Murder in Little Egypt (11 page)

There were jaunts up to St. Louis for hi-fi shopping with the Leonards, dinner afterward at Schneithorst’s steak house with a few rounds of brandy alexanders or brandies alexander, no one could decide which, for the road. Local excursions proved less exhilarating; there were so few options. A fried-catfish dinner in Old Shawneetown—by then nothing but ruins and a string of rough taverns under the levee—was fun until, just as Dale was paying the check, a fight broke out between two men in the doorway. The Leonards and the Cavanesses watched as one fellow knocked the other into the street and kicked his face in. Dale and Chuck professed to have enjoyed the show; the women swore not to return. A night out in Egypt was apt to end that way.

Dale broke the tedium of long drives with cocktails in the car. He favored a silver-plated martini pitcher for a while but had to toss it overboard one evening when he spotted a highway-patrol car in the rearview mirror. His red Chrysler—he bought a matching white one for Marian—ended up in ditches several times. Once he abandoned it near the Carmi Country Club after an intense evening and an attempt at a cross-country shortcut. Always in a hurry, Dale liked to pioneer his own roads. He traded the Chrysler in on a black Lincoln Continental convertible with what were known as suicide doors, ones that opened backward.

They took holidays with their more affluent friends in Florida and at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs. Having resigned herself to an indefinite stay in southern Illinois, Marian relished these trips and, at home, tried to live as she would have elsewhere. She shopped for Dale’s favorite Hart, Schaffner & Marx suits at Wolff’s clothiers in St. Louis, for her own outfits at Stix, Baer & Fuller, Garland’s, or other fashionable St. Louis stores. Her parties, grand by Eldorado standards, were the most elegant in town. Giving a dinner or entertaining for the holidays, she might descend the stairs in pink chiffon, and she enjoyed putting out the mother-of-pearl plates and the silver. If some women resented her style, she had her own circle and was socially active, becoming president of the Women’s Medical Auxillary and the Ladies Golf Association.

Her relations with Noma subsided into an unspoken nonaggression pact, not without the occasional border skirmish. Noma prowled around outside the house when Marian gave a party, counting the parked cars and showing up the next morning when everyone was hung over to emanate disapproval.

“I see you had quite a crowd. A lot of mouths to feed. I suppose there was plenty of liquor.”

Noma dared enter the house one evening during a party to which she had not been invited. Dale escorted her out and told her not to try that again. Everyone could hear him screaming at his mother outside. “I can’t stand that woman,” he said when he returned. Marian reminded him that most mothers, particularly those of only children who were male, were meddlesome. “I hate her,” Dale said.

Marian could not fathom Dale’s feelings about his mother. He did not like her, but he loved her, was the way Marian formulated it. If he only hated her, would he have moved back to within a few blocks of her? It was as if he were still trying to prove his independence from her while permitting her to get his goat. When Noma told Marian about playing the death game with Dale when he was a little boy, Marian thought it was pretty peculiar; and Noma still liked to remind Dale of how she had almost died giving birth to him. But Noma was no monster, from what Marian could see, only possessive and old-fashioned, nothing extreme enough to explain the depth of Dale’s resentment.

That resentment was not the only mystery about Dale. He never remembered an anniversary or a birthday—after two or three years Marian gave up expecting gifts or even cards—but he could be erratically, spontaneously generous, surprising her with a mink jacket or a string of pearls when there was no occasion. He seemed to insist on giving on his own terms and would permit no convention to dictate to him, acting as a man above or apart from what gave ordinary people pleasure and lent order and harmony to common lives. During their courtship he had been too poor to buy her an engagement ring; but in 1957, during a shopping trip to St. Louis, Marian noticed a little unwrapped box in the trunk of the car. When she asked what it was, he reached in and handed it to her without words or ceremony, there in the street. It was an emerald and diamond ring. It was the kind of gift, emblematic of their love, more appropriately given at an anniversary dinner—but there were none of those, and the ring was beautiful, and Marian accepted it and wore it gratefully.

