Jonathan Kellerman - Monster

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."