Murder in Little Egypt (10 page)

“I’m putting you on azo gantanol. That’s a fancy name for an antibiotic. Start off with four tablets just to kick it into gear. Then we’ll go to sulfamethoxazole once the pain goes away. Don’t worry if your urine looks a funny color, it’s just the pill, you’re not bleeding to death. You can bet the farm you’ll be fine in a few days.”

He was one of the few doctors in the region willing to take on workmen’s compensation cases, and the high incidence of injuries to coal miners brought plenty of those. Each case required the doctor to go to court in Harrisburg to certify the nature and authenticity of the injury, and the state’s payments to physicians were low, so most doctors did not care to bother. Nor did Dale ever turn away someone on public aid, which paid only three dollars for an office visit, a dollar for any prescription medicine, fifty dollars for delivering a baby, and nothing for prenatal care.

He could be tough with his patients, telling pregnant women, for instance, that if they wanted to “be a slob” and gain more than twenty pounds, they could get out and find another doctor. But he was attentive. Once when dysentery threatened the infants at Pearce, he canceled his office appointments and remained at the hospital for four days and nights until the outbreak subsided. Nothing seemed to distress him more than a baby in danger.

He never asked a patient for proof of credit or insurance. He told Marilyn not to bother him with bookkeeping matters, he did not want to know who had paid up or not, but once a year at her insistence they went through the outstanding accounts. Some of the bills he would simply throw in the wastebasket, when he knew that the person could not afford to pay. He instructed her never to remind someone about an outstanding bill when they came in for treatment: He was running a doctor’s office, he said, not a collection agency. The only overdue bills that annoyed him were from people who delayed payment because they were too cheap to cough up the money.

People waited hours to get in to see him. He let friends in through the back door, but others might sit outside in their cars for two or three hours, wait another two in the reception room, and finally be examined at half past nine in the evening. They were as uncomplaining as pilgrims to Lourdes.

He could be sarcastic to anyone who doubted his diagnosis, as Marilyn had many opportunities to observe, no matter the social standing of the patient. A prominent Eldorado merchant, an elder in his church, scheduled a complete physical after his fiftieth birthday. When his blood tests came back, they indicated that he had syphilis. Just to be sure, Dale had his laboratory technician, Russell Anderson, double-check the results. They indicated positive again. Dale shared the news with Marilyn.

“That son of a bitch is going to wet his pants when he hears this,” Dale said. “Have him come in early when nobody’s around.”

Marilyn could hear through the door as Dale broke the news.

“That’s preposterous! I’ve never been unfaithful to my wife in my life. Never!”

“If you expect me to believe that bullshit, fine,” Dale said. “I wouldn’t want to accuse your wife of anything. However you got it, you’ve got it. You want it cured, or not? Weren’t you in the army? You weren’t in the chaplain corps, were you?”

The man stomped out, enraged. But within a couple of months he sold his business and moved with his family to Arizona, frightened that his secret might get out.

As much as she admired Dale and enjoyed working for him, certain things he did worried Marilyn, often to the point of making her want to quit. Most of the time she loved his sense of humor, but occasionally she thought he went too far. One morning he poked his head out of his examining room and told her that he had a patient inside he wanted her to take a look at. Since Marilyn was not a nurse, she wondered what Dale had in mind. She went in, and Dale told her to take a close look.

“Get right up to him. See if his eyes are dilated.”

Marilyn noticed nothing except that the man’s neck seemed to be swollen. When they were alone, Dale asked her if she had figured out what was wrong with the fellow.

“Of course not,” she said. “I’m not a doctor. What are you driving at?”

“He’s got the mumps!” Dale said, bursting into his loud laugh, a kind of rippling guffaw, haw-haw-haw-haw-haw. “He’s got the goddamned mumps! Do you think you got close enough to him?” He doubled up with laughter.

Dale knew Marilyn’s medical history—he must have checked it before launching his little scheme. She knew how serious and painful the disease could be for a woman who had just turned thirty and had not contracted it as a child. Dale had made sure that she had gotten close enough to the young man to catch the virus. She tried to laugh about it, but the more she thought about it, the more Dale’s joke cast a pall. For the next couple of weeks she checked herself for symptoms. None appeared.

