Murder in Little Egypt (17 page)

Six months later Dale called again. What in hell was the matter with Curtiss-Wright? he wanted to know. It had not moved at all. It was down half a point. Eddie Bell told Dale to be patient. The stock would show some sort of gain in due time, and in the mean-while it was paying a nice dividend and Dale’s money was safe.

“I’m looking for a profit,” Dale said. “I don’t care about any penny-ante dividend.”

“How many shares did you buy?”

“Six thousand,” Dale said.

“Six
thousand
! You bought six thousand shares of one stock just on my recommendation? Jesus H. Christ.”

Dale hung up. Eddie was horrified that Dale had sunk something like a quarter of a million dollars into a single stock. He doubted that Dale had that kind of cash: He must have bought the stock on margin; he might have lost it all by now. Eddie wondered whether Dale was as bright as everyone, including Dale himself, believed.

Another Eddie, an unlikely figure named Eddie Miller, knew more about Dale’s business dealings and financial situation than anyone else. Eddie Miller took over for Marilyn Leonard as Dale’s office manager and bookkeeper after she quit for good in 1958. For the decade that followed, Eddie became, more than Marilyn ever was, the doctor’s confidant in everything having to do with the income and outflow of money from his medical practice and from all the other enterprises that gradually took up more and more of Dale’s time and energy.

Marilyn and Chuck decided to leave Eldorado for more lucrative and promising positions in a wealthy suburb of Chicago. To the end Marilyn’s relations with Dale were friendly but stormy; he continued to try to get her involved in practices of which she did not approve, and by the time she finally left she had come to know a vindictive side to him that she found unattractive. He ran for election to the school board, as he told her gleefully, only to get back at the history teacher who had given him B’s and prevented him from becoming class valedictorian back in 1943. That teacher was now the principal at Eldorado High, a man whom Chuck enjoyed working for and whom everyone liked and respected. But Dale had it in for him.

It was one of the principal’s minor duties to collect the money from the sale of hot dogs and soft drinks after Friday night or Saturday football or basketball games. A big game could bring in two or three hundred dollars. The principal took the money home in a shoebox and delivered it to the athletic department promptly Monday morning.

Once on the school board, Dale started a private investigation. He arranged for the students who were selling food and drink to count up the receipts and give him the results before turning the money over to the principal, swearing them to secrecy. He discovered, he told Marilyn, that the principal was skimming. The amount he was turning in to the athletic department was a few dollars short of the students’ totals. He confronted the principal and threatened to expose him. It would be his word against Dr. Cavaness’s.

The man protested his innocence, Dale said, but resigned, moved away, and took a job selling insurance. Dale had routed his old enemy. To Marilyn and Chuck the episode was unpleasant. Even if the man had been guilty, which they doubted, it was not a crime warranting his resignation. He was underpaid anyway, and it would hardly have been a blot against his character if he had taken a couple of dollars for beer money.

Marilyn spent her last three weeks at the office training her replacement. Edward E. Miller, C.P.H.M. (Certificate of Public Health Management), had been a patient of Dale’s for two years. He was in his mid-twenties then, a shy, sensitive young man with a weight problem, a Harrisburg native who lived with his sick mother and played the organ at the Presbyterian church. He was fascinated by Dale—his dynamic manner, his warmth, his worldly air, his beautiful suits. He told his mother that he had never seen suits like the ones Dr. Cavaness wore. He leaped at the chance to work for Dale.

Eddie Miller’s roots in Little Egypt were deep—his grandmother had been present at Charlie Birger’s hanging and had always insisted that Charlie’s last words had been “Good-bye, beautiful world,” not the accepted version—and like most of Dale’s patients he was but dimly conscious of the wider world. To him Dale Cavaness seemed an emissary from sophisticated places beyond the understanding of ordinary folk, a man of medical genius who out of love for his home and a desire to serve had returned, an inspiration to all, yet still a man of the people. He had put Eddie on a diet—morbidly obese was the term for his condition—and was compassionate about his compulsive eating. Eddie’s mother loved Dr. Cavaness, too. She had numerous ailments; she said that no other doctor treated her so well. Mrs. Miller depended on her son. She was delighted when he quit his job over in Evansville, Indiana, to go to work for the doctor in Eldorado. It was a step up for him, and now he would be close by at all hours of the day.

