Zachary Lazar

by Evening's Empire

  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,

  Enclosed find a copy of promissory note from James Kieffer. Consolidated Acceptance Corporation is assigning one-quarter of the proceeds of this note to Consolidated Mortgage Corporation in exchange for your remittance to Consolidated Acceptance Corporation, in the amount of $650. Period.

  Very truly yours,

  Consolidated Acceptance Corporation,

  N. J. Warren

  The memo was like an image of his own qualms and bad faith.

  He called his lawyer, Phil Goldstein. It was not a good time to be thinking about getting out of the business, but he wanted to discuss what it might cost him to do so anyway.

  “I’m glad you called,” Goldstein said. “I was going to call you. When was the last time you spoke to Ned?”

  “We’re not on the best of terms right now.”

  “Well, that’s fine. That’s just fine. Can I tell you something?”

  “What?”

  “You’re not going to like this. You better sit down for this.”

  It was Goldstein’s habit to get sarcastic just when things were at their least funny.

  “They’ve closed up shop,” Tony Serra told McCracken over the phone. “Cornwall’s gone—disappeared.”

  McCracken stared down at some evidence sheets in their folder. “What do you mean ‘disappeared’?”

  “He left the country or something. No one knows for sure.”

  “When?”

  “Last Friday, they filed for bankruptcy. Kieffer had his guys put everything on hand trucks. They carted it off. They went down and seized the books.”

  “Kieffer?”

  “Jim Kieffer. Talley’s office.”

  McCracken thought of Cornwall sitting in the coffee shop last week, his food untouched, promising that this wouldn’t happen, that he wouldn’t flee.

  He hung up and put his jacket on. He took the elevator down to the parking lot and then he started up Central Avenue in his car, forcing himself to drive slowly, his stomach distended, chest burning. He took a deep breath and let it float up into his head. A good, deep breath and you felt the heat dissipate, a rational distance between yourself and the moment that was about to flare out of control.

  There were cars in the lot on East Camelback—everything looked completely ordinary. In the building’s lobby, the directory still listed Great Southwest Land and Cattle in white letters on the black board. But Serra was right. Almost everyone but Cornwall was still there, but the books had disappeared.

  In the offices of Consolidated Mortgage, the phones rang, they were answered, but the typewriter keys struck only sporadically, thin clicks against the platens, the transistor radio low but somehow impertinent amid the solemnity of closed doors, the men in their emergency meeting. In his office, Ed did some calculations on a yellow pad, using rough figures he knew by heart—salesmen’s commissions, office overhead, roads and utilities, payroll, accounts receivable, accounts payable. He was determining the slimmest margin Consolidated could operate on, now that there would be no more money coming in from AHI, which had just frozen its credit lines. Warren’s hair showed gray bet
ween the dark furrows. You looked at him and saw an investor, nothing more or less stolid than that. He watched Ed, guessing the figure in advance, and Ed put down his pencil, looking not at Warren but at Phil Goldstein, the lawyer, who leaned back with his cigarette drawn behind his head, the kind of gesture a film director might make after finishing a take. Before Goldstein were the folders, laid out on the conference table like tiles—Consolidated Mortgage, Great Southwest, Cochise College Park, Queen Creek, Prescott Valley—all of Warren’s empire, company by company, in each folder the documents showing where each company got its financing. On top of each folder was a mark indicating which company’s paper was still good, which was not, which paper might still be attractive to under-writers like First National Bank or ITT or Westinghouse, now that the land market was collapsing.

  “We can go to about twenty-one percent,” Ed said. “That’s the most we can discount. After that, we’re running a loss.”

  Warren wiped two fingers blearily down his cheek. “We won’t have to go that deep,” he said. “But it won’t hurt to tell AHI we’re going that deep.”

  Goldstein came out of his recumbency. He was a large, bearded man, a blond Jew who could wear suspenders and a silk bow tie because he had played football in college. “You want your stock back,” he said.

  “I want the stock back because it’s still worth something,” Warren said. “Consolidated is worth five million dollars. In a few months, AHI will be worth nothing. Why should we be helping them out?” He twisted the paper wrapper off a lollipop, frowning down as it tore and stuck to the candy.

  “’We will sell paper until such time as AHI can resolve its credit issues,’ ” Goldstein said, as if dictating the letter already. “ ‘We will sell this paper at substantial discount, likely running Consolidated at no profit in this interim period.’ ”

  “Let AHI think about it for a while,” said Warren.

  Ed pushed the yellow pad away from him and looked back over his ledger. He would have to not panic. If they forced this split from AHI, then it would be his problem, not Warren’s. It would be up to him, not Warren, to keep Consolidated running at no profit in this interim period.

  He had signed a personal guarantee on the loan for the Oklahoma land. There would be no easy way to walk away from the business, even if he wanted to.

  McCracken drove up Central Avenue to North 44th Street and parked in the lot of the Real Estate Department, the warrant in his jacket pocket, on the opposite side from his gun. He took the elevator to the fifth floor, then walked the gray linoleum hall with his three rubber-banded notebooks in his hand.

  “I’m here to see Fred Talley,” he said to the girl at the desk.

  There was a man standing behind her, leaned against the wall. He was James Kieffer, McCracken realized. Jacketless, in a red tie and a white short-sleeved shirt, he crossed his arms.

  “If you know where Jim Cornwall is, I need to talk to him,” McCracken said.

  “I have no idea where Jim Cornwall is,” Kieffer said. “Did you try his home?”

