Flo asked, “Has all the nasty publicity had any impact on the hospital?”
With a head bob indicating the door at my back, I said, “Certainly seemed to be bustling on our way in today. No shortage of patients or doctors, apparently.”
Richard said, “There’s been little if any effect on Bay View. Of course, we have one less surgeon on staff—one less gifted, talented surgeon, at that—so the volume of our work has increased.”
I said, “Perhaps we should let you get back to it.”
“I do have to go,” Richard said, with a glance at his watch, then he smiled and nodded at us, and—without taking time for another round of handshakes—slipped out.
“I have a few minutes,” Steve said, still ensconced behind his desk, not going anywhere.
I had a feeling he always had time for his brother Sam’s cause.
He went on: “I wonder if you might tell me what you have in mind. How you intend to proceed.”
I told him about the interviews we had arranged, or in an instance or two were still being lined up.
“I invited Miss Kilgore along,” I said, “because, frankly, her television fame can be useful. People are both intimidated and caught off guard by it.”
Flo smiled and nodded in agreement at that.
The surgeon’s frown, like his smiles, was barely perceptible. “Why is that, do you think?”
“Well,” Flo said. “They on the one hand know I’m a celebrity, and on the other are used to inviting me into their homes every Sunday night. Understand, if anyone wants to go off the record—or ask me to leave, fearing publicity—I’ll scurry off to the car and wait there for Nathan, like a good little girl.”
Like a good little girl reporter, she meant. She’d likely find a window to listen at.
“Nate,” Steve said, “pay special attention to Marshall Dodge, and his wife as well. To me they are excellent suspects. I tried to get the police interested, but didn’t get anywhere. And that character Hardmann, too.”
“I plan to. Anything to add on either score?”
“Well, Dodge spent a lot of time with Marilyn. Very friendly.”
“Do you suspect an affair?”
“It’s possible. He’s much older than Marilyn was, and, frankly, he’s not much to look at. But Marilyn told me herself that Dodge was in love with her. He seems to have served as a father figure to her.”
And some fathers have been known to turn to incest.
I said, “Understood. And Hardmann?”
“Marilyn hated him. Hated him! He was a slovenly sort and more than once Sam inflicted his old friend on her as a houseguest. I’m fairly certain he made passes at her that were not warmly received.”
“The police cleared him,” I said.
This time the bitterness in his smile wasn’t hard to read at all. “And why not? They had their man from the start, didn’t they?”
CHAPTER
8
The setting was unusual for the white gloves, pert hat, high heels and other feminine attire of Flo Kilgore, as she sat on a stool in the chilly back room of the Bay Village Meat Shop with its butcher block, meat grinder, assorted saws, stainless steel sinks, hanging smoked meats, and double-door meat locker.
I was seated next to her on another stool, and our host was similarly perched but facing us, a bloodstained apron and white beanie (no propeller) over gray coveralls. Marshall Dodge, former mayor of Bay Village, heavyset, baggy-eyed, droopy-faced, looked only slightly more healthy than the hanging beef carcasses that awaited his attention.
Right now he had our attention and we had his.
“We were friends, certainly,” he said, meaning his family and the Sheppards. “We’d been neighbors a while, six months or so. This was, I think…’51? But only to nod to—they were younger than Mildred and me, a good ten years. Then out of the blue Sam wrote me, offering his services as police physician.”
“Because you were mayor,” I said.
He’d shown no signs of recognizing me from our brief meeting at the murder house back in 1954. Of course, he was dazzled by the presence of TV star Flo in his little shopping-mall meat shop.
“Yes,” he said. “That Bay View Hospital of the Sheppards’, they were trying to get a leg up on emergency services in all these West Side suburbs. Bay Village would be a prize catch. So Sam became friendly with me, the two families became friendly, and maybe in retrospect that was a little bit political of him. But I liked the guy. And Marilyn, of course.”
With a winning little smile, Flo said, “You bought a boat together, I understand.”
