Ed turned down North Central Avenue. On the passenger seat was the morning paper, folded over to another headline about the Warren scandal, centered this time on the county prosecutor’s investigator, George Brooks. It had been more than a month since Ed had given his grand jury testimony. There had been a series of postponements, but tomorrow he was scheduled to go back for his next session. Last night, he’d received a strange phone call from a man who introduced himself as “Weinstein,” a man who claimed to be looking for an accountant for a friend. The call had gotten more and more perplexing and hostile as it went on. Would Ed be in his office tomorrow morning and at what time? Where did he work again? He would be there tomorrow morning? Finally Ed had hung up.
The squeaking gate. The strange phone call. Perhaps there was a reason he’d played tennis yesterday evening instead of looking over the tax returns. Perhaps the reason was that he was trying not to let it get to him.
He crossed Camelback Road and turned left into the parking garage at 3003 North Central Avenue, the First Federal Savings Building. There was a place he liked to park on the second underground level, near Catalina Street, where there were never many cars.
Lee walked over from the stairwell and was standing above him as he opened the door of the Pontiac. He told him to put his briefcase down. He said not to say a fucking word. Then he put the gun to the base of his skull and they walked back toward the stairwell and Lee told him to open the door.
The garage is still there. You can see that my hand was shaking as I took some of the photographs. I parked aboveground on a weekday morning in the middle of rush hour, not much later in the day than he would have arrived. There was sunlight on the level I parked on. I waited outside for an elevator to take me down two floors, holding my camera, feeling conspicuous and morbid while a group of secretaries smiled at me. I was concerned that the garage would not be the same. I was repelled by my desire for it to be the same. At the second underground level, I got out of the elevator alone and started taking the pictures. By now I knew that the garage had not changed in thirty years. At the back corner, off Catalina Street, there were fewer cars. I pushed open the stairwell door and went inside.
It was so small there would have been barely enough room for two people, let alone three. Gray concrete, a filthy fluorescent light bar, like the one that had been unscrewed thirty years ago by Lee DiFranco or Doug Hardin. The stairwell was not wide enough for two people to stand side by side. It was very cold the day I was there, and the narrow space reeked of mildew and dust, as if the door had not been opened in a very long time. I knelt down on the first step — I knew I would do this and now I was doing it almost as a formality. The step was so solid that I felt an immediate pain in my knees and shins. I was shaking. My father would have been shaking, forty years old, a young man, not much older than I was that day. The shape of the stairwell suggested a coffin. It was a tiny cement box in which to be executed. Forty minutes later, the dust was still in my mouth and my nose.
Warren turned white when he heard that Ed was missing. They thought he was having a heart attack. He canceled a business meeting and walked out of the room and went home for the day, and perhaps he wasn’t faking. Three people witnessed it and they all tell the story the same way.
He had set up a kind of alibi for himself more than a month before, on the same day my father testified before the grand jury. That evening, Warren had asked Bill Nathan, one of the investors who had bought Consolidated Mortgage, to swear out a complaint against Ed Lazar with the attorney general’s office, charging Ed Lazar with fraud. He thought this might neutralize the testimony Ed Lazar had just given that morning. He asked Nathan to tell this to Lonzo McCracken. He also asked Nathan to tell McCracken that he was looking for a deal. He was ill, he had a heart problem, he was afraid he would be convicted and go to jail, he would be completely broke from the legal bills. Perhaps he believed in this version of himself in the moment he presented it to Bill Nathan. Within a year he would be making comments about how Ed Lazar was probably killed by a jealous husband, or because he was selling drugs.
Around nine o’clock that morning, a lawyer named Rad Vukichevich parked in the second underground level of the First Federal Savings Building, where he noticed a Pontiac Grand Ville with its front door open, a briefcase and a set of keys lying on the ground beside it. He informed the parking lot assistant manager, Ruben Lopez, who eventually brought the briefcase and keys to the office of the building manager. Lopez noted the parking permit number on the Pontiac, which could be used to trace its owner. About three hours later, around 1:15, after Ed had missed his eleven and one o’clock and lunch appointments, his office called Susie to ask if she knew where he was. She thought at first that he had just wandered off somewhere, which he did sometimes, often to her annoyance. Around two o’clock, she called the county attorney’s office to see if they might have called him in for any further questioning. Around 2:15, three Phoenix police officers were dispatched to the garage and a missing person file was opened. It was about 3:45 when the briefcase and keys finally made it to the office of Harold Toback, Ed’s boss, who called Susie again. About seven hours had passed since Lee DiFranco and Doug Hardin had driven off in their station wagon. Detective Wallace Sem discovered the body in the stairwell at 4:47. The Homicide Detail arrived almost two hours later, at 6:40.
It’s somewhere around this time that the current span of my memory really begins, in fits and starts, as if some clock in my mind had been reset to zero on that day.
21
On my last night in Phoenix, I met Chuck Kelly, a reporter for the Arizona Republic, at a restaurant in Scottsdale. A few weeks before, Kelly had done me a great favor by sending me more than a hundred pages of photocopied news clippings in which my father’s name appeared. Looking through that sheaf of papers, I’d had the sense of reading a baroquely plotted crime novel composed of found documents, a cacophony of names and faces, facts and suppositions, and in the silent gaps, as if in some occult code, the story of what had happened.
Joining us at the bar before we ate was Jon Sellers, a retired detective from the Phoenix Police Department. He had worked my father’s case for several months in 1975 and 1976. Kelly and Sellers had known each other for over thirty years, since at least June of 1976, when one of Kelly’s fellow reporters, Don Bolles, was murdered by a car bomb in the parking lot of the Clarendon Hotel in downtown Phoenix. The murderer turned out to be John Adamson — now always referred to as John Harvey Adamson. The most likely scenario is that he’d been hired to do this by a man named Max Dunlap at the behest of a wealthy Phoenix businessman named Kemper Marley. The story is byzantine and takes in dozens of names and in some ways it dovetails with the story of my father and Warren. Bolles had been lured to the Clarendon Hotel that afternoon with a tip from Adamson about land fraud, allegedly involving the usual suspects, Barry Goldwater, Congressman Sam Steiger, and Harry Rosenzweig.