Murder in Little Egypt (27 page)

After a week’s poking around, Nolen isolated two suspects.

The first was Frank Stoat, a big, rough man in his mid-thirties who volunteered that he was probably as close a friend as Mark Cavaness had—a statement Nolen had no reason to accept at face value. Nolen had interviewed Stoat at his run-down house on the outskirts of Shawneetown early Easter Sunday afternoon. With him were his younger wife and a twenty-year-old boy from Eldorado who said that he had been living at the Stoats’ house since leaving home several weeks before.

Stoat had worked in the coal mines, on river dredges and on various farms in the region. Mrs. Stoat had held odd jobs, but mostly she took care of the house, Stoat said.

Stoat reported that he had gone looking for Mark on Tuesday. He asked his wife to confirm the date, but she said nothing, staring into the shag carpet.

“I borried this wrench off of him,” Stoat went on, gesturing. Nolen noticed that the second and third fingers were missing from Stoat’s left hand. An old, deep scar ran from his left ear nearly to the corner of his mouth. With his bright red hair and watery, pale-blue eyes, he wasn’t easy to look at. “I got done with the wrench and I took over to Galatia to return it, you know.”

“To the Cavaness place?”

“Sure. I done odd jobs for the old man. I took and went to the Shea place to find Mark. Tried the trailer.”

“You didn’t see anything?”

“Not a thing.”

“Is that right. Was the Jeep truck there?”

“I don’t think so, I don’t remember for sure.”

“So you left the wrench?”

“Nosir. I figured old Mark might be over at his dad’s place, you know, over by the lake. So’s I took and went over there.”

He had found no one at Dr. Cavaness’s trailer. He had not gone inside, only knocked. Then he had gone home.

“What kind of a kid was Mark? Was he despondent or anything like that? You think Mark could have taken his own life?”

“Hell, no. He was a real good kid. He used to stay with us.”

“Is that so. He stayed with you, you say?”

“Oh, yeah.” Mrs. Stoat went into the kitchen. Nolen could hear her messing around in there. The young man lolled on the ratty couch. “Sure, he come and stayed with us sometime. We liked him real well. He was a good kid, wasn’t he, Doyle?”

“Yeah,” the boy on the couch said.

“He had his own place over there, didn’t he? Why would he come and stay with you?”

“Well, him and his dad, they didn’t get along real well. They’d have a fight. The old man would get on him, you know.”

“What about?”

“Just the usual.”

“Father and son? The boy wasn’t working hard enough?”

“That’s it. I think the doc kind of wanted him to go into the coal mines, you know. Mark didn’t want to.”

“So the doc would get on him?”

“Sure. Don’t get me wrong. I like the doc real well. The doc’s been real good to me.”

“Is that right.”

“Oh, yeah. I like the doc real well. Smartest man I ever knowed. Real good man, the doc. There’s lots of folks he never charged.”

“So Mark would come and stay with you. How long would he stay?”

“Off and on. A day. Two three weeks at a stretch.”

“That was real nice of you and Mrs. Stoat to take him in.”

“Oh, sure.” Stoat pointed to the boy on the couch. “We got ’em coming in here all the time.”

“A regular boarding house,” Nolen laughed. “You all charge these boys for room and board?”

“They help out how they can.”

Stoat said that they often had three or four boys staying at the same time. He tipped up a can of beer and wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

Nolen could see that the house had only two small bedrooms. He smelled meat frying in the kitchen. He got up to leave, handing Stoat one of his business cards, as he did everyone he interviewed. Some people would call and tell you things on the phone that they would conceal face to face, especially if there were others present. The urge to talk was a detective’s bread and butter.

Nolen doubted, however, that he would hear from Stoat; but he handed over the card as a matter of routine. If nothing else, the card was a reminder that could serve to make somebody jumpy. At the upper left of the card was the gold, flying-eagle seal of the Division of Criminal Investigation. Under the name Jack T. Nolen the term Special Agent added authority.

“Seeing you were such good friends with Mark, I might want to talk to you all again.”

“Sure. Anytime.”

“And by the way, would you mind giving me the names of those other boys that stayed here?”

“Sure thing.”

