Murder in Little Egypt (28 page)

He liked to be home by five-thirty or six for dinner, barring emergency calls. His recurrent nightmare was Shawneetown, where the miners, river rats, soldiers from a nearby base, anyone in search of whiskey and a fight would gather to hoot and holler. Some of the dirt-floored Shawneetown taverns were equipped with metal washtubs that would fill with teeth, human hide and hair, the water dark and thick with blood during a night’s hell-raising. There the violent heritage of Little Egypt survived in its most traditional form. Nolen was forever getting a call in the night to head for Shawneetown to investigate a stabbing or a shooting or a head bashed in with a pool cue. One evening an arsonist torched a few of the bars; Nolen was not sorry to see them go, nor surprised to learn that locals had caught the culprit and beaten him to death. When he examined the body, Nolen counted over five hundred stitches, old and new, fresh and healed, insignia of a Shawneetown life.

But on a good evening Nolen could settle into his chair in his basement den to watch television and read and answer telephone calls—always a few and often as many as thirty from friends, tipsters, snitches, fellow detectives adding to his hoard of information. The den, paneled and immaculate, was a refuge for Nolen and his wife. Its shelves held books about the history of southern Illinois, titles like
Bloody Williamson, My Fight with the Ku Klux Klan,
and
A Knight of Another Sort: Prohibition Days and Charlie Birger
. On one wall Nolen had hung a photograph of Charlie Birger and his gang, fourteen desperadoes with their revolvers, rifles, shotguns and machine guns, posed around Charlie’s armored Lincoln at Shady Rest. On another wall he had framed the front page from a 1925 edition of the Harrisburg
Daily Register
. The headlines read SHERIFF GALLIGAN’S RESIGNATION DEMANDED and SPECIAL LEGISLATIVE SESSION NEEDED TO BRING PEACE. Other stories told of coal-mine disasters and announced that the blind widow of a Klan leader was to deliver a lecture on morality and violence.

It helped Nolen to know that people had been behaving this way forever, that other lawmen had faced tough cases, mob violence and ineffective courts, and that life went on regardless. Time heals all was his motto: He repeated it often, and usually he was able to believe it.

As weeks passed without any new leads in the Cavaness case, however, another folksy phrase kept coming to Nolen’s lips: “There’s good times coming, but we may never live to see them.” He did not seem to be making progress on the case, and he found himself sitting up later than usual thinking about it. Every time he opened the Cavaness file at the office he could not help glancing at the color Polaroids of Mark’s remains; no matter how often he looked at them he felt anger along with revulsion. The ravaging of the body by animals seemed a part of the crime and suggested a savagery and also an indifference beyond comprehension. What if the boy’s own father had left him to be devoured like this? If he had done it, or if he had paid someone else to do it and was now playing it cool, going on about his business, tending to the sick, chasing women, boozing—why, a man like that, Nolen said to himself, would gamble on his mother’s tombstone and play poker with the corpse. There’s good times coming, but we may never live to see them.

Nolen played tricks on himself to avoid thinking about the Cavaness case all day long and going to sleep with the pictures of Mark’s body in his mind. He yielded to distractions. He followed the St. Louis Cardinals with greater intensity than usual. They were on the television almost every night, and he planned a weekend in St. Louis with his wife to take in a couple of games and get away from the terrible images and the accompanying frustration of not being able to do anything about them.

In June Nolen filed a long, confidential report with the D.C.I., detailing the interviews he had conducted but drawing no conclusions and listing no suspects. He did, however, identify Mark D. Cavaness as the victim of a homicide, ruling out either an accident or suicide as the cause of death.

Around that time, and regularly thereafter, Nolen began receiving calls from Kevin Cavaness, sometimes late at night after Nolen had left his den and gone to bed. Kevin wanted to know what Nolen had found out, whether there were any suspects. Nolen assured Kevin that the case was very much open, that there were some leads; but he would not give details other than that it was being treated as a murder. He did tell Kevin about the spent cartridge found on the floor of the Jeep, indicating that the gun had been fired out of the nylon case, in which no spent shells remained. Kevin, who had been permitted to examine the evidence two weeks after the murder, found this puzzling: He was sure that the case showed grooves where pellets had been fired through it.

“You’re holding back,” Kevin accused Nolen over the phone late one night. “You got to tell me what you know, goddamnit!”

