Evening's Empire: The Story of My Father's Murder (15 page)

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

N
ew 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 such 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.