Evening's Empire Read online

  About three months after James Cornwall became president of the Great Southwest Land and Cattle Company—in January 1971—McCracken and his partner, Bill Bouley, drove to an office on East Camelback Road, not far from the offices of Consolidated Mortgage Corporation, to speak to an informant named Tony Serra. Tony Serra was the lot salesman at ALCO who had helped Warren manufacture land contracts to sell through Diamond Valley, the company Warren later sold off to Lee Ackerman. Serra had also been a sales manager for James Cornwall at Great Southwest. More recently, he had started his own business, Western World Development, to sell Great Southwest land and paper in the manner Warren had taught him.

  The office of Western World looked more like the back room of a store: a few plastic chairs against a bare wall, a calendar from an auto parts wholesaler, a carpet remnant on the linoleum floor, a card table with three newspapers from the previous month. The girl behind the desk wore a crochet dress and had long, straight hair and hoop earrings. She did not end her phone conversation, even when McCracken took off his jacket, revealing his holstered gun. She parted her lips a little, half looking, half concentrating on the voice on the line.

  “No one’s in yet,” she said, her hand covering the receiver. “You could try back in half an hour.”

  “It’s ten o’clock,” McCracken said. “Our appointment was for nine-thirty.”

  “Then they must be late. They’re usually here by ten.”

  Bouley stood with his feet apart, hands in a bridge before his waist. McCracken nodded his head, looking at the floor.

  “Tell Mr. Serra we’ll be waiting for him at the coffee shop across the street,” he said. “The Pullman Pie, it’s called.”

  . . .

  They sat in a booth near the window and had coffee.

  “Serra’s not really anybody,” McCracken said. “He knows a few of the Ivanhoe crowd. Talks a lot.”

  “He’s from Cleveland?” asked Bouley.

  “St. Louis. He was in the insurance racket there. I don’t know what else he got up to.”

  A car pulled into the parking lot—a deliberately Hollywood entrance, complete with squealing tires and a sudden, juddering stop at an angle to the parking lines. The car was a white Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow. McCracken thought, this is how people get killed, by sitting in a coffee shop that turns out to be the imagined set of somebody else’s action movie. He watched the driver step out, a stocky white-haired man in a tan leisure suit. The man stood up straight and jammed a pistol into his waistband. He made sure the gesture was as visible as possible. Then another man got out of the backseat, Tony Serra.

  McCracken took a sip of his coffee. When he looked up again, he saw the driver open the restaurant’s glass door with a jangle of bells, Serra behind him, already scanning the tables. He wore a charcoal suit and a shiny green tie with scarlet stripes. When he saw McCracken, his face looked absent. Then he recognized him. He put his hand on the driver’s shoulder and turned his head back toward the door, indicating that he should leave.

  He apologized, standing at their booth. He explained that the girl at the desk had forgotten to mention that McCracken and Bouley were detectives—all she’d said was that two men with guns had come by.

  “It’s all right,” McCracken said, barely looking at Serra. “I guess her talent is more for answering phones.”

  Serra sat down and ordered a coffee. McCracken took out his notebook and pen and on the next blank page wrote a dateline with Serra’s source ID. The waitress brought over the coffee pot and poured into Serra’s cup, then refilled McCracken’s and Bouley’s. McCracken looked at his watch and wrote down the time. They talked for about half an hour.

  “Cornwall,” Serra said toward the end. “He’s the one you want to look at first.”

  “The southerner,” said McCracken.

  “He seems like a southerner. Actually he’s from some cracker town in Oregon. Dig around, you’ll find his signature on twenty, thirty loans—loans to pay off loans. More than a million dollars, maybe more like five.”

  McCracken flipped back a few pages in his notebook to an earlier part of their conversation. He had written the words NED WARREN and then a scribble of details. Everyone in the land business, Serra had told him, knew that Ned Warren was behind more than a dozen companies in one way or another. He said that the Mafia’s biggest interest in Arizona at that point was not gambling, not prostitution, not loan-sharking, but the land business. That’s why they’d sent him there from St. Louis ten years ago, Serra said, to find a way into the land business.

  Serra saw from across the table the notation about Warren in McCracken’s book. “You’re going to have a hard time getting anywhere with this,” he said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because—you know how this town is. Warren, those people, they’ve got everyone tied in.”

  “Who’s everyone?”

  “Everyone. The real estate commissioner, Talley. All his investigators. They’ve got the county prosecutor, the attorney general. They’ve probably got Barry Goldwater.”

  McCracken paid for the three coffees. Some parts of the story seemed more or less credible, but it was all coming from Tony Serra—the expensive new suit, the fantasist with the breath mints and cologne. At first, McCracken didn’t take it very seriously.

  It was almost a year after that conversation—the first week of December 1971—that the complaints began to arrive from Japan. A few servicemen had paid for their lots in cash rather than in installments. They went looking for their titles and deeds, only to find out that no titles or deeds existed. Chino Grande did not exist in any legal sense. Ed was staring fixedly at the pen resting at a slant on his desk.

  “Are they still selling over there?” he asked Warren over the phone.

