“Would you tell the jury the name of the surgical instrument you see impressed in that pillow, please.”
“I can’t give you the name of it, because I don’t know what it is. It could be one of many, but it’s something that weighs about eight, nine, ten, eleven ounces.”
“Now, you know Sam Sheppard is a doctor, don’t you, Doctor?”
“Yes.”
“And you knew it at the time of the first trial?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you testified then that it was a surgical instrument, didn’t you?”
“I did.”
“And you never produced one, did you? Did you?”
“No.”
“Produce one now, if you can.”
“I can’t. But they have names—cast spreader or bone spreader.”
The attorney’s surface courtesy and his underlying tenacity were throwing Gerber off badly.
“Did you ever find anything that fit that impression?”
“No.”
The prosecutors were not even trying to hide their dejection. None seemed able to bear to look at the witness stand.
“You could never find one in twelve years?”
“I found plenty of things close to it, but … no.”
Bailey put on a mask of sympathy. “When you testified at the last trial about a surgical instrument, you didn’t suggest that just because the defendant was a doctor, did you? Doctor?”
“Oh no. Oh my no.”
“Of course, you have been a surgeon yourself, haven’t you, Doctor?”
“No.”
“Do you have such an instrument back at your office?”
Gerber shook his head.
“Have you ever seen such an instrument in any hospital, or medical supply catalogue, or anywhere else, Dr. Gerber?”
“Oh, I’ve looked all over the United States.”
“My goodness, then please, by all means, tell us what you found.”
“… I didn’t find one.”
The rest of the trial was Bailey’s, too.
He got Gerber’s assistant, Mary Cowan, to admit the assailant was left-handed; Sam, of course, was right-handed. An osteopath testified that, two days after the murder, Sam’s X-rays showed a fracture of the third cervical vertebra and a bruise of the spinal cord. Dr. Paul Kirk, brought in from Berkeley, shared the story told by the blood patterns in the murder room—that Marilyn was slain by a person whose O-type blood was different from Sam’s A-type; that the killer was left-handed; that blood on Sam’s wristwatch—which Cowan claimed came from “flying blood”—had reached it by direct contact.
During a recess, in a side room, Bailey spoke to Sam and gave him some bad news: “I’m not calling you, Sam.”
The defendant’s eyes showed white all around. “Goddamnit, man, you have to!”
“No. We have everything to lose and nothing to gain. We have this thing sewed up—Gerber sewed it up for us. It’s too big a risk for you to go on the stand. If you do poorly, we’re screwed. If you do well—or probably if you just testify at all—the prosecution has Frenchy Foor in its pocket as a rebuttal witness.”
“He’s a fucking liar!”
“I don’t doubt that. But do you really want this trial to end with testimony saying you tried to hire a fellow convict to frame and kill Marsh Dodge?”
Sam looked at me with that baby-about-to-cry look.
“He’s right,” is all I said.
Apparently it was enough.
On November 16, Sam Sheppard was found not guilty of the murder of Marilyn Sheppard.
CHAPTER
19
On the courthouse steps, Lee Bailey—standing beside his grinning client, Sam Sheppard, whose son Chip was on his left, with wife Ariane (a blonde in sedate black) on his right, an arm around either—answered a few press questions. A small retinue, including myself, hovered behind them. On this mildly chilly Wednesday evening, topcoats weren’t necessary.
“My client was found not guilty and that’s what he should have been,” Bailey said, “but neither of us will be satisfied until the real killer or perhaps killers of his late wife are brought to justice. Nathan Heller, the well-known investigator, is still on retainer, and on the case. Stay tuned.”
In the back of a limo, I sat next to the confident attorney in his usual three-piece suit, and said, “What’s the idea? Do you really want me to stay on this thing?”
“Possibly.”
“What does that mean, Lee?”
“It means I intend to compose a letter to the police chief of Bay Village detailing the evidence you’ve already gathered on Marshall and Mildred Dodge. If that jump-starts an official investigation—perhaps with a grand jury impaneled—I may ask you to dig further.”