He nodded. “Sam and I went out fishing, and he and Marilyn used it for waterskiing. They were both real athletic. Sam liked to take that little boat out and let ’er rip, bought a top outboard motor for it. Kind of a speed demon, Sam. But about all I used it for was fishing.”
I asked, “Was it a genuine friendship, d’you think, or was he using you?”
He shook his head, giving me a facial shrug. “You’d have to ask him. I know I went to bat for him, getting him that police physician position. It didn’t pay anything, but that hospital sure did benefit. You know, a lot of the city council members were against Bay View Hospital even opening here. We had an M.D. on the council who really fought Sam getting the police surgeon slot.” His chin came up, lording it over the creped neck. “But I appointed Sam, and that was that. As mayor I could do that.”
“And you stayed friends,” I said.
“Oh yes. The two families got together all the time, for a while there anyway. My mother was living with us, and she was something of a hypochondriac—Sam would stop by to humor her, and she loved the attention. Sometimes he came over and watched sports with me, just kicked his shoes off and leaned back and had a beer.”
Flo asked, “Where did Mrs. Sheppard fit into this?”
“Well, Marilyn was just a swell person. Just a hell of a nice person. One hundred percent straight. She knew, well … she knew Sam was playing around.”
I asked, “And you knew? Before she mentioned it?”
“Everybody knew. He was kind of shameless about it. Lovely girl like Marilyn … just no excuse for it.”
“You’ve had similar criticism, though, right?”
That blindsided him. I thought he might fall off the stool. “Have you been talking to that…” He almost spit out the rest. “… Stephen Sheppard?”
Actually I had. He’d given Flo and me chapter and verse before we left.
“We’ve been asking around,” I said vaguely. “Am I wrong that some of the guys in town call you ‘Lover Boy’? That you’re considered something of a Romeo?”
This overweight, baggy-faced butcher being a well-known local ladies’ man seemed absurd; but that’s what Sam’s brother Steve had claimed.
“That damn Stephen Sheppard’s been going around telling all kinds of lies,” he said, shaking a fist. “I should have punched out that S.O.B. a long time ago … pardon the language, Miss Kilgore.…”
Flo put a sympathetic smile on her famous face. “Then it’s just idle gossip that you had an affair with her?”
“It’s nonsense! Marilyn and I were friends, that’s all. I was like a … a big brother to her.”
“How so?”
“Well,” he said, and he gestured around him, to hanging carcasses and phallic smoked meats. “When she ordered special cuts off me, I’d deliver them. If she had a bowling league match that ran long, I’d pick up her boy Chip when the school bus dropped him off. And she’d stop by for a cup of coffee now and then, for a heart-to-heart. At her place, of course, but sometimes she’d sit right here in this back room with me.”
Flo asked, “Heart-to-heart about what?”
“Sam, of course. He was neglecting her. He was selfish. It was all his career and his own interests. Including the kind that wear lipstick.”
I said, “But rumors did fly around about you and Marilyn?”
He shrugged too elaborately. “It’s a small town. Wh
at do you expect?”
“Did Sam ever confront you about it?”
The butcher took that like a slap. Finally he said, his voice softer, “He asked me once.”
“Asked you…?”
“If I was sleeping with Marilyn. I said, no—hell no! He accepted that.”
Flo, still giving him a sympathetic gaze, said, “Were these rumors why you took a lie detector test?”
Another slap—he drew in a deep breath and let it out. “Those rumors were part of it, yes … but mostly the garbage Steve Sheppard was spreading around town about me. You bet I took a lie detector test. I had nothing to hide!”
“But you didn’t pass it,” I said.
That slap he took wearily, like he had it coming. “I … on a couple of questions … they said I showed deception. So I took another test a while later. Passed that fine. Flying colors. Nerves the first time, I guess. And it’s Steve Sheppard who’s the liar!”
“How do you feel about Sam at this point?”
His eyes tightened. “Let’s just say … I’m comfortable with the verdict.”
