Truth Like the Sun

by Jim Lynch

  “Stop this!”

  He held up a finger. “It needs an ending, doesn’t it? She has a soothing voice that sounds friendlier than she really is. And she has an artistic side too, as evidenced by the calluses on the fingertips of her left hand, which means she plays a string instrument, likely a violin.” He smiles. “How’m I doing?”

  Her face was red, her jaw tight. “For the most part,” she said, after a breath, “you’re inaccurate and way out of line.”

  “Excellent! I hoped you’d understand.”

  She took another breath, debating whether to leave before she said anything she’d regret. “You show a complete misunderstanding of the diligence I pour into my stories, which is surprising considering how long you’ve been around this game. But there’s probably more truth to some of what you said than I’d care to admit. The bit about the violin is remarkable. So clearly you can be observant if you want to be, but you can also be wrong and cruel.” Her eyes glassy now, she tilted her head back slightly. “My son’s father dumped me, not the other way around. I was the one who didn’t cut it.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I apologize for that. But see, that is my point. It’s hard to be accurate when you’re firing from the hip. Most people barely know themselves, Helen, much less their wives and friends. And with strangers, we’re all guessing. You could line up a whole bunch of truths about anyone and still miss the ones that really matter.”

  She had no idea how to respond, so she waited for whatever he’d say next.

  “Would you please tell me,” he asked, as gently as a pediatrician, “how you got that scar?”

  Her chest heaved as the photographer snapped several pictures from above and behind Morgan’s head, the blinds casting rectangular shadows across the side of his face.

  “I was following a lumber truck on the Pennsylvania Turnpike when a four-by-four sprang loose and flew right through my windshield.” Her eyes swung around the room before landing on his. “Struck me right here.” She put her pinky finger on the center point of the scar. “Unlucky, right? Until you hear that two cars behind me was an empty ambulance, which of course makes me remarkably lucky, right? Though it definitely messed up my Halloween routine. I used to dress up as Medusa just by clipping some rubber snakes into my hair. As you can imagine, it was very convincing. But see, most people don’t realize that Medusa ultimately got decapitated by Perseus. So I haven’t felt comfortable putting rubber snakes in my hair ever since.”

  He grinned. “Can I flatter you without ticking you off?”

  “Not a good idea.”

  “You’re going to be gorgeous for a very long time.”

  The shooter pivoted to snap photos of Helen blushing. She glared at him, then turned her bulging eyes on Roger. “That is so unprofessional.”

  “Really? You get to break me down to the cellular level, but when I state something flattering and obvious about you, I’m unprofessional?”

  “Would you have said I’d be handsome for a very long time if I were a man? It’s not flattering. It’s just typical of the sexist crap your generation still carries around.”

  After a long pause, he nodded. “I apologize for acknowledging your beauty.”

  Another silence passes before he offered brief sketches of his three fiancées, his three children and his two grandchildren out of wedlock. Then he stretched, yawned and explained that he had to get dressed for Sy Postman’s funeral.

  “Check out the fridge and the cupboards,” he said over his shoulder. “The people deserve to know what I eat.”

  “This guy,” the photographer whispered, “is a piece of work.”

  With an unsteady hand, Helen wrote down a line she’d been holding on to for twenty minutes: The candidate people see as representing Seattle’s old money is nearly broke.

  Teddy arrived almost immediately after Roger shooed the P-I duo out, and he could tell by his friend’s grimace that he’d seen them.

  “Tell me you refused to talk to her,” Teddy pleaded.

  “Good to see you, my friend. Get yourself some water.”

  Roger slipped into his black suit jacket and followed Teddy to the elevator, both of them hobbling. “Aren’t we a pair?” he said. “Looks like I’m mimicking you now.”

  Teddy wouldn’t look at him. He pressed G, and they began to fall. “What’d you tell her?”

  “Teddy, you—”

  “Don’t Teddy me! Think I wouldn’t find out? Can’t resist any audience, can you? Consequences be damned.”

  Roger smiled. “You expect me to wake up and change at seventy?”

