Murder in Little Egypt by Darcy O'Brien Read Free Book Online

educational institution in the region, its medical school among the best in the nation. Medical students from Washington trained at Barnes Hospital, which was also highly regarded. Dr. Pearce had advised the move to St. Louis. If Dale did decide to return to Eldorado to practice, it would be useful for him to have had experience and contacts there. Dr. Pearce routinely referred difficult cases to St. Louis specialists. Dale and Helen Jean settled into a tiny apartment over a pizza parlor on Pine Street, near Barnes. She took a part-time job with the telephone company, and with the G. I. Bill and help from her parents, they were able to sustain a pleasant if frugal life, postponing having children until Dale could secure his degree.
    Dale began that gradual conditioning to disease and death that every medical student experiences. He had seen some injury and death in the Pacific, but he had not stuck needles into arms and legs, into livers and bone marrow. He had not threaded tubes down noses and mouths into lungs, nor plunged his arms into a body up to his elbows. He had not confronted death in the form of old people preserved in formaldehyde and displayed on stainless steel tables perforated to permit fluids and fat to drain away as from meat in a roasting pan. Systematically cutting dead people into pieces over a semester, the medical student may gain the sense of being different from the common run of humanity, coming to regard life as a proving ground and other people as members of an opposing team. When the classwork finishes and the student goes into the hospital to deal with live patients—to whom he may speak, whom he may even get to know, whose relatives may gather—the success of a procedure or the loss of a patient may become more a matter of performance than of suffering, more a question of winning or losing than of pity.
    Dale prided himself on his cleverness and efficiency. He could grasp the principles of a subject, while many others became distracted by details. He had no trouble mastering the vocabulary of body parts and processes: He had developed mnemonic tricks, he said, and his high school Latin helped.
    Some of Dale’s fellow students found him a blowhard and a know-it-all; others admired him. As in high school, slower students came to him for assistance. Everyone agreed that with Dale Cavaness, there was no middle ground. His country accent and folksy manner were among the points of division. He still called everybody Rudies. His brothers in his medical fraternity, Phi Beta Pi, elected him president, a sign of social rather than of academic approval. When he visited Eldorado, people there were glad to see how little he had changed, outwardly at least. They saw the same old Dale, older and smarter but, apparently, uncitified, down-to-earth.
    In Eldorado Dr. Pearce built his new hospital on Organ Street. He was so pleased with his son-in-law, who from all reports was sailing through his studies in St. Louis, that he decided to make a special gesture. When he chose the cornerstone for his new building, Dr. Pearce ordered it to read: Pearce-Cavaness Hospital.
    Dale’s return to Eldorado now seemed a certainty. St. Louis in those days had a reputation for beer, baseball, and Buster Brown shoes. It also had the energy of its railroads and all the attractions of a long-established metropolis, a symphony and an opera company, a jazz scene, scores of Italian and other good restaurants, celebrated botanical gardens, neighborhoods of beauty and wealth. The flow of American life in this postwar period was away from small towns and into cities of promise. Yet Dale’s inclinations remained homeward, toward the outdoors and scenes of his early triumphs. On holiday visits he enjoyed reminiscing about high school athletics and hearing about who was leading the Purple and Gold that year. He could draw on the past, and now people also revered him as a doctor, or as almost one, confiding in him about their ailments and