by Jim Lynch
He was tall, fit and long-faced with pocked cheeks, baggy eyes and ears sprouting wiry bushels of gray hair. His charcoal suit and thin black tie made him look like an elderly extra in a black-and-white movie. When the airy-voiced waitress floated by, Helen asked for a pot of tea. “Eat!” Yates insisted, ordering another Singha. “Gimme a couple more egg rolls,” he said, without looking up, then resumed gorging. “So you’re the one,” he added, almost as an aside, sliding in and out of a grin, “who’s written all those puff pieces on Roger Morgan.”
“Puff?” Her temperature spiked. “I just wrote that he’s been so foolish with his money that he’s practically broke.”
“Yes, but with such a sympathetic tone,” he said with a full mouth, “as if it just makes him all the more of a giver.” He winked at her and grinned at Omar, then returned to his dish.
“Morgan’s people,” she told him as calmly as she could, “are complaining day and night.”
“C’mon, now.” He winked again. “People I talk to assume you’re sleeping with him.”
“Well,” she said, “you’ve got some sick friends.” She stood up. “Enjoy your lunch.”
“Oh, sit down.”
Omar made helpless soothing noises while Yates snickered. “What a theatrical reaction,” he said. “Is that how Birnbaum teaches you to treat sources?” He smothered a belch. “You’re not leaving yet anyway, little lady. Haven’t paid for my lunch yet. Sit down.” He winked yet again. “Relax.”
“Mr. Yates,” she said, shaking Omar’s hand off her forearm, “let’s see if we can have a conversation without you insulting me every other sentence or giving me any more condescending winks.”
“Touchy, touchy.” He looked at Omar for confirmation. “It’s obvious to anyone with opposable thumbs that your paper wants Morgan to win.” He licked his lips. “That’s not your fault. One reporter can only do so much to puncture the fairy tale perpetuated about him for decades now. That’s why I’m offering my help, to save you further embarrassment. Please, sit down.”
She glared at Omar and then Yates, whose eyes leisurely panned the walls of what looked more like a residence than a restaurant. “If you have something to tell me,” she said, reluctantly lowering herself back into the booth, “you should get to it pretty soon.”
“Patience,” he said, then spooned sauce straight into his mouth. “Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?”
Helen reluctantly took notes to spare herself from watching him eat.
“He helped kill mass transit initiatives in the sixties and helped Republicans get elected. Fought the clean-air initiative in the seventies and helped Republicans get elected. Advised companies on how to get around new wetlands regs in the eighties and helped more Republicans get elected. He’s always had this gift, you see, for knowing exactly how to buffalo the public. And he’ll share that gift with anybody who pays him for it, which I guess defines him as a whore, doesn’t it?” He mopped his face with a napkin and set it on the table between them. “Then, of course, he fattened himself up building skyscrapers, leaving us with these totems to our excess. How you figure Malcolm Turner got that height exemption on his towers, huh?”
The recounting of Morgan’s alleged abominations continued right up to his public comment last year that Nader supporters had thrown their votes away. “How dare he?” Yates demanded. What Morgan had done right over the years, he told her—sneering at his efforts to save the Market and clean up the lakes—was only for his own glorification. “He’s a false prince, okay? That’s all he’s ever been.”
She’d dealt with so many unforgiving activists in D.C. that it surprised her how much she’d let Yates agitate her. “So, that’s it?” She cracked her tiny purse and pulled out her credit card. “He’s an enemy of the environment and a two-faced whore. Any last insights before I go?” She caught the waitress’s eye and mimed her signature.
“Oh, yeah.” His grin dilated in and out again before he took a bite of the remaining egg roll. “Did I fail to mention that he was taking bribes during the fair?”
Helen set her card down under her palm, watching him chew.
“Oh, so you like that?” He winked at Omar this time. “Listening to me now, isn’t she?”
He then told her how Morgan had forced Seattle’s Freemasons out of their building, and how one of them, a furious attorney named Sid Chambliss, vowed revenge. Before dying, he’d passed along to Yates the name of a retired Seattle cop who’d speak up if the opportunity arose. After Yates rattled off his name and that of his Spokane nursing home, and even his room number, Helen dialed 4-1-1 and got connected to the Sunset Rehabilitation Center.
