Monster

Chapter 23

Returning to the main reference room, I pulled up San Francisco, Bakersfield, and Fresno microfiche on the Ardullo slayings. Nothing that hadn't been covered down in L.A.

In the Modesto Bee I found an obituary for Terri Mclntyre Ardullo. Her death was described as "untimely," no mention of homicide. The bio was brief: Girl Scout, volunteer for the Red Cross, honor student at Modesto High, member of the Spanish Club and the Shakespeare Society, B.A. from UC Davis.

She'd been survived by her parents, Wayne and Felice Mclntyre, and sisters Barbara Mclntyre and Lynn Blount. A Wayne Mclntyre was listed in Modesto. Feeling like a creep, I dialed and told the elderly woman who answered that I was conducting a search for relatives of the Argent family of Pennsylvania, in anticipation of the first Argent reunion, to be held in Scranton.

"Argent?" she said. "Then why us?"

"Your name came up on our computer list."

"Did it? Well, I'm afraid your computer got it wrong. We're not related to any Argents. Sorry."

No anger, no defensiveness.

No idea what had interested Claire about Peake.

I pictured him in his room, grimacing, twitching, rocking autistically. Nerve endings firing randomly as Lord knew what impulses coalesced and scrambled among the folds of beclouded frontal lobes.

The door opens, a woman enters, smiling, eager to help. A new doctor. The first person to show any interest in him in sixteen years.

She kneels down beside him, talks soothingly. Wanting to help him… help he doesn't want. Help that makes him angry.

Put her in a box. Bad eyes.

I went searching in Miami newspapers for items about the Crimminses. Obituaries were the daily special: the Herald informed me that Carson and Sybil Crimmins had died together twelve years ago, in a yacht explosion off the coast of south Florida. An unnamed crew member had perished as well. Carson was listed as a "real estate developer," Sybil as a "former entertainer." No pictures.

Next came a Las Vegas Sun reference to Carson Crimmins, Jr.'s, death in a motocross accident, two years later, near Pimm, Nevada. Nothing on the younger brother, Derrick. Too bad; he'd talked on record once. Maybe he'd be willing to reminisce, if I found him.

Former Intelligencer publisher Orton Hatzler was memorialized in a back-page paragraph of the Santa Monica Evening Outlook. He'd died in that beach town of "natural causes" at the age of eighty-seven. Just a few miles from my house. Memorial services at the Seaside Presbyterian Church, donations to the American Heart Association, in lieu of flowers. The surviving widow: Wanda Hatzler.

Maybe she still lived in Santa Monica. But if I found her, what would I ask about? I'd uncovered a financial battle between the Ardullo and Crimmins clans, had played Sherlock with a single photograph that suggested another type of competition. But nothing suggested that the slaughter of the Ardullos had resulted from anything other than one madman's blood feast.

I thought of the suddenness of the attack. Asian cultures had a word for that kind of unprovoked savagery: "amok."

Something about Peake's amok had caught Claire Argent's interest, and now she was dead. Along with three other men… and Peake had predicted the murders of two of them.

Prophet of doom in a locked cell. There had to be a common thread.

I abandoned the periodicals indexes and searched computer databases for Wanda Hatzler and Derrick Crimmins. Find-A-Person coughed up a single approximation: Derek Albert Crimmins on West 154th Street in New York City. I used a library pay phone, called, and participated in a confused ninety-second conversation with a man who sounded very old, very gentle, and, from his patois, probably black.

W. Hatzler was listed in Santa Monica, no address. The woman's voice on the tape machine was also elderly, but hearty. I gave her machine the same spiel I'd offered Jacob Haas, told her I'd stop by later today.

Before I left Bakersfield, I phoned Milo. He was away from his desk and not answering his cell phone. Route 5 clogged up just past Newhall. An accident had closed the northbound lanes and caused rubberneck spillover in the opposite direction. A dozen flashing red lights, cop cars from several jurisdictions and ambulances parked diagonally across the freeway, news copters whirring overhead. An overturned truck blocked the mouth of the nearest on-ramp. Inches from its front wheels was a snarled mass of red and chrome.

A highway patrolman waved us on, but inertia slowed us to a snail slide. I turned on KFWB. The accident was a big story: some sort of altercation between two motorists, a chase off the ramp, then an abrupt U-turn that took the pursuing vehicle the wrong way. Road rage, they were calling it. As if labeling changed anything.

