“One of my stand-outs,” Warren said. “One of the brightest young men around, Ed Lazar. He works with me over at Consolidated Mortgage.”
Rosenzweig looked up at Ed with the delight of someone whose expectations of people had not diminished since childhood. There was the impeccably cut white hair, the mild cologne. You couldn’t help feeling magnified by his attention, reassured by the dryness and warmth of Harry Rosenzweig’s hand.
Harry Rosenzweig
The years of his early family life — happy, especially happy in hindsight. A son and a daughter, almost four and almost two, Zachary and Stacey. A ranch house full of noise, laundry, the cleaning woman on Wednesdays, Susie tired, needing a vacation. Ed faded in and out sometimes, thirty-eight years old but feeling now that thirty-eight was hardly old at all, even forty was hardly old at all. He would leave the office for a few hours in the afternoons, go for a drive, not telling anyone where, just disappearing. At night, he and Ron Fineberg still went out for drinks. Ed “could sweet-talk any beautiful woman,” Ron would say later. He was not a talker but he had the smile, could flirt without saying very much, letting the silence or a few simple words cast everything in a comic, uncertain, suggestive light. He slipped in and out of moments, all of them real but transient, floating, maybe a little boring if he stayed too long.
To be not just eager, talented, “bright”—instead, to be poised. There was something compelling about Warren, even now, because Ed could see the limitations of his own scruples. The scruples could seem fussy, weak, collegiate. At times, they seemed to constitute a kind of failure.
Blackbrush, shadscale, greasewood. Dark land under clouds — borax, potash, salt. A sudden rain washed down cliffs. Flood pools formed, flood pools dried out. A sequence of events unfolded without witnesses, without meaning.
At Durant’s restaurant, you parked in the back and went in through the kitchen, past the line cooks, the waiters hustling by in their half tuxedos. They carried trays of large white plates covered by lank sirloins, chops, strip steaks, potato on the side with a thick slice of buttered toast. Ed and Warren had just made a down payment on two thousand acres in Oklahoma and now CMS had come to discuss what could be done with the Jack Ross acreage at Chino Grande. Ed had arrived late, so he wasn’t at the bar when Warren had first joined up with CMS’s Robert Kaplan and Harry Sperber, there in place of Harry Gillis. They were all sitting at the table now with their menus and drinks. James Kieffer of the Real Estate Department was also there, a man in his thirties with slicked-back hair and sideburns that cut down across his cheeks. He was Talley’s chief investigator. He had just broken the news that Chino Grande was not a legal subdivision, that there was in fact no such thing as Chino Grande. He looked impotent and stern, sitting upright in his plaid sport coat, a clerk with a blotched face, a salary in the low teens.
“I told him we’re not here to sue anybody,” Kaplan told Ed before Ed even sat down. “We want to work something out, that’s all.”
Ed put a Time magazine down on the table. On the cover was Liza Minnelli in a black hat, a black leotard, mascara. “Well, that’s good you’re not going to sue,” he said. “That would make for an awkward lunch.”
No one laughed. They had just been through this already, and Warren had bluntly told them that if they sued he would just deny everything.
“I spoke to Ross,” Kieffer said. “He said to call his lawyer. That was all he had to say.”
“I’m not surprised,” Ed said a little sarcastically. “Did he offer to show you around in his plane?”
“I’m just trying to clear this up.”
“I understand. The fact is he won’t talk to us either.”
Kieffer was sitting next to Warren, who was eyeing the magazine cover.
“ ‘The New Miss Show Biz,’ ” he said. “I don’t understand the appeal of Liza Minnelli.”
“She looks like a boy,” suggested Kaplan.
“I see,” Warren said. “Though not really.”
Their booth curved around three sides of the table, so no one’s back was to the room. There were white tablecloths, red wallpaper embossed with silk, as in a bordello. Kieffer looked mistrustfully at his silverware, as if he were already anticipating the arrival of the check and his inability to pay his share. His presence aroused suspicion. The lunch went badly. The proposals Ed made — an exchange for lots in other subdivisions, a discount on the price — met with skeptical shrugs. We’re not here to sue anybody, Kaplan had said. But what he really meant was there was no incentive for CMS to do anything but wait for their money back.
In the parking lot, Warren handed Ed a slip of paper, a tear-off form for telephone messages. It gave the date and time and the name of the caller: Detective Lonzo McCracken, Phoenix police.
James Kieffer stood watching beside Warren, perhaps more aware of what was happening than Ed was.
“Lonzo McCracken,” Warren said to Ed. “Odd name. I’ll have my lawyer call Mo Berger, the county prosecutor. See what he has to say about Lonzo McCracken.”
Ed looked down at his car keys. “I don’t want to be hearing this.”
“That makes two of us,” said Warren.
“What do you want from me?”
“I want you to not worry. I’ll meet with this cop and I’ll straighten him out. I’ll have my lawyer call our friend Moise Berger. That will be that.”
“Ross went to the police,” Ed said.
“It wasn’t Ross. You think Ross wants the police involved?”
“Then, who was it?”
“It’s pretty obvious. It was Jim Cornwall.”
Ed got into his car. He placed his briefcase and the Time magazine on the passenger seat and put his key in the ignition, not looking at anything but the dashboard, the steering wheel, the rearview mirror. Jim Cornwall. If Jim Cornwall was talking to the police, it meant that things were even worse than he’d realized. It meant that Great Southwest was facing not just bankruptcy but criminal charges. It meant that Warren’s life was about to be scrutinized by the police, and by extension so was his own.
Every time he’d made a payment to Talley, he had strengthened his resemblance to James Cornwall. Every payment of his to Talley had been matched by a similar payment from Cornwall, channeled through the same chain of Warren-controlled corporations. Every payment to Talley had made it more difficult to argue that there was any real difference between Consolidated Mortgage and Great Southwest, between himself and James Cornwall.
I’ll have my lawyer call Mo Berger, the county prosecutor.
Our friend Moise Berger.
12
The office smelled like air freshener, beneath the scent the faint sourness of cigarettes. Warren started to hand the envelope across his desk, then drew it back, smiling, as if to say maybe the photographs were inside, maybe they weren’t. Maybe it didn’t matter. Probably if he had the photographs he wouldn’t be passing them over his desk in the middle of the afternoon, as a kind of joke, to the county prosecutor’s own investigator, George Brooks. But perhaps the mere rumor of their existence would be enough to keep Moise Berger in their circle.