I nodded toward the pile of tapes and graphs and such on his desk. The chipmunk, finding them of no particular interest, jumped down and scampered off somewhere.
“All that stuff says they didn’t do anything of the kind,” I said. “Also shows that all four, wives included, believe in Sam Sheppard’s innocence. How about you, Erle? Do you think he’s innocent?”
Gardener thought about that. Bravo the miniature coyote on my lap watched its master as if in anticipation of his response.
“I think he deserves a better hearing,” Gardner said finally, “than he got. Now, I’m not saying he didn’t have a fair trial. That the jury didn’t do their best to be careful and impartial, despite all the publicity. His lawyer hasn’t been able to get the verdict set aside, you know.”
That was how the case had become the baby of the Court of Last Resort—all other options seemed closed to Sam Sheppard.
“General opinion,” I said, “was that he did it.”
“At the time,” Gardner said with a nod. “But a steady stream of letters from those who feel otherwise have poured in to Argosy and editor Harry Steeger, and directly to me, as well. A sizeable public out there feels the widespread publicity did adversely affect the outcome.”
“People also voted for Adlai Stevenson. That doesn’t make him president.”
“And others,” he said, ignoring that, “including a good number of attorneys, feel the evidence—almost entirely circumstantial, by the way—was not sufficient to prove Dr. Sam guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. And that’s the standard required in our courts.”
“Fine,” I said, after a sigh and another sip of rum and Coke, “but now it’s in your lap. If you have any questions about what’s on those tapes, or the other material, I’ll be in L.A. for the rest of the month. You can catch me at the Beverly Hills Hotel.”
The squint was gone but the friendly smile worried me almost as much. “Well,” he said, with a tiny shrug, “I know you have to check in with the A-1 branch there, time to time.”
“There will be some of that. But I’m also planning to pry my son loose from my ex-wife and have a little fun. We haven’t been to Disneyland yet.”
“How old is Sam now?”
“Eight.” Like he was interested.
Now he got a sly look going, with a pipe stuck in it, puffing away like the Little Engine That Could.
“Did you really think, Nate, that all I had in mind was recruiting you as a delivery boy?”
Bravo jumped down, sensing trouble.
I said, “Well, one can always hope.”
The sly look disappeared and something as grave as the expression on a judge, about to pronounce a sentence of death, came over the pudgy face. “Do I have to tell you that the polygraph test we really need our four experts to administer is of Sam Sheppard himself?”
“It’s the obvious next step,” I said. I wiggled a forefinger at him. “But that sounds like where you come in.”
He nodded. What is it about a nod from a guy puffing a pipe that gives it extra weight?
“I have to approach the warden where Dr. Sam is incarcerated,” he said, “to request the test. He’s likely to say no—he wouldn’t want every prisoner in the place to start asking for such testing—but that’s where I have to start.”
“Then what? The governor?”
Another weighty nod. “The governor of the great state of Ohio is almost certainly where we’ll end up. He can make it happen.”
“Frankly, Erle, I’m not sure I see where you’re going. Like I said, lie tests are inadmissible. Remember?”
“Of that I’m well aware. But if Sheppard passes, then the Court of Last Resort will throw all its resources at the case. And, remember—in a situation like this, it’s the public who ultimately pushes the legal system into doing the right thing.”
“The real Court of Last Resort.”
He jabbed the air with the pipe tip, putting a period on my sentence. “Precisely. Of course, it would be nice to have something to back up these polygraph results.”
“Such as?”
“Some fresh investigatory results.”
Which was where I came in.
“You want me to go to Cleveland,” I said, “and dig into this thing.”
He smiled just a little. It was disarmingly boyish coming from such a grandfatherly type. “Why, are you volunteering, Nate? Don’t you have enough crime on your hands already?”
“Don’t you?”
The boyish look left. “I’m not some commanding officer, who tells a man to volunteer. I understand you’re busy, and this is pro bono work, much of it coming out of your own pocket.”
