The Man With Candy (11 page)

On Monday, June 4, 1973, two years after the first disappearance in the old neighborhood, father and son were at home together in the afternoon. Jimmy zipped up his one-piece work suit, and Billy said, “How about giving me a lift down to the corner, Daddy?”

“Why, sure, son,” Jimmy said. “Let’s go.”

They drove slowly along the narrow street flanked by wide expanses of dark-green lawn on both sides, and Billy said, “Daddy, you’ll be having a birthday next month. What do you want me to git you?”

“Well, son, whatever you want, whatever your little heart desires,” Jimmy said. “It’s not the gift, but the thought.”

At the corner of Thirty-first and Yale, Billy began running up the street. “I love you!” Jimmy shouted. “See you in the morning.” It was his habit, ever since his sons had lost their mother, to remind them of his love at every opportunity.

Around ten that night, busy running the big Cutler machine in the mailroom of the
Post,
Jimmy was summoned to the phone. “Daddy,” Billy pleaded, “could I
please
go fishin’ up at Lake Sam Rayburn?”

“Well, it sounds okay to me,” Jimmy said. “Who with?”

“Oh, just some friends.”

Jimmy was tempted to ask for a name or two, but he had vivid memories of earlier arguments with his son about prying. The boy hated to be interrogated about friends and friendships. Jimmy said, “When’ll you be back, son?”

“Oh, two, three days,” Billy said. “Maybe Thursday.”

“Well, enjoy yourse’f, son,” Jimmy said, “and remember, I love you.”

“I love you too, Daddy,” Billy said.

Thursday came and went, and there was no sign of the boy. Jimmy fretted, but he accepted the mobility of the younger generation, and he was not seriously upset. On the morning of Saturday, June 9, five days after his last conversation with Billy, the father opened a letter postmarked in Austin the day before. In familiar handwriting, Billy had written:

Dear Daddy,

I have decided to go to Austin because I have a good job offier, I am sorry that I decided to leave but I just had to go.

P.S. I will be back in late Aug. Hope you understand, but I had to go. Daddy, I hope you know I love you. Your son, Billy

Nearly a month went by without word, and on July 2 someone telephoned and asked if Billy was at home. “He’s working in Austin,” Jimmy said. “Who’s this?”

“Wayne.”

“Well, he’s gone for the summer. He won’t be back till school.”

Two evenings later, while Jimmy Lawrence was wrapping and mailing newspapers, burglars broke into his home and stole his guns, his asthma medicine, cameras, young Billy’s stereo and a strongbox filled with papers and mementos. “It was someone that knew the house,” Jimmy told the police. “Someone that knew my habits. They broke a glass in the side door, and they just come right in.” He neglected to mention to the officers that his son Billy was unaccounted for. “That didn’t seem to have nothing to do with it,” he said later. “Not right then.”

BY THIS SAME JULY,
1973, young Billy Baulch had been absent for over a year, “working for a trucker loading and unloading from Houston to Washington,” a job that his truck-driving father knew did not exist. “By then we was doin’ a lotta waitin’ and hopin’,” the elder Baulch said in his hill-country drawl. “I’d gave up on the police a long time ago. I dialed that phone till I got to whar’ I was ashamed to call ’em anymore, and they jes’ talked to me like I was a idiot.”

It was consoling that Michael Anthony “Tony” Baulch, Billy’s foot-loose younger brother, seemed to be settling down. “We were happy about Tony,” Janey Baulch said. “He’d wander every once in a while, but he’d never be gone long without callin’ us, so we knew where he was at.”

“He’d get to missin’ us,” Billy Gene Baulch said, “and he’d have to hear our voice. We wasn’t worried about Tony anymore.”

On Thursday, July 19, six weeks after Billy Lawrence had accepted “a good job offier” in Austin, Mrs. Baulch suggested to Tony that he get a haircut. “His hair was comin’ down over his ears,” the mother said, “and I tole him to get it trimmed up, but he could leave it long to a certain extent. I knew he had to get some of that hair cut off if he was gonna stay around here.”

The boy asked his mother for enough money to pay for the haircut and a pack of cigarets, and walked out, apparently in a reasonable mood. When he failed to return that night or the next, Billy Gene told his wife that he was worried.

“Well, why, Billy?” Janey asked. “He’s run before.”

“This time’s different,” the cowboy truck driver said. “The boy’s too well contented. Why, Janey, he’s
happy
here. You can see it all over him.”

