“Would you care for a drink?” she asked. “Vodka and ginger is all I have to offer, I’m afraid.”
We declined, but she helped herself, dropping in some ice. A cigarette was already going in a nightstand ashtray. She came over and settled herself close enough to the pillows to reach the ashtray and her pack of Kents, and to set her drink down. Our chairs had been pre-angled to accommodate the arrangement.
We sat.
“I have seen you on the television, Miss Kilgore. You are, if I may say so, even prettier in person.”
Flo smiled that deceptively prim smile of hers. “Thank you, Miss Tebbenjohanns. But do please call me Flo.”
Despite the friendliness of that, the girl reporter was already at work, the notebook out of her purse and her pen poised in a white-gloved hand.
“I would be pleased if you would call me ‘Ariane.’ I am afraid for anyone but a German, my last name is … a mouthful?” She gave me the kind of smile that could fry a man like an egg. “And you are Mr. Heller.”
“Nate.”
“Nate. I have read of you in Der Spiegel—private eye to the movie stars! Most impressive. Did you know Marilyn?”
That threw me for a second—did she mean Marilyn Sheppard or Monroe? I took a chance, taking the context of her question into consideration.
“I knew Miss Monroe rather well,” I said. “She was a lovely woman. Her hair shade and yours are identical, by the way.”
She dipped her head, keeping the smile going. She was almost exactly the kind of blonde any healthy man would like to share a motel room with, under different circumstances.
Flo said, “I don’t want to interview you under false pretenses, Ariane. I’m here as a journalist. But you probably know I was known as the most sympathetic of those who covered your fiancé’s trial.”
She nodded. “I am aware of that, and I am grateful.”
I said, “And I’m here representing your fiancé’s attorney—Mr. Bailey. So I’ll keep an eye on Flo, here. Keep her honest.”
They both responded with a smile. Neither smile seemed forced.
Our hostess lighted up a Kent with a silver art moderne lighter that might have been borrowed from the set of The Blue Angel. “You may ask me anything you like, both of you. I am not shy. I do not easily embarrass.”
“I appreciate that,” Flo said. “But if I step over the line, do please say so.”
She shrugged, exhaled smoke in a stream. “People have at times accused me of all kinds of things. They say it is impossible for a good-looking woman—who has been a playgirl up to now, just worrying about her next adventure—to possibly fall in love with a Sam Sheppard. They think you have to be ugly, a thousand years old and bowlegged to have human feelings in your heart, and the guts to stand up and fight for what you think is right, and good.”
Flo gave me a glance that at once said she was glad she knew shorthand, with these words flying by, and gave me permission to take the lead in questioning.
I asked, “How did you get interested in Sam’s case?”
Ariane tossed off a gesture with a cigarette between red-nailed fingers. “I first read of it in a picture magazine in a dentist’s office. Was this man a killer? Was his community prejudiced because of his wealth? It made me angry! I could … identify with this doctor. Successful at thirty, and the object of such jealousy! When I was a child at school, I was resented for my family’s money.” She shrugged elaborately. “Anyway, I knew he was innocent.”
Flo looked up from her notebook. “How?”
“I could tell just looking at him! I could feel it. And I wondered how such a thing—such an injustice—could happen in America? My husband did not want to hear about such things, and I admit I went on and on about it. I asked an American couple, vacationing near our place on the Riviera, if they knew of the Sheppard case. They did—and they said they thought he was innocent. They said the newspapers convicted him! I wanted to write to him. I did write letters, but always tore them up. As a rule I never intrude on other people’s affairs, but somehow, even though I was a complete stranger to him, I thought for him to know that I believe in his innocence would help him some way.”
I said, “And you finally did send him letters.”
She sipped her vodka and ginger ale, then nodded. Her legs were crossed; they were nicely tan and shapely, slipping through a slit in the skirt of the mink-edged dress.
