UBC: Rule, A Fever in the Heart

[truepenny]

A Fever in the Heart and Other True Cases by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

• "A Fever in the Heart": Yakima WA 1975: the murder of Morris Blankenbaker & the highly ambiguous death of Talmadge Glynn "Gabby" Moore
  
• "The Highway Accident": Salem OR 1976: man tries to make his wife's death look like a car accident, not knowing the police have already found the murder scene
  
• "Murder Without a Body": Rainier OR 1976: Vicki Brown's body was never found, but the cops found a sufficient corpus delicti to prosecute and convict her murderer.
  
• "I'll Love You Forever": Auburn WA 1974: woman falls prey to sociopath; her daughters brought a successful civil suit against him before the cops could put together a criminal case--but after he managed to squander most of the wealthy victim's estate. He died in prison and it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.
  
• "Black Leather": Roy WA 1979: a sadistic sexual psychopath's last victim manages to turn the tables on him
  
• "Mirror Images": the horrific lives of Carl Harp (rapist and sniper) and James Ruzicka (rapist/murderer), who met in prison, became friends--insofar as either of them was capable of it--and shared a pseudonym, "Troy Asin." Harp died in prison (most likely suicide, but there's an outside chance he had help) and Ruzicka is serving consecutive life terms.

"A Fever in the Heart" demonstrates as clearly as any of her work the point where Rule and I don't mesh. She's interested in the people; I'm interested in the case. Mostly, this isn't a problem, but in this particular story she's so interested in the people--particularly Olive Blankenbaker, the victim's mother, who asked her to tell the story--that she does a lousy job of presenting the case. And the case is, in a horrible way, fascinating.

Talmadge Glynn "Gabby" Moore was a phenomenal high school wrestling coach. Blankenbaker was one of his wrestlers, later a coach himself and Moore's friend. When Moore's first wife finally divorced him for being possessive, controlling, and manipulative, Blankenbaker let Moore stay with him and his wife for a few weeks "while he got back on his feet." Moore repaid him by seducing Blankenbaker's wife (pseudonymously called Jerrilee--and I'm going to call her that, even though I'm using everybody else's surname, because she shared surnames with both victims and it's too damn confusing, even though it's a patriarchal convention I loathe; just watch how rarely women get called by their unadorned surnames in anything you read). Jerrilee left Blankenbaker and married Moore, but less than a year later, she realized what a horrible mistake she'd made, divorced Moore, and went back to Blankenbaker. They were getting ready to be remarried when Blankenbaker was murdered. Moore was obsessed with Jerrilee and had told her he knew she'd come back to him if it weren't for Blankenbaker; she--and the cops--immediately suspected him, and even when his alibi held (he was in the hospital the night of Blankenbaker's murder), she and they were convinced he was behind it. He insisted he wasn't, insisted that he was trying to solve Blankenbaker's murder, that he was being stalked himself and was getting death threats. Jerrilee, the last time she was weak enough to speak to him, told him she didn't believe him, and he was trying to tell her he could prove it when she hung up on him. Moore could never grasp that she wasn't going to come back to him no matter what he did; he truly believed that Blankenbaker had been the obstacle in his path, not that he himself had driven her away.

Moore died less than a month after Blankenbaker of a gunshot wound that probably wouldn't have killed him if the .22 hadn't ricocheted off his rib and torn a hole straight across his body from left to right, through both lungs and the pericardium. (Low caliber bullets can do amazing things inside the human body.) The Yakima detectives working the case eventually dragged out the truth: Moore, who was like a god to his wrestlers, had gotten one of them to murder Blankenbaker and then, in pursuit of his delusion that he could "prove" his own innocence, browbeat that same wrestler into shooting him. Moore didn't intend that shot to be fatal, and one of the very important questions at trial was whether Angelo "Tuffy" Pleasant had also meant Moore to survive. Or not.

Angelo Pleasant (surely one of the most ironically misnamed people of all time) confessed to Yakima detectives on tape, then tried to recant his confession (throwing his younger brother and his best friend under the bus as the "real murderers"), but didn't have the intellectual stamina to maintain his new story under sharp and relentless cross-examination. It was hard to tell--and I think it was hard for Rule to tell--whether Pleasant was a conscienceless murderer or someone so malleable that Moore could verbally pin him to the mat and force him to do things he genuinely didn't want to do. Moore was a vile human being who hoist himself with his own petard.

Rule starts with Blankenbaker and her narrative meanders and loops and has to go spiraling off in all these different directions because Blankenbaker (to talk in terms of story-telling craft for a second) may be her hook, but he's not the throughline. In an awful, cruel, tragic way, Morris Blankenbaker is almost incidental to his own murder. Pleasant had nothing against him; he killed him because Moore wanted him dead. And Moore didn't care about Blankenbaker; he saw him only as the thing keeping Jerrilee away. And Jerrilee, in the worst tradition of courtly love, is also weirdly peripheral to the story; Pleasant barely even knew her and he said openly he didn't care about her one way or the other. She was Moore's idee fixe, the cruel beloved who appears in so much Renaissance lyric poetry, capriciously spurning the poet/knight until he proves his devotion. To give credit where it's due, Renaissance poets prove their worth by writing poetry, not by browbeating their former students into murder, but the cognitive schematic is the same. Feminist critics talk about the way the beloved in Renaissance lyric poetry is deprived of subjectivity, never allowed to be independent of the poet's desire for her, and that's exactly what Moore did to Jerrilee Blankenbaker. She had no subject position of her own in his conceptualization of her, no independent will that would keep her from returning to him if he just got rid of the other guy.

So most of the story is Moore and the steadily widening gap between Moore and reality, but Moore isn't the throughline either, because the investigation of his death made the investigation of Blankenbaker's death a whole new ballgame. But Pleasant, the murderer, isn't the throughline, because the motivation for Morris Blankenbaker's murder had nothing whatsoever to do with Angelo Pleasant himself.

You can see why Rule didn't think she knew how to tell this story, and I don't for a second pretend I would have done any better in her shoes.

But looking at what she did write, I think her throughline was staring her in the face in the person of Vern Henderson, a Yakima detective who was one of Moore's former students; was Blankenbaker's best friend; was--like Pleasant--an African-American man in a community that was 95% or more white; who found the shell casing at the scene of Blankenbaker's murder; shared investigative duties on the Blankenbaker/Moore case; and worked Angelo Pleasant into the right state of mind to confess. Henderson saw Jerrilee make the mistake of meeting with Moore after she'd returned to Blankenbaker, so although he wasn't close to Jerrilee (the poor woman exists in Rule's narrative almost exclusively in terms of her relationships with Blankenbaker and Moore), structurally he holds all the pieces of the story. If you follow Henderson, you get everything, and that isn't true of any of the other players. Also, if you follow Henderson, you stay focused on the case, but--because his life was so intertwined with Blankenbaker's, Moore's, and Pleasant's--you don't lose sight of the people. QED.



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