by Jim Lynch
“Not just cops,” one of them says. “Bankers, councilmen, you name it.”
“Shut up, Larry.”
“Everybody always focuses on dirty cops. Cops, cops, cops,” Larry drones. “But why in God’s name would it stop there? Everybody likes money, right?”
“Hard to know what’s talk and what’s real,” Roger says, agreeably.
“It’s as real as the nose on your face. What people don’t understand is that it’s an industry—tax-free too.” His grin’s one-sided.
“Shut up, Larry.”
“Sounds like a racket to me,” Roger says.
“What isn’t? If you’re doing business, you’re in a racket.”
“Somebody’s gotta run it,” Roger says. “Things don’t run themselves.”
“There’s a network. That’s what they call it. The network.”
“Shut it, Larry. You’re blowing smoke.”
“Yeah? Go see who shows up for breakfast at the Dog House on the second Tuesday of every month.”
“Shut up, Larry.”
“Cops, jewelers, realtors, staffers from the mayor’s office and—”
“Shut the hell—”
“You shut up, Rudy.”
Roger tosses in more chips, raising the pot by thirty dollars, and loses again. He stays quiet and loses some more, waits another hand, then asks, “Any of you ever know a Robert Dawkins?”
The dealer shuffles.
“Who?”
“Bobby Dawkins. Used to play a lot of cards round here maybe fifteen years ago.”
Cards fly, heads shake.
“He’s my uncle.”
Nothing.
The men cagily organize their cards. Another hand passes, and Roger loses more money.
“He go by Doc?” asks a potbellied old-timer, speaking for the first time.
“How’s that?” Roger asks.
“That uncle you’re snooping around about. I knew a Doc, my age or older. Laughed like a cement mixer. Big old gummy smile.”
Roger feels a quiver.
“Las Vegas. Least that’s what I heard. Went to Vegas, didn’t he, Larry?”
Larry studies his cards, suddenly mum.
Rudy glares at Roger. “Your uncle owes people a lot of money.”
“Perhaps,” the dealer says, “but you can’t squeeze it out of his nephew.” He glances at Roger’s chip pile and grins. “Or maybe we already have.”
Chapter Ten
JUNE 2001
THEY SLEPT in the same bed, mother and son, in their dank brick apartment in the shadow of the freeway just north of downtown. He had his own big-boy bed, but slept beside her, not out of his need so much as hers. After peeling his skinny arm off her stomach, she rolled onto her side and turned off the alarm seconds before it would have sounded at 5:29. What she craved were two uninterrupted hours before entering the Monday newsroom. Outside, the interstate roared with people speeding into the city even before the day had a chance to break.
Her apartment looked like a set for an earthquake movie—toppled stacks of dishes and cereal boxes, books and folders strewn across the floor next to newspapers, maps, notebooks and DVDs—Toy Story, Lion King, Aladdin—and crumpled drafts of her next Roger Morgan story. The books were split into distinct piles. Skid Road, Seattle Heritage, See You in Seattle!, Century 21, and Seattle: Past to Present in one heap. The New Journalism, Raising Hell, Stalking the Feature Story and instructive gems by Orlean, Kidder and Thompson in the other. She could summon their salient points from memory, yet having them within reach made her feel like she wasn’t writing alone, and the same was true of her bound collections of Pulitzer-winning articles. She’d reread them often enough to know the common ingredients: original reporting, compelling prose and some irresistible intangible that often involved dragging secrets into the sunshine. From what she could tell, the Public Service Medal, the granddaddy of the Ps, guaranteed salvation.
