Zachary Lazar: Evening's Empire: The Story of My Father's Murder

I remember his forehead being broad, with lines scored across it (lines that even then I thought I would inherit and by doing so know I was an adult). I used to try on his boots, stumbling toward the fireplace, with its mesh screen pulled closed by a thin chain. I remember the family room’s white shag rug, its console stereo with the plastic arm on which you could stack several records at once. I remember an avocado linoleum floor in the kitchen, a “passway” that looked into the living room (dark in memory, small and long). The living room, the family room, the kitchen — I remember the rooms. Whatever I write here about my father will have to be a kind of conjuration.

The evening the two detectives came to our door to bring us the news of the murder, my mother sent my sister and me to our rooms. From across the house, I could hear my mother laughing, a high-pitched, unabashed kind of laughter that sounded more and more illicit as it went on. When I went out to see what was happening, she was sitting on the couch, bowing and rising like a marionette, or as though someone was shoving her from behind, only to yank her back upright with her blouse in his fist. When she looked at me, she screamed, her face distorted. The scream was angry, personal, insane.

Almost from that moment, we stopped talking about it. As time passed, there were fewer and fewer occasions on which it made sense to try. To do so was to return on some level to my mother screaming in the living room.

I have always had two ideas: that one day I would have to write about my father’s story, and that if I ever did so I would never be able to write another thing again. What story could compare with his? The question was a more specific case of a larger dilemma: What could I ever do that would not seem trivial compared with what he went through?

The author (right) and his friend and next-door neighbor David Nichols

It took me ten years to start. In the ten years I waited, some people who might have told me things died. When I at last flew to Phoenix, a week before Christmas 2006, I wasn’t thinking very much about what I was doing. I had put the trip together in such a hasty way that I had no time to consider my expectations. The pilot announced we were beginning our descent toward Sky Harbor Airport, and I was there. I had a stack of newspaper clippings, a few relevant books, the addresses of the people and places I was going to visit. I had appointments and dinners set up for every night I would be there. I would wake up at six-thirty every morning and go to bed at midnight, and every moment of that time I would be following a schedule, not thinking about it.

He was “not a big talker”—this was something I had learned from my interviews over the phone with some of my father’s friends. He “could keep a secret,” one of them said, “as you know.” My father’s onetime roommate Barry Starr had lived in the same apartment with him for three years and still felt he never knew him, that he remained a mystery. Phone calls would sometimes come to the apartment from a woman named Ruth, a woman who was otherwise a total secret. Only years later did Barry Starr learn that Ruth was Ed’s ex-wife, that they had a son together named Richard.

The story is not in one anecdote or newspaper article, but in two hundred anecdotes and newspaper articles. The story is in the relationship between eight thousand facts that for weeks and months seemed to have no relationship at all.

A young accountant takes a chance: he goes into business with a man who has “a not very savory reputation,” a man who in fact has a criminal record. No one knows exactly why he does this. This is the first mystery. It has something to do with his having a secretive side: he “could almost lead two lives,” according to one friend. It has something to do with his being adventurous, with his not being your average CPA.

A kind of conjuration. You look at the facts and see an intricate puzzle with some pieces missing. You establish a time line. You think of possible motives, of psychology. You piece together what you know and imagine how things could have played out in rooms forty years ago, most of the players long since dead.

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