During his training period with Marilyn, Eddie found himself shocked by her tumultuous relationship with the doctor. There was an antagonism between them that, as a patient, Eddie had never noticed. He could not imagine talking back to the doctor the way Marilyn Leonard did. She did not even call him doctor. She acted as his equal, which to Eddie seemed indecorous and inappropriate.

“Dale,” Marilyn might say, “I’ll teach Eddie how to keep the books, goddamnit, and you go find a cure for cancer. If you tell him how to do it, you’ll go broke in six months.”

And Dr. Cavaness would leave the room, slamming the door, saying that it was a good thing that Marilyn was quitting, so that he’d be spared the trouble of firing her.

There were by then five other people besides Eddie Miller working in the office: a file clerk, an insurance clerk, a receptionist and appointments secretary, and a couple of nurses, all of them women. No one talked to the doctor the way Marilyn had. Even after Eddie figured out that Dr. Cavaness actually respected Marilyn for standing up to him, and that it was to Marilyn that he had delegated extraordinary authority for writing checks for every kind of business and personal expense, Eddie knew that his relationship with the doctor would have to be different. Eddie abhorred conflict, for one thing, and he believed in good manners and respect for authority. He resolved to win the doctor over not by confrontation but by making himself indispensable.

Eddie loved figures and records the way he loved church music, as a refuge of order and symmetry. He delighted in making a business letter into a perfect work of art, beautifully spaced, impeccably grammatical, phrased just so. Inside his misshapen, grossly overweight form he had the soul of an accountant or a monk devoted to intricate manuscripts. And he had no distractions. He lived for his organ music, his mother, and now for Dr. Cavaness.

For the first three or four years, everything went as Eddie had hoped and intended. He put Dr. Cavaness’s business affairs into glorious order; he came to know far better than the doctor the condition of every account, the whereabouts of every sum. He paid all the bills, including those for the Cavaness home, and he deposited five hundred dollars at a time into Marian’s checking account as she needed it, which was whenever the bank called to say that she was overdrawn. His correspondence was a marvel of neatness and precision. In appreciation Dale had built for him a special cubicle, so that he could labor undisturbed. He was the first to arrive in the mornings and the last to depart, often figuring and fussing until late in the evenings.

Apart from the joy he took in imposing order itself, Eddie’s greatest satisfaction came from serving this man whom he admired so fervently. His work, Eddie told himself, freed Dr. Cavaness from petty concerns. It gave Eddie a kind of vicarious satisfaction to be near and helpful to someone of such triumphant will and energy and intelligence, a man who drove himself beyond the limits of ordinary men and women, whose learning and brains set him above others. Eddie felt better about himself just having the privilege of aiding this man of decision, this paragon of iron determination. Eddie’s was the kind of devotion found usually only in a good soldier or the loyal citizen under a dicatorship.

A few things did bother him. There was never enough money. From the start Eddie found himself juggling accounts and fending off creditors. It was remarkable the way the doctor could spend money as if it did not matter to him or was merely the means to a higher goal—thousands on cattle and farm equipment and numerous other investments, a golf course, a public skeet range, lots here and there, interests in a fluorspar mine in Hardin County, a coal mine in Kentucky. From what Eddie could tell, none of these was bringing in any money as yet, but he assumed that the doctor knew what he was doing for the long term. The income from his practice was nearing two hundred thousand dollars annually and growing, but he was always short.

Eddie got an idea of the scope of Dr. Cavaness’s financial plans one morning when the doctor presented him with boxes of new stationery bearing in red and blue ink the letterhead NEW RUHR ENTERPRISES, along with the office address and telephone number.

“This is it,” the doctor said. “We’re going to use this stationery for all the business correspondence. Keep the medical stuff separate. All the other business is now New Ruhr. I’m consolidating everything.”

Eddie said that was fine. He sat at his desk contemplating the letterhead. It sounded remotely familiar, but Eddie could not place it nor understand exactly what the doctor meant by consolidation. Should he change the checks, all the accounts? He went in to see Dr. Cavaness. What was Ruhr? Was it some kind of an acronym?

