Do No Harm

by Max Allan Collins

  Ten minutes later I was reading on the couch in my T-shirt and boxers and black socks, my feet up on a coffee table, when a knock came to the door. I placed the Playboy facedown on the table next to my nine millimeter. After my experience with Corrigan’s little union card–carrying punks, I thought I’d better take the Browning along, and I did. Opening the door but leaving the night latch on, I saw Flo’s sweet face.

  She got a glimpse of the automatic in my hand, and smiled and said, “Is that a gun or are you glad to see me?”

  “Is this a bribe to keep me quiet?”

  That hurt her a little, so I added, “Or maybe you just want a cup of sugar.”

  I let her in. She was in a baby blue terry dressing gown, floor-length; being seen in the hall wouldn’t have been a disaster for her, unless someone recognized her and saw her slip into my suite.

  Which is what I’d booked, since I might need to interview someone and an outer room would be more businesslike. A panorama of the city’s bustling streets with Lake Erie in the background filled the windows behind us as we sat on the couch. I didn’t reach for my trousers or anything—they were in the next room, after all, and of course Flo and I knew each other well, including in the biblical sense.

  “Something occur to you?” I asked.

  She was sitting close to me.

  “I was thinking,” she said, “you might not be in the mood for company tonight.”

  “Is that right?”

  “I was thinking,” she said again, “that the nature of this case might have … put a damper on things.”

  “In what way?”

  “Well. A sex murder. Adultery. An open marriage that may have gone tragically awry.”

  “May have gone tragically awry?”

  “Well, yes. So I thought … did I mention that Frank and I, uh … you know.”

  “Are in an open marriage? Yes, you mentioned that.” I’d never heard the term before Flo used it, a few years before.

  “But I also thought,” she said, “that you might like a little company tonight. Such an intense, troubling case.”

  “Job. We call it a job.”

  “Ah. Job. Would you? Like some company?”

  She stood, turning toward me, and untied her dressing gown and let it hang open, revealing pale flesh and curves and more.

  “Company might be nice,” I said, standing, then took her hand and walked her into the bedroom.

  If this was a bribe, I didn’t mind.

  I’m from Chicago.

  * * *

  She was sitting up in bed, the covers around her waist, the nice handfuls of pertly tipped breasts seeming to read along as she perused the paperback copy of 79 Park Avenue by Harold Robbins I’d started on the plane. The light on her nightstand was on, mine was off, and I was almost asleep when the phone rang. On my nightstand.

  “Nathan Heller,” I said.

  “Nathan,” a familiar, friendly but gruff voice said, “it’s Erle Gardner. How’s the Cleveland trip going?”

  “Well, it’s Cleveland, all right. I’ll write you a detailed report when I get back to Chicago, but for now I have to say I don’t know if I’ve picked up anything new.”

  At least nothing I hadn’t pledged to keep to myself.

  I went on: “Did you know Dr. Gerber set up shop in the front room of the Dodge house? That the investigation was conducted from there?”

  “No! Interesting.”

  I filled him in on a few other things, when he interrupted, sounding almost impatient, “I need you to make a trip to Florida.”

  “All right. When?”

  “Tomorrow. I’ve already booked you on American Airlines to go out at eight A.M.”

  “Like the traveling salesman said to the farmer’s daughter, this is a little sudden, isn’t it?”

  “We have a confession, man.” Excitement colored his voice. “To Marilyn Sheppard’s murder.”

  I didn’t figure it was Cock Robin’s.

  “Erle, there have been something like twenty-five of those, over the years, and they’ve gone nowhere.”

  “This one’s credible. My man Alex Gregory went down there and gave the suspect a polygraph examination and the guy passed it. I want to question our confessed killer myself, but I want you there. At my side.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the polygraph is one thing, and the opinion of somebody who’s been down in the mud with these kind of people for his entire career, well, that’s another.”

  Should I be flattered?

  “This could be the break we’ve been waiting for,” he was saying. “I’ve had word Governor O’Neill is favorably impressed with the Sheppard family passing those lie tests.”

  That would be William O’Neill, who’d been Ohio’s state attorney general during the Sheppard investigation, before his gubernatorial win.

