Evening's Empire

by Zachary Lazar

  “I told Ned you were my accountant,” said Rich, clasping his hands on his desk and leaning forward. “I recommended you, and I wouldn’t have done that if I thought Ned was a crook. He’s made a pile of money in the last few years—Prescott Valley, this Queen Creek venture with Stenz. It’s in his own interest to keep on the straight and narrow, don’t you think?”

  They’re not exactly in the business of lying for people, not for people like Warren anyway.

  It was a stupid thing to say, Ed thought in the car later that afternoon. The question it raised, of course, was why was Warren looking for a new accountant in the first place? Was it because Arthur Andersen had been too “conservative”?

  He was on Camelback Road, driving to Warren’s house in Paradise Valley. He had spoken to Warren that afternoon on the phone and told him yes, they had a deal, he would bring over some initial paperwork they could go over together. He had done this without thinking it through all the way, or rather he had wanted to do it and had allowed himself to make the call before working through all of his misgivings. It was a big account. If they took it on, it would be one of Gallant, Farrow’s biggest accounts. Sam Gallant himself had encouraged Ed to give it his consideration.

  When he’d hung up the phone, Ed had realized that he was curious about Warren in a way he would not have expected. He’d realized that he was looking forward to seeing Warren at his house instead of at his office.

  He found the street he was looking for, North Dromedary Road, but then strayed off it, not in any hurry, wanting to just drive for a while, to look at the surroundings, the city’s wealthiest neighborhood. The desert was still a vivid presence there, pink sand between the spacious two- or three-acre lots—vivid, but tamed. There were palm trees, paloverde trees, brilliant red bougainvillea draped over walls the color of mud. It was quiet, no other cars out. Trails led up to the boulder formations at the foot of Camelback Mountain, but no one was out walking on them. He finally got back on North Dromedary Road and began following its switchbacks up the mountainside, the road steeper and steeper, until he was almost unable to move any farther. Piles of crushed rock blocked the way in places, and slopes of crushed rock spilled off the edge, over the sheer, hundred-yard drop down the mountainside. He saw a gated driveway and wondered if that was the turnoff he was looking for, East Grandview Lane, Warren’s street. He put the parking brake on and got out of the car and took a closer look but could see nothing except extended driveway through the bronze grillwork.

  He sat in the car for a moment, frustrated. If he went farther up, there was no guarantee he would be able to turn back around—his car was a large Pontiac sedan—and eventually he decided he might have missed the turn, and so he began the difficult task of backing his way down, using the side mirror to keep the edge of the road in sight. It turned out that he had passed East Grandview Lane on his way up the mountainside. East Grandview Lane was smoothly paved. He could see what he guessed was Warren’s house beyond a curve in the road lined with perfectly spaced date palms. 4958 East Grandview Lane. He parked the car and took his briefcase and walked around the bougainvillea-covered wall to the low pale green rotunda where the front door was. Thin white columns held up the roof, whose greenness turned out to be the verdigris of weathered copper. He did not use words like verdigris. He did not look at the house, with its graceful, botany-inspired details, and think of Frank Lloyd Wright. It struck him as an unusually pleasant, understated house, a kind of ideal house he had never seen or thought of or imagined before.

  “You must be Ed Lazar,” a woman said, answering the doorbell. She was attractive, tanned, thin, her blond hair held loosely in a clip. Behind her, two black Dobermans were barking and pawing the carpeted floor. “Boys, stop it,” she said, twisting toward them, a cigarette cocked at a perfect right angle to her hip. “Down.” She looked at him again with a flat grin, a thin bar of flawless white teeth. “I’m Barbara Warren.”

  Inside, the front room was like an observation deck, its curved walls and floor-to-ceiling windows offering a protected sense of distance from the view outside, all of Phoenix stretched out beyond the palm-lined mountainside. There was the secretive hush of wealth—artwork, Navajo rugs, dark wooden furniture—everything kept clean and ordered by someone else, there for your enjoyment, there for you to use or just to look at. She showed him back into a den with a wall made of bare slate-colored rock—the actual side of Camelback Mountain—and then into a sunroom with opened windows, their iron frames painted brown. There were terra-cotta pots filled with geraniums, gardenias, jasmine. At the back of the room was a white bar shaped like a teardrop, where Barbara Warren poured him a Scotch, took his briefcase and jacket, and then showed him outside.

