Zachary Lazar

by Evening's Empire

  “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.

  “It’s nothing serious,” Ed told Lou after dinner. “Just some nonsense with the new tax laws. We have to move some money around. The usual song and dance with the IRS.”

  His father wasn’t looking at him. He was looking at the sealed envelope addressed to L & B Realty.

  “Just cash the check and bring it to Ned’s,” Ed said. “He’ll take care of it from there.”

  He willed the scene into normalcy by simply watching his father, not saying anything until the strangeness passed.

  The show of weakness, the show of qualms. There was the way Ed had stood at the window, as if he couldn’t look Warren in the eye. There was the concentration on his face as he considered what Warren really meant by the loan to Kieffer. He thought about it for a long time afterward. He thought about James Cornwall talking to McCracken and he thought about the impasse with CMS, about James Kieffer bringing the news that Chino Grande was an illegal subdivision.

  It was $650. It was nothing. He saw that if he stood on principle, then everyone would have no choice but to turn against him—Warren, Cornwall, Kieffer, Talley, possibly several others he didn’t even know about yet.

  “I think you should wash your own money from now on,” Warren had told him, when he’d finally capitulated. “I don’t think you want my help with that anymore. I think it would be better for you if you handled the money for Talley on your own.”

  The author as a newborn with his father and grandfathers, Ervin Berman (left) and Louis Lazar (right)

  Lou Lazar left the bank with the envelope of cash and got back into his car. He put the $200 in the glove box and started the ignition and drove slowly to the office building on Central Avenue. It was Tuesday, March 7, 1972. He had never heard of J. Fred Talley, had no idea what the $200 was for. The office building had an elevator even though there were only three floors, and on floor three you could have been in a dental complex: a gray carpeted hallway with freshly painted graphic designs on the walls, windows hung on the inside with white venetian blinds and stenciled in black with the names of the businesses. When the secretary let Lou into Warren’s office, Warren was on the phone. He didn’t hang up, just raised his eyebrows, his hand over the receiver, and indicated that Lou could leave the envelope on the desk.

  “Fence-posting.” “Hanging paper.” Selling land to a stranger who was using a false name, or selling the same land to two or three different people in different states. Manufacturing contracts and then retailing the mortgages to still another person through a chain of corporations. These were some of the procedures Lonzo McCracken had learned about in the past year from Tony Serra.

  Congratulations on your investment program with Western World Development, official broker of the Great Southwest Land and Cattle Company.

  In a volatile market, mortgage securities are your safest, smartest bet for the future.

  Lots are going fast in our scenic Beaver Valley subdivision.

  Mr. and Mrs. Craig from Hannibal, Missouri. Mr. and Mrs. LaMotte from Utica, New York. Mr. and Mrs. West from Burnsville, Minnesota. They’d been coming to McCracken’s office for the past month or so with their paperwork in accordion files, their fear like resentment in their eyes, telling him the same story they had now recited three or four times to different, unhelpful officials. Two quarter-acre lots near Wilcox, no deed ever sent, just tax forms and a payment booklet. Eleven payments made, then the mortgage reassigned to something called the Bemis Corporation, then the news that there was no deed, not even a lot, or maybe there were three buyers for the same lot, all of them still responsible for the payments, the checks due each month to Bemis or First Bank of Michigan or Spectrum Enterprises or the Franklin Bank of Texas. McCracken would take down their statements on a carbon form. They had written letters, the buyers would tell him: to the land companies, to the Real Estate Department, to the attorney general, to HUD. Did they have copies of these letters? No, they had not thought to make copies of the letters.

  James Cornwall sat in the coffee shop, looking annoyed by some mild physical pain. He wore a linen suit with a tie and matching pocket square. He had ordered the steak sandwich, but he wasn’t eating it and it sat before him as if that had been his intention all along. “What did Serra tell you?” he asked.

  McCracken lowered his gaze, then looked Cornwall in the eye. “He said he had permission to turn Warren in. That was the phrase he us
ed. I guess he meant permission from who he works for.”

  Cornwall looked across the restaurant, his eyes steady, sightless, his mouth a little open. They had always joked that Serra was “mini-Mafia,” but it had always been a joke.

  McCracken opened his hand beside his plate. “I’m trying to help you,” he said. “I need a copy of the books. That’s the only way we can go forward.”

  “I can’t do that. You know I can’t do that.”

  “Then I’ll get a warrant.”

  “I need to talk to you,” Cornwall said, standing in the doorway of the bedroom with his suit jacket still on, his unknotted tie around his neck. His wife lay in bed with the ten o’clock news on. He had talked to McCracken again—she knew and didn’t want to discuss it anymore. She scratched the back of her neck, watching President Nixon campaign.

  “He said he wants a copy of the books,” Cornwall said. “He needs proof. I told him I couldn’t do it—if I did that, he’d have me in a corner.”

