Murder in Little Egypt (32 page)

At about one-thirty Kevin reached Dale at the Harrisburg house. Kevin thought that his father sounded drunk and gathered that Marian had already telephoned him.

“He’s dead, huh?” Dale said.

Kevin asked his father to come to St. Louis the next day. He could stay at Kevin and Charli’s apartment. He said he would.

Kevin and Charli were up all night, trying to imagine who would have or could have murdered Sean. They could not name a soul.

19

BY NINE-THIRTY THAT MORNING DAVE BARRON HAD RETURNED to 4170 Arsenal. With other officers he surveyed Sean’s apartment, which proclaimed alcoholic depression: an empty quart of vodka left on one of the few pieces of furniture, a round coffee table; a little Coleman kerosene stove which with the electricity and gas shut off must have served for heat and light; the telephone dead; dirty clothes heaped in corners of the two bedrooms and the bathroom, which had seen no scrub brush for many weeks.

The scene made Barron melancholy. From Kevin and Charli he had already formed an image of Sean as a sad young man eager to love and be loved, swamped by miseries, facing a doubtful future. It was easy to imagine him in these dark, bare, rudimentary rooms. Kevin by contrast, devastated though he was, seemed strong—angry but determined. Kevin had Charli. Barron had been impressed by Charli when she had volunteered to spare Kevin the task of identifying the body. In conversation she revealed an intense, coherent intelligence, a kindly nature, and powers of endurance. A woman like that probably meant the difference between the two brothers’ lives.

Barron had been a cop long enough to know that family members with the same background could turn out radically different. Like most homicide detectives, he was a believer in both heredity and free will: People made their own heavens or hells, although some had to overcome longer odds than others. Barron had extricated himself from poverty in a tough St. Louis neighborhood. He gave his wife much of the credit for his being able to handle a difficult and depressing job with equanimity. He also tried never to neglect his marriage, sharing his cases with his wife, making sure to telephone her during the day, more often when he was working nights, to see how the kids were doing and to ask whether she was having any problems. He had seen too many cops’ marriages break up, and even a brief conversation with his wife helped his perspective, reminding him of normal life.

While other officers photographed the apartment and dusted for fingerprints, Barron went downstairs to talk to the neighbors, who, Kevin and Charli said, were Sean’s friends. They were Ralph and Peggy Kroeck, in their late twenties, married with two young children. Mrs. Kroeck answered the door; her husband emerged in his bathrobe, rubbing his eyes.

Barron identified himself and Detective Larry Fox, his partner. Mrs. Kroeck, a short, heavy woman dressed in a meter-maid’s uniform, said that she had seen the officers come in and had heard them go upstairs to visit Sean’s place. She had not wanted to wake Ralph, who had worked last night, but he had heard the footsteps. Why were the police visiting Sean? Was something wrong? Surely Sean hadn’t done anything.

“Sean is dead,” Dave Barron said.

Peggy and Ralph Kroeck, who was as wiry and tall as she was neither, looked shocked. When Barron told them that Sean had been shot to death and found early the previous morning, they grabbed one another and started crying. They could not understand why anyone would want to kill Sean, he was such a loving, wonderful person. They had come to think of him as a brother or even as a son. They described him as a young man who drank too much but was a happy drunk, around them anyway. They had last seen Sean two nights ago, late Wednesday evening.

“Did you speak to him?” Barron asked.

Mrs. Kroeck said that Sean had come down to use the telephone sometime after six that evening. He had been excited about his plans for the holidays, going to Illinois with his family for part of the time.

“Did he seem drunk? Was he acting intoxicated?”

“No, not at all. He had not been drinking from what I could tell,” Mrs. Kroeck said.

Somehow he managed to get up to 0.26 before dawn, Barron thought, but he did not doubt Peggy Kroeck’s perceptions.

“So that was the last time you saw him?”

No, Mrs. Kroeck said, Sean had gone out after that. He had said that he was going over to his girlfriend’s, Tina Crowley’s. Mrs. Kroeck said that Tina was her best friend and that she had introduced Tina and Sean when he had moved into the building; he and Tina had been close ever since. Then Mrs. Kroeck herself had gone out, to visit a funeral parlor. Her husband’s grandfather had died.

Ralph Kroeck added that he had come home from work—he was a truck driver—after nine, when his wife was still at the funeral parlor.