  Teddy hissed, then limped to the car, where he started the engine and handed Roger a thick folder. “Read up on your girlfriend. She hangs politicians, okay? That’s her specialty.”

  Roger leafed through copies of news clippings about an Ohio congressman who’d been jailed on bribery charges, and whose photos made him look evil. Every article beneath her byline began with punchy, inflammatory sentences.

  “Check out the lawsuits I’ve got in the back.” Teddy gestured wildly with his right hand while steering with his left.

  “Calm down,” Roger said, suddenly upset himself.

  “Annie found a web site called ‘The Twenty-three Lies of Helen Gulanos!’ ”

  “You’re too close to the curb on this side.”

  “She ran some youth-camp leader right out of business. Tried to turn some accidental death into murder!”

  “If the guy was innocent, why didn’t he sue?”

  “He did! You’re not listening. She’s been sued twice. At least twice.”

  “Well, I take it she won.”

  “Ever tried to prove malice? There was a front-page correction! Twenty-three lies. Twenty-three.”

  “Watch what you’re doin’!” He started to reach for the wheel before Teddy steadied it.

  “What’d you tell her?”

  “Stop shouting!”

  “You’re the one shouting!”

  “Just drive!”

  Chapter Fifteen

  OCTOBER 1962

  TOO MUCH is going on at once.

  Lines back up a quarter mile to shoot up the Needle or enter the Science Pavilion as the fair bubbles over—111,500 visitors yesterday!—with the exhilaration peaking nightly now in standing-room-only raves for the Chinese opera and the Romanian dance company. And what about the cartoon sitcom that debuted in color on ABC Sunday night? Set in 2062, the Jetsons live atop a Space-Needle-like tower in a city of efficiency and leisure, with breadwinner George working ten minutes a day, three days a week. The expo’s influence has apparently grown so pervasive that it’s now driving pop culture.

  Meanwhile, just a mile from the frenzied fairgrounds, reporters, gossips and the simply curious stake out the federal courthouse to watch tavern and card-room owners, street cops and other mystery men skitter inside, heels clacking on checkered tiles, necks bowed as they drop down into chilly basement passages and the subterranean bunker where the inquisition’s being held. Policemen arrive in street clothes, some with jackets pulled over their heads, others crawling out of rusty vans, shielded from cameras and gawkers by gruff entourages as word spreads that a federal grand jury has been convened to investigate gambling and bribery and maybe even organized crime in a wholesome city now beaming with pride after Teddy broke the news this morning that the fair is guaranteed to turn a profit—a rarity in the expo biz, where host cities usually lose millions.

  “Despite all the doomsayers’ predictions of certain financial disaster,” Teddy gloated, “and despite putting on a show that costs fifty thousand dollars a day and employs two thousand people, Century 21 will wind up in the black.”

  This leads the Seattle newscasts, though now there’s competition. Nationally, New York Senator Kenneth Keating has claimed there’s evidence that Cuba is building launch pads capable of hurling missiles into the American heartland. And locally, this grand-jury stunner is turning the long-rumored graft investigation into a front-page sca
ndal that reads like a misprint. Police on the take? Maybe in New York or Chicago, sure, but here? Yet the evidence and consequences are piling up. Two shipping lines and four out-of-state manufacturers are reconsidering relocation plans, and the commissioner of Major League Baseball just canceled his visit.

  The card-room busts were nothing but diversions, Meredith Stein had informed Roger the day after the raids shortened his outing with Elvis Presley. All they were really after were the books from Dominic’s Bingo Hall, she explained. Arthur Dominic kept meticulous records on pink index cards of profits and payoffs, including recipients’ names. She’d teared up after explaining that to him, and Roger knew the subject was about to change. “Please don’t tell me yet,” she said, rolling a stocking over her knee, “that this has all been a huge mistake.”

