Murder in Little Egypt (29 page)

When drunk, Sean would fall into an uncanny imitation of Dale, swaggering around the house, swearing, threatening, trying to be funny but achieving an unnerving effect. Sean was an excellent mimic anyway; his version of Dale was near-perfect. “By God,” he would begin, “you can bet your sweet ass,” and use all of Dale’s favorite phrases. “We’re going to get all the Rudies together and sit down at the roundtable and settle this goddamned thing!” He would try to telephone his father in southern Illinois and, if he reached him, tell him how much he loved him and ask when he could come down to visit. Dale usually hung up on him, and Sean would cry and wonder why his father was so cold to him. Didn’t Dale love him? Was there something he had done? Did his father hate him because he was too fat? Was it because he had dropped out of school? Maybe next summer he could get close to his father again.

Dale’s lawyer had succeeded in fending off the felony-theft charges against his client for six years. In November of 1980, Dale finally pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of deceptive practice. He was sentenced to a five-hundred-dollar fine, seventeen hundred dollars in restitution, and one year’s probation. His co-conspirator in fraud, Harker Miley, a Department of Vocational Rehabilitation counselor, received by contrast a sentence of ten thousand five hundred dollars in restitution, five years’ probation, and a five-hundred-dollar fine. As the chief probation officer of Saline County wrote in his confidential report:

Having access to offense reports and conversations about the offenses with Harker Miley and Dr. Cavaness, there is no doubt in my mind that they were equally culpable but due to Dr. Cavaness’ position as a doctor and surgeon, the [judicial officials] decided to reduce the charges to a level where he would not lose his license to practice medicine. . . .

Marian still invited Dale to St. Louis for holidays and tried to hold her tongue rather than to condemn him in front of the boys. She feared that to denigrate Dale to them would risk depriving them of a father. They would probably believe whatever she said of him, and she was not prepared to assume so complete a responsibility. She succeeded in burying her worst suspicions and perpetuated the necessary lies, or half-truths, or convenient fictions, whatever they were: that Kevin, Sean and Patrick had a father who, whatever his angers and peculiarities and deficiencies, had once been a wonderful man, might become so once again, and cared for them in some deep, hidden way. In the long run, she reasoned, they were better off with a distant and difficult father than with no father at all.

At Christmastime in St. Louis Uncle Eddie Bell and other guests, friends of Marian old and new, were astonished at the way Dale would talk to his sons when Marian was out of the room. Under his breath he would refer to Sean as buzzard-brain, aardvark, no-bill, deadbeat. Kevin tried to deflect Dale onto innocuous topics: How were the farms doing? Were the cattle bringing good prices?

“What do
you
want to know for?” Dale responded. “Just what are you after? Why don’t you get out of my life?”

The other guests would leave early, and Dale would zero in on Sean, asking what he planned to do with his life, if he was prepared to remain an embarrassment. When Marian did witness these attacks, she would force Dale to apologize on the spot or later over the telephone; but their memory festered.

As Sean approached twenty years of age, his drinking grew worse. He would often break down when drinking, swear he was going to find Mark’s killer, try to telephone his dad at all hours. He grew attached to an older couple who lived in the house next door, Elmer and Viola Eltinge, who were survivors of the Auschwitz concentration camp and had come to America in the 1950s. They had been separated from each other and from their son in 1943, reunited after the liberation in 1945. Having escaped death in the camps, they talked of little else.

Marian loved Elmer and Viola and listened to their stories with horrified fascination. Again and again she heard Viola tell of the night when they were rounded up, herded into boxcars, transported, and marched into different sections of the camp.

“They took my son!” Viola cried out. “They took my son from me!” Marian told the Eltinges that she had lost a son, too, without going into details. At least the Eltinges could be grateful that their son had survived along with them and could come to visit them now. But Marian knew that her troubles were far less than the Eltinges had witnessed and endured. Their stories were almost unimaginable; she could stand to hear only so much about Auschwitz.

Not so with Sean. He never tired of examining the Eltinges’ forearms, where the tattooed prisoners’ numbers still showed, and poring over their collection of photographs taken on the day of liberation: One depicted Elmer and Viola huddled with other freed prisoners, hollow eyes telling of death.

