Truth Like the Sun (17 page)

Instead of preparing to introduce the governor of Louisiana—or was it Nebraska?—he goes for a drive, veering past the Market and the deserted card rooms and honky-tonks before rolling through Pioneer Square and turning east on King Street to watch another train-load of rumpled out-of-towners shuffle into the morning glare with stiff necks and drowsy toddlers in their arms. They keep coming, more every day, as if it’s become a national mandate to haul your family all the way out here to see the fair at the end of the road.

He parks on Bell Street and feels ridiculous snooping past the windows of the Dog House before stepping into the aroma of bacon and pancakes. “Just meeting someone,” he tells the hostess, wandering toward the back, where the tables can’t be seen from the street. A German or Austrian family is barking consonants in one booth, with mostly American couples in the others. Roger recognizes several older businessmen but can’t place their names. Walking out, though, he notices two tables he’d overlooked. A large family at one and seven men crowding the other—a city councilman, a deputy county prosecutor, a prominent jeweler and the pushy Teamster who’d brokered the labor deal with the fair. All regulars at Club 21, all guys whose hands Roger shook on a regular basis these days. He turns away as the Teamster’s bald skull swivels toward him, then strides outside beneath a hopeful sky.

With a few worn-out puns and generic flattery, he introduces the Louisiana governor to a tiny, disinterested crowd, then returns to yet another stack of complaints—including several more about the
appalling
French film—and the results of yet another study, which Teddy summarizes aloud to him. “The Science Pavilion is easily the most popular attraction. Overall attendance is, curiously, better on cloudy days, and far more people are paying to enter the World of Art than the nudie shows. The most popular rides are Calypso, the Olympic Bobsled and Wild Mouse.”

Roger’s barely listening. Finally, he tells him what he saw at the Dog House.

Teddy goes silent, as if double-checking to see what, if anything, he’d just missed. “So?”

Roger sheepishly shares an abbreviated version of what Charlie McDaniel told him.

“You met with that crackpot?” Teddy hisses. “Jesus H. Christ, you’re naïve. A little gambling’s
good
for a city. It’s just a little goddamn vent. If anything big was going on we’d have the mob involved. And who gives a damn who eats breakfast together? A city councilman knows a cop who golfs with a Teamster who buys his wife bracelets from a jeweler who went to high school with a prosecutor.” He leans back and studies Roger again. “Isn’t there enough on your plate?” He waits, but Roger won’t meet his stare. Then, as if recalling his main point, “So what the hell’s the senator doing about that U.S. attorney, anyway?”

“Haven’t heard.”

“Then maybe you should put in another call.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t?” Teddy inhales, still looking at him.

“You hear about Marilyn Monroe?”

Teddy hesitates, then nods. “Are you finally showing your youth? Is that it?”

Roger rises, leans across the desk, lifts the pack of Chesterfields out of Teddy’s breast pocket, taps one out, lights it and slides the pack back in, all without making any eye contact.

“And now you’re smoking?” Teddy says.

Later that afternoon he avoids the office and strolls the grounds, chain-smoking in the anonymous mob before drifting into the French exhibit to see what all the fuss is about. The movie starts calmly enough, with a soft-sell promo on the achievements of French scientists, then shifts into an ominous portrayal of modern life—brawling street mobs, flashing lights, sirens and machine guns—before ending gracefully, with the “seven keys” to a promising future. Roger sits through it a second time before concluding it might be the most honest entertainment the fair offers. He’s still thinking about it, while simultaneously appreciating an impossibly tall blonde in the fashion tent, when it occurs to him that it’s Tuesday and approaching six o’clock.

Without the crowds, it’s a far more intimate one-on-one with Calder, Tomlin, Tobey, Pollock and the others. The longer he studies these paintings, the more convinced he is that many of these modern works resemble cities, no less chaotic or preconceived than New York, Paris or Seattle. Whether they intended to or not, they capture the pleasing asymmetry of …

“You’re wound up.”

He spins, startled to see her, broad-hipped, buxom and imposing. He doesn’t know how long it has been since she led him back here and told him to take his time.

She points at the cushioned bench next to Tobey’s
Serpentine
. “Sit down, keep looking,” she says.

He obeys.