“I waited several years before I had the courage to write,” she said. “But the prison would not deliver them. For a time his brother Steve sneaked my messages in and Sam’s out. Then permission came and we were able to write each other in the open and, finally, I was able to visit him.”
Flo said, “Quite a step to take. Coming all the way from Germany to the States—to Cleveland.”
Dark arcs of eyebrow raised momentarily. “I did come to Cleveland, during a terrible snowstorm, and for a few days stayed with Steve and his wife Betty. But I took the train by myself to Marion.” She took smoke in, let it out, and her thin, very red smile became somehow private. “It was not love at first sight, you know.”
“It wasn’t?”
Now the smile went public. “We were already in love. It was just that the meeting … confirmed for each of us our previous impressions of each other. Sam said we were in love before first sight.”
I said, “You talked for over four hours, I understand.”
She nodded several times, flicked ash into the tray. “There was much catching up to do. We held hands and he told me about prison life, and I told him of my silly, indolent existence. We talked of my daughter and his son, and our future plans.”
Flo said, “If he is released.”
“When he is released.” She took a good slug of the vodka and ginger. “If I had any doubts about his innocence, they were eliminated during that visit.” Her laugh was brittle. “The beautiful Riviera and the crazy life I led there? No longer seems important to me. Sam is the important one—not me. He’s the one who should be free.”
I said, “You’re convinced of that.”
She sat forward with an urgency at odds with her cool manner. “Not only in my mind but in my heart, I know that Sam couldn’t possibly have killed Marilyn. There was no reason for him to do it! He was happy with her. If he were guilty, he couldn’t have lived with himself all these years and be the man that he is today.”
Flo said, “If he was so happy with Marilyn, why did he run around on her?”
She batted the air with a palm that split her own smoke stream in half. “Oh, I know a lot of people say, ‘But he lied about having an affair with another woman.’ Well, if all the men who have lied about affairs were murderers, there wouldn’t be enough jails for them.”
Flo smiled a little. “No argument there. But his affair with Sharon Kern is most likely the biggest single factor in his conviction.”
A grave expression flattened the lovely face. “That type of thinking upsets me, because I have to fight a different kind of prejudice. In my travels I find many people hate me just because I am a German. Other people don’t like me because, oh, I wear long earrings and eye makeup and don’t dress or live as they do. So they say: ‘She must be no good.’”
Ariane had unwittingly opened a door for me and I went right through it. This was information that I hadn’t yet shared with Flo, but which would make the exclusive she was getting really worth a Cleveland trip.
“It must be difficult,” I said, “explaining to some people how being in the Hitler Youth was no big thing.”
Flo is a pretty cool customer, but if her eyes had opened any wider, they might have tumbled out. Ariane didn’t notice.
“People are too touchy,” our hostess said, with a toss of a cigarette-in-hand. “It was simply the organization for Germans under eighteen, like your Boy or Girl Scouts.”
Flo said, “I, uh, never thought of it quite that way.”
“Oh, yaah. It taught us good things. It taught us to love our country.” She sighed, l
ifted her shoulders up and down. “We were full of idealism then.”
Sitting forward, Flo asked, “But you weren’t really pro-Hitler…?”
Ariane smiled, waved that off, too. “I was never a Nazi. I was only fifteen when the war ended.”
I asked, “Were you at your sister’s wedding? When she married Goebbels, with Adolf Hitler as best man?”
Dr. Paul Josef Goebbels, propaganda minister of the Third Reich. I bet you can almost hear Flo’s gulp.
“Of course not,” Ariane said lightly, as if we were discussing the weather. “I wasn’t even a year old then, and Magda was only my half sister. She was married and living in Berlin when I was growing up.”
Flo’s shorthand was flying.
“My father was against that marriage,” Ariane was saying. “He was no Nazi—not even a Nazi sympathizer. But Goebbels and Magda visited from time to time. I remember, when I was ten, my father got into a terrible quarrel with him—over the treatment of the Jews? I heard him tell Papa, ‘If you weren’t my father-in-law, I would have you thrown into a concentration camp!’”
