Murder in Little Egypt (26 page)

“I want to tell you something,” Marian said to Dale now that they were alone. “If you have any ideas about inviting Martha to the funeral, just forget it. Forget it, is that clear?”

“No. I’m not inviting her.”

“Were you planning to invite her, before I said something? Because if you do, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

Marian’s eyes had been dulled from weeping, but now they shone black.

“Martha’s not coming,” Dale said.

“Don’t get any last-minute ideas about inviting her. I never know what you’re going to pull anymore. I couldn’t take that.”

“She’s not coming.”

Marian’s anger suddenly gave way to weeping again. She wished Dale would comfort her. It was their son. They should be able to share something. She threw herself into a chair in the living room and looked up at him. He did seem grief-stricken, red-eyed, disheveled. But she could tell that as usual he was anxious to be on his way. The death of his son had interrupted his routine or whatever it was he did. Something had come up that was beyond his control, and it annoyed him: Was that what he was feeling inside? He had become a mystery to her.

Abruptly Marian found herself saying with an edge to her voice, “I don’t suppose all that insurance you’re always talking about having covers something like this, does it? I mean, even you probably haven’t thought of that.”

“As a matter of fact,” Dale said, “I just took out a policy on Mark in February.”

“What?”

“It was for his future.”

“His future?”

“That’s right. You get low rates, then you turn it over to him later. It was for his future.”

“How much?”

“About forty thousand.”

“And who’s the beneficiary?”

‘‘I’m the primary beneficiary, and you’re the secondary beneficiary, in case something happened to me. I got to go.”

Dale left the house. A disturbing idea occurred to Marian. In her mind she heard Dale’s voice: “If I find out that damn Mark is involved in some dope ring, I’ll kill him.” He had uttered variations of that statement many times. Marian had always dismissed it as the sort of thing an angry father says, as a figure of speech. But the life insurance made Marian begin to wonder.

She had heard of parents who took out life insurance on their children and then turned the policies over to them when they married. But Dale had taken out the policy in February. In April Mark was dead. It did seem like quite a coincidence.

The disturbing idea invaded Marian. Dale had never liked Mark. Was it possible . . . ?

It was too absurd. She had nothing like proof. She would not tell anyone and she would have to try to dismiss the idea. But the more she thought about it, the less implausible it seemed and the more she heard herself saying I know it, I know he did it. She had an impulse to telephone Detective Nolen to tell him of her thoughts—but no, he would think her hysterical, and she probably was; her grief was confusing her judgment, her resentment of Dale getting the better of her reason. Fathers do not go around killing their sons.

On Monday afternoon the First Presbyterian Church, the place where Dale had gone as a child, a white wooden structure with a square bell tower, filled up with family, friends, employees from Pearce Hospital, hired hands from the farms, and many of Dale’s patients. The crowd numbered close to four hundred. The Reverend Mark Porter, new to the church since Marian had left Eldorado, spoke of the tragedy of Mark’s death and of how it need not be entirely a tragedy. This was the season in which we rejoice in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

“Mark was a handsome young man,” the pastor said, “who had a warmth toward other people. He also had a sense of love for other people that many of us experienced.

“But Mark was in a time that many of us have gone through as have many of you. He couldn’t get a handle on a direction in his life and that came out in many ways.”

Mark’s potential would now never be realized, Reverend Porter said. He could have been run over by a car when he was five years old, or he could have had a heart attack, or he could have died in his sleep at age ninety-two. But if we believe in Jesus Christ, then we know that God is with Mark.

During the sermon Sean kept glancing over at Kevin to see if it would be all right to let go and cry, but Kevin held back. It was a brief service. Afterward Marian and Dale accepted condolences on the church steps until Marian said that she had to go back to Grandpa’s house to lie down.

Mark’s remains had been cremated. A plaque would be placed in the McLeansboro graveyard, but Kevin and Sean accompanied Mr. Bean, the funeral director, out beyond Herod to the Hickory Handle farm to scatter the ashes. The boys expected their father to go with them, but he drove out in his own car and lingered by the barn with his farm workers as Kevin and Sean walked with Mr. Bean, who carried the metal box, up to the top of a hill.

