Evening's Empire: The Story of My Father's Murder (25 page)

He looked at Susie with that smile—he had that cat-that-ate-the-canary smile. Carol had been their next-door neighbor since they moved in, and whenever her father came to visit, he and Ed would get together and try to stump each other with sports questions. Her father could be a tough nut to crack, a wholesaler in the fruit business, but Ed could always make him laugh—he was funny, smart, iconoclastic. Carol had never known Jewish men who drank, as Ed did, though she was Jewish herself. They liked to kid each other, Ed and Carol. His new office was in the same building as the Playboy Club, and one day Carol called him up, pretending to be a playmate. She put on a Southern accent and said she had heard he worked in the building, maybe they could carpool together, save on gas. He got very interested until he finally realized it was her, and he said what he always said: “You’re trouble.”

He worked as a tax specialist at LKH&H—consultant work, no clients of his own. If you looked up Ed Lazar in the phone book, you would find his home number but not his work number. When he’d left Gallant, Farrow five years before, he was bored with accounting, but now he was glad to be back doing it. For close to two years, he’d been on the verge of losing everything. Susie had had to go back to work. He’d had to check into the Homestead Act to see if their house was protected in the case of bankruptcy. It was, but every month was a struggle to make the mortgage on the $20,000 ranch house they still lived in. He was afraid Susie would leave him. He couldn’t understand why she didn’t. He told her to stop buying new clothes—no new clothes except for the kids. They stopped going out to eat. One morning she was doing laundry and she heard a loud pop and then a shuddering noise. The washing machine was broken—one of the plastic fins on the agitator had snapped off and the machine was full of clothes and soapy water. There was still more laundry to do. They had two young children who were always making dirty clothes. It was the one time she almost broke down in tears.

No clients of his own—no public role. Part of the reason was that he was facing, along with Warren and David Rich, a $1.62-million lawsuit filed by A. A. McCollum and Bill Nathan, the new owners of Consolidated Mortgage. He had almost lost his CPA license. Five years at Consolidated and the stigma would never go away. It was supposed to take eighteen months to make $1 million in the land business. After five years, he had passed the endless problem onto someone else.

She had grown up believing that if she married a Jewish man and knew how to bake a brisket, then everything would be all right. It wasn’t true, of course, but she found this out sooner than many people she grew up with. That summer of 1974 was the happiest they’d ever been. They knew they were never going to be rich. They understood that now, but they were glad that they weren’t poor.

He was always a sharp dresser, but one time he came over to Carol’s house in a white guayabera and he kept asking if she liked his shirt. He had that smile, as if he knew how ridiculous it was, but he was playing it deadpan, and she didn’t know if he was joking or if he wasn’t. He was very funny. When Ronnie Fineberg graduated from law school, Ed gave Ronnie
Quotations from Chairman Bill,
by William F. Buckley. Ronnie was a liberal—Ed said it was something to fire him up before he went into court.

Warren said, “McCollum wanted something for nothing, and I gave him nothing for something.” They almost came to blows. McCollum would say later that he got fucked to death on that deal. He spent $250,000 of his own money to buy Consolidated and it ended up costing him everything. Two accounting firms looked over the books and gave him the okay. Then he found out it was under a federal probe, that it had half a million dollars in undisclosed debts. He ended up on trial in federal court for fraud. His name dragged through the mud for nothing at all. Eight weeks later plus legal expenses, he was acquitted. Even then, he would go to the ASU football games and people who had been his friends would pretend he wasn’t there.

They joined the Toastmasters Club, Ed and Ron Fineberg, but they eventually stopped going to the meetings and just went out for drinks. Newton’s on Van Buren every Tuesday night. One night Ron got a call that Ed had been picked up on a DUI. He went down to find him, but there was no Ed Lazar on the blotter. He had given a different name. He said he was Eduardo Español Fuck You.

18

I
n early November 1974, Adamson got a call from a friend of his named Mark Rossi,
^*
who rented a liquor store from Carl Verive’s friend Old Man Kaiser. Mark Rossi knew everybody. The liquor store was near Papa Joe Tocco’s bar, the Barrel, on East Washington Street, and Joe and Albert Tocco headed the Phoenix branch of the Chicago Outfit. Rossi said he’d heard from another one of the Outfit guys, Freddy Pedote, yesterday. He said that Freddy Pedote wanted Adamson to give him a call.

They were putting him in the loop, Adamson realized, which is what he’d wanted ever since he met Verive, but he saw now that there was more to it. He saw that he had no choice now but to go as far as they told him to go. They were putting him in the loop because of what he’d heard at Applegate’s.

“Come over and we’ll talk,” Pedote said when Adamson called. “The Sun King Apartments, over on Thomas. Fifty-nine hundred East Thomas.”

.  .  .

The Outfit guys usually lived in run-down little houses, or they took a room at the Arizona Manor, but Fred Pedote was living in Scottsdale in one of those beige-stucco apartment complexes with Spanish tile on the roofs, a swimming pool surrounded by umbrella tables. Adamson parked in the lot with its aluminum overhang to screen out the sun. He walked into the courtyard planted with orange trees and bougainvillea, following a trail of gray concrete disks toward Pedote’s door. Pedote answered in a red golf shirt, a stout man in his midfifties, the hallway behind him a dark nebulous space from where Adamson stood in the sun. He could see that Pedote was short but big, muscle under the fat. He had brown, greased hair and a mottled complexion and strange, milky blue eyes. He smelled like Old Spice. They went inside and sat down in the dark living room and Adamson had a vodka cranberry and Pedote had a Löwenbräu beer.

“Mark Rossi said you could help me get a setup,” Pedote said.

Adamson stared down at the carpet, adjusting his sunglasses. “I’m not sure I know what that means.”

“Mark said you knew how to make a silencer for a twenty-two pistol. We call that a setup. Okay?”

“I don’t know why Mark told you that. I don’t have that on hand.”

“I was told you could get me one.”

“I could probably make you one. I’ve seen it done with a plastic bottle, that’s one way. But you’d be better off with a forty-five, not a twenty-two.”

“I want the peashooter.”

“Why?”

“That’s the way we do it. It’s quiet.”

“I’ll look into it.”

“You do that.”

“I said I would.”

Pedote clicked on the television with the remote. He leaned back on the sofa, his legs spread apart. “Mark Rossi says you breed greyhounds,” he said.

“I have a few dogs. No pups right now.”

“I like the track once in a while.”

“It’s one of my sidelines. Just keep my hand in.”