He took his hair off and set what was a Beatle wig on the walnut lamp table between us. The top of his skull now wore wispy memories of what must have once been an actual head of hair.
“Started losing it in high school,” he said, meaning his hair, but that was a little ambiguous. “I have a whole shelf of wigs and toupees, actually. Pay top dollar for ’em! Just another fashion accessory.”
Was he trying to distract me? Change the subject?
I said, “When your ‘hobby’ came to light, it was, what, about seven, eight years ago?”
He nodded, but suddenly didn’t seem to have anything else to say on the subject.
“How,” I asked, as casually as possible, “did you happen to have Marilyn Sheppard’s engagement ring? And a cocktail ring of hers? The Sheppards were clients of yours, right? Did you pick those things up while doing a job for them?”
He shook his head; no suggestion of a Beatle going for a high note now. “They were my clients. But that’s not where or how I got the rings. I’d seen the cocktail ring before, out on her dresser, when I was up there cleaning? Nice item. One diamond, surrounded by diamond chips, worth hundreds.”
“If you didn’t get it at the Sheppards’, then—”
“Oh, I got it at the Sheppards, all right … just not those Sheppards. The two rings were in a box on a shelf in the closet at Richard and Dorothy Sheppard’s place. My service did more than just clean windows, we did walls, too, including closets.”
His idea of cleaning a closet was different than mine.
He was sitting forward, his hands folded almost prayerfully in his lap. “I saw a box that said ‘Marilyn Reese Sheppard—Personal Property’ on it. Just an old cardboard box. But those rings were in there. So I took them. As a kind of … memento.”
“Of what?”
“Of her. Of Marilyn. I didn’t do the first job at Dr. Sheppard’s place, two of my boys did. But they came back saying, ‘Wow! What a dish!’ Thought I’d have a look myself, so I went over to get payment personally and she had this California look—tight little brief shorts and a very little blouse. She was immaculate, all in white. Only a few years older than me.”
“How many jobs did you do there?”
“Half a dozen. I only met Dr. Sam once. He was at the breakfast table with Chip and her. She introduced me to him and I hardly got a nod, certainly not a word, but she had me join them, sit there with them. That man was arrogant, thought he was a gift to mankind.”
“But Mrs. Sheppard was nice to you.”
“Yes, if a little … distant. Not full of herself like her husband, but she was one of those golden girls from the East Side, with the qualities of a well-groomed lady. One day, when I was working, she brought out a tray of brownies and milk onto the porch for me to share with her and Chip. It was almost like we were a little family.”
“The rings were intact? You didn’t remove the stones from their settings, which was your standard way?”
“I did remove the stone from the engagement ring, but I held on to the setting, too. The cocktail ring, like you said, I didn’t fool with. I kept the rings separate from other things I’d gathered, tucked away.”
“Why?”
He frowned. “They started to bother me. The stones had belonged to a dead girl, you know?”
“How many thefts did you admit to?”
“Oh, over a hundred. In Bay Village, Westlake, Rocky River. I talked to lots of detectives from here and there, and tried to help. One asked me why my blood was found in the Sheppard house—I learned later that was just a lucky guess. Anyway, I told them how I cut my finger taking out a storm window by the kitchen sink. When I went back to work, I inadvertently dripped blood in various parts of the Sheppard house.”
This had turned Eberling into a suspect in a supposedly solved murder. Part of why I was here was to see whether he made a better witness for the defense or suspect for the murder. The blood was key, because a trail of blood, unable to be typed, had been said by the prosecution in the first trial to be dripping from the bloody weapon as Sam Sheppard wandered about the house, in a post-homicidal haze, getting his act together.
“They wanted to do a polygraph with me,” Eberling said, “but Bay Village couldn’t afford the cost, so they tried to palm it off on Cleveland. That Coroner Gerber came and talked to me for almost four hours, and decided I was innocent and blocked the test.”
“But later Bay Village did give you a polygraph.”
“Yes, I guess they scraped the money up from somewhere. And I passed it, without a hitch. Listen, if I had been the slightest bit guilty, they would have pulled me in.”