It was the highest point on the farm, overlooking a valley, giving an unobstructed view of the hills that rose toward the Ohio and Kentucky to the south. The spot was near the site of a graveyard dating from pioneer days, but Dale had had that bulldozed as a nuisance years before. They paused for breath, gazing over the valley. Kevin spotted a hawk riding wind currents.

“Here,” Mr. Bean said, “you hold Mark,” removing the lid and pushing the box at Sean, who hesitated before grasping it with both hands. Kevin could see that Sean was unnerved, having to hold his brother’s ashes like that.

The boys walked along the crest of the hill, following Mr. Bean, who reached behind to scoop out handfuls of ashes and scattered them deliberately, left and right, the light breeze lifting them and letting them fall. On the wind Kevin thought he caught his father’s voice from down by the barn, intermittent shouts, and he figured that the men would be drinking. He thought he heard someone laugh at something his father must have said.

They made their way along the crest of the hill in the afternoon light, saying nothing, walking and sowing the ashes.

A few days later, back in St. Louis, Marian received a letter from Reverend Porter. When he was Mark’s age, the minister wrote, he had just flunked out of college and had no direction in his life. Now, however, he believed that God agonizes over us and struggles with us—with Mark, with anyone who has lost direction—rather than acting as a judge. The pastor hoped that Marian could thank God for Mark’s life, even though it had been short and unfulfilled. He knew the pain she was feeling: It showed that she had loved Mark very much and had been close to him.

Marian was grateful for the letter; she believed that Reverend Porter meant well. But she did not think that anyone needed to tell her not to judge Mark; nor could she imagine that God had judged her eldest son as anything but one of the innocents. Only Dale had judged him harshly, and it sounded to her as if Dale had been denigrating Mark to the minister, making it sound as if the boy were to blame for his own death.

Mark had not asked to be murdered. He had done nothing wrong, unless being young and unhappy was wrong. One way or another, Marian blamed someone else for his death, and that someone was not God. She blamed Dale, whether or not he had pulled the trigger. But she resolved to tell no one her suspicions, not even Kevin, who was constantly asking her whether she had any theories about Mark’s death. She did not even mention the insurance policy to anyone. What would be the point, when nothing could be proved and she might be wrong?

16

AFTER ONLY A FEW DAYS OF INVESTIGATION, DETECTIVE NOLEN was able to conclude that Mark Cavaness had been for a time a heavy drinker but only a nickel and dime marijuana user. Some of his friends and acquaintances indicated that Mark had in the past experimented with other drugs but that he was not in debt and had no known enemies. All stated that in recent months, since he had returned to southern Illinois, he had been leading a quiet and relatively drug-free life.

With his father paying him only the ludicrous wage of two dollars an hour, Nolen reasoned, Mark could not have afforded anything more than the occasional six-pack and joint. He had not been a thief and had never been in serious trouble except for the speeding citations that had cost him a suspended license.

Mark’s name had turned up on lists that the D.C.I. kept of known drug users, dealers and hangers-on—some of them people the law would move in on after enough evidence had accumulated, or people permitted to remain at large because they would eventually link up with a major drug connection and might be useful as informers—but Mark was on these secret lists only by association.

You could get your name on such a list merely by buying a lid or by being present when drugs were bought or used. Nolen had snitches all over Little Egypt who sang rather than go to jail.

Jack T. Nolen, forty years old, the son of a miner who had died in a coal-mining accident, could have passed for a country banker or maybe a wildcat oil man, although he was too well-known in Little Egypt to engage personally in any undercover operations. He had been with the Illinois Division of Criminal Investigation all of his working life, starting out up in the Champaign-Urban area and then returning to live in his native Harrisburg and operate out of the D.C.I. office up in Carmi as the chief detective in Little Egypt. His hair, pepper-and-salt, thinning a little in front, was brushed straight back and, like his full, slightly drooping mustache, was always neatly trimmed. The dark, aviator-style glasses hid his eyes. A pink round face and a good-sized belly suggested a man who was not missing many meals, but he was portly rather than fat: “Portly gentleman” was the phrase that suited him. He chose his clothes with care. In cooler weather he favored herringbone-tweed jackets with hand-stitched lapels and leather buttons; if the jacket of the day was brown, he might wear a puce cotton shirt with a silk paisley necktie of a color poised between the shirt and the coat; light wool tan trousers neatly creased; tasseled cordovan loafers, spit-polished.