  “I need to see the Great Southwest records. Right now. I know they’re here.”

  “Go yell at Berger’s office,” Kieffer said. “They’re the ones that made the call.”

  McCracken took the warrant out of his breast pocket. He smoothed it out slowly on the counter, running the edge of his hand over the piece of paper, then held it up.

  “I’ll call Berger’s office right now,” Kieffer said.

  McCracken followed him back into the maze of desks, the gray steel file cabinets, the coffee urn on its stained plastic card table. Talley’s door was ajar. He looked at McCracken and frowned, his mouth open. He was eating some kind of sandwich out of a paper bag.

  “Do I need to call my lawyer?” he said.

  “I don’t know. You tell me.”

  “You wait right there until I call my lawyer.”

  A $5 million fraud. Not just one bankruptcy but many. Not just Cornwall’s Great Southwest but the companies who financed their paper or did business with them. The land business was a confidence game. The value and sale of real estate is always something of a confidence game, but no one anticipated how quickly everyone could lose confidence. It didn’t matter if you were playing it basically straight. Before long, no one was very interested in the investment potential of Arizona land.

  Ed went through the papers in his desk, the memos and pamphlets and brochures. He thought of Cornwall hearing about the AHI deal last spring, seeing it as a glint of hope. I could use the financing more than you could—you know that. If there’s any way you could put in a word for me, I would appreciate it.

  How unlikely it all was. How unlikely that less than a year later they would both be in so much trouble. How unlikely that AHI would fall apart the exact same week that Great Southwest fell apart. How unforeseeable that his life would end up so resembling James Cornwall’s life.

  The rock face in sunlight. The tufts of dry grass pushing through the sand. The hiss of insects, the sudden flare of grasshoppers. The pointless shades of brown, the grass putting forth its blades.

  When he got home, the house smelled like vinegar. They had been dyeing Easter eggs, Susie and the kids. Zachary was dressed like an Indian brave with black yarn for braids and paint on his face. Stacey was crying in her high chair. It had taken only the length of his drive home from the office for the office to seem like a phantasmagoria. In the space of a day, he had lost everything. He shook his head at Susie, then rolled his eyes, then smiled, mock-scolding her for bringing Easter eggs into their Jewish home. Zachary held one up, his mouth gaping, struggling not to drop it.

  14

  “He had nurtured prostitution and gambling in Phoenix for years,” declared the report. Rosenzweig once owned apartments that were rented out to prostitutes whom he supplied to visiting businessmen. References to him as the “Diamond Man” were found in prostitutes’ “trick books.”

  —Time, March 28, 1977

  April 28, 1975—Members of the Phoenix police intelligence squad invite (Moise) Berger to a meeting in the I-squad office. They confront him with several items discovered during the investigation which they felt might affect Berger’s effectiveness in the Warren prosecution: that he had been dating a secretary who worked for a Warren-connected land company; questions about his lack of prosecution on the Warren-related Arizona Land Co. fraud; a stack of Arizona Land Co. forgeries and fraud evidence that had been “lost” by Berger’s office; a statement attributed to Berger that no Jew would go to jail as long as he was county attorney; and the bribery of Brooks—Berger’s investigator—by Warren aides. Berger denies all.

  —Newsday, March 24, 1977

  This was Phoenix in the late 1960s and ’70s, a caricature of itself. This was the Phoenix in which my father was murdered. In some other kind of city—if there is another kind of city—things might have gone differently. He refused police protection when he finally had to testify against Warren. He refused, I think, because he couldn’t believe that he lived in the kind of city where witnesses were murdered on their way to a grand jury.

  The night I arrived in Phoenix was unusually cold, even for December, and a thick fog hung in the courtyard of my hotel, sent up from the vast, heated swimming pool. It was a slow period for the hotel, and it seemed abandoned that night, spectral, a carefully maintained resort with no other guests but me, stretching out for acres—arcaded walkways, palm trees, fountains, lawns. My room was too big, accentuating the fact that I was there by myself. I ironed some clothes and drank the beers in the minibar. I went through the newspaper clippings: hooded witnesses, judges taking bribes, hit men called “Hopalong” or “One-Eyed Jack.” By the time I went back out into the dark to get another drink at the bar, there was the feeling that it was not 2006 but 1975, that my presence in Phoenix was somehow known. I drove the next morning to Warren’s old house and when I got lost and asked someone for directions, the woman I spoke to was an old friend of one of Warren’s daughter
s. The city had become my hallucination. I found my name on a street sign in Verde Lakes. I found my father’s grave. I found the stairwell in which he was murdered. When the sun came out, it struck everything at a low angle, and it stayed cool, the trees and buildings cast in shadow. I felt unreal and went for a run on the treadmill back at my hotel. There was no one else there. I went back to my room and got ready for dinner.

  The Scottsdale Plaza

  PART FOUR

  171 known gangsters, most of whom have arrived in the past ten years, reside in Phoenix and Tucson alone. They deal in prostitution, illegal gambling and narcotics smuggling; Arizona, in fact, has become the chief corridor for narcotics entering the U.S. now that Mexico has replaced Turkey as the leading source of heroin. The mobsters have gone unmolested, says the report, because “until recently the prosecutorial system has been marked by incompetence, fuzzy or nonexistent law and brazen bribe taking.”

  —Time, March 28, 1977

  15

  REPORT OF INTERVIEW OF

  ROBERT DOUG HARDIN

  CASE: OCI86-0045