Evening's Empire: The Story of My Father's Murder (31 page)

The Beth El Cemetery is in a small corner of a vast, landscaped compound called the Greenwood Memorial Park on Van Buren Street near the Papago Freeway. A series of small roads leads you from one field to the next, the different sections designated by small numbers painted in white on the trunks of trees. I had never been there before. I drove around and got lost and asked an employee for directions, and eventually I found a small, garage-like building with one wall larger than the others, painted red, a large white stylized menorah in front of it. I had a chart and I had written down the number of my father’s plot, which I found after a few more minutes of looking. I ended up staying there much longer than I expected. There was no one else around.

His stone is simple, made of blue-tinted granite, with his name beneath a Star of David, a Hebrew inscription, and the words
Loving Son, Husband & Father
. Beneath the dates is another inscription,
Held Close in Our Hearts,
and five more Hebrew letters. His stone is next to my grandparents’ stone, Louis and Belle Lazar, who both survived their son by ten years. They are buried side by side and share a stone that says
Lazar
and gives their names and dates beneath.

There are rituals but I don’t know them. The grayish blue stones sat amid the dead grass, which was yellow and dry as hay. I brushed them clean of some clippings left there by a lawn mower. I didn’t know when the last time was that anyone had come to these graves and I understood in a way I never had before why such visits are necessary. I looked at the gray stone and imagined the forty-year-old man. Silence, the three of them there—my father and my grandparents—the highway nearby, so close you could see the cars in their crowded lanes. It was a sunny day, the blue sky very still, cloudless and cold.

People talk about the mystery of evil, but evil seems less mysterious to me than good. The word
good
is harder to say with conviction than the word
evil
—
good
is harder to define. In the Jewish tradition, you can’t call it by name. It’s called
Adonai.
To say the actual word would be to denigrate its mystery, which is not only gentle but fierce, perhaps even inclusive of evil. When Job asked God why God had forsaken him, this is the knowledge I think Job received.

He came alive for me while I wrote this book. I still can’t remember him, but I will remember this portrait of him. A kind of conjuration. Another stone to mark his passage on this earth.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I
n 2006, I started researching this book with a phone call to a Phoenix police sergeant named Mike Torres, whose name appeared in the
Arizona Republic
article that now opens the prologue. Torres and I talked about my project and he gave me several leads, including the obvious but very valuable recommendation to call Chuck Kelly, one of the two reporters who had written the article
.
Immediately, Chuck made this project viable—on his own time, he went through the
Republic
’s archives and sent me copies of every article they’d printed that included my father’s name. In addition, he shared with me his extensive knowledge of Arizona in the time period. Another reporter, since deceased, Al Sitter, also gave to me of his time and memories. Kelly’s and Sitter’s articles and those written by their colleagues at the
Republic
and the
Phoenix Gazette
provided me with much of the factual outline of this book. I also referred constantly to the work of The Arizona Project reporters, and to Michael F. Wendland’s account of their story in his book,
The Arizona Project.
In an era when the very survival of print journalism is in jeopardy, the work of these writers is a vivid reminder of the importance of newspapers, and I thank them for what they’ve done. Thanks also to Dave Wagner, an expert on this period in Arizona’s history and its staggering array of figures.

Through their recollections, my father’s friends and family members gave me the ability to imagine him beyond the bare sketch provided by my documentary research. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Carol Nichols Turoff, Ted and Elaine Kort, Ron Fineberg, Beverly Fineberg, Murray Goodman, Harry Swirnoff, Earl Geller, Ira Feldman, Norton Stillman, and Jeff Lazar. Thanks also to David Nichols. Above all, thanks to my mother, who supported this book from the beginning and, so that I could write it, relived some of her most painful memories.

I want to also thank George Weisz, senior assistant to the mayor of Phoenix; former Phoenix police detective Jon Sellers; Linda Whitaker of the Arizona Historical Foundation; William Stolz and David F. Moore at the Western Historical Manuscript Collection at the University of Missouri; Beth Kopine and Mark Horvit at Investigative Reporters and Editors; Ron Passarelli and Vicky Rokkos at the Arizona Department of Real Estate; Tim Muse of Land Am Title; Tina McMillian at the Arizona attorney general’s office; former Maricopa County prosecutor Don Harris; Bill Farrow; A. A. McCollum; Dave Cross; James Cornwall; Winojene Harris; Tom Henze; and Chris Nolan.

My agent, Bill Clegg, and my editor, Pat Strachan, both gave me enormous encouragement and help with
Evening’s Empire,
for which I am deeply grateful. I owe a special thanks to Pat for getting this book over the many unforeseen obstacles that emerged throughout the process. Thanks to everyone at Little, Brown: Vanessa Kehren, Marlena Bittner, Katherine Molina, Terry Adams, Allison Warner, Pamela Marshall, and Michael Pietsch.

Finally, many sincere thanks to my family—all Lazars, Lackners, Watsons, Cottrells, and Patins.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Zachary Lazar has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and holds a 2009–2010 Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University.
Evening’s Empire
is his third book.

*
DiFranco’s name has been changed.

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Rossi’s name has been changed.