They surveyed Tony’s room. “See that?” Billy Gene said. “He left all his clothes hangin’. Did he ever do that when he run before? Lookee, there’s the new shoes his grandma bought him. Would he leave them behind? They ain’t never even been wore.”

Wearily, Billy Gene called the police, but Tony had left home so many times he was already listed in police files as a runaway. “The cops just said, ‘Well, what do you want
us
to do?’” Billy Gene told his wife. “I just said I wanted ’em to do their job.”

On his days off, Baulch would make up excuses for leaving the house, and then scour the neighborhood for his missing sons. “I knew all the places kids normally would go, but I never seen nothin’ nor heard nothin’ about either one. That was somethin’ different from the other times Tony run away, too. Just fadin’ like that. It wasn’t like Tony a bit.” The father checked with the Coast Guard, thinking that Tony might have gone shrimping again, but the Coast Guard said they had no record of a crewman named Baulch. He wrote to Social Security officials to see if regular payments were being made to his sons’ accounts, but there was no answer. The suffocating July dragged on, and Billy Gene began to get a feeling of helplessness. “Nothin’ worked,” he said. “Nothin’ helped a tiny bit. Everywhar’ I looked,
nothin’.
I was losin’ my oldest sons, one by one. Marvin that was kilt in the car accident, Billy, and now Tony. Lucky we had two more, and I told my wife, I said, ‘Janey, I cain’t seem to get one raised up. Now you’ll just have to take special keer,’ which Janey give her promise.”

THE HILLIGIESTS
had been searching without relief for two years, but by the summer of 1973 they were as confused and frustrated as the others. One dark afternoon, Dorothy Hilligiest was visited by Christine Weed, the grandmother who years before had trundled little Wayne Henley down to the Hilligiest house for supervised playtime with David. Mrs. Weed was always welcome. Nearly sixty, she drove her rattletrap sedan all over Houston; she was busy, alert and friendly, and Mrs. Hilligiest enjoyed their talks. It was through Christine Weed that she had learned of the disappearance of several neighborhood boys. “Seems like they’re all runnin’ away nowadays,” Mrs. Weed had said, and Mrs. Hilligiest had noted, just for the record, that there was no evidence whatever that young David had run away. Mrs. Weed had nodded.

On this sultry day in July, with bilious storm clouds touching the tops of the massive oaks along Twenty-seventh Street, Wayne Henley’s grandmother arranged herself primly on one of the two overstuffed sofas in the Hilligiests’ immaculate living room and began talking. “I been sittin’ around listenin’ to the kids,” she said. “Did you know Tony Baulch is missin’ now? Did you know the Baulch boys?”

Dorothy said she did not know them personally.

“Well, Tony Baulch, he was at our house a few weeks before he disappeared,” Mrs. Weed went on. “He come around to ask if we’d seen his older brother. You know—Billy? The one that’s been missin’ a year? Well, right after that, Tony disappeared himself, and he hasn’t been seen since. Why, it’s gettin’ to be a neighborhood without boys!”

Mrs. Hilligiest said she had felt that way for two years.

CHARLES COBBLE,
a blue-eyed bean pole with fine light hair, walked with a shambling, stoop-shouldered gait that seemed to diminish him. “He slank around here as though he didn’t want to be no trouble,” a neighbor said. “It was like he was scared to disturb your attention.” Charles was five feet ten inches in height, tall for a growing boy, but no one thought of him as tall; indeed, hardly anyone thought of him at all. The other children called him “loser” to his face; to adults, he barely existed. Like so many of the young men in The Heights, he was a high school dropout, his relations with his family were strained, and his life was bleak and unrewarding. “My son very seldom smiled,” said forty-six-year-old Betty Cobble, a tiny, forceful red-haired woman who was brought up in The Heights and spoke in the “raised” intonations, almost Cockney, of the native Houstonian. “He was a sad-lookin’ boy. We never knew what to do to make him happy, and we tried every single dye of his life.”

Betty and her husband, Vern, a forty-five-year-old postal supervisor with a soft voice and a retiring nature, had reared three daughters smoothly, but their youngest child was always a problem. “Oh, he was stubborn!” the diminutive mother said. “Just like me. We had to move twice when he was little to get him away from bad boys and girls. Once we moved because I overheard a phone call from another little boy tellin’ Charles about these little girls and what all they would do. I gave Charles a really bad spankin’ and we moved that weekend. This put him in a new school and separated him from his old friends and more or less kept him isolated, and it probably did him a lot of horm.” Betty Cobble was always critical of herself, and never more than when she was discussing
her son. “Charles was very bright, extremely bright, but I doubt if he ever went one full week to school. If he was gonna be lite, he wouldn’t go. He didn’t want to walk in lite in front of the other students; he said the teacher would holler at him. One dye in the fifth grade, I was drivin’ him to school, and as we got closer, he cried louder and louder. He said, ‘Don’t stop, Mama!
Please
don’t stop!’ When we got near the school, he grabbed the wheel of the car and almost made me go in a ditch. I said, ‘I’m not stoppin’!
I’m not stoppin’!
I’m gonna tyke you back home!’ He’d get so upset he’d get diarrhea, or he’d throw up. I just didn’t know
what
to do, and I guess a lot of the things I did were wrong.”

