Glancing up at me, he said, “May I help you?”
“I hope so,” I said.
Then the eyes behind the rimless glasses studied me. “Ness’s friend. The Chicago detective. Nathan Haller.”
“Heller. My apologies for ambushing you like this. I called your office and was told you’d be here. I wondered if I could steal just a few minutes.”
He leaned against the podium, looking down at me, as if he were the six-footer and I were five foot three. “I do have an appointment in fifteen minutes. What’s the occasion?”
I quickly told him that I was looking into the Sheppard case for Erle Stanley Gardner and the Court of Last Resort.
He did not come down and join me, preferring the professorly advantage of the podium. “‘Court of Last Resort’ sounds rather official, Mr. Heller. But we both know it’s just a monthly feature in a cheap magazine.”
“Not that cheap. It’s up to thirty-five cents.”
He gave that a tiny smile, which was about what it deserved, then his expression turned serious. “I heard about Eliot’s death. Very sad. A young man, relatively speaking. My condolences.”
“Thank you.” I didn’t ask why he hadn’t been at the memorial service. Strange, in a way, since the Kingsbury Run slayings would forever link him with Eliot.
Still leaning across the podium in a casually condescending manner, he said, “May I be frank? About this effort of yours?”
“Please.”
Now he stood to his full height. He began to pace before the big blackboard, with reading assignments on it, as if to remind me who was schooling who.
“Mr. Heller,” he said (and at least I now rated a “mister”), “your Court of Last Resort would seem indeed to be the last resort for Dr. Sheppard. The efforts of counselor Corrigan’s forensics man—after we turned the house over—were not found convincing by the Eighth District Ohio Court of Appeals, who denied the motion for a new trial.”
He returned to his podium and resumed his patronizing stance.
“And,” he lectured, “the Ohio Supreme Court affirmed Sheppard’s conviction just last year—a decision the Supreme Court of these United States chose to let stand. So why should I talk to you about this very much decided case?”
“Because,” I said, “there’s one court remaining to hear it.”
“What court would that be? The one of ‘Last Resort’?”
“In a way. The court of public opinion. And the man who gave the world Perry Mason, patron saint of unfairly accused defendants in murder cases, is just the person who could embarrass you royally.”
He thought about that. Straightened. Smoothed a side of his already perfect white-gray hair; he was balding some, giving him a high forehead, not unlike Sam Sheppard.
Then he said, “If so, why on earth should I help you, Heller?”
Ah. Back to the Good Old Days when I didn’t rate a “mister.”
“Because,” I said, “you have a basic misunderstanding of what Gardner, and I, are up to. We’re not saying Sam Sheppard is innocent. We have no opinion on that. The idea of my looking into this old case is to see whether new evidence does exist that might get the not-guilty verdict overturned. And, if so, pave the way for a new trial.”
“Well, he’s guilty as sin, man.”
“Then what do you have to worry about? Gardner’s biggest concern is the unfairness of the trial in the context of a smear campaign by the press in general and the Cleveland Press in particular.”
“That’s greatly exaggerated.”
I thought back to my morning in the murder house, where reporters ran rampant. Later, photographs stolen from frames and family albums would appear in their papers.
“Perhaps,” I said. “But I want you to understand I have no ax to grind here. I’m just an unbiased investigator making sure justice was done.”
He slowly took the several steps down from the riser and came over and sat next to me.
This small man was a big deal in the world of criminology. He had traveled worldwide, lecturing. Had assisted Scotland Yard. Written the standard textbook for physicians giving testimony in court. Served term after term, his reelection automatic, no matter which party was otherwise in power. As a practicing physician and licensed attorney, he had been called “the most powerful figure in Cleveland’s criminal justice system.”
“I have no desire to be made a fool of,” Gerber said, with surprising honesty. “But if there’s been a miscarriage of justice—which I severely doubt—I will do everything I can to cooperate.”
