Questions, questions, question.
When I get some answers, I'II keep you posted.
S.N.C.
She never did.
Last edition of the Intelligencer.
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 speciaclass="underline" 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.