Do No Harm

by Max Allan Collins

  Why, should he have done otherwise?

  “His responses were non-informative and inconclusive,” Seltzer said, waving that off, disrupting his cigar smoke. “So I published a page-one editorial—wrote it myself—headlined ‘Somebody Is Getting Away with Murder.’”

  “And you kept at it, I understand.” I didn’t allow any disapproval into my tone.

  “Oh, yes! The next headline was ‘Why No Inquest, Dr. Gerber?’ I admit feeling a little bit bad about calling out Sam Gerber like that—we’re good friends, as you may know. But a newsman must do what newsmen must do.”

  “And then Gerber called an inquest.”

  Flash of a smile. “He did! How much do you know about that?”

  “Not much,” I admitted. “Just that it was held in a high school auditorium with a full audience and a lot of press, and that Sheppard lied under oath about the affair with the Kern woman. And didn’t Gerber throw Sheppard’s lawyer out?”

  Seltzer nodded vigorously. “He did, and rightly so. Corrigan was causing trouble. It wasn’t a trial—it was a damn inquest! That shyster had no right making objections and causing trouble. After that, my next editorial was headed ‘Quit Stalling—Bring Him In.’ And Gerber and the Cleveland PD did just that. Put him in handcuffs and hauled him away, like the murderer he is.”

  I shifted in the chair, crossing my other leg. “You’ve been praised for your role in the Sheppard case, in some quarters. But in others—”

  “We … I … have been vilified. Yes, as I said at the outset, some view me as the bad guy in this yarn. I’m well aware that the Press and I have been criticized by those who believe we ‘tried’ the case in our pages before it got to a courtroom. That we inflamed public opinion.”

  That made him laugh and shake his head.

  “Well,” I said, risking a raised eyebrow, “even the Ohio Supreme Court, when they turned down Sheppard’s appeal? Remarked on the ‘Roman holiday’ atmosphere the media brought to the party.”

  He took in cigar smoke, let it out quickly. “I know that better than anyone. And when the United States Supreme Court declined to review Dr. Sam’s case, Justice Frankfurter raised the question of whether the defendant had been denied a fair trial because of that.”

  So this was something he had given real thought to.

  “But,” he said, lifting a forefinger, “both courts refused the appeal. Don’t forget that.”

  “No,” I said, nodding. “And my job is to find new evidence, not raise this old issue. Which is why I wanted to assure you of the impartiality of this investigation.”

  Now he was nodding. “And I appreciate that. Understand, Nate, that my philosophy, where the newspaper business is concerned, rests on the ultimate best interests of my community. To help it grow and prosper, and fight those things that are harmful to it. To do battle to make the community a better place to live.”

  I gave him a bland smile. “Well, that sounds just fine.”

  He turned to the window with Lake Erie in its view. His voice grew reflective.

  “A newspaper,” he said, “is properly concerned about the state of law enforcement in its community, and cannot permit a protective wall to go up, shielding a murderer by saying or doing nothing. We must move in with all our heavy artillery.” He turned back to me and his smile and nod were dismissive. “Now … I have a paper to get out.”

  He gestured toward the door, and turned to his typewriter on its stand, and started right in, clickety-clacking. Perhaps he had an editorial to write, if he had any juice left after all the editorializing he’d subjected me to.

  Louis Seltzer was a guy who, if he got his balls in an uproar, could shake the walls of City Hall like Sampson in a bad mood. If you were chief of police, or the mayor, you wanted to keep Louis Seltzer happy.

  Even I wanted to keep him happy, at least temporarily.

  I went through the endless newsroom to the elevator and down to the parking garage. As my footsteps echoed, my mind pondered.

  This was a dangerous man. I hoped I’d kissed enough ass to keep him out of my hair while I did my job in Cleveland. But this was a man who knew that taking the likes of the Sheppards down a notch was just what his blue-collar readers would relish. After all, Sam Sheppard made thirty grand a year! Seltzer had printed that in his paper.

  But not that the editor made seventy-five grand himself.

  I was getting keys out to unlock the driver’s side of the rental Chevy when I felt the finger poke in my back.

