Evening's Empire

by Zachary Lazar

  Ed sat down in one of his chairs. He could play this game as long as Warren wanted to. He wasn’t going to be the one who mentioned the letter that had just arrived that morning from Barry Goldwater.

  “How was the marijuana down there?” he said.

  Warren pretended to shiver. “No comment.”

  “Well, at least you got out of this inferno for a few days.”

  “I may have a lead on some more land. Straight brokerage deal. No financing, no salesmen, nothing.”

  “Where?”

  “Near Chino. It would be a good favor for us to do. But let’s worry about Chino first.” He examined his lollipop, glaring at it for not being a cigarette. “This one’s called Chino, too, actually. Chino Something-Else. Chino Grande.”

  Ed knew Warren was waiting for him to bring up the Goldwater letter. He knew Warren knew he was thinking this. It was a game they played, a telepathy of withholding, in some ways more important than whatever words they ever actually spoke. When they spoke, it was jokes, banter, cocktail talk, punctuated by a two-minute phone call or a terse memo written almost anonymously. Got it, was the only note Warren had appended to the Goldwater letter, for, as they both appreciated, any further comment would only diminish the impact of the signature at the bottom: just the first name, Barry, in firm blue ink.

  Ed had been in the men’s room that morning when Fred Greene, the collections agent, had come in and walked over to the urinal. Greene was six six and weighed almost three hundred pounds, standing there with both hands on his hips, the man who knocked on doors when a mortgage went unpaid.

  “Your salesmen are all worried about their jobs,” he said, scowling down as if pissing were a kind of indigestion. “They’re all trying to make a hundred thousand in sales before their business gets shipped overseas to Japan or Taiwan or wherever the hell it is.”

  Ed stared into the mirror as he washed his hands. “They’ll still have jobs,” he said.

  Greene flushed the urinal. His shoes were as big as galoshes, white with silver chains. “These guys would sell to a dead man if they could keep their commissions.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s why we have Mean Fred Greene.”

  Greene moved toward the sink, pumped soap powder all over the basin, then washed his hands under full pressure from the tap. After pounding his hands dry on a thick stack of paper towels, he threw the towels on the floor by the wastebasket. Not in the basket, but on the floor.

  Ed nodded, his silence a coded laugh that Greene acknowledged with more silence, not looking but seeing.

  Ed thought, if the CMS deal worked and the lot sales happened in Japan instead of here, then he wouldn’t have to think about any of this anymore—not the salesmen, not the commissions, not the stupidity, not the greed. He wouldn’t have to see Fred Greene tossing his garbage on the men’s room floor. He would see numbers, contracts, memos, statements. He would take his seat on the board of AHI and after a reasonable amount of time had elapsed, he would sell his shares and get out of the business.

  Mr. Dave Martin

  Capital Management Systems Ltd., Inc.

  P.O. Box 364

  Koza, Okinawa

  Dear Dave:

  Best wishes on your investment program for the ownership of home-sites in Chino Valley, Arizona.

  Much of Arizona’s phenomenal growth has been due to the fact that many service men that were based in Arizona during their training decided to make their home here in their civilian life. These men have contributed a great deal to the vitality and growth of our State. This program should be an additional step along these lines. We wish you continued success.

  With best wishes,

  Barry Goldwater

  Ed put it back in its manila envelope and looked again at the memo he’d written yesterday:

  TO: N. J. Warren

  FROM:Edward Lazar

  We will want a letter from Sam Steiger that will read something like the following:

  Mr. Dale Holmgren

  Mr. Dave Martin

  Mr. Dale Hunt

  Mr. Harry Gillis

  Capital Management Systems Ltd., Inc.

  P.O. Box 364

  Koza, Okinawa

  Dear Mr. So and So:

  Best wishes on your investment program for the ownership of home-sites in Chino Valley, Arizona.

  Much of Arizona’s phenomenal growth has been due to the fact that many service men that were based in Arizona during their training decided to make their home here in their civilian life. These men have contributed a great deal to the vitality and growth of our state. Your program should be an additional step along these lines. Continued success.

