He still didn’t think he’d done anything wrong, so when McCracken found him, he decided to cooperate. He should have trusted Tony Serra before he trusted Lonzo McCracken.
There was nothing in Ed’s past that could have prepared his father, Lou, for what he had to tell him now. The world was no longer recognizable. His father wore a blue golf sweater and polyester pants and he seemed to barely listen, his hand on the recliner’s armrest, head slightly bowed. Disgust, then quiet. Maybe not even disgust, just incomprehension. Then it was as if it hadn’t happened. As if the money for Talley had never existed. They never talked about it again.
Warren eased into the pool, grimacing in the sun’s glare as he looked down at the steps beneath the water’s surface. He moved gingerly in, the water rising to his waist, an aging man alone on a Wednesday afternoon, his breasts and shoulders beginning to sag. He ducked down into an awkward crouch, shivering a little, then moved forward, rowing with his arms.
His problem now was his own fatigue. Since last June, almost four months ago, not a day had gone by without his name appearing in the paper attached to the words “bribery” or “land fraud” or “organized crime.” It required energy to always say “no comment,” to put up a bland front that was not just a matter of pride but of physical safety. He felt himself becoming vulnerable to his own ego, his own mystique. It was as if he were vying with his son-in-law, Gale, and his son, Ned Jr., in some unannounced contest of vitality. He couldn’t stop it with Charlotte — her crooked teeth, the sheen of stubble on her calves when she came out of the pool. Charlotte had a big mouth, always laughing too loud, breaking her wineglass, flirting with someone’s kid in the middle of a fund-raiser. There would be tears from Barbara, gossip added to the gossip. He and Charlotte would meet the next afternoon for margaritas at the Embassy Hotel. They were the actions of someone who was already starting to lose. He saw this but couldn’t stop.
Tony Serra, eight to ten years in prison. Warren’s old friend and partner Bill Steuer, dead of carbon monoxide in his own garage. Seven officers and employees of Great Southwest convicted, two of them sentenced to jail time, all put there by James Cornwall. Warren had known Bill Steuer since the 1940s, when they had put together their fake Broadway play, The Happiest Days. He and Steuer had celled together in Sing Sing. Every day there was another article about Sing Sing, about the Talley bribes, the loan to George Brooks. Every day he waited for it to balloon into a federal case.
He got a call from his lawyer, John Flynn, that afternoon, September 25. Five months of hearings and now they were coming after him for something so dubious and minor that it seemed like a ruse. He’d given a deposition last summer to the county grand jury looking into Great Southwest, then he’d given another deposition to the U.S. attorney. The two statements had inconsistencies. Moise Berger was claiming this constituted perjury. He claimed this even though he knew the statements were made in two different venues and were mutually inadmissible.
“Perjury,” Warren said. “They’ll get me for jaywalking next.”
“It’s chickenshit stuff, for the newspapers. Just go through the motions and I’ll try to keep the cost down,” his lawyer said.
He watched Charlotte move across the dark room through the crowd, her hair like a tattered wig, bare shoulder blades in the halter dress. The red-lit lounge insinuated an outflare of blood. Amyl nitrite, methedrine, cocaine. Chickenshit stuff, perjury, but they were coming for him. He started thinking about someone like Dominick DiFranco with thirteen hundred acres in Yavapai County. That was the way things were moving: an alliance.
Charlotte entwined her way around John Adamson’s arm at the doorway of the Happy Garden, a swinger and lesbian bar on Indian School Road. Adamson was neuter to her, he knew, one of the big guys who could be counted on to pretend it was nothing, an older brother figure. Adamson drank a quart of vodka a day and sold stolen jewelry out of the trunk of his wife’s car and occasionally he worked a shift at places like the Happy Garden, one of the places Ned Warren ran with Ned Jr. and Gale Nace. Adamson wore two-tone shoes and tinted glasses, even indoors and at night. He bowed his head and made the faintest gesture toward a sheepish grin, and Charlotte banged her open palm against the lapel of his leather coat, confident that she saw right through him, so out of it she didn’t remember she’d been writing him bad checks for the past three months. The checks were his insurance against Warren — that was why he never said anything. If the bad checks ever fell into the wrong hands, then Charlotte would end up having to answer a lot of questions from Lonzo McCracken. For example, how did she get her job at the Happy Garden? Answer: Ned Warren had gotten her the job. How could Ned Warren get her a job at a bar owned by Dennis Kelly? Answer: Ned Warren was the person who actually owned all of Dennis Kelly’s bars. Was it Mr. Warren who ordered the monthly payments to John Adamson’s company, Parking Control Systems? Yes. And what services did John Adamson’s company provide?
You firebombed a bar with dynamite, or C-2 or C-4 in an amber-colored cylinder with a valve built into the side for the twelve-volt cap. You could firebomb the Happy Garden with a few of these cylinders slotted right into the ends of Dennis Kelly’s tiki torches, but Little Huey’s was in a black neighborhood, so Adamson and Carl Verive used ordinary Molotov cocktails. Maybe the Panthers did it. Black neighborhood, white owner, the Kellys an old Phoenix family. They knew going in that there would be no police investigation anyway, beyond the first perfunctory report for the insurance.
Verive held the trunk door open with his extended hand, squinting down into it, then slammed it shut on the wadded, gasoline-smeared towels. He weighed two hundred and thirty-five pounds and he had slicked-back hair and a face like Johnny Cash, thick sideburns almost down to his jaw, the long points of his shirt collar hanging out over his jacket lapels. In the trunk was a length of steel cable with taped grips, covered with blood and hair. Adamson had seen it before. That was Carl Verive. It was through Carl that he had met all the other Chicago people — the Pedotes, the DiFrancos, Paul Schiro, Old Man Kaiser. You came into the darkness of the bars and there was always a glass full of red plastic cocktail straws, hushed lighting on the bottles. The Ivanhoe, the Phone Booth, the Scotch Mist, Rudy’s. Adamson had watched them evolve, watched people like Carl Verive and his friends slowly take them over.
“Honey’s first bar,” he said, when they were back in the car.
“Who’s Honey?” Verive said.
“Honey is Dennis Kelly. I told you that.”
Little Huey’s was barely on fire, but the windows were smashed in and there would be smoke damage. Adamson took a sip of vodka.
“Honey,” said Carl Verive.
“It’s what Warren calls him. You never heard that?”
Verive didn’t look at him. He had settled into his seat, was waiting for Adamson to shut his door before he started the car. He stretched his arm out the opened window.