Truth Like the Sun

by Jim Lynch

  Neither of them could muster much conversation until Roger shared a bit about the fair, telling him how big of a deal it’d been for the city and downplaying his role to essentially a VIP chauffeur. Bob Dawkins did his best to look fascinated, but his eyes were foggy and Roger soon realized his father was going to ask for money. Yet what a relief to see him so diminished! Skinny and shrunken, shabby and balding, round-faced and groveling. His voice was the only thing left.

  “They’ve got a casino in here called the Bullpen,” he’d said, lighting up. “Amazing, isn’t it? A casino in prison? And I’m good at craps. Extremely good, actually. You spot me a thousand, I’ll send you twice that in a week. Should be outta here in a month anyway, two at the most.” He sounded as certain as a stockbroker assessing the market. “And when I do, I’ll hook you up with a guy who can double your savings just like that.” He snapped his fingers and cracked the same grin Roger had seen in the mirror too many times.

  “Let me show you something.” His father brightened as he pulled out a deck of cards so worn you couldn’t make out the casino’s name on the back. “Shuffle, cut and pick,” he said, flashing his gummy smile. Roger did the drill and slid a card to his side of the table without glancing at it. Then his father performed the same flamboyant high shuffles Roger recalled from his childhood before turning five cards faceup like a veteran dealer and rubbing his palms in mock concentration. “What do you think you’re doing, mister, with my jack of clubs?” Roger wouldn’t flip the card, so his father did it for him and followed that with a wink and a slick account of all the lucrative options he’d be weighing once he got out. “In the meanwhile, though, I could sure use a couple bills.” The number kept falling until it hit twenty dollars. Roger never said no, but he didn’t give his father any money either.

  Speeding north out of Carson City through this sun-broiled moonscape, they toasted Seattle as if they were newlyweds moving there. And they saluted Kennedy, too. It had been weighing on Roger more than he realized, this fear of nuclear annihilation. Otherwise, why would he feel so liberated? Of course, seeing his father had something to do with it. That he wasn’t curious about what Roger was making of himself lifted the burden of so many imagined expectations. There also was the comforting call he’d had with Teddy, who told him the grand jury had closed down and that its indictments would be announced soon. But as much as anything there was the exalting possibility that he finally had figured out what he’d do next.

  He would meet with honorable men in dark rooms like his grandfather used to and have long thoughtful conversations about what was best for the city. He’d be a midwife for good ideas. He’d make it his business to advise people, a notion that makes him giggle now, given that he’s driving drunk with a married woman in her underwear. But he’s high enough on this plan to be bouncing it off Grandpa Morgan in his mind when he feels the front right tire grab the outer lip of asphalt and hears her scream, the vehicle swerving then rocking on its shocks through mercifully flat dirt. When it fishtails to a lurching halt, her head swings dangerously close to the dashboard and she stops screaming and starts laughing and can’t quit as he steps out and strolls around the car, thrilled that they’re somehow still intact. Settling back into his seat, he apologizes gently and repeatedly before shifting the Impala into gear and rumbling back toward U.S. Route 395. Meredith Stein is still laughing.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 2001

  HELEN LISTENED, steeling the courage to insist they either hold the story or pull her name off it, but they were thawing her with praise, raving about all the phenomenal reporting she and Steele had done. It’s just postpartum blues, Marguerite assured her. The prevailing sentiment was they’d be fools not to run this now. Hell, the Times would have run it days ago and already be whoring for a book deal. Or, as Birnbaum summarized, “The voters deserve to know everything we know before the primary.”

  Everybody but Helen was buying in.

  Steele had reorganized the top of their draft the night before, after she’d reluctantly gone home sick. He claimed the editors had done most of it, but his prose was as singular as everything else about him and he obviously was the one who’d turned her thoughtful look at Morgan’s secrets and contradictions into an old-school hit piece. Regardless, it was full speed ahead now, especially once Steele announced the Times was piecing together a similar story for Sunday.

