A young redheaded waitress, who seemed considerably less impressed with Jerry’s Diner than Hardmann, came over and looked sullenly pretty in spite of, or possibly because of, her heavy makeup with its green eye shadow. She took our order and went away. “Kicks” by Paul Revere and the Raiders was playing on the jukebox.
He leaned forward chummily. “Listen, Nate, I’m happy to talk to you. It’s not my favorite subject, obviously, and it was such a long time ago…”
“Nine years tonight.”
He chuckled. “That’s right, isn’t it? This is a kind of anniversary!”
That almost made it sound like a celebration—like maybe he should have ordered cake, not pie.
“You understand,” I said, “Mr. Bailey has no intention of, or interest in, calling you as a witness. That will be up to the prosecution.”
“It’ll cost ’em.”
“Oh?”
His nod just kept going. “They’ll have to fly me in. I’m in San Francisco now. I mean, I’m in Kent at the moment, obviously, but my hospital is in San Fran—Presbyterian Medical Center.”
“You’ve worked a lot of places.”
He kept smiling but it curdled some. “Well, I keep running into people who make mistakes, then blame me for it. Politics, it’s always political, wherever you work. It’s like you’re all the time living in a damn soap opera!”
The smile was gone now, and rage flickered in the eyes.
“I know what you mean,” I said sympathetically.
His cherry pie came, as well as our drinks—milk for him, iced tea for me.
He began to eat enthusiastically, squeezing in sentences between bites. “I don’t know what there is to talk about.… I was a houseguest, which I was a lot of times with Sam and Marilyn.… But I wasn’t there when it happened.… If I had been, maybe I coulda stopped it.… Or maybe it wouldn’ta happened at all.”
“Do you think Sam did it?”
He paused, a forkful of cherry pie frozen midair. His eyeballs marbled at me. “Hanky Panky” was going on the jukebox. “I would never say that.”
“Would you think it?”
He sighed. His eyes went back to normal, or as normal as possible. He ate the bite of pie, then said, “Hard to believe.”
That wasn’t really an answer.
“I’m somebody poking around in the past,” I said, “and talking to people I don’t know about other people who I never met. So I have a limited point of view.”
He chewed. “I can see that. I can see that.”
“For instance, I keep hearing … forgive me for this, Luke … but I keep hearing Marilyn didn’t like you much. And that strikes me as odd, because she seems to have been someone who really liked people. Relatives, neighbors, even neighbor kids, were always welcome around her place.”
He swallowed the last bite, pushed the plate away. His smile had a reddish tinge now. “Here’s the thing. She was jealous of me.”
“Of you?”
He nodded. “See, Sam and me met in college, back in ’44. He was just a baby, twenty, but I was a man, a dozen years older. So I took him under my wing. Like an older brother. Showed him the way.”
“But wasn’t Sam already a favorite of his classmates and professors? Wasn’t he at the top of his class?”
He pursed his lips. “Yes, and I don’t think Marilyn ever appreciated my role in that! How I guided him! After they got married, it was always like she was trying to inject herself between Sam and me.”
I held up a gentle palm. “Again, Luke, forgive me—but my materials, and they may be inaccurate, state that when you were a houseguest, you would flirt with her. That you even made a pass at her, once, that she rebuffed.”
His eyes flared and so did the rage in them. “And told Sam! But that’s not how it was. I was trying to be friendly, trying to get through to her. And I’m a red-blooded man, and she was a good-looking woman, no question of that … but frigid! I told Sam many a time that if he wasn’t getting enough at home, he needed to look for it elsewhere.”
“That didn’t work out too well for him, did it, Luke?”
His eyebrows shrugged. “No. The boy never was discreet. That Marilyn caused me a lot of trouble. I had a good job at Bay View for a while, but she turned Sam’s parents against me—and his papa was the big cheese there! I went to the Dayton hospital for a while, but the politics at that place—brother! I went back to Bay View, with Sam’s help, but again, Marilyn—she was head of the Ladies’ Hospital Auxiliary there—God knows what she told people!”
