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

“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.

There were many Ned Warrens. There was the blunt “N. J. Warren” that appeared on the business stationery, the more personable “Ned” who shook your hand and asked what you’d like to drink. There were the variations “Nathan Warren,” “Nathan J. Warren,” and “Nathan Jacques Warren” that appeared on his police record, which, when he first came to Phoenix, nobody had seen. There was the birth name, “Nathan Jacques Waxman,” which in its Jewish fussiness simply didn’t have the trustworthy, red-blooded ring of “Ned Warren, Sr.”

In November 1961, two days after arriving in Phoenix, he walked through the carport of a rental house with a newspaper and a paper sack containing milk, bacon, eggs. His wife, Barbara, was already serving toast with butter and sugar to the children. He put his cigarette out in an ashtray on the kitchen counter, said nothing, placed the eggs and bacon and milk in the refrigerator, shutting it no harder than necessary and in this way expressing his detachment from the scene.

“You beat me to it,” he said over his shoulder.

“The kids were starving,” said Barbara.

“Wouldn’t want anyone to starve. Not on a school day.”

He went through the low-ceilinged passage into the dim hallway with its brown carpeting, unfolding the newspaper in his hands. For a moment, after the bright sunlight outside and the bright lights of the kitchen, he was almost blind, and he had to look down at his feet to steady himself as he walked. Donna Stevens was in the second bedroom down, standing in a frayed black slip among the opened cardboard boxes, smoking a cigarette. She and Barbara were almost exactly the same age, former roommates.

“Douglas MacArthur’s Reminiscences, ” she said, covering her breast with her hand. “You’re going to give those as gifts.”

“Not everyone drinks,” said Warren. “Some people like to read.”

“Some people have a pulse.”

The room was littered with papers — stationery, ad samples, résumés, letters — and boxes of odds and ends — books, bottles of Scotch and liqueur, packaged nuts. They had all driven in a convoy from Florida — Donna, Barbara, and Warren in separate cars — and in the two days since their arrival they had only started to unpack.

“I thought I’d call Roeder’s office around ten o’clock,” Donna said, straightening at Warren’s touch. “ ‘Mr. Warren will be free anytime between noon and two-thirty. He’s very much looking forward to meeting the senator, can he stop by—’ ”

“I already spoke to John Roeder,” Warren said, turning away. “Last night, we spoke. We’re old pals now. You can call if you want, but I’ll just drop in.”

He leaned on a stack of boxes, leafing through the classifieds section of the paper, looking for his ad. It said, under the words Advertising… Insurance… Real Estate… Land:

I Can Sell Anything.

He had, as he would tell it later, “three cars, two women, three kids, a dog, a cat, and eight hundred dollars.” His mother, now living in New York, had given him the name of a state senator, John Roeder, the son of a friend, and that was all he had to go on for now. But it was part of a cycle he’d been through many times already. He was forty six and had already had many lives, many incarnations.

I Can Sell Anything.

He got a job selling undeveloped land outside Wickiup, in Mohave County, for a man named George Wickman at the Star Development Corporation. When they disagreed over sales practices, he got a job with Richard Frost at the Arizona Land Corporation, or ALCO. He used the reference from John Roeder for both jobs. From his car, he’d viewed the respective subdivisions — not the spectacular pink rock of the Grand Canyon, nor the Phoenix Valley, with its eerie ranks of saguaro rising on the mountainsides like abstracted human figures. The subdivisions were fenced off by rusted lengths of barbed wire. There was nothing to see but clumps of gray rock and sand, a dry bush here and there — cholla, ocotillo. You looked out the car window at it and you felt abandoned, futile. The nearest town had a gas station and the ruined barracks of a government boarding school where Apache children, taken from their homes, had been made to speak English.

Thirty dollars an acre — sometimes less — retailed at whatever markup you dared to ask. There was something solid and immutable about the land that felt like a counterweight to all human foolishness. You cut it up into squares and laced barbed wire around the edges and the land did nothing, as if it knew that you and the barbed wire would go away. Its value was not just symbolic. It was not just gold, it was earth. You could call it “North Star Hills,” create a logo and a slogan, print fliers with an artist’s rendition of the golf course and trout pond planned for next year, and the barrenness of the land would seem to justify your deceit, for the barrenness was eternal.