  Warren was sitting at a glass table by the pool beneath an umbrella, reading a paperback novel and fingering a tall blue glass beaded with condensation. The table was covered with newspapers—the Arizona Republic and the Phoenix Gazette, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times—an ashtray, cigarettes, a yellow pad and pen. He wore a clean white robe and espadrilles. His damp hair was slicked back after a swim in the pool. With his deep tan, the robe hanging open as he backed up his chair and stood to say hello, the impression he gave was of a man who had been everywhere and had laid out every aspect of his current life with a deliberate sense of what the options were.

  “I heard you saw Dave Rich today,” he said.

  “I met with Dave this morning.”

  “He has a good accent. Everyone loves him for that accent.”

  “He was telling me about Lee Ackerman. Your old friend, or your old nemesis. I still don’t understand the story.”

  Warren put his hand on Ed’s shoulder and led him to the glass table. “Let’s talk,” he said. “I want to talk to you about this because I think you’ll understand it from a business angle. You know the language—I don’t think most people understand the language very well. Very few do anyway. It’s boring, it doesn’t make sense to them.”

  The weather was bright and warm, and the pale water in the pool shimmered—blurry, blue lattices forming and unfolding on the surface. Ed put his Scotch down on the table, rolled up his sleeves, sat down in the shade of the umbrella. Warren lit a cigarette. They talked for almost two hours. Barbara came out periodically to freshen their drinks and would sometimes lean for a while on Warren’s chair and listen to what he was saying, silent, thoughtful. At one point, there was a clamor inside when the children came home from school. The Dobermans got out, racing around and then into the pool until Warren clapped his hands and they panted and bobbed around the glass table, shaking water from their gleaming backs. One of Warren’s daughters came to take the dogs back inside, a pretty, blond girl who said hello and did a stiff pretend curtsy, laughing, the formal gesture some sort of joke between her and her father. When she went back inside, Warren reclined further in his chair.

  “Lee Ackerman had no sense of timing,” he said. “He bought my shares at a bad time. It’s not a beauty pageant, it’s business, but everything I’ve done here is legal.”

  Ed looked out at the pool, then up and across the mountainside, the houses hanging like small fortresses out of the rock, the blue sky above them. He had finished a second and then a third Scotch. “I don’t see how anyone stays in the land business for very long,” he said. “I don’t like the way the financing works. To me, it seems like it gets very close to a Ponzi scheme sometimes.”

  “Eighteen months,” Warren said. “I like to build up a company for about eighteen months and then I like to sell it to someone else. After that, you really need someone who can manage money, someone who knows how to structure a company’s finances. I like making money, but I’m not an accountant.”

  Ed smiled. “You’re not an accountant. What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You know what it means.”

  “No, I don’t,” Ed said, not smiling anymore.

  “I guess it means that I don’t know how you can stand doing taxes every year
for some of the people you must have to work for. That’s what it means. You don’t seem like the type.”

  “It’s not so bad.”

  “It’s steady work. I understand that. Maybe I’m too much the other extreme. That’s what used to get me into trouble.”