Mrs. Kroeck said that she was driving back from the funeral parlor at about ten-thirty when, only a few blocks from home, she noticed what she thought was a dark car acting very strange, staying close to her, following her as she turned east on Arsenal from Morganford and right on Bent Drive from Arsenal, where she parked at the corner. As she stopped, she said, the other car pulled up next to her for a moment and then drove on, heading slowly south on Bent.

Mrs. Kroeck said that she hurried out of her car and ran into her apartment and told her husband, Ralph, that she was afraid she had been followed home. She and Ralph had run to their daughter’s bedroom window, which looked out on to Bent Drive, and she noticed the strange car make a U-turn in an alleyway and then come back toward Arsenal. The car was going very slowly. When it reached Arsenal, it made another U-turn and headed back south again on Bent.

At this point Ralph Kroeck picked up the account. He had been alarmed, he said, at the behavior of this car, and he hurried out the back door of the apartment to get a better look. He saw the car make yet another U-turn at Hartford, one block south of Arsenal, and head back, slowly as before, again toward Arsenal on Bent. As the car approached, Mr. Kroeck took up a position at the rear of his building and was able to get a clear view as it passed under a streetlamp. He read the license plate and rushed back inside and wrote down the number.

“You wouldn’t still happen to have that number, would you?”

“I think so,” Ralph Kroeck said. He went into his kitchen and produced a brown-paper grocery sack. “Here it is. Illinois, AVT-one-eight-three.”

“Illinois. You’re sure it was Illinois? Okay. Then what happened? Did the car go away?”

Mr. Kroeck said that the car parked under a streetlamp at the corner of Bent and Arsenal, facing north. By this time he and his wife were watching it again from their daughter’s window and then through the front windows. They watched the driver, who was the only person in the car, get out and reach back in on the passenger side and take from the glove compartment a flashlight and some other object, they could not tell what. The car was a dark-colored Oldsmobile Toronado, Mr. Kroeck said, with a spare-tire kit on the back, like a Lincoln Continental. The man walked to the corner of Bent and Arsenal.

Just then Sean Cavaness appeared on foot. He was coming from the direction of the 7-Eleven store several blocks away. He walked right up to the man, and the two embraced.

Mrs. Kroeck said that at this point she finally recognized the man she thought had been following her. He was Dr. Cavaness, Sean’s father from Illinois.

Mrs. Kroeck had recognized Dr. Cavaness because he had come to the apartment once before, about a month earlier, looking for Sean, and she had put him on the phone to Tina Crowley, who gave him directions to her apartment. He had introduced himself at that time, and she was able to see that it was the same person because he was standing under the lamp. Then from their front window she and Ralph had watched him and Sean walk together up the porch steps, talking and embracing; and they heard the two men go up the stairs to Sean’s apartment. Ralph Kroeck said that he did not recognize Dr. Cavaness, because he had never seen the man before; but he described him as white, between fifty and sixty years old, short and stocky. The porch light had been on. They could see both men clearly.

Mr. and Mrs. Kroeck said that Sean and Dr. Cavaness had been upstairs in Sean’s apartment for a couple of hours or more. They could hear them up there, talking and laughing and singing; they assumed that father and son were sharing drinks, the laughing and the singing got pretty loud. And they could hear them walking around up there: two distinct sets of footsteps.

So we’re on the way to 0.26, Barron thought. Then we take a ride out of town, and that’s it.

Mr. Kroeck said that he and his wife had watched television and gone to bed sometime before one o’clock on Thursday morning. They were able to fall asleep, but later—he could not name the hour; he had not looked at the clock—he was awakened by footsteps, again two distinct sets, coming down the stairs. He was a light sleeper, and he always heard Sean coming in or out. The stairs ran right past his bedroom, and the hallway echoed. That night he heard the footsteps clamping all the way down the stairs and the front door being opened and shut. Peggy had not awakened. It was unusual, Mr. Kroeck said, for Sean to have late-night visitors, except for Tina Crowley, and very unusual to hear him go out after midnight. That was entirely unlike Sean.

Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Kroeck had heard or seen anyone enter or leave Sean’s apartment since Thursday morning before dawn. There had not been a sound from up there. They had assumed that Sean must have been with Tina, with whom he had been staying off and on.

Barron had Mr. and Mrs. Kroeck go over their story again. He checked out the places from where they said that they had observed the car and the man who Peggy was sure had been Sean’s father, and he took with him the grocery bag with the license number on it. He thanked the Kroecks, telling them that they had been very helpful and that he would be in touch with them again. They agreed not to discuss what they had told him with anyone else for the time being.

