Murder in Little Egypt (37 page)

Barron believed that he now had everything he needed except the murder weapon. When Dale was arrested the police had found a loaded pistol under the seat of his car, but when tested it did not appear to be the right gun.

As soon as Charli and Kevin got home early that afternoon they opened an attaché case Dale had left behind. Marian had glanced into it for only a second when she had noticed the case lying behind a chair in the living room, after Dale had hit the road, or so the family had believed, for Illinois; but she had snapped it shut again, not wishing to pry and saying that there was nothing inside but books and papers. Kevin and Charli now decided to open the case again. They thought that they might find a gun in it.

Inside they discovered no gun but an equally frightening collection of objects underneath some tax statements, medical brochures and a letter demanding payment of a debt: a ten-inch butcher’s knife, a two-pound sledgehammer, and a length of nylon cord knotted with a hangman’s noose.

“Looks like he wanted to have several options,” Kevin said. “Holy Christ. Were we next, or what?”

“He’ll probably just say he needed this stuff for the farm,” Charli said. She telephoned Barron, who said that he would send someone over to pick up the case.

* * *

When Kevin telephoned Marian, she had only just arrived from the Wausau airport. Les answered the phone and said that Marian would call right back. Kevin did not tell Les what had happened, feeling that he should inform his mother directly.

“I have some good news and some bad news,” Kevin began.

“Yes, dear. What on earth?”

“The good news is that they have the killer. They’ve arrested somebody.”

“That’s wonderful. But who is it? Who?”

Kevin then began reading Dave Barron’s notes, which the detective had given him: Suspect admits arriving in town, goes upstairs to victim’s apartment, and so on. He asked Marian to say whether she thought the police had the right guy.

“It certainly sounds convincing,” Marian said. “Who is this person?”

“That’s the bad news,” Kevin said. “It’s the old man.”

“It’s what?”

“It’s Dale. They’ve arrested Dad for killing Sean.”

Marian at first could not accept it. Kevin referred again to Barron’s notes, and Marian acquiesced reluctantly, then affirmed her belief in Dale’s guilt. For the first time she confessed that seven years before she had suspected Dale of killing Mark. She had known about the insurance on Mark, but she had repressed the idea. It was too terrible.

Kevin admitted that he had also had his suspicions and had also repressed them, for the same reasons. He of course had not known about the insurance on Mark. He was kicking himself now, Kevin said, for not seeing through Dale’s latest insurance fraud. There had been one after another. They all fit together.

Marian had to get off the phone. She had to tell all this to Les. She had to lie down.

That evening the phone rang constantly at Kevin and Charli’s—Marian, friends who had seen the news on television. Tomorrow, Kevin knew, it was going to be in all the papers, in St. Louis and all over southern Illinois. He would probably have to get an unlisted phone number to keep his sanity, if indeed he could get through all this without cracking. The horror of what his father had done—and might have wished to do to him—weighed him down, sending his emotions from anger to despair. He caught himself wondering whether he had done something, along with his brothers, to earn Dale’s hatred. Charli told him to banish such thoughts. They were poison and totally irrational.

One of the callers was an old girlfriend of Dale’s, the one to whom he had given a few acres of Hickory Handle. She was living in the northeast now but had heard about the arrest from southern-Illinois friends. It was absurd, she said. What did the St. Louis police think they were doing? It was outrageous to think that they could hold Dale just because they had found a gun in his car.

“If that’s all it is,” Charli told her, ‘‘I’d have to agree with you.” Barron had instructed her and Kevin not to discuss the evidence with anyone except Marian and the prosecutors, who would soon be contacting them. Charli was not pleased to be talking to one of Dale’s old girlfriends about anything anyway. Her loyalty to Dale and her faith in him were not surprising, but they were unsettling. Charli told her to talk to T. R. Murphy, who was acting as Dale’s lawyer for now.

“She didn’t ask about Sean, did she?” Kevin said. “All she cares about is the old man.”

“She won’t be the only one,” Charli said. “We better be prepared.”