For years now, without ever saying it aloud, she has prowled and dredged and scratched for stories that just might—if everything fell right—be deemed Pulitzer-worthy. The dot-com saga offered some of the essentials. She’d already gathered the glitter and punch such a series needed. But she hadn’t been here for the zenith, when champagne-colored Lexuses filled the streets, and her reporting began during the confessional stage with open-collared thirty-something former CEOs called Ron or Daryl or Brad (they were too cool and new-school to bother with last names) crowing about their $100,000 parties, Brazilian strippers, chain-saw jugglers and pet alligators. Some even boasted about how hard they’d crashed, hawking Ferraris, Steinways and marble-size diamonds while tumbling through divorce and bankruptcy courts. One smiled ruefully and tried to describe what it felt like to lose $1.1 billion in stock options. She’d amassed enough details that her description of the collapse alone should be as irresistible as watching a skyscraper implode in slow motion; and she had begun tying it all into the city’s boom-and-bust DNA, likening it to the Yukon Gold Rush hysteria, when enough little people got ridiculously rich here to lure mobs of newcomers. And people were still coming. Just ten months ago, national reporters were telling the world that Seattle receptionists were retiring in their twenties with a few mil in options, that the rules of the old economy no longer applied in a city that was printing money. Shortly before its fall, The Economist called Seattle the tenth best city in the world. Not to be outexaggerated, USA Today anointed it “the number one city of the future.”
The problem with her dot-com drama, she increasingly understood, was that once you peeled away the silliness and excesses, it pretty quickly boiled down to rich kids getting drunk and puking on themselves. But the mysterious father of the world’s fair running for mayor forty years later? Now, there’s a story that wouldn’t win any prizes but was alive, unpredictable and perhaps even parabolic.
She’d written a few drafts of “Mr. Seattle” over the weekend. It still needed fact-checking, whittling and sharpening, but she’d have most of the week to get it just right. She steamed herself a latte, then stepped over dirty clothes into Elias’s bedroom and turned on the computer. Once her old Compaq finally awakened, she typed seattletimes.com, pressed enter and up popped Morgan’s jug-eared face alongside Rooney’s jowly mug. Mayoral Race Almost a Dead Heat.
She didn’t exhale until she realized it was just a poll story. Still, prior surveys showed Morgan at least ten points behind Rooney and five behind Norheim. This one had Rooney leading him by just three, Norheim by six. Once she got over the fear of being scooped—anybody can buy a poll—her heart skipped again when she noticed the Times had another story about the race, this one detailing campaign contributions from several strip-club owners to mayoral and council candidates over the past ten years. She read it fast, relieved the sums were inconsequential and that it was mostly a dry recounting of adult-club ordinances.
She guiltily poached the last egg for herself, knowing Elias would have to eat cereal now. She heard the Seattle Times thump her porch and resisted the urge to see exactly how the stories were played. Over breakfast, she condensed and recast her pitch to make “Mr. Seattle” sound original and ambitious enough to lead Friday’s paper. Then she soaked her hands in hot water for three minutes, dried them off and took her Molinari out of its case.
She played three-octave scales as softly as she could. Tucking the violin under her chin always calmed her, until she heard sloppy bow work on simple études. Just playing chords and double-stops was difficult enough. She should’ve practiced before she’d read the Times and started rethinking her story. She pulled out one of the solos in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and hummed the first page to herself. Yet as soon as she began playing, it sounded strained. She was holding the bow too tightly or moving it too slowly, and her aching fingers were too tense for vibratos. Five more tries, but it only got worse, her mind wandering now between Morgan and the fact she couldn’t play Vivaldi anymore, even the easier parts.
She woke her boy up and helped him dress. He b
rushed his teeth with his eyes closed, oblivious to her urgency, and yakked nonstop while chewing cereal about how he wanted to go to Hogwarts and be a child wizard too. When the phone rang, she saw her childhood number pop up and groaned.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Oh, Helen!” her mother blurted. “I didn’t expect to get you!”
“Been working hard, and now I’ve gotta get Elias to preschool. I’ll try to call you tonight, okay?”
Elias big-eyed her. “Granny?”
She glanced at the clock. They were already late. “Elias wants to say hi.”
Her parents had been clamoring to visit ever since she got settled. They couldn’t grasp that her apartment was too small and that even modest hotels were too expensive out here. Plus, she didn’t want them to see how far her life had fallen short of their imagination. It was easy to picture her mother tidying, cooking and ironing, desperately trying to make this place homey while her father paced, jingling keys, in between trips to the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts. His voice boomed through the phone now. “That my grandson?”