  “I just feel like we’re opening a watermelon with an ax,” Helen said, hoping to avoid another coughing attack. “Why not hold it until after the primary, just to give us enough time to tighten everything up? Even if he loses, it’ll still be relevant.”

  “With any big story,” Birnbaum sympathized, “there’ll always be screws you’d like to tighten one more turn. Isn’t that right, Bill?”

  Steele grunted on cue. “Tell me about it.”

  “You’re a perfectionist,” Marguerite added, “but you’re spent and you’re sick, okay? Let us do our job here. You’ve got to trust us.”

  Helen felt like she was the only one who hadn’t read this script in advance. “What if Morgan’s right about this being a vendetta?” she asked softly, everyone leaning toward her now. “I mean, I checked it out, and Yates, Bottenfield and Carmichael were all local Freemasons. And shouldn’t we worry that we might be killing off our best candidate? Doesn’t that factor in anywhere?”

  The editors glanced at Steele, as if he’d already briefed them on her conspiracy theory and growing affection for Morgan.

  “Instincts,” Birnbaum said vaguely.

  “Look,” Marguerite said, “it’s easy to get too close to your subject, especially one this charming. That’s why we’ve got Steele on this thing to give us a more detached perspective. All this stuff about his father alone needs to be printed right now, Helen. If you’d feel more comfortable with Bill’s byline on top, we could—”

  “Absolutely not,” Steele protested. “This is her baby. I’m just happy to be the stork here.”

  Everyone laughed except Helen, who started coughing and couldn’t stop.

  SHORTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT, Roger is clicking Refresh again and again on the P-I web page. Having heard rumors that it was coming out each of the past three days, he’d checked every night at midnight after learning that some stories were available that early. He knew even a hostile newspaper wouldn’t try to hang him on the eve of an election. So, without a Sunday edition, the P-I had just Friday or Saturday to squeeze it in before the primary. And Saturday was the least-read paper of the week, so either it would get posted in the next hour or they’d hold it until after Tuesday. If he could just survive the primary, he thought hopefully, an attack afterward might even work in his favor. Roger against the media! Roger against the cops, the unions, the state party! Roger against the world!

  He hit Refresh again, and at 1:18 a.m. the story popped up. The headline made him dizzy—“The Secrets of Roger Morgan”—and the old photo staggered him. It took him a few breaths to recognize himself in a chummy-looking foursome with soon-to-drown pinball mogul Rudy Costello, soon-to-be-indicted county prosecutor Clive Buchanan and soon-to-be-skyscraper-tycoon Mal Turner. He’d never seen this picture before, but the backdrop and the fact that Mal had hair told him it was shot during the fair inside Club 21. The only one not smiling like a lotto winner was himself, as if he’d sensed bad things might come of this moment.

  He attempted to read the article on the screen, but his vision blurred. When he printed it out, the type was too small and the ads disorienting. Finally, he grabbed a magnifying glass and started on the printed version. He read the first paragraph, backtracked, read it again, then did the same with the next two, a hummingbird fluttering in his chest as he tried to picture any of this on the front page of a newspaper in a few hours.

  He read the same three paragraphs again through his mother’s eyes. Unable to get past them, he called Teddy. “It’s online,” he said when his groggy friend answered at last. “Please tell Judith I’m sorry.”r />
  “How bad?” Teddy grunted.

  “Feels like it’s about somebody else.”

  “What’s it say?”

  “I can’t get through it. You try.”

  “I’m not … What’s it say, Rog?”

  “That I’m a big-time shyster just like my old man.”

  “You don’t sound right,” Teddy grumbled. “Get a glass of water or something, then read me the top. Probably isn’t as bad as you think.”

  Minutes later, Roger started reading aloud:

  Colorful mayoral candidate Roger Morgan legally changed his name when he was 18, in part to distance himself from his father, whom Nevada police would later dub “the king of Las Vegas con men.”

  “What?” Teddy blurted. “You never changed your name, did you?”

  “Let’s keep going.”

  “Well, shit!”

