Do No Harm

by Max Allan Collins

  I was trying to make her smile, but she was in a kind of waking trance, saying, “He stole personal things from me, perhaps to take them to the … pawnshops? To ‘hock’ them? Are those the right terms?”

  “Yes.”

  “He stole money from me, and denied it or said, ‘So what?’ I paid twenty-five thousand dollars to your lawyer friend, Bailey, for Sam! He sold my Lincoln Continental, behind my back! Why does he need money? I have paid all of his bills—I sold my major interest in a company in Germany to do it. Once, in Boston, he got mad at me and threw me out of the car in the rain. I had no money and had to walk a mile to the hotel. Soaking wet. He carries knives and sometimes a hatchet and always a gun. He needs medical help!”

  “You say he’s never hit you.”

  She shook her head, sighed. “No. But last night, in the middle of the night, I woke up. I felt something cold against the side of my head. He had the gun, its little nose, pushed against the side of my head, and he looked right at me, so cold, and said I was a thief. I was a thief!”

  An armed uprising.

  I asked, “You didn’t call the police?”

  She reared back as if I’d said something absurd. “No. You can’t call the police and still live with your husband!”

  “Is that what you want to do? Keep living with him?”

  “I don’t know, Nathan.”

  “Do you still love him?”

  “I care for him. I believe in him. I do love him, still. And I know he is innocent.”

  “You know that even after he put a gun to your head?”

  She shrugged. “He didn’t fire it.”

  I nodded, as if she’d made a good point.

  “I’ll tell you one thing, Ariane. If you repeat any of this in public, or share it with the police, Sam doesn’t have a prayer in the new trial. You know the expression, his goose will be cooked?”

  She nodded. “I do not wish to cook his goose.”

  I squeezed the hand she’d given me. “If you leave him before the trial, before the verdict, all the effort, all the money, will’ve been wasted. File for divorce or separation now, and the world thinks you think Sam is guilty. You can go back to Germany for a while with an excuse you give the press—you’re off to visit your daughter and mother, or to wrap up some business matters—but you have to be back well before the trial. Do you understand?”

  She nodded. “Will you talk to Sam?”

  I nodded. “You want some help with those bags?”

  Soon we were moving slowly and near silently through the purple living room and out the door. I moved my car out of the way. We loaded up the Thunderbird, and she gave me another hug, and a sisterly kiss, then got behind the wheel and backed out of the driveway, smiling, looking almost giddy. When she was out of sight, I went back in.

  I lifted the coffee table carefully, just a few inches off the wall-to-wall carpet, and moved it away from the couch and set it back down. From the coffee table I took the .38 and dropped it in my pocket; I left the bottle of Johnnie Walker there, but out of reach. Somehow I found a chair worth sitting on to pull over and arranged it before the slumbering Sam. I unbuttoned my suitcoat and slipped out of it, then draped it around the high back of the fancy schmancy chair, and sat in shirt-sleeves and shoulder holster. I told you I always carried the nine millimeter in a murder case, no matter how moldy the murder.

  I kicked the side of the couch.

  Nothing.

  I kicked it again.

  Again nothing, but the third try roused him. He sat up like a driver who fell asleep at the wheel, only to have a trucker’s horn scare him the hell awake. He tasted his mouth, a snack I didn’t envy him, and tried to make his eyes work—they could barely manage a blink. He ran a hand over his short-haired, balding head. I could have helped him sit up, but letting him do that by himself let him wake up a little. Also, it amused me some.

  “Your wife has gone back to Germany,” I said.

  The baby face scowled, teeth clenching, cheeks reddening. Then he relaxed. He reached out absently, probably for the Scotch, maybe for the .38. He blinked some more, really coming around, saw where I’d moved the coffee table and apparently felt it too challenging a trip.

  “Nate Heller,” he said, in that somewhat high-pitched voice. If I were a woman, that sound alone would have been enough to make me leave him.

  “Right.”

  He tried to bring me into focus. “You were … you were coming over tonight.”

  “I was. I did. I am.”

