Do No Harm

by Max Allan Collins

“They’re mostly volunteering their time?”

  “That’s right.” His pipe was out and he relit it, puffing it back to life. “At least in here … I can do something constructive … with myself and education … and get some regular exercise.” The pipe bowl was glowing again. “I do five hundred push-ups a day. Spend a lot of time lifting weights—a person has to know how to defend himself in a place like this.”

  “Have you had problems? With your notoriety—”

  “When I first got here,” he said, with a flicker of smile, “they marched me down to chow, and a con yelled out something like, ‘Tell us about that broad you were shacked up with.’ I merely smiled and said, ‘Some things a gentleman doesn’t discuss in public.’ I got quite a laugh from everyone on that, getting me off to a good start.”

  “And now you’re one of the boys?”

  He frowned, though his voice remained calm. “Not really. I could never speak the language of the professional criminal. I have no bank robberies or holdups to reminisce about, after all.”

  “I guess not.”

  He shrugged. “So I’ve staked out a position as a loner, what they call a ‘solid square’ inside. Someone who can keep his mouth shut—no danger to my fellow inmates.”

  “Not a squealer.”

  “Not a squealer. You learn to stay away from the rapists and child molesters, because they are more likely to be informers—finks. Punks. Badasses and motherfuckers, as I’ve come to know them.” He gave a little comic shudder. “The language in stir is not for the delicate of nature.”

  “Neither is prison life in general.”

  “Exactly right. An individual must learn to withstand the indignities administered by sadistic guards, the constant clanging of bells and slamming of iron doors, the long, sleepless nights that come if you allow yourself to think. It’s difficult to hold up under the loneliness, Nate.” He sighed some smoke. “To suffer the lack, frankly, of female companionship.”

  My smirk had scant humor in it. “Plenty of prisoners find another form of companionship.”

  An eyebrow went up. “If that is your way of introducing the subject of homosexuality, let me say right now that I do not indulge. If anything, I am known as a protector of young men, not their defiler.”

  “How so?”

  He shrugged. “Well, take the time an immature young newcomer was threatened by a burly Negro—either satisfy him sexually or get beaten with a hammer. I told the Negro in no uncertain terms to lay off the boy. He laughed at me—he was bigger than I, younger than I, too.”

  “How did you handle it?”

  He gave me half a smile. “I sucker-punched him and used karate on the back of his neck. He dropped like a bag of cement.”

  That oddly recalled the way Sheppard said he’d been knocked to the floor when he ran to help his screaming wife.

  “As I say,” he went on with unconcealed pride, “I keep in shape to be able to handle myself in these circumstances. I participate in most of the prison sports—basketball … I’m a hell of a point guard even now … and I’m chief trainer for the football team. Play baseball, and of course wrestle. I wrestled in high school and college, you know.”

  “You seem to have a very positive attitude,” I said, “considering.”

  “My strength comes from my family. From the support my brothers give me. You know, my mother killed herself within days of my guilty verdict. Shot herself. And my father died, oh, a week later—of cancer they say, but really of a broken heart. This sorrow has only brought Steve and Dick and myself closer together. And I console myself with the thoughts of the many happy years of my marriage, when we led the best of lives.”

  He nodded toward the framed photographs of his wife and son on the bedside table. “Even in my cell, I kept Marilyn’s picture, and Chip’s, prominently displayed.”

  That struck me as an odd way to put it. Like his handshake, that was trying a little too hard.

  “A normal person,” he said, “has to work to stay sane under these conditions. Take this hospital—the first-floor ward, used for quarantine of new ‘guests,’ makes no allowance for cross-contamination. Nor does the tuberculosis ward, which is on the same floor as surgery and two surgical wards. Madness!”

  “And yet you seem to have preserved your own sanity.”

  Nodded. Puffed. “I have. But it’s a struggle. I once had a prison bureaucrat advise me, confidentially of course, to let a prisoner die after a stabbing incident. Because he deserved it, I was told.”

  “And?”