22

STEVE GOLDMAN, ASSISTANT PROSECUTOR FOR THE COUNTY OF St. Louis, was a wry, scholarly man of Barron’s age, dark and birdlike in appearance—he had a way when he was thinking of crooking his neck downward and dropping his chin onto his shoulder that made him resemble a heron. Law-enforcement circles knew him for his thoroughness and his sardonic wit. After reviewing the facts of the case, Goldman declared that if a book was ever written about Dr. Cavaness, it should be entitled
Family Practitioner.

On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, Goldman and Barron were chatting about the doc, who had been sitting silently in his cell since the nineteenth. They wondered what he was thinking and when he was going to get himself a lawyer, or whether the Public Defender’s Office would have to handle his case. The doc’s finances were a question. The check that he had written, postdated, for Sean’s funeral expenses had bounced; the funeral director was holding on to Sean’s ashes as a kind of security deposit.

“I’ve got an idea,” Barron told Goldman. “From everything we’ve learned, the holidays are a pretty rough time for the doc. He always went wacko at Christmas. Sean was killed practically on Christmas. Mark was killed at Easter. The reckless homicide happened at Easter. The guy might be in the mood to spill something. I’m going to wait until tonight and go talk to him again.”

“You can try,” Goldman said. “Maybe you should bring him a tree.”

It was after five in the afternoon when Barron went to see Dale where he was now being held, in a cell on the top floor of the St. Louis County jail in Clayton. Barron took Detective Sergeant Frank Foan along to witness the ritual reading of the rights and resigning of the waiver forms, which Dale completed without complaint. Barron noticed with satisfaction that from Dale’s cell window you could look out over Clayton, a prosperous, fashionable part of St. Louis, and see the Christmas lights and the hurrying last-minute shoppers. He hoped that Dale had been staring out the window and feeling sorry for himself. I should have brought a cassette, Barron thought, and played him some Bing Crosby.

“It’s Christmas Eve, you know,” Dale said, much to Barron’s satisfaction.

“We know,” Barron said. “We thought you might be wanting a little company.”

Dale said that he had been thinking. He wanted to make an additional statement about Sean’s death. It was true that he had driven to St. Louis, stayed at Sean’s apartment, and left the apartment with Sean at about half past one in the morning. Neither he nor his son had, however, ever returned to the apartment.

“Is that right?” Barron asked. “Well, tell us what happened, Dale.”

Dale said that he had taken Sean down to Laclede’s Landing—a restored part of old St. Louis on the Mississippi waterfront, full of restaurants and bars—and drunk with him until after closing time at approximately three A.M.

That explains Sean’s 0.26 blood-alcohol level, Barron thought. The two of them were really hitting it.

Dale said that, rather than go back to Sean’s apartment, they decided to drive around for a while. They passed through various areas of the city and ended up driving west on Highway 44. He did not know what time it was by then, Dale said, but the sun was coming up.

As they approached the Lewis Road exit, Dale said, Sean suggested that they turn off and drive through some of the countryside because it reminded him of southern Illinois.

They exited at Lewis Road and drove until there was a dead end, with a group of trailers blocking the way.

Barron noted, silently, that this must have been the sealed-off entrance to Times Beach.

They turned around the other way, Dale continued, stopped for a school bus that was loading children, crossed some railroad tracks and took a side road.

Allen Road, Barron thought.

It was farm country, and it did look like southern Illinois. Dale had driven down the side road for a short distance when Sean asked him to stop the car so they could get out and look at some cows. He did stop, next to a pair of stone pillars that might have been hand-carved. As they were standing by the car, Sean all of a sudden asked Dale if he had a gun with him. Could he see it?

Dale opened the trunk, took out a pistol, a Smith & Wesson .357 magnum that he carried there, and handed it to Sean, who was standing near the passenger-side door. He did not know whether Sean wanted to fire the gun or not. They were out in the country, so it would not have mattered.

Dale said that as he returned to the trunk of the car to get himself a can of soda, Sean said:

“Tell Mom I’m sorry.”

Dale heard a shot and looked up to see his son crumple to the ground. He ran to Sean’s aid but found him lying there lifeless. He showed no vital signs.

Dale said that he immediately felt that his ex-wife, Marian, would have a terrible time dealing with a suicide, so, in order to save Marian from emotional stress, he picked up the gun from Sean’s hand, backed up a few feet, and fired another shot, striking Sean in the back of the head.

