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

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.

He passed the Chris-Town Mall — the Piccadilly Cafeteria with its tiki-house roofs, Guggy’s Coffee Shop, Montgomery Ward and the Broadway and JCPenney, where Susie shopped for the kids. There was Orange Julius and Pizza D’Amore and the Court of Birds, with its vast cages of parrots and parakeets suspended from the ceiling.

Lee DiFranco was thirty-nine years old, short and stout, his hair going white, especially at the sideburns, thinning to a dark frizz on top. He had blue eyes and a straight nose, like the nose on a war mask, a mask of glee. He waited on the second underground level of the parking garage, his partner, Doug Hardin, on the level above it. They waited without anxiety — neither of them drank alcohol or smoked, neither of them was the nervous type. Lee had strangled someone to death three days before in the back of his brother Dominick’s Cadillac, a man who was probably named Jack West, whom Lee and Doug called “the Canadian.” I have a photograph of Lee DiFranco. I know less about Doug Hardin’s appearance. He’s in the witness protection program now, if he’s still alive. In 1981, Lee DiFranco was beaten to death with a baseball bat and left in the trunk of his Mercedes. Doug Hardin was of medium height and weight with wiry brown hair. I have the 214 page transcript of his scattered recollections of this period, which I had to read three times before it made any sense at all.

Ed turned down North Central Avenue. On the passenger seat was the morning paper, folded over to another headline about the Warren scandal, centered this time on the county prosecutor’s investigator, George Brooks. It had been more than a month since Ed had given his grand jury testimony. There had been a series of postponements, but tomorrow he was scheduled to go back for his next session. Last night, he’d received a strange phone call from a man who introduced himself as “Weinstein,” a man who claimed to be looking for an accountant for a friend. The call had gotten more and more perplexing and hostile as it went on. Would Ed be in his office tomorrow morning and at what time? Where did he work again? He would be there tomorrow morning? Finally Ed had hung up.

The squeaking gate. The strange phone call. Perhaps there was a reason he’d played tennis yesterday evening instead of looking over the tax returns. Perhaps the reason was that he was trying not to let it get to him.

He crossed Camelback Road and turned left into the parking garage at 3003 North Central Avenue, the First Federal Savings Building. There was a place he liked to park on the second underground level, near Catalina Street, where there were never many cars.

Lee walked over from the stairwell and was standing above him as he opened the door of the Pontiac. He told him to put his briefcase down. He said not to say a fucking word. Then he put the gun to the base of his skull and they walked back toward the stairwell and Lee told him to open the door.

The garage is still there. You can see that my hand was shaking as I took some of the photographs. I parked aboveground on a weekday morning in the middle of rush hour, not much later in the day than he would have arrived. There was sunlight on the level I parked on. I waited outside for an elevator to take me down two floors, holding my camera, feeling conspicuous and morbid while a group of secretaries smiled at me. I was concerned that the garage would not be the same. I was repelled by my desire for it to be the same. At the second underground level, I got out of the elevator alone and started taking the pictures. By now I knew that the garage had not changed in thirty years. At the back corner, off Catalina Street, there were fewer cars. I pushed open the stairwell door and went inside.

It was so small there would have been barely enough room for two people, let alone three. Gray concrete, a filthy fluorescent light bar, like the one that had been unscrewed thirty years ago by Lee DiFranco or Doug Hardin. The stairwell was not wide enough for two people to stand side by side. It was very cold the day I was there, and the narrow space reeked of mildew and dust, as if the door had not been opened in a very long time. I knelt down on the first step — I knew I would do this and now I was doing it almost as a formality. The step was so solid that I felt an immediate pain in my knees and shins. I was shaking. My father would have been shaking, forty years old, a young man, not much older than I was that day. The shape of the stairwell suggested a coffin. It was a tiny cement box in which to be executed. Forty minutes later, the dust was still in my mouth and my nose.