I opened a hand. “Why would you invite yourself as a houseguest so often, when you knew how Marilyn felt?”
The eyes flared again. “Nate, Sam was like my little brother!”
I jerked a thumb over my shoulder. “You do know he’s living over in Rocky River, don’t you, out on bond? With his new wife. Waiting for judgment. Are you going over there to see him while you’re in the area?”
He shook his head. Any trace of happiness was gone. Gloom had settled in. “Marilyn ruined it for us. Our friendship.”
“Her getting murdered did, you mean.”
He nodded, not grasping that I’d insulted him. “Nate, that event put me in an awkward position. I had to tell the truth, didn’t I? When the authorities asked, I told them how his brother, Steve, told Sam to get his story together. Both Sam and Steve really resented that. I overheard them when I visited Sam at the hospital that first day.”
He stared in despondence at his barely touched milk. He drank some. The Supremes were singing “My World Is Empty Without You” on the jukebox.
Then he said, “Marilyn told her father-in-law I was a bad influence. That I was encouraging Sam to divorce her … when it was just the opposite! I told Sam to stay in that marriage! Fool around on the side, if that’s what it took. But not mess up a good thing. I mean, his father and brothers would have killed him, if he divorced Marilyn! All those kind of people think about is their reputations.”
I leaned forward, let some of the contempt into my voice. “The way you felt about Marilyn—is that why, when you got the call from the Bay Village police about her murder, telling you to come report in to them, you sat down in your friend’s kitchen and ate a sandwich and a piece of pie … cherry, maybe? Taking your time, at a time like that?”
His face still looked like a German POW camp guard’s, but not benign like Sergeant Schultz. Not anymore.
“I had just played eighteen holes of golf, Mr. Heller. I was tired. So I ate a goddamn fucking sandwich. Sue me!”
He got out of the booth, reached in a pocket of his orange-and-black Bermuda shorts, and tossed a crumpled couple of dollars beside the empty pie plate, which was smeared scarlet.
After he’d stormed out, the waitress returned. She seemed amused now. “Anything else, sweetie?”
“Give me a piece of that cherry pie. Scoop of vanilla.”
“Your wish is my command, handsome.”
Pushing sixty and I still had it.
I was just starting in on the slice when a guy in a yellow polo shirt and tan shorts slipped in across from me. He was slim and serious, with short dark hair, sharp dark eyes, and pleasantly bland features; his sideburns had some white going, and a few lines were in his face, lending a distinguished touch. The waitress might have called him “handsome,” too.
“We Can Work It Out” by the Beatles was on the jukebox.
“You’re Nathan Heller,” he said.
“Am I?”
“I followed Luke over from the house. Waited for him to go. He’s really not as bad as you think he is.”
“How bad do you think I think he is?”
He sighed. “Pretty bad. He’s his own worst enemy. I’m Paul Robinson.”
“I was hoping to talk to you, Doctor,” I said, pushing the pie away.
“Go ahead with that,” he said, nodding toward the plate. “It’ll melt.”
I returned the pie and ice cream to their rightful position, but before having an
other bite, I said, “Luke’s a charmer. Does your medical expertise include the term ‘manic depressive’?”
“No, but I picked that up from Ben Casey. Look, he doesn’t know anything. He didn’t do anything. My house is a couple of blocks over—a duplex. The private practice is on the main floor, and I live with Dad upstairs. He’s been in private practice here for years, retired now. Mom has passed, but she was around when Luke stayed over, uh, nine years ago.”
Tonight.
“Dr. Robinson, several things bother me. First of all, it’s an easy ride, Kent to Bay Village—an hour under the worst circumstances, and not much more than half an hour under the best. And that loony friend of yours could have killed Marilyn Sheppard and driven back to Kent and slipped into the house again. In plenty of time.”
He was already shaking his head. “Probably not, Mr. Heller. I sleep like a rock—like Sam does. We used to laugh about it, grabbing naps on ER shifts. But my mother was a notoriously light sleeper, and it was warm that night, as you might imagine on the weekend of the Fourth. She had the windows open. She’d have heard him leave and heard him come back.”