  “Well, they’d better not be selling five-acre parcels.”

  “I guess I’m wondering, what did you tell them?”

  “We’ll get this fixed. They’ll have to get a subdivision approved, but that shouldn’t take long. Talley’s on it. He’s got the heat on Japan, not on us.”

  “Where is Ross in all this?”

  “Ross doesn’t want to hear a word about it.”

  “Did he say it was a subdivision or not?”

  “If Ross needs a subdivision approved, he’ll get a subdivision approved. Who do you think got us that letter from Goldwater?”

  They hung up. They had close relations with the Real Estate Department. Chino Meadows had been approved in a single day, without anyone even viewing the property. At that point, no one but Ross had actually seen the land at Chino Grande. Ed thought of Talley in his double-knit shirt, of Ross in his white belt, and he told himself that none of this could be very serious. It didn’t seem serious until he went through the ledger and began paying the bills for that month.

  In the large stack of checks prepared for his authorization each month, there would always be one made out for $200 to one of Warren’s corporations—Camelback Mortgage, WR Investments, Pacific West Realty—there were several. The checks were prepared by the office manager, Warren’s ex-mistress Donna Stevens, who entered the payments into the Consolidated ledger as broker’s fees. Donna Stevens had set up the ledger herself before Ed had even started at Consolidated, and she had inserted a separate card as a reminder each month to write the check. The recipient companies, rotated by her like specials on a menu, were all controlled by Warren, who had Donna, an officer in all these companies, cash the checks and then deliver the money to him in an envelope. In the business world in Phoenix, it was expected that you would get into a little trouble from time to time, that you would need a favor—that was how business worked, through favors. You would need to approach the men in charge of water rights in Prescott, for example, or the men at the Energy Department who installed gas lines, or the men at the Forest Service who could grant you an easement or a rezoning if you suddenly needed more land. You would buy them a case of Scotch, or take them for a round of golf. People who didn’t smil
e at this kind of arrangement had no sense of lightness, no sense of humor—they didn’t even quite understand that these things went on. Warren didn’t have to explain this to Ed. Ed could see right away that saying anything about the checks would only make him look hapless.

  The $200 payment had started out as “money well spent,” in Warren’s words—bonuses for the salesmen, charitable donations, campaign contributions. But after a few months in the business—the monthly check always for the same amount—Ed knew enough to know that this particular $200 was in fact not casual but a regular payment to the real estate commissioner, J. Fred Talley, who got the same payment from every land company in Arizona. He made almost $10,000 a month in this way. It had seemed a little ugly to Ed, primitive, but it had also seemed like a formality, a gesture of obeisance, like getting your real estate license. He was playing the game basically straight, straighter than almost anyone else, and it was only now, with the first complaints about Chino Grande arriving from Japan, that he saw the monthly payments as something more serious. He saw that from any objective point of view they would simply look like bribes.

  He put the checks in a rubber band and then he put his pen in its holder, his papers in a neat stack on the side of his desk. Then he picked up the duffel bag in which he kept his tennis clothes—if you left them in the car, they got too hot to wear—and went out to the secretaries with the bag and his mail in two clipped bundles, interoffice and postal.

  “What time did Elaine come in this morning?” he asked Sharon, stern, his brow coming down at her like that of a bird of prey.

  “She was here early,” Sharon said. “She was here at eight-thirty, I think. Why?”

  Ed shook his head. “I doubt that very much.” He sighed. “Get your things together. You’re fired. Get out.”

  Sharon’s face went blank.

  “They just waltz in here,” Ed said, leaning over her desk. “They waltz in and they think you’ll cover for them. Is that the way it is?”

  He didn’t know why he was doing this. It took Sharon a long time to realize he was only joking. She tried to smile then, her eyes a little wet. “That isn’t funny,” she said.

  He brushed her on the shoulder, tilting his head at her skeptically. “Come on.”

  She wouldn’t smile. He placed the mail on her desk and left.

  The Jewish Community Center. Two men playing tennis on their lunch hour, white shirts and white shorts. This was the person he was, the ball a yellow blur over the net, no thought but the thought of the motion. The deep pock sound of the ground strokes. The hesitation before the ball toss, the long inhale, the smooth rise of the racket up the back, past the shoulder blade, the sudden overhead slam. The game in endless deuce—first serve, second serve. Afterward, the shower, the thick white towels, a sandwich and an iced tea on the deck.

  He played with Barry Starr that day. Barry Starr could not have known what was going on in his mind.

  That afternoon, Warren came into the office in a brown suit with his briefcase. He had Sharon bring him in a coffee with cream and two sugars.

  “Cornwall says he wants to keep his override,” he said.

  Ed nodded, poker-faced. Great Southwest was in such trouble by now that Consolidated Acceptance was managing some of its sales, helping it scratch out a profit on its newly acquired subdivision near Casa Grande. Even now, Cornwall refused to take a pay cut, nor did Warren insist that he do so.

  “Where’s he going to find the money to pay himself?” Ed asked.

  “I told him the same thing. I told him it would be Chapter Eleven if he keeps it up, but he doesn’t listen.”