“Is Denny Carmichael still in 106?… Yes, that’s all.… No, no thank you.”
She signed the bill, stewing on the vagueness, difficulty and vindictive nature of this lead.
“Oh, and you might ask the prince himself where he went once the fair finally ended.” Yates straightened his tie. “This guy makes Clinton look like a prude. His whole past’s like that, doing whatever he wants. Omar here speaks highly of you. That’s why I’m giving you a head start. But if you can’t get it in the paper, I’m sure Trevor Stiles can.”
Helen’s eyes flashed. “What’re you saying?”
Even Omar was on red alert. “You promised,” he said, then more forcefully, “an exclusive.”
“If she can’t get it in, I’m sure the Times will,” Yates told him without looking up. “Wouldn’t be fair if I played favorites, would it?”
She glanced at Omar, then gave Yates a murderous stare. “I don’t think you have any idea what the word fair means,” she said before storming outside, under the first overcast sky in weeks.
“The guy’s an ass,” Omar said once he caught up. “I’m sorry,” he added, “but you got the tip, at least. Helen, please.”
She sped up, trying to distance herself from him, her boot heels beating the sidewalk along Queen Anne Avenue.
“Go on, let me have it,” he pleaded, catching up again. “Just say something. I didn’t know he’d be this manipulative. I really didn’t. Please, Helen.” They walked side by side toward her car. “Just say something, please.”
Without looking at him, she stuck her arm through his, pinning it tight to her elbow, and they strode in silence to the flashing Don’t Walk sign on the corner where three men rolled past on bicycles, drafting behind one another like migrating birds, followed by two minivans, a woman jogger and a bus with Roger Morgan’s billboard-sized face stretched over its side. His self-effacing smile seemed to say, I can’t believe I’m on this bus either. The only words on the poster: Vote for Roger.
She released Omar’s arm and started laughing so softly that it sounded like she was crying.
WITH SPOKANE’S AIRPORT fogged in for the last two days, the editors agreed they couldn’t wait for the weather to lift. So Helen pulled Elias out of preschool and raced east out of the city before rush hour, up and over Snoqualmie Pass into what looked like cowboy country. Grateful to be out of cell range, she stepped on it, hurtling through tumbleweeds toward the Columbia. Elias woke from a nap and wanted to eat and hear stories and play games. Helen ran more questions and interviewing ploys through her head while playing guessing games with him until he said, “The speedometer says one hundred, Mommy.”
“It’s broken,” she told him. “We’re not going that fast.”
“Tell me a story?”
“I’m really distracted right now.”
“No story?”
“Sorry, Eli. Not now.”
“Why don’t I have a father?”
The dry moonscape suddenly blurred on her. “What,” she said slowly, “makes you ask that?”
“Everybody else has one. Michael Ruskofsky’s dad doesn’t live with him, but he sees him on Saturday.”
She could feel his eyes on the side of her head. “Some boys have ’em, some don’t.”
“Where’s mine?”
“I don’t exactly know.”
“Should we try to find him?”
“I don’t think so, Elias.”
The boy pondered that. “Would he like me?”
“Oh, Eli.”
“What’s wrong? Why are you—”
“Of course. Of course.”
“YOU KNOW all this how?” Roger asked the older man across the table.
“Huh?”
“Ah Jesus, Clint, work with me here.”
“How’s that?”
“At least lip-read a little, will ya?”
Clint squinted, tilting his unsteady head.
“Where did you hear this?” Roger shouted, drawing stares, propping his chin on a palm and leaning closer.
After another palsied shimmy, Clint said, “Yates is friends with Halsey, who plays bridge with Rosemary.”
So this was how bad news got delivered these days, by a Parkinsonian, liver-spotted, half-deaf Clint Rohrbacher over a bowl of chili at Lowell’s. He used to relish their grueling hikes together, but now it was hard to even catch up on their lives. What he did know was that Clint and his wife preferred birds to humans, a bias that made them allies of the Halseys and grudge-holding doomsayers like Donald Yates.