The door opened and a slightly stocky, boyish man in amber-lens wireframes rolled in. His full, tousled hair and skimpy mustache were black, and he wore a blue-green-yellow Madras short-sleeve shirt and light blue shorts well above the knee. He had a Rolex and a tan.
“Ah see we have comp’ny,” he said in an easy Southern drawl, and walked straight to me as I stood. We shook hands—another firm, brief one. His smile was a dazzler.
“Oscar B. Henderson,” he said, “but call me Obie. Has my business partner here been chewin’ your ear off?”
Speaking of chewing, the four schnauzers had roused themselves and were bounding from the couches to dance around Obie enthusiastically, like Indians attacking a circled wagon train. Woo woo woo woo, woo woo woo woo.…
“Nathan Heller,” I said with a nod. “Doing a little pre-interview for Lee Bailey.”
“Pleased to meet you, Nathan. Dick, would you feed these girls for me, and put ’em outside? Thanks, brother.”
Eberling, saying, “Outside, outside,” led the four bearded girls down a hallway.
Obie took his partner’s chair and I sat again, too.
I said, “Richard’s been very open about his past. That’s a good thing, because we can’t have any surprises on the witness stand.”
“You might keep in mind, Nathan, that not everything my buddy tells you may be strictly true. Oh, he’s a hell of a guy, Dick—we live here together, and travel, Mexico, Ireland, Japan, throw parties together, buy property together. But there’s something you need to know—we do not have a homosexual relationship.”
“I didn’t assume that,” I lied. “Anyway, it’s none of my business.”
“Good to hear, ’cause I’m a live-and-let-live kind of guy myself.”
Eberling was coming up the hall, and apparently had heard some of that, because as his footsteps echoed, so did his voice, as he said, “Obie does the laundry, I do windows and clean. We take turns on supper. He pays utilities, I buy groceries, so there’s no money spats. We just share.”
My host pulled another brocade chair from somewhere and positioned himself in front of and between us.
“Oh, we have a tiff now and again,” Obie said, “like any couple.” He seemed to realize how that sounded, and added, “Of friends.”
“The list of women,” Eberling said, shaking his head and grinning, “who are after Obie here? It’s as long as, well, it’s long.”
Obie said, “Y’see, Nathan, we both have sadness in our pasts where the fairer sex is concerned. I was married when I was young, unhappily, and have a son who suffered for it. So that’s a road I don’t care to go down again. The girl Dick loved died tragically, in an auto accident he had.”
That must have been a road Dick didn’t want to go down again.
“So,” Obie was saying, “let people think what they will. Y’know, Nathan, just because we’re interior decorators doesn’t mean we’re a couple of faggots.”
“Not at all,” I said. “Is that what you are now—interior decorators?”
Both men nodded, but Obie said, “After Dick had that little problem with klepta-mania, his window-washin’ concern kinda went by the wayside. But he still has a way with the ladies … the older ones, widows? And cleans and does household chores for several, regularly.”
“In the meantime,” Eberling said, “we’re tak
ing on more and more interior decorating clients. This house has been our best public relations move—we’re on the Westlake Garden Club unique homes tour, and that got us all sorts of press write-ups. What was it that one columnist said, Obie?”
Obie grinned, his mustache coming along for the ride. “‘The Hermitage displays the elegance of a nineteenth-century salon.’ I think he hit ’er on the nose.”
“No argument,” I said.
We chatted some more—Eberling, as a fan of true detective magazines, had questions about various jobs of mine, and after all that he’d spilled about himself, I felt he’d earned some stories from me. They invited me to stay for lunch and I politely declined.
Obie was on his knees playing with his dancing dogs when Eberling walked me to the door.
“Nate, when do you suppose the trial will be?”
“Probably early in the fall.”
“And you think I’ll be called as a witness?”
“Good chance of it.”
