The Man With Candy Page 10

  At 10:30 P.M., when the evening newscast was over, Betty Cobble retraced the four doors to her son’s apartment to see if he had arrived home, but the place was dark. “I stayed up till after The Virginian,” she said, “and went down again and they still weren’t there. That’s when I began to worry. They didn’t usually stay out lite like that, not without callin’ me to come pick ’em up, no matter what time it was. I went to bed, but I didn’t sleep much, and at six in the mornin’ I went back again, and they weren’t home and their beds weren’t slept in. When Vern came in at seven, I said, ‘Charles and Marty didn’t come home last night.’ I told him to call me at the flower shop if they showed up.”

  Vern Cobble knew that the boys roamed all night every now and then, even though his wife was unaware of it, and he thought they would probably tiptoe back any second. In an hour, Charles was scheduled to begin helping a neighbor move, and the boy was usually dependable about such matters. When eight o’clock arrived and the neighbor pounded on the door and said the boys were not home, Cobble began to wonder. “But then I said to myself, ‘Now look! Charles is seventeen years old, out on his own, earning his own money. You can’t tie a boy down to where he’s got to account for every minute of his life.’ And I decided to just stay calm and forget about it. We’d done enough worrying about Charles, and all we got out of it was a worried boy.”

  At 9:50 A.M. the phone rang and daughter Emily answered. Charles was on the line, asking first for his mother and then for Vern.

  “Daddy?” the boy asked in a shrill voice.

  “Yes?” Vern answered.

  “I’m in real serious trouble!” Charles’s voice was broken and shaking. The child who was afraid of everything was terrified again.

  “Well, what’s the matter, Charles?”

  “I can’t tell you,” the boy said. He wrenched the words out between spasms and gulps. “There’s some—people that think—we’ve—we’ve done something to them.”

  “What are you talking about?” Vern asked, taking pains not to raise his voice.

  “I cain’t tell you,” Charles insisted.

  If the boy was in trouble, his father figured, Marty Ray Jones must have something to do with it. “Where’s Marty?” he asked.

  “He’s here with me.”

  Vern spoke with deliberate gentleness. “Charles,” he said, “what’s going on? What’s the situation?”

  The boy began to cry convulsively. “Daddy,” he said between sobs, “I have—I have to—I have to have a thousand dollars.”

  Cobble tried not to sound shocked. “Charles,” he said evenly, “I don’t have that kind of money here. It’d take time to get something like that.”

  The boy’s voice became insistent. “But, Daddy, I’ve got to have it!”

  “Then I’ll have to raise it,” Vern Cobble said quickly. “I haven’t got that kind of money here. I’ll have to see about it.”

  “Well, if you cain’t do it yourself, talk to Mr. Rogers. Maybe he can help?”

  Before Vern could say another word, he heard voices in the background, and then Charles spoke in a strangely resigned and depressed tone, as though he had given up hope. “I’ll tell you later where you have to have the money,” he mumbled. The connection was broken.

  Cobble put down the phone and found that he was trembling. Charles had sounded so forlorn, so helpless. The whole conversation was beyond comprehension; it fitted in with nothing in the gentle father’s placid background; it found him unprepared, bewildered. Who was “Mr. Rogers”? Vern knew no one of that name. There were a few rich members in the Cobble family. Why had Charles cited the mysterious Mr. Rogers and not the wealthy relatives?

  Vern Cobble dialed the Houston police and a dispatcher asked if he wanted a squad car. “No, I don’t want to talk to any patrol officers,” Vern said. “I want to get somebody investigating on this.”

  He was put through to homicide, and he told about the telephone call and his son’s terror. “I can guarantee you, officer,” Vern Cobble said, “my son’s not the type to be gone like this.”

  The homicide detective told him, “There’s nothing we can do.”

  “What?” Vern said. He thought he had misunderstood.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the officer said, “but on the strength of what you’ve told me, there hasn’t actually been any crime committed. If somebody else called and said he was holding your son, that’d be different. We could say the boy was being held unlawfully. But it’s possible he’s just trying to raise money to go to California or someplace. Boys do that, you know.”