The day after Hitler and Eva Braun killed themselves in their Berlin bunker, Goebbels killed himself, his wife Magda and their children. I saw no reason to bring that up with Ariane.
Just when I was thinking Ariane had dug herself out of a hole—or maybe a bunker—she said, a manic edge coming in, “You know, the German people find the American standards of justice horrifying … with the unfair trial of my Sam a big example.” The arcs of eyebrow rose and, this time, hung there for a while. “I intend to carry on a press campaign in Germany, to raise awareness of this injustice—Der Spiegel wants an article from me! I had planned to take this up with President Kennedy at the White House, before tragedy interceded. But I will talk to his brother, the attorney general, and appeal to him for justice!”
“Ariane,” I said gently, “are you planning to attend the parole commissioner’s hearing coming up?”
She drew on the cigarette, then gestured with it in hand as she let the smoke drift out. “Of course. It is an excellent opportunity to proclaim my love for Sam … and my displeasure with the American justice system.”
Flo asked, “Do you think that’s wise, dear?”
The big eyes got even bigger. “Someone has to speak for Sam! If he is refused his parole, I already have three television stations that want to interview me. And radio stations, and several American magazines. Public opinion is so important.”
Flo nodded, closing her notebook and slipping it back into her purse. “Yes, it is.”
Before long, after warm yet somehow cool goodbyes had been exchanged with our hostess, Flo and I were back in the rental car. I was heading downtown, to the Hotel Cleveland, where she planned to check in.
“Let’s head back to the airport,” she said. “I want to see if a red-eye is available.”
“You don’t want to stick around? I think I can get the Sheppard brothers to sit for an interview.”
She shook her head. “No. I’m going to write this story, but it will be the last I file about this case, for a while—maybe ever. That screwy broad is going to sink the Sheppard ship, and you know it.”
“I’m not sure that’s true,” I said, both hands on the wheel. The road was just snow-packed enough to require thought. “You know how I feel about jailhouse romances, but as you said, the public can be suckers for them. Next week on The Fugitive, Richard Kimble and a jet-set beauty fall in love, in a stirring, inspiring—”
“You can barely get that out,” she interrupted, “without laughing or maybe choking. The nightly news and their cameras are going to go for her in a big way. Let’s face it, she’s sexy. She’s got an aura—if she walks in a room, men look at her.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“Right. And if I hadn’t been along, wouldn’t you have a made a pass at her, just to ascertain her sincerity for F. Lee Bailey’s client?”
“I plead the Fifth.”
Flo had turned toward me now, and was leaning close. “Look, she’s a scrapper, but also a loose cannon, with zero judgment and no awareness of how her zany behavior, and ill-advised, ill-conceived public statements could backfire.”
“Plus she was in the Hitler Youth,” I said.
“Plus she was in the Hitler Youth,” she said. “How can a guy like Lee Bailey, who plays the press like a banjo, make a mistake like this? There’s no way she should attend that hearing!”
I shrugged. “Well, you know going for parole is Sam’s idea. Lee would rather have him get a new trial through the federal courts and get his life back. Exoneration means practicing medicine again and voting and the works.”
“Is Bailey that sneaky?”
“Was Hitler a stinker?”
I took her for supper at Guarnino’s on Mayfield Road, the oldest restaurant in town, and a former speakeasy. We had the veal saltimbocca. Eliot had introduced me to the place.
Flo made the red-eye.
And Ariane’s appearance at the hearing—and her self-styled media blitz afterward—caused all the trouble Flo had anticipated. Not only did Sam not get his parole, in February he was told “all this publicity is unacceptable” by the director of Ohio prisons, who referred to Ariane as “a blonde bitch” and Bailey as an S.O.B. Sam said if Ariane was a bitch, then the director’s wife was a whore, and Sam Sheppard was taken from Marion’s minimum security back to the Ohio Penitentiary and dumped in the hole for six days, after being beaten with rubber hoses by guards.
