Free The Man With Candy by Jack Olsen

common. They rode around in Corll’s white Ford Econoline van or sat on Henley’s porch talking quietly and watching the passers-by.
    “Dean must of rilly liked Wayne,” said the talkative teen-ager Sheila Hines. “Why, Dean was good as gold to Wayne! Wayne would say, ‘Take me here, take me there!’ and Dean would take him anywhere he wanted to go.” A carload of Heights children blew a tire twenty miles from town, and Wayne telephoned Corll and instructed him to rush a fresh tire to the scene. “Seems like Dean always jumped for David and Wayne,” Sheila said. “But none of us thought nothin’ about it at the time.”
    One day David Brooks showed up in the neighborhood with a gem of priceless beauty: a green 1969 Corvette. While the other children gaped and gawked, Wayne explained in a sullen voice that “Dean bought it for him; David practically lives off Dean.” Seven-teen-year-old Bruce Pittman was intrigued by the acquisition and offhandedly asked Brooks to explain. “I just scratched pennies for years,” the taciturn blond boy answered. Bruce remained puzzled. David never seemed to hold a job; like Henley, he was a ninth-grade dropout, and he was barely seventeen himself.
    The Pittman boy was inquisitive, and one day he asked his friend Henley, “Why’re you and David always hanging around an old man like Dean?” Henley quickly changed the subject, and Bruce realized he had touched a nerve. “Wayne was always decent to me, a close friend,” the boy said later. “I decided that his other friends were his own business.”
    To most of the people in The Heights, the odd trio was seen only as a hawk is sometimes seen in the woods: in quick silhouette, or as a subliminal shadow, swiftly past. Individually, Corll, Henley and Brooks maintained low profiles; they were regarded as losers, ciphers in the teen-age society. As a threesome, the old mathematical precept applied: multiples of zero are zero. Corll could not even have been described as enigmatic, since no one cared enough to wonder about his modus vivendi or why he came around. The quiet, solidly built man with the dark eyes and the sharp, rabbity face seemed to crave anonymity. One young member of Henley’s local circle of friends had heard that Corll sometimes granted small loans, and made an impassioned appeal in person. “Dean sat there looking up at the ceiling, playing his radio, like he wasn’t listening,” the chagrined boy said. “He never even answered me!” Sometimes Henley or Brooks would make a cryptic remark, and Corll would grin warmly, as though sharing a secret memory. “You never knew what was behind their smiles,” a Heights boy said. “But who gave a shit?”
    A girl friend of David Brooks came to know Dean Corll as well as any of the neighborhood females, and she found him cool and detached. “Dean didn’t want to get involved. He was just friendly enough to get by, to make you think he wasn’t a stick-in-the-mud, but not letting you get to know him. Nobody knew him except David and Wayne. Nobody ever talked about him or asked about him. No one would ever say, ‘Oh, have you seen Dean lately?’ Dean didn’t matter.”
    If his personality did not seem overpowering to females, Corll,assisted by his two young helpmeets, found it easy to make friends with boys. “I met Dean at a store one day,” said a Heights teenager, “and he told me about a party he was gonna have. If I wasn’t working I’d a gone, ’cause I thought he was real nice. He said he was gonna have some dope, some beer, just about anything we wanted.”
    Another boy said, “His parties were really far out. Everybody just totally got messed up. Everybody enjoyed it a lot, and never said anything about him being strange or having anything up his sleeve, just that he was real nice.”
    Not every boy in The Heights attended the affairs. Close friends of Wayne Henley, like Bruce Pittman and Johnny Reyna and Ricky Wilson, barely knew of the parties,