  Twelve years later, Morgan was running Seattle’s 1962 World’s Fair and simultaneously helping launch the controversial career of mega-developer Malcolm Turner by giving him insider information about the future path of Interstate-5 through Seattle, which led to the construction of an apartment building at 911 E. Roanoke St.

  “What a load of—”

  “Just listen.”

  A document obtained by the Post-Intelligencer, during its four-month investigation of Morgan’s often mysterious past, suggests most of the original investors in the Roanoke Apartments were city and county officials later indicted on assorted graft charges stemming from illegal gambling activities involving a payoff system that amounted to monthly bribes to city police during perhaps the worst spate of municipal corruption in Seattle’s history.

  “This is so outrageous!” Teddy hisses.

  Morgan says the freeway information he shared with Turner was already public knowledge. Yet records show that Turner bought the Roanoke property at less than 10 percent of its appraised value before the release of the report boosted property values near future off-ramps. Morgan says he never knew who Turner’s other investors were or where their money came from.

  Teddy growled inaudibly.

  Turner, who went on to build four of the city’s ten tallest skyscrapers before facing bankruptcy proceedings and related lawsuits earlier this year, refused to comment other than to say, through his attorney, that he never knowingly accepted investor capital raised by criminal means.

  More than 80 people, mostly city police officers, were indicted by federal and county grand juries in 1962 and 1963, six of whom showed up as investors in Turner’s apartment building, which still stands on Roanoke Street. According to this internal document, investments ranged from $5,000 to $25,000 per person. Morgan’s contribution to the project at the time was $15,000—or about $105,000 in today’s money.

  Commercial real estate analysts interviewed by the P-I speculated that Morgan and his fellow investors at least tripled their money when Turner sold the building in 1965 for $847,500. While Morgan and Turner were never subpoenaed or implicated during the city’s graft probe, their names surfaced at the federal hearings during discussions of graft money being “laundered” in real estate investments, according to one of the jurors, Lilliana Strovich, a Ballard woman who says she intends to vote for Morgan on Tuesday.

  Roger then raced through a series of quotes from former policeman Denny Carmichael about the widespread investment of graft profits with Turner, a young developer at the time who’d boasted of his connections to the man running the fair.

  “Unbelievable,” Teddy mumbled. “This is un—”

  “Hold on, there’s a lot more.”

  Born Roger Morgan Dawkins on April 28, 1931, Morgan dropped Dawkins from his legal name after graduating from Sedro-Woolley High School, where he was voted “best smile.” Morgan said he changed surnames to honor his grandfather Thomas Morgan, a history professor at the University of Washington, rather than to distance himself from his father.

  Robert Ignatius Dawkins spent eight years in prison before dying of a brain aneurysm in 1966 at the age of 69. Dawkins’s signature con, according to press and police reports, was to claim he’d owned a restaurant chain in the South and was now just trying to help others get rich. He had a friend, he’d say, who’d stockpiled gold and diamonds that he would sell to him at bargain prices. As The Las Vegas Review-Journal wrote in 1958: “Dawkins was known for his ability—some called it a gift—to talk people into doing just about anything.” One city detective dubbed him “the king of Las Vegas con men.”

  “You want more?” Roger asked.

  “No,” Teddy managed after a long pause. “I don’t think … I don’t know what to … Look, make a list of all the crap they got wrong, okay? And we’ll go after Helen and the P-I with everything we’ve got. It’s just a disgrace.”

  Roger listened to silence on the other end, then heard a cigarette igniting and a windy inhale. “It’s over, Teddy, isn’t it?”

  “You don’t deserve this.”

  “Neither do you, my friend.” Roger wanted to get off before Teddy broke down. “Apologize to Judith for me for waking her up. I hate to bother that woman.”

  He hung up wondering how soon he needed to get to his mother’s to intercept her morning paper. He read the article all the way through for the first time. It went on forever. There were plenty of inflammatory photos as well, including one of him and Malcolm Turner holding cocktails and laughing, and also a mug shot of his father that made their likeness unmistakable.