The two of them talking always got to her. Elias immediately launched into a detailed account—sounding like an FAA investigator—of exactly how his cardboard Spitfire airplane broke its yellow wing. Her father’s laugh was enough to push her over this morning.
“Jesus,” she mutters, dabbing her eyes and firing up another latte. Glancing out the window, she watched one of her hard-drinking neighbors—the fifth-year psych major or perhaps the sixth-year philosophy student—step outside in a filthy bathrobe and gut the neighbors’ Times of its sports section. Minutes later, she and Elias were striding through the ratty courtyard—a coffee mug in one hand, Elias clutching the other, skipping to keep up—with the freeway roaring like surf at their backs, as if the entire city were on deadline.
She noticed that just seven of the twelve apartments got morning papers now, fewer every month, and it made her anxious. People don’t quit the paper, change their minds and sign back up. It was a lifestyle decision, or a pattern broken. And with papers increasingly free online now, big scoops could become as transitory as lightning bugs. Only two of the remaining seven subscribers, she noticed, got her paper, which gave extra personal weight to the recurring notion that she was born too late.
THE LIVING ROOM above the Ming Yen restaurant was packed, just as Roger had hoped it would be since Teddy shared the encouraging news that Chan Wu had asked to host a tea for him. The eighteen women were nibbling egg rolls and sipping gunpowder tea while Chan, pushing eighty beneath a two-tone beehive, popped the questions until they all joined in. Does he call this the International District? No, Chinatown. What about building a branch of the city library here? He’s all for it. And tennis courts? Why not? Would he help them raise money to build a Chinatown gate? Of course.
The questions weren’t hard, but they kept coming, and he felt awkward articulating his intentions on issues he’d never once thought about. Stalling, he nervously defaulted to storytelling and sharing his recollections of Wing Luke. He barely knew him, yet was dropping his name, which further rattled him. “Always so measured, but he had a fun side—didn’t he?—with those cartoons he drew and that smile of his. First one to ever put campaign ads on buses, remember that? Looked ridiculous at first, then everyone started doing it.” He knew he was dying here, rolling out two-dimensional memories of a man some of these people had counted as a friend, yet blundered ahead hoping to find somewhere to stop. “Better leader than people realized, I’d say. He fought for open housing and was the only one, as I recall, in favor of saving the Market. And then, well … Then he just vanished in that little plane in—what was it, ’sixty-five?” Hell, none of this was news, though it probably was insensitive and maybe even ghoulishly violated some custom about not discussing the dead. In all his previous visits here with candidates, he’d never seen a moment this awkward. “It’s just that he was only forty,” he continued, sweat beading his forehead. “If he could’ve … I don’t know.” He trailed off, all these dark eyes avoiding his, amazed anew that the gateway to the city’s Asian vote still passed through the modest living room of this venerable restaurant owner.
Chan gently broke the silence. “We had Wing Luke fortune cookies for a while when he was on the council.” She smiled. “ ‘Wing Luke says this. Wing Luke says that.’ ”
The room filled with oxygen, and Roger was so grateful he reached over and squeezed her hand. As they were leaving, she quietly told Teddy to put her on the endorsement list.
Two hours later, he was riding shotgun through downtown after meeting with Boeing’s machinists, babbling like an excited child.
“Ever wonder how much water gets piped into this city on a daily basis? Or how much electricity gets wired in from Ross? Or how many thousands of gallons of storm water gush beneath these streets when it pours? And think of all the hundreds of garbage trucks and buses and ferry boats it takes just to keep this city moving every goddamn day. Then think of all the thousands of policemen and firemen it takes to keep us safe, and all the hospitals and doctors and ER nurses it takes to patch us up. We don’t really think about it, do we? No, we just mosey along our little habit trails. But we feel it whether we think about it or not, know what I’m saying? It’s what we share, all this stuff that’s going on offstage. And there’s an odd collective power to it that gets under our skin in a good way, don’t you think? It’s not just the landscape or architecture that holds us here.”