The Cobbles took their son to psychologists and psychiatrists, to guidance centers and behavioral clinics. “We found he was deathly afraid I was gonna leave him,” Mrs. Cobble recalled. “I don’t know what on earth gave him that idea. Maybe it was because I’m not well; I’ve been in the hospital a lot. Maybe he thought I was gonna die. It’s my nerves. I used to have severe headaches all the time, till they put me on Dilantin. I’ve been on it steady for eight years. My brain wave is similar to epilepsy.”

Whatever the cause, Charles Cobble went through life on the edge of panic. “There was
nothing
he wasn’t afraid of,” an uncle said. “He was afraid of the water, he was afraid of the dark, he was afraid of people and dogs. Nobody liked him, and he knew it, because they made it obvious to him. My mother, Charles’ grandmother, is a real termagant, very outspoken, and she made it plain to Charles that she didn’t like him. So did my father. The truth is, Charles wasn’t much of a boy. He’d throw tantrums, and nineteen times in a row he’d get his way, and the twentieth time Betty would hit him hard. I’m afraid she was overprotective of him.”

Betty Cobble admitted that “maybe I overloved him, maybe I tried too hard. But Charles always suffered from a feelin’ that nobody loved him. A few months before he went away, he told me, ‘I might as well be dead.’ I was walkin’ out of his room at the time; he never would go to sleep without me tellin’ him good night, and
if I were mad at him, I’d still have to go in and talk to him. So this night I turned around and walked back in and sat on his bed. I said, ‘Charles, you surely can’t believe that I don’t love you.’

“He said, ‘Well, maybe
you
do.’

“I said, ‘Well, what about your sister?’

” ‘Yeh,’ he said, ‘Donna loves me, but you and Donna are the only ones, and nobody else.’”

By the tenth grade, the boy had all but stopped attending classes. “His grades were down,” Betty said. “He wouldn’t do his homework. He’d stay home and watch TV all dye, sit around and play cards, and the doctor said he was on the verge of an ulcer. So we let him quit school at sixteen.”

One night Charles brought home a new friend. “Mama,” the boy said, “this is Marty Ray Jones.” Betty Cobble shook hands with a wide-smiling boy who resembled her son, with blue eyes and blond hair and a well-groomed exterior. Marty Ray Jones was short, about five feet five inches, but the two boys seemed almost equal in height because of Charles’s tendency to cower and stoop. Charles took his mother aside and said, “Marty’s had a hard life, Mama. His mother’s been married three or four times and he had a stepfather that beat him so bad he had to be taken to the hospital, and his real father’s remarried and they don’t get along too good and Marty Ray wants to stay overnight.”

“Stay overnight?” Mrs. Cobble said. “Why, Charles, he’s a stranger!”

“Well, he’s already checked with his daddy and it’s okay.”

Marty Ray Jones stayed Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and then went back to his father’s house to pick up fresh clothing. “Charles,” Betty Cobble said, “do you realize Marty’s movin’ in?”

“Yeh, well, it does look that way,” the boy said.

“Well, he has to go home! He can’t stay with us.” But in fact he could. The Cobbles had a four-bedroom house, large by contemporary Heights standards, and Betty Cobble had made a career of taking in “the strays and the strange,” as she put it herself.

“Once I counted and we had eleven children livin’ in our house, and only four of ’em were ours. A woman at Child Guidance had the nerve to tell me I had an earth-mother complex. That great big old fat thang told
me
that!”

Marty Ray Jones, the boy who came to dinner, began a tumultuous eighteen months under the Cobbles’ roof. “He had charm, he was funny, you could talk and life with him about anythang,” Betty Cobble said, “and I learned to love that child as my own. But I should have thrown him out the first day. He was deeply emotionally disturbed. I took him to a psychiatric clinic and they gave him bottles of tranquilizers, which he sold. The next time I took him they gave him ninety more, and he told me he could get to feelin’ pretty good by tykin’ four of ‘em.”