Murder in Little Egypt (33 page)

And who may have murdered yet another son. The connection to Mark, the similarities of age and circumstances of death, had never been absent from Barron’s mind.

It was time to tell his superiors about the case. Barron met with a sergeant, a lieutenant, and Major Tom Moonier in the major’s office.

“The doctor is suspect number one right now,” Barron told them. He went through the evidence and said that he was expecting a call from Kevin Cavaness when the doctor arrived in St. Louis. He planned to go to Kevin’s apartment, have a chat with the doctor, and ask him the big question—when was the last time he had seen his son Sean. Everything hung on how he would answer that one.

“If he doesn’t admit that he was in town Wednesday night,” Major Moonier told Barron, “book him.”

“I don’t want to do that,” Detective Barron said. “I figure he’s probably going to admit that anyway. He’ll say he took Sean to dinner and dropped him back at the apartment—something like that. Or he left him off somewhere. And even if he lies about being in town, I need more time. I need more on him.”

Barron reminded the other officers that, only a few weeks before, he had locked up a wife too soon for killing her husband, and she had been able to get released for lack of evidence and had subsequently escaped trial. He said that he would also prefer to spare the family more trauma than was necessary. He told the other officers about the connections to another son’s death in 1977. If he could wait until after the funeral to arrest the doctor, more evidence might turn up in southern Illinois. He did not want the doctor to think he was a suspect, not for a couple of days anyway.

Major Moonier asked Barron to leave the room. After about ten minutes the major summoned him again. They were worried, Major Moonier said, that this doctor might try to kill someone else. He might try to blow the whole family away.

“The M.O. would be too different,” Barron said. “I don’t think he kills people when there might be witnesses. I’ll just make sure nobody takes a scenic drive with him.”

“Okay, Barron, we’ll do it your way. Go talk to him. See what he says. See what you can dig up. But take somebody with you and put some men out there. We better watch that son of a bitch.”

* * *

Kevin and Charli had sat all day in their Maryland Heights apartment waiting for Dale to arrive and feeling uneasy. Not having any idea who had murdered Sean made them wonder whether there was some nut out there who for some reason had it in for all the Cavaness children. When they spoke of Mark, they could see no other possible connection to Sean’s death.

Kevin recalled that every time he visited southern Illinois, some idiot or another came up with a so-called theory about Mark’s death, one more ridiculous than another, some involving the Mafia, as if mobsters would bother with someone like Mark Cavaness. Kevin hoped to God that at least the St. Louis police would be able to catch the killer this time.

By late afternoon Kevin was beginning to become irritated that his father had not yet appeared. There was no answer at the Harrisburg house; he left messages at Pearce Hospital. Finally at six P.M. Charli reached Martha in Harrisburg. Dale had been seeing patients all day, she said. She would see that he got on his way. She expressed what Charli thought were tepid condolences. But this was no time to be concerned with Martha.

Dave Barron telephoned twice more to ask whether Dale had arrived. Finally Dale showed up at about half past nine. He walked through the door mechanically, saying nothing.

“Hi,” Kevin said.

“Oh, hi,” Dale said, “how’re you doing?”

“You haven’t seen this place before.”

“Yeah. It’s nice.”

Kevin telephoned Barron, who said he would be right over.

Thinking about interviewing Dr. Cavaness, Dave Barron had grown nervous; yet he knew that he would have to try to appear nonchalant. Barron believed himself to be a good detective, but in his mind he had conjured up the image of the doctor as someone who must look like Marcus Welby, M.D., silver-haired, distinguished, suave, brilliant and fabulously articulate. From what he had gathered from Kevin and Charli, Dr. Cavaness was chief of surgery at his hospital. Who am I, Barron wondered, a cop with less than three years’ experience in homicide, to try to take on some medical whiz? If I’m not careful, he’ll bullshit me and wrap me around his finger. I’m not even a college graduate.

His regular partner was otherwise occupied, so for support Barron took along Detective Tim Nisbet, a friend whom he could trust to be quiet and cool; this was no time for strong-arm tactics. They arrived at the apartment complex, modern two-story buildings set in a wooded, landscaped tract, rather like a college campus. Barron knocked at the door of Apartment F and offered a last prayer that he would not screw this up.

