The Man With Candy (12 page)

Before long, the Cobbles were aware that Marty Jones took more than tranquilizers. He was a heavy user of barbiturates and stimulants and marijuana, and they had reason to believe he experimented with other potions, perhaps heroin and cocaine, still relatively uncommon in the backward neighborhood. When they realized that they were harboring an incipient addict, the Cobbles packed Marty’s bags and deposited them on the front porch.

“That was all right with him,” Mrs. Cobble said. “He’d just sleep out there till we let him back in. Then he’d do some outrageous thang and we’d take all his clothes down to his father’s house and empty ’em at the door, and the next morning we’d find Marty asleep in the backseat of our car. He was just beyond control. His father couldn’t handle him and neither could anybody else. His father said it was the mother’s fault, and the mother said it was the father’s, and meanwhile he was livin’ in our house. There’d be times when Marty and Charles would be so mad at each other they wouldn’t even be speakin’, and still Charles would beg us to let him stay because he said Marty had no plice to go. Charles knew what it was like to be an outcast, and he had a deep sensitivity about thangs like that. We tried to make the best of it.
I drove those two boys everywhere in the car, and I’d go back and pick ’em up. I don’t know what more we could have done.”

One night Marty came home to the Cobbles’ in a wild and manic state. “He was on somethin’ worse than marijuana,” Betty Cobble said. “He insisted on drivin’ our car, and we wouldn’t let him, so he began goin’ through my daughter’s purse to find the keys. Marty was very quick goin’ through purses. All you had to do was turn your back for a second and he’d have a ten-dollar bill. He was death on ten-dollar bills, because you could buy a lid for ten dollars.

“When he couldn’t find the keys, he began ravin’ and threatenin’. I said, ‘Marty, you better calm yourself or I’m gonna have to call the police.” He picked up a mortar block and threw it through the rear window of the Mustang, and I said, ‘Okay, I’m callin’ ’em!’ Marty sat on the front porch and waited.

“The police came and told him to stand up. Marty wouldn’t move, so one big cop grabbed him and jerked him to his feet. Marty started screamin’ ‘Police brutality! Police brutality!’ so the whole neighborhood could hear, but the cops were very good to him, considerin’ how he was actin’. They handcuffed him, and Marty turned to me and said, ‘Are you gonna let ’em treat me like this?’

“I said, ‘He’s not doin’ anythang to hurt you. And it’s your own fault.’ By that time he was pleadin’ and cryin’. They took him away, and I went to bed after midnight. When I got up at seven the next mornin’, about the time Vern usually gets home from the post office, Marty was sittin’ on the couch in our livin’ room.

“I said, ‘Marty, how did you get out?’

“He said, ‘Oh, my dad came down and got me.’”

In police records, the first mention of Marty Ray Jones was at age six, as the complainant in a sodomy case. In 1972, the year of the window-breaking incident, he was seventeen and on probation for theft. His lifelong behavior had alternated between acts of furious delinquency and mournful contrition. He stole Vern Cobble’s
antique gold watch and later gave him a worn old time-piece with gold-plated case, purchased at a pawnshop for thirty dollars. After he had caused Betty Cobble untold misery, he bought her a ceramic elephant and presented it on her birthday with quiet pride. “He made it so hord for us,” Mrs. Cobble said, “because he was tryin’ to be liked, and at the same time makin’ everybody mad. He was a companion to Charles, yes, but my God, look what it cost Charles in the long run!”

In March, 1973, there were changes in the lives of the Cobbles and their bad-penny houseguest. Betty flew to Massachusetts to help one of her daughters through a difficult pregnancy, and Marty Ray moved in with a succession of hosts ranging from his mother and latest stepfather in Brownwood, Texas, to a dope dealer called “Satan” in the scabrous section of Houston called “Sin Alley.” Vern Cobble, the quiet man who worked at night and let his wife run the family, grew closer to his son Charles. “For the first time in his life,” Cobble said, “Charles would ask me questions, solicit my advice, and for the first time in his life he’d take it. Up to then, he’d been his mother’s boy, mainly because I wasn’t around much—I always had to hold two jobs, sometimes three, till I made supervisor. But with Betty gone to Massachusetts, Charles and I became friends, and it felt good. I think he was surprised how much I’d learned about life in the last year!”

One night Charles dragged home another waif, a tiny fifteen-year-old girl with orange hair and a doll’s face on which she had appliquéd heavy portions of rouge and lipstick and eye cosmetics. “This here’s Debbie,” Charles told his father. “She’s a beautician, and she’s working as a waitress on Yale Street. We’re gonna have a baby.”