  It had all come out in their conversation—Warren’s wayward past, the stories from a dozen years ago, twenty years ago, from when he was, for lack of a better term, a grifter. He had raised money for a concert for the blind, but the concert had never happened. He had found backers for a Broadway musical that also had never happened, though he had produced a script and a title—The Happiest Days—and billed Lucille Ball and June Allyson as the stars and hired a famous publicist, Chick Farmer, to promote it in the newspapers. He had spent a year in Sing Sing for The Happiest Days. You pictured him in a prison suit with a number on his chest, sawing his way through the bars with a file taken out of a cake—that was how real the time in Sing Sing seemed. It was hard to connect it to the fifty-three-year-old man sitting by the pool in his robe, a man who’d been to Europe, to New York, to Asia, a man whose financial statement linked him to some of the most important people in Phoenix—a man who understood the detailed complexities of his financial statement. To take his past seriously seemed to imply a lack of a sense of humor, a missing sense of joie de vivre. He was like Dean Martin, Ed thought. He had Dean Martin’s thick crest of hair and his low-key, half-shrugging delivery. Like Dean Martin, he came across as a charming rogue, a man who had lived through all manner of disorder and yet had managed to land on his feet.

  Barbara came out again, not to freshen their drinks this time but holding a tray with a great pitcher of ice water and some glasses. There were napkins so white they left a blind spot in your field of vision for a moment. There was a silver bowl of guacamole with peeled shrimp arrayed along the rim.

  “We’re having some guests come by for dinner in a little while,” she said to Ed. “Around eight o’clock. Would you like to join us? I was thinking you could call your wife and see if she wanted to join us, too. I realize it’s very short notice.”

  Ed sat with his hands on the aluminum arms of his deck chair. He had lost track of the time, but now he roused himself. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should let you get ready.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “No, of course. I really have to go anyway. We have a baby at home, I shouldn’t have stayed so long.”

  Warren was reaching for a shrimp. Barbara was standing behind him with her hand on his shoulder, as if to balance herself, while she inhaled from her cigarette.

  Ed stood up and shook their hands. Then Barbara followed him into the sunroom, where he found his briefcase and his jacket and said a last good-bye. A part of him had wanted to stay for dinner, he realized. It surprised him that a part of him had wanted to stay for dinner.

  4958 East Grandview Lane

  4

  Their neighborhood was tract houses. You picked one of five models from a book and then six months later you had neighbors who all had kids and bicycles and two cars.

  “I can’t believe we’re living in a Norman Rockwell neighborhood,” he said one day to Susie out of nowhere—one of those sudden views into something deeper that she had gotten accustomed to by now, Ed’s occasional urge for something more or something else. She didn’t know what to say, what more or what else could really make him any happier. They had a son, Zachary, whom he doted on, and his relationship with his other son, Richie, was different now, infused with his new understanding of what it meant to be a father. He played tennis several times a week, the game at his level an intense blending of the physical and the mental, a rapid blur of angles and approaches, satisfying, exhausting. On Saturday nights during football season, they went to the ASU games, the men in slacks and button-down shirts, the women in skirts and nylon stockings, all of that clothing in the 90-degree heat; and then afterward, during a late dinner and drinks in a Mexican restaurant, the darkness and coolness were soothing, you felt you were on vacation, that your life itself contained many of the elements of a vacation. It was a weekend life, an after-work life. It seemed perfect to him almost all of the time, as long as he was in it and not in his office.

  It was not that he wanted material things: a boat, a second home, a luxury car. Things didn’t interest him—what they signified had begun to interest him. In the office, there were subtle, newly unexpected humiliations that went along with the servicing of clients. They always wanted you to keep in mind, through a kind of code, how much money they made in relation to how much money you made. The code was simple—your car, the neighborhood you lived in, the stocks you owned, the pastimes you pursued. In the Midwest, no one would have questioned you about these subjects with such hungry interest. In Phoenix, because it was sunny, because you could play tennis every month of the year, could swim and play golf every month of the year, there was a competition to be more fun-loving, more free spirited than everyone else. There are very few people in America who don’t want to be fun-loving, free-spirited—Ed was both of these things by nature, he didn’t have to pursue them. But he was learning, as people learn in all times and places, that the easiest way to remain fun-loving and free-spirited is to have a lot of money.

  What he wanted was to not feel invisible, to not feel like he was failing just because he didn’t want or have the boat, the second house, the better car.