  Gardner said, “I am told O’Neill is giving serious consideration to allowing Sam to take a polygraph at the prison at Columbus. We’ll all be there with Steeger’s photographers and the works. NBC is excited. They’re paying the freight.”

  Steeger was the Argosy editor. NBC was the network the upcoming Court of Last Resort TV show would be on.

  “Hell, Erle. Sounds like we might be in the home stretch.”

  “It does at that. If we come back from Florida with something solid, a new trial is a damn near certainty.”

  We exchanged goodbyes and clicked off.

  My naked bedmate had the paperback in her blanket-covered lap. She looked at me with big blue eyes; her breasts seemed to stare at me, wide-eyed, too.

  She asked, “Was that Erle Stanley Gardner?”

  “Yeah.” I grinned at her. “And guess who you’re in bed with? Paul Drake.”

  CHAPTER

  10

  Gary Weed—twenty-three, his slick-backed hair long and accompanied by endless sideburns—probably had an inch on my six feet. He was skinny, no more than 150 pounds I’d estimate, and almost good-looking, like a would-be rock ’n’ roll idol dropped by his record label after one too many flops.

  Hands cuffed before him, he shuffled in and, as directed by a uniformed jailer, sat in a straight-back chair next to a desk behind which sat Sheriff Rodney Thursby, broad-shouldered with a narrow oval of a face emphasized by his thinning dark hair’s widow’s peak. The sheriff wore glasses with dark plastic above the lenses and metal below, and no uniform or pinned-on star, no tie with his white short-sleeved shirt, cigarettes in the breast pocket. He had the unflappable look of a naval officer, which I’d been told he was during the war.

  The sheriff had welcomed us to his domain, Gardner thanking him for his willingness to allow the Court of Last Resort to conduct a polygraph examination of Weed.

  “Happy to have you here,” Thursby said, affably professional. “Frankly, I don’t have the funds available to do it myself.”

  Weed and the sheriff had a sizeable audience. Squeezed in the office of the jail, adjacent to the police station, were eight reporters from as far away as the Chicago Tribune, all standing, taking notes, forbidden to take part in the questioning conducted by two men seated in chairs across from the sheriff and his prisoner. One of those men was Erle Stanley Gardner, in a brown suit and darker brown tie. The other was me. I was in a short-sleeve shirt with no tie, having left it with my suitcoat in my rental car in the parking lot.

  It was hot in DeLand, Florida, in June.

  And, like I said, it was crowded in that office. Among the reporters and photographers were a few non-journalists, including Alex Gregory, the polygraph expert from Detroit who I’d met when he was one of the group examining the Sheppard brothers and their wives back in Chicago.

  Getting here from Cleveland had taken three stops, including Tampa, with a connection to Daytona Beach, half an hour by car from DeLand. The latter was an idyllic little burg of six thousand or so, a college town with a village square, bandshell park, lots of oaks and the occasional palm. A block or so off a business district—where you migh
t run into Judge Hardy and his family shopping for wholesome presents at Woolworth’s or J.C. Penney—was the jail and police station.

  Also nearby sprawled the Hotel Putnam, a six-story building in the Mediterranean Revival style with two wings, two towers, and flat roofs. I was surprised to find something so grand in such a small if picture-perfect town—apparently the hotel dated to the Florida land boom, and was only starting to show its age. Gardner, Gregory and I had dined in the restaurant off the lobby.

  “I did two long sessions with Weed,” Gregory said.

  In his late fifties or early sixties, the polygraph examiner might have been a high school principal with his steel-gray hair, wire-frame glasses, and steady gaze. Age had given a softness to his face that was contradicted by sharp cheekbones. At this point all of us wore our suitcoats—the restaurant was air-conditioned.

  We’d ordered and were waiting for our lunches.

  “Three and a half hours yesterday,” Gregory was saying, “and again today for four. He was cooperative, our young convict.”

  Gardner said to me, “He ran away from a prison work camp not far from here. Recaptured a day later. Sitting in jail awaiting trial on escape charges. Already faces ten years for a holdup in Tampa.”

  I asked, “How did we get from a Florida holdup to an Ohio homicide?”

