Do No Harm

by Max Allan Collins

  “Nate,” he said, the baby face showing surprisingly little wear, but his cheeks bourbon-blushed, “thanks for everything you’ve done over the years!”

  “I’m just a bit player,” I said.

  He gave me half a smirk. “Let me tell you, my friend—it’s no fun being the star of this thing.”

  * * *

  Two small footnotes.

  The Trib stiffed Sheppard for the bridal suite. I’m surprised Bailey didn’t sue them.

  And for the honeymoon, Mr. and the new Mrs. Sheppard headed to New York and the Pierre Hotel, dining like the famous people they’d become, walking hand in hand in Central Park, looking for the romance that had been missing at the Conrad Hilton.

  After only two days, the couple flew back to Ohio for a champagne party thrown by a New Yorker—Flo Kilgore, who’d flown to Cleveland one last time.

  CHAPTER

  14

  On July 3, 1966, the Lobby Court bar in the Cleveland Hotel seemed oddly shy of customers for a holiday weekend; but this was the middle of the afternoon, when even premature fireworks were unlikely.

  That is, unless the meeting with Sharon Kern that F. Lee Bailey’s office had managed to arrange got heated. I’d been warned by Bailey’s secretary that it had taken some talking to get “the other woman” to agree to see me. But with another trial in the offing for Sam Sheppard, Mrs. Meredith (her new last name) surely knew the star witness of the first go-round would seem destined for an encore.

  I had the last of my rum and Coke. She was a little late. Meanwhile I could sit back and take in the ornate mahogany woodwork, black-and-white marble floors, lush draperies, and ceiling-to-floor windows with their view on Public Square. Not much different than in Eliot’s day, when we would stop by here for his Manhattan and my … well, my rum and Coke. We’d done that the night Mayor Burton was reelected, in ’39, after the reception in the ballroom upstairs attracted a hundred friends and supporters and more reporters than, what? The day the guilty verdict came in for Sam Sheppard?

  Another ghost drifted in, but not from my life or Eliot’s—Sam Sheppard’s “paramour” (as his attorney William J. Corrigan had quaintly called her in court) entered from the lobby, turning her eyes loose till she found me at a table along the windows. We’d never met, but I’d been in magazines, and she’d been in newspaper clippings in the packet I’d been given by Erle Stanley Gardner nine years ago.

  Sharon Kern Meredith was one of those small women who seemed almost tall, her fashion-model slenderness and high heels working wonders. As she glided over, granting me the slightest smile, I could well imagine Dr. Sam liking what he saw, ten years ago—judging by this knockout of a married woman in her mid-thirties.

  Her slender, small-waisted figure looked fine in the scooped-top silver knit dress with silver belt and pearls at her throat and more on one wrist; her eye shadow was silver, too, her mascara something Liz Taylor would have been fine with. Cut well above the knee, the dress somehow seemed both mod and classic. On the Fourth of July weekend, she might have gotten away with far more casual attire, even in the Lobby Court bar; but she was every bit as elegant as the surroundings. Her brunette hair was worn Twiggy-style, vaguely suggesting the wild girl she’d once been.

  My dark gray Botany 500 suit, with a two-button jacket and even darker gray tie, gave us just enough color coordination to look like a nice couple. We would see about that.

  I stood, smiled. She approached, stopped, extended a hand, and we shook like two lodge members at an Elks convention. I gestured to the chair across from me, at this table for two, asked her what she’d like.

  “To be anywhere else,” she said pleasantly. Then she smirked just a little and said, “Nothing to do with the company.”

  The sound system was oozing Mantovani—“Who Can I Turn To?” At least it wasn’t “What Kind of Fool Am I?”

  “You haven’t spent enough time with me,” I said, equally pleasant, “to be offended yet. Give it a few minutes.”

  She liked that. She even laughed a little.

  A waiter in black and white, in tune with the marble floor, took our order—she, a Manhattan. Like Eliot. I ordered another rum and Coke. Like me.

  I was taking in her pretty features. She had big dark lustrous eyes and a fetching trail of freckles tickling its way across her nose, and the bruised fullness of her lips was accentuated by very red lipstick. She was nicely tanned. She lived in California, after all.