“Where did the bullet hit him?” Barron asked.

Dale pointed with his index finger to a spot just to the right side of the lower portion of the back of his head. The autopsy report did indeed show a wound at that exact spot. The examining surgeon, however, had determined that this was the first shot, not the second, which was to the side of the head, just in front of the right ear. The shots had occurred in reverse order from Dale’s account of them; and the pathologist had determined that the first shot, the one to the back of the head, had been fired from behind, while the victim was still standing.

Barron could not think through these discrepancies in the midst of the interview. He made a note to check Dale’s version of what had happened against the forensic evidence.

“It must have been tough to hit that spot on Sean’s head,” Barron said quietly, concealing his disgust at the image of a father firing a bullet—a second one—into his dead son’s head. This was some story.

“It was a lucky shot,” Dale said, as though describing target practice, showing no emotion whatsoever. He spoke as if his actions had been logical, even thoughtful, with his supposed concern for Marian. “I didn’t have my glasses on and I have buried cataracts. It was a lucky shot, that’s all.”

“You know, Dale,” Barron said, “that our Bureau of Criminal Identification is going to be able to verify whether or not Sean had fired the weapon. They did a gun-residue test on Sean’s hands.”

“Any test you did would come back negative,” Dale said.

“Why is that, if he fired the first shot himself?”

“Because I took a damp cloth. After the second shot, I took a damp cloth and wiped his hand clean so nobody would find gunpowder residue there. You see, I wanted it to look like a homicide and a robbery.”

Dale said that he had for that reason taken his son’s wallet, keys and coat and driven back to southern Illinois that morning. He had hidden Sean’s things on some property he had down there.

“What about the gun?” Barron asked.

“I have that,” Dale said. “It’s hidden in my garage.”

Barron asked for exact directions to where the items could be found. He gave Dale pen and paper, and Dale drew two maps, showing where Sean’s belongings were at the Galatia farm and where the gun was hidden in the garage on Walnut Street in Harrisburg.

Barron telephoned Steve Goldman to convey this latest of the doc’s stories. The idea that Sean had committed suicide was preposterous, Goldman said, and Barron agreed. Barron thought that he might have put the suicide business in Dale’s mind during the previous, marathon interview, when he had asked him whether Sean had died of murder or suicide or what, just to try to get him to say something and admit that he had been present at Sean’s death. It had taken Dale a few days to dream up this version.

“The autopsy should disprove it,” Goldman said, “but I don’t like to have an entire case hanging on forensic evidence. I hope you can come up with something else. We may not have enough here.”

“Don’t worry, Steve,” Barron said, “I’m going down to southern Illinois the day after Christmas. I’ll come back with everything you need.”

Dave Barron drove down to southern Illinois on Wednesday, December 26, with detectives Larry Fox and Ted Kaminski and met Jack Nolen at the Saline County Courthouse on Shawnee Square in Harrisburg.

Nolen had warned Barron not to expect a warm welcome from the people of Little Egypt, especially not from the citizens of Eldorado. They were up in arms about the doc’s arrest. Nobody, nobody who was talking anyway, believed that Dr. Dale, as they called him, had murdered his son. Barron had better understand that Doc Cavaness was the local hero. His patients worshiped him, and just about everybody was a patient or a relative of the patient. Nolen had talked to one man, the owner of an Eldorado shop, who had told him that he did not think that Doc Cavaness had done it, but that if he
had
murdered his son, the boy had probably deserved it and, the man said, he hoped that the doc got away with it and was acquitted whether he was guilty or not.

Nolen had always had good relations with the people of Eldorado. Now he was no longer welcome there. He could feel it. He could see it in the faces and hear it in the voices. The word was out that he was still investigating Mark Cavaness’s murder and that there might be a connection between the two killings. Publicly he was still denying that Dr. Cavaness was a suspect in the earlier death or had ever been a suspect. He had to tread carefully. His new name for Eldorado was the City of Hostility. The people were organizing a defense fund for the doc, asking for donations to hire a hotshot St. Louis attorney. They planned to hold fund-raising bean suppers and to place canisters in stores, so people could donate to the doc the way they did to conquer diseases.