Evening's Empire Page 15

“That’s the way we do it. It’s quiet.”

  “I’ll look into it.”

  “You do that.”

  “I said I would.”

  Pedote clicked on the television with the remote. He leaned back on the sofa, his legs spread apart. “Mark Rossi says you breed greyhounds,” he said.

  “I have a few dogs. No pups right now.”

  “I like the track once in a while.”

  “It’s one of my sidelines. Just keep my hand in.”

  They watched TV for a few minutes without talking. It was the afternoon and the only things on were soap operas and game shows and Pedote settled on a game show. Eventually Adamson realized that Pedote was waiting for him to leave.

  A few days later, he and his wife, Mary, were over at the Rossis’ trailer in a suburb called Chandler. They were having drinks with Mark and his wife, when Mark said he wanted to show Adamson something out in the yard.

  “They don’t want the gun,” he said. “They want to bomb the car. They want to make it big, send a message.”

  Adamson moved his feet in the gravel. There was a row of blue agave cactuses, their spines torn off at the ends like broken swords. “That’s fine,” he said.

  Rossi nodded. He was tall and wide, like a strong man from an old circus, with a workman’s battered hands. “You want to do it now?”

  Adamson shrugged. “Fine. Sure.”

  “I’ve got some things in the camper. Some dynamite.”

  “How much dynamite do you have?”

  “I’ve got six sticks of dynamite. I’ve got primer cord. Caps.”

  “You have magnets?”

  “No.”

  “We’ll need to go get magnets.”

  They told the girls they were doing an errand. Adamson stood on the porch, his back turned, while Rossi spoke through the bare aluminum screen door. They drove over to the GEMCO on McClintock and Baseline and bought some magnets and some tape. When they got back to Rossi’s, Adamson just waited for him in the driveway, pretending to look over Mary’s car, seeing that the tires all had pressure. Mark came back out, breathing heavily with a canvas duffel bag, frowning, and they went into Mark’s camper. It was dark and hot inside, all metal and oil and dust. Mark unzipped the bag and Adamson pulled out the sticks of dynamite and set them out on the top of a strongbox. He laced them together with the primer cord, working it around and around, until he could draw the six sticks together into a loose cylinder. It was not easy and he made sure he used plenty of cord. He was just taping the ends together when Mary opened up the door of the camper and asked him what they were doing.

  “Mary, go back in the trailer,” he said.

  She wore glasses with wide brown frames and a flannel shirt. “I see you two are up to no good.”

  “Go back in the trailer, all right?”

  “We were going to order some pizzas. Unless you or Mark wants to go pick up a bucket of chicken.”

  “Pizza sounds fine. Get one. One’s plenty.”

  “What do you want on your pizza, Mark?”

  Mark was staring down into the flat of his upturned hand.

  They put the bomb in a briefcase and he and Rossi drove up to the Sun King Apartments in Mary’s car. The briefcase had belonged to Mary’s father, a family heirloom, a brown leather contraption that opened from the top. Adamson waited in the car beneath the metal overhang while Rossi went in to make sure that Pedote was alone. Rossi’s solid figure came back down the pathway of concrete disks, out of the tropical foliage, and he gave Adamson a curt, irritated wave.

  Pedote was in the kitchen in a powder blue shirt over a sleeveless undershirt. He stood with his hands locked in front of his waist. On the counter was a large, iced vodka and orange juice. There was a skillet on the stove with the last shreds of some scrambled eggs stuck to its surface.

  “That was quick service,” Pedote said. “You want to show me how the thing works?”

  Adamson let his head fall a little to one side, affronted by the tone. He was going to assert himself—tinted glasses, silver-and-turquoise jewelry—and Freddy Pedote was going to have to take it or leave it.

  “Let’s go outside,” he said. “I’ll show you how the thing works.”