Maybe you should not spend so much time over at Elmer and Viola’s house, Marian suggested to Sean. Maybe it is too depressing for you. But Sean remained drawn to them, and when Viola died, Sean devoted hours to comforting the desolate Elmer.

While Marian could hardly fault Sean for his compassion, she perceived something morbid and compulsive in the degree of his interest in the Eltinges. He would run up to Elmer and hug him, as if by touching him he could heal the wounds of the past and his own wounds. She feared that, given his emotional state, an obsession with the most hideous crimes in the history of mankind was dangerous. She tried to convince him that one had to make one’s own life, find joy and hope in trivial, everyday things, as she had tried to do. The alternative was depression, madness: He could no more solve the world’s problems than his brother’s murder.

Sean’s behavior reminded her of the way Mark would shut himself up in his room and listen to Jimi Hendrix records by the hour. Like many parents Marian had fought a losing battle against music she thought might have a baleful influence on her children. Sean’s tastes were easier for her to bear—old Beatles records, James Taylor, sounds that might almost be called romantic—but the effect was similar, turning him inward, putting him in a daze. And his memories of Mark appeared to intensify over the years, especially when he drank and grew angry. Marian came home one evening to find that Sean had driven his fist through a wall in frustration.

Early in 1982, now in his twentieth year, Sean got the idea from some of his southern-Illinois friends that there was big money to be made in the oil fields of Oklahoma. It sounded like an adventure; it might shake him from his obsessions with the past; Marian encouraged him to go.

Dale supplied him with an old pickup truck and Sean headed west with a couple of his buddies to Woodward, out in the Oklahoma Panhandle, a boomtown in those days, a place as alive with drilling activity as it was rough and isolated. Sean survived the life of a roughneck for a few months, but when he was laid off as the boom began to bust, he came home, minus the truck. At Christmas in St. Louis, Dale lit into him for his failure.

Kevin and Charli, who were married in October 1982, at the First Presbyterian Church in Eldorado, were now living in St. Louis. Marian hoped that their stability might have a positive effect on Sean. Kevin landed a manufacturing engineering job at Emerson Electric Corporation, and Charli worked as the nurse and receptionist for a pediatrician. Their apartment in the suburb of Maryland Heights was only a few minutes’ drive from Marian’s house.

They tried to counsel Sean and to get him to seek medical help for his drinking, which was increasing. He could not stop talking about Mark, about his love for Grandpa Peck and his troubles with his father. After months of persuasion, they, along with Marian, finally convinced him to enter an alcoholic-rehabilitation center in December 1983. The program involved a month’s seclusion, supervision, counseling, and diagnosis.

That Christmas Kevin and Charli, in southern Illinois to visit her parents, stayed one night at the Harrisburg house that Dale had recently bought for himself and Martha Culley. They hoped to persuade Dale to contribute something toward the costs of Sean’s treatment, which was only partially covered by Marian’s insurance from her nursing job.

The house was a three-story place with an impressive portico, next door to the Sullivans’ on Walnut Street, filled top to bottom with antiques—mostly junk, Kevin and Charli thought, thrown together and lending the impression of a used-furniture warehouse, the rooms apparently arranged according to nationality, with a Japanese wing here, an Italian room there, all of it dark and musty. In one room they discovered the bed and other furniture from Dale’s Galatia trailer, which had burned to the ground the previous spring, supposedly a total loss. Evidently Dale had had the foresight to remove everything of value beforehand.

“I knew it,” Kevin said to Charli as they lay in bed after a difficult evening trying to make conversation with Dale and Martha, everyone except Charli, who seldom took more than a single beer, ending up pie-eyed. “The son of a bitch burned that trailer and collected on the insurance. He told me he got eighty thousand or something. Son of a bitch.”

They found themselves unable to sleep in the house and wished they had not stayed there. Marian, in her usual effort at diplomacy, had urged them to try to be friendly with Martha. She herself would never speak to the woman again, but after all, it looked as if Dale planned to stick with her, for God only knew what reasons. There was no sense in having more ill feelings in the family than there already were.

