Evening's Empire: The Story of My Father's Murder (18 page)

A man walked into the bar, holding a newspaper, searching the faces, then approached their table. He wore a navy suit and a pale green shirt and a plaid tie. McCracken slowly recognized him. He was the prosecutor Moise Berger’s land fraud investigator, George Brooks.

“A friend of mine,” Warren said, turning. “I think you know each other already.”

McCracken put his menu down, but didn’t stand up. He looked neutrally at Brooks, who blankly extended his hand across the table. Warren lit a cigarette and blew a fine blanket of smoke over the basket of rolls.

“We were just talking about Great Southwest,” he said. “I think you both also know Jim Cornwall.”

Brooks didn’t respond or even seem to hear. He sat down and now he was studying Warren’s menu and he didn’t say a word until they ordered.

McCracken thought of Serra, of their conversation a year earlier in the Pullman Pie.
You’re going to have a hard time getting anywhere with this. Warren, those people, they’ve got everyone tied in.

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

Our friend Moise Berger.

Ed put down the phone. Through the slats of the office blinds, the harsh light of early dusk flared white and orange, then left a violet haze when he closed his eyes. The phone call had been from one of his oldest loan sources, Gene Silver at Talcott Financial. Gene Silver had said that the top brass at Talcott were putting a stop on all land developer applications at this time because of “trepidations on a recent spate of negative publicity about the industry.” Silver said that in Consolidated’s case there were concerns about mortgages held by overseas buyers—soldiers over in Japan or the Philippines who had almost certainly never seen their properties. He reminded Ed that Talcott had lost several thousand dollars recently on land company paper from Arizona firms. He reminded Ed of a recent article in
Time
magazine about deceptive practices in the land business. It was nothing personal, Silver said, but there was risk aversion, and if the story had made it into
Time
magazine, then it was hardly news to anyone who followed the industry or had money in it.

Ed remembered the article from
Time
magazine. He remembered it, because it had come out the same day as his lunch at Durant’s with James Kieffer and the executives of CMS.

He rubbed his eyes, then blinked them into focus. When Gene Silver had mentioned the overseas buyers, Ed lost his temper.
What are you implying? No, what are you implying?
But even as he said these things, he knew that anger never sold anyone on anything.

13

F
ive minutes to midnight—Barbara was asleep. Warren made himself a Scotch and walked back into the living room, his dog at his heels, the last of his two Dobermans, its long pink tongue hanging sideways over its teeth. He gave the dog a flick on the snout and bent down over it, petting its throat. There were only a few lamps burning, no music, just the banal reverie of his own thoughts, the kind of after-hours solitude that made him feel weightless, detached. In the beige light, he looked for a moment at the room: the telescope on its mount, the stone fireplace, the settee with its zebra-skin print, a touch of the hunting lodge. He sipped his drink, assessing it as a stranger might assess it. Outside, the view was black through the window glare. He cleared his throat and walked over and looked out at the city: a palm-studded valley under the dark sky, cars reduced to small pricks of moving headlights, no people visible. It all moved and moved without him—the bars and private rooms, the restaurants—all of it hidden in darkness, softened beneath the glow of the streetlights. Even the palm trees seemed placed there as a form of concealment.

The plays had been to give the loan to Brooks, the loan to Kieffer, to pay off Talley, then to sacrifice Cornwall and maybe Serra. He’d had to appease Serra because of Serra’s connections. Serra, the goombah, claiming a piece of the action. You gave it to him and no one could call you greedy, then you let him bury himself in his own bad decisions. It was just luck that Cornwall had appeared, the kind of open-faced American that Warren was always looking for. Cornwall had been managing a car dealership, had impounded a few cars from Warren’s salesmen, and that’s what had got them talking—“I like your spirit,” that kind of thing. You read his résumé and saw he’d been to Bible College and you sensed the other tendency ready to burst into full flower. It was a hunch, an instinct, putting them together, Cornwall and Serra, like a cat and a snake in a gunnysack, the kind of intuition that came to you after forty years of living by your wits.

