Evening's Empire Page 9

  I asked him if Warren had threatened his life the night of that midnight phone call, but he was not comfortable giving me any more details. It had been thirty-five years. Eventually we talked again, and he told me that for a long time in that period he’d had to park his car in a different spot every day. He said that he never drove without first checking underneath the car for what might be there.

  PART THREE

  “This is going to be very confusing. It’s confusing in my own mind.”

  —Ed Lazar before the grand jury, January 9, 1975

  11

  New Year’s Day 1972. They were at the Biltmore Hotel, with its wide lawns under Squaw Peak, having brunch with their wives. There was the gilt ceiling, the pianist playing jazz, the prime rib under its red lamp. On the patio outside, Warren stood against a pillar made of concrete blocks carved to resemble the trunk of a palm tree. He lit a cigarette, his khaki suit seeming to rebuff the sunlight. Ed sat in a deck chair and looked down into his glass of Scotch. Before them both was the Olympic-size pool—the neat ranks of empty chaises longues, the high dive—the pool that had once been Marilyn Monroe’s favorite pool in the world.

  “That was the right thing to do, not going to Talley’s,” Warren said. “Those things are always a gray area. When to help, when not to. When to keep your distance.”

  Ed turned the glass in his hand, feeling the moisture bleed through the tufted cocktail napkins. Since their dispute, Warren had been neither hostile nor affable, just industrious, sending Ed memos and specs about sites in Arizona, Utah, Oklahoma, Oregon—land everywhere, executives he’d met through the network. They had barely spoken about Talley or Ross or CMS. They had just gone deeper into the fray of business. On paper, they were still worth $5 million.

  “You said you had some news about Oklahoma,” Ed said, changing the subject. “Why don’t you tell me about that?”

  “It’s beautiful land.” Warren put away his lighter, raising his eyebrows. “It’s like Verde, only there’s more of it. Green, mountains, not hot. We can go up there and look at it sometime. Meanwhile, there’s something under way here. Very high-end land, just north of town, it’s called the Rose Garden. As in ‘Rosenzweig.’ ”

  Ed squinted. “Harry Rosenzweig?”

  “We have lunch together once in a while, a drink. Harry had some stock we helped him with—ten thousand or so, it was in his wife’s name. This was that Educational Computer deal. You remember that? When we merged Great Southwest with Educational Computer?”

  “Harry Rosenzweig.”

  “Some of that stock was Harry Rosenzweig’s.”

  Harry Rosenzweig happened to be there that morning, seated near the piano, surrounded, as he always was, by a crowd. Ed had seen him as he and Warren left for the patio, a man with white hair and sideburns, a deep tan, the avid gaze of some figure you might spot at Palm Springs or Las Vegas. He was Barry Goldwater’s oldest boyhood friend. He had managed Goldwater’s presidential campaign in ’64, had been a longtime chairman of the Arizona Republican Party. If you read the newspaper in Phoenix, then you knew that in some mysterious way Harry Rosenzweig ran the city. He did not hold office, but placed people there—the county prosecutor, the police chief, the city council, the board of supervisors. They were there because Harry wanted or allowed them to be there. Every public official in Phoenix began his career with a visit to Rosenzweig’s Jewelers, where Harry had his office on the second floor, overlooking the showroom with its glass cases.

  “You remember those people at Fuqua?” Warren asked, looking at Ed.

  “No. Fuqua?”

  “Fuqua Industries. Out in San Diego. Another one of those deals I’m in with Dave Rich.”

  Ed didn’t smile, but he had to resist the urge. They still liked each other—that was something he could not deny, even now. David Rich, Harry Rosenzweig, Fuqua, the Rose Garden: Warren explained the whole knotted story, not slowly, not patiently, just putting it out there in hard, clean shapes. They had known each other for fifteen, twenty years, Dave and Harry, had bought some land together called the Rose Garden. Now Warren was going to help them sell it at a good price to a conglomerate called Fuqua Industries in San Diego. If Ed wanted to join them as broker, he could take away about $50,000 for half an hour of having drinks with everyone. It would be a way of making it up to him for all the trouble with Jack Ross and CMS.