All domestic rites irritated him. Marian loved the holidays and always made a fuss over them with parties, a big tree, wreaths, special tablecloths, strings of cards hung across the windows in the family room. Yet it was all she could do to get Dale to sit for the family photograph she liked to use as their Christmas card. When she could finally corner him to pose for the snapshot, he would run off immediately afterward, muttering that he had more important things to do, acting like some savage who had never seen a camera before and feared it would rob him of his soul.

Christmas brought out the peculiar side of his sense of humor. One year Marian hid the presents in the attic of what they called the summer house, a screened-in cottage in the backyard, against which Dale had built a big brick barbecue and in which he kept his tools and his equipment for casting his own ammunition for hunting—bullet molds, sizer-lubricators, a lead furnace. She wanted to show Dale what she had bought for the children, so he could react without surprise on Christmas morning, when he might be touchy. She took him out to the summer house and climbed the folding stairs to the attic, intending to hand the presents down to him. Before she knew what was happening, Dale lifted the stairs up behind her and bolted the ceiling trapdoor shut.

Marian panicked. She shouted and pounded on the attic floor. She could hear Dale’s big laugh below. He kept her up there in the dark long enough for him to go inside and fix himself a drink. When he finally let her down, she was furious. If it were not for the holiday, she told him, she wouldn’t be speaking to him. He laughed her off, saying she ought to learn to take a joke. How was he to have known she’d be so frightened? She had overreacted, he said.

That incident took place on the Christmas of 1964. Marian was glad that the children had not witnessed it. A second son, Kevin Dale, had been born in 1956 on Dale’s own birthday, and a third, Sean Dale, on May 20, 1962. The Irish names were Dale’s idea because he considered himself Irish, and wearing green and having plenty to drink on St. Patrick’s Day were exceptions to his indifference to holiday observances. He was unaware that his Scotch-Irish Cavaness ancestors would have worn orange.

Another exception to his scorn for holidays was the pleasure he took one Halloween in dressing up as a witch doctor and showing the boys how to wedge sticks into automobile horns to make the neighbors’ cars honk, a rare show of interest in his sons’ activities. Yet like Mark, Kevin and Sean had been planned, Marian and Dale agreeing that they wanted to have several children.

He did like to tease her in front of friends when she was pregnant, saying that she had made herself “great with child” to attract his attentions as an obsetrician. He delivered her babies himself without complications but, as with Mark, grew indifferent to them once they were no longer of professional interest. Marian continued to expect that his paternal instincts would emerge once the boys were in school and taking up sports. Surely Dale, who liked to play the teacher with others, would enjoy imparting his knowledge and skills to the boys. She tried to get him to come home at five-thirty or six for dinner with the children—he could go back to the hospital afterward, she said—but he rarely did. If he came home early, he said, he would linger and not feel like going back to work. He had all the responsibilities he could handle; Marian could hardly say that he was not being a good provider.

There was a story in the paper one day about a kidnapping up in Kansas City. The son of a wealthy couple had been abducted; a large ransom was being demanded, and the parents had decided to pay it. Dale was outraged, as much by the ransom demand as by the kidnapping itself. Paying blood money, as he called it, was a mistake, Dale said, pounding his fist on the breakfast table. If one of the boys were kidnapped, say Mark, he would not pay a cent. But if they killed Mark, he would hunt the bastards down and kill them himself in revenge. It was the only way to deal with this kind of thing.

Marian said nothing. She thought his attitude strange and spent most of the day puzzling over it before dismissing it as so much hot air. She would be prepared to do anything to get a child back and would count on the law to take care of the criminals. She figured that, faced with the actual situation, Dale would do the same. He had an odd way, sometimes, of expressing parental concern, ever anxious never to display what he regarded as personal weakness.

Apart from the bridge games and the trips, Dale preferred to pursue recreation away from his family, golf or poker with his male friends and especially hunting. He kept in shape by doing fifty push-ups and sit-ups every morning. He prided himself on winning at everying and on being able to outwalk and outshoot anybody in any kind of weather. He went hunting so frequently that Marian adopted a certain Mother Goose rhyme as her favorite song to sing Mark to sleep:

Bye baby bunting,

Daddy’s gone a-hunting.