After all, Lee Bailey had all but ruled him out as a suspect. Eberling had passed a lie test successfully, and no matter what Dick and Obie said, they were obviously gay. Of course it was possible one or both were bisexual, but I didn’t think so, at least not in Eberling’s case.
Marilyn Sheppard’s murder had been a sex crime, either a rape or more likely—considering the way her pajamas had been arranged—consensual sex. The way it looked to me, Richard viewed Marilyn as the mother in an idealized family, the kind denied an orphan boy. A bastard.
Richard Eberling had stolen a lot of things in that oddball life of his, but a piece of tail from another man’s wife in the early morning hours?
I didn’t think so.
CHAPTER
17
I spent Tuesday afternoon talking to several of what you might call the “bushy-haired” witnesses. These were people who had seen things in the predawn morning of July 4, 1954, that seemed to back up Sam Sheppard’s description of the intruder he claimed to have wrestled on the beach.
These included a Cleveland attorney with a client who’d seen a man running on the beach, said client having been reluctant to come forward because it would reveal a tryst with a “respectable lady” who wasn’t his wife. Imagine something like that happening in Bay Village.
A woman who’d been on a bus near Bay Village, headed east, said a nervous man with bushy hair had boarded the bus, shortly after the estimated time of Marilyn Sheppard’s murder. A husband and wife had seen a bushy-haired man alongside the road and so had a guy coming back from a fishing trip, a suspicious-looking character “six feet tall with his hair standing up.”
These individuals were so generous as to see me at my Hotel Cleveland suite and were informed this was just a preliminary meeting. Mr. Bailey or one of his legal associates would likely be speaking to them later.
Or maybe not. The nameless “bushy-haired intruder” as murder suspect did not hold much appeal to Bailey. He felt the answer lay among the Dodges, Lucas Hardmann, or Richard Eberling, and I didn’t disagree with him. Part of my mission here was to see if I could hone in on which of these suspects to like best.
The only key person I hadn’t seen this trip was Sam Sheppard himself. Of course, I had only been in Cleveland a few days, and somehow making contact over the Fourth of July weekend seemed in questionable taste. I had called that morning and left word with Ariane that I would stop by this evening, when I’d finished my interviews with the bushy-haired bunch.
“It will be good to see you,” she said, as if we were old friends when we’d only been around each other twice.
Rocky River, the western suburb beyond Bay Village, was another bedroom community, where Ariane had leased a five-room brick townhouse while Sam was still in the Ohio pen. I parked in the drive behind a purple Thunderbird—a gift to Ariane from herself, while she gave Sam her old Lincoln—and was soon going up the three steps to the small landing under a modest white overhang supported by slender pillars.
I was poised to knock when I noticed the door was ajar. Since I was expected, I pushed it open a ways and was about to call out when I saw Sam Sheppard, stretched out in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, on the living room sofa. He was out. Whether passed out or sleeping, I couldn’t tell, but the detective in me deduced the former, since a bottle of Johnnie Walker and an empty glass were on a nearby coffee table.
So was a .38 snubnose revolver.
I went in quietly. I had not been here before. As surprising as that gun had been, the real shock was the decor. Having survived Eberling and Obie’s decorating style this morning, you might think I would not be easily surprised.
You’d be wrong.
Not that the royal purple color scheme didn’t go perfectly with the eighteenth-century furnishings. How Sam could sleep, or even stay passed out, on that under-stuffed, spindly-legged shades of lavender button-tufted sofa, I couldn’t hazard a guess.
Ariane must have shipped over her favorite furnishings from Germany. In addition to the Louis XV furniture, touches included an oversized light purple vase with purple artificial flowers, and a shelf of knickknacks dominated by an ebony statue of a curvy nude woman seated in a pose with hands behind her head and elbows winged, like Marilyn Monroe’s famous calendar shot. Over the couch were two framed original paintings of Parisian beauties of a type I’d seen at George Diamond’s Steak House hanging with the Keane waif masterpieces—these were waifs who’d grown up nicely, as their big floppy chapeaus and wispy fashions showed. They were benign angels floating above the balding baby-faced man in his T-shirt and shorts with a bottle of Scotch and a .38 within reach.