  Gregory said, “Weed told one of the jailers he wanted to get something off his chest—a crime he committed in Cleveland.”

  “Marilyn Sheppard’s murder,” I said.

  “Yes and no. He never mentioned her name, just said he’d been in Cleveland early July ’54, and that he’d driven to a western suburb in a stolen car. There he entered a big white house and beat a woman to death with a pipe, when she woke up as he was rifling a dresser.”

  Gardner said, “The sheriff, a modern type, no rubber-hose Southern lawman, interviewed this Weed boy, got more details, put it all down in a three-page single-spaced document. Then he got in touch with the Cleveland homicide bureau, sent them the statement. They showed no interest in following up.”

  “Which is where we come in,” I said.

  “Yes. And with us on the scene, the sheriff released a statement to the press, which is why we’ll have so much company today. This little town is crawling with reporters—print and TV both.”

  “Anyone from NBC?”

  “Oh yes.” Gardner sipped iced tea. “This should give our new program a boost.”

  I wasn’t sure whether he was talking about the TV show or the Court of Last Resort’s efforts for Sheppard. And I didn’t ask, too distracted by lunch arriving, including my grilled Florida pompano with buttered almonds.

  I had just finished my apple pie with rum sauce when the conversation got going again.

  “So the Weed kid is telling the truth,” I asked the polygraph expert, “in your opinion? And the machine’s, of course.”

  “He’s telling the truth,” Gregory said, after dabbing his mouth with a napkin, “or what he believes to be the truth. The reason I spent so much time with him is the seriousness of this thing. Giving Sam Sheppard false hope would just be cruel at this point.”

  And now Gary, who might have been James Dean’s younger, less talented brother, was sitting there in his checked short-sleeve shirt and dungarees, cuffed hands in his lap. He seemed at once shy and eager to please.

  “I’m Erle Stanley Gardner, Mr. Weed. And this is Nathan Heller, my investigator.”

  “Mr. Gardner,” he said with a nod, his voice thin and with no discernible accent. He nodded to me, said, “Mr. Heller, sir.” I nodded back.

  “Mr. Weed,” Gardner began, but the boy grinned bashfully at him, holding up a timid hand.

  “Call me ‘Gary,’ please. I’m no ‘mister.’”

  “All right, Gary,” Erle said with a grandfatherly smile. That round face of his had a way of suggesting warmth one moment and dead seriousness in the next. “Suppose you tell us a little about yourself.”

  The slender convict’s eyebrows went up, though the eyes themselves stayed half-lidded; a good trick. “I figure it’s the bad things you’d like to hear about. The good things don’t really apply in this here situation.”

  I gave him a little help. “Where were you born, Gary?”

  “Washington, D.C., sir. My pop ran off before I can remember. My mom was a waitress and … well, a prostitute is what you call it, in polite terms.”

  I’d never thought of “prostitute” as a polite term, but he had a point. “Whore” and “hooker” were definitely worse, and “courtesan” probably wasn’t in his vocabulary.

  “I dropped out of school at fourteen. Went to the reformatory for stealin’ a car when I was fifteen. Did jail time as a vagrant, which I guess is a bum with no visible means of support or such. Got took in the air force, though! That was pretty cool, till they kicked me out. Stealin’ from the PX. Did prison time for a gas station holdup. Escaped a couple times. I got slippery ways. Got a dime for me to do waitin’ in Tampa for robbery.”

  I said, “Tell us about Cleveland.”

  “Well, I got out of stir around March of that year—’54. I hung out at my grandmother’s in Virginia for a couple of months. That was boring and she wanted work out of me, so I took off hitchhikin’. I was everywhere from Colorado Springs to Cheyenne, even L.A. a while, then took off east. Wound up in Omaha.”

  Erle said, “Cleveland, Gary. Tell us about Cleveland.”

  “That’s where things got a little out of hand. I was dead broke, and I didn’t have a piece or anything, so a stickup was out of the question. Anyway, I was hopin’ to stay out of stir for a while. So I slept in alleys and parks and such. Then I broke down and helped load some fella’s truck … and come away with fifty bucks! Man, that was real sweet.”

  I asked, “What did you do with all that money, Gary?”