  “Not Charles!” Cobble said emphatically. The idea of his timorous son embarking for California was too outlandish to merit discussion. “He wouldn’t go anywhere, I’m positive of that.”

  “Well, the only thing I can do is let you talk to Missing Persons.”

  The father waited impatiently for the new connection. Maybe Missing Persons was the right department. Charles was certainly missing, and these detectives would have experience in hunting lost and endangered people. He outlined the situation once again, and said, “When can you start looking?”

  “Oh, we don’t look for missing people,” a policeman said. “We just take the information and if we come across ’em we let you know.”

  “Well, that’s not what I want!” Vern snapped. “These boys are in trouble. I could tell the way my son talked, he’s in serious trouble!”

  The officer said he was sorry, but there was no possibility of assigning anyone to the case. “There’s too many like this. We couldn’t handle ’em all.”

  A thoroughly confused Vern Cobble hung up the phone, then phoned Marty Ray Jones’s father, a former country-and-western singer who now ran a gas station. Yes, Marty had called with a similar request, and “Tex” Jones was as much in the dark as Cobble. Vern dialed the FBI and was informed that there was no apparent violation of federal law. The FBI man recommended that he try the Houston police department.

  All day Vern Cobble waited for Charles to call him back and tell him how to deliver the money. He checked his bank balance and found he had two hundred dollars. He called the federal credit union and asked for a loan of eight hundred more. “No problem,” a clerk said. “What’s it for?”

  Vern mumbled something about his son being in trouble. “Oh,” the clerk said. “Then you need it for legal fees?”

  “Yes,” the father said. “Just put down ‘Legal fees.’”

  That night, the Cobbles stayed by the phone, exactly as their neighbors at the next corner, the Hilligiests, had waited two summers before. Periodically they called the police to ask if there was any word and to solicit assistance; the police were respectful, courteous and indifferent. By the third day, both Betty and Vern had come to the conclusion that the boys were probably dead. “Charles just wouldn’t do us that way,” Mrs. Cobble said later. “It wasn’t in his character.” Said her husband: “Our hope was that they had run away, but it didn’t add up. Those boys had their own apartment, their own money, their own stereo; they had everything two boys could want, and there was no pressure from the family or anything. Why, the outside world’s a tough place; would they run from something good to something bad? I tried to make that point to the police, but they didn’t get it.”

  The desperate parents conceived a desperate plan. If they could find narcotics in Apartment 26, perhaps they could force police to enter the case. “We might get Charles in trouble, too,” Betty said, “but at least somebody’d be out lookin’.”

  They ransacked the apartment and came up with some hypodermic needles and smoking masks, used to concentrate marijuana fumes. Betty Cobble had high hopes, but they were quickly dashed by the gruff tone of a police captain’s voice. “Listen, lady,” he said, “I understand you already have somebody out looking for these boys.”

  Betty said that she had asked her brother Chester Doby for help, but that his resources were limited. She described the paraphernalia in her son’s apartment and inquired when
she could expect narcotics detectives to arrive. “Well, you’re the one that found the stuff,” the captain said. “You’ll have to come on down and file charges yourself.”

  “You’re not even gonna come and look?” Betty asked.

  “No,” the captain replied. “We didn’t find anything, you did.”

  Mrs. Cobble said, “But you didn’t even look.”

  “Well, you’ve already got your brother out looking, don’t you, lady?” the captain said. He sounded deeply offended.

  Something snapped in the overwrought mother. “Listen here!” she shouted. “You don’t have to keep callin’ me ‘lady’! My name’s Mrs. Cobble.”

  “Well, I don’t know who you are,” the captain said curtly. “You’re just a voice on the telephone to me.”

  The upshot of the acrimonious conversation was that the indomitable Betty Cobble won her point, or appeared to. A team of narcotics detectives arrived, combed the apartment and found three needles, two masks and a pipe. “Sorry, ma’am,” one of them said as he was leaving. “We can’t file any charges on this.”

  “Does that mean you’re not gonna look for the boys?” Betty asked.