Also downstairs were the kitchen and a den, both empty of Ariane or anyone else. I went upstairs where two rooms were off a short hallway. Standing open was a door to what appeared to be a guest room—framed photos of Marilyn Sheppard and son Sam Jr. (Chip) were on the wall. The furnishings here were contemporary, more 1952 Holiday Inn than eighteenth-century French. The other door was shut—presumably the master bedroom.
I knocked, very softly.
Then, my voice barely a whisper, I said, “Ariane? Ariane…?”
Nothing.
I went in. Again, the furnishings were early Holiday Inn. Only the living room was a showplace. On the bed were two yawning-open suitcases, Louis Vuitton, with their signature monogram canvas and tan leather trim; in them were piles of haphazardly folded designer dresses and such. Across from the near side of the bed were closed double slatted closet doors.
I went over and opened them. Ariane Sheppard née Tebbenjohanns was crouched on the floor under now-empty hangers. She was hugging herself as if it were cold, and the air-conditioning was doing its job, all right, but that wasn’t why she was shivering. Her big dark eyes were bigger than usual, her white hair up in a stylish beehive, her slender, shapely form in a dark blue dress with white polka dots, bare arms and a scoop neckline. Her earrings were white suspended balls, almost as big and round as her eyes. She was fully made up, her mouth a red wound.
“Nathan,” she said, shuddering, looking up at me like a puppy hoping another beating wasn’t on the way. “Nathan. What am I going to do?”
I held a hand out to her, like she was a wallflower who was lucky to have a guy offer her a dance. She got to her feet, smoothed her dress, which wasn’t a mini but showed plenty of nice tan leg, and then she came out and hugged me.
Nothing sexual about it. Well, not much, anyway. She slipped out of my arms but stayed close, and, with an arm around her waist, I led her to the double bed, where she sat on the edge, the Vuitton bags framing her.
“Looks like you’re going on a trip,” I said.
She swallowed and nodded. I found a chair somewhere and sat right before her. She reached out for one of my hands and I let her take it.
“Going home,” she said firmly but softly. “Back to Düsseldorf.”
“What does Sam think about that?”
She shook her head, the global earrings swinging. “He doesn�
�t know.”
“Are you coming back?”
She shook her head again and the earrings swung some more. “I don’t know.”
“Let me guess. You thought you’d take a hike while Sam was nice enough to be dead on his ass on the couch.”
She frowned a little. “Take a hike? Leave? Dead on his ass? Unconscious?”
“Nicely translated from the semiliterate to actual English. Why don’t you tell me about it?”
Her eyes narrowed and she shared a secret: “He’s been drinking.”
“Really.”
She nodded. “Pills, too. He’s been irrational. A maniac!”
“Has he struck you?”
“No.”
“I thought you two were happy as clams.”
“Clams?”
“Well, happy, anyway.”
Her eyes drifted from my face to nowhere. “I tried to make a go of this marriage. Really I did. I knew, of course I knew, Sam was under a terrible strain. And I thought it would work itself out. But we fight all the time.”
“I thought you two were getting along fine.” That’s what Bailey had indicated.
Her eyebrows lifted as the eyelids came to a weary half mast. “At first, yes. Sam would give me rubdowns using all of his medical knowledge. He would shave my legs, massage my feet, trim my toenails—my devoted servant!”
More like slave. And slaves have a tendency toward uprisings.
“Every day at first,” she said, “he would drive me to the beauty shop to wash and style my hair. And we would go out to dinner, then come home and Sinatra would sing to us from the phonograph. Sam would drink. So would I. I like to drink. But then … he began earlier in the day. And continued. And continued. At first, so much sex … you are a man of the world, aren’t you, Nathan? I can speak frankly?”
“Yup.”
Something wistful came into her expression. “He would talk of his desperate love for me. Once, toward the beginning, we made love ten times in one day.”
I shrugged. “Well, he was in prison that many years. Things build up. At my age, twice is a miracle.”
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