Murder in Little Egypt (18 page)

“I put that woman on a pedestal! I did everything for her! I scrubbed floors for her! She betrayed me!” Eddie did not know whether the doctor was going to cry or start pounding on his desk or both; he calmed himself, draining his cup. “I can never feel that close to anyone again. Never.”

Eddie thought that this was certainly sad for the doctor but also for Marian and the children. Dr. Cavaness hardly ever mentioned them, except to complain that Marian was spending too much money. Of the doctor’s family only his father and mother were frequent visitors to the office. He always saw Peck Cavaness immediately, admitting him to the examining room before any of the other patients. Noma Cavaness he let wait and dealt with summarily. Eddie could not understand a man who treated his mother that way. When he spotted her sitting in the waiting room, sometimes for hours, Eddie would come out to chat with Noma, bring her a cup of coffee. It pained him to see her staring at the wall, unattended as a nobody.

Everyone in the office professed to adore Dr. Cavaness’s sense of humor; Eddie was not so sure about it. Sometimes his wisecracks brightened the day; at other times the doctor carried things too far and made Eddie nervous. Many of Dr. Cavaness’s jokes took advantage of the ignorance of patients, simple people who believed everything the doctor told them as readily and as literally as they believed the Bible.

A widower in his late sixties complained that every time he walked in front of his television set, it changed channels. The man wondered whether he was electrically charged, a human remote-control unit, and asked the doctor to check him out.

Dr. Cavaness obliged, running all sorts of expensive tests, electrocardiograms and so on, and pronounced the patient nonmagnetic and nonelectroconductive. Eddie was as amused at this as the rest of the staff, although he considered the administering of the tests unethical. But the old fellow persisted. His set still changed channels, he said, every time he walked past it. He had to sit dead still to get through an entire program.

“I’ll cure him this time,” the doctor said. “Set up another appointment. If what this guy wants is a diagnosis, he’ll sure as hell get one.”

Dr. Cavaness ushered the man into the examining room and told him to take off his clothes:

“I want you buck naked.” He called for a light bulb. “Make it a hundred watt. We want to be able to pick up any current.”

Dr. Cavaness told the man to bend over. He stuck the end of the light bulb in the man’s rectum, twisting it around.

“It lights up all right,” the doctor said. “I’ll tell you what. You’re a regular electrical conduit.”

“What do I do now?”

“There’s only one thing you can do. Every time you watch TV, you’ve got to wrap your feet in aluminum foil. That’s the only way you’ll be nonconductive.”

The man did as he was told but was soon calling again saying his set was still changing channels. When Dr. Cavaness refused to see him, he finally caught on. He complained around town that Dr. Cavaness had made a fool of him, but people either did not believe it or thought it was funny, another good Dr. Dale story.

If Eddie Miller considered that episode distasteful and cruel, the doctor thought it was so funny that he told everybody about it, even Kevin and Marian, repeating it over and over at parties. He did not brag about the time he reduced his sixteen-year-old file clerk to tears and near-hysteria when he called the police on her. She had driven the doctor’s new Olds 98 on an errand but by mistake returned with a car of the same year, model and color which was parked in the same lot but happened to be owned by another man. By a chance remote but familiar to policemen and thieves, the same keys fit both cars.

Dr. Cavaness realized the girl’s mistake when he noticed his black bag missing from the trunk. He knew who the owner of the identical car was, clued him in, and talked a couple of Eldorado policemen into bursting into the office, handcuffing the girl, and telling her that she faced twenty years in prison.

The joke was all right for a minute or two, but Dr. Cavaness pressed it. He shouted at the girl that she was a no-good liar and urged the cops to throw the book at her. He relented when she began sobbing as the police led her out the door.

The girl quit her job. Dr. Cavaness said he had no use for anybody who couldn’t take a joke.

The incident altered Eddie’s perspective. He was friends with the girl and her family. He tried making excuses for Dr. Cavaness, but he saw that the doctor’s misdirected sense of humor had wounded a defenseless creature, a naïve, unworldly young woman who had placed her trust in authority and had been betrayed. He wondered whether Dr. Cavaness understood the pain he had caused.