  New Year’s Day. Sunlight on the blue sky, the purple rock of the peak, people playing golf in midwinter. On the patio, after a few drinks, the Chino Grande deal seemed far away, a minor stumble amid a dozen deals, $100,000 tied up in escrow.

  “Harry Rosenzweig,” Ed said.

  Warren blew out smoke. “Why don’t we go inside and I’ll introduce you.”

  They went back into the dining room, past the tables with their white cloths, the ice sculpture on its silver platform. You have to realize that Ned is Ned, Barbara Warren had whispered earlier, her hand on Ed’s hand, confiding. Ned’s a piece of work, but he always lands on his feet. Always. Now Warren clasped his hands behind his waist as he moved through the room. Ed followed, leaving his napkin-wrapped drink on someone’s half-cleared table. He watched as Warren put his hand on Harry Rosenzweig’s shoulder and Rosenzweig cocked his head a little to better concentrate on what Warren was telling him.

  “One of my stand-outs,” Warren said. “One of the brightest young men around, Ed Lazar. He works with me over at Consolidated Mortgage.”

  Rosenzweig looked up at Ed with the delight of someone whose expectations of people had not diminished since childhood. There was the impeccably cut white hair, the mild cologne. You couldn’t help feeling magnified by his attention, reassured by the dryness and warmth of Harry Rosenzweig’s hand.

  Harry Rosenzweig

  The years of his early family life—happy, especially happy in hindsight. A son and a daughter, almost four and almost two, Zachary and Stacey. A ranch house full of noise, laundry, the cleaning woman on Wednesdays, Susie tired, needing a vacation. Ed faded in and out sometimes, thirty-eight years old but feeling now that thirty-eight was hardly old at all, even forty was hardly old at all. He would leave the office for a few hours in the afternoons, go for a drive, not telling anyone where, just disappearing. At night, he and Ron Fineberg still went out for drinks. Ed “could sweet-talk any beautiful woman,” Ron would say later. He was not a talker but he had the smile, could flirt without saying very much, letting the silence or a few simple words cast everything in a comic, uncertain, suggestive light. He slipped in and out of moments, all of them real but transient, floating, maybe a little boring if he stayed too long.

  To be not just eager, talented, “bright”—instead, to be poised. There was something compelling about Warren, even now, because Ed could see the limitations of his own scruples. The scruples could seem fussy, weak, collegiate. At times, they seemed to constitute a kind of failure.

  Blackbrush, shadscale, greasewood. Dark land under clouds—borax, potash, salt. A sudden rain washed down cliffs. Flood pools formed, flood pools dried out. A sequence of events unfolded without witnesses, without meaning.

  At Durant’s restaurant, you parked in the back and went in through the kitchen, past the line cooks, the waiters hustling by in their half tuxedos. They carried trays of large white plates covered by lank sirloins, chops, strip steaks, potato on the side with a thick slice of buttered toast. Ed and Warren had just made a down payment on two thousand acres in Oklahoma and now CMS had come to discuss what could be done with the Jack Ross acreage at Chino Grande. Ed had arrived late, so he wasn’t at the bar when Warren had first joined up with CMS’s Robert Kaplan and Harry Sperber, there in place of Harry Gillis. They were all sitting at the table now with their menus and drinks. James Kieffer of the Real Estate Department was also there, a man in his thirties with slicked-back hair and sideburns that cut down across his cheeks. He was Talley’s chief investigator. He had just broken the news that Chino Grande was not a legal subdivision, that there was in fact no s
uch thing as Chino Grande. He looked impotent and stern, sitting upright in his plaid sport coat, a clerk with a blotched face, a salary in the low teens.

  “I told him we’re not here to sue anybody,” Kaplan told Ed before Ed even sat down. “We want to work something out, that’s all.”

  Ed put a Time magazine down on the table. On the cover was Liza Minnelli in a black hat, a black leotard, mascara. “Well, that’s good you’re not going to sue,” he said. “That would make for an awkward lunch.”

  No one laughed. They had just been through this already, and Warren had bluntly told them that if they sued he would just deny everything.

  “I spoke to Ross,” Kieffer said. “He said to call his lawyer. That was all he had to say.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Ed said a little sarcastically. “Did he offer to show you around in his plane?”

  “I’m just trying to clear this up.”

  “I understand. The fact is he won’t talk to us either.”