  Only it wasn’t a finger.

  Somebody besides Louis Seltzer was bringing out the heavy artillery.

  CHAPTER

  6

  Right there in the parking garage, with no one around to notice, I was escorted to another car, parked nearby—a brand-new Olds 98, white with black trim, a snazzy number I knew to have electric windows and power steering, because my partner Lou Sapperstein drove the identical model, color and all. Would have been nice if Lou had driven here to pull a practical joke, but that didn’t seem to be the case.

  Yet I couldn’t help feeling a nostalgic twinge for the days of bulgy black sedans and bent-nose gangsters who knew what they were doing.

  The three taking me for a ride—some kind of ride, anyway—were disconcertingly young. What kind of hoods wore gabardine bomber jackets, in shades of light blue and tan? Hell, there was hardly anywhere to tuck a gun.

  I was in back with the kid who had ushered me here, between him and a pudgy one, who looked like the next-door neighborhood kid on Ozzie and Harriet. Wally, was it? The kid who’d walked me over with a gun in my back had the kind of acne that would leave him pockmarked one day. When he grew up. All I saw of the driver was the back of his head, black hair shorn as close to the scalp as if a military base barber were responsible.

  In fairness, none of them—and I had soon glimpsed the narrow, slit-eyed, sharp-jawed driver’s face in his rearview mirror, cigarette dangling from tight lips—was really a kid. They were at least mid-twenties and maybe more. But I was a guy in his fifties and guys this young were dangerous. I would have to pick my moment carefully.

  I said, pleasantly, conversationally, to the pockmarked junior hood, “Where are we headed?”

  “Somewhere,” he said in a high-pitched, Henry Aldrich-ish way.

  Coming, Mother!

  It would really piss me off to be killed by brats like these.

  Really, though, I was the one who deserved a spanking. This was a murder case, a not fresh one admittedly, but one of my standard rules was to always carry my nine-millimeter Browning under my arm in any murder case. Murder cases, after all, always had murderers in them.

  The barrel of what proved to be a snubnose .38 was jammed in my side now.

  I said, “Do us both a favor. Take that gun out of my side. Whoever you’re doing this for wouldn’t like me getting killed here in the car.”

  He thought about that, for a sullen few seconds, keeping the snout of the pistol poked in me, then withdrew it but still kept it pointed at me. A snubnose is kind of an insult. A little toy-looking thing that can kill you.

  “Don’t point that at me,” I said sternly. “Don’t point it at anybody. Aim it there, why don’t you?”

  I nodded toward the empty rider’s seat up front.

  His pimply brown forehead tightened, and he seemed to be about to argue with me, when Wally, also with a high-pitched voice, said, “He’s right. Careful with that.”

  This told me something interesting. These punks were not workaday hoods, used to carrying guns. Mob guys, even the Junior Varsity, weren’t as inclined these days to go around packing heat all the time, as we senior citizens put it. But I had a hunch hauling any kind of hardware was not a usual thing with this trio.

  In a way, that made them more dangerous. Getting accidentally killed is still dead. Having some spooked amateur shoot you still puts a bullet somewhere.

  The drive my new friends and I had made from the Press building and the Playhouse Square theater
district was less than ten minutes, but we were in another world—the world of the Flats.

  To some, the Cleveland Flats, situated on the bottomland of the river’s floodplain, was an industrial wonder—shipyards, foundries, oil refineries, chemical plants, lumberyards, flour mills. To me, the Flats would always be a hellish collection of gin joints and warehouses, where sailors and working men wandered in a dank, dark world lit by flickering neon and open flames from gas runoff, the silence broken by honky-tonk music and the fingernails-on-blackboard screeches of factories across the river. Some of these dives dated back to the turn of the century, piles of brick held together by sweat, sawdust and swill.

  We pulled in the alley behind one such establishment, the Harbor Inn, a dingy dive loomed over by the Center Street Swing Bridge on the west bank of the Cuyahoga River. Wally politely held the car door open for me and his pockmarked pal nudged me inside with the snubnose. The driver took up the rear, after parking against the side of the building behind some garbage cans.