  “I’ve read about you,” she said. Her voice was high but not shrill. “You’re not an attorney. You’re that ‘Private Eye to the Stars.’”

  “Guilty, Your Honor.”

  “Then why do you live in Chicago?”

  “Some things are just hard to explain. I do have an office in L.A., and if you need anything, drop by. But a lot of the ‘stars’ I’ve known are not famous actors. More like public figures. Amelia Earhart. Charles Lindbergh. Bobby Kennedy.”

  “Al Capone,” she said. “Frank Nitti. Bugsy Siegel.”

  She had me liking her already.

  I said, “You did read an article once, didn’t you?”

  “Guilty,” she said. “And speaking of pleading guilty … may I plead my case?”

  “Certainly. Though I don’t know what you have to plead about.”

  She leaned forward. “I really don’t want to be involved in this thing anymore. Again. Whatever. I have children. I have a husband. I don’t want this.”

  I gave that a gentle shrug. “Well, F. Lee Bailey has no intention of calling you as a witness. But we can’t stop the prosecution from doing that.”

  She took a deep breath, let it out. “Shit. Yes, I know. I’m not that dumb.”

  “You’re not dumb at all. Are you still a lab technician?”

  “I’m a housewife. Ten years now. My husband is a very successful sound TV and film editor. Music, mostly. Would you like to hear something funny?”

  “Almost always.”

  “He’s music editor on The Fugitive.” Her laugh had an edge in it. “What do you think of that? Have you ever heard of a crazier coincidence?”

  “No,” I said, not having the heart to tell her that Eliot Ness had lived next door to Sam Sheppard, and that they both had TV shows with the same producer. And that her husband worked on at least one of them.

  “So if you’re not calling me as a witness,” she said, “is this kosher? If you want us to get our stories straight, I can’t help you. Sam and I tried that once and it didn’t work out so well, did it?”

  “You both denied your affair.”

  She nodded. “Never under oath, but it got us both in real hot water. Him a lot hotter, I admit. Understand, we both feared criminal charges for, you know, adultery. So what’s the function of this meeting? My husband is understandably anxious when I go out with a strange man.”

  She was maybe trying too hard now.

  “I’ll tell you frankly,” I said, “there’s a good chance the prosecution also won’t call you.”

  Those big eyes got even bigger. “What? Why?”

  I shrugged. “Times have changed. Birth control is every girl’s favorite pill, except for maybe acid. The kids are rebelling, free love is in, and skirts are so short I don’t even have to bend down pretending I’m looking for something to take in a nice set of gams. ‘Gams’ dates me just a little, doesn’t it?”

  She laughed gently through the last half of that.

  “Maybe,” she said. “Just a little.”

  “Also,” I said, “Lee Bailey is bound to try to keep the sex stuff out. He’ll go after a ruling that Sam’s infidelities are irrelevant. And, knowing him, he’ll get it.”

  The eyes went wide again, but just for a moment, her head tilting. “Times have changed, all right. So, then, what’s there to talk about?”

  The waiter brought our drinks.

  I sipped mine, then said, “Unfortunately, we do have to go over some old ground. My job is to find new evidence, and to look hard at some old suspects �
� and maybe some brand-new suspects.”

  “I don’t see how I could be a suspect,” she said, frowning a little. She kissed her Maraschino cherry into her mouth, chewed daintily, swallowed, sipped her cocktail. “I was in California. Unless you think I hired somebody to kill Marilyn.”

  That remark surprised me a little. But then she was surprising me a lot.

  “You didn’t like her? Marilyn?”

  “No.” Something about her face told me she was regressing, her younger self asserting itself. “I didn’t wish her dead, and boy do I wish she was still alive. But she was the kind of woman who knew damn well her husband was running around, and was fine with it … but then if she ran into you, she’d be catty as hell. Claws would come out.”

  “For example?”

