Truth Like the Sun

by Jim Lynch

  “Where’s this gonna end?” Roger asks softly.

  “What?” the mayor asks, his smile lagging behind his startled eyes. “Where what ends?”

  “I hear council members took money. Head of licensing too.” His voice is quiet, but he’s moving closer. “Where’s it end?”

  The mayor’s lip trembles. “Look.” He pulls both pants pockets inside out. “Nothing but lint, Roger. Okay? Never got a dime, I swear. Christ almighty …”

  Two hours later, he’s reliving his ineptitude with Linda and taking off his coat to help demolish a ticket booth when the planet stops spinning. “Within the past week,” President Kennedy says on every television and radio station in America, “unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island.”

  Roger and a swarm of workers are huddled around a small transistor outside the food pavilion as the president states the obvious: “The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.”

  Of course, Roger tells himself. It wasn’t a stupid head cold that kept the man from the closing ceremonies.

  Kennedy explains his plan to quarantine Cuba by inspecting all seaboard shipments, then drops this gauntlet: “And finally, I call upon Chairman Khrushchev to halt and eliminate this clandestine, reckless and provocative threat to world peace.” Roger’s mind hurtles ahead so fast he misses the next line. All those gushing accolades he’d thrown out last night about peace and universal understanding were already being exposed as so much happy horse shit. A more apt speech might have concluded: We threw a ridiculous six-month party on the eve of the apocalypse, but thanks for coming. Finally Kennedy closes with this comment about his Soviet counterpart: “He has an opportunity now to move the world back from the abyss of destruction.”

  PSAs follow the speech, encouraging everybody to load up on food, water, flashlights and radios. “The head of the family should have a plan of action, so panic can be avoided. If war comes, every man should be prepared so that we may survive to win and rebuild the nation.”

  Afterward, there is a quiet moment of awe similar to people’s reaction when they stare into the Grand Canyon for the first time. Roger pictures Murrow in mid-inhale, squinting at him as if he were a toddler. Boeing makes you a bull’s-eye, of course. But you already know that, right?

  When a 707 thunders overhead, vertebrae crack in thousands of necks. Roger drifts into the numb crowd around the International Fountain and stands silently among them, absently noticing the yellowed maple and alder leaves dangling loose, the slightest puff testing their resolve.

  “Mr. Morgan.”

  He recognizes the voice but keeps his eyes on the leaves, wishing like hell he’d already left town.

  “Mr. Morgan,” the tall man says again.

  “Does the federal building,” Roger asks, still staring upward, “have a bomb shelter?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “You should look into that.”

  “Will do. But have you heard from McDaniel? We need him to testify right now.”

  Roger turns and sees that Ned Gance is paler than ever.

  “You understand this is serious, right?” Gance glares down his nose at him. “We were supposed to interview Rudy Costello yesterday, but perhaps you heard he didn’t make it to his appointment. You want to know something else that article didn’t mention? Rudy was a competitive swimmer in high school.”

  Roger hears this last bit but it doesn’t stick because he’s busy recalling a night in Club 21 when Mal Turner introduced him to a tanned and bloated man named Rudy, who shook his hand with moist, meaty fingers, one sporting a massive onyx ring that looked like it wouldn’t come off without a hacksaw.

  “So you can understand,” Gance says, “why we’re a bit worried about your pal Charlie.”

  Roger watches people hugging and crying and walking in circles.

  Gance steps closer. “They want to subpoena you too, see. They’ve waited until the fair was over, at my personal request, but I can’t hold them off any longer. I only have so much pull, you understand?”

  All of Roger’s suspicions click into place. Gance has been a double agent since the beginning, earning points with the U.S. attorney for everything he’s squeezing out of Roger while making the senator think he’s doing him all the favors.

  “Why?” Roger stalls. “What could they possibly want to hear from me?”

  “They want you to explain what McDaniel told you, and what you saw at the Dog House, and what you know about how the city works, that sort of thing. This is a broad investigation, understand?”

  “Have you guys even figured out who’s running this goddamn thing yet?”