Two rectangular-cut diamond rings, good-sized, one for each hand, added to the impression of a man who was not so much looking for something as enjoying what he had already found, a man who was not to be confused with the low-life thieves, drug dealers and killers who occupied most of his attention. In his left lapel he always wore a little embroidered red rose, the crowning touch to an appearance that was disconcerting to someone under investigation. It could throw you off stride to be confronted by a detective with diamonds on his fingers and a rose in his lapel, especially in a territory where most men dressed in overalls or Sears and J. C. Penney tailoring.

Nolen put fifty thousand miles a year on his state Buick, tooling around southern Illinois gathering information. He knew more things about more people in Little Egypt than anybody else did, partly because of his carefully cultivated network of snitches, more because of his quick, retentive mind and his appearance and manner, which combined authority with an amiability that, like his tinted glasses, concealed his thoughts. He was good at shooting the breeze and then suddenly zeroing in on what he was really after. His was the opposite of the typical big-city detective’s approach, direct and aggressive: Nolen was circuitous, devious, as cute as a left-hander throwing junk. He might discuss the prospects of the baseball Cardinals or the migration of geese for half an hour before edging into homicide. He knew enough about hundreds of local people and their families, their debts, their secret vices, their dreams, to be able to drop something of interest to almost anybody—always with an air of courtesy, good humor and concern, so that before you knew it, you thought you were talking to your uncle—a kindly fellow with your best interests at heart who, smiling and chuckling and touching you on the elbow, was really weaseling information out of you.

Nolen had begun driving around to interview people as soon as he was finished talking to Dr. Cavaness at the murder scene that Saturday afternoon. By five o’clock he was at the house of the funeral director, chatting up Mr. Bean’s son, Corwin, a friend of both Mark’s and Kevin’s, who supplied other names and addresses. By the time Nolen quit that night, he had spoken to seven men and to two women, both of whom had been Mark’s girlfriends. On Easter Sunday he interviewed seven more people. No one had seen Mark after Wednesday of Easter week, except for one man who said that he had spotted him leaving an Eldorado restaurant with a sack of food on Thursday at one in the afternoon. A hired hand at the Galatia farm stated that he had visited the area around the Shea house on Thursday afternoon to pick up a load of hay with a tractor. He had seen nothing in the grass, no animals or vultures. The white Jeep truck had been there, parked beside the trailer.

On Easter Sunday a pathologist from Evansville issued a positive identification of Mark’s remains based on Eldorado dental records and estimated, from the condition of samples of tissue taken Saturday from the lower legs and feet, that the victim had been dead for approximately fourteen hours when found. That would put the death on Friday evening or late afternoon. Nolen’s original guess had been accurate. A body left out in the country did not last long.

Nor did Nolen waver from his belief that this had been a murder and that the gun had been booby-trapped with the coat hanger after the fact, probably in a clumsy attempt to make the scene look like that of an accident. As he interviewed people, however, Nolen observed that the word was getting around that the death had been an accident. He did nothing to discourage the idea, which may have originated with family members or even with one of the local deputies. It could not hurt to have the killer or killers relax.

Everyone seemed to have liked Mark. His success with the girls sometimes involved him in jealous rivalries; there was one fellow who had warned Mark to stop seeing his sister unless he intended to propose marriage. People had been killed for less in southern Illinois, but this did not feel like the stuff of homicide.

His male friends ranged from clean-cut types with whom he played basketball once a week to druggy characters who, Nolen was willing to bet, would never see the backside of thirty. Several people thought that Mark was kind of spacey; but after talking to just about everyone who had known him well, Jack Nolen concluded that Mark had been a nice, friendly kid who had a way with the girls and was probably too easygoing for his own good—which made him like almost every other young man stuck in and around Eldorado. Nolen liked to joke that the hottest thing going in Eldorado was the new electronic cash register at the IGA grocery store: You could stand around and watch the little lights flash.