It took over two hours to get back to L.A., and by the time I reached the Westside the skies had darkened to charcoal splotches underlaid with vermilion. Too late to drop in on an old woman. I bought gas at Sunset and La Brea and called Wanda Hatzler again.

This time, she answered. "Come on over, I'm expecting you."

"You're sure it's not too late?"

"Don't tell me you're one of those morning people."

"As a matter of fact, I'm not."

"Good," she said. "Morning people should be forced to milk cows."

I called home to say I'd be late. Robin's message said she'd be in Studio City till eight, doing some on-site repairs at a recording session. Synchrony of the hyperactive. I drove to Santa Monica.

Wanda Hatzler's address was on Yale Street, south of Wilshire, a stucco bungalow behind a lawn of lavender, wild onions, thyme, and several species of cactus. An alarm company sign protruded from the herbs, but no fence surrounded the property.

She was at the curb by the time I finished parking, a big woman-nearly six feet, with healthy shoulders and heavy limbs. Her hair was cut short. The color was hard to make out in the darkness.

"Dr. Delaware? Wanda Hatzler." Brisk shake, rough hands. "I like your car-used to have a Fleetwood until Orton couldn't drive anymore and I got tired of supporting the oil companies. Show me some identification just to play it safe, then come inside."

Inside, her house was cramped, warm, bright, ash-paneled and filled with chairs covered in at least three variations of brown paisley cotton. Georgia O'Keeffe prints hung on the walls, along with some muddy-looking California plein-air oils. An open doorway peeked into the kitchen, where soft dolls were arranged on the counter-children in all sorts of native costumes propped up sitting, a tiny stuffed kindergarten. Old white two-burner stove. A saucepan sat above dancing blue flames, and a childhood memory hit me: the cold-afternoon fragrance of canned vegetable soup. I tried not to think of Peake's culinary forays.

Wanda Hatzler closed the door and said, "Go on, make yourself comfortable."

I sat in a paisley armchair and she stood there. She wore a deep green V-neck pullover over a white turtleneck, loose gray pants, brown slip-on shoes. The hair was black well salted with silver. She could've been anywhere from seventy to eighty-five. Her face was broad, basset-hound droopy, crumpled as used wrapping paper. Moist blue-green eyes seemed to have suction power over mine. She wasn't smiling but I sensed some sort of amusement.

"Something to drink? Coke, Diet Coke, hundred-proof rum?"

"I'm fine, thanks."

"What about soup? I'm going to have some."

"No, thanks."

"Tough customer." She went into the kitchen, filled a mug, came back and sat down, blew into the soup, and drank. "Treadway, what a hole. Why on earth would you want to know anything about it?"

I told her about Claire and Peake, emphasizing a therapeutic relationship gone bad, keeping prophecy out of it, omitting the other murders.

She put the mug down. "Peake? I always thought he was retarded. Wouldn't have pegged him for violence, so what do I know? The only psychology I ever studied was an introductory course at Sarah Lawrence back in another century."

"I'll bet you know plenty."

She smiled. "Why? Because I'm old? Don't blush, I am old." She touched one seamed cheek. "The truth is in the flesh. Didn't Samuel Butler say that? Or maybe I made it up. Anyway, I'm afraid I can't give you any ideas on Peake. Never had a feel for him. Now you're going to leave. Too bad. You're good-looking and I was looking forward to this."

"To talking about Treadway?"

"To maligning Treadway."

"How long did you live there?"

"Too long. Never could stand the place. At the time of the murders, I was working in Bakersfield. Chamber of commerce. Not exactly a cosmopolis but at least there was some semblance of civilization. Like sidewalks. At night I helped my husband put the paper to bed. Such as it was."

She lifted the mug and drank. "Have you read the rag?"

"Twenty years' worth."

"Lord. Where'd you get hold of it?"

"Beale Memorial Library."

"You are motivated." She shook her head. "Twenty years' worth. Orton would be shocked. He knew what he'd come down to."

"He didn't like publishing?"

"He liked publishing fine. He would've preferred running the The New York Times. He was a Dartmouth boy. The Intelligencer-doesn't that reek of East Coast sensibilities? Unfortunately his politics were somewhere to the right of Joe McCarthy, and after the war that wasn't very fashionable. Also, he had a little problem." She pantomimed tossing back a drink. "Hundred-proof rum-developed a taste for it when serving in the Pacific. Lived to eighty-seven, anyway. Developed palate cancer, recovered, then leukemia, went into remission, then cirrhosis, and even that took years to kill him. His doctor saw an X ray of his liver, called him a medical miracle-he was oodles older than me."

