The Man With Candy (6 page)

“Yes, ma’am,” the man said politely, and produced Malley and David from a back room. Slightly ill at ease, Mrs. Hilligiest offered to buy some candy. The man sold her a small box of pralines and divinity for a dollar, “and it was right good candy, I can still taste how delicious it was.”

She was disturbed by the situation, but not displeased with the
nice young man. “I’d appreciate it,” she said diffidently, “if you wouldn’t let David come over here. I know you run a bidness, and he’s got no reason being here.”

As though to reassure her, the man said, “Well, I’m a friend of Mrs. Winkle. She works here part-time, and so does Malley.”

“Well, that’s up to the Winkles, but I’m just speaking for my own son.”

“Yes, ma’am. Well, I’ll comply with your wishes then.”

By the time David was eleven and Malley into his teens, the elder Hilligiests advised their son that Malley was roaming too far and too fast for their own peace of mind and the relationship would have to end. After that, Malley sometimes played with David in the Hilligiest yard, but the boys saw less of each other. The parents had been relieved, and the incident with the candyman was pushed to the backs of their minds. Reliving it now in the light of David’s disappearance, they could see no connection whatever. They drove by the old candy factory, but it was closed and locked. Another business had moved into the shed, and the man with the candy was nowhere to be seen.

Geraldine Winkle had her own memories of the little candy factory, but she too saw no significance in them. One day in the mid-sixties, when Malley was about ten or eleven years old, he had come home and announced that the candyman had offered him a job sweeping up pecan scraps and peeling caramel off the floor and washing stainless-steel cooking vats. When Mrs. Winkle had checked out the place herself, she was offered a part-time job, dipping pralines on a piecework basis.

The small factory in its overheated blue-green shed was as busy as a maternity ward when Nurse Winkle arrived to begin her part-time job; there were so many orders stacked up that the manager, a pleasant young man named Dean Corll, was running the assembly line on two full shifts, from early morning till after midnight,
and was hiring all the extra help he could find to supplement his standard work force of five women. The plant made divinity, pralines, pecan chewies and the other simple confections that are lumped together in the South and Southwest under the classification “Mexican candies,” although they are no more endemically Mexican than Latvian or Ugandan.

From the first day, Mrs. Winkle found her part-time boss a fascinating study. “He was like a man that had
nothin’
on his mind but success. The lights were on many a night, all night. I got to feelin’ sorry for him, that the job was too much for a poor kid like him maybe in his mid-twenties. His mother seemed to be involved in the business, but she really wasn’t much help. Her name was Mary West, and she used to come in there flashin’ her diamonds and her furs. She was determined to get married. Seems like her latest husband was some kind of a nut and she’d divorced him. She met him through a computer dating service, and now she was goin’ back to the computer lookin’ for another one. I couldn’t figure her out. She had a big smile and a wonderful personality, a little plump but a nice figure, too. She was an attractive woman of maybe fifty, but looked younger. Why’d a person like that have to go to a computer for a husband?”

Sometimes Mary West gave the appearance of pushing her son. “She’d want to know why he hadn’t done this or done that,” Gerry Winkle said. “I never did get the story straight, but one of her ex-husbands had a candy company nearby and she wanted to beat him. That’s what drove Dean so hard, I guess.”

Young Corll had another facet to his personality, according to Mrs. Winkle. “He was crazy about children; he’d let them walk all over him. Every afternoon that doorbell would ring and there’d be a gang of little kids from the Helms grammar school, beggin’ for broken candy. Then Dean put a pool table in the back and the boys used to knock at all hours. ‘Can we play pool?’ When I found out Malley was goin’ there after work, I told him to cut it out. Not
that I had any feelin’ that Dean was doing wrong. I just felt that he shouldn’t be disturbed. He worked awfully hard and I respected the man for it.”

While Geraldine Winkle slowly adjusted to the loss of Malley, just as she had adjusted to the loss of her sailor husband years before, the Hilligiests were refusing even to consider the possibility that their own son might be gone forever. No clue, no hint, no rumor, no wild idea was too outlandish to be taken seriously. Sometimes they would drive a thousand miles on weekends, searching. They ran up high telephone bills that completed the destruction of the family budget. The window-trimming job that had been interrupted by David’s disappearance remained undone through the summer, the paint cans from Sears unopened. The vacation to Kerrville was called off, and never mentioned, not even by the other children. “Everything stopped,” said Dorothy Hilligiest. “Everything.”