“Most people won’t give this stuff a chance,” she says. “It’s like a revolution only some people can see.”

He flinches when she comes closer and presses down on his shoulders. “Relax,” she says, working her thumbs into the stress knots between his shoulders and neck.

“They’re cities,” he says, trying to remember her husband’s name. “At least for me they are. They show us what cities are like, and why they move us.”

“Keep looking.”

Her thumbs crawl up his neck, then descend along his spine, through his shirt, vertebra by vertebra, until the paintings start to move and look like forests or rivers or oceans or …

“They can be anything you want them to be,” she whispers, close enough that he can feel her breath on his ear.

She explains how Pollock paints, her words now a low, rumbling accompaniment to whatever she’s doing to his back with her elbow. “Most people give these ten seconds at best, shake their heads and move on. Sad about Marilyn, huh.”

“I didn’t even know I cared about her.”

“She cut a half inch off all her left heels to exaggerate her butt-wiggle,” Meredith says.

“It worked.”

“Must’ve been hell on her ankles, though,” she purrs. “Sure was on mine when I tried it.” Her fingers work below his belt.

“I really like your voice,” he hears himself saying, his eyes closing.

“You know what Pollock should’ve called this one?” she whispers into his left ear.

“What?”

“Foreplay.”

He opens his eyes, turns his head and her smile covers his.

“No janitors?” he asks when he can breathe again.

“Not till seven.”

“Or assistants?”

“Nope.”

Afterward, he’s sitting on the same bench slipping his slacks back on, not wanting to overthink, much less discuss, what just happened. Fortunately, a comfortable silence lingers, as if they’ve been naked around each other plenty of times before. He hopes like hell they can get through this without talking, but she starts in so gently the words feel harmless.

“You’re engaged, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Lisa?”

“Linda.”

“Very pretty.”

“Yeah.”

He changes the subject and inexplicably begins sharing some of what he’s seen and heard about cops on the take.

“And you’re surprised?” she asks, her heavy breasts swinging toward him. “How could anything like that happen in this sweet little city of yours?”

“Your husband’s a cop, right?” he suddenly remembers.

Even that doesn’t trip her. “A lawyer, but my brother-in-law is one of the assistant chiefs now.”

“Is he honest?”

She smirks. “To a fault.”

“He ever talk about the gambling and crooked cops and all that?”

“He can’t stand it. Won’t let anyone buy him a cup of coffee, okay? Straight as a fence post. Keeps transferring people out of his division if he thinks they’re not. I worry about him all the time.” She inches her panties higher on her smooth thighs, not bashfully, not turning away as Linda would, but facing him.

“Tell your brother-in-law I’d like to help him,” Roger says, surprising himself.

She smiles as if he were a child. “You haven’t heard a word I’ve said. This never happened, understand? None of it. I never mentioned him to you. This is all in your imagination.”

Time slows as he takes everything in at once. The pleasing curve of her hips, the swirling art, the deep nook of her navel, her candor and infidelity, the delicate hairs on her upper thighs—all crammed into this swollen moment and calling into question everything about his known world.

She slides a finger under the elastic and holds it until he meets her gaze, looking down at him without affection or familiarity. And in this instant he can see her future resentment and the both of them blushing whenever they meet each other in public twenty or thirty years from now, when she’s larger than a mule and he’ll walk up to her knowing he has nothing to say.

An hour later, Roger pulls up outside Linda’s apartment, ready at last to tell her a gentle version of the truth and plead with her to at least hold off on the invitations.

She greets him in her casual blue sun dress, his favorite, and immediately breaks into a glassy-eyed apology for being such a simpleton—he’s surprised she knew the word—and dragging him out of the concert last night. He sits silently on the love seat beside her, smelling salmon and potatoes—also his favorite—in the kitchen, her long, slender fingers trembling inside his.

I
T’S IMPOSSIBLE
to know for sure how a story will play outside the newsroom. Sometimes the hardest ones to report and craft, those designed to expose and outrage, are greeted with yawns while cheesy no-brainers capture the public’s mood like catchy songs. And occasionally there are stories crafted well enough to jolt your colleagues and blessed with enough timing to enter the zeitgeist and become
talkers
.

Helen’s “Mr. Seattle” was one of those.

