It could be why Jacob Haas had tightened up when talking about Sybil Crimmins.
Scott, a boy he'd long admired, straying with a platinum-haired strumpet from L.A.?
As I stared at the picture, it seemed to give off waves of heat. Worth well more than a thousand words. I was surprised the Intelligencer had published it.
I found an editorial three weeks later that might've explained that:
After much soul-searching, as well as witnessing, firsthand, the triumphs and the travails of those noble enough-and some would say sufficiently quixotically
inclined-to brave the elements of Nature as well as the much more malignant Forces of Big Government, this newspaper must weigh in on the side of rationality and self-preservation.
It s all fine and well for those born with silver spoons in their mouths to pronounce righteously about abstract ideals such as the Sanctity of the Family Farm.
But to the bulk of the populace, those hardy but bowed men entrusted with the day-to-day, backbreaking labor that keeps the ground fertile, the branches laden, and the trucks loaded with Bounty, the story is quite another one.
Joe Average in Treadway-and, we 'd venture to wager, any agricultural community-toils day after day for fixed wages, with no promise of security or profit, or long-term investment. In most cases, his meager plot of backyard and his domicile are all he owns, and sometimes even that is tethered to some Financial
Institution. Joe Average would love to plan for the Future, but he's usually too overwhelmed by the Present. So when Good Fortune smiles in the form of rising land values, offering said Mr. Average the chance of Real Gain, he cannot be condemned for seizing the opportunity to afford his family the same safety and comfort that the more fortunate regard as their birthright.
Sometimes good sense and the rights of individuals must prevail.
At our last Kiwanis luncheon, Mr. Carson Crimmins said it best: "Progress is like a jet plane. Fly with it or stand on the runway and you risk getting blown away."
Those of more fortunate lineage but less vision would do well to realize this.
Times change, and change they must. The history of this great country is based upon
Free Will, Private Property, and Self-reliance.
Those who resist the voice of the future may find themselves in that Godless state known as Stagnation.
Times change. Brave and smart men change along with them.
Humbly, O. Hatzler
Scott Ardullo, fallen out of editorial good graces. Still, wouldn't the picture have embarrassed Carson Crimmins as well?
I read through subsequent issues, waiting for Scott's written response to the editorial. Nothing. Either he hadn't bothered, or the Intelligencer had refused to print his letter.
Five weeks later, Orton and Wanda Hatzler's names were gone from the paper's masthead. In their place, in ornate, curlicued typescript:
Sybil Crimmins PUBLISHER, EDITOR AND CHIEF WRITER
A pink sheet now, and cut back to three pages, flimsy as a supermarket mailer. No more wire-photo material. In its place, gushing movie reviews that seemed copied from press releases, barely literate accounts of local events, and amateurishly drawn cartoons with no apparent point. The too-large signature: "Derrick C."
Three barely filled pages, even twenty months later, when the headline screamed:
SLAUGHTER AT THE ARDULLO RANCH! RATCATCHER PEEKE ARRESTED! by Sybil Noonan Crimmins Publisher, Editor and Chief Writer
Treadways darkest hour has arrived, or so it seemed when Sheriff Jacob Haas was called by Best Buy Produce Supervisor Teodoro "Ted" Alar con to the ranch and found a horrible massacre of unbelievable proportion. Their in the house, Sheriff Jacob
Haas found several dead bodies, namely the ranch cook, Miss Noreen Peeke who was
subjected to unbelievable and unhumane treatment at the hand of a dark fiend.
Upstairs, were the other bodies, the ranch owner Scott Ardullo who got the place from his dad, Butch Ardullo, Scott's wife Terri and their daughter little Brittany who was around five years old. It was all horrible. But no sign of one other member of the family. The baby-Justin. All of us remember how Terri had such a hard labor with him and it would've been great for him to be okay.
But the terror continued. Sheriff Haas followed the blood and walked all the way to the back of the house where Noreen Peeke's son Ardith was living at the time and their he found Justin. Good taste says we won't go into detail but let's just say whoever did that to a tiny little infant is a fiend of unbelievable satan-like proportion. We are sick over this.
Ardith Peeke was drunk and stoned on all sorts of drugs. He was the ratcatcher on the ranch, going after all sorts of rodents and other pests, as well. So he probably had all sorts of weapons and poisons but we don't know yet what he used on those poor people.
Its really terrible and unbelievable, that something like this could happen in a small, peaceful place like ours but that seems to be the way the world is going, look at the Manson Family and how they attacked people who thought they were safe because they had money and lived behind gates. And the music of today, no one sings about love and romance, it s all nasty stuff and getting worse.
So the message, I guess is, trust in God, only He can protectyou.
Sheriff Haas called in the FBI and the Bakersfield police to consult on this because its way out of what he usually deals with. He told me he was in Korea but never saw anything like this.
My sources tell me Ardith Peeke has always been weird. Sometimes people tried to help him-I know my sons Cliff and Derrick sure did, trying to get him involved in some athletic activities and whatnot, theater projects, you name it. Anything to bring him out of his shell, because they figured he was lonely. But he wouldn 't hear of it. He just stayed by himself snorting paint and glue and whatnot. My sources tell me he was too into himself to relate to other people, some sort of severe mental illness.
Why did he suddenly do such a terrible thing?
Will we ever know?
Everyone loved theArdullos, they were here so long, working hard even when it wasn
't sure that would help because crop prices were so low. But working hard because that's what they believed in, they were salt of the earth people, they just loved to work.
HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN HERE-IN TREADWAY!?
INAMERICA!'!!!???
But that's what happens when the mind goes I guess.
I wish I had the answers but I'm only a journalist not an oracle.
I wish God worked in ways that we could understand- why should babies and children suffer like that? What makes a guy just go crazy like that?
Questions, questions, question.
When I get some answers, I'II keep you posted.
S.N.C.
She never did.
Last edition of the Intelligencer.
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.