Surprised at his own cool sophistication, Vern Cobble arranged a marriage and helped the newlyweds set up housekeeping in the Ben Hur Apartments, twelve blocks away, just across the street from the home of Elmer Wayne Henley, Jr., and a block from the
Hilligiests. When Betty returned from the East, the elder Cobbles gave up their rambling old house and joined their son at the Ben Hur. Once again the seventeen-year-old boy and his mother were close, four doors apart on the second floor, overlooking the little swimming pool.

Only a few months passed before the child Debbie, not yet five feet in height, became disenchanted. “For a while, it was nice,” she said. “Charles got a job in the nickel-plating shop on Twenty-sixth Street, but then he quit because he was scared of his boss. He’d sit around the apartment and ask me to tell him I loved him, over and over and over and over and over. He felt that everybody else resented him. Then one day Marty Jones came back and started hanging around. Marty always brought marijuana, and he’d get Charles to go places with him, and Charles would come home in bad shape, spaced out, drugged, or drunk, and in a bad mood. Charles wouldn’t talk to me about it. He said that Marty was the only real friend he’d ever had; he said they tried to help each other. I asked him not to bring Marty back, but he said Marty didn’t have anyplace else to go.”

After a few months, the young married couple separated. “Charles just told me, ‘It’d be for your own good if you went away. I don’t want you to get hurt.’ He said he’d send for me when the time was right. That was the Fourth of July, and as soon as I moved out, Marty moved in.”

By this time, Marty Ray Jones had become known throughout The Heights as a smalltime supplier of narcotics, and also as a “burn” artist—a peddler who takes the money and fails to produce the goods, or substitutes dope of a low quality. With faithful Charles at his side, the Jones boy managed to alienate the whole neighborhood, including the young man who lived across the street, Wayne Henley. Eighteen-year-old Johnny Reyna recalled, “One night in the middle of July we were at Long John’s fish place, and Marty came in looking for a fight. He went up to Wayne and tried to start something, but Wayne just threw it off. Marty was getting real
redneck, real mean, but nobody wanted to hassle with him. Charles was there; he was acting okay. You could talk to Charles, but not to Marty.”

A boy named Danny Ward remembered: “Marty and Charles, they tried to start a fight with everybody. Like Marty came up to the Jack-in-the-Box and asked me if I wanted to step outside and fight him. I told him no. Then I whipped his ass.” All along Twenty-seventh Street and Yale Street and Heights Boulevard, every place where teen-agers congregated, Marty Ray Jones and his shadow, Charles Cobble, became anathema.

At noon on Wednesday, July 25, a steaming summer day in Houston, Betty Cobble drove home from her new job making deliveries for a Heights florist. As usual, she stopped by apartment No. 26 to invite her son to join her for lunch. Mother and son ate together in the parents’ apartment, No. 30; then Betty returned to her route.

A few hours later, Charles was seen cooling off in the small pool in the Ben Hur’s courtyard, and toward the end of the day he and Marty made an appearance at Long John’s in their fanciest outfits, including new platform-sole shoes. “They was rappin’,” Sheila Hines said. “Nothin’ out of the way. If they woulda said somethin’ to me and Rhonda Williams about goin’ away, we wouldn’t’ve been so surprised later. But they didn’t. They just walked in and rapped a little bit and said they had to go and take care of some stuff.”

Mrs. Cobble dropped into her son’s apartment when she finished work late that afternoon, but neither Charles nor Marty was at home. She served dinner, and her husband, Vern, left for the post office about 9
P.M.
Once again Betty looked into No. 26 and saw no signs of life. She returned to her own apartment to await the ten o’clock news on television.

Down in the courtyard, a Ben Hur resident sat by the small swimming pool, hoping to catch a breeze on the sweltering evening.
It was just before 10
P.M.,
and like Betty Cobble she intended to watch the news in a few minutes. “I was looking at the water, deep in my own thoughts,” the woman said, “and I was startled by footsteps behind me. Three boys were walking over by the sidewalk one behind the other: Marty Jones first, then Charles Cobble, then another boy with a moustache, not a heavy moustache, but definitely a moustache. They got to the lights by the pool and Charles looked over and gave me a real weird look. I didn’t know whether it was a look of ‘Don’t speak to me’ or ‘For heaven’s sake, say something!’ I just can’t describe the look; it’s bothered me ever since. Normally Charles would have said hello, but this time he said nothing. Nobody said anything, and they just kept marching single file. They turned the corner out of my sight and my second thought was that they were going up to Charles’ apartment for another pot party. I tried to put it out of my mind, but that look stayed with me. It was as if Charles was trying to plead with me with his eyes.”

Later Johnny Reyna and two of his friends drove along Twenty-seventh and spotted a stiff procession. “They were walkin’ toward Wayne’s house, Marty and Charles walkin’ ahead of Wayne,” Johnny said. “We stopped and started talkin’ to ’em and they didn’t want to say nothin’. Wayne kind of turned us off. Normally he’d come over and talk, ya know? So we drove off.”

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.”