Murder in Little Egypt (36 page)

“Well, don’t you know, I don’t, for you to start with the past, I—”

“You and I and everybody else on earth,” Yarbrough told him in concluding the interview, “that is what we are in our lives. We are our past lives. The occupation, the profession that you have as a doctor, the legal complications that you have gotten yourself into. I am not sitting here playing war games with you. You know what your past is. Your past is you. You add it all up, and what do you come up with? We are all a sum total of everything that we have experienced and everything that we have done. Right, Dale? Do you understand that? Just a sum total over the years of everything that we have experienced and everything that we have done, good or bad.”

Yarbrough reported to Dave Barron that, in his professional opinion, the doc was a liar. Dale had firsthand knowledge of Sean’s death, but was concealing it. Yarbrough thought Dale’s coldness extraordinary. In all of his experience as a polygraph examiner, he had never before dealt with such a cold person, a man apparently devoid of normal human reactions.

It was also noteworthy, Yarbrough thought, that Dale had confused the identities of his two dead sons throughout the interview, calling Sean Mark and Mark Sean, mixing up their ages and personalities. He did not seem to have an emotional commitment to either. Yarbrough also gathered that Dale thought both boys an embarrassment to a man of such professional competence and accomplishment. It was as if the doc had decided at some point that both boys were indistinguishable and expendable, like two animals tagged for slaughter.

One of the keys in determining whether or not someone is lying during a polygraph examination is the tone of voice, something not always within the power of the machine to evaluate with the necessary subtlety. Dale’s tone had been monotonous throughout. He might have been discussing the price of eggs rather than the death of his son, or two of his sons. The doc was encased in a cake of ice, the kind of guy you would not want to play poker with. You would lose.

Barron tried questioning Dale again. It was getting on toward dawn. Barron was feeling the strain, but Dale appeared to be willing to go on indefinitely. I’ve got to hand it to the son of a bitch, Barron thought. This is like dealing with the Bionic Man.

By seven that morning, Kevin and Charli had returned from taking Marian and Patrick to the airport and were facing the necessity of going to work. Charli set the alarm for seven-thirty and fell into bed with Kevin for a few minutes’ sleep. But before the alarm could go off, the telephone rang. It was Dave Barron.

“Charli, we’ve made an arrest.”

“Great!” Charli said. “Don’t tell me who it is yet. I’ve got to tell Kevin.”

“We need you down here.”

“We’ll be right down!”

Charli switched off the alarm and told Kevin the news. They were speculating on the identity of the killer—probably somebody Sean had worked with, some kind of a redneck nut case—when the phone rang again. Hap Dawson, the manager of the Hickory Handle farm, sounded hysterical. He was yelling into the phone.

“Charli! They’ve arrested D.C.!”

“What? Who?”

“Doc C. They’ve arrested him!”

“Oh, no,” Charli said. “What for?” She remembered that Dale had stopped at a liquor store before leaving St. Louis yesterday afternoon. “What is it? D. U.I.? Was he speeding?”

“I don’t know,” Hap said, and as he spoke, Charli’s mind slipped into gear.

“Oh, Hap,” she said, “we just got a call from the St. Louis police. They’ve made an arrest. Who told you about Dale? How did you find out?”

“Martha called me.”

Charli said that she would call back. She told Kevin what Hap had said. Kevin immediately telephoned Martha.

“Yes,” Martha said. “He’s been arrested.” Kevin thought that Martha sounded rather snippy, as if he had intruded on her privacy.

“What’s he been arrested for?” Kevin asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, how did you find out?”

“You better call Murphy’s office.” Martha’s voice made Kevin want to spit. “Murphy knows what’s going on.”

T. R. Murphy was Martha’s son-in-law, a lawyer who had married Martha’s daughter after her divorce from Johnny Weingarten. T. R. Murphy was a big-boned man with a ponytail who had handled Dale’s legal affairs for the past few years; Kevin did not relish the prospect of having to contact him to find out what was going on. But he dialed Murphy’s number and reached an assistant. Had Dale Cavaness been arrested? Kevin asked. What were the charges?

“It’s the big one,” Kevin heard the twangy voice say. “Murder One.”

Dave Barron was on the phone when Kevin and Charli walked into his office at the Clayton station. Kevin, standing at Barron’s desk, scanned a yellow legal pad on which Barron had been making notes. “Suspect admits arriving in town,” Kevin read. “Suspect goes upstairs to victim’s apartment. Suspect leaves with victim.” Barron hung up the phone and grabbed the pad.