  We were in a back room, or anyway the middle of one, within a fortress of stacked cartons of beer and booze. The floorboards creaked like whining women and the ceiling was high and ornate, peeling light brown paint, like the ugliest suntan in history, set off by one long dangling light bulb, which was already switched on as we came in. A small square table was centerstage, with four chairs around it, as if waiting for somebody to show up with a deck of cards.

  On that table, though, was a coil of clothesline, which suggested someone might get tied up with it. Maybe someone who was going to get worked over. That was good news of a sort, because nobody hauls you into the back room of a working bar to kill you. There were plenty of places, indoors and out, to do that in the Flats. But this wasn’t one of them.

  Still, I was in no mood to be tied up. I was in no mood to be questioned by a trio of somewhat grown-up Dead End Kids at all, even if clothesline wasn’t involved. I quickly got my bearings.

  The table was between me and a pathway through stacked boxes to a door, apparently into the bar, from which bled rock ’n’ roll—“All Shook Up.” Jukebox, of course. I didn’t figure the Harbor Inn could afford Elvis Presley. Standing half-blocking that path was the driver. He was wearing a blue car coat with a grinning red Cleveland Indians “Chief Wahoo” patch; also jeans and tennies. The rearview-mirror glimpse hadn’t revealed that the close-cropped black hair was part of a crew cut.

  Were hoods these days getting young or was I growing old? Don’t answer that.

  Behind me was Henry Aldrich with the .38 in my back, and over to my left, by the table near one of the empty chairs, stood a grinning Wally. He had a hand in the pocket of his light blue bomber jacket, maybe holding a gun. He had a crew cut, too, brown-haired variety. He might have been high on booze or pills, or maybe the glassy-eyed unblinking stare was excitement or nerves or something.

  The kid edged from in back of me, at my right now, the gun pointed at my gut.

  “Sit down,” Henry said. His hair was long and blond with a Vitalis-dripping pompadour. “We’re going to talk.”

  “I can talk standing up,” I pointed out.

  “Listen, old man! I said sit down.”

  “You don’t need to tie me up,” I said reasonably. “I’m happy to answer your questions. I just don’t have any idea what it is you want to know.”

  With his free hand, he shoved me toward the waiting chair. Not hard, but making his point.

  I raised my hands, as if noticing for the first time he was armed. “All right. It’s just that you don’t need to get tough. I’m happy to cooperate.”

  Elvis said, “I’m all shook up!” and I grabbed the chair and hit Henry with it. The thing shattered into kindling, but wood is wood and it knocked him down. He wasn’t out but he was good and stunned, his hair back like a cheap wig, and I plucked the .38 from his loose grasp and took the two steps needed to reach Wally before his fumbling fingers got the gun out and I slapped him with the .38, holding it tight in a palm like the hunk of metal it was. The driver was coming at me, also with a gun out, another snubnose, and he looked scared, but that didn’t stop him. He didn’t fire his weapon, though, which I’d kind of counted on, because these imbeciles had chosen an open-for-business bar and not one of the countless warehouses in the Flats to do their roughing up and enforced questioning.

  I kicked the table at him, and it slid roughly across the slatted floor, but it did slide, and the edge of it caught him in the midsection and folded him over, till he was sprawled on it. I could smell the Butch Wax holding his hair up in front. I yanked the table back, like a magician pulling out a tablecloth without disturbing the china and silverware on it, and the driver hit the floor in a pile. His gun I kicked away, then kicked him in the head.

  Behind me bloody-faced Wally was scrambling on the floor toward his gun, which had been half out of his pocket and had fallen from his fumbling fingers onto the floor. He was like a jellyfish washed up on the beach. I kicked him in the head, too. Both he and the driver were out cold, very damn cold, and I knew a kick like that could kill somebody, but I hadn’t started this, had I?

  Henry was on the floor, like a high school girl looking for a contact lens, and what the hell, I kicked him in the head, too. They’d kidnapped me and waved guns at me and I can only take so much.

  While the Everly Brothers sang “Bye Bye, Love,” I went around gathering things—guns, car keys, billfolds. They were all asleep and breathing hard, little men who’d had a busy day. Nobody seemed dead or anything.

