Her eyes reacted to the TV, squinting or flinching, then going blank again, her mind back on what they were discussing. “How are we going to do that?”
“I’d need to think about it. But I’m going to be more valuable to them in a year or two. They’re going to need me as a witness. They’re not going to worry about whether I ran off or not.”
She didn’t look at him. What had sounded firm and even reasonable when he was saying it now revealed itself as stagey, absurd.
He shook his head, walking away.
He had been worse than a fool, but he’d never thought he’d done anything wrong. There was that moment in the coffee shop when he’d finally understood that Tony Serra was not just stealing from him, but that Serra could put him in jail or even have him killed. He had not known how it had happened at first, thinking that the buyers were just defaulting — that they were people on fixed incomes, old people, people who’d got in over their heads. It had taken him a long time to realize that his own salesmen had been manufacturing worthless contracts — not only Serra but others. The banks and finance companies were calling in the debts that he had personally guaranteed — three million dollars in loans he had personally guaranteed. For months now, they’d been offering less and less for his paper. But if he wanted to keep the company alive long enough to try to fix the problem, he had no choice but to keep selling the paper.
“I’ll take care of it,” Warren always said. “It’s my money we’re talking about, too. I’ll fire the pricks.”
It was true, he would fire the salesmen. Cornwall would watch him do it, Warren blunt but somehow also genial even then. But it was Warren who would hire the replacements. It took Cornwall a long time to really believe that Warren held him in such utter contempt: the cracker from Eugene, the rube with the Baptist face. You trusted people. You trusted them longer than you would have imagined. It took Cornwall a long time to really believe that Warren had never cared about how the sales got made, as long as they got made, as long as Warren got paid his monthly disbursement.
There was always more land. There was always a whole state of sunlit, empty land that you bought for $30 or $40 an acre, then sold for twenty or thirty times that. There was always the hope that by selling more land you could begin to cover your losses, a conviction you held more stubbornly as it became less and less true.
He remembered the night he’d brought home the white Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow. He couldn’t believe it was in the garage. It had a phone in the backseat, and on special occasions he’d hire one of the office boys to put on driver’s livery and act as his chauffeur.
St. Patrick’s Day — the first time Lonzo McCracken ever saw Warren, standing at the bar at Navarre’s restaurant a little after two o’clock in the afternoon. Warren was staring down at his memo pad, smoking, unmindful of the green tinsel and the paper shamrocks hanging from the ceiling above him. McCracken wore a hunter’s tan shirt beneath his sport coat, a perfunctory striped tie. He held at his waist three small notebooks bound together by three thick rubber bands. When he introduced himself, Warren appraised him slowly, exhaling from his cigarette.
“I had the girl hold a table,” he said, putting the cigarette out in the ashtray. “Why don’t we sit down.”
They walked over to the hostess stand and Warren stood watching the girl come over, his hands in his pockets. The lunch crowd was businessmen with their jackets off, women at separate tables who weren’t these men’s wives but were the same kind of women as their wives — docents at the museums, iced tea and chef salad and French onion soup. Warren smiled at one of them, pulling in his upper lip and softening his eyes. He stopped and chatted with a man in an open-neck sport shirt, Warren’s hand on the man’s shoulder, the hostess and McCracken not looking at each other, both knowing they were being made to wait. When they finally sat down, Warren spread his napkin on his lap and stared at the detective.
“I come here quite a bit,” he said. “As you can see. Not usually with a cop.”
McCracken put his three rubber-banded notebooks on the table and kept his hand on top of them. “I appreciate you meeting me.”
“Well, that’s fine as long as lunch is on you.”
He didn’t smile, but he was less abrasive after that, more soft-spoken than McCracken would have expected, East Coast, urbane. What he said had been prepared in advance but was delivered in such a casual tone that it suggested an unspoken, obvious understanding between them. He was a businessman in the community, he began, a cliché that produced something like a mild sleepiness, a difficulty in paying attention. His friends were some of the most important people in the city. He was a supporter of the Phoenix Symphony Orchestra. It didn’t make him happy to be talking to a cop in a public place. It didn’t make him happy to be the subject of controversy. His past had been aired in the newspapers several years ago and he didn’t relish the idea of going through all that again. He had loaned James Cornwall money. He had loaned Tony Serra money. It had been a mistake in both cases, but he had loaned a lot of people money, he had set up a lot of people in business, he had made a lot of people very wealthy. What he was asking for now was a few weeks to pull some money out of Great Southwest, and then he would speak with McCracken at greater length about all he knew.
A man walked into the bar, holding a newspaper, searching the faces, then approached their table. He wore a navy suit and a pale green shirt and a plaid tie. McCracken slowly recognized him. He was the prosecutor Moise Berger’s land fraud investigator, George Brooks.
“A friend of mine,” Warren said, turning. “I think you know each other already.”
McCracken put his menu down, but didn’t stand up. He looked neutrally at Brooks, who blankly extended his hand across the table. Warren lit a cigarette and blew a fine blanket of smoke over the basket of rolls.
“We were just talking about Great Southwest,” he said. “I think you both also know Jim Cornwall.”
Brooks didn’t respond or even seem to hear. He sat down and now he was studying Warren’s menu and he didn’t say a word until they ordered.
McCracken thought of Serra, of their conversation a year earlier in the Pullman Pie. You’re going to have a hard time getting anywhere with this. Warren, those people, they’ve got everyone tied in.
I’ll have my lawyer call Mo Berger, the county prosecutor.
Our friend Moise Berger.
Ed put down the phone. Through the slats of the office blinds, the harsh light of early dusk flared white and orange, then left a violet haze when he closed his eyes. The phone call had been from one of his oldest loan sources, Gene Silver at Talcott Financial. Gene Silver had said that the top brass at Talcott were putting a stop on all land developer applications at this time because of “trepidations on a recent spate of negative publicity about the industry.” Silver said that in Consolidated’s case there were concerns about mortgages held by overseas buyers — soldiers over in Japan or the Philippines who had almost certainly never seen their properties. He reminded Ed that Talcott had lost several thousand dollars recently on land company paper from Arizona firms. He reminded Ed of a recent article in Time magazine about deceptive practices in the land business. It was nothing personal, Silver said, but there was risk aversion, and if the story had made it into Time magazine, then it was hardly news to anyone who followed the industry or had money in it.