“You been reading my notes?” Barron said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Kevin said. “We know who you’ve got.”

“Oh, yeah? Who?”

“My dad.”

Barron leaned back in his chair.

“Well, you’re right. You’re too quick for me. You’ve ruined my spiel.”

“What have you got on him?”

Barron went through the evidence and described to Kevin and Charli how Dale had reacted to the charges. It was then just after eight in the morning. Dale had been questioned for nearly fifteen hours. He had not asked for an attorney, had waived all his rights. Apparently he had the idea that the St. Louis police were stupid and would not be able to check out his alibi and trace his movements.

“I get the impression,” Barron said, “that Dale is a guy who’s used to having his own way. It sounds to me like he’s been able to do just about anything he wants in southern Illinois.”

“That’s putting it mildly,” Kevin said.

He had changed his story once, Barron said, but had admitted to nothing. Martha Culley had more or less confirmed Dale’s absence on the night of the murder. The case was becoming clear-cut, even with his stonewalling.

Barron said that he understood what a shock this must be to Kevin and Charli. He did not envy them, having to call Marian with the news. But he wanted them to understand that he had not acted without being sure of what he had. It was a difficult thing to face, but everything pointed to Dale’s having murdered Sean. The only question left was, why?

Barron explained the MOM theory of probable cause: Means, Opportunity, Motive. Dale certainly had the means; he was known to carry loaded guns around in his car. He had the opportunity, because he was in St. Louis with Sean that night. But what about a motive? Barron said that he had some ideas, but they were a little too hypothetical and abstract to stand up in court. If they did not get more evidence as to motive, they were going to have to release Dale. A judge was going to have to issue a proper warrant for his arrest. The police could not hold a suspect for more than twenty hours without probable cause; that was Missouri law. They had only four and a half hours left. Why had Dale done it?

Kevin and Charli looked at each other. Simultaneously they uttered the word: insurance.

Kevin described what his father had talked Sean and him into signing earlier that year, back in January as Kevin recalled. He had thought that there was something hokey about it at the time, but Dale’s insurance agent had assured him that the scheme was sound and potentially very lucrative. Kevin thought that the amount was something like a hundred thousand dollars each on all three sons, with Dale as the primary beneficiary and Marian as the secondary beneficiary.

“I don’t see how we could have been so naïve, signing something like that,” Kevin said. “I can’t believe this.”

Barron said that he could easily understand. If Kevin had seriously suspected that Dale would take out insurance in order to kill him or one of his brothers, he never would have signed and he probably would have kept his distance from his father. But it was too difficult for a son to imagine. It was hard enough for anyone else to imagine: Barron himself had had trouble at first accepting Dale’s guilt. He had never run across anything comparable before, nor had any of his fellow officers.

Barron asked Kevin and Charli whether they were aware that Dale had also had an insurance policy on Mark, around forty thousand dollars’ worth, taken out just a month before Mark’s death. Kevin and Charli were stunned.

“Then you think he killed Mark too?” Kevin asked, finding it painful to pronounce the words condemning his own father, his flesh and blood, the man with whom he had just spent four days and nights in close confinement.

“Jack Nolen thinks Dale killed Mark,” Barron said. “He’s thought so for a long time. As soon as I told him about Dale being a suspect here, he said that he was sure then that Dale had killed your other brother, too.”

After letting all this sink in, Kevin and Charli agreed that they had more to tell Dave Barron. They described how Dale had threatened to kill them if they told anyone about the safe and Weingarten. They had not known whether to take the threat seriously; now they did. And Charli told of a suspicious incident which had occurred a couple of years before when they had been visiting at Thanks-giving, staying in one of the Galatia trailers because there was not enough room for them at Charli’s parents’ house. They had gone to sleep one night in the trailer with the door locked. Dale had the only other key.

They were awakened in the morning by Charli’s sister and her husband, who had stopped to say good-bye.

“And when they walked in,” Charli said, “the trailer was full of gas. Every gas burner on the stove, all four of them were turned up full blast. I know we had locked the door. When my sister arrived at the trailer, the front door was unlocked. I woke up and the smell of gas was heavy. It was sickening. If Kevin had lit a cigarette that morning, we would have blown up.”