Laughing, she finished the soup, got up, poured a refill, came back. "The Intelligencer was Orton hitting bottom. He began his career at The Philadelphia Inquirer and proceeded to embark on a downward slide for the rest of his life. Treadway was our last stop-we bought the rag for next to nothing and settled into a life of crushing tedium and genteel poverty. Gawd, I hated that place. Stupid people everywhere you looked. Social Darwinism, I suppose: the smart ones leave for the big city, only the idiots remain to breed." Another laugh. "Orton used to call it the power of positive backpedaling. He and I decided not to breed."

I made sure not to look at the dolls in the kitchen.

She said, "The only reason I stayed there was because I loved the guy-very good-looking. Even handsomer than you. Virile, too."

She crossed her legs. Were those eyelashes batting?

I said, "The Ardullos don't sound stupid."

She gave a dismissive wave. "Yes, I know: Butch went to Stanford-he told anyone who'd listen. But he got in because of football. Everyone else liked him, but I didn't. Pleasant enough, superficially. One of those fellows who's convinced he's a magnet for females, puts on the Galahad act. Too much confidence in a man is not an endearing trait, particularly when it's unjustified. Butch had no fire-stolid, straight-ahead as a horse with blinders. Point him in a direction and he went. And that wife of his. An oh-so-delicate Victorian relic. Taking to her bed all the time. I used to think it was phony baloney, called her Little Miss Vapors. But then she surprised me and actually died of something."

She shrugged. "That's the trouble with being malicious- occasionally one is wrong, and a nasty little urge to repent seeps in."

"What about Scott?"

"Smarter than Butch, but no luminary. He inherited land, grew fruit when the weather obliged. Not exactly Einstein, eh? Which isn't to say I wasn't shocked and sickened by what happened to him. And his poor wife-sweet thing, liked to read, I always suspected there might be an intellectual streak hidden somewhere."

Her lip trembled. "The worst thing was those babies… By the time it happened, Orton and I had just sold the paper and moved down here. When Orton read about the murder in the Times, he vomited, sat down at his desk, and wrote a story-as if he were still a journalist. Then he ripped it up, vomited again, drank daiquiris all night, and passed out for two days. When he woke up, he couldn't feel his legs. Took another day to convince him he wasn't dying. Great disappointment for him. He cherished the idea of drinking himself to death, sensitive soul. His big mistake was taking the world seriously-though I guess in a case like that you'd have to. Even I cried. For the babies. I wasn't good with children- found them frightening, too much vulnerability, a big girl like me never seemed suited to those little twig bones. Hearing what Peake had done confirmed all that. I didn't sleep well for a long time."

She brandished the mug. "I haven't thought about it in years, wondered if raking it up might bother me, but apart from thinking about the babies, this is rather fun. For twenty years we lived above the newspaper office, scrounged for advertising, took extra jobs to get by. Orton did people's bookkeeping, I tutored incredibly stupid children in English and wrote press releases for the yahoos at the C of C."

"So you never had much contact with Peake."

"I knew who he was-rather conspicuous fellow, lurching around in the alleys, going through the garbage-but no, we never exchanged a single sentence." She recrossed her legs. "This is good. Knowing I can still remember a few things- some juice in the old machine. What else would you like to know?"

"The Crimmins family-"

"Morons." She sipped more soup. "Worse than the Ardullos. Vulgarians. Carson was like Butch, uncreative, obsessed by the dollar, but minus the charm. In addition to walnuts, he grew lemons. Orton used to say he looked as if he'd been weaned on them. Never seemed to take pleasure in anything. I'm sure you have a word for it."

"Anhedonia."

"There you go," she said. "I should've taken Intermediate Psychology."

"What about Sybil?"

"Slut. Gold digger. Dumb blonde. Right out of a bad movie."

"Out for Crimmins's money," I said.

"It sure wasn't his looks. They met on a cruise line, faw-gawdsakes, what a horrid cliche. If Carson had had a brain in his head he'd have jumped overboard."

"She caused him problems?"

Pause. Eyeblink. "She was a vulgar woman."

"She claimed to be an actress."

"And I'm the Sultan of Brunei."

"What kind of difficulties did she cause?" I said.

"Oh, you know," she said. "Stirring things up-wanting to run everything the moment she hit town. Transform herself into a star. She actually tried to get a theater group going. Got Carson to build a stage in one of his barns, bought all sorts of equipment. Orton laughed so hard telling me about it, he nearly lost his bridgework. 'Guess who moved in, Wanda? Jean Harlow. Harlow in Horseshit.' "

"Who did Sybil plan on acting with?"