  Kieffer was sitting next to Warren, who was eyeing the magazine cover.

  “ ‘The New Miss Show Biz,’ ” he said. “I don’t understand the appeal of Liza Minnelli.”

  “She looks like a boy,” suggested Kaplan.

  “I see,” Warren said. “Though not really.”

  Their booth curved around three sides of the table, so no one’s back was to the room. There were white tablecloths, red wallpaper embossed with silk, as in a bordello. Kieffer looked mistrustfully at his silverware, as if he were already anticipating the arrival of the check and his inability to pay his share. His presence aroused suspicion. The lunch went badly. The proposals Ed made—an exchange for lots in other subdivisions, a discount on the price—met with skeptical shrugs. We’re not here to sue anybody, Kaplan had said. But what he really meant was there was no incentive for CMS to do anything but wait for their money back.

  In the parking lot, Warren handed Ed a slip of paper, a tear-off form for telephone messages. It gave the date and time and the name of the caller: Detective Lonzo McCracken, Phoenix police.

  James Kieffer stood watching beside Warren, perhaps more aware of what was happening than Ed was.

  “Lonzo McCracken,” Warren said to Ed. “Odd name. I’ll have my lawyer call Mo Berger, the county prosecutor. See what he has to say about Lonzo McCracken.”

  Ed looked down at his car keys. “I don’t want to be hearing this.”

  “That makes two of us,” said Warren.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I want you to not worry. I’ll meet with this cop and I’ll straighten him out. I’ll have my lawyer call our friend Moise Berger. That will be that.”

  “Ross went to the police,” Ed said.

  “It wasn’t Ross. You think Ross wants the police involved?”

  “Then, who was it?”

  “It’s pretty obvious. It was Jim Cornwall.”

  Ed got into his car. He placed his briefcase and the Time magazine on the passenger seat and put his key in the ignition, not looking at anything but the dashboard, the steering wheel, the rearview mirror. Jim Cornwall. If Jim Cornwall was talking to the police, it meant that things were even worse than he’d realized. It meant that Great Southwest was facing not just bankruptcy but criminal charges. It meant that Warren’s life was about to be scrutinized by the police, and by extension so was his own.

  Every time he’d made a payment to Talley, he had strengthened his resemblance to James Cornwall. Every payment of his to Talley had been matched by a similar payment from Cornwall, channeled through the same chain of Warren-controlled corporations. Every payment to Talley had made it more difficult to argue that there was any real difference between Consolidated Mortgage and Great Southwest, between himself and James Cornwall.

  I’ll have my lawyer call Mo Berger, the county prosecutor.

  Our friend Moise Berger.

  12

  The office smelled like air freshener, beneath the scent the faint sourness of cigarettes. Warren started to hand the envelope across his desk, then drew it back, smiling, as if to say maybe the photographs were inside, maybe they weren’t. Maybe it didn’t matter. Probably if he had the photographs he wouldn’t be passing them over his desk in the middle of the afternoon, as a kind of joke, to the county prosecutor’s own investigator, George Brooks. But perhaps the mere rumor of their existence would be enough to keep Moise Berger in their circle.

  I’ll have my lawyer call Mo Berger, the county prosecutor.

  Our friend Moise Berger.

  “I would say you’re joking, but I know you’re not,” George Brooks said, sitting in his chair with crossed legs.

  Warren put the envelope back on his desk. “Berger doesn’t seem like the type,” he said.

  “Everyone’s the type. But Berger’s always been clean. Seersucker suit, white bucks. He used to come to work with his lunch in his briefcase, like his wife made it for him every morning. Harry Rosenzweig’s bright young star.”

  “He can’t handle his liquor, I guess.”

  “Which I didn’t think he even drank.” Brooks looked down at his fingers. “Who’s the girl?”

  Warren just shook his head. “What I’m telling you is that I wouldn’t worry about Moise Berger anymore. You can take the money from Cornwall and wave it right in Berger’s face if you want.”

  “It’s one of Harry Rosenzweig’s girls?”

  “Take the two thousand and buy yourself a cabin in the woods. I don’t know anything about Harry Rosenzweig’s girls.”