At some point around 1965 or ’66, Eddie began to feel anxious about his job. I know too much, he thought. The doctor began revealing things and showing sides of himself that Eddie would have preferred not to know about. Just after seven one morning Dr. Cavaness arrived at the office looking as if he had slept in his clothes, smelling of drink, carrying a thermos cup. He sat down with Eddie and said that he could not resist telling how he had spent the evening.

He named a certain businessman who had been hounding him about an unpaid bill. The man had threatened to file suit. Eddie had already answered a hostile letter from an out-of-town lawyer.

“I fixed that son of a bitch,” Dr. Cavaness said. “He won’t be bothering us from now on.”

Dr. Cavaness had been sitting around last night, he said, having a few drinks and thinking about this bastard and how he thought he was so high-and-mighty.

“I decided to make a house call.”

He drove over to the man’s house. It was late, after midnight. He took out the pistol he always kept loaded in his glove compartment and walked right up and rang the bell. The wife opened the door in her nightgown. He told her to get her husband out of bed. He showed her the gun.

The man came down in his robe. The doctor directed them into his car. He drove them out into the country and ordered them out. He told them that he hoped they enjoyed the stroll home. If they ever said one word about suing him again, they could figure out what the next step would be.

Eddie wanted to quit right then, but he held his tongue. Maybe the doctor was still drunk and hallucinating or bragging about something he had imagined in his dreams or in a drunken fantasy.

What Eddie learned about Dr. Cavaness and women also made him anxious. From his earliest days at the office, Eddie had observed the doctor’s power over women. Most of the nurses and other female employees seemed to be in love with him. The spectacle had its amusing aspects, as when the doctor bought hundreds of dollars’ worth of tickets to get a young woman elected Miss Boat Queen in an Ohio River beauty contest and then hired her briefly as a nurse. That young woman was none the worse for her acquaintance with Dr. Cavaness, but over the years Eddie became aware of another, more typical pattern with the doctor and his girlfriends: Eddie could count at least twenty.

The doctor would ingratiate himself one way or another, win the woman over, and then brutally drop her. Eddie could document these affairs: He was the one who wrote the checks to the women, arranged for gifts to be sent to them. One specially favored woman was deeded a few acres of the doctor’s Hickory Handle farm.

The women’s reaction on being dropped was usually unpleasant to witness and, having acted as the doctor’s official dispenser of largesse, Eddie felt like an accomplice, at least an accessory to what seemed to him crimes against the human heart. One married nurse became a Demerol addict after Dr. Cavaness rejected her. Her moods rocketed from euphoria to depression until she lost muscle coordination and collapsed in fits of vomiting. Dr. Cavaness fired her.

He was adept at finding a weakness and exploiting it. He won over a married patient whose child had died, inching his way in, commiserating with her, until she divorced her husband in anticipation, it seemed obvious, of the doctor’s divorcing his wife and marrying her. Her husband took her back after the doctor dumped her. One time after another, the story repeated itself. He would flatter the women, send them gifts of cash or, sometimes, cheap jewelry or perfume, seduce them, and then cut them off.

Most of them continued as patients or as nurses, hanging around, hoping. He paid decent wages. All seemed to remain loyal to him, as if he had cast a spell.

It was the same with the doctor’s drinking as with his womanizing: Everybody knew about it; nobody questioned it. The drinking, by 1966 and after, became legendary, part of the Dr. Cavaness mystique. Eddie recognized the extent of it when he found four thermoses full of liquor on the front seat of the doctor’s car. His curiosity piqued, Eddie made a habit of glancing into the car; the thermoses were always there, ready for the road. At the office the doctor had one bottle in his desk, others stashed in a cabinet. It became usual for him to show up at the office cup in hand, jittery from a hangover. He would drop his pants in front of the employees and have one of the nurses give him a shot. What was in the syringe, Eddie did not know, maybe vitamin B
₁₂
, maybe something else.

He performed most of his operations in the mornings. The nurses told Eddie that they kept a special oxygen bottle in the operating room so that Dr. Cavaness could clear his head before cutting someone. It was no secret, they said. Everybody knew about it—except of course the patients.

