The voice at the other end of the line was deep and assertive, but also guarded, the voice, I imagined, of someone who had made and lost money, a business voice. He recognized my last name. Perhaps that was why he took my call. The more we talked, the more his voice reminded me of another voice I had heard while doing this research. I had discovered, through a complicated set of circumstances, a few taped interviews made by journalists in Arizona in 1976, among them an interview with David Rich, who is now dead but who spoke at length back then about my father. That was how I learned that David Rich had an English accent. I heard him speaking on tape about my father’s story, and the sound of Rich’s voice made the story seem more real, that is to say smaller, less mythic. There was another taped interview with a man named A. A. McCollum, whose voice sounded like the man from American Home Industries. A. A. McCollum bought Consolidated Mortgage in 1973, after Consolidated had separated from AHI. By 1973, Consolidated’s assets had been compromised, and McCollum lost everything. His voice on tape had a certain flatness you hear in California, an accent perhaps transplanted there from the Midwest. It was the same timbre I heard in the voice of the man I talked to now, the man from American Home Industries.
What happened, as the man explained it to me, was that the housing market began to collapse in 1972. The Vietnam War, the rising cost of oil — it was the beginning of what would come to be known as stagflation, the deep recession that would eventually characterize the whole decade. The Fed raised interest rates. Almost immediately, no one could get the financing to build houses. AHI’s stock was traded on the NASDAQ, so all you had to do was look at the morning paper to see how far it had fallen.
The man told me something he’d never told anyone then, not even his wife. On the stroke of midnight one night, the phone rang, and it was Ned Warren calling from Phoenix. Warren said he wanted out of the merger with AHI, he wanted his Consolidated stock back. The man didn’t want to tell me exactly what Warren said after that. He told me that the next time he met Warren, in Phoenix, he brought along an associate who was carrying a.45 beneath his jacket. My father was at that meeting. I asked the man what my father was like and he said that he didn’t talk a lot, he was the quiet one, very much the accountant. It was Warren who made all the decisions.
I asked him if Warren had threatened his life the night of that midnight phone call, but he was not comfortable giving me any more details. It had been thirty-five years. Eventually we talked again, and he told me that for a long time in that period he’d had to park his car in a different spot every day. He said that he never drove without first checking underneath the car for what might be there.
PART THREE
“This is going to be very confusing. It’s confusing in my own mind.”
11
New Year’s Day 1972. They were at the Biltmore Hotel, with its wide lawns under Squaw Peak, having brunch with their wives. There was the gilt ceiling, the pianist playing jazz, the prime rib under its red lamp. On the patio outside, Warren stood against a pillar made of concrete blocks carved to resemble the trunk of a palm tree. He lit a cigarette, his khaki suit seeming to rebuff the sunlight. Ed sat in a deck chair and looked down into his glass of Scotch. Before them both was the Olympic-size pool — the neat ranks of empty chaises longues, the high dive — the pool that had once been Marilyn Monroe’s favorite pool in the world.
“That was the right thing to do, not going to Talley’s,” Warren said. “Those things are always a gray area. When to help, when not to. When to keep your distance.”
Ed turned the glass in his hand, feeling the moisture bleed through the tufted cocktail napkins. Since their dispute, Warren had been neither hostile nor affable, just industrious, sending Ed memos and specs about sites in Arizona, Utah, Oklahoma, Oregon — land everywhere, executives he’d met through the network. They had barely spoken about Talley or Ross or CMS. They had just gone deeper into the fray of business. On paper, they were still worth $5 million.
“You said you had some news about Oklahoma,” Ed said, changing the subject. “Why don’t you tell me about that?”
“It’s beautiful land.” Warren put away his lighter, raising his eyebrows. “It’s like Verde, only there’s more of it. Green, mountains, not hot. We can go up there and look at it sometime. Meanwhile, there’s something under way here. Very high-end land, just north of town, it’s called the Rose Garden. As in ‘Rosenzweig.’ ”
Ed squinted. “Harry Rosenzweig?”
“We have lunch together once in a while, a drink. Harry had some stock we helped him with — ten thousand or so, it was in his wife’s name. This was that Educational Computer deal. You remember that? When we merged Great Southwest with Educational Computer?”
“Harry Rosenzweig.”
“Some of that stock was Harry Rosenzweig’s.”
Harry Rosenzweig happened to be there that morning, seated near the piano, surrounded, as he always was, by a crowd. Ed had seen him as he and Warren left for the patio, a man with white hair and sideburns, a deep tan, the avid gaze of some figure you might spot at Palm Springs or Las Vegas. He was Barry Goldwater’s oldest boyhood friend. He had managed Goldwater’s presidential campaign in ’64, had been a longtime chairman of the Arizona Republican Party. If you read the newspaper in Phoenix, then you knew that in some mysterious way Harry Rosenzweig ran the city. He did not hold office, but placed people there — the county prosecutor, the police chief, the city council, the board of supervisors. They were there because Harry wanted or allowed them to be there. Every public official in Phoenix began his career with a visit to Rosenzweig’s Jewelers, where Harry had his office on the second floor, overlooking the showroom with its glass cases.
“You remember those people at Fuqua?” Warren asked, looking at Ed.
“No. Fuqua?”
“Fuqua Industries. Out in San Diego. Another one of those deals I’m in with Dave Rich.”
Ed didn’t smile, but he had to resist the urge. They still liked each other — that was something he could not deny, even now. David Rich, Harry Rosenzweig, Fuqua, the Rose Garden: Warren explained the whole knotted story, not slowly, not patiently, just putting it out there in hard, clean shapes. They had known each other for fifteen, twenty years, Dave and Harry, had bought some land together called the Rose Garden. Now Warren was going to help them sell it at a good price to a conglomerate called Fuqua Industries in San Diego. If Ed wanted to join them as broker, he could take away about $50,000 for half an hour of having drinks with everyone. It would be a way of making it up to him for all the trouble with Jack Ross and CMS.
New Year’s Day. Sunlight on the blue sky, the purple rock of the peak, people playing golf in midwinter. On the patio, after a few drinks, the Chino Grande deal seemed far away, a minor stumble amid a dozen deals, $100,000 tied up in escrow.
“Harry Rosenzweig,” Ed said.
Warren blew out smoke. “Why don’t we go inside and I’ll introduce you.”
They went back into the dining room, past the tables with their white cloths, the ice sculpture on its silver platform. You have to realize that Ned is Ned, Barbara Warren had whispered earlier, her hand on Ed’s hand, confiding. Ned’s a piece of work, but he always lands on his feet. Always. Now Warren clasped his hands behind his waist as he moved through the room. Ed followed, leaving his napkin-wrapped drink on someone’s half-cleared table. He watched as Warren put his hand on Harry Rosenzweig’s shoulder and Rosenzweig cocked his head a little to better concentrate on what Warren was telling him.