"The local yokels. She also tried to rope in Carson's boys. One of them, I forget which, had a minor knack for drawing, so she put him to work painting sets. She told Orton they both had 'star quality.' I remember her coming into the office with her ad for the casting call."

Leaning toward me, she spoke in a chirpy, little-girl voice: " 'I tell you, Wanda, there's hidden talent all over the place. Everyone's creative, you just have to bring it out.' She even thought she'd rope Carson in, and just being civil was a performance for him. Guess what play she had planned? Our Town. If she'd had a brain, you could have credited her with some irony. Our Dump, she should've called it. The whole thing fell apart. No one showed up at the audition. Carson helped that along. The day before the ad was supposed to run, he paid Orton double not to print it."

"Stage fright?"

She laughed. "He said it was a waste of time and money. He also said he wanted the barn back for hay."

"Was that pretty typical?" I said. "Crimmins buying what he wanted?"

"What you're really asking is, Was Orton corrupt when he dealt with wealth and power?, and the answer is, Absolutely." She smoothed her sweater. "No apologies. Carson and Butch ran that town. If you wanted to survive, you played along. When Butch died, Scott took over his half. It wasn't even a town. It was a joint fiefdom with the rest of us serfs balancing on a wire between them. Orton was caught right in the middle. By the late seventies, we decided we were getting the heck out, one way or the other. Orton had qualified for Social Security and mine was about to kick in, plus I'd inherited a small annuity from an aunt. All we wanted was to sell the printing equipment and get something for ownership of the paper. Orton approached Scott first, because he thought Scott would be easier to deal with, but Scott wouldn't even listen."

Beating her chest, she put on a gorilla face. " 'Me farmer, me do nothing else.' Straight ahead and pigheaded, just like his father. So Orton went to Carson, and to his surprise, Carson said he'd consider it."

"Surprise because Carson was uncreative?"

"And because everyone knew Carson wanted to get out of Treadway himself. Each year there'd be talk of some new real estate deal."

"How long had that been going on?"

"Years. The main problem was Scott wouldn't hear of it, and half the land wasn't very attractive to the developers. The approach Orton used with Carson was to suggest the paper might be a good activity for Sybil, to keep her out of trouble." She snapped her ringers. "That did the trick."

Now I understood the Intelligencer's sudden editorial shift toward Crimmins.

"What other kind of trouble was Sybil getting into?" I said.

She smiled archly. "What do you think?"

"I saw a picture of her and Scott at a dance."

The smile faltered, then changed course, growing wider, fuller, ripe with glee.

"Oh, that picture," she sang. "We might as well have published them naked. Orton wasn't going to print it, a gentleman to the last. But that night, he was sloshed to the gills, so I put the paper to bed."

Breathing in deeply, she savored the exhalation.

I said, "What was the fallout?"

"Nothing public. I suppose there was tension among those directly concerned. Terri Ardullo always impressed me as tightly wound, but she didn't run around after Sybil with a hatchet. The Ardullos were never the type to air their laundry in public. Same for Carson."

"What did the serfs have to say about it?"

"Nothing that I heard. Doesn't pay to antagonize the nobility if you want to eat. And it wasn't as if everyone didn't already know about Scott and Sybil."

"The affair was public knowledge?" I said.

"For months. Certainly since Sybil's production fell apart. I suppose she needed another role." She shook her head. "The two of them adopted a flimsy coven First, Scott's truck would speed out of town. An hour later, the slut's little Thunderbird would zoom away. She'd always return first, usually with shopping bags. Sometimes she'd visit the peasants in the local stores, showing off what she'd acquired. Then, sure enough, Scott's truck would zip past. Ludicrous. How could they possibly think they were getting away with it?"

"So Carson had to know."

"I don't see how he couldn't have."

"And no reaction at all? He never tried to stop it?"

"Carson was much older than Sybil. Maybe he couldn't cut the mustard, didn't mind someone else keeping her busy from time to time. Perhaps that's why he bought Orton's line about finding Sybil recreation. We were certainly trying to exploit him-did you read the rag after she took over?"

"Borderline coherent."

"You're a charitable young man." She stretched. "My, this is great fun."

"What can you tell me about Jacob Haas?" I said.