  Eighteen months, Warren had said—many times, in the months after their first meeting. In the land business, you can make $1 million in eighteen months. Ed and Susie went to a party at the Warrens’ one Saturday, and the food, the table settings, the bossa nova music carried over the hidden patio speakers, had been of an elegance they’d never seen. There were people whose names you read in the newspaper—Richard Stenz, John Roeder—men in madras shirts and slacks and loafers. There was the ogre-like commissioner, J. Fred Talley, surrounded by men who did not look quite like businessmen, with their big lapels and turquoise watchbands and cologne. It was Phoenix. It was the city they lived in, the gaudy jumble of high and low, aspiration and bad taste, the very center of it, never before glimpsed from this close up. One of the land salesmen arrived in a Rolls-Royce. There was nothing in the world more ludicrous than a man in Arizona driving a Rolls-Royce—even Warren thought so—but the sense of how easy it would be to transform everything about your life, the sense of fun, that was something to think about.

  It was the sense of fun that got him and Susie thinking.

  July 20, 1969—the night of the moon landing. On the television, Neil Armstrong was walking on the cratered surface, his back hunched beneath his pack, arms out at the sides, skipping beside the planted American flag with great, hulking steps like a boy having fun. In Houston, the engineers watched him with concealed excitement, a control room full of almost identical men in white short-sleeved shirts and black neckties. They were the likable face of America—not napalm, not Agent Orange, but the boy’s dream of space travel made real by the grown-up boy’s practical science. “I just want to evaluate the different paces that a person can make traveling on the lunar surface,” Armstrong said in his ordinary voice, bounding from side to side, watching his feet. “You do have to be rather careful to keep track of where your center of mass is. Sometimes it takes two or three paces to make sure you’ve got your feet underneath you.” The flag and his giant steps made the moon seem toylike, their position on it central, a distant, eerie playground in a vast desert of white dust and crumbled rock. To stop himself from moving, Armstrong shifted out to the side a few steps and “cut a little,” as he said, “like a football player.”

  At Ed and Susie Lazar’s, on West San Miguel, they watched it several times, replay after replay. There was a deli tray on a long table—corned beef, pastrami, turkey, salami—a group of friends gathered in the living room before the television. Walter Cronkite was in the midst of a marathon thirty-hour broadcast. Walter Cronkite, as fatherly as God, was acting tonight like an awestr
uck boy. “Go, baby, go!” he’d yelled on lift-off. He was almost speechless when the Apollo first landed, touching down on the surface, as unreal as a dream but in fact real.

  “I’ve grabbed the brass ring,” Ed said when there was a lull in the action, when they had shown the sequence of Armstrong’s walk yet again. “I got my real estate license. Ned and I are going into the land business.”

  There was silence. No one knew what to say at first. They had not been privy to the evolution of Ed’s feelings toward Ned Warren, and for many of them the announcement came as a shock. They remembered his skepticism, then an amused interest, but not a real interest. Ed had always spoken about the land business in a denigrating or sarcastic tone—it’s a bit of a racket, it comes close to a Ponzi scheme—and they had always shrugged and said, It’s Arizona, it’s the Wild West, anything goes. Everyone used that phrase, “It’s the Wild West.” Everyone used it and no one took it very seriously.

  “That’s terrific,” someone said.

  “Good for you, Ed.”

  He took a sip of his drink. “One small step for Ed Lazar.”

  He had been to a fortune-teller’s booth a few days before, with Beverly Fineberg, the wife of his friend Ron. Beverly had asked a surprisingly solemn question. Her father had died when she was young, so she asked if she would live to see her grandchildren. The fortune-teller assured her that, yes, she would, there would be many years with her grandchildren. Perhaps to lighten the mood, Ed had asked a more facetious question: Would he be a millionaire by the time he was forty? The fortune-teller had heard this question many times before, always from men, and it was not a question she liked. She had a ready answer. “Yes,” she said, “but the cost will be very high.”

  At all times, the most unlikely situations are unfolding all around us. It is our own luck that allows us not to see it. Our luck allows us not to see the people in the shadows, or not to see them as they really are. It is the people in the shadows who see us as we really are.