  “And I refused! It would be a violation of my medical oath—to do no harm. Another of these public servants asked me to plant drugs in a prisoner’s mattress! The object? To have a guard find the contraband and throw the uncooperative convict in the ‘hole.’”

  “You have access to narcotics?”

  He nodded. “And that sometimes puts me at odds with other male nurses, who steal morphine to use or sell, primarily to jockers who want to bait young men into homosexuality.”

  A jocker, in prison lingo, did the “pitching,” a queen “the catching.”

  “Of course I don’t squeal on them,” he said with a one-shoulder shrug. “That just isn’t done. But they soon learn I’ll slug them senseless if I spot them filching narcotics. They’ll switch much-needed medicine with a syringe of distilled water! Unconscionable.”

  Time to get into more pertinent matters.

  I said, “You understand that Erle Gardner and his Court of Last Resort, and that includes Argosy magazine, are not taking a position on your guilt or innocence.”

  “Understood. This is about the undeniable unfairness of my trial, and the Roman holiday the press had at my expense.”

  “Yes. But a key component of Gardner’s effort is getting you a polygraph test—are you comfortable with that?”

  “Hell, I insist upon it!”

  “Yet you refused a lie detector test when you were first being investigated.”

  He waved that off. “Of course I did. That test would have been conducted by the Cleveland authorities, in a climate of public clamor for my arrest. How could I trust them under such circumstances?”

  “You’ll sign a waiver for a test by the same experts who questioned your brothers and their wives?”

  “Absolutely. Wholeheartedly, unhesitatingly. I’ll abide by whatever their examination and conclusion might show.”

  “You’d risk that?”

  He gestured with pipe in hand. “To a guilty man, it could spell catastrophe. For an innocent man, there’s no risk—it’s a godsend. Mr. Heller … Nate. I was just the ‘logical suspect,’ though little of what was said about me was logical at all. For example, that I might have killed my wife and then, in remorse, thrown myself, head first, off the beach house landing, to kill myself.”

  “Well, isn’t that possible?”

  His eyes flared. “It’s absurd! Me, a medical man, seeking a means of self-destruction, would choose that as the method? It’s second only to the ridiculous notion that a doctor, committing homicide, would use a bludgeon.”

  “But you were a husband found alone in a house with a murdered wife. You were, forgive me, the textbook logical suspect.”

  “To a lazy constabulary, perhaps!” He pointed at me with the pipe. “Within two hours after I was taken to the hospital, two hours, witnesses heard Coroner Gerber loudly express the opinion that I was the murderer of my wife.”

  I knew this was the truth—I was one of those witnesses. But I saw no benefit to telling Sheppard I’d been in his house that morning.

  “Since you’re not from Ohio, Mr. Heller, you probably aren’t aware that Coroner Gerber was a highly publicized player in regard to the so-called Torso Murders that plagued Cleveland for years on end. A dozen or more slayings, never solved. So embarrassing for him. Is it any wonder the watchword of the Sheppard investigation was ‘wrap this one up fast!’”

  “How soon did you realize that?”

  He let out a small, hollow
laugh. “Well, I was in my hospital bed, a few hours later, when both the coroner and two Cleveland detectives questioned me at length. I complied freely and completely, as best I could in my dazed state … even though one of the detectives began with, ‘I believe you killed your wife.’”

  I shrugged. “The best remedy for that—to your entire situation, Dr. Sheppard … Sam … is to find the real killer. What are your suspicions?”

  His pipe had gone out again. He got it going while his forehead tightened in thought. Finally, he said, “You’re right to say ‘suspicions,’ because I have no single answer to this question of questions.”

  I nodded. “Has the picture of the intruder, the ‘form’ you encountered and struggled with, grown any sharper in your mind, over time?”

  He nodded back. “Somewhat. I’d say he was on the stocky side, medium build, average height. His head was large, his hair dark and unruly.”

  “The ‘bushy-haired man.’”