I waved that off. “No, I volunteer, all right.”
That made him blink. Not an easy thing to do with this guy. “You do? I was expecting to have to do some arm-twisting.”
“Actually, Erle,” I said, regretting only a postponement of the Disneyland visit with my son, “I’ve been interested in this thing from the start.”
Another blink! “Really?” he asked. “Why is that?”
I shrugged. Two dogs, a chipmunk and a coyote looked at me, intrigued. “The murder happened in the early morning hours of July 4, 1954—correct?”
“Correct.”
I shrugged. “Well, I was there.”
“Where?”
“Cleveland. But to be specific, I was in that house—the murder house—later that morning.”
Gardner’s eyebrow climbed.
“Nate,” he said, “if I were writing this? This is where I’d end the chapter.”
CHAPTER
2
In years to come Cleveland would be known as “the Mistake on the Lake,” but in July 1954 it was still “the Best Location in the Nation.”
The latter designation had been coined in 1944 by a PR guy working for the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company, in a longer, uncapitalized version that included “for many industries.” The Cleveland papers trimmed the slogan to what was a familiar one for years—especially in the early 1950s, as the seventh-largest city in the United States enjoyed an economic boom fueled by such civic projects as a rapid transit system, a lakefront airport and a thousand miles of street and highway lighting. Flourishing fossil fuels, steel and textiles, with exports racking up record sales, turned Cleveland into one of the world’s great industrial centers.
In 1947 my friend Eliot Ness ran for mayor of Cleveland. He’d been a popular and highly publicized public safety director there in the ’30s, in charge of the police and fire departments, youngest in the nation to hold such a post, continuing a kick-the-door-down crime-busting style he’d begun in Chicago as one of the key feds who put Al Capone away. But that hadn’t kept him from getting his butt handed to him in the 1947 mayoral race.
In 1944, he left law enforcement to be chairman of the board of Diebold; soon he and his third wife, Betty, were living among other business executives in Bratenahl, an exclusive area on the east side of Cleveland. When I visited him ten years later, he was still on the east side, but in a modest bungalow on Ford Avenue. He’d been shown the door by Diebold in ’51 and, since then, his fortunes could be said to have fallen.
He’d been doing whatever it took to support his wife and son—electronics parts wholesaler, bookstore clerk, and frozen hamburger salesman.
“This is going to be the next big thing,” Eliot said.
He was talking about home alarm systems, which he was hoping to get the Cleveland police to help him promote. We were sitting at the kitchen table in his small house, which was crowded with the expensive contemporary furnishings of his former spacious digs. The glass-topped dining room table and its chairs were white wrought iron and looked like money.
Wife Betty was a good cook and vivacious hostess, a lovely apple-cheeked dark-haired gal who wore a crisp yellow-and-white dress as she served us up. She had a certain elegance about her, and seemed to adore Eliot. But I noticed a tiny frown that disappeared as quickly as it came, when Eliot sp
oke with enthusiasm of this latest “big thing.”
Eliot may not have shared his wife’s elegance, but he still dressed well: dark tailored suit, light-color tie snugged in place, hair trimmed and neat. But the man sitting across from me was not the lean lawman I’d known so well in Chicago, twenty years ago. His puffy face might have belonged to a man of sixty-five. He was about fifty.
I was staying in the guest room of the three-bedroom house. Eliot had asked me to come. He had called me at my A-1 office in Chicago and invited me for a visit.
The voice I knew so well said, “Come celebrate the Fourth with Betty and Bobby and me.”
It was July second.
“Can it wait? I was flying out today to see my son.”
“You tell me. I have news about our friend in Sandusky.”
I said, “See you tomorrow.”
Our friend in the Sandusky Soldiers and Sailors Home was one Lloyd Watterson, the so-called “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run,” the Jack the Ripper of Cleveland in the ’30s. Eliot and I had caught him, and subjected him to Leonarde Keeler’s lie detector; but Lloyd’s influential father had pressured the then public safety director to allow a quiet institutional commitment rather than a highly public arrest and trial.