“I wish I knew more, son.” Nolen tried to calm Kevin down. ‘‘I’ll keep at it.”

“This is my brother we’re talking about! What the shit is this? We want something done! Who else is working on this?”

Nolen remained unruffled. He let Kevin rave and vent his anger because he understood how he felt. But he was not about to tell Kevin that his own father was now the primary suspect in Mark’s murder. Not only did Nolen not have any proof: He could not risk a violent reaction from Kevin, who from what Nolen could gather did not even know about the insurance policy.

Nolen continued collecting information about the doctor. The more he learned about him, the more Nolen was amazed that the man had been able not only to function but to prosper as a physician and surgeon all these years and the easier it was to imagine him killing his own son, or anyone else, whether in a fit of temper or, as it appeared, cold-bloodedly after taking out the insurance. As for how such a man, educated and, by all accounts, highly skilled in his profession, would be capable of such an act, Nolen could only resort to country wisdom and phrasing: The doc must have burned out a couple of bearings.

Kevin continued to sense that Detective Nolen knew something. He could not guess what it might be, but the feeling that Nolen was not telling him everything made Kevin wonder whether he could trust the detective. His sense of southern-Illinois justice was that it was corrupt and ineffective, and he began to wonder whether Nolen was just another bumbling, back-scratching good old boy. Kevin vacillated, because Nolen did seem to be different from other officers, above them in intelligence, aloof and independent; and the D.C.I. itself had a fine reputation for efficiency and integrity. But why wouldn’t Nolen be more forthcoming? Wasn’t the family of a victim entitled to know everything? Nolen promised to disclose all, but he was being enigmatic, acting more like a kindly uncle than a hard-nosed detective who was out to get his man. Kevin’s rage welled up. Without a killer in sight, he had no one else to resent but the man who seemed to be failing in his task. Kevin thirsted for accusation.

He spent that summer working for Dale on the farms, or trying to work for him. His frustrations were somewhat eased by a new girlfriend, Charli Ann Haun, a nurse who had worked briefly at Pearce and was now employed by a doctor in Harrisburg. Kevin had gone to high school with Charli but had not started dating her until after Mark’s death. She had known Mark. A week before his death Mark had complained to her when she was giving him a lift from Eldorado to Harrisburg that, because he was a doctor’s son, people expected him to have access to narcotics. Some of his acquaintances were badgering him to get hold of speed and morphine. Mark had said that he was through with any kind of drugs except for the occasional joint.

As Kevin told Charli, he and Mark had long been sure that their father was using speed to counteract his hangovers. They had seen the bottles and packets of Fastin and Obestat squirreled away in Dale’s trailer, and they had chalked up some of his irascibility to what they recognized as the “speed meanies,” a short-temperedness common among heavy, long-term amphetamine addicts. It gave Kevin some solace to discuss his father and his dead brother with Charli. She was a slender, brown-haired girl whose intelligence, kindness and sympathy soothed Kevin’s anguish and quickly won his heart.

Charli accompanied Kevin one afternoon over to Dale’s trailer near the lake at the Galatia farm. They wanted to see how Dale was getting on with what Kevin regarded as a ridiculous plan to construct a glass A-frame over the trailer, a design that Dale said would revolutionize the mobile-home industry. They found him standing with three young men, two of whom were supposedly going to build the frame and install the glass. The third was Jim Eldridge, a male nurse from Pearce who was talking animatedly to Dale.

As Kevin and Charli got out of their car, they heard Dale curse Jim Eldridge. Dale had a drink in his hand.

“Why is he screaming?” Charli asked.

“That’s just Dad,” Kevin said. “It could be about anything.”

“You don’t even care about your patients!” Jim Eldridge shouted back. “You’ll let them lay in there and die while you’re out partying! I’m going to tell them what you think of them!”

“You won’t tell anybody anything about me,” Dale said.

It sounded like a threat. Jim Eldridge climbed into his car and roared away.

Dale turned to Kevin: “And what have
you
been doing all day?” Kevin said that he had been mending a fence. “Is that right? Mending a fence? Is that all you can think of to do? You call that doing something?”

“Now wait a minute,” Kevin said. “It looks to me like you’ve spent the day drinking over in E-town,” referring to Elizabethtown on the river, one of Dale’s favorite watering holes.

“You shut your mouth,” Dale said. “You’re no better than your brother.”

“Wait just a goddamned minute,” Kevin said. “What do you mean by that?”