  And that was the strangest part. Sleeping with his fiancée felt like a bigger mistake than having an after-hours affair in an art gallery with a married woman. And the fling continues, as if running on its own momentum, much like the fair itself. Roger tries not to miss any of it, attending every party and show, hosting, emceeing, winding everything up toward its zenith when Kennedy will walk into the stadium and conclude this extravaganza. Yet it’s getting harder to focus. Ned Gance wants to meet again, and not in a dive bar this time. He’s coming to the fairgrounds, which feels intrusive. Will he finally tell him something worthwhile? Roger doubted it. He finds him, though, where he’s supposed to be, standing along the western rim of the fountain, undisguised in his suit now, his pale face hovering irritably over the sunlit crowd.

  “Heard from Charlie McDaniel lately?” Gance asks, lighting a cigarette for what looks like the first time.

  “No.”

  “Seems to be missing, doesn’t he?”

  Roger waits for a dozen noisy women to pass, then opts to say nothing.

  “It’s all coming to a head,” Gance says ominously. “New batch of subpoenas going out tomorrow. This might wrap up sooner than we thought.”

  “How soon?”

  “Who knows? Maybe in the next couple weeks. They really want McDaniel. They need him now, see, and they want you to talk him into testifying.”

  Roger looks away, anger pulsing through him. “How could they know I know him, seeing as how everything I’ve told you has been confidential.”

  “Look,” Gance snaps, “people’ve seen you together. And you do talk to him, right?”

  “Not in a while. Don’t even have his number. He calls me.”

  Gance studies him. “You really want us to pull your phone records? Let him know it’s in his best interests, okay? We’re prepared to offer him immunity. I strongly encourage you to cooperate.” His face softens. “And don’t forget to let the senator know I’ve done right by you.”

  Less than an hour after Roger is back shuffling through requests, Jenny Sunshine tells him that Malcolm Turner’s on the line.

  “Can I say something here without you getting all worked up?” the developer begins.

  Roger waits.

  “You’re walking a curious line here, my friend, and it’s not going unnoticed, okay?”

  Roger runs the words back through his head and stalls. “Beg your pardon?”

  “Jesus,” Malcolm whines, “you think people don’t know who you are?”

  “Believe it or not,” Roger says quietly, “I don’t have the dimmest idea what we’re talking about.”

  “No? You walk into the fanciest cathouse in the city and just smile and ask questions at five in the morning? You have a heart-to-heart at the Frontier with a lunatic who couldn’t run a tavern to save his life? And now you’re an informant for the U.S. Attorney’s Office?”

  The line goes quiet, Roger every bit as curious as he is alarmed.

  “Listen, I’m not trying to bust your chops,” Malcolm continues. “When I hear these things, seems like you’d want a friend to say something. I mean, really. You think people don’t recognize you?”

  “I’d think you might know not to believe whatever …” Roger’s voice trails off. “Somebody just popped in. I gotta ring you back.” He hangs up and waits for his blood to cool, studying his big hands as if they belonged to someone else.

  That evening he’s sweating in the opera house, introducing Theodore Roethke, and feeling unprepared, distracted and fumbling beneath stage lights that feel like heat lamps. From up here, all he sees is blackness, but he can hear the city’s finest and the artsy out-of-towners packed in here to listen to, of all things, a poet. No crazy dancers. No mentalist. Neither Elvis nor Hope. A poet.

  “You all are about to hear the best poet I know—not that I know him personally. In fact, I don’t. What I mean is,” he labors, “he just happens to live here. And he’s a gifted man who walks on window-sills.” Roger rises over the laughter, feeling a sudden desire for authenticity, at least from himself. “I’ve been fortunate to introduce many extraordinary people over the last five months, yet none of them have been as humbling as this man who simply seems far better connected to what matters than the rest of us. I give you the incomparable, Pulitzer- and National Book Award–winning Theodore Roethke.”

  Who looks as discombobulated as Roger feels, shambling onstage in a tuxedo, his Churchillian head gleaming in the lights. Oddly chatty at first, as if he were his own warm-up act, he flatters his friends, summons a weak Groucho Marx impression, guzzles water straight from the yellow pitcher and skewers T. S. Eliot and other overrated poets. “You see,” he suddenly explains, “what I want is power!”