  He squinted, un-squinted, tasted his mouth again. His expression said, Yucchh, then he said, “What was that you said about Ariane?”

  “She left. Went to Germany.”

  “Good riddance. Fuck the bitch. For good?”

  “She didn’t say. I told her if she didn’t come back for the trial, or if she went public with your shenanigans, you were deader than your first wife.”

  His expression turned indignant. “What shenanigans?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Stealing money. Selling her car. Waking her up with a gun to her head. Little things. Of course, they say the little things mean a lot.”

  He frowned. “Did I do that?”

  “All three or one in particular?”

  “I … I thought I dreamed that.”

  “You didn’t.”

  His frown turned pouty. “Well … she drove me to it. She smothers me. I don’t have a single male friend, Nate. She, she boxes me in! Crowds me too much. Really bugs me.”

  “That’s tough, her being such a bitch, in between paying your bills and fucking you ten times in a day.”

  That startled him. “What’s she been telling you?”

  “I’m a private detective. If you want dirt on your wife, you’ll have to hire me. What was last night’s fight about?”

  Shrugged, shook his head. “Nothing, really.”

  “I know. But, still, it must have been something.”

  “I called her Marilyn at dinner, by mistake, obviously. Just a slip of the tongue. You know. And she got mad.”

  “Imagine.”

  “She says, ‘Thank you,’ and doesn’t speak to me for the rest of the evening.”

  “She said you gave her a little thirty-eight-caliber wake-up call.”

  The eyes widened, then un-widened. “Probably not the smartest thing. She’s been talking about a divorce a lot lately.”

  “I wonder what Louis Seltzer will do with that, heading into the new trial?”

  His mouth dropped open, and again the eyes were wide. “I really … really can’t let that happen, can I?”

  “No. You can’t. But I don’t know if I, in good conscience … to the degree I have one … could advise Ariane to stay in a marriage, even temporarily, with an asshole who puts a gun to her head.”

  He got up and got the Scotch and the glass. Sat again, filled the glass, put the bottle between his bare legs and against the front of his boxers. He guzzled a little from the glass.

  Then he said, “She’ll come around.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. I get paid whether the state of Ohio calls you a murderer again or not. Would you like to know what I’ve been up to? Besides taking in an Indians game with a stewardess?”

  Damn. Let it slip.

  “Please,” he said. “You want something to drink?”

  “No.”

  “Beer? Coke? Seven-Up? Some of this Johnnie Walker?”

  “No.”

  Filling him in on my witness/suspect interviews took a good hour, with him sobering up enough to ask the occasional smart question. And he made that one glass of Scotch last through my whole spiel. That was encouraging. But we were a long distance from the thoughtful pipe smoker I’d met at the prison.

  He was shaking his head. “I don’t remember meeting this Eberling character.”

  “He says it was only once, at breakfast. He seems to have known Marilyn a little. He was there half a dozen times on jobs or collecting payment. She gave him brownies a
nd milk on the porch with your son, he claims.”

  “Sounds like Marilyn. She was always taking in strays. He sounds like a kook, but that doesn’t make him a killer. My opinion? It was Mildred. Marsh was having an affair with Marilyn, got drunk and came over and Mildred caught them in the act.”

  “Do you know for a fact Marilyn and Dodge were having an affair?”

  He shook his head. “No, but it was possible. Everybody in town knew Marsh was sweet on her. Plus, well … I don’t know if I should get into this.”

  “Into what?”

  He looked into the glass of Scotch. “It’s something I did privately for Lee. We’ve kept it under wraps.”

  “I’m working for Lee. You can tell me anything that you feel is useful. I’m covered by your client confidentiality with him.”

  He sighed, nodded. “Okay. You know as well as anybody how much effort Lee Bailey put into getting me a polygraph, which he was never able to get approval for. But once I was finally freed, awaiting the new trial, too much time had passed for that kind of test to be considered reliable. So a top authority on hypnosis, a Dr. Bryan in Los Angeles, who is also a lawyer, regressed me to the night of Marilyn’s murder. Bailey was right there—he can tell you better than I could.”

  “Well, he isn’t here. Do your best, Sam.”