“Maybe he was quiet about it.”
Robinson laughed softly. “You saw him. You met him. Luke’s a lot of things, but nimble isn’t one of them.”
“Okay. Let me give you that, all of it. But just suppose you noticed he’d gone out, or heard him come in. His return would have been early enough in the morning to wake you up.”
“I don’t know if I like what you’re implying.”
“I hadn’t got around to implying anything. But I am curious why it didn’t occur to anybody that Luke’s alibi was Sharon Kern’s ex-fiancé.”
His forehead tightened. “That wouldn’t make me the enemy of Marilyn Sheppard!”
“No. But it wouldn’t make you the friend of Sam Sheppard, either.”
He shook his head, his eyes sad but steady. “I didn’t cover up for Luke. And anyway he didn’t do it—the police looked into it, thoroughly.”
“Did they? Did they check his car or his clothes? When Coroner Gerber started talking about surgical implements as the probable murder weapon, did they check his, or yours? One other possibility bandied about for a murder weapon was a golf club. Did the police check the contents of your friend’s golf bag? Or yours? Did they make an inspection of his hands for cuts or abrasions? How about his teeth? Did you know your friend went to the dentist a week later? Did you ever notice that your buddy had something of an unnatural interest in Sam Sheppard, and an intense dislike for Marilyn Sheppard?”
He had no answers. He was staring at my pie. Maybe he was hungry.
“To me it’s a strong possibility,” I said, “your screwball pal, during his final unwelcome stay at the Sheppards’, got fed up once and for all with Marilyn’s bitchy attitude toward him. So he arranged his sleep-over visit with you, as an alibi … not enlisting you, but knowing he could sneak out and back in again. He had planned ahead, so whatever the murder weapon was, he had it in his car, which was a new model by the way, and the killing tool could be tossed out a window on the ride back, probably with his bloody clothes. And after your round of golf the next day, when he was told of Marilyn’s death, what did he do? He sat down and had a sandwich and a piece of pie.”
He let some air out. His eyes could barely look at me. “Maybe you should talk to the police about this.”
“What police? The Cleveland police, who would like nothing better than to railroad Dr. Sam one more time? Or the Bay Village police, and their crack staff of five officers?”
“Wild Thing” by somebody or other was on the jukebox.
He held up both hands, palms out, as if in surrender. “I didn’t have anything to do with this. As for Sharon Kern, I didn’t hold the affair against Sam. She just wasn’t ready to settle down. If it hadn’t been Sam, it would’ve been somebody else. She was a beautiful girl but she got around. And I don’t believe Luke had anything to do with her murder, either … but pursue that if you like. You probably should.”
The smile I gave him wasn’t much of one. “Here’s the problem Luke has—it’s the same one you have.”
“Which is?”
“Which is when Sam Sheppard is finally cleared, the cops will suddenly have an unsolved murder on their hands.”
The damn ice cream had, as the doctor diagnosed, melted. I got up and left, stopping just long enough to give the little redhead a five-spot.
CHAPTER
15
I took July Fourth off.
Disrupting family holidays with questions about a murder case—even though that is exactly what had happened nine years ago—seemed a little out of line.
With the temperature in the nineties, I took in a rerelease of Psycho at the Vogue for the air-conditioning and a movie I knew would be good. And in the evening I caught the Indians losing a close one to the Twins, followed by a rousing patriotic fireworks display unhampered by the defeat. I may have done all of this, as well as have various nice meals at various nice restaurants, as a lonely bachelor. Or I might have met a thirty-five-year-old blond American Airlines stewardess in the Lobby Court bar who was worried that she was getting too old for the job and needed reassurance from an understanding older man who reminded her of her father, but not enough to be a problem.
Having been accused of including gratuitous and perhaps dubious sex scenes in these memoirs, I will say no more.
But I did wake up alone, as either a sad lonely bachelor or a guy whose bedmate had an early flight out, and began a long if interesting Monday talking to a variety of people. First up was a Spang Bakery deliveryman named Ronald Draper who I caught at the Barber Avenue plant, a brick building consuming several blocks of a narrow side street in an otherwise residential area.