  Roger sits in the second row in the only patch of vacant seats, chin up, craning to see, feeling the crowd’s dismay, sweating profusely now, thinking Roethke might simply be too much of an iconoclastic oddball for these people, but then the man started reciting hypnotic, mournful poems, as if channeling the dead.

  The whiskey on your breath

  Could make a small boy dizzy;

  But I hung on like death:

  Such waltzing was not easy.

  You beat time on my head

  With a palm caked hard by dirt,

  Then waltzed me off to bed

  Still clinging to your shirt.

  The words roll through Roger, as if they were his, describing his own father. Roethke’s godlike voice, hovering in the hall, feels capable of absolving him and the city and—for that matter—the increasingly dismaying world.

  I knew a woman, lovely in her bones

  Roger flinches at the sudden grip on his collar from behind, but recognizes the touch. Her voice is in his ear now, her cheek pressed against the back of his sweaty neck. The auditorium is dark, but people can probably see—Linda, his mother, Teddy, Malcolm, anyone who wants to. Her breathy words mix with her smell. “I knew a woman lovely in her flesh” is what she whispers now. “The good cops are looking at the city council and some businessmen too. There’s a banker and a developer in the bingo ledgers. This thing could go all the way,” she says even more softly, “up to the governor.”

  Roethke stares directly down at them now with heavy eyes, swaying in the lights.

  Thought does not crush to stone.

  The great sledge drops in vain.

  Truth never is undone;

  Its shafts remain.

  Chapter Sixteen

  AUGUST 2001

  THE SECOND ROUND of candidate profiles ran two weeks before the primary, one after the other. First the Rooney story—Lundy’s thumbsucker on whether it was true the mayor was allergic to any idea that wasn’t his own. Then the yawner about Christine Norheim’s transformation from loaded Microsoft exec to demanding councilwoman who expected round-the-clock Microsofty zeal from her lackeys. Even the teaser for Helen’s story—Tomorrow: Why Roger Morgan Isn’t Financing His Own Campaign—generated more street buzz, with its backlit photograph of him hovering over what looked like—could it be?—a LEGO version of the skyline.

  Shrontz, Marguerite and Birnbaum took turns fiddling with the fifty-nine-inch story. When it finally came out—with a
larger LEGO photo—the case was made that Mr. Seattle’s finances mirrored the city’s own economic roller coaster over the past forty years. He rode the modest postfair boom through the ’60s, crashed with Boeing in the early ’70s, rose up again with the high-rise binge of the mid-’80s and participated in the dot-com ups and downs of the late ’90s. As recently as five years ago, he’d owned a Queen Anne bungalow as well as getaways at Crystal Mountain and Hood Canal. Yet after a spate of dubious investments and his mother’s move into a nursing home, he now lived in a nearly viewless $1,250-a-month apartment and got around—when not walking or busing—in a 1994 Nissan worth about $5,000. And while Morgan remained a regular at the Rainier and Broadmoor clubs, it was as an honorary, not a dues-paying, member. All of which would help explain why, according to his most recent filings, he hadn’t spent a dollar of his own money on his campaign. The article concluded with his claim that he didn’t feel any meaningful difference in his life whether he was wealthy or broke.

  Birnbaum told Helen the story showed great instincts and precision, while Marguerite called it groundbreaking journalism. “This is the most humanic financial story I’ve ever read,” she gushed. Bill Steele waddled up afterward. “Humanic is not a word. Look it up. You won’t find it.”

  The street response was more nuanced. Some claimed it proved just how inappropriate Morgan was for the job. His fans saw it as further evidence of his authenticity and honesty, though many of them called it yet another cheap shot. A subsequent Times poll showed Morgan still slightly ahead of Rooney and Norheim, which provoked Omar’s gadfly to finally agree to this rendezvous.

  He was already deep into his curry and halfway down a twenty-ounce Singha by the time Helen and Omar showed up at the Ying Thai Kitchen. Donald Yates—whose name Omar finally relinquished—didn’t rise or offer his hand, just kept chewing while instructing them not to consider ordering anything but yellow chicken curry, “and go at least four stars.” His comments were directed at Omar, as if she wasn’t there.