“Thank you, Doctor. Along those lines, I would be grateful if you would spread the word among your colleagues on the police department that my inquiry is neither pro Sheppard, nor against.”
“Understood.”
“But if I may be frank—there are those who say you had a bias against Dr. Sheppard, and his whole family. That their Bay View Hospital rankled.”
“Are we off the record?”
“Certainly. I’m gathering background, nothing more.”
“I won’t be quoted in Gardner’s column?”
“No.”
We were sitting side by side, and I’d angled myself to face him; but for the occasional glance, he looked straight ahead, at the empty podium and the looming blackboard.
“The Sheppard family has always been a shady operation,” he said, the pun of that apparently eluding him. “I, of course, like most physicians, feel none of these osteopaths, these charlatan bone crackers, should be performing surgery. That should be a crime in and of itself.”
“The American Medical Association doesn’t recognize them, I understand.”
A nod and a glance. “That’s correct. And these Sheppards … for one thing, they ran an abortion mill.”
That was a new one on me.
But all I said was, “Is that right?”
He nodded curtly, his eyes on an invisible lecturer. “Many hospitals perform ‘legal therapeutic abortions,’ should a woman’s life be threatened. But at the Sheppard father’s first clinic, here on the East Side, starting in the ’30s? All a woman had to say was that she would kill herself if she didn’t get an abortion. And that was all Sheppard and his staff had to hear.”
“Would abortions of that kind be considered illegal?”
“Most certainly! It’s a serious crime, for an abominable, immoral practice! Any doctor knowing of such a procedure has a responsibility to report it to the police.”
I frowned. “Wouldn’t that violate the confidentiality between doctor and patient?”
“No! It’s a crime. We had many, many reports of criminal abortions taking place at the Sheppard Osteopathic Hospital on the near east side. We were told that countless fetuses were buried under their parking lot! And we dug it up.”
“And found?”
“Well … nothing. Apparently they disposed of the tiny corpses in some other fashion. But it was well known that a woman wanting an abortion simply had to go to Richard Sheppard and say she wanted one.”
“Dr. Sam’s brother?”
“No! The father. But the man’s offspring are just as bad. We have reliable word that five to ten abortions are performed monthly at Bay View Hospital.”
I wondered if it was the same reliable source who advised him to dig up that parking lot.
“They are a sleazy bunch, those Sheppards,” he was saying. “They’re ambulance chasers—Sam Sheppard was the Bay Village ‘volunteer police physician,’ going along to accidents—and what hospital do you suppose accident victims were shuttled to? And his brother and late father had the same arrangement with Rocky River and Westlake, among other West Side suburbs!”
I decided not to say that ambulance chasers and abortionists weren’t necessarily wife murderers.
“Such an unprofessional pseudo-branch of medicine!” He was ranting now, lost in quiet rage. “They’re glorified chiropractors, and the idea of them performing operations and prescribing drugs makes me shudder.” He shuddered. “And t
hese Sheppards, they virtually market themselves—use the press for promotion! Issuing self-serving press releases to the papers and even medical journals.”
This coming from a man who played the Cleveland media like a kazoo.
He seemed to have run out of steam, so I said, “I really appreciate your frankness. I had no idea what kind of people these Sheppards are.”
“Well, they are,” he said, rather childishly.
“You seemed to know that Sam Sheppard was guilty from the start. But weren’t his injuries real? My notes say he had a spinal cord contusion and a concussion, combining to cause a nervous-system malfunction.”
“Ridiculous,” Gerber said, with a smirk. “Our physician said Sheppard’s so-called wounds were superficial and probably self-inflicted. And the X-rays Bay View Hospital provided were either faked or switched. That leather neck brace ‘Dr. Sam’ wore to the funeral, and the inquest? An obvious fraud. Blatant play for sympathy.”
“Of course,” I said, “you brought him down a peg by testifying about the murder weapon being a ‘surgical instrument.’”
“Yes,” he said, with a thin smile, “it left a blood signature.”
