He sprang up again. "Hell, no, I won't go there. Took me too damn long to erase those pictures from my head. Goodbye, Doctor-don't say another word, just good-bye."
He hurried to the door, held it open. I thanked him for his time again.
"Yeah, sure."
"Just one more thing," I said. "Who inherited Scott and Terri's estate?"
"Bunch of relatives all over the state. Her folks were from Modesto, and Scott still had family up in San Francisco, on his mother's side. The lawyer in charge said there were two dozen or so heirs, but no one was fighting. None of them gave a damn about inheriting, they were all broken up about how the money came to them."
"Do you remember the lawyer's name?"
"No. Why the hell would it matter?"
"I'm sure it doesn't," I said. "And Scott's mother was already deceased."
"Years before. Heart condition. Why?"
"Just being thorough."
"Well, you're sure being that." He started to close the door.
I said, "Mr. Haas, is there anyone else around here who might be willing to talk to me?"
"What?" he said, furiously. "This wasn't enough?"
"As long as I'm up here, I might as well cover all bases- you were a lawman, you know what it's like."
"No, I don't. And I don't want to. Forget it. There's no one from the old days.
Fairway's for old city folk looking for peace and quiet. I'm the only Treadway hick in the place. Which is why they stuck me out with the trailers." His laugh was cold.
I said, "Any idea where Derrick Crimmins-"
"The Crimminses are as gone as anyone else. After Carson Senior and his wife got their money out of the land, they moved to Florida. I heard they bought a boat, did all this sailing, but that's all I know. If they're alive, they'd be old. At least he would."
"His wife was younger?"
"She was a second wife."
"What was her name?"
"I don't remember," he answered too quickly. His voice had hardened and he had closed the door till only a five-inch crack remained. The half-face I saw was grim.
"Cliff Crimmins is also gone. Motorcycle accident in Vegas-it made the papers. He was into that motocross stuff, stunt driving, parachuting, surfing, anything with speed and danger. Both of them were like that. Spoiled kids, always had to be the center of attention. Carson bought them all the toys they wanted."
The door closed.
I'd raised someone else's stress level. Some psychologist.
No end to justify the means, either.
Had he reacted with special vehemence when the topic was the second Mrs. Crimmins, or had I already primed his emotional pump so that anything I said raised his blood pressure?
Walking back to the car, I decided upon the former: how likely would he be to forget the name of one of the richest women in town? So something about Mrs. Crimmins bothered him... but big deal. Maybe he'd hated her. Or loved her. Or lusted for her without satisfaction.
No reason to think it related to anything I was after.
I didn't even know what I was after.
Dry hole.
It was still before noon, and I felt useless. Haas claimed no Treadway residents were around, and maybe he was telling the truth. But I felt unsettled-something about his demeanor-why had he agreed to see me, started off amiable, then turned?
Probably just horror flashbacks.
Still, as long as I was up here... I'd already exhausted the major news sources on the Ardullo murders, but small towns had local papers, and Treadway's might've covered the carnage in detail. The records had all been shipped to Bakers-field. Not much of it, Haas claimed. But city libraries appreciated the value of old news.
As I reached the Seville, a baby blue security sedan nosed through the trailer park.
Different guard at the wheel, also young and mustachioed. Maybe that was the Bunker
Protection image.
He cruised alongside me, stopped the way the first man had.
Staring. No surprise. He'd been told about me.
I said, "Have a nice day."
"You too, sir."
On my way out, I tripled the speed limit.
Back at the Grapevine gas station, I made a few calls and learned that the main reference library for Kern County was Beale Memorial, in Bakersfield.
Another forty-five minutes of driving. I found Beale easily enough, a ten-year-old, modernistic, sand-colored structure in a nice part of town, backed by a two-hundred-vehicle parking lot. Inside was a fresh-smelling atrium and the feel of efficiency. I told the smiling librarian at the reference desk what I was after and she directed me to the Jack Maguire Local History Room, where another pleasant woman checked a computer database and said, "We've got twenty years of something called the Treadway Intelligencer. Hard copy, not microfiche."
"Could I see it, please?"
"All of it?"
"Unless that's a problem."
"Let me check."
She disappeared behind a door and emerged five minutes later pushing a dolly bearing two medium-sized cardboard boxes.
"You're in luck," she said. "It was a weekly, and a small one, so this is twenty years. You can't take it out of the room, but we're open till six. Happy reading."
No raised eyebrows, no intrusive questions. God bless librarians. I wheeled the dolly to a table.
A small one, indeed. The Intelligencer was a seven-page green sheet and the second carton was half empty. Copies, beginning with January 1962, were bound by the dozen and bagged in plastic. The publisher and editor-in-chief was someone named Orton
Hatzler, the managing editor Wanda Hatzler. I copied down both names and started to read.
Wide-spaced text and a few photos with surprisingly good clarity. Weather reports on the front page, because even in California weather mattered to farmers. High school dances, bumper crops, science projects, 4-H Club, scouting expeditions, gleeful
descriptions of the Kern County Fair ("Once again, Lars Carlson has shown himself to be the peach-pie-eating champion of all time!"). Page two was much the same, and three was reserved for wire-service snips abstracting the international events of the day and for editorials. Orton Hatzler had been a strong hawk on Vietnam.
Butch Ardullo's name cropped up frequently, mostly in stories related to his leadership in the farm organization. A photo of him and his wife at a Fresno charity ball showed a big man with a bulldog face and a gray crew cut hovering over a willowy, refined-looking, dark-haired woman. Luck-of-the-draw genetics had favored
Scott with his father's build and his mother's facial features.