Even the large front-page photo was provocative, with Morgan staring thoughtfully—righteously?—back at the reader, the left side of his lips curling toward a grin, the right side flat and stern, as if he were shifting from amused to concerned. It was taken three days ago, during his doorbelling expedition, his expression hinting at fatigue, his shirtsleeves rolled to mid-forearm, his tie slack around his open collar. And the story itself read more like a freewheeling magazine piece than a standard newspaper profile, asserting up high that Roger Morgan might be as close as anyone to the human incarnation of this city.

Think about it. He’s ambitious, photogenic, courteous and agnostic. He’s a Gore-Tex-wearing, novel-reading, Mariners-loving, daily-exercising former mountaineer who seemingly reinvents himself at will. He’s advised Boeing and Microsoft and five of the last six mayors. He’s arguably played as much of a background or foreground role in shaping this city as anyone alive
.

And like the city’s Pied Pipers before him, she wrote, he sold the notion that Seattle exists beyond the humdrum limitations of the rest
of the country. Doc Maynard pitched it to easterners in the 1850s as an Eden with winter flowers. Fifty years later, Erastus Brainerd spun the illusion that this city was only a brief stroll from the Yukon gold mines. And after another half century, young Roger Morgan coaxed everyone out to the unlikeliest of world’s fairs. At times, she wrote, the city seems like his alter ego. “I’ve always taken this place very personally. When it’s thriving, I thrive. When it’s struggling, I struggle. Right now I feel like hell, which is part of why I’m running.”

Inside the
P-I
, some editors marveled over a political feature that, for once, was hard to put down. Young reporters discussed Helen’s daring style while older ones pondered how her story slipped past the butchers and pruners, speculating that someone with a glass office—probably Marguerite—must fancy her. Regardless, the story generated a battle-cry buzz, as if a salty profile had somehow raised the stakes in one of America’s last daily newspaper wars. The
P-I
, Helen learned early on, pretended it competed with the
Times
every single day. Actually, the
Times
had twice the staff, and it usually showed. So when the
P-I
won a news cycle, it celebrated and the
Times
feigned oblivion.

Yet this hubbub wasn’t enough to alter Bill Steele’s morning ritual. When he finally got to her article, she watched him slide his glasses lower on his nose to assess the visual placement of the story. Then he slowly read the lede and his eyes widened. When he smirked a few beats later, she knew exactly which sentence he was on. Once he finished, he carefully recreased the section, set it in his tidy stack, unlocked his Rolodex, dialed a number and said “Hey.” Then: “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh …”

By 10 a.m., circulation reported that street sales were
ridiculously
high, and Steele finally shuffled up to her desk. “Solid story,” he said, glancing at the crowded fishbowl. “But I hope they’re not stupid enough to think this is as good as we can get on this guy.”

She nodded, fending off deflation. An electronic message from Marguerite flashed onto her screen. “
YOU ABSOLUTELY ROCK
!!!!!!”

Steele leaned closer, squinting over his glasses. “Hmmm. Six exclamation points. In Marguerite-speak that means ‘not bad.’ She sent me a note once without a single exclamation point. I almost offed myself. Talk to Morgan’s mother yet?”

“He won’t give me her number,” she said. “Practically begged me not to bother her.”

“Good for him.” He tore a page from his notebook. “Personally, I’d much rather beg for forgiveness than ask him for anything. Here’s her address.”

ROGER READ
the obits every morning though was rarely surprised. With most of his friends a decade older, he spent more time discussing lung, brain, liver, breast, thyroid and prostate cancer than most doctors. If not the big
C
, it was the big
D
or all the mental slippage associated with the
A
word. What could he offer beyond sympathy? Though today everything hurt, but that still wasn’t something to bring up with dying friends.
I tell ya, Vern, this doorbellin’s a son of a bitch
.

Most of his funeralgoing cohorts exuded grim obligation. They signed the book and rehearsed the clichés—
You have my condolences
—though by the time they got through the grieving line they often broke down or became inappropriately chatty.
How the hell are you?
Afterward, they exited ASAP, hunkered, spent, apocalyptic. Roger came early, stayed late. Often asked to speak, he knew how to exaggerate the right amount, to sum up complicated lives and to resuscitate poignant stories that left audiences teary, chuckling and wondering if he’d made them up.