In the next few days Nolen interviewed several of the young men who had stayed with the Stoats, did some additional discreet nosing around with tavern-keepers, people who had worked with both Stoats, others in the know. The point of this line of inquiry was to learn why the young men preferred the Stoats’ to their own homes. What Nolen learned filled out a picture he had already partially imagined and supplied a possible motive for Mark’s murder. It suggested that Mark’s sexual attractiveness and activity may have been fatal to him.

According to Nolen’s informants, Frank Stoat had a sexual problem. The only thing that turned him on, from various accounts, was watching his wife make it with other men. Mrs. Stoat did not appear to mind accommodating her husband’s voyeurism and engaged in sexual acts with the young men staying at the house. You could say that Frank Stoat acted as a pimp for his wife except that he declined to charge for her services, content with a spectator’s pleasure.

Nolen found grim humor in the scene. People might assume that life in Little Egypt was all hard labor and churchgoing. Why, Hollywood and New York had nothing on the Stoats, who were right out there with the swingingest folks in the country. They were up-to-date.

Mrs. Stoat, people reported, sometimes taunted her husband about his bystander’s approach to marriage. What with the drink and the grass and the free-form atmosphere of the house, Frank Stoat would occasionally knock his wife around and turn the young men out, only to lure them back again. Mrs. Stoat was no oil painting, as one of Nolen’s informants said, but she had qualities.

Nolen had no evidence that Stoat had ever so much as turned Mark out, let alone murdered him. But if Mark had been staying at the Stoat’s house for two or three weeks at a time, perhaps Mrs. Stoat had found Mark attractive enough to provoke her husband’s jealousy. There were probably unwritten rules to the Stoats’ arrangement. She might be permitted to savor the moment, but lingering enthusiasm could invite a reaction. It’s a sad house, Nolen reflected, where the hen crows louder than the cock.

Stoat had already admitted going to look for Mark on Tuesday. Maybe it had been as late as Friday. Maybe he had gone to look for Mark not to return a wrench but in a rage; had found him in the Jeep with the shotgun; had killed him and then crudely tried to make it look like an accident.

It was nothing but a hypothesis, but it was enough for Nolen to ask Stoat to take a lie-detector test—to clear him of any suspicion, Nolen said, indicating a little of what he had learned about the Stoats’ domestic arrangements, hinting that it would probably be a good idea for Stoat to cooperate. Stoat agreed to the polygraph.

He passed the test, which appeared to verify his account of having nothing but friendly feelings toward Mark and of not having seen him at all during the week of the murder. This was not conclusive proof of his innocence—the polygraph was far from infallible—but in the absence of real evidence, it let Stoat off the hook for the time being. Had he failed the test, Nolen would have begun to put the squeeze on him; now there was nothing to do but keep an eye on him, continue to ask around about him, and see if he might slip up.

With Stoat in the background, Detective Nolen turned his attention to the other prime suspect, Dr. John Dale Cavaness. Once Nolen learned, as he quickly did from the doctor’s insurance agent and other sources, that Dr. Cavaness was about to collect on a forty-thousand-dollar policy which he had taken out on Mark’s life only in February, the doctor naturally became an object of curiosity. Add to this the doctor’s well-known animosity toward his son, his reputation for hard drinking and a violent temper, his conviction for reckless homicide, and his indictment (still pending) in 1974 on sixteen felony counts of deceptive medical practice—and the idea that he might also be guilty of cold-blooded murder was hardly inconceivable.

What was almost inconceivable was the idea that a father would actually murder his son to collect on a life-insurance policy. Nolen was sure that the identical crime must have been committed at some time, somewhere, by someone; he had been a detective too long not to believe that human beings were capable of any crime; but he had never encountered nor even heard of anything like that. Shoot-outs between feuding family members, yes—but nothing so cold and so premeditated as this appeared to be, if indeed Dr. Cavaness had committed the act or—and here Stoat remained a possibility—arranged for it to be done.

And Nolen knew that he was asking for trouble by making Dr. Cavaness a suspect. The doctor certainly had his enemies, but by and large he was probably the most respected and beloved figure in Eldorado, possibly in the whole of Little Egypt. Nolen was aware of the public reaction to the reckless-homicide charges and convictions—the support for the doctor, the indifference to the victims. In general the people of the region perceived him as a selfless humanitarian. Even if solid evidence did turn up, Nolen had doubts about indictment and prosecution. The case would likely become a social and political cause. All Nolen had to do to gauge public sentiment was to drop Dr. Cavaness’s name and the testimonials would pour out: “The doc told me I had Rocky Mountain fever when nobody else knew . . . he never sent me a bill . . . Doc C.’s a regular Robin Hood . . . “and so on.