“I never did like him. Turkey-head. I never did like Mark. He was a no-good son of a bitch.”

Kevin stepped up to his father and looked down into his face. He was big and broad and four inches taller than Dale. Kevin was holding a half-empty can of RC Cola in his right hand and he crushed it and threw it to the ground at his father’s feet.

“I’m not going to stand for this shit,” Kevin said, leaning into his father’s face. “I happened to like Mark. I loved him. He was my brother.”

“What the hell for?” Dale shouted up. “He was no good! He was nothing but a failure! Why the hell would anyone like him?”

The two remaining young men slipped away, got into their car and drove off. Kevin and his father stood toe to toe. Charli looked on from beside her car.

Dale started backpedaling. Kevin followed him step for step until his father was pinned against the trailer.

“You lousy creep,” Kevin said. “You take back what you said about Mark!”

“You may be able to whip my ass,” Dale said, lowering his voice, spitting out the words from between his teeth, “but I’ll get you. I’ll get you.”

Kevin slowly turned and walked away. He told Charli they were leaving and asked her to drive.

In the car Kevin was shaking with rage. Then tears came. Charli reached over and took his hand. She told him that she loved him and that she wanted to be there for him.

That evening Kevin and Charli talked about Dale’s behavior and about what he had said. Kevin confessed a terrible thought that had occurred to him. He had tried to dismiss it as too farfetched.

“Do you think there’s any possibility that Dad might have had something to do with Mark’s death?”

Charli at first did not answer. Finally she said yes, after what she had seen today, she thought it was possible.

They talked all night. They wondered what Detective Nolen thought, but neither Charli nor Kevin believed that they could bring the matter up with Nolen. Not now. Not yet, anyway. They had no proof.

They told each other that the idea of Dale as the murderer of his own son was too horrible and too remote to consider. He was an irrational, angry man, but they could not think of him as a killer. He had his own odd theories about Mark’s death which he voiced from time to time. He said he thought that Mark was probably killed by a demented itinerant named Grolsch who had been convicted of another murder that had also occurred in 1977. He spoke of hearing about some people in a van who had been spotted by the proprietor of the Galatia cafe during the week of Mark’s death. It looked as if they had had an injured man in the van; they were asking for a doctor. Probably, Dale said, they had panicked and dumped the body near the Shea house.

Kevin thought this story as preposterous as most of his father’s other theories and business schemes. He felt sorry for Dale, whenever his anger at his father subsided. The poor guy had fouled up his life. He was probably half-deranged by the death of his son, in spite of his cruel, drunken words about Mark. Dale was bizarre and difficult, but underneath his aggressive, hostile manner, he had to be human, didn’t he?

17

DURING THE FOLLOWING YEAR AT COLLEGE, KEVIN’S ANGER turned inward, and he fell into a depression, staying in his room and letting his studies slide. Marian became so worried about him that she convinced him to seek treatment at a St. Louis hospital. He remained there for only a couple of days, however, because the sight of the other patients frightened him and woke him up. With Charli’s help he made up his lost work and managed to struggle back on track toward his degree in industrial engineering. She moved into an apartment with him at Cape Girardeau, and they began to talk of marriage. She continued working as a nurse; he hoped to land a job in St. Louis when he graduated.

Sean did not fare so well. His reaction to Mark’s death was delayed; then it overwhelmed him. His moods veered from anger to despair; he frequently recalled the death scene, awakening in the middle of the night screaming from nightmares about his oldest brother’s body. Kevin came up to St. Louis to try to help him and noticed that, at sixteen, Sean had already acquired a drinking problem. He lost whatever interest he had left in school and dropped out and began working at odd jobs—at a brickyard, delivering furniture, substituting off and on for workers at a landscaping outfit—still living at home with Marian and Patrick. He did not want to spend his life at manual labor, he said, but he needed time to get himself together. At home Marian would return from work and find Sean already at the booze. She tried badgering him, soothing him, warning him—nothing worked. She hoped it was a phase. Sean was the most outwardly sensitive and emotional of her boys; she could not bring herself to be harsh with him. He would take a couple of beers—probably something stronger behind her back—and burst into tears, hugging her and asking why Mark had died and when would they find out who had done this to him. He liked to stick close to her and help her in the kitchen, concocting stews, fixing breakfast for everyone on the weekends. He grew very fat and was ashamed of that.