“Who’s your client in this? Sam Sheppard was found not guilty.”
“But not innocent. Think of the publicity finding Marilyn’s killer would bring. The American public has a memory of about six weeks. We need to jog it by tying a bow on this thing.”
“Why, so the movie about the case has a better ending?”
He smiled that sly smile of his, which could delight or infuriate. “Now that you mention it.”
No great victory celebration followed, at least not one I was invited to, and by ten that night I was in my Hotel Cleveland suite packing my things in preparation for checking out in the morning. I’d called the airport and had a reservation for a plane back to Chicago in about twelve hours, the same length of time it had taken the jurors to reach their verdict.
When the phone rang, I half expected it to be Lee or Sam inviting me for a drink or something; but the reedy voice belonged to neither, though I recognized it at once.
“Now that you helped get David Janssen off,” Gary Weed said, “maybe you’d like to bring in the One-Armed Man and really get some ink.”
The One-Armed Man, of course, was the TV Fugitive’s version of Sam’s bushy-haired intruder.
“You obviously know where I’m staying, Gary. Maybe you’d like to drop him off at the front desk.”
“Come see me and let’s talk. Same place.”
“When?”
“What do you think? Right now.”
“Is this going to be worth my time? Last time it wasn’t.”
“You come see.”
He hung up.
I stood looking at the phone receiver, like maybe it could explain to me why this case, this job, wasn’t over yet. Gary Weed was a drug-addled opportunist and not very smart. Should I even bother with this?
And yet there I was, parking under the Main Avenue viaduct, in a neighborhood smelling of industrial smoke and exhaust fumes. A fall crispness was in the air and leaves nobody was bothering to rake up were in view pretty much everywhere. Even the Harbor Inn—with its narrow sidewalk in front and along one side, parking lot in back and vacant lot next door—had a backdrop of skeletal trees having spilled their leaves. I hadn’t shed the suit I’d worn all day at the trial, though I’d added an accessory: the nine millimeter was under my arm.
Again, Weed was at a side table opposite the bar, in the midst of dinging pinball machines, too-loud conversation, and a jukebox blasting “Last Train to Clarksville” by the Monkees, who were to the Beatles what Richard Kimble was to Sam Sheppard. My buddy Gary wore a blue corduroy peacoat and matching captain’s cap snugged on his dyed blond bowl-cut hair; also a sweater of wide blue and red stripes and faded denims. He appeared more prosperous, a hippie who came into money. The Beatle boots, though, were unchanged.
Nor were the sunken cheeks and eyes with reddish whites. He looked like Herman of the Hermits if Herman had a drug problem.
The working-class crowd at the Harbor Inn had been infiltrated by long-haired boys and girls in their late teens and early twenties. The dockworker types gave the boys nasty looks and the girls longing ones, but right now nobody was causing trouble.
Except maybe Weed, for me.
One of those girls, a redhead who was working
here, took my drink order—a Hamm’s on tap. This was the land of sky-blue waters, after all. Gary had a beer already, and was lighting up a cigarette.
I said, “We have to stop meeting like this.”
“What would you say,” Gary said, through exhaled smoke, “if I told you I have the grip.”
“I’d say, ‘What fucking grip?’”
He flicked ash off into a tray; his smile gave him a skeletal look. Like the trees.
“I dug it up,” he said. “The grip. You know, the grip. With the bloody clothes? And the hunk of pipe?”
And it came back to me—the story he’d told in the sheriff’s office in DeLand, where he had a grip stuffed with the murder scene clothes and blunt instrument, and buried them in the woods near a construction site.
I stayed cool. “Where you buried them, Gary? Found the exact spot after all this time?”
“I didn’t bury them. Frenchy did.”
My eyes were burning from the smoke in the joint; pretty soon I would have reddish whites like Gary’s.
“Frenchy Foor,” I said. “Armand Foor. The state’s favorite rebuttal witness they didn’t call.”
