Evening's Empire: The Story of My Father's Murder (4 page)

PART ONE

Asked how his son became involved with Warren, Louis Lazar replied:

“Some fellows were making pretty good money in the land development business. Ed was a very bright young man. He saw other fellows making money and thought he should have a good land development business also. And he did have it for awhile.”

Ervin Berman, 7430 E. Chaparral, Edward Lazar’s father-in-law, said the murder victim never discussed his business dealings with him.

“Ed wasn’t much of a talker and, of course, we never pushed it,” Berman said. “We didn’t know what was going on and we hoped it would just be forgotten.”

—
Arizona Republic,
February 21, 1975

1

I
t was tax season, March 1959, but Ed was not in the office, as he might have been even on a Sunday evening that time of year. He was on the basketball court of a public high school, shooting baskets with some teenage boys. He’d been in Phoenix for almost a year now but still wasn’t used to a March evening being 70 degrees. The sky was striated with thin, twisting clouds the color of salmon. Everything was dry, and he could breathe easily. He had left his parents and brother in Minneapolis to come to Phoenix in part because he had asthma. Basketball was good for quieting his mind, something about the rhythm of it, the repetition of an easy task—shooting a basket—that eight or nine times out of ten went right. What was on his mind was not taxes, but his girlfriend back in Minnesota, Ruth, who had just called him again long-distance. It weighed on him like a dream in which dark images—snakes, blood, weeds—asserted themselves as more real than the furniture and clothing of everyday life. Ruth was not Jewish; his parents did not approve of her. As for the child she was pregnant with, it was something he couldn’t even mention to his parents, nor was the baby quite real to him—not a child that he would one day love, but a problem he didn’t know how to solve. He was twenty-six, had never been responsible for anyone in his life, had never set foot into the arena of seriousness. On the basketball court, he was still Eddie, a successful young CPA who was amused by how it looked to be shooting baskets with a bunch of teenagers.

A rebound came high off the rim toward him and he put up a set shot that bounced off the backboard and through the net. The boys dribbled and looked at him, then went back to the respectful, silent appraisal of two different basketballs in motion, the alternation of shots. Ed missed from outside. He stepped forward for a rebound, allowing his momentum to carry him up the key, dribbling twice, then striding into the air for a layup. He was the quiet instigator of his group of bachelor friends, someone who was always near the action but who never tripped up, never got caught. He and his buddies drove to Pasadena for the Rose Bowl. They went to Nogales, Mexico, for Cinco de Mayo, where two years ago they saw the greatest living bullfighter, Carlos Aruza. The small guard driving the lane had to move to the basket and just assume that the path would somehow clear up, that by leaping into a crowd of defenders he would manage to get by them, that they would fall away.

A quick marriage in Minneapolis, the birth of a son, then, just as quickly, the marriage over, the father gone, the mother and son left behind in Minnesota.

People always talked about Eddie’s smile, his devious, quiet smile. You didn’t get it constantly, so it never seemed like something he used on purpose. It seemed spontaneous and slightly wicked, irresistible. A year later, Ruth moved to Phoenix to be near him so that their son, Richard, could be near him. She asked him for nothing he didn’t want to give. Life went back to normal—easy, a report card full of As. He was smart and optimistic, not a person who imagined himself being duped or tricked in any way.

Men wore cowboy hats in Phoenix. They wore bolo ties, braided leather cords with clasps, like a silver coin or a silver steer’s head. Some of them spoke with western accents and had the gruff faces of Dust Bowl farmers. Others might wear a western vamp on their suit jackets, but when they spoke you heard Pittsburgh or Detroit. He noticed that there were a surprising number of Jews in the city, and in fact the power structure contained many Jews, although they were different from the Jews of the East Coast or even the Midwest. Like the half-Jewish Barry Goldwater, some of them looked, acted, and talked like ranchers or citrus growers, conversant with irrigation, railroads, military bases, oil. Ed often felt as if he were on the set of a movie that didn’t quite make sense. He played tennis and a little golf. He ate Mexican food. He still dressed like a member of Sigma Alpha Mu: madras blazers with thin lapels, loafers, oxford-cloth shirts with button-down collars. In Phoenix, it was the costume of the Bright Young Man, the new pool of college-educated businessmen, lawyers, and accountants who, along with the retirees, had helped triple the city’s population in the last decade. The land boom was just starting, and if you were an accountant in Phoenix, you had a clear view of all the money suddenly sprouting up out of nothing—not out of cotton farming or citrus orchards but out of simple land, empty land fed by the dams and canals of the Salt River Project, the Verde River Project. There was the state’s year-round sunshine. There was the newly affordable luxury of air conditioning. There was expanded air travel, and there were new highways, cheap gasoline, an understanding that you could leave a place like Minneapolis, Minnesota, without severing all ties to your past.

