The Man With Candy (10 page)

He went back to the Delcambre residents Eunice had already seen and reconfirmed their stories. To some, he applied heavy verbal pressure. “One ol’ boy almost wanted to fight me. He finally said, ‘Man, I done
tole
ya for the last time:
I seen your son!
Now why don’t you believe me?’ He got hot!” Gerald felt encouraged.

But in Houston, Eunice Oncale received a dismaying report from Mrs. Billy Gene Baulch. Young Tony Baulch, the original bearer of the good news about Johnny and Little Bill, had made a confession. He said he had hated to see his parents suffering over
his brother’s absence and he had made up the story to console them. “It wasn’t nothin’ but a little white lie,” Janey Baulch told Mrs. Oncale. “I cain’t tell you how sorry I am. The boy meant well.”

When Gerald returned from Louisiana, he was not to be dissuaded. “Tony Baulch was lyin’, all right,” Oncale said, “but not about working with Johnny and Billy. When he found out I was gonna go over to Delcambre and catch ’em, he changed his story. He didn’t want me finding ’em, that’s why he changed. That’s the only way I can see it happening.”

He resumed his dogged search.

THE HILLIGIEST AND WINKLE CHILDREN HAD DISAPPEARED
from the Heights in May, 1971, Ruben Watson in August of the same year, Frank Aguirre seven months later in March, 1972, and the Baulch and Delome boys two months after that. The summer of 1972 passed uneventfully, and on the second day of October, with the coming of fall making temperatures plummet into the sixties and seventies, a sweet-faced fourteen-year-old boy named Wally Jay Simoneaux, scion of Louisiana Cajuns, left his house in The Heights to spend the night with Richard Hembree, a shy thirteen-year-old who lived a few blocks away. Just after dark, a friend saw the two boys in a white vehicle parked in front of a grocery store, but when he tried to engage them in conversation another boy got out and said “Beat it!”

Later that night the phone rang in the Simoneaux house on Twenty-fourth Street. Wally Jay’s voice said “Mama—” and then there was silence.

“Darlin’,” Mrs. Simoneaux said. “Where are you, darlin’?”

There was a shuffling noise in the background, and then a click, and the line went dead. The disturbed mother phoned the Hembree residence and found that both boys were late and unaccounted for. When Mrs. Simoneaux called police, she was told that the boys would be stopped and questioned if they were seen on the streets.

Nearly three more months passed. Then on December 22, 1972, an eighteen-year-old problem child named Mark Scott told his parents he was going to Mexico for a few days to forget his troubles. In his latest entanglement with the law, Mark had been arrested and charged with carrying a knife. A few years before, he had stayed overnight with a blond boy named David Brooks, and Brooks had accidentally shot him with a pellet gun; the tiny cylinder of lead had been dug out of Mark’s leg in a hospital emergency room. Young Scott occasionally traveled with another juvenile offender and close friend of the pistol-packing Brooks: Elmer Wayne Henley, Jr. The Henley boy had shown up at one of Mark Scott’s parties and had become enshrined in Scott family history as “the first to arrive and the last to leave.”

A week after Mark Scott’s departure for Mexico, his parents studied a card with an Austin postmark:

How are you doing? I am in Austin for a couple of days. I found a good job. I am making $3 an hour. I’ll be home when I get enough money to pay my lawyer.

The weeks went by and there was no further word.

TO MOST OF THE HEIGHTS CHILDREN,
it seemed that the brooding Elmer Wayne Henley, Jr., “just up and disappeared” around March of 1973, but his friend Bruce Pittman knew better. “He’s
gone to Mount Pleasant to live a new life,” Bruce told the other boys. “He’s got him a job in a filling station. His daddy lives there now, and Wayne’s decided to be a regular country-town boy from now on. It won’t take.” Young Pittman was right. A month or two after leaving the clangorous city of Houston “for the absolute last time,” Elmer Wayne Henley, Jr., was back in his mother’s house, and soon he had returned to the company of the quiet David Brooks and the even quieter Dean Corll.

“Seems like they had a regular program,” said Johnny Reyna, who lived a block from Henley. “Every afternoon, Wayne’d sit at Hart’s, the fried-chicken place near Hamilton Junior High, but you wouldn’t see him talking to none of the older kids. He was always rapping with the seventh-graders, him and David Brooks and sometimes Dean. They was there just about every day after school.”