A waiter hovered over them, glancing at the two canes leaning against a chair on the far side of the table. “Can I get you young men anything else?”
“I’ll be damned,” Roger muttered, Clint’s words still coursing through him.
“S’cuse me?” The waiter leaned closer.
“Two whiskeys.”
Clint cocked an eyebrow. “It’s not even three o’clock.”
“Right. I forgot.” Roger glanced at the waiter. “Doubles.”
“What kind, sir?”
“Maker’s Mark should do the trick.”
Even in his physical free fall, Clint’s grin was mischievous and the neurological wobble of his head made him look like he was moving to jazz nobody else could hear. They’d hiked in the Olympics a dozen times during the ’70s, though Clint always relied on Roger’s camera and his memory for the particulars. Their last peak was a steep scramble near the southern end of the range. They weren’t fit enough to enjoy the ascent, but the tiny summit was unforgettable considering they wound up sharing it and their lunch with two beautiful young Australians.
Roger pulled out a photo and laid it flat on the table. It took Clint a few beats to recognize himself twenty-five years younger, laughing between the two festive women, then a few more to recall the moment and the setting.
“Come on.” Roger looked away. “If I’d known you were gonna go sappy on me …”
He realized Clint didn’t hear him and gave him another moment with the photo, then loudly said, “Yates still live in that shit box on Warren?”
Clint looked up, wincing. “Not planning anything rash, are you?”
Roger smiled. “Don’t worry. I’m only violent when I drink.”
Lip-reading, Clint snorted a laugh.
They watched massive port cranes off-loading three freighters while stout tugs shuttled in and out of the Duwamish and two enormous Asian ships, bobbing well above their waterlines, awaited fresh loads. The more he mulled over what Clint told him, the more sense it made. The Freemasons had dropped their suit after the fair, but Sid Chambliss warned him never to run for anything. And Yates and Chambliss, of course, were a natural humorless duo. Roger felt foolish for being caught off-guard like this. The routine bustling of the waterfront usually relaxed him, but not today, not with Clint’s message and the lingering anxiety created by the oddly intrusive P-I article with the LEGO photo that had put Teddy back on the warpath.
Once the drinks arrived, Roger clinked his glass against Clint’s and smiled, but his teeth were grinding. “To old friends,” he said, “and new enemies.”
Clint tilted his head, as if to hear some distant message. “Nothing rash, Roger. Nothing rash.”
HELEN’S PULSE was fluttering as they rolled into the gravel lot in front of a large wooden building in sun-scorched fields near a languid curl of the Spokane River. They hadn’t stopped for food—other than Fritos—and Elias was starting to whine. She crouched next to him beside her bug-splattered Civic, the baked land still giving off heat at nearly seven o’clock. “I’m very, very sorry it hasn’t been much fun today, but Mommy has to do her job here, okay?” Her lips were so dry they stung. “And you know what? I need your help, Elias. If you’re a good boy in here, I’ll get you the best burger in the world after we’re done, okay?”
He pretended not to hear any of this—his most effective punishment, and he knew it.
“See, I need this old man to tell us a story,” she added.
He looked up, finally curious, sporting more nose freckles than ever.
“It might be hard to follow, but it’ll be a good one. And I need to make sure the story he tells us is true, okay? And that’s why I want you to be with me, because nobody would lie around such a smart, good boy. So just look him in the eye when he looks at you, okay? Can you do that for me? And it might be a little smelly or gross in there, but that’ll be our secret, all right?”
The sliding doors didn’t respond to Elias Gulanos’s forty-three pounds, but once his mother caught up they opened into a small lobby and a long reception counter, in front of which an old woman was slouched in a wheelchair, her balding head listing precariously while a shirtless man holding a sack of fluids connected to a tube inserted into his bruised forearm paced back and forth, the both of them trying to get the attention of the nurse on the phone behind the counter.