Gone to get a rabbit skin

To wrap the baby bunting in.

Dale gradually acquired a large gun collection, dozens of rifles and shotguns and pistols, many of them valuable. The family room reflected his primary interests: the hi-fi and record collection neatly stored away in a custom-built cabinet; a gun case to display the prizes of his arsenal, including a pair of Parker shotguns; a life-size metal hunting dog, pointing, painted white with brown spots; a brass caduceus, Mercury’s winged staff entwined with twin serpents, on the mantel; and on the walls birds mounted in bubble-glass cases—quail, pheasant, grouse, a snowy owl.

Behind the snowy owl lay a story and a secret. Like most owls, this was a protected species. Dale told most people that he had shot it by mistake, going for pheasant on a hunting trip with Pat Sullivan. It was such an impressive bird and so unusual, Dale said, that it had seemed silly just to leave it there, so he had brought it back and had it stuffed and mounted as he had the other birds, by a master taxidermist in St. Louis.

Pat Sullivan remembered a different story, one that he kept to himself. The son of a coal miner, Sullivan had grown up experiencing the worst of the Depression in southern Illinois, moving from town to town as his father searched for work. But he had become big and jovial as he got rich in the contracting business, building everything from golf courses to Holiday Inns and dormitories for the new Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. He had known Dale since high school. Sullivan had been one of the Harrisburg Bulldogs who had called Dale “Toughie” after the epic Armistice Day game in 1942. The Sullivans lived in a large corner house on Walnut Street in Harrisburg, a light and airy place filled with treasures from their travels: Inside it looked more like Bar Harbor than Little Egypt. Marian and Betty Ray Sullivan, Pat’s wife, became instant and close friends. The two couples visited Florida together and often spent weekends down at Kentucky Lake, where Pat owned the Holiday Inn and a boat.

Sullivan piloted his own plane, an F-model Bonanza. One autumn he flew Dale and another friend of theirs, Bob Davenport, up to South Dakota for a few days of pheasant hunting.

They hired a guide and bagged their limits each day. On their last afternoon Dale was gazing into the cold sky when he caught sight of an owl gliding, then circling. Snowy owl, the guide said, a large creature, maybe two feet long with a wingspan near six feet. It was one of the few kinds of owl that hunt during the day. Pat Sullivan let out a whistle of admiration. Dale alone raised his shotgun.

He fired, downing the owl with the first blast. It hit the earth with a thump heard across the silent fields.

The guide protested. What the hell was Dale doing? Didn’t he know you weren’t supposed to shoot owls? Every hunter knew that. Neither Sullivan nor Bob Davenport said anything: It was too late, and they knew Dale too well. They did not want an argument.

Dale started toward the fallen bird. Sullivan suggested that he just leave it. “Something’ll eat it. Let’s move on.” It was a mistake. Better to forget it.

“Hell, no,” Dale said, striding off. “By God, I want that thing on my wall.”

The others followed Dale over to the owl. It lay, white and speckled with black, on some stubble of weeds, twitching. A few snowflakes swirled in the air, but the ground was bare, the owl very white against the brown. As the men approached, the creature struggled to rise, feathery legs scrambling, talons clawing the earth. Only one great wing moved. A spot of blood showed against the white where the other wing joined the body.

“Son of a bitch is still alive,” Dale said. “I must’ve just winged him.”

Dale bent down over the bird. With the quickness of a predator he grabbed it behind its head with his left hand and gripped the top of its head with his right, covering the yellow eyes. He commenced to twist the head around one way, then the other. He was trying to break its neck. But the head swiveled freely, and the strong curved beak kept opening and snapping shut. The owl made no sound, but it breathed.

“They can turn their heads two hundred and seventy degrees,” the guide said. “You’ll never kill it that way. Hit it on the head with your gun butt. Put it out of its misery.”

“I don’t want to bust his skull,” Dale said. “I want this son of a bitch in one piece. Give me that bag.”