To Hatred Turned (3 page)

A few minutes later, he saw a girl he knew from Hillcrest coming up the steps. She stopped to talk to the blonde, then looked up at Larry, who waved her over. “Who is that?” Larry asked, pointing toward the blonde.

“That’s Joy Davis,” the girl said. “She’s a sophomore.”

“Is she going with anyone in particular?” Larry asked.

“Not that I know of,” the girl replied.

“Good,” Larry replied, “because I’d like to meet her.”

“Funny you said that,” the girl told him, “because she just told me she’d like to meet you, too.”

After the game, he talked briefly to Joy, but did not have a chance to ask her out before her date hurried her away. Larry’s opportunity came a few days later.

After school and on Saturdays, Larry had a job as a bag boy at a neighborhood supermarket. A couple of afternoons after the Hillcrest/White game, Larry and a coworker were talking about girls when the coworker mentioned that he had a date that Saturday night with a Hillcrest girl named Joy Davis. The next day, when the store manager posted the work schedules for the weekend, Larry’s coworker groaned in disappointment.

“What’s the matter?” Larry asked.

“I have to work Saturday night,” the other youth complained.

“So?” Larry asked.

“So that means I can’t go out with Joy Davis,” the youth replied.

Larry beamed. “In that case,” he asked, “do you mind if I call her? Just so she won’t have to sit at home all by herself.”

The youth studied his friend. “Why the hell not?” he said.

When Larry showed up at Joy’s house to pick her up, his knock was answered by another youth whom Larry recognized immediately. Although the youth did not know Larry, Larry knew Michael Walker because he worked in a popular record store that was frequented by neighborhood teens. When Michael opened the door, the first thing Larry noticed was a lot of yelling in the background.

“What do you want?” Michael asked rather abruptly.

“I have a date with Joy,” Larry stammered. “Am I at the right house?”

“Yeah,” Michael answered, his voice rising above the noise, “come on in.”

A few seconds later, Joy rushed up and grabbed Larry by the arm, pulling him into the living room.

“It’s kind of wild around here right now,” she explained. In the other room, Larry could hear another girl screaming and cursing. He started to ask what was going on when Michael Walker ran through the room. Right behind him was a slim girl with frizzy blond hair. She was waving a shoe in her hand. As Larry watched in amazement, Michael made it almost to the opposite door before the girl threw the shoe, bouncing it neatly and undoubtedly painfully off the back of Michael’s head.

“Take that!” she screamed.

Bewildered, Larry turned to Joy. “Who the hell is
that
?” he asked.

Joy grinned meekly and shrugged. “That’s my sister Carol,” she said.

Later, as Larry and Joy dated regularly and eventually began going steady, Larry discovered that Carol, older than Joy by almost two years, was totally unpredictable. She had a firecracker temper and a nasty mouth that she never tried to govern. In contrast, Joy’s younger sister, Elizabeth, usually called Liz, was a sweet-tempered child of five who followed Larry around like puppy. Often, when he and Joy went to the movies or a sporting event, they would take Liz along as well. Carol, however, insisted on going her own way and, despite her frequent fights with Michael Walker, the two persisted in their relationship.

From his position of being slightly removed from the family, Larry was able to stand back and study the dynamics of the Davis household. The patriarch of the clan was Henry Davis, a tall, bony man then in his early forties.

Henry, as so many young men of his generation had done, left the family farm in Ennis, a small community south of Dallas, for the lights of the city. When he left the farm, he often liked to brag, he had only fifty cents in his pocket and no discernible talent other than an amazing capacity for hard, physical labor.

Signing on as laborer in a tile-setting crew, Henry quickly built a reputation as a man of remarkable stamina. While other burlier and seemingly more robust men wilted quickly under the hot Texas sun, Henry was able to continue for hours the back-breaking labor of mixing tubs of the thick cement, called “mud,” that was required as base for the tile. The setting of the tile itself was a skilled job that required years of apprenticeship. Eventually, Henry graduated from laborer to tile setter and, while his work was generally regarded as well above average, he was still better known among the area contractors and subcontractors for his physical endurance.

While Henry worked hard, he also played hard. On Saturday nights, after everyone got paid, Henry would often hurry down to lower Greenville Avenue, where Dallas’s blue-collar workers liked to gather to drink and play poker and craps. As often as not, Henry would go home the winner.

Still, his Saturday night forays did not sit well with his new wife, Frances, a straitlaced country girl from the community of Alma, which was even smaller than Ennis. Frequently, when Henry returned to their small house early on Sunday, staggering somewhat as a result of the alcohol he had imbibed during the evening, Frances would greet him with a severe tongue lashing. Once, Henry later told Larry, he came home more than a little inebriated and Frances got so furious that she shoved him into the bathtub and turned on the cold water in an attempt to sober him up. As the water rose over the semiconscious Henry, who was sitting uncomplaining in his work clothes in the rising water, a twenty-dollar bill floated to the top. As Frances watched, another twenty floated upward. Then another and another. By the time the surface of the water was covered with bills, Frances had forgotten how angry she had been and threw her arms around Henry with a squeal of delight.

Thanks mainly to his skill at gambling and Frances’s careful management of finances, Henry had some money set aside that he could use for investment. Ignorant of stocks and bonds, treasury notes and portfolios, Henry waited instead for an opportunity to invest in the only business he knew: tile setting.

After World War Two, when the housing boom hit Dallas hard, tile became very scarce, so scarce in fact that contractors would pay almost any price for it. Through his contacts, Henry heard of several boxcar loads of tile that had unexpectedly come on the market and were for sale. Using all of his savings, Henry bought the supply and then resold the tile at a handsome profit, which he plowed back into still more tile. In the few years he had been in Dallas, Henry had gone from a helper to a tile setter to a tile dealer.