"Well-meaning but a boob. Before he became sheriff, he'd been working as a bookkeeper in Bakersfield. He got the job because he'd served in Korea, took some law enforcement courses in junior college, didn't offend anyone."

"Meaning he wasn't aligned with either Butch or Carson."

"Meaning he never put their kids in jail."

"Was that ever a possibility?" I said.

"Not with Scott, but with the Crimmins boys, sure. Two obnoxious little buggers-spoiled rotten. Carson gave them fast cars, which they proceeded to race down Main Street. It was common knowledge that they drank and took drugs, so it was only luck they never killed anyone. One of them paid for his recklessness a few years later-died motorcycling."

"Any other offenses besides drunk driving?"

"General bad character. They treated the migrants like dirt. Chased the migrant girls. When the picking season was over, they switched gears and bothered the local girls. I remember one night, very late, I'd just finished with the paper, walked outside to get some air, when I saw a car screech to a stop down the block. One of those souped-up things with stripes on the side, I knew right away whose it was. The back door opened, someone fell out, and the car sped away. The person lay there for a second, then got up and started walking down the middle of Main Street very slowly. I went over. It was a little Mexican girl-couldn't have been older than fifteen, and she spoke no English. Her face was all puffy from crying and her hair and clothes were messed and torn. I tried to talk to her but she just shook her head, burst into tears, and ran away. The street ended a block later and she disappeared in the fields."

"Whose fields?" I said.

Her eyes narrowed, then closed. "Let me think about that… North. That would have been Scott's alfalfa field."

"So no consequences for Cliff and Derrick?"

"None."

"How did they get along with their stepmother?"

"Are you asking if they slept with her?" she said.

"Actually, my imagination hadn't carried me that far."

"Why not? Don't you watch talk shows?"

"You're saying Sybil-"

"No," she said. "I'm not saying anything of the sort. Merely musing. Because she was a slut and they were healthy big boys. To be fair-something I generally detest-I never picked up an inkling of anything quite so repellent, but… How'd they get along? Who loves a stepmother? And Sybil wasn't exactly the maternal type."

"But she managed to get them involved in her theatrical production."

"Only one of them-the one who drew."

"Derrick," I said. "She wrote about it in the Intelligencer. Still, spoiled adolescents don't do things they hate."

She turned quiet. "Yes… I suppose he must have enjoyed it. Why all these questions about the Crimmins clan?"

"Derrick Crimmins's name came up in newspaper accounts of the murders. Commenting about Peake's oddness. Other than Haas, he was the only person to speak on the record, so I thought I'd track him down."

"If you find him, don't send regards. Of course he'd jump at the chance to ridicule Peake. He and his brother delighted in tormenting Peake-another bit of their delinquency."

"Tormenting how?" I said.

"What you'd expect from rotten kids-teasing, poking. More than once I saw the two of them and a gang of others they ran with collecting in the alley that ran behind our office. Peake used to hang around there, too. Inspecting garbage cans, looking for paint cans and God knows what. The Crimmins brats and their friends must have been bored, gone after some sport. They circled him, laughed, cuffed him around a bit, stuck a cigarette in his mouth but refused to light it. The last time, I'd had enough, so I stepped out into the alley using some blue language and they dispersed. Not that Peake was grateful. Didn't even look at me, just turned his back and walked away from me. I never bothered again."

"How'd Peake react to the ridicule?" I said.

"Just stood there like this." Her facial muscles slackened and her eyes went blank. "The boy was never all there."

"No anger?"

"Nope. Like a zombie."

"Were you surprised when he exploded into violence?"

"I suppose," she said. "It wouldn't surprise me, today, though. What do they always say-'It's the quiet ones'? Can you ever tell about anyone?"

"Any theories about why he killed the Ardullos?"

"He was crazy. You're the psychologist, why do crazy people act crazy?"

I started to thank her and moved to stand but she waved me still. "You want a theory? How about bad luck, wrong time, wrong place. Like walking off a curb, getting hit by a bus."

Her lips worked. She looked ready to cry. "It's not easy- surviving. I keep waiting for something to happen to me, but my luck keeps running in the black. Sometimes it's infuriating- yet another day, the same old routine." Another wave. "All right then, be off. Abandon me. I haven't helped you, anyway."

"You've been very helpful-"

"Oh, please, none of that" But she reached over and took my hand. Her skin was cold, dry, so smooth it seemed inorganic. "Bear that in mind, Doctor: Longevity can be hell, too. Knowing things will inevitably go bad, but not knowing when."