He’d used that phrase in court: “blood signature.” It appeared to have real weight for the jury.
“I have a couple of questions,” I said, “about other evidence.”
“Certainly.”
“Later examination of the murder room turned up a tiny leather strap, a chip apparently of red nail polish, and another tooth fragment.”
“Random items,” he said with a shrug.
“But the tooth fragment didn’t belong to either husband or wife.”
Another shrug. “Every murder scene has unanswered questions. Those little evidentiary bits didn’t necessarily date to the time of the crime. Anything else?”
“At the trial, you gave the probable time of death as three A.M.”
“That’s correct.” He turned his head to look at me, one eyebrow raised above a rimless eyeglasses lens. “And what was the good doctor doing for the three hours until he called Mayor Dodge, at around five forty-five?”
Dr. Richard Sheppard, the first physician to examine Marilyn’s body, put the time of death at between 4:15 and 4:45 A.M., and Gerber’s top deputy put the death between 3:30 and 5:30.
“We believe,” Gerber went on, “that one or both Sheppard brothers were called by Sam Sheppard, in the aftermath of the sudden murder, to help him clean up and stage that bogus robbery and generally get a story together.”
I gestured with an open hand. “A polygraph taken in Chicago recently, with both brothers and their wives, indicates otherwise. The examiners were top people and unbiased.”
He bristled. “It sounds like a stunt to me. Do I have to tell you that Dr. Sheppard refused a polygraph test before and after his arrest?”
“No, I’m well aware of that. And we’re insisting that he take one now … but certain permissions have to be obtained—from the warden of the prison, perhaps the governor. How would you feel about Sheppard finally taking a lie test?”
His expression brightened. “Why, I’d be all for it, of course! It would certainly bring this Court of Last Resort inquiry to a rightful conclusion.”
With a pleasant smile, I said, “Well, you certainly seem to have been the driving force behind the original investigation.”
“Someone had to be. Five police agencies were involved, and chaos was ensuing.” He sat straighter, his chin rising. “So I called a meeting of the county prosecutor, county sheriff, the Cleveland chief of police, the Bay Village chief … and myself, of course. We met right here—in this auditorium.”
He smiled to himself, reminiscing.
“We had a dozen photographers and as many reporters. Radio and TV. I used that blackboard and a slide projector, to show the color shots I’d eventually bring into court. It was a most successful event.”
Much like the Torso Clinic that Eliot Ness had thrown for the press in 1937, and that Samuel Gerber had milked for years.
I said, “And you were chosen to head up the inquiry?”
“No,” he said, the smile disappearing with a hint of embarrassment. “We didn’t come to an official arrangement. But someone had to show some leadership.”
* * *
The newsroom of the Cleveland Press was a vast space occasionally interrupted by pillars with prominent round clocks keeping deadlines looming. The metal desks gave it a modern feel, but the past hovered by way of typewriters chattering and cigar and cigarette smoke drifting like a battlefield haze. Occasional shouted questions or orders were peppered with profanity, as if someone had spread the word that a Chicagoan had come calling and creating an atmosphere out of Hecht and MacArthur’s The Front Page was only polite.
The office of editor Louis B. Seltzer was at the far end, but on my way there, I ran into him, seated, jutting into the aisle with his little well-shod feet on a reporter’s desk as he read copy, one stem of his glasses in his mouth. I’d met him a few times back in Ness days, but there was no reason for him to recognize me.
“Be with you in a moment, Nate,” he said, without seeming to have noticed me frozen there.
I recognized him, all right. He might have been Dr. Samuel Gerber’s rich brother, similarly short, but his baldness had taken over all save the sides of his oval-faced head. Typically dapper, he wore a crisp gray pinstripe suit with a starched shirt and a darker gray tie with a gold stick pin and a matching breast pocket handkerchief.
“Good job,” he told the reporter, tossing the copy on the desk, then springing to his full five six to say to me, “Heard you called. Only have fifteen minutes for you, though. That time of day.”