* * *
My other interim job for Bailey was largely a PR stunt, though it had its practical side, as well.
After the 1964 district court decision, terming the 1954 trial a “mockery of justice,” Sam Sheppard was released on a ten-grand bond … but with the sixty-day threat of a retrial hanging over him.
So on July 16, I got a call from Lee Bailey at my Chicago home. For the record, that was the top two floors of a brick three-story on Eugenie Street, a block north of North Avenue, with the bottom floor lodgings reserved for visiting A-1 clients.
The mellifluous voice said, “I’m calling from a motel in Columbus.”
“The ruling’s all over the news, Lee,” I said. “Congratulations.”
“You still have a good relationship with the Tribune?”
“Well, Jake Lingle is dead, but I may still have a few connections over there. Why?”
“Do you think they might like to arrange and cover a wedding for a celebrity client of mine?”
I grinned at the phone. “Is your celebrity client a groom named Sheppard? And is the bride a blonde named Ariane, who is definitely not a Nazi?”
“Yes,” he said. “Steve Sheppard and I aren’t crazy about this marriage happening so quickly.…”
“Probably doesn’t seem all that quick to your client.”
“No.” I heard the intake of smoke and then the out-go. “He wanted three things when he got sprung—a glass of orange juice, a rare steak, and sex with Ariane.”
Not necessarily in that order.
I said, “I would think a shrewd counselor of the law like you could arrange those things.”
“I could, but the last one is a problem.”
“Maybe for her, handling a man who hasn’t had a woman in ten years.”
I could never get a laugh out of that guy.
He was saying, “I got word Louis Seltzer has his people on us like a skin-tight dress on our little Düsseldorf dish. He would like to see Sam’s ass back in jail, even if it’s for spitting on the sidewalk.”
I got his drift. “A fornication charge.”
“Still on the books in Ohio. I can sneak our boy out of here, if you can put things in motion with the Tribune.”
“Why help out any newspaper, after what the press has done to that poor bastard?”
“Sam says, why not exploit them for a change?”
“I see his point.”
“Let your Trib guy know we need a bridal suite, champagne, meals
, blood test, and fees. They get exclusive wedding photos and the story that goes with them.”
I made some calls. Illinois was a good move—no waiting period, and the blood tests could be processed immediately. The Tribune loved the idea.
Bailey and his own pretty blond wife, Wicki, accompanied Sam and Ariane in that baby blue Lincoln, which she drove—staying under the limit, since a police helicopter trailed them out of the state. Louis Seltzer would gladly have settled for a traffic violation.
They were in Chicago by midnight, driving through a raging rainstorm, slipping the Trib’s rival reporters in half a dozen trailing cars, and finally getting out on Michigan Avenue to be whisked to the fourth floor of Tribune Tower for photographers and a WGN-TV camera crew. Separate rooms were booked for them at the Conrad Hilton—no fornicating till tomorrow.
They were married in the bridal suite the next afternoon. Lee and his Wicki served as best man and matron of honor. I was just an observer, though Ariane honored me by coming over and whispering, “This hotel is shabby compared to our fine European ones. I had hoped for more romance.”
“Honey, you’re gonna love Cleveland.”
That evening the wedding party wound up at the Pump Room, with a reception hosted by Irv Kupcinet of the Sun-Times, whose good side I needed to stay on.
Ariane at one point said to me, “I was worried about Sam keeping up with me.”
“Keeping up with you how?”
Some rotten part of me was hoping she was making a pass, but instead she said, “With my drinking. But he’s already way ahead of me.”
Her face was smiling but the eyes in it weren’t. Sam—and who could blame him—was the “vild” one now, his high-pitched voice loud and a little desperate as he threw down the bourbon. His freedom, after all, might well be temporary.
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