Traditionally crime was never a problem in The Heights, earlier because of the close-knit community life, later because there was so little to steal. Burglars might reside there, but they committed their misdeeds in Houston’s mushrooming suburbias or in the business sections. A few years back, a fey lunatic called The Heights Phantom stalked the dark streets, but only a few timid ladies took him seriously when he appeared naked at their doors and then ran off cackling into the shadows. After his arrest, no one could make a positive identification. “The girls couldn’t remember anything above the waist,” said a bemused detective. “They wanted a nude showup!” The Phantom was released and told to pull himself together.
Such were the grave crime problems of The Heights, shielded from larceny and burglary by its own austerity, and fully dedicated to the mythic principles embodied in the supercharged political phrase: “law and order.” The real crime rate was negligible; there was almost no murder, in sharp contrast to the rest of Houston, and Richard Nixon’s Silent Majority, a chimera in some parts of the country, was dominant.
“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?”