Ideas make the world seem safer than it is. He was in serious trouble, but by all accounts he was never afraid.
I have a transcript of his grand jury testimony. It was hard to find — I found it eventually in the Western Historical Manuscripts Collection at the University of Missouri, where there is a collection on Arizona during this time, with two whole files devoted to my father and dozens more devoted to Warren. Like so much else in this story, the history of the transcript is complicated. Being secret, technically it should never have been made public at all. It was made public in a motion filed by James Cornwall’s attorney, Richard Remender, in August of 1975, after Moise Berger revoked his plea agreement with Cornwall. Remender attached the transcript of my father’s testimony to show that Cornwall was not lying about the Talley bribes, as Berger claimed when he threw out the case against Warren and allowed Cornwall to go to prison for three years. Cornwall, testifying from memory, had gotten a few dates wrong on the checks he’d written to Warren for paying off Talley. Berger abandoned Cornwall over this technicality. Eventually, Warren was convicted of the bribes anyway, though not until Moise Berger had had to leave Arizona in disgrace, James Cornwall had been sent to prison, and two other witnesses — Tony Serra and Ed Lazar — had been murdered.
Hours spent in rooms — the male shabbiness of McCracken’s corner of the detectives’ floor, the sterile red spines of the law books on Phil O’Connor’s shelves. You entered the courthouse and walked down a dreary linoleum hallway to a far corner of the building where on the gray wall was a brass sign that said GRAND JURY with a long black arrow beneath the words.
“You’ll do fine,” said O’Connor, who would have to leave Ed at the door. They both stood rather than sat in the waiting room with its folding chairs, wrinkled newspapers and candy wrappers littering the card tables.
Ed walked in the door and found a room like a miniature classroom, ten people seated around a fiberboard table, staring at him. They had soft drinks in wax cups, some object like a key chain or a toothpick they’d been fidgeting with, ballpoint pens. There was a gray-haired man in a short-sleeved plaid shirt, his glasses case held in his breast pocket by a big black flap. Airport faces. Ed had a hard time knowing how to look at them: the young man with the beginnings of a mustache, the salesman with his tie clip, the fat woman in the sleeveless yellow shirt that said Hussong’s Cantina.
The assistant prosecutor, Larry Cantor, drew in a short sniff of breath, a bald man with sensuous lips and an actor’s green eyes. He turned to Ed in his gray suit and said, “You’ll sit over there,” bowing his head a little in sympathy, one Jewish professional addressing another.
Ed sat down in a chair fronted by what could only be described as an old-fashioned wooden school desk. They told him to face the jurors when he answered the questions, not to face Cantor, who sat to Ed’s left with the court reporter, both of them crammed together behind two other similar desks. You had this strange arrangement then of hearing questions from over your left shoulder, but answering them to an audience, who looked at you like an exhibit on a stage. They were only a couple feet away, so close there wasn’t even a microphone.
Three hours in the tiny room, with a couple of recesses. The questions were mostly about Great Southwest — the circumstances of its formation, Warren’s hidden interest in it, the control he had over James Cornwall. Most of the other questions were about the payments to Talley. No questions about Harry Rosenzweig or Barry Goldwater. Nothing significant about CMS and Chino Grande and Jack Ross, though Ed had described the deal in detail to McCracken and even called it a “fraud.” They told him they would like to talk to him again next Tuesday, January 14. Everything he said appeared in summary the next morning in the newspaper under Al Sitter’s byline.
I don’t think they killed him for what he said, or even for what he might have said later, in further testimony. The initial police theory was that they killed him to deter others from testifying. I think perhaps they killed him simply to show they could do it. They were all planning Phoenix — Warren, the DiFrancos, and the Toccos — all of them with their own motives. In the murder of a witness, their interests happened to coincide. They were going to shake the bush and get the lion to jump out. They were pretty sure the lion didn’t exist anyway, and this was a chance to prove it.
Fred Pedote waited in the bushes with the gun in his lap, rain dampening his nylon jacket and the front of his slacks. He’d been drinking and he couldn’t sleep and then he drank some more and drove across town to Lazar’s house on West San Miguel. It was not just raining but cold, more like Chicago than Phoenix — he didn’t think it could be this cold. He was there. It had to do with the use of careful preparation to stop thinking, something like that, or maybe the self-discipline of not feeling drunk when he knew he was drunk.
The only way to leave the house, he thought, was out the front door, then through this courtyard with its cactuses and bougainvillea. The door to the garage was on the courtyard’s west side. Pedote wiped his face and closed his eyes against the rain. He would be sitting there as he sat now, on the ground with his legs out in front of him, his back against the wall, looking straight at that door, night turning into day, the cul-de-sac gradually coming alive around him. The straight-laced Jewish accountant, sunlight on his business suit — shoot him right there in the courtyard as he left for work. Stand up out of the bushes, then kneel beside him on the ground and put three more in his chest. That was the photograph: the victim sprawled on his patio, his briefcase tipped over on its side. In the moment it happened, everything would be different in all kinds of small ways, Pedote’s heart beating too fast, his mind a jangle of color. He would have to walk very calmly around the side of the house to his car in the back alley. Then he’d have to drive out of there in no hurry, past the garbage cans onto San Miguel.
His hands were numb, but he stayed there for a long time. Maybe it was four o’clock in the morning when he got up, staggering a little in the branches and tearing his foot out of the vines. He walked across the puddles on the tile and unlatched the iron gate. It squeaked a little, as it had when he came in, and then it squeaked again as he latched it behind him. That was when the front door opened and a voice, aiming for deepness, asked who was there.
The iron gate at West San Miguel
He was never afraid. He would joke to Susie sometimes that he would not want to meet Ned Junior in a dark alley, but they never took the jokes seriously. He told the man who sold him life insurance that year that he would not pay the extra few cents a month for a double indemnity clause because it would be a waste of money. “Nothing ever happens to accountants,” he said, perhaps a little defiantly. He bought the policy on January 31. He had given his first grand jury testimony on January 9. Nothing had happened to him in twenty-two days. It was the salesman who made the one and only monthly payment — Ed had either forgotten to mail it in or decided he didn’t want the policy after all. It didn’t cost the salesman much to protect the commission on his new sale.