He walked over to the phone and looked for the number in his memo pad, turning the pages with his thumb. According to his watch, when he dialed the first digit, it was twelve midnight exactly.

“This is Ned Warren,” he said, his voice quiet, curious, as if he were answering the call and not making it. He looked back down at the rotary dial of the phone as he put down the memo pad. He pictured Cornwall blinking himself awake in the now lamp-lit bedroom, his wife rolling over beneath the tangled sheets. “Why don’t you pick up on the other extension,” he went on. “The one in the kitchen. Go on, rise and shine. I want to discuss something with you.”

He took another sip of his Scotch, facing the bookcases now. He imagined the layout of Cornwall’s house. He knew the layout because he and his son-in-law, Gale Nace, had gone to look at it just days ago with the idea of Gale making an offer on it.

“What is the idea—”

“Just take it easy. Are you in the kitchen?”

“This is out of line. You have no business calling me up in the middle of the night like this.”

“My son-in-law came by tonight. Gale. We were talking again about your situation with the house. I’m trying to help you, that’s why I called. Gale said he wants to make you an offer. He said he would offer you sixty thousand, and I told him no, that wasn’t right, the house was worth twice that, he had to come up. I think there’s room to negotiate, that’s why I’m calling you. I’d ask Gale for seventy. I’d take sixty-eight. I’d get it settled this week, get it over quickly. Then I’d get out of the country as soon as possible.”

There was silence. Warren looked across the room at the windows. He could see a faint image of himself reflected there, a primitive figure—head, shoulders, arms. He knew that Cornwall was realizing what time it was, that timing the phone call at the stroke of midnight had not been accidental.

“I can pick up the phone and have someone maimed or killed,” Warren said. “I think you should know that. I have to play ball with Serra because of who Serra works for, but as far as I know, the only person you work for is me.”

Ed looked at the plats, the streets and numbered lots of Verde Lakes I, Verde Lakes II, Verde Lakes III, Chino Meadows.
A subdivision of the N.E. of the N.W.
1
/
4
, the N.
1
/
2
of the N.E.
1
/
4
, the S.E.
1
/
4
of the N.E.
1
/
4
, the E.
1
/
2
of the S.E.
1
/
4
of Sec.
23
, T
16
N, R.
2
W.
The words were written in pencil in a neat hand: the surveyor’s notations on percolation and curve data, the compass points for the sites of drainage easements. White Cap Drive, Palo Verde Drive, Ponderosa Trail, Bottle Brush Court. Improvising, narrowing one of his eyes, Warren had laid out these street names with the dry efficiency that Ed brought to a column of numbers. It was his gift, the instinct for names that were slightly corny, evocative of real, affordable places, not just fantasies. He had come up with Lazar Road for the large diagonal thoroughfare, and then Ed had suggested the small cross street, Zachary Lane—he might not have been so whimsical without Warren’s example. Tumbleweed Drive, Apache Lane. Eventually the names took on a jokey, fatigued absurdity: Jackrabbit Trail, Coyote Corner, Leaping Lizard Lane. There were streets named for wives and ex-girlfriends: Susan Street, Donna Drive, Portia Place, Yvonne Way. It became a kind of game. When they’d finished mapping it out, Ed took the surveyor’s plans to Prescott and got the stamps and the requisite signatures: the county recorder, the health examiner, the engineer, the notary public, everything legal, everything by the book.

He had heard from another contact in Sacramento, Dale Sitka, one of the VPs over at First Financial, that American Home Industries, Consolidated’s parent company, was having credit problems. According to Dale Sitka, AHI was stretched very thin. The housing business in California had started to slow down. If interest rates went up a point or two, then AHI would find itself hard-pressed to keep current with its loans. They would be facing a potential bankruptcy. Sitka said that some investors were already making bets on what the Fed would say next week, and Ed should keep a close eye on the NASDAQ.

Dear Ed,