  Sincerely,

  Sam Steiger

  “No one’s heard of Sam Steiger,” Warren had said on the phone yesterday, speaking from his house. “Sam Steiger’s just a congressman from Arizona.”

  “He’s helping us out with the Forest Service,” Ed had said.

  “So get him, too,” Warren had answered, as if with a shrug.

  The memo had been delivered to Warren’s house by messenger boy and then the letter had been dictated to Goldwater’s office by someone over the phone—that was the only way it could have happened in less than twenty-four hours. That also explained some minor differences in a few of the sentences. But he couldn’t imagine Warren patiently reading a letter over the phone, making subtle changes of phrasing. The phrases would have been changed by someone’s secretary, probably Goldwater’s, but how the letter had even made it that far was a mystery.

  It was the Wild West—that was the phrase that covered such mysteries. He could have asked Warren how the Goldwater letter had materialized, how it had happened in less than twenty-four hours, but it was the kind of question you knew not to ask after two years in the land business. They had connections to a lot of people. Now they somehow had connections to Barry Goldwater. He wondered if not just Sam Steiger but Barry Goldwater owned land in Chino Valley.

  “I need a favor,” Jack Ross had said that afternoon in Mexico, standing at the bar, drinking whiskey because that was what he drank, even by a pool. “That land I told you about, I don’t know what I’m going to be able to do with it.”

  Warren nodded. “It’s called Chino Grande?”

  “That’s right. They did up a flier already. Chino Grande Ranchettes.”

  “Outside Seligman.”

  “Far outside. There’s no road.”

  “But it’s in Chino Valley.”

  “Not really Chino Valley. It’s north of there.”

  “We’ll call it Chino Valley. That way we’ll keep it simple.”

  Their conversation would have happened on August 14. The Goldwater letter was dated August 19. The first time Warren mentioned the Jack Ross land to Ed Lazar was a month later, in September. There were reasons for doing it this way, reasons for spacing out the favors so that no one could connect them too easily.

  CAC, CMC, CMS. Chino Valley, Chino Meadows, Chino Grande. This is how you can become a party to fraud without quite knowing it, without the perpetrator necessarily even planning it that way.

  Ed drove home that evening in his new car. He liked it even less than his last car, which had been a Cadillac. Like the Cadillac, the new car, a Lincoln, had been Warren’s idea. It made Ed feel silly—it was ostentatious, it cost more than his house was worth—but there was only so much you could explain to your friends and family about the performative aspects of the land business. At the Lincoln/Mercury dealership in Mesa, Jack Ross had gone over all the details before handing Ed the keys—the Kashmir Walnut Matina paneling, the Cartier timepiece, the small, oval-shaped “opera” windows in the back—all the details that made the Lincoln Continental Mark IV different from last year’s Lincoln Continental Mark III. It had a grille in front, designed to mimic a Rolls-Royce’s, and a rounded, old-timey hump in the rear where the spare tire fit. Ed pulled it into his driveway now and opened the garage door and hid it inside—he never left his company cars in the drivew
ay. He turned his back on the closed garage and faced the sunlight.

  It was 103 degrees, the heat a white sheen on the houses and the asphalt cul-de-sac. His son Zachary and Zachary’s friend David Nichols were playing on a plastic slide hooked up to a garden hose in the front yard of David’s house. He left his briefcase in the driveway and started walking toward them, knowing that he would get his suit pants wet when Zachary came running over. Susie and Carol must have been inside Carol’s house in the air-conditioning. He would say hello and then he would go back home and change into his bathing trunks and he and the boys would splash around in the plastic pool in the backyard. That was what he wanted to do. It seemed remarkable, after getting out of that car on the day the Goldwater letter arrived, that this was what he wanted to do.

