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 awestruck 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.
5
A kind of conjuration.
I am writing this sentence on June 21, 2007, almost exactly thirty-eight years after the night of the moon landing. I did not know the story of that night until a few months ago. Nine months ago, I knew almost nothing about my father at all. I am working from a stack of index cards, a time line filled out with notes taken in libraries and government agencies and in the room of my house that I use as a study. I have a banker’s box full of newspaper clippings, depositions, grand jury testimony, office correspondence. I have the interviews I did with journalists and former police officers, with my parents’ friends and relatives, with my mother. I have anecdotes like the one about the fortune-teller, the one about the night of the moon landing. I am trying to imagine how it all happened, trying to dramatize the scattered bits of information, to understand the nuances. I don’t know if anyone who knew my father will recognize this portrait I’m making. This portrait is crucially distorted by the way his life ended. When his friends and loved ones knew him, they didn’t know the future — the future had not yet distorted his image. I am adhering to the final shape, the unbeautiful shape of what happened, reconstructing an old mosaic with only a few of the tiles, letting the fragments suggest what might have been in the missing spaces.
Verde Lakes, Yavapai County, 2006
. . .
By the time I got to the exit to Camp Verde, it was snowing so hard that I could hardly discern the road from the empty land on either side of it. I didn’t know quite where I was going. The wipers were moving at full speed. There was a road called General Crook’s Trail, and I followed this road into an Old West town where the buildings, as much as I could see of them, were outsize brick or wood facades in front of rough, windowless boxes. There was a café, a title company, a store. I drove up and down the main street and finally pulled into the parking lot of the title company. It was snowing even harder by then, the sky getting darker, the day seeming to end already though it was not yet noon. A secretary told me there might be someone at the chamber of commerce who could give me a better map of the area. She knew where Verde Lakes was, but her directions were confusing. The chamber of commerce was staffed by an elderly woman with an odd, comical way of speaking that turned out to be unintentional. She wore a vest and owlish glasses and moved around in a determined way, finally providing me with a flier that had a vague map with stars on it for the area’s restaurants and motels. It wasn’t surprising to hear her story of dropping everything to come to this part of Arizona. She told me that she knew some people who lived in Verde Lakes. She said it was a shame what had happened there. The land, she said, had been sold as a retirement village to air force pilots stationed in Japan. Some of the lots were in a flood zone. She told me there’d been a terrible flood several years ago, in the 1980s, in which a woman died, pets were abandoned, garbage was left strewn in the limbs of trees. “I remember when that was still a ranch and I went up to Ned Warren and I asked him what he was doing building on a flood plain,” she said. “He told me the water never gets that high.”