For years, the Henley home on Twenty-seventh Street had been presided over by Wayne’s cheerful mother, Mary, who worked days as a cashier, and his spry grandmother, Christine Weed, and the two pleasant ladies made everyone welcome. “We’d go over to the Henleys’ just to listen to the radio, and to have someplace to go, you know?” Johnny Reyna said. “’Cause there’s rilly nothing to do around here. Just go and sit someplace. And Miz Henley and Miz Weed, they was real nice.”

In the early evenings of spring 1973, the visitors found that Dean Corll was likely to appear at the Henley residence; he would pull up in his white Ford van as though arriving from work and enter the house in his customary cloud of silence. “He’d never say nothin’ to the rest of us,” said Sheila Hines. “I first met him in June; we were sittin’ in Wayne’s and Dean come up in his van, and we all sat around rappin’, but Dean didn’t say nothin’, ya know? He just looked at everybody. He gave me weird vibrations because of the way he’d stare, just sittin’ back and starin’ while we all talked. He didn’t react to anythin’ that was goin’ on.
I’d say ‘Hi’ to him, and he wouldn’t even answer. He was like the walkin’ dead in the movies. He was just-well-takin’ up space. The rest of us would get ready to boogie off, and Wayne and Dean and David’d get in the van and split somewhere else.”

One evening the neighborhood gang was assembled in Wayne’s living room when little Ronnie Henley shouted “Hey, Dean!” and snapped a flashbulb picture of the startled man. “Dean freaked out!” Johnny Reyna said. “You could tell when the picture was developed how freaked he was: his eyes was all bugged and weird. Later the kid tried to take another picture, but Dean squirmed all over the place. He hid his face; he held his hand up to where Ronnie couldn’t take it. I kind of wondered why he didn’t want his picture taken, but I didn’t ask nothing.”

The perceptive Bruce Pittman sensed undercurrents, but he had decided months before not to bother his troubled friend Henley about the relationship with Corll. “By this time I was pretty sure Dean was a homosexual,” Bruce said. “I mean, he didn’t have feminine actions or a feminine voice, but he was messing around with a couple of seventeen-year-old boys, always giving ’em money, takin’ ’em places. Why would a normal thirty-three-year-old man act like that? You never saw him with chicks. He’d sit in Wayne’s living room and look us over, and then he’d go into the bedroom with Wayne and come back out and stare some more. If Dean had anything to say, it was strictly at Wayne, not another soul. You might could get a ‘hello’ outa him, but that was the extent of it.”

Early on a humid afternoon, young Pittman and Wayne Henley mounted their ten-speed bikes and pedaled toward a nearby pool hall, and on the way Wayne called out, “Hey, Bruce, what would yew think about bein’ a professional assassin?”

“A
what?”
Bruce said.

“A hired killer, like for the Mafia or somethin’.”

Bruce glanced over at his friend, expecting to see a grin or a smirk, but Wayne looked serious.

“Man, that’s a silly question!” the preacher’s son said. “Man, that’s
stupid!
I could never kill anybody.” He studied Wayne again. The boy’s face was intense, as though he were deep in thought. Bruce put the incident down to “just dreaming, the way all of us do once in a while,” and the subject was dropped.

In June, somebody noticed that another regular playmate had stopped coming around, and for a time children like Johnny Reyna and Sheila Hines wondered what had happened. The absent boy was Billy Lawrence, fifteen years old, six feet tall and a football player at Booker T. Washington Junior High School. Billy and his father lived together on Thirty-first Street, across the Belt Freeway from the Henleys and the Hilligiests and the rest, and in a different school district. “Man, he hated that school!” a neighborhood boy exclaimed. “He’d always come down here and play with us, and all he could talk about was the niggers at Booker T. He got beat up by ’em one time, but he’d been down on ’em long before that. Every time we’d see him he’d talk about how bad they were, how much he hated ’em, and we got tired of hearin’ the same old broken record, ya know? So we began tunin’ him out.”

“Billy never was that happy,” another boy said. “He did a lot of bitchin’ about his old man, same as everybody else. Billy wanted to smoke grass and fool around, and his old man wouldn’t let him, and they had some pretty bad scenes. So he wasn’t gettin’ along at home and he wasn’t gettin’ along at school and after a while he wasn’t gettin’ along with us, either. He’d come down to get us and we’d be gone. The pigs were watching this neighborhood, so we’d just boogie off to the country in somebody’s car, and by the time Billy got here from Booker T., we’d be long gone, and he got to thinkin’ we were avoidin’ him.”