His stride back to the glassed-in office was quick and sure. He went in first, leaving the door open for me to go in through and then close. A visitor’s chair was waiting, the office itself rather spare, a wall of wooden file cabinets at his back, other wall space taken up by the usual framed award certificates and photos of poses with the famous—mostly entertainers, local boy Bob Hope, Danny Kaye, Frank Sinatra, Jack Benny.
Seltzer was “Mr. Cleveland,” after all.
A window to one side made a living seascape of Lake Erie with freighters going by at their own regal pace. The sky was clear with just enough clouds to add artistic touches. All was right with the world, when you were the editor of the flagship paper of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain.
I knew a little about this man. That he’d been brought up poor. Dropped out of the sixth grade to become a copy boy. Was a police beat reporter by twenty, perhaps explaining his interest in the Sheppard case. An editor at thirty.
Had once gotten himself incarcerated at the Ohio State Penitentiary to do an exposé on the institution’s terrible conditions. Sam Sheppard could have told him not all of those conditions had been improved.
“Your friend Ness,” he said, as if we were already in the middle of a conversation, “was a great public servant. Honest as hell. When my man Lausche went in as mayor, a Democrat, Frank was pressured to drop Eliot, a Republican. Frank refused. And Eliot set about to wipe out every gambling den and racketeering place he could. Good men, both of them. Sorry for your loss. Now, what’s this about?”
I gave him the rundown on Erle Gardner and the Court of Last Resort’s interest in his case.
“I just came from seeing Dr. Gerber,” I said. “I wanted both of you to know that this effort is open-minded. We’re not setting out to prove Sheppard’s innocence, or his guilt, for that matter. Just to determine if he got a fair shake at the trial.”
Seltzer served up a smile, then put a cigar in it and lit up, after pushing a humidor my way. I declined the offer.
“I suppose I’m the bad guy in this latest Perry Mason,” he said jovially, adjusting his glasses. “Well, that’s fine. Every good mystery needs one. But as far as I’m concerned, it already has its villain, in one Doctor Samuel H. Sheppard.”
I crossed my legs, got comfortable. “Wha
t made you so sure of that, so early on?”
He leaned back in his swivel chair. “What I knew from the start, Nate, was this was a great story. Again, a mystery, with fragmentary clues, painstakingly assembled by modern scientific methods, lovely young woman for a victim, handsome young husband for a prime suspect, a rich successful family for my working-class readers to envy.”
His frankness made me smile. “Let’s go back to that prime suspect,” I said. “Didn’t Gerber and the cops kind of rush to judgment on this one?”
He shook his head. “Marilyn Sheppard was brutally murdered. At the time of the killing, only two other persons were present—her husband and a sleeping child of seven. I think we can safely rule out the child as a suspect.”
“Agreed.”
“And then there’s another element that sets this murder case apart from most others—there was a deliberate effort to prevent law enforcement authorities from finding the killer.”
I frowned. “You mean, because Sam Sheppard’s family rallied around him?”
“That’s part of it, and not an unexpected part, obviously. But you have to understand Bay Village to really see what was going on here. It’s a tightly knit community, socially active, with a population of mostly younger people, who make a good living, to say the least.”
The kind his “working-class readers” might readily resent.
“They’re very loyal to each other,” he was saying, “when any form of trouble occurs. Take this Dodge fellow—the local butcher, a close friend of Dr. Sam’s—they owned a boat together! Dodge rejected Dr. Gerber’s advice to arrest Sam. And quickly a protective wall went up around Sheppard, designed to wait until public interest waned, and investigators had turned their efforts elsewhere.”
“Why, were there signs of that happening?”
Dark eyes flared behind the glasses. “Damn right there were! All the other papers in town were losing interest—but not the Press. We kept the case on page one. We stayed at it, prying, trying to break down that wall. I finally put together a list of questions for Dr. Sam, which he answered … with the help of his lawyers no doubt.”
Do No Harm Page 7