Evening's Empire: The Story of My Father's Murder (16 page)

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

T
he 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 Romanian 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.

Ed looked out the window of the office. He saw Kieffer’s blotched face, the sideburns, the greased-back hair. He was like the aged version of the hoods in high school, threatening now not because of physical toughness but because of the resentment brought on everywhere by money.

“I have nothing to hide from Jim Kieffer,” Ed said.

“There’s a cop out there, Lonzo McCracken, who wants to drag our names through the mud,” Warren said quietly. “That’s how they play these things, through the newspapers. That way they don’t need any facts.”

“What does Kieffer want?”

Warren clasped shut his briefcase. His suit could have been ten years old or brand-new, one of three dozen conservative suits in muted colors. “You would be surprised the way a person like Jim Kieffer thinks,” he said. “I got him to take out a loan. Twenty-six hundred dollars was all it took to make him happy.”

Ed looked down at the windowsill. “You had him sign a note?”

“I had him sign a note,” Warren said. “It’s not just cash this way, it’s not just a gift. It’s a corporate note with his signature on it.”

Ed’s hand was still on the window frame. He looked out at the sunlight and pursed his lips as if he had bitten into something unexpectedly strong. In a way, it was a smile. It was a disgusted smile at his own innocence. It took him a moment to understand what Warren meant. There was a show of weakness, a show of qualms. In that moment, Warren became more of an adversary.

“He knows about Talley,” Warren went on. “He knows about Talley and now he knows that Cornwall is talking to this cop, McCracken, telling him God knows what, and all Kieffer wanted was twenty-six hundred dollars. It’s already done, I already gave him the money. I’m asking for your help. I don’t want a bunch of people pulling their money out of the business just because they’ve heard some rumors, or read a story in a newspaper. Cornwall gave me thirteen hundred—that’s half. All I’m asking from you is six hundred and fifty.”

Sabbath dinner. A challah bread, a glass of Cutty Sark for the men, candles but no wine. There was noodle kugel with raisins, glazed chicken, green beans with sliced almonds. In a closet off the kitchen, with its footstool for the high cabinets, were two “For Sale” signs painted with the words
L & B Realty:
L & B for Louis and Belle Lazar, their realty agency, more a hobby than a business. I remember the realty signs like another toy in a house full of toys. I remember a great deal about that house. My grandmother collected china dolls in different period costumes. There was one dressed as a Beefeater, one as Anne Boleyn in a purple gown with an extra finger on one of her hands. My grandfather loved sports and kept his cousin Billy’s boxing gloves as a memento of him—Billy, a boxer in the army in World War II, a Jewish boxer. I have the gloves now in my own closet at home.