|
"Evening's
Empire" by
Zachary Lazar
; Little,
Brown and Company
(228 pages,
$24.99
)
———
"True
crime" has such a florid, overdressed reputation
that it pays to remember the genre's monuments —
"In Cold Blood" or "The Executioner's
Song" — are marked by their bloodless eloquence.
Even the chronically feverish James Ellroy restrained
himself in "My Dark Places," a coolly
deliberate autopsy of his mother's murder. It makes
sense: For all the exhaustive research, interviews and
controlled dispassion, the identity of the real villain
in these stories — profound personal loss — is known
before you crack the covers. It's deprivation that
breeds anger, and cosmic anger that runs these stories.
The same
can be said of
Zachary Lazar's
remarkable "Evening's Empire" — his
novelized investigation into the killing of his father,
Ed Lazar
, in the stairwell of a
Phoenix
parking garage in 1975. The elder Lazar was Jewish, a
family man and an accountant. He also drank, had a son
by an ex-wife, and got involved — almost the way
someone might get on the wrong bus, or burn the toast
— with the notorious
Arizona
land swindles of the late '60s and '70s.
That
widespread criminal enterprise would also lead to the
1976 car-bomb murder of
Arizona Republic
reporter
Don Bolles
(whose prominence provoked the kind of exhaustive probe
that
Ed Lazar
was denied, and benefited the author three decades
later). Amid the bolo tie-and-cocktail shaker world of
Goldwater-era
Arizona
— the onetime presidential candidate even makes a
brief appearance here — snakes of every variety were
overrunning the sun-baked landscape.
"I
have almost no memories of him that I can feel certain
are true and not the kind suggested by
photographs," writes Lazar, who was 6 when the two
hired killers pumped five .22-caliber bullets into his
father and left the body to be discovered hours later.
While relying on first- and second-person accounts of
the time, Lazar also employs a Capote-inspired technique
of laying on creative mortar to fact-based brick — in
other words, he takes liberties. He imagines dialogue
and interior monologues; characters feel, observe and
reflect based on what Lazar conjectures. But while these
people probably consist of equal parts research and
supposition, they're also fully formed.
Lazar,
author of the 2008 novel "Sway," creates
nuanced portraits of his father and — even more
vividly — the man dubbed the "godfather" of
Arizona
land fraud,
Ned Warren
, a rather casual career criminal who would hardly
describe himself as such, but whose approach to business
was less about capital than alibis.
Warren's
tactics were all show and no tell — he leveraged
former Apache land (some of it on precipitous
hillsides), set up a respectable front, hired actor
Cesar Romero
as a spokesman (Lazar's recreation of this episode is
painful but priceless) and sold the inhospitable and
sometimes nonexistent tracts to U.S. servicemen
overseas. The structure wasn't exactly "Madoffian,"
either in its scale or its mechanics, but as Lazar
imagines his father's seduction into Warren's world, the
word Ponzi does come to mind: The deeper he and Warren
and their
Consolidated Mortgage Corp.
dug themselves in, the less sunlight they could see —
the only way out, Ed became convinced, was to keep
digging.
"Evening's
Empire" — which, as Bob Dylan told us, "has
returned into sand" — is a brave book, a project
that promised to pay off its author in pain. What was
Lazar going to discover about his dead father? He may
not have had memories, but he must have erected a
memorial in his mind for the father he lost so young.
The disillusionment that fires his book, something Lazar
knew was coming and that he went after anyway, manifests
itself in a cold-burning anger. Lazar tries his best to
control it, fails, and via his effort achieves a
literary catharsis.
|
