The Man With Candy

by Jack Olsen

  “Up here the whole issue in the election was whose side the police chief was on,” an elderly resident observed. “Chief Short was hell on Nigras and hell on dope. Up here, that spelt law and order.” He laughed. “It’s funny,” he said, “how things change. Now they’re holding vigilante meetings in the churches, and they ain’t nobody in the whole Heights can figure out the answer: Where was our police?”

  TRAUMA à deux NEARLY OVERWHELMED Fred and Dorothy Hilligiest when they came to the full realization that their son was unmistakably, undeniably gone, and that no one was going to help. They stopped eating; sleep came in short spans, interrupted by nightmares and shiverings. Repeatedly they awoke with the same words on their lips, “It’s not real, it’s all a nightmare, I’m awake now,” and then had to face the loss over again. For days, every awakening was a new ordeal, visited upon them with Assyrian cruelty for reasons they would never comprehend. Dorothy’s voice turned weak and broken, a permanent tremolo impressed on it by shock. Fred alternated between frenzies of physical activity and shudders of grief, and for six weeks, he was unable to work.

  From the second night, the whole family went to bed in shifts, so that someone would always be up and around to grab the phone or open the door for David. Fred slept by night and Dorothy by day, changing over at five in the morning. A new telephone line was installed, and friends and business associates were instructed never to call on the family’s old line, permanently reserved for the missing boy. In the early morning hours, Mrs. Hilligiest would stare at the phone, willing it to ring, but it remained silent, her prayers unanswered.

  After Geraldine Winkle told the couple of her Saturday-night conversation with Malley, Dorothy and Fred assigned their children to the telephone vigil and drove to Freeport, a city of twelve thousand. They began a hectic search, checking every public place and cruising the beach and talking to hippies and fishermen, shell collectors and sun bathers. They learned nothing. When they arrived home, they heard a secondhand rumor from neighborhood children that David and Malley were being held in “a house on stilts, with a high steeple, down on the beach at the Bolivar Peninsula.” The weary couple headed back to the Gulf of Mexico. The car broke down and they rented another. They searched sixty miles of waterfront on the highway side and then drove the same stretch on the beach, from the Sabine Pass, across from Louisiana, southwest to Port Bolivar, near Galveston. Whenever they saw a habitation that approximated the description they had been given, they stopped and made inquiries. Late at night they came to an old church that once sheltered young runaways, a weatherworn structure “on stilts, with a high steeple,” but it was closed and boarded, and had been for months.

  They got home in time to pick up another rumor, this one that David had been hit in the head and seriously injured while surfing in Galveston, and that an older resident had paid the hospital bill and taken the boy home to recuperate. Fred drove to Galveston and checked hospital admission lists. There was no record of a David Hilligiest, and nothing in Galveston police files. A police clerk accepted a photograph of David and said he would keep in touch.

  By Wednesday, four days after the disappearance, the parents had begun to move like sleepwalkers, and out of desperation they hired a private investigator at twenty dollars an hour. “We couldn’t afford not to, way we seen it,” Fred said. “We needed professional help.”

  The detective attacked the problem as though David were his own. “I don’t know what made the man drive hisself so hard,” Fred Hilligiest said. “Him and I together, we was going three, four nights in a row without a lick of sleep, mostly around Freeport or down on the Bolivar Peninsula, walking and driving the beach, and not a complaint outa him. Sometimes one of us would try to catch a little cat-eye in the car. Going across on the Bolivar Ferry, he’d say, ‘Let’s rest a little.’ I’d say, ‘Well, you go ahead,’ and then I’d see that he was wide awake, too. After maybe seventy-two straight hours without sleep, we’d just get ourse’fs a cuppa coffee and keep right own.”

  At the end of two weeks, the detective was told that a young runaway named Samantha had information on the case. He tracked her to a poor section of The Heights and found a highly neurotic teen-ager with a rambling, disoriented manner of speaking. He assembled the Hilligiests and the girl in his office and began an insistent interrogation that lasted late into the night. Under pressure, Samantha sobbed out a disconnected story. “Somebody told me a long time ago that they buried people, that they had ’em buried east or south or something like that, buried from their necks down,” she said. “I had a dream about it, too. They buried ’em and they just left ’em.” The girl said she once had been taken to the burial site, an old garage or shed, where “a guy from the Mafia” entombed a small boy in sand before her eyes and then drove off and left him there.

  The detective asked if she thought she could point out the garage, and Samantha took him on a long, backtracking tour of Houston, culminating at an automobile repair shop off the busy Southwest Freeway. It turned out to be a reputable business establishment where race cars were tuned and repaired; close questioning turned up nothing that tallied with the rest of the girl’s story, and the floor of the place was concrete, not sand. When some of Samantha’s young friends sent word to the Hilligiests that the disturbed young woman spent most of her days reading horror comics and spinning ghoulish fantasies, they realized that they had wasted time and money.

  The private investigator turned to other leads, and one day Geraldine Winkle told Dorothy Hilligiest, “I wish to God you’d call off your detective.”

  “Well, Miz Winkle, we want to find our boy!” Dorothy replied. “I’m ’bout to go crazy. I just cain’t sit here and not do anything about it. We’ll never give up searching for David.”

  Mrs. Winkle said, “I’m just afraid if Malley turns up they’ll send him to Gatesville for violatin’ probation. The judge warned him.”

  Mrs. Hilligiest understood, and it seemed to her that the two of them were at cross-purposes, at least for the moment. She said firmly, “Well, Miz Winkle, from now on it’s every man for hisself!”