  Acquanetta

  7

  October 3, 1971—about a month after Warren had flown to Tachikawa, Japan, to present the board members of CMS with photographs, a fact sheet, and a preliminary grid of Jack Ross’s acreage of “green, rolling hills” at Chino Grande, outside Seligman. He had also brought a promotional letter from Senator Barry Goldwater, in gratitude for which CMS had offered Warren the loan of their spokesman, the actor Cesar Romero, who stood now under a white pavilion set up outside the clubhouse at Verde Lakes, greeting a kind of reception line of thirty or forty prospective buyers who had just arrived in a fleet of vans from Phoenix.

  On their way to meet the former movie star and current supporting player on TV’s Alias Smith and Jones, the prospective buyers could help themselves to a paper cup of fruit punch laid out on the buffet table covered in a plastic cloth held in place by clothespins. Cesar Romero shook their hands, bowing slightly forward at the waist, courtly, Latin. Many of the people in line remembered him from his days as a romantic lead, dancing with Carmen Miranda or Betty Grable. They remembered him as Hernan Cortez with a silver breastplate and flowing sleeves in Captain from Castile. They were flattered to meet him, and his presence, along with the pennants and picnic tables and chairs, made the empty streets of Verde Lakes, some of them nothing more than dirt ruts, some still not even bladed by the bulldozer, look like the early growth of what would someday be a functioning town.

  “He’s worth the thousand dollars,” said Harry Gillis of CMS, who had flown over from Japan that week to see Verde Lakes and Chino Meadows and Jack Ross’s Chino Grande, which he would do tomorrow from Ross’s private plane. Gillis was a handsome balding man with sideburns and an easy California smile. He had an enthusiasm for sports cars. He was bright, genial, but when Ed asked him a few token questions about his family, there emerged a murky picture of a wife and son back in Seattle whom he never saw. Money did odd things to people, made them migrate to Japan, but perhaps Gillis’s move hadn’t been for the money but for the distance. Gillis was an Irish name, Ed thought—Catholic, no possibility of divorce.

  Cesar Romero made a blank face and bent down low to hear what an older woman was trying to communicate to him, her hand on his biceps, raising her chin, a white sun visor coming down over her forehead and large black-lensed sunglasses covering her eyes. She was a kind of woman Ed recognized: opinionated, not just unwilling but incapable of hearing anything that did not fit into her line of argument. She didn’t realize that Romero knew even less than she did about Verde Lakes or Chino Meadows or the investment potential of real estate in Yavapai County.

  “A thousand dollars a day,” Ed said. “I guess basically he gets paid to feel ridiculous for a couple of hours.”

  “Acting. Just a different kind of acting,” said Gillis.

  “We can go inside the clubhouse and have a real drink if you want.”

  “No, I’m all right. I haven’t seen one of these sales promos in a long time. I’m getting kind of a kick out of it.”

  Ed looked over toward a couple standing in line. “It’s always geared toward the wife,” he said. “The pitch, I mean. It’s usually the wife who makes all the decisions. Either that, or she can’t stand it when her husband looks like a cheapskate. The salesman hands her a notepad and he says, ‘Write this down. You’ll want to remember these figures.’ It gets her used to following instructions. On the other hand, it makes her feel like she’s important, the one in charge. The longer the husband says nothing, the more she starts to get interested in the whole project. You’d be surprised how much emotion these guys create. Anxiety. Humiliation. Then they say, ‘Isn’t it beautiful out here? Don’t you just love the fresh air?’ I’ve actually seen them sometimes—they’ll bend down and pick up a handful of dirt and talk about how beautiful it is, how there’s nothing like good, clean desert soil. The husband is standing there with this look on his face like his feet hurt. By then, the salesman looks like Tony Bennett compared to him. That’s the way these deals work a lot of the time.”

  Gillis sniffed a little laugh and looked down at his shoes. “We do it mostly with brochures,” he said, “brochures and promises.” He looked around with something like a poetic squint. “Does it get very hot here in the summer?”

  “It gets pretty hot. Not like Phoenix, but hot. In the hundreds.”

  “And what about Chino?”

  “Chino’s the same.”

  “There’s trees, a water table. It’s not like it’s the sandy wastes.”

  “We’ll take a drive over there after lunch. It looks like this. Trees, hills, more lush than maybe you’d expect.”