  “Oh, yeh,” the detective said consolingly. “We’ll find ’em.”

  By August 1, a week after the disappearance, Betty’s brother Chester Doby had talked to dozens of Heights children, tracked lead after lead, and achieved nothing. The former CIA operative, a physical reincarnation of Vincent van Gogh, down to the last red wisp of beard, was a rare-book dealer, but he had dropped everything to look for his nephew. He agreed with the unmentionable conviction that the boys were probably dead—“Neither one could have stayed away three days without help, because neither one was man enough to make it on his own”—but he plodded ahead anyway, uncertain of his motivation. “Partly it was to help my sister feel better,” he explained. “Partly it was because I was curious, and I guess partly I was mad. I’m not religious like Vern and Betty. I believe in vengeance.” With a wink from police, Doby wore a snub-nosed .38 in his belt, and had no compunction about using it.

  “From the beginning I took the approach that maybe the boys had stolen something or burned somebody and that they really did owe a thousand dollars,” Doby said. “I had to find out who they owed, and I must have talked to every kid in the neighborhood. I know I talked to Wayne Henley two, three times, and he was just like all the rest—cooperative, sympathetic and a blank wall.

  “So I spread the word—‘Anybody that can find out who we owe the money to, let us know, and we’ll pay the thousand and a fifty-dollar finder’s fee on top of it, no names, no checks, and no questions asked.’ I made it plain that we were interested in Charles only. I said they could keep Marty, and I meant it, because I knew that if these boys had gotten themselves in deep trouble, it had to be because of Marty. I already knew some of his habits, but out on the streets I learned more: he was a rip-off artist, a sadist and probably a queer. It was a bad day for everybody when Charles dragged him home.”

  Even in this neighborhood of relatively poor people and money-hungry teen-agers, there was no response to the offer. Doby broadened his investigation and picked up bits of information on several other missing boys, including one who had telephoned his parents for five hundred dollars and then had vanished. Nobody remembered the boy’s name, and the police had no such information in their files. Doby turned to the only clue in Charles’s final telephone call: the name “Rogers.” He knew that a man with that name was one of the city’s major narcotics wholesalers. Doby tried to reach Rogers and in the process was shot at and nearly run down by a truck. He put out feelers for an informer and addict named Kelly Davis, but a few nights later Davis was found dead in Matamoros, Mexico, shot in the head. Chester Doby was aware that he was accidentally stirring up narcotics circles in Houston, but he was getting no closer to solving the original case.

  Meanwhile, the taciturn Vern Cobble was making an investigation of his own, prowling the neighborhood and ringing doorbells. He learned quickly that there was an insidious pattern in The Heights. “The very first day that I went out looking for Charles,” the father said, “I talked to a man that said, ‘Well, these aren’t the only boys that disappeared.’ He told me about David Hilligiest and Malley Winkle, and he said it was weird the way boys were dropping out of sight.”

  Each day the Cobbles or Chester Doby called Missing Persons to keep the officers posted on their latest finds, and each day the information was taken without comment. “Then I began asking them what they had learned,” Vern Cobble said, “and they’d read back out of their file the same stuff I’d given them the day before! I’d say, ‘Look, these boys aren’t regular runaways. They would never stay out on their own; they’re in trouble.’ And they’d say ‘Thank you very much’ and tell me they were working hard on the case and read me some other piece of information that maybe Chester’d given them three days earlier. That made me mad! Not at the officers, no. It’s the system that’s bad.” Vern began visiting the homicide division almost daily, trying to stir up interest in the case.

  A week after the disappearance, two young plain-clothes men knocked at the door of the Cobbles’ apartment. By now it was August; temperatures and humidity approached the one-hundred mark every day, and Houstonians sweated and griped and sought the solace of ice-cold beer. The rookies worked hard. “We learned to admire them,” Vern Cobble said. “They hadn’t even been assigned, but they’d seen the report lying around at homicide for all that time, and they just took an interest.” Against all hope, the Cobbles were reassured.