  There were too many people around the Sun King parking lot, so Adamson said they should go over to his house across town on Minnezona. It was a one-story brick house with asphalt shingles on the roof and small square windows that had aged into a dim green. You could hardly notice the house amid the clutter of outbuildings—a toolshed, two chain-link pens for the dogs, a rusting camper shell. Around it all ran a dead lawn where Adamson parked the car beside his van. He opened up the car’s hood and showed Pedote where the coil was. He was surprised that Pedote didn’t know this. Mark Rossi had a light meter in his pocket and they ran a wire from the ignition coil to the light meter and Adamson turned the key from the driver’s seat, the door open, and he watched Pedote watch the light meter register the charge.

  “Boom,” said Adamson.

  Pedote stood looking at the meter in his hand, a meaningless gadget with a plastic needle that moved.

  “Forget it,” Adamson said. He got out of the car, more annoyed than ever now, and walked over to the house. There was an old mop bucket on the porch and he dumped the water and refilled it with clean water from the hose. Then he went inside the house and got one of the blasting caps from his closet.

  “I’m going to show you what we’re talking about,” he said to Pedote. “You watch.”

  He put the cap on the wire that was still attached to the coil of the car. Then he dropped the cap into the bucket of water. He got back in the car and turned the key.

  There was a sound you could hear for blocks, a dull boom flared at the edges with the fling and plash of water. The bucket lay on its side, its bottom blown out, the whole thing a different shape now. Pedote turned to Adamson, his eyes a pale, unnatural blue. He hadn’t expected the power of it.

  “There’s people across the street,” he said.

  “You’re right,” Adamson said.

  “So what the fuck are you doing?”

  Adamson just stared at him. It was a stupid thing to have done. But that wasn’t what had caused Pedote to look so enraged.

  You couldn’t see the explosion without imagining the car. The hood torn off, the windshield shattered, the doors puckered and bent. The body inside, twisted and burnt black.

  A few weeks later, Adamson got a call from Pedote asking him to come back out to the Sun King Apartments. Pedote stood in the kitchen and told him they had changed plans, they weren’t going to use the bomb after all, they were going to do it a different way. He wanted Adamson to take it away. He had been storing it in his refrigerator, still in the leather briefcase that had belonged to Mary’s father, and the leather was cold in Adamson’s hand as he walked it back out to Mary’s car.

  Warren’s perjury indictment was thrown out on October 29, 1974. The grounds were that state and federal testimonies were mutually inadmissible. Two days before Christmas, he was finally indicted for bribery—not of Talley, as everyone expected, but of George Brooks. On November 3, Talley had died of a heart attack.

  19

  Phoenix Gazette, July 30, 1976

  Former Investigator Is Convinced Talley Death Was Murder

  James Kieffer, former chief investigator and deputy Arizona real estate commissioner, said today he believes that Commissioner J. Fred Talley was “murdered” in his St. Joseph’s Hospital bed because he knew the identity of Arizona’s big land fraud operators.

  Kieffer thinks Talley was silenced forever to keep him from “fingering the big men” behind the state’s land scandals.

  “He had talked it over with his wife and he told me he would tell me the next day but he was dead by then.”

  Talley, 70, the record indicates, died Nov. 3, 1974, of a heart ailment, 11 days [sic] after being admitted Oct. 21, 1974.

  Kieffer recalled that Talley was in a regular room when he called Ma
rge Bedford, the commissioner’s secretary, to ask to visit. Kieffer, at that time, was sales regulation director of the Queen Creek Land & Cattle Co., having left Talley in February 1974.

  Bedford told him, the former investigator says, that Talley was out of intensive care but that he’d have to clear a visit with Mrs. Talley. He considered Talley, under whom he served, “a good friend.”

  The next day, Kieffer says, he called for Mrs. Talley, at her husband’s side at the hospital, “but somehow I got him.”

  To his surprise, “Talley answered and said he would see me the next morning (Sunday) and give me the names,” Kieffer declared. “Next day, he was dead.

  “I think he was murdered but I can’t prove it.

  “It was too convenient to have died from a heart ailment when he was doing so much better. Out of the intensive care unit.”