Flo leaned forward. “Did you ever witness anything that might indicate your friend was capable of such a terrible thing?”
“I didn’t,” he admitted. “But Marilyn once said they’d had a real ‘battle’ the night before. I said I couldn’t imagine Sam getting mad at anybody! She said he never showed that side of himself to anybody but her. That where she was concerned, he was a real ‘Jekyll and Hyde.’”
Flo gave me a quick sideways look.
“So,” I said to him, “your friendship with Sam was over by the time of Marilyn’s murder.”
“Not … over. Cooled, maybe. I was always a good friend to Sam. I was who he thought of to call, right, that awful morning? You know, if I hadn’t been mayor … and also public safety director? He’d have been arrested much sooner. I resisted it. Finally had to recuse myself.”
Flo said, “But you testified for the prosecution.”
He frowned and the deep-set, baggy eyes seemed suddenly sinister. “They subpoenaed me! What else could I do?”
I said, “On the stand, you claimed you heard Richard Sheppard ask his brother if he’d killed Marilyn. That his own brother’s first thought was that Sam did it … which had to weigh heavily on the jury.”
His mouth was a thin firm line. “It’s not a claim, Mr. Heller. It’s what I heard.”
“Richard and Sam say otherwise. And you’d never mentioned it before that moment.”
“I was under oath!”
He’d been under oath at the inquest, too, where he’d said Richard had said something to Sam but he couldn’t hear what. I didn’t confront him on that, but noted the disparity.
Flo said, “Mr. Dodge, we don’t mean to sound like prosecutors ourselves. We’re just trying to take another, honest look at this case. Certainly if Sam Sheppard didn’t do the crime, you wouldn’t want him to stay behind bars?”
“Of course not! But I don’t see that you’re turning up anything new here. Just plowing old ground.” He patted his thighs, or the bloodstained apron covering them, anyway. “All right. I’ve answered all your questions. I really should get back to my customers. There’s only one man behind the counter out there.”
“Some questions,” I said, “have never been answered, Mr. Dodge. Like why you didn’t call the police immediately—if not from your house after Sam phoned, but when you discovered Marilyn had been battered to death?”
Flo picked up. “Weren’t you afraid the murderer might still be there?”
I asked, “Why didn’t you take a weapon along?”
He blinked at the barrage of questions. Then he sighed deep. “It’s easy to ask things like that when you didn’t live through it. I answered my friend’s call, we ran over there, and Mildred rushed upstairs and found Marilyn, and I tended to Sam. The police got called. I really don’t want to discuss it further.”
I said, “I have just one other question.”
“… All right.”
“The Sheppards were your friends. You and Marilyn were particularly close. I’m not accusing you of an affair, but you’ve indicated you had a warm, personal relationship with this young woman.”
“That isn’t a question.”
“This is: Why didn’t you go to your friend Marilyn’s funeral?”
That made him shake, just a little, as if the room’s chill had suddenly got to him. “… It was just too much. Detectives, reporters … too much.”
I nodded. “Had you already been hospitalized?”
His eyebrows climbed. “What?”
“I understand you had a nervous breakdown and were in an East Side hospital for a month.”
“That’s … that’s incorrect.”
“Oh?”
“It was … nervous exhaustion. That’s all. And it wasn’t till August.”
“Right before the trial?”
He nodded.
Then he got to his feet and gestured toward the front of the shop. We got up and Flo smiled at him and thanked him for his time and frankness. I just smiled and nodded in a perfunctory way.
We were out in the shop, where a few customers were lined up along the glassed-in counter, when he said, “I know you from somewhere. Have we met?”
“Just in passing,” I said.
* * *
The Dodge house, three doors west from the Sheppards’ in this affluent neighborhood, was surprisingly shabby, a frame cottage worth much less than the lot it sat on, crying out for remodeling or perhaps demolition. The interior was no better, and as Flo and I sat in the living room on saggy chairs, our hostess—Mildred Dodge—sat across from us on the edge of an easy chair she’d pulled around. The furnishings were right out of the Sears showroom circa 1938, and the floor itself was at an angle. Curtains, not doors, separated the adjoining rooms.