  “Yes. I have a sense that his features were either heavy or coarse, or that he was unshaven. Not a beard, but a day’s growth, which makes sense in the early morning hours. But this was in the semi-gloom, remember. He wore a white or light-hued upper garment and dark trousers. Whether this was the white blur of the form I saw hovering over Marilyn, I couldn’t say.”

  “Because there may have been two of them.”

  “There may have been two.” His eyebrows went up and the pipe was in his teeth. “My brother Steve seems convinced I saw Marshall Dodge and his wife, Mildred, in my wife’s bedroom that night … or rather morning. That the reason the Dodges’ telephone number came to mind, in my frazzled state, was my subconscious speaking.”

  “Why the Dodges?”

  A sigh of smoke. “Well, not long after Marilyn’s funeral, Marsh and Mildred Dodge invited Steve over to their house for a gathering of my friends who, Marsh said, wanted to help ‘my cause.’ The friends included a former FBI agent whose idea of helping was to tell Steve I should confess. That if I did so, I would likely be charged with manslaughter, not murder, and have the full support of these … these great friends. Steve left mightily irritated, thinking Marsh calling this meeting seemed highly suspicious. Why hadn’t Marsh, as mayor, summoned the police when he first got my call? Why did he haul his wife along to a murder scene? And why go unarmed, when a killer might be somewhere about the premises?”

  “Dodge seems an unlikely suspect,” I admitted. I had met Dodge, who was an older man, heavy and unattractive in a Droopy Dog kind of way.

  Sheppard’s eyes narrowed. “Spen and Marilyn were very friendly—he was a kind of father figure to her. You know, Marilyn was in the first grade when her mother died, and she and her father were never terribly close.”

  “How does that make Dodge a suspect?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t say he is. That’s Steve talking. Marsh and I were friends—had a boat together. He used it for fishing, and I used it for waterskiing, mostly. Of course, he and Mildred did do us kind of dirty in court.”

  “You mean Dodge claiming that your brother asked you if you had anything to do with the murder.”

  “Right. Which was either a lie or perhaps he misheard something. And Mildred claimed in her testimony I told her that head injuries were easily faked. Which was a lie, too, unless I’m just not remembering. Why would that even come up?”

  I let some air out. “I don’t see a motive.”

  “I don’t really, either. The idea of Marilyn having an affair with Marsh? Just doesn’t tally. Oddly, though, he did have something of a reputation as a ladies’ man.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, he did. I believe he ran around on Mildred … and if you’ve seen her, who could blame him? And I know he would come over from his butcher shop and have coffee with Marilyn, and deliver meat to her.”

  If the double entendre of that had occurred to him, he didn’t show it.

  “Somebody,” I said, “committed this murder. You must have some ideas.”

  The eyebrows went up again. “Well … my friend Lucas Hardmann was staying with us. He had the guest room. I was trying to help him get on staff at Bay View. He was something of a … well, you’d have to say a rounder. He would encourage me to stray, actually. Talk about the kind of fun he and I could have, out on the prowl. Y’see, he knew Marilyn had become, uh, frigid after Chip’s birth. Funny thing, though—he seemed to have a thing for her himself.”

  “For your wife?”

  He smirked. “Well, I never really noticed it, but Marilyn would complain to me that Luke would flirt with her, get ‘handsy,’ as they say … make a play for her, now and then. She said she rebuffed him, but … well.”

  “Is it credible he did that? Came on to her?”

  “Maybe. But it’s more likely she was just trying to get me riled up with Luke, so that I wouldn’t see him or have him stay over. Luke is kind of a slob, and Marilyn liked things neat. She once said he ‘repulsed’ her.”

  “He was out of town the night of the third and morning of the fourth.”

  A nod. “He was. Visiting Paul Robinson in Kent. Paul’s a doctor, too.”

  “How far away is Kent from Bay Village?”

  “Oh, thirty miles, give or take.”

  Not much of a drive.

  I asked, “What sort of doctor is Robinson?”

  A shrug. “General practitioner. He was an intern at Bay View for a while. I’m not exactly his favorite person.”

  “Why’s that?”

  His smile was vaguely embarrassed. “Oh, well … he and Sharon Kern were engaged for a while.”

