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 driveway. 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.