Thin, petite, with a long face just shy of being pretty—her nose too long, her forehead too prominent, thanks to short graying dark curls—Mrs. Dodge said, “I do apologize for the state of this place.”
Her eyes were her best feature, large, dark, wide-set, with some sparkle. Her eyebrows, unfortunately, were drawn on. She kept her hands folded primly in her lap.
“Don’t be silly,” Flo said, both her smile and voice sounding absolutely sincere. “You’re obviously a wonderful housekeeper.”
Flo’s celebrity presence, I was sure, was the reason Mrs. Dodge had granted this interview. And Flo was right—the place was picked-up and pleasant, with a minimum of knickknacks and a few framed starving-artist oil paintings. But still a non sequitur in this well-heeled neighborhood.
“We bought it quite reasonably,” Mrs. Dodge said. “It had been a summer cottage for East Siders. The plan had been to remodel, but we’ve never got around to it. Marsh was mayor until recently, and that was so time-consuming.”
She had put on Sunday attire for her famous guest, a navy dress with white collar and cuffs, a cultured pearl necklace, and small white hat. Her husband had worn a white hat, too. That and a bloody apron.
Flo said, “Oh, I understand. And, of course, your involvement in the Sheppard case can’t have been easy.”
Mrs. Dodge just smiled her pinched smile, and turned to me. “We’ve met.”
“We have,” I admitted.
“You were at the Sheppards’ that morning. With Eliot Ness, who lost his mayoral bid. He was quite the golden boy when he was public safety director.”
“Yes he was.”
She trotted out a wider smile with some smugness in it. “Of course, my Marsh was both mayor and safety director.”
“A big honor. Big responsibility.” In a tiny town.
She frowned. “Let’s get one thing straight. This nonsense about Marsh and Marilyn being an item is … nonsense. Marsh is just one of those men who likes to flirt, particularly with the young ones. Means nothing.”
Flo’s smile was sympathetic. “Small-town rumor mills are a fact of life, I’m afraid.”
“Oh yes. And Marsh, he thought if he parked his car, right out front, when he dropped by to see Marilyn? That would let people know he wasn’t having some sort of secret affair with her. But all it did was tell people he was seeing her!”
Still laying on the sympathy, Flo said, “Even if it was entirely innocent.”
“Exactly!”
I asked, “And what did you think about it?”
The mouth pinched again but not in a smile. “That he was making a darn fool of himself. Anyway, she wasn’t interested in that kind of thing.”
“What kind of thing?”
The drawn-on eyebrows went up the prominent brow. “Sex. She wasn’t interested in that at all. I’ll tell you what fueled all the talk. The Sheppards had this once-a-week housekeeper who came in, and she was vaccinated with a phonograph needle, that one. A few months before the tragedy, Marilyn was sick in bed. Influenza or some darn thing. Anyway, Marsh went over and fixed her breakfast and took it up to her on a tray.”
“Breakfast in bed,” I said.
“Yes. But he came right back down. And then it got all around town he’d served Marilyn Sheppard breakfast in her own bedroom. The heck of it was, Dr. Sam had called Marsh at the meat shop and asked him to look in on her! No good deed goes unpunished, they say. Anyway, it spread around town like wildfire. I was born and raised here, and you’re right, Miss Kilgore—it’s a rumormonger’s paradise!”
“One rumor I’ve heard,” I said, “is that Sam and Marilyn fought.” I didn’t mention that it was her husband I heard it from.
“Well, all old married couples do that, even the young ones. Marilyn was always wanting to buy more of that antique furniture for the house and Sam didn’t like it—the expenditure, not the furniture. And he complained when he came back from a convention to find she’d bought a new dishwasher without asking. Well, he hadn’t asked her permission when he bought that little sports car, had he?”
Flo said, “That does sound like typical husband-and-wife squabbling.”
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