  HIS YOUNG FRIENDS WERE GROWING more and more worried about Elmer Wayne Henley, Jr. Sometimes he was drunk, often he was irritable, and sometimes he seemed to react out of proportion to reality. “Like on the Fourth of July, ya know?” Sheila Hines said. “Wayne told us he was goin’ over to Dean Corll’s for a little-bitty party and we could all come along and shoot fireworks and drank wine and stuff, ya know? We told him we had somethin’ else planned, but he kep’ on and kep’ on and kep’ on! ‘Y’all kin come over! We’ll have fun! Dean has a whole house over in Pasadena, and there’s a bayou in the back, and we kin shoot fireworks all day long! And it’s cool, eve’ythang’s cool, ya know?’ He just wouldn’t take no for an answer, and we finally just turned him off. We couldn’t understand why it was so important to him, but that’s how Wayne was gettin’ these days: all upset over nothin’.”

  Bruce Pittman, closer to the Henley boy than most of the others, mentioned nonchalantly one day, “Hey, where’s Billy Lawrence been? You seen him?”

  Henley blurted a sharp “No!” and abruptly switched to a different subject. Pittman began to wonder again. When friendly remarks were made, Wayne acted as though he were under attack, and changed the subject or impulsively popped open another beer.

  Some of the group thought that the boy might have been let down by the departure of his crony David Brooks. The blond eighteen-year-old Brooks had married a pretty girl named Bridget, and the newlyweds were expecting a baby. Brooks hardly ever drove his green Corvette into the shady old neighborhood anymore, and young Henley could be seen sitting around killing time till late in the afternoons, when his faithful friend Dean Corll would usually arrive in his white Ford van. Twice young Henley bestirred himself to walk a half block to the Methodist church and discuss family problems with his minister, but the rest of the time he appeared phlegmatic and immobile, lost in his own world, drowning in beer. “He was puttin’ away tons of that stuff,” said Sheila Hines, “and he was worried about it hisself. He said he wanted to find a doctor that’d help him kick the habit. One morning a few of us was walkin’ down the street, and Wayne was up on his porch, and he told us he’d been drankin’ on one single beer for an hour, makin’ it last. He was real excited about that. We went inside and sat around his livin’ room and a couple boys started a game of chess, but Wayne was too nervous, and he kep’ talkin’ about goin’ to the doctor to see about his beer problem. He couldn’t sit sti
ll; his hands were shakin’ and he was talkin’ and chatterin’ away. We knew somethin’ besides beer had to be wrong, but we didn’t know what.”

  On August 4, nearly two weeks after the disappearance of Charles Cobble and Marty Ray Jones, Wayne invited Bruce Pittman to an old-fashioned country weekend in the Henleys’ ancestral home town of Mount Pleasant, near the Texas border with Arkansas and Oklahoma. The boys swam in the town pool Saturday night and then settled into a late session of Mexican Sweat, a local variant of poker. Bruce lost all his money and five borrowed dollars and climbed into bed. Early Sunday morning, Henley and one of his cousins woke the boy and announced they were going after rabbits. The hunters sighted no game bigger than a mockingbird and ended up firing two boxes of .22 ammunition at bottles and cans. They tried a few sips of “white lightning” and bought a bottle to take back home. And Wayne babbled incessantly about his latest ambition.

  “He told me Houston was as good as any other town, but the best place was Australia,” Bruce said. “He told me he’d pay my way to go with him, seventeen hundred dollars, counting the money I’d need to qualify as a homesteader. He said I could pay him back later. He said it was worth it to have a friend with him. I looked at him and he was serious. It was just like the time he asked me if I could ever be a Mafia assassin. He said he’d been doing a lot of reading about the old West, and Australia sounded like the same thang to him. I wondered where he would get that kind of money, seventeen hundred for me and seventeen hundred for himself, but he said he had it already. I guess I shoulda realized something was going on. Most of us kids, we never seen that much money in our life. It had to be coming from somewhere. But where? The Henleys, they was poor folks.”

  The view from The Heights was still obscure.

  Awakening

  For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known. Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops. —Luke 12:2-3