  When Gance reaches inside his coat, Roger braces for a subpoena, but it’s just his tiny black notebook in which he jots something, then says irritably, “What thing would that be?”

  “The network, or whatever you want to call it. Who runs it?”

  Gance leans forward, his neck bowed. “There’s no godfather, if that’s what you’re asking. There’s just people who live and work here. People like your police chief and your county prosecutor and some of your other friends.”

  “My friends?”

  “Have you invested in an apartment building, Mr. Morgan?”

  Roger’s voice gets small as the air pressure drops. “What?”

  “Having trouble with English? Do you or do you not have a stake in the construction of an apartment building on Seventh Ave.?”

  Roger stalls, amazed, wondering if Gance had botched the address. “No,” he says finally, “do you?”

  Gance reshuffles his feet like a man getting ready to swing a bat. “Tell you what, I’ll do what I can to get you blanket immunity.”

  Roger forces a laugh. “From what?”

  “For your own peace of mind. Blanket immunity: think about it. It’s not easy to get. I can’t guarantee it, but I’d do my best, especially if you bring McDaniel in today. ”

  Roger jingles the change in his pants pocket, realizing that Gance, like everybody else, is just guessing. “I don’t think so,” he says.

  Gance cocks a thin eyebrow. “How’s that?”

  “I don’t need any more of your so-called favors. Your boss has no legitimate interest in me, and he’s well aware of the risks of overreaching. If I’m wrong, come find me.”

  Roger waves aside Gance’s rebuttals and legal advice and strolls off, eyes on the ground, heart thumping, his thoughts hopping from Gance’s warning to wondering what percentage of the city can squeeze into bomb shelters to reliving Linda’s emotionless response as another plane roars overhead, and all eyes, including his, swing upward.

  Chapter Twenty

  AUGUST 2001

  SHE COULD TELL when the depleted night shift gravitated toward the newsroom TV that the mayoral debate had begun. Joining in, she listened to their mockery of the candidates. Rooney and Morgan looked exhausted. As the questions mounted, their answers warped into snide attacks on each other, an unsightly fracas in such a mannerly city. Norheim was the only one who seemed reasonable. A slight shift in countenance or tone suddenly made her look and sound more appealing, competent and original than the surly men smiling painfully on either side of her. The newsroom banter faded until Helen was finally staring at the television alone, realizing with a low groan that this was the fifth straight night she’d stranded Elias with another teenage babysitter.

  The story had gotten away from her. She liked to work fast, but with just nine days left before the primary, everybody was rushing her. Management’s fear of getting sued had been trumped by the more unthinkable dread of getting scooped, especially with the Times dropping more bombs about Vitullo and his strippers backing Rooney. The latest installment featured read-aloud funny quotes from anonymous dancers who said all fifty-six performers at Vitullo’s three clubs were offered $700 in cash for every $650 check they wrote to the
mayor’s campaign. Told she was among Rooney’s most generous contributors, one of the girls was quoted as saying, “I never even knew Mr. Chubby’s real name until I wrote that check.” A local weekly stole the next news cycle by offering Norheim a front-page endorsement if she came out of the closet and admitted she was a lesbian. The race was so close now—a virtual three-way tie—that every newspaper, radio and TV station was firing off whatever they had. Given that only two candidates would survive the primary, nobody wanted to be left holding a scoop on someone who soon might no longer matter. As Marguerite kept telling Helen, “Carpe diem!”

  She’d spent most of the past four days skimming grand-jury transcripts and tracking down cops who’d testified. One former sergeant politely declined to talk and then, the second time she called, suggested she leave him alone. When she then knocked on his peeling front door, he looked at her through a swirl of whiskers and slurred, “Get off my porch, you communist slut.” Another retired cop who’d testified in ’62 told her he didn’t recall hearing anything disparaging about Morgan other than that he preferred married women. She tried to find the U.S. attorney who’d led the crusade only to discover that James Stockton had been dead since 1971 after a forgettable six years in Congress; his deputies and assistants also had vanished.

