Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [32]
With his mother’s house a charred ruin, Toole needed a new place to live, so he rented a room in a blue-collar rooming house owned by a woman named Betty Goodyear. Toole then reconnected with his erstwhile wife, Rita, and convinced her to move in with him on July 31.
At about 4:00 p.m. the following day, Rita—twenty-four years Toole’s senior—glanced out the window of their room to see a familiar-looking man striding up the sidewalk. “Hey, looks like your brother Howard’s here,” Rita said, turning. But Ottis was in full flight out the back door.
Howard was about to knock, but when he heard the back door bang, he realized it would be a waste of time. He vaulted off the porch and lit out after Ottis, who was running down Market Street for all he was worth. Ottis made it as far as the entrance to a Little Champ convenience store on the corner before his brother caught up with him.
“Someone’s going to shoot me,” Ottis cried to the clerk as he burst through the door.
“Go ahead and call the cops,” Howard added as he ran in on Ottis’s heels. He snatched Ottis by the collar and began slapping him. “This son of a bitch stole my truck.”
The encounter might have given Howard Toole some minor satisfaction, but as the cops who arrived to quell the disturbance soon pointed out, there were no grounds upon which they could take Ottis into custody. For his part, Ottis had no interest in pressing assault charges against his brother, and the matter ended for the time being with Howard skulking off and Ottis figuring he’d taken his rightful lumps.
In the days that followed, Toole got by doing yard work for Goodyear at her various properties and helped out as best he could in her office, though the fact that he could not read well limited his usefulness there. He also found employment at the modest parish of the Church of God on Ramona Boulevard, where pastor Cecil Wiggins paid him $17.50 for lawn maintenance one day late in August and another $22.75 on the next.
In the meantime, Betty Goodyear’s son James Redwine had returned home from some kicking around in Miami of his own, and he and Ottis were soon hanging out together, sometimes cruising the streets in an older-model Cadillac. One evening Toole showed Redwine a .22-caliber pistol that he pulled from under the seat of the Caddy. He told Redwine he was thinking of using the pistol to kill a couple of drifters who had been hanging around a local park. Redwine, who had also seen a large wooden-handled knife under the seat of the Caddy, didn’t know if Ottis was serious about killing anyone, but he did see him fire a shot over the head of one of Goodyear’s tenants shortly thereafter.
“What was that all about?” Redwine asked Toole as the tenant hightailed it in terror down the street.
“The guy just pissed me off,” Ottis said.
Early in October, with the car theft charges dropped, Ottis Toole’s former lover Henry Lee Lucas was finally released by Pikeville, Maryland, authorities. Lucas made his way back to Jacksonville, and before long found Ottis and was able to explain where he’d been all this time. Lucas had not abandoned Ottis for his niece Frieda. The separation was just bad luck, and once he’d been thrown in jail, there was no way for him to get in touch.
As to Frieda and nephew Frank, they were now in foster care somewhere in Polk County, down by Tampa. The children’s mother had died of a drug overdose that might have been a suicide, and they’d spent a few weeks in the custody of their stepfather, A. J. Carr, until Frieda told Child Protective Services that Carr was physically abusing her. When a polygraph exam confirmed Frieda’s story, Health Rehabilitation