  In the alley I dropped two of the weapons in a garbage can, and the clunking sent some animals scurrying. Cats maybe. Or rats. After dropping one snubnose in my suitcoat pocket, I got behind the wheel of the Olds, used the key in the ignition, and drove. In a few minutes I pulled in alongside The Flat Iron Café.

  Whether the Flat Iron got its name because of its steam iron–like shape or because it resembled New York’s Flat Iron Building has been the source of pointless controversy for years. If you’re wondering how a Chicago boy knew that, I was fairly well familiar with the Flats, having done an extended job for Eliot in these environs back in 1940. The area hadn’t changed much. Neither had I, apparently; this I realized as I sat looking through the wallets I’d lifted off three younger men whose heads I kicked into unconsciousness.

  Driver’s licenses, with names that meant nothing to me, union cards, a total of three hundred and seventy-five dollars, some of which had probably been their pay for their botched mission tonight. I shoved that in my pocket, of course. But the only thing of any real interest was the business card in one wallet.

  WILLIAM J. CORRIGAN

  CIVIL AND CRIMINAL LAW

  Williamson Building

  200 Public Square

  In addition to a phone number on the front, another number in pencil was scrawled on the back. Home, most likely.

  This was starting to make a little sense, but just a little. Corrigan, Sheppard’s lawyer, had represented mob defendants any number of times, and was known around town as organized labor’s attorney. But I’d had some friendly long-distance contact with him already, so he was aware I was working with Gardner and the Court of Last Resort, with a new trial for his client the ultimate goal. He knew I had a Cleveland trip in the offing. Were those Bowery Boys somehow his welcoming committee?

  In a phone booth down the street, I fed in coins and dialed. It rang only a few times before a slightly tobacco-and-age-ravaged voice came on the line.

  “Bill Corrigan,” it announced.

  “Nate Heller.”

  “Mr. Heller! A pleasure. Are you in town?”

  “Oh, I’m in town.”

  “When can we get together, sir?”

  “Right now.”

  “Well, uh … I’m in for the evening. I don’t live in the city, you know. I have a farm, and—”

  “How soon could you get to the Flat Iron Café?”

  Everyone in Cleveland knew the Flat Iron Café.

 
“Could you give me half an hour, sir?”

  “Sure. I haven’t eaten. I’ll have a bite while I’m waiting.”

  “Splendid. Could you, uh, tell me what this pertains to, beyond the Sheppard case?”

  “Frankly, Bill, I’m not sure. You see I just took three guns off three young characters with union cards who snatched my ass and tried to grill me in back of the Harbor Inn. They’re sleeping that off, but in the meantime I’ve worked up an appetite.”

  “Oh, my lord…”

  “See you soon.”

  I hung up.

  The Flat Iron Café had begun as the stable of a four-story hotel. Many decades ago, the top two stories had caught fire, and the remaining two stories became a fabled drinking and dining spot. Odd as hell, the place was half cafeteria, half bar. Steam from the buffet trays mingled with cigar and cigarette smoke. I did as the Romans do, or the Rumanians or the Irish or what have you. I got my tray and took my place in line. I was pretty sure the size of the servings dished out to you was according to your size. I got corned beef and cabbage, with sides of boiled spuds and carrots. This was mostly a tradesman joint, iron workers, longshoremen, pipe fitters. The bar was thirty feet long, the tables banquet style. You sat by whoever you sat by. On a bench.

  I plopped down at the unpopulated end of one table, so that Corrigan and I might have a little privacy in this most un-private of establishments. I had finished my third beer and my second plate of corned beef and cabbage when a small, white-haired, bespectacled gent came in. He wore a fedora with its brim turned up and a blue vested suit with shades-of-blue striped tie. He paused inside the door just long enough to pick me out among the overalls and dungarees.

  At lunch you might see lawyers and businessmen among the working men, but this time of evening the presence of two business suits was rare. He got a few looks but no remarks; neither had I, but then my suit was a little rumpled from getting kidnapped. He hustled down the aisle between long tables, a man in his early seventies with some spring in his step that belied a time-ravaged face.