But Kevin could not stomach an evening with Martha. He told Charli, who held him as he squirmed in the bed, that he wished he had grabbed Martha’s wig and flung it in the fire. He boiled with resentment at the house which, though it needed paint and smelled of wood-rot, was just the sort of elegant old place Marian would have loved to fix up. It dated from the early 1920s, the end of Little Egypt’s only prosperous modern period, and qualified as a Harrisburg landmark. To Kevin the house symbolized everything that his family had lost through Dale’s indifference and Martha’s complicity in his ways.

“I don’t suppose you could cough up something to help Sean,” Kevin said to his father the next morning. “That treatment program is going to cost a bundle.”

“Can’t promise anything,” Dale said. “Things are tight.”

He’ll send something, Kevin thought. He’ll send a couple of hundred dollars, cry poverty. He’ll probably take it out of Grandpa’s trust fund, if that isn’t already gone.

During that same period, from the middle of December 1983 into January 1984, Jack Nolen dared to hope that he was finally closing in on the doctor. He had discovered no new evidence regarding Mark’s murder. Frank Stoat had separated from his wife and was living somewhere in the Deep South; Dr. Cavaness was behaving as usual but had betrayed nothing that would tie him to the killing. Yet the case remained open, Nolen had not given up, and now he thought that he might have something on the doc that would land him in jail, perhaps for a good long stretch.

Nolen organized an undercover drug bust that led to the biggest narcotics dealer in southern Illinois, a man known as the Panther, who operated out of Old Shawneetown. In a sting operation, D.C.I. agents were able to purchase cocaine and other drugs from the Panther who, in return for leniency, agreed to inform on other dealers. He named names and one of them, Johnny Weingarten, Nolen recognized as a close acquaintance of Dr. Cavaness’s.

Weingarten worked for the doc on the Galatia farm and had built a house on property acquired from Dr. Cavaness on Harrisburg Lake. (Where Weingarten, who had been a promising youth, valedictorian of his high school class, but had amounted to nothing since, had acquired the money to buy land and build a house was an interesting question; the property deed indicated a price of fifty-five thousand dollars for the land alone.) Weingarten’s former marriage to Martha Culley’s daughter was another link to the doctor.

None of these connections proved any criminal behavior on the part of Dr. Cavaness, but Jack Nolen had them in mind when he planned a setup in which the Panther would attempt to buy drugs from Johnny Weingarten. It was not a matter of guilt by association but rather of suspicion by association, so often a fruitful approach in any investigation. The target of the bust was Weingarten; if he could be shown to have any criminal ties to Dr. Cavaness, who as a physician had access to drugs, that would be a bonus.

When the Panther told Nolen that a meeting to buy drugs had been arranged with Weingarten at a spot out in the country near Galatia, Nolen directed that the Panther be wired with a transmitter. Nolen knew the location well. It was on the Cavaness farm, near the Shea house, where Mark Cavaness’s body had been found.

On a clear December night Nolen placed the recording equipment in his Buick and followed the Panther out to the Galatia farm. He let the Panther proceed up the dirt road to the Shea house: Nolen switched off his headlights and pulled up on the main road beyond the entrance to Dr. Cavaness’s property, safely out of sight and hearing.

Nolen adjusted the recorder and his earphones. He heard the Panther and Weingarten exchange greetings. Weingarten introduced another man.

“You sure there’s nobody else around here?” Nolen heard the Panther say. “Who owns this place?”

“Our friend the doctor,” Weingarten said. In the darkness Nolen turned up the volume and smiled. He heard Weingarten go on to say that he had done a little favor for the doctor a few months back. He had torched the doctor’s trailer for him.

“This is pretty good stuff,” the Panther said. “Where’d you get it?”

“The doctor,” Weingarten said. “Our buddy the doctor.”

“You don’t say. So what if he gets raided? Here you are. He could tie you in.”

“No sweat,” Weingarten said. “We don’t have nothing to do with him, see? We just say we’ve been working for him on his catfish farm. Which is what we have been doing.”

When the evidence was analyzed it included 29.3 grams of liquid morphine. With five milligrams as the normal dosage given to a heart-attack victim or other patient suffering excruciating pain, this was a considerable amount, worth upwards of ten thousand dollars on the street, capable of providing several thousand highs.