  She moved her hand as if to brush something off the blanket. “So then we’re back where we started.”

  “I was thinking I’d like to get out of Phoenix,” he said, clearing his throat. “I’d like us to move back to Eugene.”

  Her eyes reacted to the TV, squinting or flinching, then going blank again, her mind back on what they were discussing. “How are we going to do that?”

  “I’d need to think about it. But I’m going to be more valuable to them in a year or two. They’re going to need me as a witness. They’re not going to worry about whether I ran off or not.”

  She didn’t look at him. What had sounded firm and even reasonable when he was saying it now revealed itself as stagey, absurd.

  He shook his head, walking away.

  He had been worse than a fool, but he’d never thought he’d done anything wrong. There was that moment in the coffee shop when he’d finally understood that Tony Serra was not just stealing from him, but that Serra could put him in jail or even have him killed. He had not known how it had happened at first, thinking that the buyers were just defaulting—that they were people on fixed incomes, old people, people who’d got in over their heads. It had taken him a long time to realize that his own salesmen had been manufacturing worthless contracts—not only Serra but others. The banks and finance companies were calling in the debts that he had personally guaranteed—three million dollars in loans he had personally guaranteed. For months now, they’d been offering less and less for his paper. But if he wanted to keep the company alive long enough to try to fix the problem, he had no choice but to keep selling the paper.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Warren always said. “It’s my money we’re talking about, too. I’ll fire the pricks.”

  It was true, he would fire the salesmen. Cornwall would watch him do it, Warren blunt but somehow also genial even then. But it was Warren who would hire the replacements. It took Cornwall a long time to really believe that Warren held him in such utter contempt: the cracker from Eugene, the rube with the Baptist face. You trusted people. You trusted them longer than you would have imagined. It took Cornwall a long time to really believe that Warren had never cared about how the sales got made, as long as they got made, as long as Warren got paid his monthly disbursement.

  There was always more land. There was always a whole state of sunlit, empty land that you bought for $30 or $40 an acre, then sold for twenty or thirty times that. There was always the hope that by selling more land you could begin to cover your losses, a conviction you held more stubbornly as it became less and less true.

  He remembered the night he’d brought home the white Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow. He couldn’t believe it was in the garage. It had a phone in the backseat, and on special occasions he’d hire one of the office boys to put on driver’s livery and act as his chauffeur.

  St. Patrick’s Day—the first time Lonzo McCracken ever saw Warren, standing at the bar at Navarre’s restaurant a little after two o’clock in the afternoon. Warren was staring down at his memo pad, smoking, unmindful of the green tinsel and the paper shamrocks hanging from the ceiling above him. McCracken wore a hunter’s tan shirt beneath his sport coat, a perfunctory striped tie. He held at his waist three small notebooks bound together by three thick rubber bands. When he introduced himself, Warren appraised him slowly, exhaling from his cigarette.

  “I had the girl hold a table,” he said, putting the cigarette out in the ashtray. “Why don’t we sit down.”

  They walked over to the hostess stand and Warren stood watching the girl come over, his hands in his pockets. The lunch crowd was businessmen with their jackets off, women at separate tables who weren’t these men’s wives but were the same kind of women as their wives—docents at the museums, iced tea and chef salad and French onion soup. Warren smiled at one of them, pulling in his upper lip and softening his eyes. He stopped and chatted with a man in an open-neck sport shirt, Warren’s hand on the man’s shoulder, the hostess and McCracken not looking at each other, both knowing they were being made to wait. When they finally sat down, Warren spread his napkin on his lap and stared at the detective.

  “I come here quite a bit,” he said. “As you can see. Not usually with a cop.”

  McCracken put his three rubber-banded notebooks on the table and kept his hand on top of them. “I appreciate you meeting me.”

  “Well, that’s fine as long as lunch is on you.”

  He didn’t smile, but he was less abrasive after that, more soft-spoken than McCracken would have expected, East Coast, urbane. What he said had been prepared in advance but was delivered in such a casual tone that it suggested an unspoken, obvious understanding between them. He was a businessman in the community, he began, a cliché that produced something like a mild sleepiness, a difficulty in paying attention. His friends were some of the most important people in the city. He was a supporter of the Phoenix Symphony Orchestra. It didn’t make him happy to be talking to a cop in a public place. It didn’t make him happy to be the subject of controversy. His past had been aired in the newspapers several years ago and he didn’t relish the idea of going through all that again. He had loaned James Cornwall money. He had loaned Tony Serra money. It had been a mistake in both cases, but he had loaned a lot of people money, he had set up a lot of people in business, he had made a lot of people very wealthy. What he was asking for now was a few weeks to pull some money out of Great Southwest, and then he would speak with McCracken at greater length about all he knew.

  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 sp
ate 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

  Five 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.