Kevin answered the door and led the detectives through the living room to the open kitchen, where Dale and Charli sat at the table. One look at Dr. Cavaness soothed Dave Barron’s nerves. This little guy, over whom Barron loomed like a giant, did not seem like any threat. His clothes looked like thrift-shop stuff. His curly gray hair was sparse and dirty-looking, his lips thin and tight. He showed a boozer’s bloat and all in all looked more like a traveling vacuum-cleaner salesman just in from the road than a physician.

Dale greeted the detectives in his folksy way. He held a drink between his hands on the table. Barron noticed that there appeared to be something the matter with the doctor’s hands. They were gnarled, misshapen. They looked like claws. They certainly did not appear to be the hands of a surgeon.

Dale had for the past few years been suffering from carpal-tunnel syndrome, a narrowing of the tunnel in the wrists which induced pinching of the nerves serving his fingers. The syndrome caused the muscles of the hands to knot up and atrophy and made the fingers separate, two on one side, two and the thumb on the other. He had inherited the condition from Noma.

Dale offered the detectives a drink, which they declined.

Barron had rehearsed his opening questions. He had had plenty of time to think about them, waiting for the doctor to get to town. He hoped to catch him off guard by bringing up Mark’s death first: Throw him a slider when he’s guessing fastball was the way Barron thought about it. He began soothingly.

“Dr. Cavaness, I’m just here to pick up a little background information on Sean.”

“Fire away,” Dale said.

“I understand there was another death, another son killed, some years ago. Do you happen to know what’s happened in that case? Has it ever been resolved?”

“I think it’s closed,” Dale said. “They ruled it an accident.”

“No, it isn’t,” Kevin broke in. “I understand it’s still open. It’s still an open homicide. Jack Nolen—”

Barron told Kevin to hold it.

“Come here, come here,” Barron said softly to Kevin and Charli. “I think this would work better if you guys go into the bedroom for a while so we can talk to the doctor here. It might get too confusing otherwise.” He ushered them into the bedroom, thanked them, said he would not be too long, and closed the door on them.

When Barron returned to the kitchen he noticed that Dr. Cavaness’s glass was empty. Barron brought the quart of vodka from the kitchen counter with some ice and fixed the doctor another, saying that if he had lost a son, he’d be drinking too. He and Nisbet sat down at the table, and Barron got right to business.

“When was the last time you saw Sean, Dr. Cavaness? When was the last time you were in St. Louis?”

“Oh,” Dale said, “it must have been, let’s see, about four weeks ago. I was up here for a medical convention. Yes, it was four weeks ago. I can check the date.”

That’s it! Barron thought to himself. He strove to keep his composure; his heart raced. I’ve got you, you lying son of a bitch. So you don’t turn out to be so smart after all. All you had to say was that you saw Sean on Wednesday, took him out to dinner, dropped him back, and I’d have been in trouble. But you’ve lied. I hope you just keep on lying. Dig yourself into a real good hole.

Dale went on to describe, accurately, his previous visit to Sean’s apartment, how he had talked to Mrs. Kroeck, how he had gone over to Tina Crowley’s and visited with Sean. It was nice of the doctor, Barron thought, to volunteer that he had met Peggy Kroeck. He was confirming her ability to eyeball him.

Dale said that perhaps once, since his visit four weeks earlier, he had talked to Sean on the telephone. He could not recall the content of the conversation. Kevin and Sean and Charli, he said, had been planning to come down to southern Illinois for the holidays.

Barron asked a few more questions, mainly in order to continue to appear totally in the dark about the murder. It was cat-and-mouse stuff now.

Dale said that, as far as he knew, Sean had no drug problem but that he did have a problem with alcohol. Sean did not own any handguns but should have had a couple of shotguns and a muzzle-loading rifle.

From Tina Crowley, Barron already knew that the guns had been pawned. When he asked the doctor about whether he was aware of any money problems Sean might have had, Dale said that he was not aware of any. This Barron took as another lie, since the doctor had visited the apartment on Wednesday and would know that the telephone, electricity and gas were shut off.

“I’m just so shocked and saddened by this thing,” Dale said. “I want to cooperate with you guys in any way I can. I want whoever did this brought to justice.”