Along with half a dozen like him, Draper was in a massive garage loading up his red truck with bread and doughnuts off a wooden rack. The warmth and scent of freshly baked goods overwhelmed any automotive odors. Draper was in his forties and wore a milkman-type white uniform with a white cap. He looked skinny enough to suggest he’d long ago gotten past the urge of heedlessly sampling the goods.
But he said he’d seen someone else sampling the goods at the Sheppard place.
“Mrs. Sheppard would leave the Lake Road door unlocked,” he said, in a husky second tenor, “and we had this understanding that I’d just knock, then come on in, go down the hall, and then the kitchen opened up just to the left. I’d leave her a loaf of Aunt Mary’s brand bread and sometimes some doughnuts. On several occasions she was sitting at the kitchen table having coffee with this distinguished-looking older man, gray hair, you know, suit and tie. They were friendly and kind of … familiar with each other. I figured it was Dr. Sheppard, but later I found out it wasn’t.”
“You’ve since identified him as Marshall Dodge.”
He nodded. “That’s right. They give me five pictures and I picked him right out. Funny—the Dodges were on my route, but I never saw him. Turns out he was the mayor. Of course, like I said, I never saw Dr. Sheppard, either. I dealt with mostly the ladies.”
“How familiar were they with each other, the mayor and Mrs. Sheppard?”
The deliveryman got uncomfortable. “Will I have to testify to this?”
“Probably. No sense in pulling your punches.”
He sighed. “Okay. Two times it was more than just a couple of people having coffee. Once, her nightgown—she was always in her nightgown when I saw her with this fella that turned out to be the mayor—it was down around her waist, and her … you know, her boobies was out. Her bosom. He was kissing her on her mouth while he … you know, was feeling her up. Caressing her, I mean.”
“What about the other time?”
“Oh, she had her nightgown on, nothing showing. No funny business. But she handed him this key, house key looked like, and said, ‘Don’t tell Sam.’ I guess that was when I first figured out he wasn’t Dr. Sheppard.”
“How did they react?”
>
“They didn’t see me, either time. They hadn’t heard me knock. So I went back down the hall, the way I come in, and knocked again, you know, on the near side of the door. But loud. Then I just, you know, went in and nodded and smiled at them—her nightgown was closed now, that one time—and left the Aunt Mary’s bread and a box of doughnuts.”
I smiled. “You don’t look like you eat many doughnuts.”
A grin appeared in the midst of an unhealthy-looking pallor. “I sure don’t. I got the diabetes. Gotta stay away from sweets. I’m only filling in at the bakery a few days a month now. I been too sick to work full time, either here or at the amusement park. I was night watchman.”
“You must have to be pretty observant for that.”
“Oh, yes. I still don’t miss much.”
Didn’t seem like he ever did.
* * *
The Huntington Water Tower, often mistaken for a lighthouse, had once been used to pump water to irrigate vineyards belonging to the long-ago industrialist it was named for. Now the looming structure was just a cream-colored clapboard fifty-foot artifact of an earlier day, its dignity compromised by an attached one-story refreshment stand as wide as the tower was tall.
We were seated on a bench to one side of the latter, with a nice view of Lake Erie, but not of the beach below, which—like the refreshment stand—wasn’t doing Fourth of July business on Monday the fifth. But nonetheless a steady flow of girls in their teens and twenties in skimpy bikinis were buying ice-cream cones, and scampering around giggling and licking, and making me wish I were a lot younger or they were a little older.
My companion on the bench, not looking much older than the ice-cream customers, was really an old married lady of twenty-six. Very pretty in a girl-next-door way, she wore pink-framed, green-lensed sunglasses and a pink-and-white sundress with low pink heels. She might have been my daughter.
She was, instead, Jane Carter, maiden name Sparling, the onetime babysitter of the Sheppards’ son, Chip. She’d been good enough to agree to see me, and suggested this spot. Huntington Park began just down from what had been the Sheppard home. She had lived across the street from them.
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