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

the Sun Devils were ahead 14–0, but then everything fell apart—a fumble, an intercepted pass—the kind of self-inflicted failure that bears the moral stigma of fecklessness, apathy, laziness. Suddenly North Carolina was ahead and it was halftime. The freezing rain that had made it uncomfortable to sit in the stands all afternoon now changed to heavy snow. “This does not count as a vacation,” Susie said in the line for the restroom, holding a cup of hot coffee. Ed laughed and put his arm around her, slapping her jacketed elbow, and everyone smiled, but they also looked down at the ground. The weather was going to hurt ASU, not North Carolina. ASU relied on speed, and the snow would hobble them. You began to feel a little foolish for not anticipating the loss. With their orange-and-yellow uniforms, with the jauntiness of their nickname, the Sun Devils suddenly appeared like brash newcomers, cursed by a lack of history. They were only talented, nothing else.
    But instead of losing, they won. They racked up three touchdowns and two field goals in the second half—they seemed to do nothing but score in the second half. They trounced North Carolina by twenty-two points. When the polls came out the next week, they stood a good chance of ranking number one.
    Two weeks later, Ed and Warren filed the articles of incorporation for their new business, Consolidated Acceptance Corporation.

    October 4, 1971. The day after they made their trip to Verde Lakes and Chino Meadows, Ed drove Harry Gillis to the Scotts-dale airport. Jack Ross met them inside the tiny terminal with its vending machines selling coffee and sandwiches on rotating disks. Ross, the brother of Goldwater’s son-in-law, was a tall, boisterous crank with a brown mustache and glasses with thick frames made of black plastic. He shook your hand too hard, slapped your back. He seemed like a man playing a mayor in an amateur stage play.
    “You’re not coming with us?” he asked Ed. “Can’t get you up there?”
    “Not today.”
    “Really.”
    “No. I wish, but I’ve got work to do.”
    Gillis flicked his cigarette at one of the standing ashtrays. “What kind of plane do you have?” he asked Ross, who clasped his hands behind his waist and looked out at the runway, his chin tucked in until it doubled.
    “Aero Commander,” he said. “Six-eighty.”
    “That’s a Douglas?”
    “Aero Design. Used to be Douglas, then they formed their own outfit. Nice five-passenger plane. Single-engine prop plane.”
    Through the airport’s high windows, you could see the asphalt lanes on the dried-out beige clay of the tarmac. Ed left them there talking about engines. That was the last moment anyone would be able to agree about. After that, everyone would have his own story about what went wrong.

    An accumulation of statements. A flood of documents, a five-year barrage.
    On October 4, 1971, Jack Ross thinks to write a “personal memorandum” recounting his flight that day over Chino Grande with Harry Gillis of CMS, Japan. Ross thinks to paraphrase Gillis describing himself as “a professional land acquisition specialist and real estate person.” He thinks to mention that Gillis declined an offer to also view the property from the ground—an important claim. Perhaps all of this happened as Ross said it did. Perhaps Jack Ross always wrote such detailed memoranda of his days.
    On September 28, 1972, Harry Gillis gives a deposition in which he says it was Ned Warren’s idea—not his or Ross’s—that they view the property by plane, as opposed to from the ground. He says that previously, in Japan, Warren presented photographs of what he said was Chino Grande, which Warren described as “meadow”—gently rolling acreage easily divisible into five-acre rectangular parcels. A lawyer asks Gillis if he ever in fact actually saw the Chino Grande property.
    “That is a good question, isn’t it?” Gillis answers. “I was told I did.”
    And yet on the flight with Jack