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

“Let’s go outside,” he said. “I’ll show you how the thing works.”

There were too many people around the Sun King parking lot, so Adamson said they should go over to his house across town on Minnezona. It was a one-story brick house with asphalt shingles on the roof and small square windows that had aged into a dim green. You could hardly notice the house amid the clutter of outbuildings — a toolshed, two chain-link pens for the dogs, a rusting camper shell. Around it all ran a dead lawn where Adamson parked the car beside his van. He opened up the car’s hood and showed Pedote where the coil was. He was surprised that Pedote didn’t know this. Mark Rossi had a light meter in his pocket and they ran a wire from the ignition coil to the light meter and Adamson turned the key from the driver’s seat, the door open, and he watched Pedote watch the light meter register the charge.

“Boom,” said Adamson.

Pedote stood looking at the meter in his hand, a meaningless gadget with a plastic needle that moved.

“Forget it,” Adamson said. He got out of the car, more annoyed than ever now, and walked over to the house. There was an old mop bucket on the porch and he dumped the water and refilled it with clean water from the hose. Then he went inside the house and got one of the blasting caps from his closet.

“I’m going to show you what we’re talking about,” he said to Pedote. “You watch.”

He put the cap on the wire that was still attached to the coil of the car. Then he dropped the cap into the bucket of water. He got back in the car and turned the key.

There was a sound you could hear for blocks, a dull boom flared at the edges with the fling and plash of water. The bucket lay on its side, its bottom blown out, the whole thing a different shape now. Pedote turned to Adamson, his eyes a pale, unnatural blue. He hadn’t expected the power of it.

“There’s people across the street,” he said.

“You’re right,” Adamson said.

“So what the fuck are you doing?”

Adamson just stared at him. It was a stupid thing to have done. But that wasn’t what had caused Pedote to look so enraged.

You couldn’t see the explosion without imagining the car. The hood torn off, the windshield shattered, the doors puckered and bent. The body inside, twisted and burnt black.

A few weeks later, Adamson got a call from Pedote asking him to come back out to the Sun King Apartments. Pedote stood in the kitchen and told him they had changed plans, they weren’t going to use the bomb after all, they were going to do it a different way. He wanted Adamson to take it away. He had been storing it in his refrigerator, still in the leather briefcase that had belonged to Mary’s father, and the leather was cold in Adamson’s hand as he walked it back out to Mary’s car.

Warren’s perjury indictment was thrown out on October 29, 1974. The grounds were that state and federal testimonies were mutually inadmissible. Two days before Christmas, he was finally indicted for bribery — not of Talley, as everyone expected, but of George Brooks. On November 3, Talley had died of a heart attack.

Phoenix Gazette, July 30, 1976

Former Investigator Is Convinced Talley Death Was Murder

James Kieffer, former chief investigator and deputy Arizona real estate commissioner, said today he believes that Commissioner J. Fred Talley was “murdered” in his St. Joseph’s Hospital bed because he knew the identity of Arizona’s big land fraud operators.

Kieffer thinks Talley was silenced forever to keep him from “fingering the big men” behind the state’s land scandals.

“He had talked it over with his wife and he told me he would tell me the next day but he was dead by then.”

Talley, 70, the record indicates, died Nov. 3, 1974, of a heart ailment, 11 days [sic] after being admitted Oct. 21, 1974.

Kieffer recalled that Talley was in a regular room when he called Marge Bedford, the commissioner’s secretary, to ask to visit. Kieffer, at that time, was sales regulation director of the Queen Creek Land & Cattle Co., having left Talley in February 1974.

Bedford told him, the former investigator says, that Talley was out of intensive care but that he’d have to clear a visit with Mrs. Talley. He considered Talley, under whom he served, “a good friend.”

The next day, Kieffer says, he called for Mrs. Talley, at her husband’s side at the hospital, “but somehow I got him.”

To his surprise, “Talley answered and said he would see me the next morning (Sunday) and give me the names,” Kieffer declared. “Next day, he was dead.

“I think he was murdered but I can’t prove it.

“It was too convenient to have died from a heart ailment when he was doing so much better. Out of the intensive care unit.”

Kieffer said he reported on his beliefs at the time to a Phoenix police detective. But the detective told him that, after all, the body already was embalmed and that there was nothing that could be done to determine if Talley was murdered. Police sources claim they are unaware of Kieffer’s report but say that Talley’s body was autopsied. Death certificate details are secret under Arizona law.

J. Fred Talley

Ed took a photograph out of his wallet and put it down on the table to show McCracken. They were in Durant’s, facing the bar with its leather bolster. There were tables of men with documents and legal pads amid glasses of ice water and cocktails, the restaurant red-lit, dim with smoke, crowded even at four o’clock in the afternoon. The photograph showed Ed’s son Zachary gripping a red plastic baseball bat, many times thicker than an ordinary bat, more like a club. You could see the yellowing grass of the backyard, still glistening from the sprinkler head, the anonymous shambles on any Phoenix cul-de-sac in midsummer. Zachary wore a swimsuit and his hair was wet and he didn’t know how to hold the bat, the large size of which was meant to make it easier to hit the ball. He was smiling about the game instead of concentrating on it. Ed let the photograph sit there on the table for a moment after answering McCracken’s questions: the boy’s name, his age. That wasn’t why he’d brought it out.

“We live in a tract house, there’s not much yard,” he said. “You can’t see it in the picture — it would be hard to take a picture with the house in it, because the backyard is so small. I never made any money in the land business like Jim Cornwall did.”

McCracken looked at him with a mild but wakening scorn. He had fair, thinning hair and a slightly doughy face, not what Ed expected a detective to look like. He had the face of a school principal.

“Your son looks like a nice kid,” McCracken said.

“He is. Do you have a son?”

“That’s not what you want to talk to me about, is it?”

“Not right now, no. You’re right.”

“You want to talk to me about how different you are from Jim Cornwall.”

Ed took the photograph back, holding it by the edges. “I don’t have anything to say about Jim Cornwall. What I can do is back up what he says about Warren and Talley.”

He’d had a meeting with Al Sitter, a reporter for the Republic, so he had a pretty good idea of what the grand jury was looking into— the Talley bribes, the loan to George Brooks, but not the Kieffer loan. He told McCracken that it concerned him that Al Sitter somehow always knew the details of the grand jury’s “secret” proceedings and then reported on them in every morning’s newspaper. It concerned him as someone who might want to cooperate now that Talley was dead. He didn’t want his name in the papers, but even more important, he didn’t want his father’s name in the papers. The money he had given to Talley had been pissant stuff. Over four years, he had paid Talley less than $7,000. His share of the James Kieffer loan was a grand total of $650. There was a lot he could tell McCracken about Warren, but that was the extent of his own role in what the papers kept calling “land fraud” and “organized crime.”