Shrewdly using the money he made from the tile, Henry expanded his ambitions and opened a contracting business. It did so well that he sent for his brothers, Hugh, Randall, and Sonny, summoning them from the farm to work alongside him in Dallas and eventually start their own contracting companies. None of them, however, was as successful as Henry. By the time Larry started dating Joy, Henry was an established high-volume builder who at any one time might have as many as twenty-five houses under construction.

All this time, his bank account was growing. Eventually, after Joy and Larry got married and were raising a child of their own, Henry’s worth was estimated to be in excess of $15 million.

But to look at Henry, no one would have thought he was wealthy. Despite his growing bank account, he still preferred khaki pants and work shirts to suits, and rough-cut work boots to fancy Florsheims. Despite his money, he looked rough, acted rough, and talked rough, liberally spicing his conversations with farm-country slang and colorful curses.

His wife, Frances, was totally opposite. She preferred stylish dresses and diamond-studded jewelry. Henry drove a pickup truck; Frances, a Cadillac convertible. Henry liked to associate with working men, while Frances became a patron of the arts and volunteered for civic activities. And just as they themselves were different, their children were different as well.

Carol seemed to be Frances’s favorite, while Henry appeared to be more indulgent of Joy. The baby, Liz, came along so late that she seemed to be accepted equally by her parents.

Because they were less than two years apart, a bitter rivalry also developed between Carol and Joy. When Carol was still in high school, she persuaded her parents to give her a 1963 Chevy Supersport convertible, which she used to race through the streets of North Dallas. When Joy got old enough for a car and asked for one just like Carol’s, she was given a slightly less luxurious model, a regular convertible.

After Carol graduated from Hillcrest High, her parents willingly plopped down her tuition at Southern Methodist University, a prestigious college located in a fashionable Dallas neighborhood. But when Joy wanted to go to college two years later, her parents refused to send her.

When Carol married Michael Walker soon after she dropped out of SMU well short of graduation, Henry and Frances paid for a large wedding and an expensive reception. But when Joy and Larry married in August 1968, one week after Joy’s nineteenth birthday, they were wed in a very small ceremony at a neighborhood Baptist church.

3

While Carol’s relationship with Michael Walker had
always
been troubled (it surprised no one who knew them when they were divorced within a few years), Joy and Larry’s pairing was relatively tranquil.

A native of Orange, Virginia, a small town in the hill country not far from Charlottesville, Larry had moved to Dallas with his parents and three sisters when he was nine. His father, Clyde, worked in the metal-products industry, selling movable partitions for high-rise office buildings.

Arriving in Dallas at the beginning of the city’s expansion period, the Aylors settled in a quiet neighborhood called Lakewood, which was not far from where the Davises had built a home.

For the most part, Larry’s early years were uneventful. He adjusted rapidly to Texas ways, forming early attachments to cars, hunting, and horses. To help support his hobbies, he worked at a series of odd jobs, bagging groceries, pumping gas, and selling clothing in an upscale men’s shop. He liked girls and dancing and, until he met Joy, he indulged in both fairly heavily. Joy was not particularly fond of dancing, but she was nevertheless popular among her classmates, both male and female.

When Joy and Larry met, she was a sophomore and he was a junior. By the end of that school year they were going steady and dating a couple of nights each week, usually going to football games, concerts, and movies. One of their rituals was to meet every Wednesday night at Joy’s and watch “The Beverly Hillbillies” on TV. However, each also maintained other friendships and when they were not with each other, they were likely out with members of their own circle. These extraneous friendships, Larry recalled later, were the cause of the few arguments they had during their courting years. A particular source of disagreement was Joy’s friends, many of whom were regarded by Larry as flighty and rather wild.

Like Larry, Joy worked at several part-time jobs during her high school years and soon after graduation. For awhile she worked in the billing department at the telephone company, for instance, and she also sold women’s clothes at a boutique.

Like many youths of the period, Larry and Joy had only a hazy view of the future: Neither was sure what to do.

Soon after Larry graduated from high school in 1966, his family moved back to Virginia. At that time, Larry planned to go to college, possibly to become a dentist, but he still needed a summer job. So he joined his parents and went to work with a crew that was building a new library at the University of Virginia. In the fall, he returned to Texas and enrolled at El Centro Junior College.

The following summer he went back to Virginia for an extended visit. A few weeks later, after she graduated from high school, Joy joined him at his parents’ house for a few weeks. It was during her stay that they had their first really big argument.

According to Larry, he had met a girl in Texas who had become enamored of him and persisted in writing him. During her visit, Joy found the letters hidden in a drawer in Larry’s room and confronted him with the evidence. Although they each did a lot of yelling and hurled accusations back and forth, they managed to patch it up. By the time they returned to Texas, they were again making tentative plans to be married.

It was that summer as well that a strange incident occurred involving a horse. While working at one of his part-time jobs, Larry became friends with a man who had a sideline business dealing in horses. The man would buy animals that were almost wild and break them himself. Then he would then sell them for twice what he had paid for them.

Larry went with his friend on one of his horse-buying trips and became very interested in a partially broken young mare. Intending to buy the horse himself, Larry was extremely disappointed when he discovered that he had only about half the amount of money needed to close the deal. When he told Joy how disappointed he was, she offered to put up the other half of the money. Apparently, however, the degree of her participation in the enterprise became somewhat distorted and a number of people, including Joy’s father, believed that Joy had purchased the horse for Larry as a gift.

Larry spent much of the summer gentling the horse and when it came time for him to return to school in the fall, he put it up for sale. However, when the new buyer showed up to take possession of the horse, named Lady, she had disappeared from her pasture. Others who boarded horses at the same location said two men in a red horse trailer had shown up just before Larry and taken the horse away.