  Kieffer said he reported on his beliefs at the time to a Phoenix police detective. But the detective told him that, after all, the body already was embalmed and that there was nothing that could be done to determine if Talley was murdered. Police sources claim they are unaware of Kieffer’s report but say that Talley’s body was autopsied. Death certificate details are secret under Arizona law.

  J. Fred Talley

  Ed took a photograph out of his wallet and put it down on the table to show McCracken. They were in Durant’s, facing the bar with its leather bolster. There were tables of men with documents and legal pads amid glasses of ice water and cocktails, the restaurant red-lit, dim with smoke, crowded even at four o’clock in the afternoon. The photograph showed Ed’s son Zachary gripping a red plastic baseball bat, many times thicker than an ordinary bat, more like a club. You could see the yellowing grass of the backyard, still glistening from the sprinkler head, the anonymous shambles on any Phoenix cul-de-sac in midsummer. Zachary wore a swimsuit and his hair was wet and he didn’t know how to hold the bat, the large size of which was meant to make it easier to hit the ball. He was smiling about the game instead of concentrating on it. Ed let the photograph sit there on the table for a moment after answering McCracken’s questions: the boy’s name, his age. That wasn’t why he’d brought it out.

  “We live in a tract house, there’s not much yard,” he said. “You can’t see it in the picture—it would be hard to take a picture with the house in it, because the backyard is so small. I never made any money in the land business like Jim Cornwall did.”

  McCracken looked at him with a mild but wakening scorn. He had fair, thinning hair and a slightly doughy face, not what Ed expected a detective to look like. He had the face of a school principal.

  “Your son looks like a nice kid,” McCracken said.

  “He is. Do you have a son?”

  “That’s not what you want to talk to me about, is it?”

  “Not right now, no. You’re right.”

  “You want to talk to me about how different you are from Jim Cornwall.”

  Ed took the photograph back, holding it by the edges. “I don’t have anything to say about Jim Cornwall. What I can do is back up what he says about Warren and Talley.”

  He’d had a meeting with Al Sitter, a reporter for the Republic, so he had a pretty good idea of what the grand jury was looking into— the Talley bribes, the loan to George Brooks, but not the Kieffer loan. He told McCracken that it concerned him that Al Sitter somehow always knew the details of the grand jury’s “secret” proceedings and then reported on them in every morning’s newspaper. It concerned him as someone who might want to cooperate now that Talley was dead. He didn’t want his name in the papers, but even more important, he didn’t want his father’s name in the papers. The money he had given to Talley had been pissant stuff. Over four years, he had paid Talley less than $7,000. His share of the James Kieffer loan was a grand total of $650. There was a lot he could tell McCracken about Warren, but that was the extent of his own role in what the papers kept calling “land fraud” and “organized crime.”

  “You never actually saw Warren give the money to Talley?” McCracken said.

  “No. He asked me to go once and I said no. But what I can show you is a ledger with the monthly payments. The check stubs. I can explain how the money for Kieffer was handled like the money for Talley. I have a memo from Warren telling me to pay Kieffer.”

  “What about Rosenzweig?”

  “Who?”

  “Did you ever meet Harry Rosenzweig?”

  “I don’t know anything about Harry Rosenzweig.”

  “Other public officials. Goldwater.”

  “I think I’m going to stop talking until I have my lawyer with me.”

  Warren’s voice on the phone was lighter than he remembered, mellow, a little hoarse at the edges. It was the same. He hadn’t heard it in more than a year.

  “I’ve been looking into bail bondsmen,” Warren said. “I thought I’d pass on my recommendations.”

  Ed looked at the sand-colored wall of his new office, the mild green filing cabinets, his face gradually stiffening into a meditative squint as he worked out the rationale for this call.

  “I guess you know I spoke to the police,” Ed said. “I wonder if you also know that I didn’t reach a deal.”

  “You should be careful what you say to those people. For your own sake.”

  “They’ll eventually subpoena me, they think. About Talley. I’ve already talked to my lawyer about it.”

  “Who’s your lawyer?”

  “He said I would risk incriminating myself if I testified, so I’d have to take the Fifth. I assume that’s why you’re calling. You should know better than to call me here.”