“I don’t give half a rat’s ass about that, you hear me?… Uh-huh. That so? Well, you tell him he can …” She looked up—“Hold on”—and set the phone down. “What do you need?”
“We’re here to see Denny Carmichael,” Helen said.
“We?” The woman squinted, then leaned over the counter to glance at Elias. “Family?”
Helen saw the visitors’ log and grabbed the pen. “Might as well be.” She scribbled her name and the time. “Denny’s still in 106, right?”
The woman dismissed her with wiggling fingers and resumed her conversation, the shirtless man still stammering for attention.
Helen knocked, then stepped inside the narrow, tile-floored room when nobody answered. Two loud televisions were blathering simultaneously on different channels, but a tiny bony man was asleep in the bed near the door. She watched Elias’s nose wrinkle at the barrage of odors—boiled vegetables, urine, bleach. The slumbering man looked too frail to have ever been a cop. She walked over to the curtain divider and called, “Mr. Carmichael?”
She waited, then peeked behind it and found an empty bed with rumpled sheets. A toilet flushed and the bathroom door swung open to a new stench as a gangly, white-haired man toddled out, panting, shirtless and deflated, his skin sagging like a wrinkled sheet wherever there wasn’t enough bone to stretch it thin.
“Mr. Carmichael?” she said, her heart galloping.
He looked at her outstretched hand and slowly took it with his wet fingers. When she introduced Elias, he stared at him as if he hadn’t seen a child in years. “Shake Mr. Carmichael’s hand.” He stepped forward and stuck out his hand the way a trained dog lifts a paw.
“Airport’s fogged out, had to drive across,” she said, just to say something, and started to regret this goose chase with every cell in her body.
He clearly had no idea who she was or why she was there and looked too dazed to remember much of anything. Struggling to catch his breath, he gingerly tried to climb into bed, his right leg dangling off the side no matter how hard he strained. Finally, she gave him a hand, his calf muscle soft and loose as she hoisted it onto the mattress. He stared at her for a long moment, breathing heavily.
“Donald Yates says he’s been in touch with you about me visiting. I’m a reporter with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. This is my son, Elias.” When he did nothing but breathe, she explained that she was writing about the mayoral race and Roger Morgan. Still not
hing. His eyes swiveled so he could study Elias without moving his head.
She described her lunch with Yates, “who assured me that you had some information and were willing to help.” Was this even Denny Carmichael, she wondered, then spotted a prescription vial on the bedside table. She leaned toward it, but the print was still too fine to read. “I’m sorry, sir, but I just drove four hours to see you. And I need to make sure I’m not wasting your time here. So with all due respect, my bossy editor wants to be sure you’re a reliable source of information. No offense, sir, but who’s the current president of the United States?”
His mouth sagged and his lips moved, but nothing came out until he said, in a grumbling monotone, “LBJ?” After holding the same bug-eyed expression for a few seconds, he broke into a bronchial laugh that sounded like he was strangling.
A whistling nurse waddled in, glancing at him and his visitors. “How we doin’, love?” She stepped into the bathroom, flushed the toilet again and waddled back out. “Let’s hook you back up, eh?” She fit some clear narrow tubing across his nostrils and over his ears and flipped a switch, and a small engine started humming. “Better? Daughter visitin’ you, Mr. Carmichael?”
“Hardly.”
She smiled. “Well, buzz when you need me, hon.” A slow-motion Victoria’s Secret commercial distracted her until some quiz show came back on and she left.
“So you think I’m senile,” he said, breathing almost normally now, his voice raspy but fluent. He snorted through his nose. “Wish like hell I didn’t know what was going on. So you wanna talk about Roger Morgan? That’s gotta be worth something to a big newspaper.”
Helen was speechless. He’d gone from zombie to extortionist far too quickly.
“At last, everybody finally wants to know about Roger Morgan,” he added. “Funny how that works.”
“Run for mayor,” Helen said patiently, “and people want to know everything about you.”
“Well, help me understand why I should talk to you instead of some other newspaper lady.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Carmichael,” she said as gently as possible, the two TVs behind her merging into one annoying blare. “We don’t pay for information.”