  I sat forward. “What? Was this Robinson her fiancé before your affair with the Kern woman began?”

  “Uh. Before and, uh, after, actually.”

  I was shaking my head. “Why didn’t this come out at the trial?”

  “It just didn’t. What importance could it have?”

  “Are you kidding? A houseguest who has the hots for your wife goes off for an overnight with your mistress’s ex-fiancé? Half an hour or so away? On the night of your wife’s damn murder?”

  “I’m sure Luke and Paul were talked to.”

  Well, they would be.

  “Anyway, it’s much more likely,” he said, “that Marilyn was killed by a stranger. Our beach is easily accessed from the nearby park. My wife was a lovely girl. She went swimming and waterskiing, and in the summer wore sexy little shorts and tops. Some sick soul may have admired her, watched her, frankly lusted for her.”

  “And just traipsed into your house and killed her.”

  Sheppard leaned forward. “No. Let’s say he’d been watching her. He sees her at the door saying good night to our guests. No sign of me. And it was well known that I was a doctor and frequently away from the house on calls. He enters through the unlocked door. He goes in with a flashlight, doesn’t see me sleeping on the daybed, tucked against the stair wall. Heads upstairs to find Marilyn, perhaps with a flashlight in hand.…”

  He lowered his head.

  “You can guess the rest,” he said softly.

  The intruder pulls down her pajamas, they bunch at one knee, her other leg bare, pushes up her top over her breasts, tries to begin his assault but she fights back. He puts a hand over her mouth and she bites down, hard—two pieces of her teeth are found in the bed. His perverse passion turns to rage and he wields the flashlight like a club, again and again and again.…

  “And you rush to help Marilyn,” I said, “and the bushy-haired man does battle with you.”

  Several nods. “Several witnesses saw such a man, remember, in the A.M. hours of the Fourth.”

  “But he doesn’t have to be a stranger,” I said. “He could be a neighbor or friend, who’d watched Marilyn and longed for her.”

  He gestured with the pipe and smoke curled in a near question mark. “It’s possible. Marilyn was a warm person. She would treat a deliveryman as a friend. There was a window washer she struck up a friendship with, for exam
ple.”

  “Do you know his name?”

  “No.” He shrugged. “There were many such persons.”

  “We only need to find the right one,” I said.

  CHAPTER

  5

  On either side of Euclid Avenue, the sprawling yet cluttered Western Reserve University, where many former residences served as college buildings, had few of the endless lawns and tree-sheltered lanes of most campuses. With Wade Park at the west, University Circle did have its share of elms, and some typical limestone and sandstone structures, among which the modern two-story bunker of a building of the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office seemed an anomaly.

  Several statues were nearby—one of Marcus Alonzo Hanna, who got President McKinley nominated, another of Louis Kossuth, a Hungarian statesman whose bronze likeness Clevelanders of that descent honored with an annual patriotic display. Near the university hospitals, the Coroner’s Center (as it was nicknamed) similarly honored Dr. Samuel R. Gerber, not with a statue but an edifice, housing a modern crime lab, X-ray and photographic facilities, and an up-to-the-minute autopsy room. Oh, and—almost as a footnote—a refrigerated room with cubicles for dead people coming and going.

  I found Dr. Gerber in the auditorium, where he was wrapping up a lecture on homicide investigation to a packed house of students. The Coroner’s Center was also a teaching institution, enlisting as an instructor the nationally known medical examiner whose work on the Torso Murders and the Sam Sheppard case had made him a star. That one of these famous criminal cases was unsolved, and the other questionably solved, seemed beside the point.

  “Remember what Sherlock Holmes said,” the little man with the big voice intoned as he leaned against his podium. “‘Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth.’ That’s all for today. You have your assignments.”

  The young men and women—a good number in this amphitheater—began to file out. I eased my way down the stairs past them, admiring a coed or two (or twelve) and took a seat in the front row. Gathering his notes and books, the small figure, who loomed only because of the riser with podium, wore a white lab coat and might have been your family doctor.