Back in his car with Detective Fox, Dave Barron whistled in amazement. It was usually only on television cop shows that people wrote down license numbers; unless there was an automobile accident, it just did not happen. Over his radio he ran a check on Illinois license AVT-183: The car was a 1983 Oldsmobile Toronado, two-tone gray, registered to Dr. John Dale Cavaness at 210 Walnut Street, Harrisburg, Illinois.

“I don’t believe it,” Barron said. “The Police Fairy must be looking out for us.”

He drove directly to the Clayton station and deposited the grocery bag for safekeeping with the evidence custodian. Then he telephoned Kevin and Charli. They said that they had been able to reach both of Kevin’s parents. Marian would arrive the next day, Saturday; Dr. Cavaness was expected at Kevin’s apartment sometime later that day or early evening.

“I’m glad the family can come,” Barron said, trying to sound as casual as possible. “This is going to be pretty rough on everyone, I know. Listen, Kevin, do me a favor, would you? Give me a call when your father arrives, okay? You have my number? Good. They’ll reach me if I’m out of the office. And here’s my home number. Just give me a call when the doctor arrives. I’ll come over.”

Now he wanted to talk to Tina Crowley. On the way out of the station, he passed a sergeant who asked him kiddingly whether he had solved the murder yet.

“Sure,” Dave said. “Don’t tell anybody. It’s the victim’s father. A doctor.”

“A doctor?” the sergeant laughed. “The hell you say. Get the fuck back on the street.”

Tina Crowley was in a bad state when Detective Barron interviewed her at her apartment on Wyoming at half past two that afternoon. She had heard the news of Sean’s death from Peggy Kroeck and from Charli Cavaness. She was worn down from weeping. Sean was the first person who had ever truly loved her, she said, and they had even begun talking about getting married. She had last seen Sean on Wednesday, December 12, and had spent the early evening shopping with him. She had dropped him off at his apartment at about eight and had neither seen nor heard from him since.

Tina, whom Barron observed as a forlorn creature who had obviously been in love with Sean, a single mother who had glimpsed some hope for her future only to have it dashed with Sean’s death—Tina Crowley said that Sean had seemed happy about his Christmas plans to visit his father in southern Illinois.

“Did Sean say anything about his father coming up to visit him? Coming to his apartment?”

“No.”

“Would you have been aware, do you think, if he had been expecting a visit from his father on Wednesday evening?”

“Sure I would’ve.” Had Dr. Cavaness visited? She wanted to know.

“I didn’t say that.” Barron said. “I was just wondering if Sean mentioned anything.”

Tina then told Barron about the only occasion on which she had met Dr. Cavaness. He came over to her apartment, she said, and sent Sean out for some vodka and Bloody Mary mix. That had upset her, because she was trying to help Sean stop drinking, but she did not say anything because she knew how glad he was to see his father, and she knew that Dr. Cavaness was a heavy drinker. Sean had told her he loved his father very much but that he could be difficult. Dr. Cavaness had not been difficult that evening. He and Sean had sat in the kitchen drinking and talking and laughing, while Tina had played Monopoly with relatives in the living room.

Sean had no enemies, Tina said, breaking down. She had no idea who had killed him or why. He was such a good person.

Difficult as it was for Dave Barron to imagine, Dr. John Dale Cavaness was now the major, indeed the only, suspect in the murder of Sean Cavaness. As yet Barron could discern no motive, but he had placed the doctor with his son within three to five hours of the murder. What had brought the doctor up from southern Illinois and when he had returned there remained unknown; but neither he nor Sean had gone back to the apartment that night. Sean was dead by seven Thursday morning. The doctor would have some explaining to do.

The toughest thing for Barron was not the evidence, which had been thrown into his lap by the miracle of the Kroecks’ having seen the doctor and having written down the license number. What bothered him was the idea of a father’s shooting his son—twice!—in the head. Barron and his wife, after having two children of their own, girls now in their teens, were in the process of adopting an eight-year-old orphan boy. They wanted a son and agreed that it would give them added pleasure and satisfaction to rescue a homeless child. They were now making regular visits to the boy before taking him home. Their daughters were enthusiastic. Barron and his wife knew that the boy would be frightened and would probably resist their love at first, but they welcomed the challenge and the chance to do something worthwhile for an unfortunate kid. To conceive of a father who would murder his own son—that was the hard part of this case as it was developing. What a weird world, Barron thought, with me adopting a son while I’m trying to catch a guy who murdered his—or who certainly appears to have done so.