  Frustrated, Helen had driven to Olympia one afternoon to scan lobbyist and campaign records for anything the capital reporters might have missed. There was nothing, though, as if Morgan’s decades of hands-on politicking had left no fingerprints. She looked up every state record involving Malcolm Turner’s corporations, hoping for something Steele might have overlooked—such as additional lists of investors. Again, no luck. The more reporting she did, the more incomplete the story felt. Yet Steele and the editors were in giddy lockstep, convinced they were on the brink of connecting two of the city’s biggest stories in decades. When Helen gently asserted that they needed more to link Turner’s and Morgan’s sagas than the allegations and foggy memories of a bedridden perjurer and an eccentric Ballard woman, Steele countered that neither accuser was vengeful and that his bankruptcy sources were independently confirming—off the record—bits and pieces of all this!

  He’d also warned her that the grand-jury transcripts were a dead end, claiming he’d scoured them five years ago when they were finally made public, but she doubted he’d had the patience to scan them adequately. So, rather than skim them in a reading room at the federal building, she’d paid for all 6,221 pages to be copied, and Shrontz hadn’t even flinched at the $311 bill. Full speed ahead! Yet the boxes surrounding her desk were a mess, with many pages out of order or missing. After reading Eddie Mills’s unenlightening transcript, she became preoccupied with the informative yet incomplete testimony of his liquor board colleague, Daniel Bottenfield. The first five pages of Bottenfield’s October 25, 1962, statements provided the most detailed accounting she’d seen of the payoffs. Yet his final two pages appeared to be missing. Researching him, she found a brief article and a photograph when he was appointed in 1959 but no mention of any potential wrongdoing. By the time she unearthed his most recent address, he’d been dead for eighteen months. Returning to the courthouse, she requested the box containing Bottenfield’s original testimony. Page 6 was missing there too, but not page 7. To her disappointment, it looked to be nothing more than a page-numbering gaffe, with page 5 flowing seamlessly into page 7, which referenced a “crime network” several times without ever mentioning any names. Yet thumbing through police testimony near the back of this same box, she came across a seemingly stray page 6—which included a pyramidal flow chart titled “The Network.” At the bottom were the Racketeers—gamblers, prostitutes and bookies. The next level up were the Organizers—card-room and bingo-parlor owners as well as cops and politicians. The top tier, the Financiers, included bankers, realtors, jewelers and developers.

  After copying this diagram, she’d sped to Ballard, where Mrs. Strovich once again mistook her for a realtor. There was no offering of pie this time, and she was further rankled when Helen pulled out the flow chart and asked her to try to recall what Daniel Bottenfield had told the jury about the network. Her recollections turned fuzzier and surlier the longer they talked.

  Finally, Helen cut her off. “Please don’t play forgetful again, Mrs. Strovich. It’s just not convincing.” She laid the black-and-white image of the double-chinned Bottenfield on the table. “This man used this diagram in his presentation,” Helen said, trying to imagine the scene. “And he probably explained, in a very meticulous manner, exactly how and where the money got invested through realtors and developers and others who helped turn dirty money into seemingly clean investments.”

  “If you say so,” Mrs. Strovich finally replied, her eyes lingering on Bottenfield’s photo, “but I don’t remember him at all.”

  Helen studied her. “I find that really hard to believe. You’ve already told me how appealing you found Mr. Morgan. I’d think you’d remember what was said about him.”

  The woman’s eyes widened. “I think it’s time for you to leave.”

  “Please just answer one question, and then I promise to leave you alone: To the best of your recollection, did Daniel Bottenfield or any other witness ever suggest that Morgan and Malcolm Turner were messed up in the city’s so-called crime network?”

  Mrs. Strovich got up and carried her empty mug to the sink. “Yes,” she said quietly, after running the water, “but there wasn’t any proof.”

  “Was there talk of subpoenaing them?”

  “See how you are? You said one question. And like I already told you, there was all kinds of talk.”

  Helen gathered the photo and the diagram and stood up. “Was there any about Roger Morgan, in particular, that he was protected, that it was a matter of politics not—”

  “Of course there was.” She nodded toward the door. “Now away you go.”