  But after three weeks, the Hilligiests were forced to grant Mrs. Winkle’s request to unhire the detective; they ran out of money. “We owed him five or six thousand dollars,” Fred Hilligiest said,” ’cause that man worked a lot of hours.” The bill was compromised amicably, and Fred was grateful. A few days later the upset couple went to Police Chief Herman Short’s office for help, now that their financial resources were wiped out, but the chief was unavailable. An inspector asked what progress they had made.

  “Not much,” Fred said. “We hired a private investigator, but he couldn’t turn up my boy.”

  “How much did you pay him?” the inspector asked.

  “Eleven hundred dollars.”

  The policeman looked aghast. “For how many weeks?”

  “Three.”

  “Don’t you know that a private investigator’s for rich people, not for poor people?” the inspector snapped. “What’s his name?” Then he called in his secretary and ordered a search of the records to determine if the detective had the required licenses and accreditations to operate lawfully in the state of Texas. Soon afterward, the investigator was summoned to court, and Fred Hilligiest was mortified. “We didn’t go to the police to bitch about the man,” he said. “All we wanted was some he’p. We were pleased with the detective; he done a good job at a fair price. Even after he was off the case, he kep’ in touch, called me whenever he got a clue. The police must have spent a thousand dollars prosecuting him. It hurt me real bad that they would take so much time and money to get a fella that was out there he’ping me look for my son, but they wouldn’t spend a nickel to he’p look for David theirse’ves.”

  Assisted by Mrs. Winkle, the Hilligiests resumed their patchwork search. They had hundreds of posters printed, showing pictures and descriptions of the two boys, and offered a thousand-dollar reward, which Fred was prepared to borrow, if need be, with the greatest of
pleasure. Gerry Winkle asked if it would be acceptable for her to pay back her half of the reward money on a weekly basis, and the Hilligiests told her not to worry; if the boys were found, they had no intention of making the poor woman pay. Gerry’s two brothers were cross-country truck drivers and they circulated the posters out of state, while neighborhood friends helped to tack them on telephone poles and tape them to store windows.

  After the flyers had been distributed, Fred and Dorothy extended their personal search to Arkansas and West Texas and Louisiana, visiting churches and YMCA’s and runaway homes and halfway houses, without result. At home, Dorothy would jump out of bed five or six times a night, chasing wisps of noise, hoping that she was hearing David’s footfall at last, shy and tentative on the back porch, where she had seen him last. Outside the house, there was a stop sign on Ashland Street, and she had to discipline herself not to run to the porch and check every car. “I would keep thinking maybe it might be him,” she said. “I’d think, ‘Maybe somebody threw him out on the lawn.’ You just cain’t imagine the wild things that go through your mind.” The remains of a scrawny teen-age boy were found at a nearby lake, with skull missing, and the Hilligiests spent panicky moments inspecting the belongings: rings, keys, and forty-three cents. They were not David’s.

  By the time Christmas had come and gone, Geraldine Winkle had accepted the possibility that her son might be gone forever. “Deep down inside I asked myself a true question and I answered it truthfully. I knew Malley wouldn’t run away and I knew David wouldn’t either. There’d of been a note, there’d of been somethin’. Why, I have thrown away a dozen thousand notes from Malley, but not a single word after he disappeared. What else could he be but dead? I made the mistake of sayin’ that to Miz Hilligiest one day, and it was the wrong thing. She was like a woman runnin’ around in a trance. A nervous trance. She couldn’t face the truth.”

  In their search for a clue or a plausible theory, the families had picked over the details of their sons’ lives—their behavior, their habits, every incident and happening in their short spans. They set up every conceivable hypothesis and either checked it out or shot it down. The Hilligiests wondered for a time if David might have offended somebody, but this seemed remotest of all possibilities. He was, as his mother explained, “a clowny kind of boy, but he never carried a joke too far or hurt anybody’s feelings. He’d always do li’l things like—Well, he knew how much I wanted the neighbors to think we were a respectable family, so when we’d drive up in the car David would stagger out and fall on the ground and roll around, pretending he was drunk, and then his brothers would imitate him. David knew this would get me, because we had two very dignified neighbors across the street. I’d say, ‘Oh, what are they gonna think? David, stop that!’ That’d just set the fire under him, and he’d go crazy, rolling around and all. It was so funny, I just couldn’t keep from fifing. Now who’d harm a clowny child like that?”

  They re-examined his relationship with Malley. There had been two and a half years’ difference in the boys’ ages, but only a few hundred feet separating them geographically, and for a time they had played together almost daily. At first, Malley had come over to David’s; the cautious Hilligiests had an unbendable rule that their children could not leave their own property until they reached the second grade, and then only at specific times and on specific request. David was never allowed to wander at will, even up to the time of his disappearance.

  One day when David was eight and Malley eleven, the two boys had played at Malley’s house and David was late getting home. “Where’ve you been?” Dorothy asked.

  “We went someplace to visit,” the child answered.

  Mrs. Hilligiest spoke sternly. “David, you know you were supposed to stay at Malley’s! Whenever you go to somebody’s house to play, that’s where you’re supposed to stay.”

  “Well, Malley knows this man that has a candy factory behind the school on Twenty-second, and he’s real nice. He has a pool table and everything. He give us candy, and there wasn’t nothing wrong with it.”

  Dorothy had been annoyed, but she was not the type to fly into tantrums in front of her children. “Son,” she said evenly, “I don’t want you going there ever again. That man has a bidness to run, and you’re supposed to play wherever I give you permission, and no place else.”

  A few years went by, and once again David failed to come home on time. Mrs. Hilligiest cruised the neighborhood, and in front of the candy factory behind Helms Elementary School, six blocks from the house, she spotted two familiar bicycles. She rang the bell, and a young man—“average size, mild-mannered”—opened the locked door.

  “Is my son in here?” she asked. “I understand that boys come over here to play pool. His bicycle’s out here. Would you get him?”

  “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 littl
e 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.”