The incident made her think that some of Dale’s other little ruses might be unfunny. One of his favorite tricks was to substitute the X ray of someone seriously injured or ill for that of a healthy patient. He would point out a break in a bone or an ominous spot on an organ, perhaps telling his patient that the odds were “at least fifty-fifty for recovery—you’ve got a better chance than the basketball team this year.” He would let the misery sink in and then guffaw as he pulled out the actual, normal X ray.

Dale enjoyed letting a joke drag out for days. When Pann Beck, Lou the pharmacist’s wife, was seven months pregnant, he suggested that he give her an X ray, assuring her that talk of harm to the fetus from radiation was groundless. He produced what he said was her fresh, still-wet X ray and pointed to the uterus, where a set of twin embryos was visible. Pann was delighted.

“Get Lou over here,” Dale said. “He’ll love this. He might be in shock.”

Lou rushed over from the pharmacy and was thrilled. That evening he telephoned his brother long distance to break the news. When the Becks started buying double sets of booties and nightclothes and sent away tor a perambulator built for two, Dale relented. He had not X-rayed Pann at all. There was no evidence whatever that she was carrying twins. The Becks took it good-naturedly. They shared a laugh with Dale and liked to tell the story afterward. But they were also shaken up. Dale said that it showed you could make people believe anything. He could have convinced Pann that she was going to have quintuplets if he had wanted to. That would have made the papers.

Marilyn appreciated that it was never boring working for Dale—most doctors were stodgy and self-important—but she thought that certain of his business practices went over the line. He saw nothing wrong with cheating the state or an insurance company to help out a patient, he said, and incidentally to secure another fee for himself. When he directed Marilyn to sign fraudulent forms, she balked. It was not only that she did not approve: She did not want to do something illegal herself and be held responsible, whatever chances Dale was willing to take.

The workmen’s compensation laws provided plenty of leeway for fraud to the benefit of both the patient and the physician. A miner with a broken leg, for instance, could continue cashing disability checks so long as his doctor certified that the patient had been attending physical-therapy sessions. If the patient missed appointments, checks to both patient and physician were supposed to stop.

Dale would become furious with Marilyn when she refused to bend or break the rules, but she had not married a steady, contemplative high school teacher to live a high-risk sort of life. One day she threatened to quit rather than sign a form stating that a miner had attended diathermy sessions faithfully. Dale had set the man’s broken arm, but the miner had not shown up since for treatment.

“If you want to say you saw the man come in here,” Marilyn told Dale, “go ahead and sign the form yourself. They’re not going to come after me. They put people in jail for that kind of thing.”

Dale tried to convince her. It would be better if she signed the form, he said: That way, if anyone questioned it, it could be attributed to a clerical error. And what was she worried about, anyway? He would back her up. No government bureaucrat was going to doubt the word of a doctor.

Marilyn was adamant. Dale fired her. She had second thoughts. Chuck’s teacher’s salary was not enough for them to live on; she would never find another job as good as working for Dale; yet she did not budge.

Dale rehired her the next day, but not before she made him plead with her and give her a raise. She knew that he liked her feistiness, that he admired a battler and had contempt for softies. Probably he also did not care for the idea of her knowing so many of his business secrets and not working for him anymore. She had an arm on him now, enough to get him into a lot of hot water, although he knew she would never stoop to snitching on him. Their arguments got to be another kind of joke between them. She would quit or he would fire her, and she would be back at work within an hour or a day.

She quit again when Dale tried to get her to fill out an insurance form that covered not the patient but his brother. What difference did it make, Dale asked, when it was all in the family and the brother didn’t care? Marilyn wondered whether Dale had seriously considered the consequences of getting caught. Was he prepared to try to face down an insurance investigator? Risk his physician’s license? How could he be sure that the brother really approved of the scheme or wouldn’t crack under pressure? She cleaned out her desk and walked.

The next day Dale found her on the golf course at the Carmi Country Club, where she was playing a round with Marian. He talked her into returning, with another raise.

Marian knew nothing of what lay behind Dale’s disputes with Marilyn, figuring that they were just the usual sorts of office squabbles, a comical battle of wills between her husband and a strong-minded woman.