“You don’t know what the Ruhr is?” Dr. Cavaness said. “You ought to know. Everybody ought to know. That’s what’s wrong around here. Ignorance. Don’t you know about Ludwig Erhard, father of the German economic miracle? He was on the cover of
Time
, for Christ’s sake. He was Man of the Year. The Ruhr is the economic heart of Germany. Hitler knew that. He had to get the Ruhr back from France to get things moving again. Erhard has made everything happen there. It’s an industrial promised land, don’t you see?

“What I’m going to do, by God, is turn southern Illinois into another Ruhr. The stationery is just the start. We’re going to have economic expansion here like you never dreamed. I’ll be head of a consortium. We’ll bring in heavy industry, automobile manufacturing, everything. We’ve got the coal. That’s the base. We start with coal and go on from there. It can’t miss. Everything is now New Ruhr Enterprises. The interstate at Marion will be just like the Autobahn!”

Dr. Cavaness kept talking about Ludwig Erhard and the Ruhr off and on for the better part of a year. Eddie was reluctant to use the stationery. He tried it a couple of times, writing to a cattle dealer in Oklahoma City and to the Purina feed corporation, manufacturers of catfish pellets. He received puzzled replies stating that the companies had no records of a New Ruhr Enterprises among their customers. Eventually he gathered that the doctor had forgotten about Erhard and the Ruhr. As much as he revered Dr. Cavaness’s medical expertise, Eddie found it difficult to imagine southern Illinois as an industrial miracle. An awful lot would have to change.

The doctor, short of cash, borrowed from banks, from friends, even from Dr. Pearce. The relationship with Dr. Pearce was peculiar, Eddie thought. The two men treated each other like father and son, affectionate one minute, screaming at one another the next. Dr. Pearce, to judge from the telephone conversations and the gossip, was nearly as short-tempered as Dr. Cavaness, whose explosions Eddie had had to tolerate from the start. Eddie heard that Dr. Pearce drank heavily, was in trouble with the state for neglecting his welfare patients, and had once in a rage thrown a nurse through a plate-glass door at the hospital. Eddie believed all of this, given the way Dr. Pearce sounded over the phone when Dr. Cavaness asked for money. He would borrow as much as twenty-five thousand at a time from his former father-in-law, sometimes for medical equipment, sometimes for his personal account. He did always try to pay Dr. Pearce back: Eddie had instructions to reimburse Dr. Pearce before anyone else. Most of the others were on hold.

The financial situation seemed to get worse year after year, along with Dr. Cavaness’s temper. He would arrive in the mornings looking as if he had not slept and suddenly blow up about some trivial thing, turning on one employee or another, pounding his fists on a desk and screaming that by God, if this or that wasn’t taken care of, there would be hell to pay and heads rolling. Eddie endured his share of these outbursts, more as the years passed. His policy was to lower his eyes, grip the sides of his desk, wait for the tantrum to pass, and try not to speak to the doctor for the next two or three days, a silent kind of protest he hoped but doubted would register.

But at other times the doctor could be so sweet and understanding, so personal, that Eddie felt that he could forgive him anything. One day Dr. Cavaness told him that he had just seen his first wife, Helen Jean, for the first time since their divorce. He might never see her again. Her father was ill. She was in town to visit him and to check on things at the hospital, where she had run into Dale. The meeting had been uneventful, Dr. Cavaness said. They had greeted each other politely and that was that.

Eddie and Dr. Cavaness were alone together in the office when he talked about seeing Helen Jean. The doctor reached into his desk and brought out a bottle and poured himself a stiff one into a coffee cup. He offered Eddie a drink.

“No, thank you, Doctor. I don’t drink.”

Dr. Cavaness wanted to talk about Helen Jean. He had worshiped that woman, he said. He had thought that they were going to have a perfect life together. Did Eddie know that Dr. Pearce had originally called the hospital Pearce-Cavaness? Eddie said that he had heard that. Could Eddie possibly realize how much Helen Jean had meant to him? Had he ever loved anyone like that? Eddie was silent. He thought the conversation was getting more personal than was proper for an employer-employee relationship. But Dr. Cavaness was getting worked up.