Annie nodded feverishly, and even Teddy wasn’t snoring. A simple bump in the polls and people listened better, even the machinists. Rooney was demanding their endorsement, but they told Roger they’d stay neutral through the primary, a vote of confidence that left Teddy baffled. “Why’d they do that?” he’d asked as they left. “You didn’t promise them anything.”
When they parked alongside a row of shops near Mercer and Eleventh, Roger noticed a young man sticking large block letters—R-O-G—in a window and slowly registered exactly where they were before following Annie into his new campaign headquarters. Close to twenty people were stacking signs, stuffing envelopes and answering landlines and cell phones in a cluttered space the size of a studio apartment. It wasn’t so much the commotion on his behalf that excited him as the mix of volunteers in their twenties and eighties. Someone shouted his name, and everybody’s attention swiveled toward him.
After disjointed applause, he asked everyone what exactly they thought they were doing here and then worked the room, greeting the smooth-skinned college kids first. “Extra credit?” he said. They nodded, and he laughed.
“We could’ve picked any campaign, though,” a girl with jagged bangs explained.
“Why mine?”
“You seem honest,” said an earringed boy with an armful of Morgan for Mayor yard signs. “We hope you’ll talk on campus.”
“Definitely,” Roger told him, then turned to the older ladies, careful not to say Nice to meet you in case he simply hadn’t placed them yet. Finally, he got to the large gray woman filling envelopes behind a desk. The familiar empathy in her baggy eyes made him suspect she knew him well.
“So how the hell are you?” he asked.
She rose gingerly and shuffled heavily around the desk as the commotion resumed around them. “You don’t recognize me, do you?” she said softly, before wrapping her arms around him and squeezing.
She smelled like almonds and dead leaves. He knew he’d slept with her, but when? Her name began with D, for sure. Diane? Diana? Denise? He held on, stalling.
SHRONTZ READ HELEN’S story pitch, glanced back at the draft, then at the pitch again. It was all she could do to resist reading it aloud to him. He was painfully slow most mornings, slogging, she suspected, through pharmaceutical hangovers. Finally, he walked by, heading to the morning meeting, and mumbled, “Pretty close on the reporting?”
“Yeah, I need to double-check quite a few things and talk to several more people and see what Lundberg has for me and so on, but what I
really need is a sit-down with him.”
He yawned. “Think you could file by late Wednesday?”
The earlier she turned the story in the more time everyone would have to tinker and second-guess. But wanting Friday A-1 and needing Shrontz in her corner, she bobbed her head.
“Put in another call to his campaign,” he muttered, as if the idea hadn’t occurred to her.
A half hour later, a fully awake Shrontz rushed out of the meeting. “We’re running it tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” Helen’s eyes widened. “No, I—”
“We’re in a competitive market here,” he said, no doubt parroting higher-ranked editors. “All barrels.”
“What?”
He turned his hands into fake guns and pointed them at her. “All barrels blazing. And everything we know,” he added, “about Mr. Seattle.”
“Wait. I’ve at least got to talk to him, because it’s still not even—”
“Birnbaum loves it. Marguerite really loves it. Everyone does.”
“That’s a draft. There’s still a lot of reporting. I mean—”
“You just said you were pretty close,” he reminded her. “Competitive market,” he repeated, hustling toward his desk. “Give Morgan a deadline.”
Helen walked as slowly as she could to the drinking fountain and back. Tomorrow? She glanced at the first page of her draft again. A daring premise thin on facts. When the words started to blur, she looked up and saw the backlit silhouette of Marguerite strutting toward her, blowing imaginary smoke off the tips of her index fingers.
HELEN AND A SCRUM of reporters, photographers and TV crews followed Morgan and his volunteers—armed with campaign flyers, yard signs and dog biscuits—through the Phinney Ridge neighborhood, north of downtown.