The Cavanesses and the Leonards became close social friends. Dale called Chuck by the nickname Pogo: He came from across the Ohio in Paducah, Kentucky, and was something of a down-home, ruminative philosopher, like the comic-strip possum. During the summers and on sabbaticals, Chuck sometimes went off to do graduate work in mathematics at various universities, and over the years he had accumulated master’s degrees from Florida, Notre Dame, and the University of Chicago. He had all the credits needed for a doctorate except the dissertation, and although he was slower than Dale, he could match wits and trade nuggets of knowledge with him. The two of them liked to stay up all night over a bottle of B&B at the Cavanesses arguing over abstruse questions such as whether calico cats were always female. Chuck insisted that from empirical observation, he had concluded that the hypothesis was true, Dale that it was scientifically absurd. They made an attempt to locate a calico cat in the neighborhood and determine its gender, but at night all cats are gray and the disputation remained unresolved, ready to Hare up again on any evening.

It was partly Chuck’s intellectual inclinations that inspired Dale to order a complete set of the Great Books of the Western World from Field Enterprises in Chicago. The idea was for Pogo and Consuelo (Dale’s name for Marilyn) and Maria and Lucky Pierre to read one Great Book a month and to devote an evening to discussing it. The tone of mental life in Eldorado might thereby be improved. They began with Plato’s
Republic,
which Consuelo and Maria admitted bored them to tears. Plato gave way to Jane Austen;
Pride and Prejudice
killed off everyone’s enthusiasm for the seminars.

They had more fun playing duplicate bridge and, with other couples, kept a tournament going from week to week at one another’s houses, with Dale the most aggressive and skillful player, his powers of retention giving him an advantage and his will to win often causing brief explosions of temper at his partner, usually Marian. Chuck Leonard’s deliberative style of play also exasperated Dale. One evening when Chuck was as usual staring at his hand, unable to make up his mind, Dale arose and walked out of the house, saying that he might as well go check on a patient at the hospital. When he returned, Chuck had just begun to select his cards. Dale announced that in the interval he had managed to deliver two healthy babies who would be walking and talking before Chuck played again.

With Chuck’s help, Dale put together an elaborate high-fidelity system in the family room. They built it from the most advanced components of the time, the huge speakers alone costing five hundred dollars. Dale and Marian passed evenings with the Leonards and other guests listening to romantic albums: Jackie Gleason’s
Velvet Brass,
Michel Legrand’s
Holiday in Rome,
Morton Gould’s
Starlight Serenade,
Julie London’s
Julie Is Her Name.
After a few drinks the lush, movieish sounds transformed the house on Fourth Street into faraway places. People began to hum and sing and dance and laugh hilariously and tell each other they were gorgeous and plan extravagant holidays. A game of charades might develop. Dale was the cleverest mimic—by now his favorite actor was the chameleon Alec Guinness—and he courted laughter and applause by balancing a lampshade on his head and filling it with fruit (Carmen Miranda) or putting a golf ball around the room and falling down from a heart attack (Eisenhower). Whenever Dale played Edmundo Ros’s
Whisky and Vanilla Gin
, a calypso record, and called for a limbo dancing contest, it signaled a long night.

With Pann and Lou Beck, Marian shared her love of classical music: Every member of the Beck family played an instrument, and the Becks hoped that their son, who took to the French horn the way other Eldorado boys did to their shotguns, would someday join a great orchestra in Chicago or the East. Now that Dale was drawing patients from all over Little Egypt and having them fill their prescriptions at Lou’s pharmacy, the Becks prospered; but they chose to spend their money on lutes and mandolins and to save it for their children’s education. From the outside their house on Glenwood Avenue looked like any other on the block; within, it was a musical and literary enclave, polished old instruments on the walls, shelves of books reflecting Pann’s interests and her work on the local library committee. They inspired Marian to buy a baby grand piano for the living room and to begin practicing again, occasionally performing a Chopin nocturne for guests. The Becks, however, were strongly religious and did not drink. Socially they drifted apart from the Cavanesses, who developed a style of life some termed facetiously the Eldorado fast lane.