Years later we learned Watterson had been signed in voluntarily, and was taking holidays that sometimes seemed to include murder. One of these was a famous one in Los Angeles that I had worked, calling in Eliot to stop the Butcher again, and return him to a padded cell. With Lloyd’s father now deceased, these homicidal holidays should have stopped.
Apparently they hadn’t.
But Eliot hadn’t said a word about why he’d invited me since I’d arrived by car late afternoon. We enjoyed his lovely wife’s company—their adopted son, an eight-year-old in glasses, was shy—and Eliot and I spent the evening in his tiny study, listening on the radio to the Indians beat the White Sox five to four, while Betty and Bobby watched television in the living room.
There was no Cleveland/Chicago rivalry between Eliot and me, because I was strictly a fight fan—both baseball and football left me cold. My host, however, was an all-around sports fiend—I was convinced he’d gone to the University of Chicago chiefly for the football tickets.
Through all this he said not a word about the Butcher.
When the game was over, I followed Eliot into the living room where he told Betty he and I were going out for a few drinks to “talk some business.” She merely smiled and returned her gaze to the TV. A movie was on—Strange Holiday, appropriately enough. Bobby was already off to bed.
This was the University Circle area, near Case Western Reserve University and various museums and parks, with a lagoon bordering a long parkway. We had to drive a while, in Eliot’s 1950 dark blue Ford convertible, to find a bar. I had to smile when we turned onto Mayfield Road to do so—Eliot had run a good share of the old Mayfield Road Mob out of town back in his public safety days.
The little working-class joint was hopping—Saturday night with July Fourth around the corner. The cigarette smoke hung like London fog and a jukebox gave out with “Sh-Boom,” to which younger couples were slowly rock-and-rolling.
We got lucky and snagged a booth in back to tuck into. A pretty, pretty bored waitress took our orders—a rum and Coke for me, and a Manhattan for Eliot, “With Cutty Sark, please.” When the drinks came and we’d sampled them, Eliot reached into his inside coat pocket and withdrew a handful of what appeared to be postcards.
“You may recall,” he said, “me telling you, some years ago, that I got the occasional taunting missive from our friend Lloyd Watterson.”
“I do.”
“Well, they’ve started again.”
He spread them out before me, five postcards, like a demented poker hand. One—addressed to “Eliot. Am. Big. U-Ness” at the Union Commerce Building, where he kept his office—had a pasted-on newspaper clipping of an advertisement for five pansy plants for twenty-five cents with an oddly sinister floral image and printed remarks about “good cheer” and “spring.”
More overtly sinister was a card with a clipped ad for Handbook for Poisoners, and a message about Eliot’s “paranoidal nemesis” catching up with him one day. Another, from “your mental defective,” was mostly a clipping of a rustic comedian in a tugged-down hat sticking out his tongue.
A card with no pasted-on image was addressed to “Eliot Direct-Um Ness,” with rambling thoughts about “the eminence of the Reaper” and seeing Eliot in an appeals court one day (though there had never been a trial). A photo from the recent film Riot in Cell Block 11 depicted two angry prisoners behind bars on a card addressed to “Eliot (Head-Man) Ness,” a grisly joke since the Butcher’s victims were often left headless.
One Cell Block 11 prisoner was actor Neville Brand, who like Audie Murphy was a highly decorated soldier in World War II; Brand would one day memorably play Al Capone on The Untouchables TV show.
Of course neither of us knew that; it was in the future—five years from now.
I asked, “Has Betty seen these?”
He nodded. “Since these came to me at work, I considered withholding them. But, damnit—she has a right to know. These are threats to our family! I’ve played them down, but…”
I was sorting through, reading them. “Nothing here that would impress the police.”
“Nothing at all.”
