Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [21]
Technically, the car was no longer his, since he’d long since fallen behind on the weekly payments of $25 he’d agreed to make. He’d returned the car to McNett some months ago, but she stored it in the company compound, and Toole, using the spare keys he had for the place and those he had made for the car, had “borrowed” the Caddy on more than one occasion since.
Toole filled the Caddy with gas from the company tanks, locked the gate behind him, and drove the few miles to what was left of his mother’s house. He’d forgotten something that day that he’d set the place on fire, but he was fairly certain it was still there.
He kept a number of tools in the Caddy, and it did not take him long to unearth the coffee tin full of cash that constituted his “bank,” buried underneath the still-standing front porch. Toole stuffed $300 worth of bills in his pocket, tossed the can into the charred rubble of the house, and set out on the five-hour drive down I-95 to South Florida.
It was his intention to hit the gay parks up and down Biscayne Boulevard in Miami, where he could fatten his bankroll by anywhere from $20 to $50 a trick, and even more by jack-rolling the defenseless among his clientele. But by the time he passed through Fort Lauderdale, a half hour north of his target, it seemed a bit early for such goings-on.
Still, he thought, there were ways he might amuse himself in the meantime. Accordingly, at the Hollywood Exit, he swung the Cadillac off I-95 and cruised along the boulevard until he spotted a Kmart up ahead. Toole pulled into the crowded lot, nodding with satisfaction at all the cars. He didn’t need to buy a single thing, it was true, but there were other attractions at a place like this.
Arlene Mayer remembers that it was about seven in the evening when she and her husband, Wayne, arrived at the Hollywood Kmart. They had their twelve-year-old daughter Heidi in tow and were set on picking up a few things for the house. If Heidi kept her promise to be good, she might get that toy Arlene had been promising.
Wayne had just gotten off work, and since he considered himself too dirty to be seen, he told Arlene that he would just relax in the car while she and Heidi did the shopping. It presented no problem for Arlene. She reminded Heidi that she had better be good, and the two set out for the store.
As they walked past what Arlene remembers as a “large white car,” they noticed the driver’s door swinging open. He was white, in his mid-thirties, and was odd-looking to both of them, “like a bum.” Most distressing was the fact that Arlene could hear his footsteps dogging the two of them all the way across the parking lot. Why had she been so accommodating when Wayne said he wanted to sit tight? she wondered.
As they neared the building, the man hurried past them and approached a bank of pay phones by the entrance. He lifted the receiver of one of the phones and mimed dropping coins into the slot, Arlene recalls, even though it was obvious he had no money in his hand. The two of them were happy to get past this creep and into the safety of the brightly lit store.
They grabbed a shopping cart just inside the entrance, and to appease her daughter, Arlene took them straight to the toy department. “Go ahead and look around,” she told Heidi, then pointed to the nearby housewares section. “I’m running right over there for something. You keep the cart. I’ll be right back.”
Heidi was understandably delighted to be left alone in wonderland. But the moment her mother had disappeared and she turned her cart to head for the section where the dolls were stacked, she stopped short. Blocking the aisle before her was the man who’d followed them through the parking lot. In the bright Kmart lights, he looked like something out of a slasher film. Several days’ growth of beard pocked his cheeks, his hair was unkempt, one eye wandered aimlessly, and a lunatic smile exposed a set of yellowing teeth. Heidi could feel the wash of this man’s fetid breath and smell his