Just after school recessed for the summer, the Lawrence boy knocked on the door of Sheila Hines’s house on Twenty-sixth Street and told her he was feeling depressed. “I think I might just go and disappear for a while,” he said disconsolately.

“Where?” Sheila said.

“I don’t know. A different neighborhood or somethin’.”

“Why?” Sheila asked. “Do ya think we don’t want ya around?”

“I don’t know, but when I gotta think about something, I just go off by myself. I’ll be gone for a while, but I’ll be back.”

“Well, come on by when ya do!” Sheila said cheerfully. “We’re always glad to see ya, Billy.”

Horace James “Jimmy” Lawrence, a beefy forty-six-year-old mailroom worker for the Houston
Post,
rattled around the empty house on Thirty-first Street cursing cockroaches and missing his son. In morose moments, Jimmy seemed to himself the personification of the hillbilly song “Born to Lose.” His father had been a millionaire who, in Jimmy’s words, “mint hiss’f on wine, women and song,” and abandoned his children to orphans’ homes. As a young man, Jimmy married a beautiful and tortured woman who required steady injections of morphine; he was prevailed upon to stick up groceries and drugstores to meet her needs. In prison in 1947, he heard from his dissolute old father: “I don’t want a criminal in my home, so when you get out, don’t bother visiting.” The twenty-two months behind bars were traumatic: “I saw awful thangs. I saw homosexuals. I saw a man kilt; his head fell in my lap in the lunchroom. I had nightmar’s and I attempted suicide. Somebody give me a Bible in solitary, and I found the Lard. He changed my whole life. I got out, I worked hard, I got pardoned by the governor, and I married a fine, fine lady that give me two fine sons, Billy and my older son Jimmy. In 1965, she got cancer, and she was in such pain, I went into a chapel at the hospital and fell down on my knees and I said, ‘Lard, if it be Thy will, take her to You,’ and a few days later, He done took her to His side.”

Jimmy went back to the bungalow on Thirty-first Street, back to the flowered yard with its banana and mulberry trees and “the only pink magnolia in this whole community,” and concentrated on his boys. Young Jimmy passed into manhood and moved away,
and Billy went to junior high school and made the football team. “He belonged to the church and he served as a acrolyte, similar to a altar boy,” Jimmy said proudly, “and he accepted Jesus Christ as his savior.”

Sometimes Billy would join his father on the evening shift at the
Post,
earning twenty or twenty-five dollars mailing newspapers out of town, but mostly he went his way unsupervised while his father worked evenings. “That was the trouble, I guess,” Jimmy Lawrence said. “He begun hanging with a kid named Wayne Henley and a couple others I didn’t like. That Henley, he been in this house two, three times that I know of. One afternoon I went off and left my shop keys on the dresser, and when I come back, I could smell incense. Once before I’d caught Billy smoking marijuana and he’d turned on the air conditioner right quick to draw the fumes out, but this time I come right in on ’em, Billy and Henley and a couple more, and I knocked the shit outa my boy. One of ’em others started coming at me and he wound up falling through that plastic partition there; that’s why it’s gashed open now. I grabbed Billy by the head—he had long hair, plenty to hold on to—and I took him into the bathroom and made him flush that dope down the drain. It was a baggie, what they call a lid. Not real good marijuana; I myse’f seen better. I slapped him, and we had some words, and he kicked at me, so I hauled off and hit him again. It hurt me, having to manhandle my own son like that.”

For a time, the chastened boy stayed out of trouble. He contracted to buy a ten-speed bicycle for a hundred and five dollars and worked hard to make the payments. He spent more evenings working with his father and sometimes his older brother, and he found a steady girl friend, a woman of twenty. His father said, “I coulda gone for her myse’f! One time I said, ‘Son, dirty old men need loving too!’” Sitting in his empty house telling the story, Jimmy Lawrence broke into an asthmatic laugh at his own cherished mot.

“But purty soon he begin having trouble at school,” the father
went on. “It was the black kids to blame. He’d come home with his face cut, but he didn’t want to talk about it. One day him and another boy was riding their bicycles, and two nigger youths approached ’em with a gun and stole the bikes. Never seen ’em again, and Billy still had to pay off the contract.”

The boy began playing hooky. “I went to school to try to help him out once in a while, but it wasn’t much use. I could see he was slipping away. But still a mighty fine son, a mighty fine boy, big and good-looking, a hundred and sixty pounds, almost too big to give a licking anymore.”