  “Well, I was living with my parents in Rocky River, and didn’t have a car of my own. Back then Marilyn and Sam and their kid were living in an apartment, half a block from us. Mornings, I’d walk over and get a ride to work from Sam. It got to where I would just open the garage door and climb in on the rider’s side of his little MG and wait for him. Sometimes she’d come out and say he was going to be late and I should just walk or catch a bus. Other times she came right out and told me how presumptuous and rude she thought I was.”

  I had a hunch Sharon would react the same way if her husband gave a pretty young thing a ride, but that wasn’t how she’d seen it then, so it wasn’t how she saw it now.

  She made a face; she was definitely in her early twenties again. “Then there was this Halloween thing, kind of an office costume party? Sam came dressed as a woman and I came dressed as a doctor, all in white with a stethoscope, and when he showed up, I took that pipe out of his mouth that he was always smoking, and stuck it in mine. We were only just joking around. But Marilyn got in a huff and called me a ‘bitch,’ and flew out of there.” She frowned. “Of course, Paul wasn’t thrilled either.”

  “Paul?”

  “My fiancé. Paul Robinson. He’s a doctor, too. Look, I have to tell you—you probably heard, or figured out, that I was something of a … wild child. I worked hard, lots of hours, very hard, and when it came time to party, guess what I did?”

  “So you were engaged to this, uh, Paul at the same time you were seeing Sam?”

  She nodded. “We broke up not long after that started. But later Paul and I got re-engaged, and had a ring and the date was set and everything. But, I, uh … I’m not proud of this.”

  “You were still seeing Sam.”

  She sighed, nodded again. “I was still seeing Sam. It wasn’t as regular—maybe we’d make it, oh, once every two weeks, y’know. We had fun together. It wasn’t always smart. You know, he was still in his twenties, late twenties, but twenties. I was younger than that. Marilyn was the first girl he was ever with. So when he had the chance to try something new, he tried it.” She gave me a knowing half smile. “Listen, this was no great love for the ages. We’d do it in that little car of his, pulling over somewhere, when he was driving me home from a late night in the emergency room. There were apartments in Bay View Hospital, for the doctors, and we used some of those. Lucas Hardmann had one we used often enough that he would call with a signal, you know two rings, hang up, three rings, hang up, meaning he was on his way home.”

  “So the idea that you and Sam would marry someday—”

  “Well, look,” she said with a shrug. “Even in a casual affair, things get hot and heavy. Getting hot and heavy is kind of the point, isn’t it? So sometimes Sam would say he loved me, and would love to marry me, but later say he couldn’t leave Marilyn and Chip, ’cause he loved them, too. But every time we broke it off, in a week or two he’d call and then we were off somewhere, doing it again.”

  Mantovani was lulling “As Long As He Needs Me” into submission.

  She leaned forward, almost whispering now. “One time I told him that I was in love with Paul, Dr. Robinson, not him. He said, ‘How can you be in love with Paul and be here with me?’ And I said, ‘How can you be in love with your wife and be here with me?’”

  “What drew you to Sam?”

  A quick shrug, a distant look. “He was little-boy handsome, and well-to-do in a way. He would compliment me not just on my looks but, well, my intelligence, my skill at work. Having one of the Sheppards on my side at Bay View gave me freedom and a kind of status.”

  I sipped rum and Coke. “Then you finally broke it off with Sam and moved to California.”

  “Well, I was kind of pressured by the rest of the Sheppard family, but, hey, it was time. For a fresh start. Got a good lab tech job right away.”

  “But then Sam came out to visit you.”

  “Yes, and right in the middle of a month-long trip with his wife! Did I mention he can be a cheap bastard? Instead of getting a room, we shack up in the spare bedroom of some friends of his—for five days! What kind of idiot does that?”

  I wasn’t quite sure whether she was talking about Sam or herself.

  She was shaking her head, wearing half a disgusted smirk. “Sam and me getting hitched was never in the cards. Never what it was about, really.”

  I had to ask.

  Only I didn’t, because she answered the anticipated question: “Do I think Sam did it? I can’t believe that. But I would be very happy never to hear of the Sheppard case again.”

  We each returned to our drinks for a few moments.

  Then I asked, “Can you tell me anything about this Lucas Hardmann character?”