Scott had inherited athletic skills, as well. The first time I found his name was under one of those football-hero group shots-players selected for the Kern County all-star game kneeling and beaming in front of a goalpost. Scott had played halfback forTehachapi High, acquitted himself honorably.
No pictures of Terri Ardullo, which made sense. She wasn't aTreadway native, had grown up in Modesto.
Carson Crimmins's name showed up regularly, too. The other rich man in town. From what I could make out, Crim-mins had started out as Butch Ardullo's ally in the fight for the family farm, but had switched course by the early seventies, expressing his frustration with low walnut prices and the rising cost of doing business, and advertising his willingness to sell "to the highest serious bidder."
No pictures of him. No comments from Butch Ardullo. The Intelligencer avoided taking sides.
March 1969. An entire issue devoted to Katherine Stethson Ardullo's funeral.
References to a "lingering illness," and to the hiking death, years before, of the oldest son, Henry Junior. The article was augmented by old family snapshots and pictures of Butch and Scott at graveside, heads hung low.
August 10, 1974. Orton Hatzler mourned Nixon's resignation.
The following December, a hard frost damaged both the Ardullo and the Crimmins crops. Butch Ardullo said, "You've got to be philosophical, ride out the bad times with the good." No comment from Carson Crimmins.
March 1975. The death of Butch Ardullo. Two extra pages in a memorial issue. This time, Scott stood alone in the cemetery. Carson Crimmins said, "We had our differences, but he was a man's man."
June 1976. Announcement of Crimmins's marriage to "the former Sybil Noonan, of Los
Angeles. As we all know, Miss Noonan, a thespian who has acted under the name Cheryl
Norman, met Mr. C. on a cruise to the Bahamas. The nuptials took place at the
Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills. Maid of honor was the bride's sister,
Charity Hernandez, and cc-best men were Mr. C.'s sons, Carson Jr. and Derrick. The newlyweds are honeymooning in the Cayman Islands."
Two photos. Finally a look at Carson Crimmins. Black tie. In the first shot, he and his new wife cut a five-tiered cake. He looked to be around sixty, tall, stooped, bald, with a too-small face completely overpowered by a beak of a nose. The nose bore down upon a fleshless upper lip. A pencil mustache added movie-villain overtones. Tiny, dark eyes glanced somewhere to the left-away from the bride. His smile was painful. A wary owl in a tuxedo.
The second Mrs. Crimmins-she who'd narrowed Jacob Haas's eyes and hardened his voice-was in her late thirties, short, with full arms and a lush body packed into a tight silk sheath of a sleeveless wedding dress. What looked to be a deep tan. Spiky tiara perched upon a pile of platinum hair. Lots of teeth, lipstick, and eye shadow, a generous offering of cleavage. No ambivalence in her thousand-watt smile. Maybe it was true love, or perhaps the rock on her finger had something to do with it.
The second picture showed the Crimmins boys flanking the newlyweds. On the left was
Carson Junior, around seventeen. Haas had said Derrick was younger, but that was hard to tell. Both boys were thin, rangy, with prominent noses and a touch of their father's avian look. Better-looking than their father-stronger chins, broader shoulders. The same thin lips. Carson Junior was already his father's height,
Derrick slightly taller. Junior's hair was wild, blond, curly, Derrick's dark and straight, hanging past his shoulders. Neither boy seemed to share the joy of the day. Both projected that immovable sul-lenness unique to teenagers and mug-shot criminals.
April 1978. The front-page story was a visit to Treadway by representatives of a company called Leisure Time Development. Carson Crimmins's invitation. Scott Ardullo said, "It's a free country. People can sell what's theirs. But they can also show some guts and hold fast to the farming tradition." No follow-up progress reports.
July 1978. The wedding of Scott Ardullo and Theresa Mclntyre. The bridal gown, a
"flowing affair complete with 10-foot train and hand embroidery, including Belgian lace and freshwater pearls, was imported from San Francisco." No cleavage here;
Theresa Ardullo had favored long sleeves and full cover.
I moved on to the next batch of papers.
A half-year after the developers' visit, there was still no mention of land sales or negotiation, offers from other companies.
Crimmins's overtures rejected because Scott Ardullo had refused to sell out and no one wanted to deal for half a loaf?
If so, Crimmins wasn't commenting on the record. In July 1978, he and Sybil took a cruise to the Bahamas. Snapshots of her on deck, doing justice to a flowered bikini, a tall, iced drink in one hand. The text said she'd "entertained the other guests with lilting renditions of show tunes and Broadway classics."
Nothing of interest till January 5, 1980, when I came across an account of "The Farm
League New Year's Ball and Fund-raiser" at the Silver Saddle Lodge in Fresno.
Mostly pictures of people I didn't recognize. Till the bottom of page four.
Scott Ardullo dancing, but not with his wife.
In his arms was Sybil Crimmins, white-blond hair long and flowing over bare tan shoulders. Her gown was black and strapless; her breasts were barely tucked into its skimpy bodice as they pressed against Scott's starched white chest. Her fingers were laced with his and her big diamond ring sparkled between his digits. He looked down at her, she gazed up at him. Something different in his eyes-at odds with the solid-young-businessman image-too much heat and light, a hint of stupidity.
Dopey surrender.
Maybe it was too many drinks, or the novelty of holding someone who wasn't your wife, feeling her warm breath against your face. Or maybe a big party had offered the two of them the chance to flaunt something they'd been savoring in dark, musky rooms.