  Ed pushed a folder toward Warren. There was only so much of his bluff you could resist before the struggle made you feel ridiculous. “We’ll sell his lots on our contracts, not Great Southwest’s,” he said. “They pay the up-front costs, the promotion. They give us fifty percent of the down, then fifteen of the flow. If it works, fine. If it doesn’t, we’re through with them. I assume you’ve been pulling your money out all this time.”

  Warren sipped his coffee. He pretended to contemplate the folder but didn’t even open it up. “I’m going over to see Talley now,” he said. “I’m going to talk to him some more about this Chino Grande deal, the subdivision approval. What we can do to make this work. I think you should come along.”

  Ed was silent for a moment. Warren wasn’t looking at him, and Ed sat there with his fingers on his chin, watching Warren’s face as he looked down at the folder. First there was the line about Great Southwest—I told him the same thing. I told him it would be Chapter Eleven if he keeps it up—as if the bankruptcy weren’t a likely possibility, as if Warren weren’t instigating it. Now there was this prod to go watch him hand Talley the envelope full of cash.

  “I’m not doing that,” he said.

  Warren tapped the folder. “You sounded very concerned about Chino Grande on the phone before, that’s all.”

  “I am concerned.”

  Warren took a long sip of his coffee. He squinted, running his tongue along his upper lip. “I don’t like it any more than you do that we’re tied in with these people,” he said. “Cornwall. Ross. They’re the ones that should be bearing the brunt of their own mistakes. We’ve been running this business for two years, and we’ve always been straight. I’ve always been able to say, look, we’re doing it by the book, we’re clean—I told it to Don Bolles at the Republic, I told him to write a story about it. That’s what matters to me, that we’ve always been clean. So you see what’s at stake right now. Not just Ross but Cornwall—this whole shadow starting to hang over us. You see what’s at stake, not just for me but for you.”

  Ed shook his head. “I’m not going.”

  Warren nodded. He turned at the waist, as if looking for Sharon to come take away his coffee cup, and in that one movement his whole demeanor seemed to change. There was the briefest glimpse of contempt, and then there was self-possession. You could see that he was going to be mild, even cheerful, but absolutely silent about whatever he was thinking. It was suddenly as though the whole conversation had not occurred.

  He stood up and patted Ed on the shoulder. “Okay,” he said. “No hard feelings, then.”

  Ed nodded, shaking his hand.

  “I’ll see you later,” Warren said.

  Things were never the same.

  10

  I was looking just a few weeks ago for some more information about American Home Industries, the company that bought Consolidated Mortgage from my father and Warren in 1971, and then later, in 1972, filed for bankruptcy. I had done an Internet search earlier, typing in “American Home Industries,” but the name is general and nothing useful came up. They become compulsive, though, these searches, so a few weeks ago, I tried out some variations and it was there—the company was still there. One of the names listed was familiar. I knew the name because I know all these names now. I know them the way I know my phone number and address.

  I called the number on the site without even preparing any questions. I knew better than this, but I did it because at that moment it felt like it was 1972 and not 2007. It felt like I could get the story in this one phone call, a ridiculous feeling I have had several times throughout this project, always immediately refuted.

  The voice at the other end of the line was deep and assertive, but also guarded, the voice, I imagined, of someone who had made and lost money, a business voice. He recognized my last name. Perhaps that was why he took my call. The more we talked, the more his voice reminded me of another voice I had heard while doing this research. I had discovered, through a complicated set of circumstances, a few taped interviews made by journalists in Arizona in 1976, among them an interview with David Rich, who is now dead but who spoke at length back then about my father. That was how I learned that David Rich had an English accent. I heard him speaking on tape about my father’s story, and the sound of Rich’s voice made the story seem more real, that is to say smaller, less mythic. There was another tape
d interview with a man named A. A. McCollum, whose voice sounded like the man from American Home Industries. A. A. McCollum bought Consolidated Mortgage in 1973, after Consolidated had separated from AHI. By 1973, Consolidated’s assets had been compromised, and McCollum lost everything. His voice on tape had a certain flatness you hear in California, an accent perhaps transplanted there from the Midwest. It was the same timbre I heard in the voice of the man I talked to now, the man from American Home Industries.

  What happened, as the man explained it to me, was that the housing market began to collapse in 1972. The Vietnam War, the rising cost of oil—it was the beginning of what would come to be known as stagflation, the deep recession that would eventually characterize the whole decade. The Fed raised interest rates. Almost immediately, no one could get the financing to build houses. AHI’s stock was traded on the NASDAQ, so all you had to do was look at the morning paper to see how far it had fallen.

  The man told me something he’d never told anyone then, not even his wife. On the stroke of midnight one night, the phone rang, and it was Ned Warren calling from Phoenix. Warren said he wanted out of the merger with AHI, he wanted his Consolidated stock back. The man didn’t want to tell me exactly what Warren said after that. He told me that the next time he met Warren, in Phoenix, he brought along an associate who was carrying a .45 beneath his jacket. My father was at that meeting. I asked the man what my father was like and he said that he didn’t talk a lot, he was the quiet one, very much the accountant. It was Warren who made all the decisions.