A friend took the parents to a seer who reported in a quavery, astral voice that David was with someone “adult in size but not in age,” that he was being kept “in a grassy area around water, but not a beach or river,” that he was wearing cutoff blue jeans and was adequately clothed and well fed, “but he cries often, and he wants to go home.”

“It sounded just like David would act,” Mrs. Hilligiest said, “and it really upset us. Now we felt like that something was holding him and preventing him from coming home.”

A psychic named Clifford Royce arrived in Houston to make a public appearance at a motel, and the Hilligiests paid their six dollars and were told to write their question. They did not bother to ask if David was alive; they knew that answer. Dorothy wrote: “When will our boy come home?”

Royce hesitated. Then he said in an apologetic tone, “I hate to tell you this, but the way I see it your boy is dead in a south Texas
town.” He asked them to remain after the session, but Fred and Dorothy were already dashing for the door, too disturbed to pursue the matter.

Months went by before they got up the nerve to consult another clairvoyant, and then friends prevailed on them to visit a man who had developed a supernatural technique for locating lost children. The Hilligiests provided a large picture of David, over which the man superimposed a map and a plumb bob, and after a short period of meditation he advised them that Malley was in jail and David was safe in Dallas. The Hilligiests drove to Dallas and found nothing to bear the clairvoyant out.

Soon afterward they contacted a Dutch seer who informed them by transatlantic mail that David was lying in a hospital with amnesia, facing a window toward the south, a pathetic look on his face. Dorothy broke down when she heard the report, but soon began calling hospitals, to no avail. Still another psychic told the parents that he envisaged their son on Bourbon Street in New Orleans; a check of the famous place turned up nothing but the usual bars and clubs and jazz joints. Little blond-haired David Hilligiest would have stood out like a beacon on Bourbon Street, but no one remembered him.

For weeks after a newspaper article told about the parents’ plight and their offer of a reward, the telephone kept jangling. A caller told Mrs. Hilligiest about an ex-convict who had bragged that he knew where the boys were. The caller warned that the man was armed, angry and dangerous. Early the next morning, before most people leave for work, tiny Dorothy Hilligiest knocked on the man’s front door and demanded entrance. “I talked to him for an hour and a hife and he turned out to be nice. He denied that he knew anything about David or Malley, and he said he was tired of being accused of things he didn’t do. He said his neighbors were always getting the police on him.”

A young boy telephoned the family and said he had seen David
hitchhiking toward Galveston. Dorothy said, “Do you know what David looks like?”

The boy said, “Sort of.”

“Did you go to school with David?”

The boy hung up.

A girl who sounded like a subteen telephoned and said she wanted the money in advance.

“You give me David for my thousand dollars,” Mrs. Hilligiest told her. “Do you know where he is?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the girl answered.

“Well, you bring my boy and I’ll give you the money.”

“No, ma’am, we don’t play that way.”

The girl bargained halfheartedly for a few minutes more and then admitted that she was joking. “Well, that’s
cruel!”
Dorothy said. “You just don’t
do
people like that!”

“I’m sorry,” the girl said. “I’m truly sorry.”

“Well, I’ll accept your apology,” the tolerant woman said. “But don’t do anything like this again, hear? We’ve been under too much strain already.”

There was a steady stream of reports from people who swore that they had just seen the boys. “They’re over at the Jack-in-the-Box at Twentieth and Shepherd!” a telephoner said, and the Hilligiests jumped up from the dinner table and rushed to the scene.

“I just seen ’em walking on Fourteenth Street near the grocery!” another man announced, and once again the Hilligiests were off.

A policeman’s son telephoned a report that he had seen Malley and David with two girls, but later recanted his story after Fred had wasted several days running down the lead. Mrs. Hilligiest said, “There were jillions of those calls, and they ’bout drove us crazy, but we had to take them as truth. One child would call and breathe heavily and whisper,
‘David’s not with Malley. David’s not with Malley.’
I’d say, ‘Well, where is David?’ and he’d hang up. He did this over and over.”