“Right. I know Frenchy going way back. When I said we was cellmates, I wasn’t lying. But I give you the wrong, you know, impression. We was cellmates in Florida, a long time ago. That’s when, that’s where, he told me about killing that Sheppard bitch.”
His smile really was an awful thing, yellow and crooked, here and there. It added a British Invasion flavor to his look.
I didn’t say anything. He was, after all, a lying little drug-fiend prick. But back in DeLand, he knew things.
“That’s how come,” he went on, reading my mind, “I could ‘confess’ that time. How come I knew things.”
“You were in Cleveland that night, Gary. We confirmed that. Now you’re saying you wound up with a cellmate somewhere in Florida who also just happened to be in Cleveland that same night?”
He nodded. “Only it wasn’t no coincidence. Frenchman was with me in Cleveland. Hangin’ out with me. Now I didn’t do the crime with him, but we linked up later that night—morning. I was gettin’ out of town with him. I was with him when he buried that grip.”
He was a liar, all right, but chances were that some truth was swimming around there in the bullshit soup he was serving up. Sam’s impression that two people had been responsible could mean Gary and Frenchy were both upstairs at the Sheppards’ that night. Morning.
“What do you have in mind, Gary?”
“Same-o, same-o. That ten-grand reward. Dr. Sam and them brothers of his, they want to be back in the doctor business together, right? Gonna be tough goin’ in a town where most people don’t care two shits about that verdict today. Most people in Cleveland think Dr. Sam did it.”
He wasn’t wrong.
“So the reward,” Weed said. “I want five grand down. Five grand on delivery of the grip. You look the shit in the grip over, decide for yourself, is it legit. Then you turn it over to the cops, leavin’ me out of it. And I get the five grand, and another five when Frenchy gets taken down for the wife’s murder.”
What the hell was this really about? Some of it could be true. Certainly all of it was meant for Weed getting his mitts on that five grand.
“Can you get the cash together,” Weed asked, “by tomorrow?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Groovy. Meet me tomorrow night somewhere.”
“Here?”
His grin still lacked a bicuspid. “Right. I’m gonna haul in a suitcase of bloody clothes and a bloody iron pipe, and you’re gonna go over the stuff right out in the open. Maybe here at this table, huh? Hell no! Someplace, you know, secluded.”
Somewhere where Weed and a confederate or two could kill me and take five grand home for their trouble.
“No,” I said. “Somewhere in public. Not a busy public place. But not some dark alley, either.”
“Where?”
“I need to get the money together. You call me at my hotel tomorrow about this time. I’ll set a place. If you don’t like it, then you don’t have to pick up the five thousand.”
“No cops? No tricks?”
“No cops, no tricks. How about you, Gary? Any tricks?”
“No tricks.”
I got up, threw a few bucks on the table, said, “That’s for the waitress, Gary,” and went out to the rental car. Back in my room, I called my partner in Chicago, Lou Sapperstein.
“I need you to wire me five thousand from petty cash,” I told him.
“Five thousand isn’t all that petty. What’s left to do in that town now that you and Bailey got Sheppard sprung?”
“Maybe something, maybe nothing. But worth the gamble, and I’ll either hold onto the five K or we’ll get reimbursed. We have contacts in law enforcement in both Ohio and Florida, right?”
“We do.”
“I need to know tomorrow if Armand ‘Frenchy’ Foor was ever imprisoned or even just jailed in Florida, and when. He’s in the Ohio pen right now, on a bank robbery rap. But see if you can find out who his cellmates have been since he was jugged. Also, see if Gary Weed, that’s W-E-E-D, has been in the Ohio pen at the same time as Foor. See if there’s any overlap between them in either state.”
“Okay. What are you up to?”
I told him.
“That sounds risky as hell. You want me to arrange backup with our sister agency in Cleveland?”
“No. But call somebody who would know where I can get an unregistered handgun in Cuyahoga County. Pawnshop, probably, but I’d rather not go randomly shopping.”
“Nate, you get yourself killed and business will suffer.”
“Your concern touches me. Can you do all that?”
“Of course.”