“We could have just plain been gassed out of existence,” Kevin said, “in our sleep.”

“I was sick to my stomach all day from the gas,” Charli said.

Charli added that they had told Dale about what had happened, but that he had just shrugged his shoulders and said that the same thing had happened to a girlfriend of his one time. But all four burners? It was possible that one of them had bumped up against one of the knobs and turned it on, but not all four.

They had thought that the whole thing was very strange at the time, but they had more or less forgotten about it until now. In a way it did not fit with Sean’s murder, because the insurance on him and Patrick and Kevin had not been taken out until the winter of 1984, yet . . .

“It’s worth remembering,” Barron said, “but the polygraph examiner picked up on something I agree with. He thought that Dale confused Mark and Sean in his mind, I mean sort of lumped them together, and that he thought they were an embarrassment to him, because he didn’t approve of their life-style.”

“That’s true,” Kevin said, and he recounted some of the numerous occasions when Dale had denigrated Sean and Mark. Dale had even said hostile things about Mark right after his death, in the summer of ’77. It was as if he had not thought Mark worthy of the Cavaness name, Kevin said sarcastically. It was the same with poor Sean, who had tried so hard to get Dale to love him. So he had taken out insurance and gotten rid of both of them.

Kevin remembered the time that Dale had shot the prize bull because it would not follow orders. His dad was obsessed with bovine genetics. It looked as if Dale felt the same about humans. Maybe he thought that Mark and Sean just did not measure up, so he got rid of them. It was like a science-fiction horror story or something the Nazis had done. Purifying the race. Kevin took a deep breath and emitted a long, weary, grieving sigh. “I guess he was culling the herd.”

Barron thought the remark apt. Mark and Sean were to their father, the master breeder, nothing but a couple of culls.

Suddenly Kevin remembered that he had asked his father about the insurance when Dale had said that he could not afford to pay for a decent funeral for Sean. Couldn’t that money be used or borrowed on to pay for the funeral? Dale had said that the policy was not in effect, because of Sean’s drinking problem. Kevin had not thought anything more about it until now.

Barron left the office and hurried down the hall to the room where Dale was being held. He asked Dale about the insurance, and Dale denied that he had ever paid any premiums on it or that the policy had ever actually been issued on Sean, because of his treatment for alcoholism.

Barron rushed back to the office and told Kevin and Charli that the motive was in danger of going out the window. He checked the clock. It was nearly eleven A.M.: Dale had already been held for eighteen hours. In two hours they would have to release him.

“Jesus,” Kevin said, “he’ll head right for southern Illinois. If he gets back down there, you may never get him. Charli and me, we’ll have to leave the country.”

Barron asked Kevin to walk over to the holding cell and talk to Dale. Kevin said it would do no good. Couldn’t Kevin just go in and look at him, shake his head, try to shame him, break him down?

“It won’t work,” Kevin said. “You cannot intimidate my dad that way. He’s got an iron will.”

Barron said that Kevin was probably correct. They would have to find out on their own about the policy in the little time they had left.

Kevin called work, where he had his copy of the policies stored in his desk, and had someone read him the policy numbers and the name of the company. Barron telephoned Jack Nolen, who would check with Dale’s insurance agent. Then Barron reached the head office of the Equitable company. Nolen called back with the information just as Barron was learning it from the company.

Dale had lied again. The policy was in effect on all three sons; the premiums, a thousand dollars a year on each, were paid up. The payoff’ was a hundred thousand.

Nolen also reported that Dale had two other policies, with different companies, amounting to another forty thousand on Sean’s life.

There was now less than an hour left before Dale would have to be released. Barron told Kevin and Charli that they could go home and raced from his office down to the booking sergeant, charging Dale with murder, first degree. The Prosecuting Attorney’s Office for St. Louis County, located just up the street in the County Courthouse, quickly issued a criminal-information sheet when Barron presented the facts. Barron hurried the papers over to the chambers of Judge Samuel Hais of the Circuit Court who, with about ten minutes to spare, issued a warrant and ordered the prisoner held without bond when Barron explained that John Dale Cavaness remained a menace and a threat to the surviving family members. Barron had no difficulty in believing that, if Dale were released, he might well try to kill Kevin and Charli, especially once he discovered that they were cooperating with the police and had supplied the most important evidence of all, the insurance policies.