  “An odd duck. Sam liked him, but it was almost like Luke was a … charity case. Luke was older, he was always screwing up, he was a resident forever at one hospital after another, never getting anywhere.” She shuddered. “He was always pawing at women but so obvious about it, he never got anywhere there, either. It was almost like he didn’t want to get anywhere.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The red smile was knowing. “Sometimes a guy seems to be overdoing it, particularly when another guy is around. Like I always wondered if under all that stupid macho crap, Luke was gay or something. You know, Marilyn hated him, Sam said.”

  “Yeah?”

  She nodded. “He stayed with them for something like six weeks once, and he didn’t make the bed or change his own linen or do his dishes or clean up after himself. After a while, she refused to cook for him or make his bed.”

  “Still, he was staying with Sam and Marilyn when all this went down. He just happened to be away for the night, visiting a doctor friend.”

  “Yes, I know. He had an overnight at Paul’s.”

  “Your ex-fiancé Paul.”

  She nodded again. “That’s right. Paul was Luke’s alibi for the murder. Hasn’t that been looked into?”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  * * *

  Kent, Ohio, on the Cuyahoga River, was a town of fifteen thousand or so, home to Kent State University and its lovely campus, and so typically middle-American that Norman Rockwell would have found it a tad too clichéd for his tastes.

  Lucas Hardmann—when I called him at the home of his friend Dr. Robinson, with whom he was spending this long holiday weekend—suggested we meet at what he described as “the town’s most cherished institution.”

  And so, in downtown Kent, I sat with the osteopath in a back booth at Jerry’s, a bright red boxcar-style diner sitting on a corner with a warehouse to one side and a residential neighborhood at its back. Jerry’s was doing better business than the Lobby Court bar, but then this was mid-evening and folks were stopping by for a burger and fries and/or pie or maybe a malted.

  A jukebox was playing rock ’n’ roll, not obnoxiously. I didn’t mind. Made me think of my son, who played in a rock band. Right now it was “Paint It Black.” Outside the occasional premature firecracker would go off.

  Hardmann had been here when I arrived, a big grinning goof—not fat, just big—with a dirty blond crew cut riding an ambitiously receding hairline. His eyes had a brightness that lived somewhere between happy and hy
sterical, and when I came in dressed as I’d promised—in a tan short-sleeve Banlon shirt and brown trousers—he lit up with a wide smile like a jack-o’-lantern with its candle going.

  He slipped out of the booth and stood in the narrow aisle, welcoming me with a curled-fingers traffic cop gesture. Thankfully he did not have a whistle. He was wearing an orange short-sleeve golfer’s shirt and orange-and-black Bermuda shorts, an outfit really set off nicely by his black socks and loafers.

  I pegged him at about fifty-five or so, and was immediately reminded of Sergeant Schultz on Hogan’s Heroes. Well, if you have to hang around with a German guard at a POW camp, he might as well be an affable one.

  We shook hands before sliding in on our respective sides.

  “I hear you’re famous,” he said jovially. “But I never heard of you.”

  “That’s all right. I never heard of you either.”

  He laughed at that. Of course, it wasn’t exactly true, because since the first time I’d gone over Gardner’s Sheppard case file, something about this guy and his story had got my attention. And not in a good way.

  He leaned forward, his smile slightly maniacal. “I thought you’d get a kick out of Jerry’s.”

  He said this as if we were sitting in a diner whose replica wasn’t in every town in America.

  “Jerry’s Diner,” he said in what I took to be an imitation of W. C. Fields, “where philosophers, poets, artists, folksingers and others of dubious repute often gather!”

  Trying to get this back on an even keel, I said, “I really appreciate you taking time to talk to me, Dr. Hardmann—this being a holiday weekend and all.”

  The grin kept going. It was the kind of grin you got from a guy as he excused himself on his way to go blow his brains out. “Call me Luke. I prefer that to Lucas. And I’ll call you Nate—unless you prefer Nathan?”

  “Either is fine.”

  He gestured magnanimously. “Let me treat you to a slice of cherry pie, Nate. Or apple.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to watch me eat a piece.”