  “This is all too bad.” Warren sighed. “It really is. We’ll get through it, though. You’ll get through it and I’ll get through it.”

  “I’ll take the Fifth. You don’t have to worry about it. Don’t call me here anymore, all right?”

  It should have been easier to hang up the phone. It was humiliating: the inflections of Warren’s voice still acted physically on him, like a scent from childhood. He remembered their first meeting beside Warren’s swimming pool seven years ago, Barbara with the silver platter of shrimp, the houses overhanging the mountainside, the Scotch sweating in his hand. I don’t know how you can stand doing taxes every year for some of the people you must have to work for. You don’t seem like the type.

  He got a call later from his lawyer, Phil O’Connor. This time it was good news. O’Connor said he had just spoken with Berger’s assistant, Larry Cantor, who told him they had a deal. They were going to give him immunity in exchange for his testimony before the grand jury.

  He told the story in the broadest possible terms, and it didn’t sound as serious as it was. The language of taking the Fifth, of getting subpoenaed to a grand jury, of transactional immunity, was not language he could speak to most of the people in his life, so he didn’t speak it. Apart from the fear—and the fear was more easily forgotten than he would have guessed—the story didn’t sound real even to himself. He had done nothing wrong. He wasn’t worried. He didn’t think he had much to tell them that they didn’t already know. Even the word immunity was too strong, so he didn’t use it either. He simply downplayed his role, saying that he couldn’t believe some of the names they were asking him about in preparation for the grand jury.

  Ideas make the world seem safer than it is. He was in serious trouble, but by all accounts he was never afraid.

  I have a transcript of his grand jury testimony. It was hard to find—I found it eventually in the Western Historical Manuscripts Collection at the University of Missouri, where there is a collection on Arizona during this time, with two whole files devoted to my father and dozens more devoted to Warren. Like so much else in this story, the history of the transcript is complicated. Being secret, technically it should never have been made public at all. It was made public in a motion filed by James Cornwall’s attorney, Richard Remender, in August of 1975, after Moise Berger revoked his plea agreement with Cornwall. Remender attache
d the transcript of my father’s testimony to show that Cornwall was not lying about the Talley bribes, as Berger claimed when he threw out the case against Warren and allowed Cornwall to go to prison for three years. Cornwall, testifying from memory, had gotten a few dates wrong on the checks he’d written to Warren for paying off Talley. Berger abandoned Cornwall over this technicality. Eventually, Warren was convicted of the bribes anyway, though not until Moise Berger had had to leave Arizona in disgrace, James Cornwall had been sent to prison, and two other witnesses—Tony Serra and Ed Lazar—had been murdered.

  Hours spent in rooms—the male shabbiness of McCracken’s corner of the detectives’ floor, the sterile red spines of the law books on Phil O’Connor’s shelves. You entered the courthouse and walked down a dreary linoleum hallway to a far corner of the building where on the gray wall was a brass sign that said GRAND JURY with a long black arrow beneath the words.

  “You’ll do fine,” said O’Connor, who would have to leave Ed at the door. They both stood rather than sat in the waiting room with its folding chairs, wrinkled newspapers and candy wrappers littering the card tables.

  Ed walked in the door and found a room like a miniature classroom, ten people seated around a fiberboard table, staring at him. They had soft drinks in wax cups, some object like a key chain or a toothpick they’d been fidgeting with, ballpoint pens. There was a gray-haired man in a short-sleeved plaid shirt, his glasses case held in his breast pocket by a big black flap. Airport faces. Ed had a hard time knowing how to look at them: the young man with the beginnings of a mustache, the salesman with his tie clip, the fat woman in the sleeveless yellow shirt that said Hussong’s Cantina.

  The assistant prosecutor, Larry Cantor, drew in a short sniff of breath, a bald man with sensuous lips and an actor’s green eyes. He turned to Ed in his gray suit and said, “You’ll sit over there,” bowing his head a little in sympathy, one Jewish professional addressing another.