  What amazed him as much as anything was that Helen Gulanos could be brutal. And in that thought, he found hope. The story strained so hard to be damning it was bound to generate sympathy from people who never would have voted for him otherwise. His mind casting about, he recalled how many years it took him not to worry about someone calling him Roger Dawkins. And while he knew that his father had tricked people out of money, he’d never heard he was the king of anything. And it amused him in the abstract to think of those shabby Roanoke apartments and Mal’s other projects as money-laundering operations. But was it true? Or had Helen just got it all wrong?

  After reading the article again, his outrage grew. Pacing barefoot, talking into a recorder, he listed all the errors, exaggerations and speculations. He called Mal Turner’s cell phone for the first time in years, but his mailbox was full. He started typing an e-mail to Charles Birnbaum, the editor of the P-I: Do you really want to go to court with this innuendo? Yet as he reread his bluster, his anger receded. Suddenly blackout weary, he squinted at the clock before collapsing on the couch. A three-hour nap, he told himself, then he’d go see his mother.

  He woke four and a half hours later, yanked on yesterday’s clothes and without breakfast trudged the nine blocks to her retirement home. Passing a 24-Hour Fitness, he saw dozens of healthy youngsters exercising, their skin glistening like fresh fruit, as if to remind him that he was nearly dead. Moments later, he was standing in front of his mother.

  Freshly bathed and smelling of baby powder, she was sitting upright in bed with the front section of the P-I folded neatly at her side. He experienced a momentary hope. She’d always refolded the sections so carefully that he never could tell if she’d read them or not.

  “Come here, Son,” she told him. “Look at you.” She pressed a button and the top half of the bed rose up with a whir. “Just look at you.” Her skinny arms reached out for him. It wasn’t her acknowledgment of what had happened that broke him down, but rather that this was how she’d always calmed him.

  THE MOOD TURNED raucous in the Olympic Hotel ballroom when the first vote tally showed Roger five points ahead of Rooney and eight up on Norheim. Only Teddy and a few insiders realized how meaningless these 8:05 p.m. numbers were, since the polls just closed and these were all mail-in ballots cast long before the P-I stink bomb. But it was hard not to feel the bounce or hear the chant—“Ro-ger! Ro-ger!”—or indulge the possibility that the unpredictable electorate, as scholars and pollsters liked to call the voting mobs, might just tell the P-I to screw itself.


  Thousands already had in word or deed. Protesters old and young alike had boycotted the newspaper building in shifts since the morning the story broke, shambling back and forth with signs proclaiming Lies! and Shame! and Gotcha Journalism! City historian Walt Merrill went on two local TV stations to blast the article as “assassination by association.” Such a story, he argued, “violates any semblance of fairness, particularly considering it ran just four days before an election.” Rumors also suggested the paper had received a record number of cancellations. The flip side, however, was a surge in newsstand sales and new subscribers. And Roger knew the overriding problem was that so many people had read it. The worst part, though, was word of mouth, thirdhand accounts from people who hadn’t read it but stated as fact that Roger was a crook who’d done time in Vegas and changed his name to hide his crimes.

  Tonight, though, people kept telling him, was another story. All he needed to do was finish second and he’d be on the November ballot! And by then the P-I story would be forgotten. People didn’t look to newspapers for guidance anymore, he was told, and after his second beer he started to believe it.

  He knew that most of his supporters here, particularly the young ones, couldn’t imagine him losing. And as the ballroom filled with this refreshing mix of college kids and retired folks, he recognized the importance of body language and willed himself to talk, look and move like a winner.

  Since the polls opened this morning, Teddy had directed his ragtag crew of volunteers to make reminder calls to registered voters in key precincts. Meanwhile, Roger talked to everyone in the ballroom, increasingly invigorated, even flabbergasted, by the turnout. He’d considered canceling this gathering altogether and joked about changing his name again and moving to Argentina. But given that the hotel had donated this space, he saw this evening as a chance to at least thank everyone.