Dr. Cavaness distributed amphetamines among the staff like candy. There were always plenty of samples from the salesmen lying around, packets of Fastin and Obestat and other appetite suppressants. He put Eddie on a regular dosage of Obestat to control his weight, until Eddie noticed that the pills were making it impossible for him to concentrate or sleep and turning him into a nervous wreck.

“Eddie, you’ll just eat yourself into oblivion,” Dr. Cavaness said when Eddie asked him to help him get off the Obestat. “You want to kill yourself? Go ahead.” Eddie managed to break the habit on his own, deciding that he would rather be fat than deranged. He wondered why his own doctor would give him such bad advice.

By 1967 Eddie was trying to get up the nerve to quit. Working for Dr. Cavaness had become like having a secret life that nobody would believe if you tried to tell them about it. He still admired the doctor’s brilliant mind; he continued to believe that Dale Cavaness had at least started out with humanitarian impulses. But he could no longer ignore the signs that the doctor was going to pieces, cared more about money than medicine, was out to destroy himself and did not mind if he took down other people with him. Eddie did not know a great deal about the doctor’s family life, but he gathered that it had become a shambles; the word was that he was not living at home. At times Eddie felt sorry for Dr. Cavaness, who for all his success seemed to set himself up for failure. Even when he made a sound investment, he pulled out before it had time to mature. He put money into a development at Lake Barkley over in Kentucky, for instance, which would have made him rich had he not sold out to cover his losses in a coal mine.

By 1967 the financial situation was so chaotic that Eddie began concealing deposits from Dr. Cavaness, hoping that if he did not know the money was in the bank, he could not spend it. The doctor ordered Eddie to cut off Marian’s credit at the grocery and liquor stores. She was spending too much and becoming an alcoholic, the doctor said, neither of which Eddie believed, although he imagined that anyone would need to drink to stay married to the man. He also told Eddie to stop putting money into Marian’s checking account.

Eddie could not bring himself to follow these orders, although disobeying them frightened him. He did not cancel Marian’s credit, and he surreptitiously transferred money from other accounts into hers, hoping that the doctor would not notice or would forget and shift his anger onto another woman or a creditor. Eddie believed that Marian must have badly misjudged her husband—not that she was alone in that. Certainly she had underestimated his hostility and capacity for treachery. He guessed that she knew little of the extent to which her husband had betrayed her, nothing of the way he had mortgaged his family’s future.

A new tale of Dr. Cavaness’s womanizing was making the rounds. Supposedly he had at least one other affair going besides the one with Martha Culley, which by then everyone knew about. This other woman lived in an apartment in Harrisburg. Dr. Cavaness arrived to visit her one night and encountered a friend of his there: The other man had been seeing the woman earlier in the evenings and departing before the doctor customarily arrived. The two men fought in the street, in view of the neighbors. The other fellow was taller and looked far stronger, but the doctor had won, nearly biting off his rival’s little finger and sending him howling away. What the doctor then did to the woman, no one could say. There had been a lot of shouting coming from her apartment.

Given the traditions of Little Egypt, as Eddie Miller knew, a story such as this one would do little to shake the faith of most of Dr. Cavaness’s patients; it would only add to his aura as a man beyond ordinary mortals. The doctor was a monarch who ranged about his kingdom with impunity. And what could his wife do about it? Where could she go? She was trapped. She could only hang on, serving out what was probably a life sentence.

Dr. Cavaness was now directing his rages more frequently against Eddie, berating him, ridiculing him, telling him that he was lucky to have his job. Eddie told his mother that he was going to have to quit, but she urged him to stick it out, afraid that he would end up unemployed, unable to support her; and he could not bring himself to tell her how bad things really were at the office, how he was having to do things that might put him in danger if the doctor found out about them, how he was taking abuse that was wiping out whatever self-confidence he had left.

Eddie’s only solace, his only way of getting free from the demands of Dr. Cavaness and of his mother, was playing the organ at church on Sunday over in Evansville. He would leave on Saturday afternoons, have dinner in Evansville, sleep in a motel, escape into music on Sunday morning, and return to fix his mother’s supper, dreading Monday.