On New Year’s Day 1960, a hundred thousand people—ten times more than expected—arrived from all over the United States to attend the grand opening of Sun City, a development for retired people on Phoenix’s northwestern edge. It seemed to appear instantaneously, a self-contained world. Enriched by the building of Las Vegas casinos, the Del Webb Corporation had spent $2.5 million erecting model homes in five different styles, planting mature palms along newly paved streets, installing shopping and recreation centers, establishing a golf course on what had been bare desert. In the first year, the Del Webb Corporation sold almost fifteen hundred houses. The sales brought in $17.5 million.

Fifteen million dollars gross in the first year. It made the cover of
Time
magazine. All over the country, people of a certain cast of mind were coming to understand that Arizona had a lot of empty land.

He was an accountant, not a businessman. He could add up a page-long column of seven-digit numbers by running the tip of a pencil down the ledger like a pointer, figuring in his head, never using a calculator. He did it with the stern expression of a surgeon making an incision. He approached his job seriously, more seriously than many people approached their jobs, but as with many men his mind was a system of switches, and in different settings he was a different person. In college, at the University of Minnesota, his favorite professor had thought that businessmen were “shills,” “daredevils,” while accountants were problem solvers, ensuring that each quarter the businessman and his company booked more earnings than they paid out in tax. Ed had believed this in college. He had believed that the best thing in the world to be was smart, as opposed to a “daredevil.” It took him longer than it took many people to realize how obviously untrue this was. He began to sense people moving forward, leaving him behind—people in real estate, people in medicine, even people with restaurants. By his early thirties, he had begun to wonder how he had ended up preparing tax strategies and financial statements for people so much less intelligent than he was.

“You need to sharpen your pencil,” he told his son Richie, as soon as Richie was old enough to write or even draw. “You can’t work with that pencil. There’s no point in sitting down to work with a pencil like that.”

He didn’t recognize himself in Ruth’s apartment. If he had watched a film of himself lecturing Richie, he wouldn’t have understood his tone and would have been surprised to see the scene play itself out as it did. It did not jibe with the Ed Lazar who drove every Saturday to Tempe to see the Sun Devils game, or who traded the same birthday card every year with his friend Ron Fineberg, his drinking buddy, who, like the birthday card, was the same age year after year.

Miss Susan Berman became the bride of Edward Lazar during an early evening ceremony in Congregation Keneseth Israel. After a reception, the pair departed for a honeymoon in California. A Valley residence is planned.

For her vows, the bride chose a floor-length sheath styled with an empire waistline and dotted with pearl applique. The ensemble was accented by a lace mantilla.

—
Arizona Republic,
August 24, 1965

She had given Ed Lazar an ultimatum. Her job would end in June—she was a speech therapist in the public schools—and if he didn’t ask her to marry him, she would go back to her home in Elgin, Illinois.

It was time to grow up—he knew it himself. She hadn’t had to put it that way.

Her name was Susan, but everyone called her Susie. She looked like a young Elizabeth Taylor, with high cheekbones that set off her green eyes. One day his father, who had moved down to Phoenix from Minneapolis, had seen her sitting in the waiting room of a dentist’s office and got her phone number and address from the receptionist. That was how they had met—the right girl this time, a Jewish girl from a small town in Illinois.

They would discover mysterious or unspoken things about each other in the next months and years, starting with Ed’s past—a son named Richie, an ex-wife named Ruth. He had been anxious about telling her, and yet it hadn’t mattered to her, his past. She had already fallen in love, had already made up her mind to marry him by the time he’d told her those things. He was not your average CPA. That was part of the attraction, and also the source of some restlessness in him that she didn’t understand, the source of an ongoing tension that would arise between them. Once they were married, there were his late nights in bars, Tuesdays or Thursdays, weeknights. She knew there were reasons men went to bars and one of those reasons was conversation with male friends, and she also knew there were other reasons. They worked things out, used humor to bring themselves back to each other. They went to Sedona, San Diego, the Peach Bowl in Atlanta. They had beautiful parties at their house, festive picnics at Encanto Park. They had two children. They loved each other most in the last year of their marriage, after near-bankruptcy had taught them to appreciate what they had in a new way. They had nine years, five months, and twenty-seven days to try to find out who the other really was.

“A Valley residence is planned.” The author’s childhood home.