We’ll do our best to accommodate your every wish, Barron thought. He thanked the doctor for his cooperation and told Kevin and Charli that they could come out of the bedroom now. He said that he would like to talk to Kevin’s mother when she arrived tomorrow, if that was all right.

Dr. Cavaness was up and fixing himself another drink. From the kitchen he called to the detectives, who had reached the front door:

“Dave, Tim, you sure you don’t want one? You know, Dave, something I think you may want to check out more, come to think of it, is drugs. You know, I’m a doctor. I see things. You know how these young people are.”

“Yes,” Dave Barron said. “Drugs are a real problem.”

“You know how it is,” Dale said. “Desperate people do desperate things.”

I’ll be asking you about that one in three or four days, Barron said to himself. It was thoughtful of the doctor to offer advice. He must think that he sailed through the interview just fine. All the better. That’s just the way we want it. Let him be cocky as hell.

Barron told Kevin and Charli, making sure that the doctor heard him, that the police had nothing new on the case, but they were working on it.

After the detectives were gone, Kevin and Charli sat at the kitchen table with Dale and watched him fill his glass again. The quart was finished, so he poured from the half-gallon he had brought in from his car—a Chevy Blazer this time, not the Toronado. Kevin helped himself to a bourbon and Coke.

Dale asked Kevin whether he thought that whoever had killed Mark had also killed Sean. Kevin said that he did not see how that could be possible. Seven years had passed; southern Illinois was far from St. Louis; Mark had been killed with a shotgun, Sean with a pistol, from what the detectives said. Dale agreed. There could not be a connection.

“You have any ideas?” Kevin asked.

“No,” Dale said. “What about the family? The people got killed when I had that accident. You think they could be coming back to haunt me? I mean, taking revenge against me by killing Sean?”

Kevin thought that idea was pretty farfetched. He decided to change the subject. He asked whether Dale knew anything about how Johnny Weingarten had gotten busted.

Dale hesitated. As he finally replied, he held his chin in his hand, a characteristic gesture of his, so that his mouth was covered by his lumpy fingers. The effect was as if he spoke from behind a veil, but Kevin and Charli had no difficulty in understanding him.

“Yeah,” Dale said slowly, “I know something about that.” He paused again. Then, with steady eyes, he looked up at Kevin and Charli. “But if you tell anybody, I’ll kill you.”

They were too startled to say anything. Both of them, as they confided to one another afterward, sought some hint of kidding in Dale’s voice or eyes but could find none. Dale said that he had concluded that Johnny Weingarten had been set up for a bust because Johnny had told him that he was selling some pills to a guy at fifteen dollars apiece. The only person who would pay that kind of money for those pills must be a cop. He decided to help out the cops, Dale said, so he asked Johnny to move a safe for him that had some drugs in it. The safe came from the hospital, so what was in it would be obvious. Johnny wasn’t stupid.

Dale taped the combination to the back of the safe, where Johnny would see it, knowing that Johnny would steal the drugs and try to sell them. That way he would be caught with some real stuff, morphine, a Class A felony, and really do some time.

“You mean that old safe that was at the clinic?” Kevin asked.

“That’s it. The drugs in there must have been fifteen or twenty years old.”

“Hell, no wonder you don’t want anybody to know about it. They were bad drugs. You sure wouldn’t want people knowing that bad drugs came from you.”

“No,” Dale said. “That’s not the point. That’s not it at all. They’d probably just kill me.”

That was enough. Kevin and Charli showed Dale the bed in the spare room and said good-night. Alone they talked about what Dale had said about Weingarten and the safe and could not make any sense of it. Why would Dale be so anxious for the cops to set up Johnny Weingarten? The only thing that Charli could figure was that Weingarten had something on Dale, so Dale wanted him put away. The whole business was confusing and disturbing. Maybe Weingarten knew about Dale’s medical scams or some of his live-stock flimflams. Kevin had long suspected his father of forging cattle pedigrees and selling bull’s sperm that had not come from its labeled source.

But the story of the safe did not make sense. It sounded like drunken rambling—nothing new with Dale. Between Sean’s death and the vodka, the man did not know what he was saying, Kevin and Charli told each other. They decided to try to forget it.