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

Author:Zachary Lazar [Lazar, Zachary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, BIO026000
ISBN: 9780316072250
Google: dHW_ts9jlwQC
Amazon: B002P8N0SY
Publisher: Little, Brown
Published: 2009-10-20T16:00:00+00:00

Harry Rosenzweig

The years of his early family life—happy, especially happy in hindsight. A son and a daughter, almost four and almost two, Zachary and Stacey. A ranch house full of noise, laundry, the cleaning woman on Wednesdays, Susie tired, needing a vacation. Ed faded in and out sometimes, thirty-eight years old but feeling now that thirty-eight was hardly old at all, even forty was hardly old at all. He would leave the office for a few hours in the afternoons, go for a drive, not telling anyone where, just disappearing. At night, he and Ron Fineberg still went out for drinks. Ed “could sweet-talk any beautiful woman,” Ron would say later. He was not a talker but he had the smile, could flirt without saying very much, letting the silence or a few simple words cast everything in a comic, uncertain, suggestive light. He slipped in and out of moments, all of them real but transient, floating, maybe a little boring if he stayed too long.

To be not just eager, talented, “bright”—instead, to be poised. There was something compelling about Warren, even now, because Ed could see the limitations of his own scruples. The scruples could seem fussy, weak, collegiate. At times, they seemed to constitute a kind of failure.

Blackbrush, shadscale, greasewood. Dark land under clouds—borax, potash, salt. A sudden rain washed down cliffs. Flood pools formed, flood pools dried out. A sequence of events unfolded without witnesses, without meaning.

At Durant’s restaurant, you parked in the back and went in through the kitchen, past the line cooks, the waiters hustling by in their half tuxedos. They carried trays of large white plates covered by lank sirloins, chops, strip steaks, potato on the side with a thick slice of buttered toast. Ed and Warren had just made a down payment on two thousand acres in Oklahoma and now CMS had come to discuss what could be done with the Jack Ross acreage at Chino Grande. Ed had arrived late, so he wasn’t at the bar when Warren had first joined up with CMS’s Robert Kaplan and Harry Sperber, there in place of Harry Gillis. They were all sitting at the table now with their menus and drinks. James Kieffer of the Real Estate Department was also there, a man in his thirties with slicked-back hair and sideburns that cut down across his cheeks. He was Talley’s chief investigator. He had just broken the news that Chino Grande was not a legal subdivision, that there was in fact no such thing as Chino Grande. He looked impotent and stern, sitting upright in his plaid sport coat, a clerk with a blotched face, a salary in the low teens.

“I told him we’re not here to sue anybody,” Kaplan told Ed before Ed even sat down. “We want to work something out, that’s all.”

Ed put a Time magazine down on the table. On the cover was Liza Minnelli in a black hat, a black leotard, mascara. “Well, that’s good you’re not going to sue,” he said.

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