  Brooks squinted, meeting Warren’s gaze, then looked out the office window. They had known each other for almost ten years, Warren and Brooks. They had known each other from Brooks’s days working as Talley’s investigator—the job James Kieffer held now—back when Brooks was first learning how the land business operated. The idea that Warren might have compromising photographs of Moise Berger did not come as a surprise to George Brooks.

  George Brooks: Moise Berger.

  James Kieffer: J. Fred Talley.

  George Brooks is to Moise Berger as James Kieffer is to J. Fred Talley.

  A $2,000 loan to George Brooks, another $2,600 loan to James Kieffer.

  This is going to be very confusing. It’s confusing in my own mind.

  “I received a check from CONSOLIDATED MORTGAGE in the amount of $250” [Louis Lazar said]. “$50 was to be for my income tax….” He then deposited the CMC check in his L & B REALTY account and wrote out another check:

  “I made this check out to myself in the amount of $200…. I cashed it…. Took the $200, I gave it to NED WARREN…. Probably the same date, I generally cashed it and gave it to him the same day…. Gave it to him in his office on Central Avenue off Osborn…. Generally an office girl was there…. I’d walk in the office and the girl was in front and I’d say, ‘I’d like to see MR. WARREN,’ and she’d—I usually would walk right in there and give it to him….”

  Q: And did he say anything at the time that he took the money?

  A: Nothing.

  —from a deposition given by my grandfather,

  Louis Lazar, July 15, 1975

  Four days passed after the meeting with CMS and Kieffer. For four days, Ed didn’t sleep, stirring at two or three with a dry mouth, then failing to concentrate on a book under the living room lamp. This was how it would be when he was old, he thought: insomnia, roiling anxiety, the body and mind at odds with each other, or rather, in mutually destructive accord.

  He had signed a personal guarantee on the loan for the land in Oklahoma—two thousand acres bought on credit. He owed more money now than he could pay back anytime soon. There would be no easy way to walk away from the business, even if he wanted to, and he didn’t know what he would do instead—ask for his old job back at Gallant, Farrow?

  That Friday was the Sabbath, so they went as usual to his parents’ for dinner. His parents were small, compact, Lou about five foot five, Belle not even five feet, though always in high heels. They were children of R
omanian immigrants, neither of them certain of their actual date of birth. There was plastic fruit in bowls, wax fruit in bowls, plastic film on the sofa to protect its yellow upholstery. The house could seem almost holy in its lack of artifice. A glazed chicken baked in the double oven, and Ed and his father watched TV in a small room with matching recliners, a nightstand used as an end table, atop it a lamp and a pair of reading glasses and a crossword dictionary. It was close to tax season, so there were ways for Ed to present what he had to say to his father that would be predictably confusing, not suspiciously confusing, not that far out of the ordinary, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it. They watched Bill Close, the anchorman, deliver an editorial on Richard Nixon’s trip to China, behind Close a shot of Nixon and his wife, Pat, waving on the tarmac, returned home. It had been a historic trip, though the editorial did not make it clear why. It only made Nixon appear monumental.

  “It looks like he’ll get reelected,” Ed said.

  “He’s the incumbent.”

  “The devil you know.”

  His father fingered a bowl of mixed nuts. Ed sat there looking at his own hand on the armrest of the recliner. Of all the things he did in these years, what he did that night would cause him the most shame.

  I thought about this for a long time. I sat up several nights, asking myself if I had understood this properly. I thought about it for a long time because I had to explain to myself why my father had enlisted his own father in helping him bribe Talley with $200 that week, the same week that my father and Warren and James Cornwall loaned Talley’s assistant, James Kieffer, $2,600.

  “I’m worried that Kieffer is a loose cannon,” Warren had said to Ed that morning in the conference room. He’d looked bleary with activity, downshifting from business to the low realm of the Real Estate Department. James Kieffer, he explained, was bitter, frustrated—everything about the land business had started to disgust him. He drove out to the empty subdivisions and confirmed that the bulldozers were in operation, that the salesmen were at least licensed, and if they weren’t, that they were fired. Then he made his phone calls back to the lot buyers, who demanded their money back anyway, who didn’t understand why everything was moving so slowly, who cursed him or threatened to sue. When he spoke about this to Talley, Talley just shrugged, because to Talley it was all a game. Kieffer wasn’t stupid, Warren explained, and he knew that Talley was taking money on all sides.