“But we were glad when kids called,
any
kids,” Fred Hilligiest said. “We thought there must be a kid someplace that knew something, and if we kep’ talking to ‘em, one of these days they’d make a slip.”

Often the Hilligiests found themselves confiding in a lifelong friend of David’s who seemed to retain a sympathetic interest in the case after others had begun to act politely bored. Elmer Wayne Henley, Jr., fifteen years old at the time of the disappearance, was beginning to be a sorrowful figure to his young peers on Twenty-seventh Street. A junior high school dropout, he had severe acne, disheveled hair that sometimes twisted into curly knots, round owlish eyes, and a transfixing stare like the young Edgar Allan Poe. Sometimes he appeared slightly disoriented on the streets, and sometimes he appeared plain drunk. The Hilligiests felt compassion; they knew that there had been serious family trouble and a rancorous divorce, and that Wayne once had been a sweet and mannerly child. In fact, he had been one of David’s earliest playmates. When both boys were in the preschool years, Wayne’s mother or grandmother would walk him the half block to the Hilligiests’ and drop him off to play. Promptly after one hour the child would be picked up and returned home. “I liked this,” Dorothy Hilligiest remembered. “I said, ‘Well, this is my way of doing, too.’ It showed that they cared who the boy played with.”

Soon after the disappearance in 1971, Wayne Henley called on the Hilligiests and expressed his sympathy, and after the family printed posters, he helped to distribute them around The Heights. “He put them into Hamilton and Lincoln schools for us,” Fred recalled, “and we really appreciated it. He was always so understanding. Ever’ time he’d see us, even if he was a little wobbly hisse’lf, from drugs or beer or I don’t know what, he’d say he was still looking for clues, and he said he’d be sure to pass along anything he learned. He give us a feeling that he was trying.”

In the summertime, eleven-year-old Gregory Hilligiest sometimes played with Wayne Henley’s little brother Ronnie, and one day Greg came home and told his parents he had discovered a fascinating new way to pass the time. It was called poker, and it could be played for money or fun, but of course Greg played it only for fun. “Where?” his mother asked quickly.

“Down at the Henleys’,” Greg answered. “Sometimes the big boys play with us, and then it’s
really
fun.”

“What big boys, Gregory?”

“Oh, Wayne and his friends. A blond-headed boy named David Brooks. The one that drives the Corvette? And that man that David used to could get candy from. Dean? Dean somebody.”

Mrs. Hilligiest was mildly concerned, but not enough to deliver an ultimatum. She knew her stern reputation around the neighborhood, and she could imagine no harm coming out of an infrequent friendly card game in the nearby home of a family they had known for fifteen years, or with the nice, polite young man who had once sold her a box of candy. “Just make sure you only play for fun, not money,” she admonished the boy.

A few days later Gregory dashed back from the Henleys’. “You know what Wayne told me?” he said in his high adolescent voice. “He said, ‘Greg, one of these days Dean and I are gonna have to take you fishin’.’”

The mother said nothing, but she made a mental note to reject any such invitations on her son’s behalf. Innocent card games might be acceptable, but she frowned on out-of-town trips unless the whole family went along.

One wet afternoon Mrs. Hilligiest dropped little Ronnie Henley off from school and Wayne was sitting on the front porch. He waved, stood up unsteadily, and called out, “Thankee, ma’am, for bringin’ mah brother home.”

“Glad to,” Mrs. Hilligiest said.

Wayne wobbled over to the car and Dorothy could tell that he
was under a baleful influence. As though he had read her thoughts, Henley said, “Yes’m, I’ve drank a few beers, and I ’pologize.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “That’s your business.”

“Have y’all heard anythang about David?”

“No, not a word. Have you?”

“No’m.” The boy opened the door and slid inside, out of the drizzle. “I know how yew and Mr. Hilligiest feels, ma’am,” he said. His words were not easy to follow; the Henley clan was originally from the piney woods country, culturally the hillbilliest region of Texas, and Wayne spoke with deep drawls and slurs that some (but never Dorothy Hilligiest) would have characterized as mush-mouthed, the more so when he had been drinking. “Ya know,” he went on, “I rilly,
rilly
feel, ya know,
sorry
for y’all, and mah heart jes’ goes out to yew.”