Evening's Empire: The Story of My Father's Murder (28 page)

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.

Ten thousand dollars and no more conversation that Freddy Pedote was selling drugs, that he knew too many people, that he had a mouth and was a risk. Ten thousand dollars after the split with Verive and then Tocco’s cut. After he killed Lazar, Freddy was going to keep right on with the coke business anyway, they could all fuck themselves.

From a summary of an interview of John Harvey Adamson conducted by Lonzo McCracken, August 8, 1979:

A short time later Adamson met Pedote in Pedote’s apartment. Adamson asked Pedote where he’d been and Pedote said he’d been sick and in St. Joseph’s Hospital. Pedote then explained that he had the contract on Lazar and got pneumonia laying in the bushes watching Lazar to determine the best place to kill him. As a result Pedote said that he had to fly someone in to kill Lazar.

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H
e wanted everybody killed. That was just all he thought about. They were plotting it just like mafia criminal people, Lee and Kaiser, and that’s the way they plot. Someone wanted that contract and they asked someone else and then they brought it to Lee. There was something about this guy, he was doing something to somebody that was affiliated with Dominick DiFranco. He was a real estater. A couple of times Doug and Lee went places and the guy never showed up, he wasn’t around there, so Lee—they’d go back by Kaiser’s house and Lee would go in and the old lady would go back in the kitchen and then Lee would ask him, what the fuck is this, and then the Old Man would tell him, well I’ll find out or I’ll go see this guy or see that guy—and they’d exchange names but Doug didn’t pay no attention to the names.

Doug was led to believe that the guy in the garage was a killer. That he killed people. That he killed people for Joe Bonanno. And do you know what, it wasn’t that way. In the staircase, that guy in the staircase was a fucking coward, okay, but you know what? You can’t bring the guy back.

—from the Hardin transcript

Ed washed his hands and looked at himself in the medicine cabinet mirror. A last stop before he left for work, he dried off with a towel and smoothed out his eyebrows. He had an eleven o’clock appointment and a one o’clock appointment, lunch in between with his colleague, Ira Feldman. In the kitchen, in his briefcase, were two tax returns he’d brought home on the pretext of putting in a few hours last night—it was tax season—but he hadn’t bothered with them. Instead, he’d played tennis in the evening and relaxed after dinner with Susie and the kids. On the sink in front of him now was a scallop-shaped dish holding five miniature rounds of soap and on the wall beside it hung three decorative towels with a cursive
L
embroidered on them in silk. Things you didn’t use but only looked at, sometimes still with the strange recognition that your own house was a kind of mystery, lavender-scented, silent. He liked to make a last bathroom stop before leaving for work, the minute or two alone a time to clear his head and start thinking about the day. He looked once more in the mirror and switched off the light. He wore a gray suit, a blue dress shirt with his initials on the cuffs, a red tie with a small diamond pattern. He wore black high-top mod-style boots, for he was not your average CPA.

He went back out into the kitchen and kissed Susie and the kids good-bye, then he opened the front door and stepped into the courtyard.

Carol Nichols was in her front yard watering a lemon tree when she saw Ed back his car out of the garage, a white-and-maroon Pontiac Grand Ville. She turned to say hello, as she often did, when Ed got out of the idling car to shut the garage door behind him.

“I forgot something,” he said. “My breakfast bars.” He smiled at Carol in that way that implied so many things: the banality of breakfast bars, his craving for them, the day-to-day thrum of neighborhood life that he relished partly for its innocuous role-playing. He wore a gray suit, a crisp blue shirt, a red tie. He was in a little bit of a hurry, because it was tax season and he had a lot on his mind.

Susie put the breakfast bars in his briefcase on top of the papers, and he took an extra one for the car. She kissed him again and he told her, “You’ve already done that once.” She gave him a playful pinch and told him that she would kiss him anytime she wanted to. Then he went back out to the courtyard. He stepped through the door he had left open and walked through the garage to the driveway, where his car was running, the extra bar in his hand, eating it out of the foil wrapper as he said hello again to Carol Nichols. Then he closed the garage door and got in his car and left, this time for good.

Q: Did Lee kick this guy?

A: Yeah.

Q: Where’d he kick him?

A: In the ass.

Q: Was this after he’s dead?

A: After he’s down, yeah.

Q: How many times?

A: Actually I thought I walked away and started looking around and it seemed like Lee was back there piddling with him. But see anytime Lee was around and somebody got shot, Lee always done something to him. Kicked him, drug him, went through his pockets. He’d take the gold out of the teeth, if he had time.

Ed avoided Camelback Road because of the morning traffic and took Bethany Home Road instead. On the radio, the news was oil prices, the recession, a stimulus package in the House, a different one in the Senate. Lloyd Bentsen of Texas had entered the presidential race for the Democrats—even in the wake of Watergate, the defeat in Vietnam, the oil crisis, and the recession, the Democrats had no one inspiring enough to win so far.