  “What do you think? I picked a girl up in a café, and went up to her place. Stayed the night. I gave her a few bucks, but she wasn’t a whore or anything.”

  More like a courtesan.

  Weed lurched forward, frowning, his sleepy eyes waking up. “Don’t you ask me what her name was! I won’t tell you. She was a nice girl and I don’t wanna get her in no trouble or embarrassment or that. Anyway, I wandered around, took in a movie—ever see Three Coins in the Fountain? I saw that. That was good. Girls was pretty. Then at a bar I met a guy named Harry Freeman. Ex-marine with a disability pension from Korea. I stayed with him a couple days.”

  I asked, “What kind of guy was Harry?”

  “Oh, a good guy. Great guy. Of course, he had a habit, ’cause of his war wound and all? Anyway, he fixed me up with some heroin that night, and I shot up at his apartment.”

  I saw Gardner flinch, just a little bit, then I asked, “What night?”

  “This night we’re talkin’ about, sir. July the third. I sat all dreamy a while, lookin’ out the window. You could see this bright glow in the sky! I got kind of excited, like maybe it was a flyin’ saucer from outer space. Harry said it was just the Indians playin’ the White Sox. Must be goin’ extra innings, Harry says, ’cause it was around midnight. I felt dizzy, like I was floatin’.”

  I asked, “Did you pass out, or fall asleep maybe?”

  “No. I got it in my head it was time to get out of Cleveland. Earlier, Harry was sayin’ if I was gonna keep bunkin’ with him, I really oughta kick in some dough. But I run through most of that fifty, so … well, I grabbed these two grips of mine and just went out in the night. I wasn’t in no kind of mood to hitchhike, so I walked along some side streets, lookin’ for a car to boost. The second one I tried was unlocked and had a key in the ignition. I got behind the wheel and took off.”

  I asked, “What color car, Gary? Do you remember? Old? New? Beat-up? Nice?”

  “Oh, nice enough, but not new, not brand-new. Could’ve stood a wash. Four-door. A ’49 maybe, or ’50 or ’51. It was a smooth ride, though. Man, I never had that feeling before or since—seems like somethin’ was urgin’ me
on! I drove west out of Cleveland and wound up in some suburb, a very good part of town, right on the lake.”

  I asked, “How did you settle on a particular house?”

  “Oh, I spotted one with the front door ajar, no lights on. It was a big two-story, built right down to the ground. There was a big tree in the yard and a driveway to a garage ’long the side of the house. I drove down a couple of blocks and parked, come back and just walked in the front door.”

  I asked, “What were you wearing, Gary?” This I did because he was starting to rush and I wanted to get it slow and in detail.

  “Uh … a dark blue shirt,” he said. “Khaki pants, tennies, yellow-and-gray socks, you know, what do they call it? Argyle? And underwear—just shorts.”

  Gardner asked, “Were you armed, Gary?”

  “Not with a gun! I never carry no guns. That can get you in trouble. What I had was this curved piece of pipe I found in California. It was square all around, not round like a lot of pipes. Had a flange on each end. I’d say it was one inch by one inch, with sharp corners. About nine inches long. I can make a drawing for you, if you like.”

  “Maybe later,” Gardner said. “Go on.”

  “I was in a kind of hallway and past a kitchen, then it opened up into a room with a staircase to the left and a man in a couch up against the side of it. He was snoring. Really sawing logs. I just kind of crept past him and went upstairs—went into a bedroom. I was in there such a short time, it’s hard to remember every little thing. A woman was asleep on a bed. Kind of on top of the covers. Slippers were on the floor and some clothes on a chair. Light come in through the doorway of the bedroom from a bulb burnin’ somewhere outside the room.”

  He paused, drew in several breaths that he let slowly out.

  I said, “Take your time, Gary.”

  “I went to a dresser and started lookin’ for something to steal. Money, I hoped, but didn’t find nothing worth takin’. I was closing the drawer, and maybe it made a noise because I heard a sound from the bed. It was like a woman coughing, like she just waked up. Not a scream. The iron pipe was stuffed in my pants. I got it out and went over to her. She was about thirty years old. Not fat or anything. She looked right at me. I thought she was going to … to do something.”