Next morning, I was up and showered and shaved and in a fresh suit when Lou called with information on what pawnshop to try. He would be working on the other info throughout the day. I should be back in my room by late afternoon by the phone. I said that was fine.
I went out and bought a nine-millimeter Browning, a newer one than I carried, the sentimental value of which—my father had killed himself with it, and it served as the only conscience I had—meant I didn’t want to lose it on some half-baked venture like I had in mind. In addition, I purchased a Smith & Wesson model 36 and a five-shot snubnose .38 revolver, with a leather ankle holster to go with it.
“You ever use one of those before?” the white-bearded pawnbroker asked me, pushing the holster across the counter. He was about my age, with a gut, but also icy blue eyes that said ex-military. So did his camos.
“Yeah. But I don’t regularly pack an ankle gun.”
“To get at the thing, you have to drop to a kneeling position. You right-handed?”
I nodded.
“Then you’ll wear it on your left leg on the inside.”
I thanked him. I knew all that, and I also knew if you regularly carried an ankle gun, you ought to practice your draw till you overcame any slowness of response. But I also knew dropping to a kneeling position wasn’t necessary, if you could stand on one leg while you lifted the other. After all, male dogs could do it—of course, they had four legs.
I picked up a second snubnose—Smith & Wesson M&P .38—and purchased ammunition for both of the snubbies. I already had nine-millimeter cartridges. At a nearby hardware store I purchased a roll of gray duct tape. At a men’s shop I bought a brown suede jacket with a darker brown fur collar and nice deep pockets; also a dark brown sweater and some black jeans. The shop had a shoe department and I got some black sneakers, too.
At the Western Union office on Euclid the five thousand dollars was waiting; the clerk counted out all hundreds, which was fine. Fifty crisp bills would fit nicely in a business-size envelope.
Back in my room, Lou called. Foor and Weed had never been in prison in Florida together. That, of course, meant Foor couldn’t have fed Gary the facts about the Marilyn Sheppard murder—or they really had been together
on the murder night, probably as accomplices? They had been in the Ohio pen at the same time, but never as cellmates. What that meant, if anything, I wasn’t sure.
Then I drove out to the location I had in mind for the exchange. The park I’d chosen was too cold to attract many visitors, and I didn’t have to wait long to find the right spot for me to hide the Smith & Wesson M&P, using the duct tape to secure it.
Then I took a bench for about three hours, well into dusk, timing the police patrol cars making their circuit. The municipality was small, so their run was only half an hour. Passing by every quarter after and quarter to.
I had a light supper at Kornman’s on Short Vincent, where I’d once had many a meal with Eliot, who liked standard steak-and-chophouse fare. For some reason his ghost lingered with me today, perhaps because my preparations vaguely resembled my friend preparing for a raid. Of course Eliot wouldn’t recognize Cleveland anymore, or America itself, for that matter, with its long-haired boys and mini-skirted girls, anti-war demonstrations and raucous rock ’n’ roll that made the jazz of his day seem restrained. Of course you could say the same for Sam Sheppard, who had missed a lot during his ten years behind bars.
I somehow managed a nap—the Kornman’s version of a light meal perhaps helping me sleep—but I was awake on the first ring, right at ten o’clock.
“Where?” Weed said, with no preamble. “When?”
“Back where it all started,” I said. “Huntington Park in Bay Village.”
“Why there?”
“It’s public, but at two twenty-five A.M.—when we meet—any cars passing by will be infrequent. The cops make a half-hour circuit. Gives us twenty minutes to do business. Plenty of time for a transaction this simple. But close enough to the residential neighborhood for anything noisy to be noticed.”
“But why there?”
“I just told you.”
“Plenty of other parks in this town.”
“I like this one. Nice view of the lake. And of the city skyline across it.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Maybe. But it somehow seems right to me. You’re coming alone?”
“Yeah. You?”
“Yeah. I will have a gun with me.”
“You won’t need it, Heller. I don’t go for guns. Anyway, this is gonna be a friendly transaction.”
Do No Harm Page 26