One old farmer whom Nolen engaged in conversation in a Harrisburg coffee shop was typical. Nolen brought up Mark’s death, saying how hard it must be on the family, and wondered aloud whether Dr. Cavaness might take to the bottle. It was said that the doctor might have a drinking problem.

“Let me tell you something,” the old farmer said, holding a finger to his mouth. “Not wine nor beer nor spirits has ever passed these lips, but what the doc does on his own time is his business. I’ll tell you one thing. I’d rather have Doc Cavaness operate on me drunk than your doctor sober.”

Nolen imagined what it would be like to try to find twelve impartial jurors in Saline County to listen to evidence against the local hero and then have the guts to act on it. They would all be either the doctor’s patients or relatives and friends of patients. He would have delivered their babies, saved their lives, occupied a place second only to Jesus in their hearts.

Nolen knew that his only prudent course would be to investigate quietly, letting no one know that the doctor was a suspect, putting nothing in writing, confiding in no one.

If Dr. Cavaness had in fact murdered Mark or conspired in his murder, the case against him would have to be airtight before anyone got wind of it. The evidence would have to be as clear-cut as it had been when the grand jury had brought down the reckless-homicide indictments in 1971. Nolen reviewed the files on that event, noting—was it something other than mere coincidence?—that the accident had occurred on exactly the same day of the same month, the eighth of April, as Mark’s murder. He was disinclined to make much of what was probably a meaningless coincidence of dates, although killers had been known to act out of obscure compulsions connected to holidays or anniversaries. What seemed more significant to Nolen was what he remembered of the doctor’s uncooperative behavior and his saying, when informed of the victims’ death, that everyone had to die sometime. The doctor had also talked a lot about insurance, Nolen recalled. None of this would be admitted in court as evidence, but it spurred Nolen on.

During the next few weeks, he made the Cavaness case his top priority. He gathered all the information he could about the doctor; no new suspects surfaced. He learned that Dr. Cavaness could fight like a red, roaring bull and that it did not take much to set off his temper. Nolen heard several versions of the nearly fatal fight after the poker game with Huck Gee. Numerous people recalled being challenged or attacked by the doctor: The farther Nolen ranged away from Harrisburg and Eldorado, the less willing people were to defend Dr. Cavaness. The sheriff in one county reported that the doc had been thrown in jail one night for drunken brawling in a tavern and had gone berserk in his cell, ripping out the sink and smashing the toilet. A man from Equality recalled having been at a cocktail party one summer and seeing Dale Cavaness standing by the swimming pool. Playfully the man had suggested that everybody jump in the pool with their clothes on. “You touch me,” the man recalled the doctor’s saying, “and I’ll cut your nuts off.”

A telling instance of the doctor’s temper when drunk was relayed to Nolen by his own son. He had been present at a party with Dale Cavaness one evening, Nolen’s son said, and had offered to give him and his girlfriend, Martha Culley, a ride home, because the doctor appeared too drunk to drive. When Dr. Cavaness refused, several people gathered around and tried to persuade him not to drive, but he grabbed a hammer from the kitchen, shoved it into his belt, and headed for his car. Nolen’s son followed the doctor outside and tried to prevent him from entering his car. But the doctor shoved him aside, drew the hammer from his belt and started swiping at him with it. Nolen’s son backed off.

None of the stories added up to evidence of murder, but Nolen kept probing. With his two sons grown, his normal routine was to be up at dawn at his house in Harrisburg to have breakfast with his wife, Polly, and listen to the first few minutes of
The Baptist Hour
on station WEBQ before hitting the road. His devotion to the program derived less from piety than from his half-interest in a flower shop, where Polly and his mother worked. The opening of
The Baptist Hour
, on the air since 1931, included mention of every Baptist who had died during the previous twenty-four hours or over the weekend, along with news of funeral arrangements. The information enabled Nolen and his wife to adjust their flower inventory according to demand. By the time the sermon came on—always a low-key performance in keeping with the early hour, the word “hell” disallowed more than three times per broadcast—Nolen was headed for his office. From there he wheeled around through the day as investigation required.