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.