  “Okay. I guess I relived the experience very realistically, even violently. At one point I threw myself to the floor and missed a heavy piece of furniture by a couple of inches. Under hypnosis, I remembered Marsh assaulting me, and I also remembered another voice, I think female, saying, ‘Shall we kill him too?’ And I also remembered the person I chased through the door on the lake had a slight limp.”

  A perfect fit.

  “None of that’s admissible, Sam.”

  “Okay, but it tells us a lot.”

  “Sam—had Lee developed his theory about Marsh and Mildred being the murderers, before you were hypnotized?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “And were you aware of it?”

  He shrugged. “Yes.”

  “Well, you could have faked being under and said what Lee wanted to hear.”

  His eyes flared; nostrils, too. “Goddamnit, man—”

  I held up a palm. “Easy, Sam. Under hypnosis, you could have been influenced by Lee’s theory and reported that as if you remembered it. Unintentionally, but influenced.”

  Now he finished his Scotch.

  Then he said, “There’s something else.”

  On this damn job, there always was.

  He was saying, “It’s the reason I got bent out of shape last night.”

  “Okay.”

  “Client confidentiality, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, Lee told me yesterday that a source tells him an old ‘friend’ of mine from the state pen is trying to work out a clemency deal through the new trial’s prosecutors.”

  I grunted a laugh. “Let me guess. This friend is using you as a bargaining chip.”

  He nodded. “His name is Armand ‘Frenchy’ Foor. He’s a repeat offender, a bank robber, a strongarm thug really, but also a guy rumored to be a snitch. I got close to him in stir. There was nothing about what I was doing for him to snitch about, and he could handle himself. So I paid him for, you know, protection. He was a buffer between me and people who thought I had money or that I could get them narcotics because of my hospital privileges. Frenchy was a good guy to know inside.”

  “Only outside he isn’t.”

  He smirked. “No. He’s made up a couple of stories about me. It’s really one story, but he’s used different characters. In one, I bribe a guard to get Frenchy transferred to a minimum-security facility, and he breaks out. You see, I’ve hired him to grab Lucas Hardmann, and make him write a confession about murdering Marilyn, after which Frenchy kills him, faking a suicide. For this I’d supposedly give him a bunch of money and some plastic surgery—Frenchy doesn’t like the way his ears stick out. The other story just substitutes Marshall Dodge as the kidnap victim who writes a suicide note confessing his crime before killing himself. And when I got out, I was to give Frenchy an ear bob.”

  “The prosecution is buying this?”

  “Seems so. The Dodge version is what the prosecutors are supposed to be going with. Bailey thinks they’ll hold Frenchy for a rebuttal witness after I testify.”

  I frowned at him. “You’re planning to testify?”

  Fist in the air. “Damned right I am!”

  “Sam, you may want to reconsider. You testified last time and it didn’t go so well. And now that you’ve told your story a dozen more times, going on the stand would open you up to punishing cross-examination on each and every one of them.”

  He was shaking his head. “Bailey has assured me I’m going on the stand.”

  I shrugged. “He knows what he’s doing. What kind of pills have you been taking?”

  He looked hurt. “Who says I’ve been taking pills?”

  “Who do you think?”

  He tasted his mouth again—now it only tasted like Scotch, apparently, because this time he didn’t make a face. “Barbiturates.”

  “Washing them down with booze?”

  “Of course not. A doctor knows better!” His shrug was elaborate. “Sometimes a man needs to sleep. Sometimes I need to take the edge off the anxiety. Don’t you think I have a right to feel anxious, after all I’ve been through?”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if your wife is feeling a little anxious herself. You might keep that in mind, if she comes back from Germany to give this star-crossed romance another try. And give you some support.”

  He swallowed. Nodded. “Your words aren’t falling on deaf ears, Nate. I promise you that.”

  “I hope not.”

  I stood, went over to the coffee table, emptied the slugs from his .38 and left them and it there.

  On the way back to Cleveland, I mulled over the various suspects for Marilyn Sheppard’s murder who I’d questioned over the past several days.

