Evening's Empire: The Story of My Father's Murder (27 page)

“Your son looks like a nice kid,” McCracken said.

“He is. Do you have a son?”

“That’s not what you want to talk to me about, is it?”

“Not right now, no. You’re right.”

“You want to talk to me about how different you are from Jim Cornwall.”

Ed took the photograph back, holding it by the edges. “I don’t have anything to say about Jim Cornwall. What I can do is back up what he says about Warren and Talley.”

He’d had a meeting with Al Sitter, a reporter for the
Republic,
so he had a pretty good idea of what the grand jury was looking into— the Talley bribes, the loan to George Brooks, but not the Kieffer loan. He told McCracken that it concerned him that Al Sitter somehow always knew the details of the grand jury’s “secret” proceedings and then reported on them in every morning’s newspaper. It concerned him as someone who might want to cooperate now that Talley was dead. He didn’t want his name in the papers, but even more important, he didn’t want his father’s name in the papers. The money he had given to Talley had been pissant stuff. Over four years, he had paid Talley less than $7,000. His share of the James Kieffer loan was a grand total of $650. There was a lot he could tell McCracken about Warren, but that was the extent of his own role in what the papers kept calling “land fraud” and “organized crime.”

“You never actually saw Warren give the money to Talley?” McCracken said.

“No. He asked me to go once and I said no. But what I can show you is a ledger with the monthly payments. The check stubs. I can explain how the money for Kieffer was handled like the money for Talley. I have a memo from Warren telling me to pay Kieffer.”

“What about Rosenzweig?”

“Who?”

“Did you ever meet Harry Rosenzweig?”

“I don’t know anything about Harry Rosenzweig.”

“Other public officials. Goldwater.”

“I think I’m going to stop talking until I have my lawyer with me.”

Warren’s voice on the phone was lighter than he remembered, mellow, a little hoarse at the edges. It was the same. He hadn’t heard it in more than a year.

“I’ve been looking into bail bondsmen,” Warren said. “I thought I’d pass on my recommendations.”

Ed looked at the sand-colored wall of his new office, the mild green filing cabinets, his face gradually stiffening into a meditative squint as he worked out the rationale for this call.

“I guess you know I spoke to the police,” Ed said. “I wonder if you also know that I didn’t reach a deal.”

“You should be careful what you say to those people. For your own sake.”

“They’ll eventually subpoena me, they think. About Talley. I’ve already talked to my lawyer about it.”

“Who’s your lawyer?”

“He said I would risk incriminating myself if I testified, so I’d have to take the Fifth. I assume that’s why you’re calling. You should know better than to call me here.”

“This is all too bad.” Warren sighed. “It really is. We’ll get through it, though. You’ll get through it and I’ll get through it.”

“I’ll take the Fifth. You don’t have to worry about it. Don’t call me here anymore, all right?”

It should have been easier to hang up the phone. It was humiliating: the inflections of Warren’s voice still acted physically on him, like a scent from childhood. He remembered their first meeting beside Warren’s swimming pool seven years ago, Barbara with the silver platter of shrimp, the houses overhanging the mountainside, the Scotch sweating in his hand.
I don’t know how you can stand doing taxes every year for some of the people you must have to work for. You don’t seem like the type.

He got a call later from his lawyer, Phil O’Connor. This time it was good news. O’Connor said he had just spoken with Berger’s assistant, Larry Cantor, who told him they had a deal. They were going to give him immunity in exchange for his testimony before the grand jury.

He told the story in the broadest possible terms, and it didn’t sound as serious as it was. The language of taking the Fifth, of getting subpoenaed to a grand jury, of transactional immunity, was not language he could speak to most of the people in his life, so he didn’t speak it. Apart from the fear—and the fear was more easily forgotten than he would have guessed—the story didn’t sound real even to himself. He had done nothing wrong. He wasn’t worried. He didn’t think he had much to tell them that they didn’t already know. Even the word
immunity
was too strong, so he didn’t use it either. He simply downplayed his role, saying that he couldn’t believe some of the names they were asking him about in preparation for the grand jury.