  “You’re talking about Chino Meadow.”

  “Chino Meadows. With an s. I’ve never seen the other one, Chino Grande, but you’ll see that tomorrow with Ross.”

  At a pair of large charcoal grills, a few cooks were flipping hamburgers onto plastic trays. The air smelled like burnt meat, lighter fluid, smoke. Pennants flapped in the breeze—white and green and yellow. There was a long table set up with ketchup, pickle relish, yellow mustard, bags of buns, and, still in their plastic crate, large bottles of Mr Pibb. Cesar Romero, as if dreading the imminence of this lunch, came over to say good-bye. He appeared unrealistically clean and pressed, his collar still bright white, his suit jacket buttoned. With his white hair and mustache, he looked not like the Joker he played on Batman but like an anchorman or a game show host. It was surprising, nevertheless, how strongly his fame asserted itself. He wore it like a glass panel through which everyone on the other side appeared amusing, harmless, neutral.

  “I must go,” he said. “Many thanks. It was a pleasure to meet you both.”

  “Thank you, Cesar,” said Gillis.

  “Thank you,” said Ed.

  Romero shook their hands. “This is very interesting. This development will be for trailers?”

  “Some mobile homes, some houses,” said Ed.

  “Well, I wish you nothing but the best,” Romero said, backing away. “We say in Spanish, !Te la comiste, hoy!” He looked at the sky, breathing in through his nose. “It means, ‘You ate it!’ ” He smiled. “But really it means, ‘You’ve had a great success.’ Really, a great success today. !Un triunfo grande!”

  He walked away, and Ed and Gillis didn’t say anything.

  “He actually thinks we’re stupid,” Gillis finally commented.

  “I guess it would be hard to blame him.”

  “He bats for the other side, you know. That’s basically an open secret.”

  Ed’s secretary, Sharon, brought them over some plates of food once the prospective buyers had finished helping themselves. There was very little you would want to eat. Sharon herself had found some cottage cheese, but she would never have considered offering that to a man, so Ed and Gillis did their best with the gray hamburgers and the sweet beans in their puddles of sauce.

  “Maybe I’ll take you up on that drink after all,” said Gillis.

  They headed over toward the clubhouse. The sales team was offering door prizes to a dozen of the prospective buyers. The prizes were S & H Green Stamps, sheets of little stamps you pasted into a book and redeemed for merchandise. The winners of the stamps were also given blu
e ribbons—the salesmen pinned the ribbons onto their shirts, as if bestowing an honor, smiling at their own guile. The winners had been selected not at random but after the salesmen had had a chance to observe what they were like. The blue ribbons indicated easy marks—“mooks,” in the parlance, “Mickey Nothings,” “Johnny Zeroes.” These were the ones you tried to sell not one but four or five lots, working out a financing plan, tying their heads in knots with complicated discounts and plans for resale with an eighteen-month option.

  “I think you can see why we’re interested in getting out of the retail side,” Ed said.

  Gillis nodded as he followed Ed into the shade of the clubhouse. He was chewing his burger and looking at his fact sheet for Chino Grande, holding it awkwardly beneath his paper plate. “You think we’re better off just driving to Grande today after we see Meadow?” he said. “That way I could skip the plane ride tomorrow with Ross, maybe catch an earlier flight back to L.A.”

  Ed shrugged. “Honestly, I wouldn’t know how to get there. I think they’re still working on the road.”

  It came to him as they stepped into the clubhouse: the emptiness of Gillis. The sales meetings, the dinners in hotel rooms, the auditoriums, the airports. It was always better not to think too much about the lives of other men, especially those you didn’t know very well, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Gillis with a Scotch in a plastic cup, flying to California from Japan, then on to Phoenix—his toilet kit, his Robert Ludlum novel—all so that he could report back on this sales program in the desert. Six thousand acres at two hundred per brings you to a million two plus commissions and fees. He realized then that Gillis was not crooked but perhaps so bored and apathetic that he was in his own way a kind of risk.