  Including the one in Ariane’s brick townhouse.

  CHAPTER

  18

  Back at the Hotel Cleveland after a long day, I was just getting ready to climb out of my clothes, turn on Johnny Carson, and crawl into bed. I’d be lucky to make it past the monologue. I’d just climbed under the covers when the bedside phone rang and startled me a little.

  “Mr. Heller?” a reedy voice said.

  “Yes. Who’s calling?”

  “Somebody from a long time ago. Could you meet me down at the Harbor Inn? You know, in the Flats?”

  “Yeah, I know the Flats, and the place. And you know me, and you say I know you. Try running a name past me.”

  “Gary,” he said. “Gary Weed. Remember?”

  The newsreel of my memory began running footage of a skinny, sideburned kid at the DeLand, Florida, jail. Wearing a checked jailhouse shirt with his cuffed hands in his lap.

  “I remember,” I said.

  “I heard you was in town talkin’ to people about the Sheppard case.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “Never mind how. Thought maybe you’d like to talk to me again.”

  “You have something to say I haven’t heard before?”

  The thin voice had a fat smile in it. “Could be I do. Could be somethin’ you’d like to hear. Or anyways, you should. I’m at the Inn right now. Why don’t you come on down and buy me a beer or somethin’, and we can do some catchin’ up.”

  “… Half an hour, Gary.”

  I cradled the phone.

  I got back in my things, including my nine-mil in its shoulder holster. Put on the suitcoat, skipped the tie. Even in clothes worn all day, I’d be overdressed at the Harbor Inn, where I could have thrown on a sportshirt and fresh slacks, to fit in better with the natives. But I didn’t have a sports jacket along tailored to accommodate hardware, and I’d have been underdressed without the Browning.

  After all, the
last time I’d been to the Harbor Inn, I’d never made it past the back room where some barely post-puberty punks had required me to teach them a lesson. I almost wondered if Weed was somehow linked to that nasty little crew, that maybe this was some long overdue try at getting even with an out-of-town private cop.

  But I decided not. The Harbor Inn was a natural meeting place for the likes of Gary Weed, and sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence.

  I parked on the street under the Center Street Swing Bridge, its shadow doing little to cool the warm night. Industrial sounds rumbled like big dangerous animals in the darkness. I headed across a deserted street to the nondescript brick building on its West Bank corner. Supposedly a saloon since 1895, the joint wore minimal lighting and an ancient Coca-Cola sign, the familiar red button riding white rusted metal with HARBOR INN in faded blue.

  The inside of the dive sported the same brick as outside, a long, narrow, cavernous place with a gray and pink tile floor that had faded from black and red. As deserted as the street had been, the dingy joint was well populated. A well-worn, well-stocked bar with an ancient cash register had, behind it on the wall, a rugged ship’s wheel amid neon beer signs. The hefty stubble-puss bartender looked like a bouncer shanghaied for the duty.

  Though the jukebox played “Time Won’t Let Me,” confirming it was 1966, this might still have been 1957, or maybe 1942; the workaday crowd, including a good share of dockworkers, had changed little from decade to decade. The beer was cheap and cold and that was all it took to keep the regulars happy—on a weeknight, anyway. A little stage toward the back, and posters here and there, indicated rock bands came in on Friday and Saturday, likely drawing kids from all social strata. But right now, this was Hourly Worker Land.

  In addition to a row of pinballs singing their tuneless tune, a bowling machine stretched along a wall, a group of guys going at it, dime after dime. Athletes with beer bellies and drooping cigarettes, eager to compete.

  Gary Weed sat alone at a table-for-four against a brick wall opposite the bar, a human collision between the ’50s and ’60s—the dark sideburns now accompanying dyed-blond bowl-cut Rolling Stones hair, his pack of Luckies tucked into the rolled-up sleeve of a white T-shirt, emblazoned with a comical, big-foot fella on the move under a bold cartoony “Keep on Truckin’.” Weed’s rolled-cuff dungarees were pure Marlon Brando out of The Wild One, but the pointed-toe black boots were strictly Beatles.