Ideas make the world seem safer than it is. He was in serious trouble, but by all accounts he was never afraid.

I have a transcript of his grand jury testimony. It was hard to find—I found it eventually in the Western Historical Manuscripts Collection at the University of Missouri, where there is a collection on Arizona during this time, with two whole files devoted to my father and dozens more devoted to Warren. Like so much else in this story, the history of the transcript is complicated. Being secret, technically it should never have been made public at all. It was made public in a motion filed by James Cornwall’s attorney, Richard Remender, in August of 1975, after Moise Berger revoked his plea agreement with Cornwall. Remender attached the transcript of my father’s testimony to show that Cornwall was not lying about the Talley bribes, as Berger claimed when he threw out the case against Warren and allowed Cornwall to go to prison for three years. Cornwall, testifying from memory, had gotten a few dates wrong on the checks he’d written to Warren for paying off Talley. Berger abandoned Cornwall over this technicality. Eventually, Warren was convicted of the bribes anyway, though not until Moise Berger had had to leave Arizona in disgrace, James Cornwall had been sent to prison, and two other witnesses—Tony Serra and Ed Lazar—had been murdered.

Hours spent in rooms—the male shabbiness of McCracken’s corner of the detectives’ floor, the sterile red spines of the law books on Phil O’Connor’s shelves. You entered the courthouse and walked down a dreary linoleum hallway to a far corner of the building where on the gray wall was a brass sign that said
GRAND JURY
with a long black arrow beneath the words.

“You’ll do fine,” said O’Connor, who would have to leave Ed at the door. They both stood rather than sat in the waiting room with its folding chairs, wrinkled newspapers and candy wrappers littering the card tables.

Ed walked in the door and found a room like a miniature classroom, ten people seated around a fiberboard table, staring at him. They had soft drinks in wax cups, some object like a key chain or a toothpick they’d been fidgeting with, ballpoint pens. There was a gray-haired man in a short-sleeved plaid shirt, his glasses case held in his breast pocket by a big black flap. Airport faces. Ed had a hard time knowing how to look at them: the young man with the beginnings of a mustache, the salesman with his tie clip, the fat woman in the sleeveless yellow shirt that said
Hussong’s Cantina.

The assistant prosecutor, Larry Cantor, drew in a short sniff of breath, a bald man with sensuous lips and an actor’s green eyes. He turned to Ed in his gray suit and said, “You’ll sit over there,” bowing his head a little in sympathy, one Jewish professional addressing another.

Ed sat down in a chair fronted by what could only be described as an old-fashioned wooden school desk. They told him to face the jurors when he answered the questions, not to face Cantor, who sat to Ed’s left with the court reporter, both of them crammed together behind two other similar desks. You had this strange arrangement then of hearing questions from over your left shoulder, but answering them to an audience, who looked at you like an exhibit on a stage. They were only a couple feet away, so close there wasn’t even a microphone.

Three hours in the tiny room, with a couple of recesses. The questions were mostly about Great Southwest—the circumstances of its formation, Warren’s hidden interest in it, the control he had over James Cornwall. Most of the other questions were about the payments to Talley. No questions about Harry Rosenzweig or Barry Goldwater. Nothing significant about CMS and Chino Grande and Jack Ross, though Ed had described the deal in detail to McCracken and even called it a “fraud.” They told him they would like to talk to him again next Tuesday, January 14. Everything he said appeared in summary the next morning in the newspaper under Al Sitter’s byline.

I don’t think they killed him for what he said, or even for what he might have said later, in further testimony. The initial police theory was that they killed him to deter others from testifying. I think perhaps they killed him simply to show they could do it. They were all planning Phoenix—Warren, the DiFrancos, and the Toccos—all of them with their own motives. In the murder of a witness, their interests happened to coincide. They were going to shake the bush and get the lion to jump out. They were pretty sure the lion didn’t exist anyway, and this was a chance to prove it.