“But as long as he’s locked up good and tight—”
“He isn’t.”
“Hell you say.”
Eliot sighed as he gathered the cards up and tucked them away. “You’ll recall I got Lloyd committed to a veterans hospital in Michigan, after we coraled him in L.A. But about a year later, I’ve learned, he was back at the Soldiers and Sailors Home. And with his father dead, he can sign himself out.”
“Any indication he might be up to his old tricks?”
My friend’s nod came slow. “One recent murder here in town has the Butcher’s fingerprints … but not literal ones … all over it—last year, a body cut up exactly like the torso victims turned up on the East Side.”
“The East Side as in … this East Side? The where-you-live East Side?”
He gulped some of his Manhattan, then nodded again. “A vacant lot within walking distance of my place. Witnesses reported seeing a man matching Watterson’s description near the crime scene.”
I swirled my glass of rum and Coke. “We should have buried him in the desert like I said.”
“You’re telling me.”
Doris Day was singing “Secret Love” on the jukebox and couples were clutching to it. You could have sliced the smoke in here and sold it for bacon.
I sighed. “So what do we do about it? We kind of lost our chance back in L.A.”
“I still have some standing in this town, and you’ve got a national reputation in the detective business. We request an audience with the director of Soldiers and Sailors and make our case that Lloyd be recommitted, with no ability to sign himself out. I have a couple of Cleveland dicks who will join us.”
I was already nodding. “Sign me up.”
A smile twitched on Eliot’s lips. I could see the old warhorse still in there somewhere.
Then the smile vanished and he said, “But, uh … nothing to Betty about this, at least not till we arrange a hearing. I don’t want her getting tied up in knots over it.”
He had drained his glass.
“You know,” he said, “I could use another drink.”
My glass was empty, too. “You know, so could I.”
* * *
The plan had been to sleep in, so when Eliot shook me gently awake in his guest room, what I said was, “What the hell time is it?”
“Quarter to seven.”
“Little early for fireworks, isn’t it?”
“Apparently not. Get dressed. There’s been a murder.”
My first thought, typically cynical, was in a town Cleveland’s size, there’s always a murder. But Eliot’s grave expression mad
e saying that out loud inadvisable.
“Suit and tie,” he said, as he went out.
So this wasn’t an early morning holiday event.
When I got to the kitchen, he had coffee going and was writing something, leaning over the counter to do so. Looking over his shoulder, I saw he was leaving Betty a note that he’d be back soon but not to wait breakfast.
We both threw down some coffee and then were in the Ford convertible. We seemed to be heading downtown, but I was no expert on Cleveland geography. The open air was riffling our hair, hats on the backseat floor so as not to blow away. It was early enough to be almost cool. Traffic was light—people were in church or just lazing around till parades and hot dogs and firecrackers kicked in.
“Remember that little cottage Edna and I lived in?” he asked, in what seemed a non sequitur.
Edna had been wife number one. She’d been his secretary in Chicago days.
“On Lake Erie? Your pal Chamberlin rented it for you, right?”
“Right. A woman’s been brutally murdered in the house next door, just west of there. Past that park.”
“Jesus. Anyone you know?”
He shook his head. “I knew the people who lived there before this young Sheppard couple and their boy moved in.”
A sick feeling came over me. “… Is it the Butcher?”
“That’s one reason we’re taking a look. All I know is it’s a savage thing—butchery if not the Butcher.”
“Last I looked,” I said, lifting an eyebrow, talking over the wind the Ford was rustling up, “you weren’t a cop anymore.”
He gave me a quick sideways glance. “You remember Frank Cullitan?”
“Sure. Prosecutor you worked with. He was in on the Harvard Club raid.”
“Right, and plenty else. Well, he’s still county prosecutor, has been for all this time. He asked me to have a look at the crime scene.”
We drove a while, or anyway Eliot did. When we got to the downtown, I think I saw tumbleweed blowing through.
Do No Harm Page 2
