The office of Western World looked more like the back room of a store: a few plastic chairs against a bare wall, a calendar from an auto parts wholesaler, a carpet remnant on the linoleum floor, a card table with three newspapers from the previous month. The girl behind the desk wore a crochet dress and had long, straight hair and hoop earrings. She did not end her phone conversation, even when McCracken took off his jacket, revealing his holstered gun. She parted her lips a little, half looking, half concentrating on the voice on the line.
“No one’s in yet,” she said, her hand covering the receiver. “You could try back in half an hour.”
“It’s ten o’clock,” McCracken said. “Our appointment was for nine-thirty.”
“Then they must be late. They’re usually here by ten.”
Bouley stood with his feet apart, hands in a bridge before his waist. McCracken nodded his head, looking at the floor.
“Tell Mr. Serra we’ll be waiting for him at the coffee shop across the street,” he said. “The Pullman Pie, it’s called.”
. . .
They sat in a booth near the window and had coffee.
“Serra’s not really anybody,” McCracken said. “He knows a few of the Ivanhoe crowd. Talks a lot.”
“He’s from Cleveland?” asked Bouley.
“St. Louis. He was in the insurance racket there. I don’t know what else he got up to.”
A car pulled into the parking lot — a deliberately Hollywood entrance, complete with squealing tires and a sudden, juddering stop at an angle to the parking lines. The car was a white Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow. McCracken thought, this is how people get killed, by sitting in a coffee shop that turns out to be the imagined set of somebody else’s action movie. He watched the driver step out, a stocky white-haired man in a tan leisure suit. The man stood up straight and jammed a pistol into his waistband. He made sure the gesture was as visible as possible. Then another man got out of the backseat, Tony Serra.
McCracken took a sip of his coffee. When he looked up again, he saw the driver open the restaurant’s glass door with a jangle of bells, Serra behind him, already scanning the tables. He wore a charcoal suit and a shiny green tie with scarlet stripes. When he saw McCracken, his face looked absent. Then he recognized him. He put his hand on the driver’s shoulder and turned his head back toward the door, indicating that he should leave.
He apologized, standing at their booth. He explained that the girl at the desk had forgotten to mention that McCracken and Bouley were detectives — all she’d said was that two men with guns had come by.
“It’s all right,” McCracken said, barely looking at Serra. “I guess her talent is more for answering phones.”
Serra sat down and ordered a coffee. McCracken took out his notebook and pen and on the next blank page wrote a dateline with Serra’s source ID. The waitress brought over the coffee pot and poured into Serra’s cup, then refilled McCracken’s and Bouley’s. McCracken looked at his watch and wrote down the time. They talked for about half an hour.
“Cornwall,” Serra said toward the end. “He’s the one you want to look at first.”
“The southerner,” said McCracken.
“He seems like a southerner. Actually he’s from some cracker town in Oregon. Dig around, you’ll find his signature on twenty, thirty loans — loans to pay off loans. More than a million dollars, maybe more like five.”
McCracken flipped back a few pages in his notebook to an earlier part of their conversation. He had written the words NED WARREN and then a scribble of details. Everyone in the land business, Serra had told him, knew that Ned Warren was behind more than a dozen companies in one way or another. He said that the Mafia’s biggest interest in Arizona at that point was not gambling, not prostitution, not loan-sharking, but the land business. That’s why they’d sent him there from St. Louis ten years ago, Serra said, to find a way into the land business.
Serra saw from across the table the notation about Warren in McCracken’s book. “You’re going to have a hard time getting anywhere with this,” he said.
“Why’s that?”
“Because — you know how this town is. Warren, those people, they’ve got everyone tied in.”
“Who’s everyone?”
“Everyone. The real estate commissioner, Talley. All his investigators. They’ve got the county prosecutor, the attorney general. They’ve probably got Barry Goldwater.”
McCracken paid for the three coffees. Some parts of the story seemed more or less credible, but it was all coming from Tony Serra — the expensive new suit, the fantasist with the breath mints and cologne. At first, McCracken didn’t take it very seriously.
It was almost a year after that conversation — the first week of December 1971—that the complaints began to arrive from Japan. A few servicemen had paid for their lots in cash rather than in installments. They went looking for their titles and deeds, only to find out that no titles or deeds existed. Chino Grande did not exist in any legal sense. Ed was staring fixedly at the pen resting at a slant on his desk.
“Are they still selling over there?” he asked Warren over the phone.
“Well, they’d better not be selling five-acre parcels.”
“I guess I’m wondering, what did you tell them?”
“We’ll get this fixed. They’ll have to get a subdivision approved, but that shouldn’t take long. Talley’s on it. He’s got the heat on Japan, not on us.”
“Where is Ross in all this?”
“Ross doesn’t want to hear a word about it.”
“Did he say it was a subdivision or not?”
“If Ross needs a subdivision approved, he’ll get a subdivision approved. Who do you think got us that letter from Goldwater?”
They hung up. They had close relations with the Real Estate Department. Chino Meadows had been approved in a single day, without anyone even viewing the property. At that point, no one but Ross had actually seen the land at Chino Grande. Ed thought of Talley in his double-knit shirt, of Ross in his white belt, and he told himself that none of this could be very serious. It didn’t seem serious until he went through the ledger and began paying the bills for that month.
In the large stack of checks prepared for his authorization each month, there would always be one made out for $200 to one of Warren’s corporations — Camelback Mortgage, WR Investments, Pacific West Realty — there were several. The checks were prepared by the office manager, Warren’s ex-mistress Donna Stevens, who entered the payments into the Consolidated ledger as broker’s fees. Donna Stevens had set up the ledger herself before Ed had even started at Consolidated, and she had inserted a separate card as a reminder each month to write the check. The recipient companies, rotated by her like specials on a menu, were all controlled by Warren, who had Donna, an officer in all these companies, cash the checks and then deliver the money to him in an envelope. In the business world in Phoenix, it was expected that you would get into a little trouble from time to time, that you would need a favor — that was how business worked, through favors. You would need to approach the men in charge of water rights in Prescott, for example, or the men at the Energy Department who installed gas lines, or the men at the Forest Service who could grant you an easement or a rezoning if you suddenly needed more land. You would buy them a case of Scotch, or take them for a round of golf. People who didn’t smile at this kind of arrangement had no sense of lightness, no sense of humor — they didn’t even quite understand that these things went on. Warren didn’t have to explain this to Ed. Ed could see right away that saying anything about the checks would only make him look hapless.