  Helen was back into the transcript boxes now, reading more testimonies while Steele whispered like a clandestine lover with his sources and tinkered with their draft, clunking it up with old-school jargon—a four-month investigation by the Post-Intelligencer has revealed that … Running short on time and options, Helen called Morgan’s assistant once again to insist on a sit-down interview either after tonight’s debate or sometime tomorrow. Impossible, she was told, his schedule was already overbooked with a reception at the Space Needle and a full day of events. Exasperated, Helen hung up and watched Steele stomp red-faced toward her desk with something he couldn’t wait to share.

  THE FAREWELLS were even slower than he expected, with a growing line forming to bid him good luck and good night, the older men flaunting their remaining vigor by not letting go of his hand, their eye contact equally intense, astigmatism to astigmatism, some choking up, others resorting to clumsy backslappy hugs. And the women, damp beneath old lace, wrapped their flabby arms around him and smeared lipstick on his cheek, a few openly crying, many of them exasperated, gingerly shifting from arthritic knee to swollen foot, exhaling, plopping back down and fanning themselves, coming off as irritable or impatient though he knew they were just in pain and wanted to be home and alone already, most of them well past straining to look younger than they felt.

  This had been Teddy’s brainstorm. One last chance to honor and loot their wealthiest supporters to help buy some last-chance TV ads, all of which made him feel like an unimaginative shyster milking the same old marks once again. When a thin widow festooned with pearls and diamonds shuffled to the front of the line, Roger knew this good-bye would come with advice, her husband having served six terms in the legislature. “You’ve gotta arrange buses for the retirement homes, Rog.” She was repeating this instruction for a third time—“otherwise they won’t get to the polls”—when he noticed Teddy impatiently skidding his walker toward him.

  Without excusing himself, Teddy bored in close and hissed, “She’s still on the goddamn story and wants to talk to you now even though Annie already told her you didn’t have time.” His
chest heaved with exasperation. “Bill Steele’s here with her too.”

  Roger glanced across the SkyLine Banquet Room and spotted them.

  “I’m gonna tell the beauty and the beast to beat it,” Teddy said between breaths.

  “No, say we’ll be delighted to talk to ’em up in the restaurant once we finish up here. I’m not about to rush this line, though. Tell ’em that too. And let Nancy know we’ll need a quiet table.” He pivoted back to the widow, dropping his head to hers. “I apologize, Opal. You’re absolutely right, my dear. Buses and more buses.” He kissed both her cheeks as she slid an envelope into his suit pocket.

  Forty minutes later, he and Teddy found the two reporters yakking on their phones—coiled and amped, sipping ice water in the spinning dining room at a window-side table. He smiled and shook hands.

  “We appreciate you taking the time, Mr. Morgan,” Steele said.

  Roger nodded graciously, the reporters’ urgency relaxing him, and turned to Helen. “Please tell me you’ve been up here before.”

  “First time.”

  Her smile was more of a wince, her skin pale, her voice nasal. Either she was sick or, he realized, a whole lot was on the line here. He chuckled. “I forgot, you just work here. But would you like my mini-tutorial anyway?”

  “We’ve actually got quite a few questions and not—”

  “Sure,” Steele interrupted her. “That’d be terrific.”

  “Okay, well, this used to take exactly fifty-eight minutes for one full revolution. They sped it up to forty-seven minutes in 1993 so they could get more diners in and out because, you see, people tend to leave after just one rotation. Upside? More business. Downside? More people get motion sickness, especially if they’re facing the wrong way like you two.” He self-consciously noticed the background music had abruptly switched to Miles Davis. “All forty-eight of these windowpanes are washed automatically.” He heard himself stalling. “Fortunately, nobody has to dangle out there anymore. Maybe a dozen people have jumped off the observation deck in forty years; the three who did it without a parachute didn’t survive. This whole thing was built in four hundred and seven days for four-point-five million. Almost half its weight is underground, which hopefully makes it earthquake- and hurricane-proof.” He tapped his knuckles on the table twice. “The elevator gets here in forty-three seconds and descends at the speed of a raindrop, though you’re welcome to take the eight hundred and thirty-two steps if you prefer.”