“She won’t go to church anymore. She used to go all the time, when my mom and dad still lived together. Now she drops me off at the door, but she won’t go inside.”

“Just because she doesn’t go to church doesn’t mean she doesn’t believe in God,” Andy said.

“Yeah, I know. But she doesn’t just not go. She gets kind of mad when I bring church up. And she doesn’t pray before we eat. And one day I went outside to empty the trash, and when I pulled the lid off the trash can, I saw my mom’s Bible in there. My dad gave it to her one year for Christmas. I think if someone throws their Bible away, they don’t believe in God,” Gabe said. Then he added, “I worry about my mom. I pray for her every day. She always seems sad.”

Andy sat in his kitchen, staring at the calendar, replaying Gabe’s words over and over in his head. Memories of Gabe and all the feelings they stirred up about Loraine and John had invaded this place, and they would not leave. Andy’s reprieve was now officially over.

Chapter 18

A
LTHOUGH THE OLD MEMORIES
had found him, Andy did his best to keep from obsessing over Gabe’s death. The change of scenery helped, as did his job. Back when he lived in Trask, he did basically the same things in the same places and saw the same people every day. Once that place became infected by the Phillips case, he had to get away from it. His new surroundings did not have that smell of death. He didn’t have to answer calls at the Madison Park Apartments two or three days a week or drive past the Adamsburg cemetery every time he went to the Harris County Courthouse. With enough effort, he could push Gabe and John and Loraine completely out of his mind for weeks at a time. I’m not so sure that was any better. The questions that haunted him never really went away. I think he just got used to their voices.

Sometime I think it was August because it was still hot. Andy was out on patrol on Interstate 65. He was cruising south, to be exact. The grass on the sides of the highway had turned brown and dry (it was a pretty dry summer that year) but another colorful sight had sprung up in its place. All along the highway, very large, very bright billboards had popped out like dandelions in May. You couldn’t get away from them. Up on the billboard was the smiling face of one Mr. Reginald Chambliss, Esquire, the infamous Harris County prosecutor turned Republican nominee for governor. Good ole Reginald Chambliss was leaning against a broom, and underneath the billboard read: sweep out crime and corruption. vote reggie chambliss, governor. His high-profile murder case had proved to be the real broom, sweeping him right past Harris County and into statewide politics. Reginald Chambliss couldn’t have plotted it out any better if he’d written the story of his life himself. Andy laughed when he saw one of the billboards for the first time. After a while he got where he hardly noticed them.