Truth Like the Sun (19 page)

“Socrates?” Helen asked, flustered.

“Excuse me, dear?”

“Are you happy Roger is getting into politics, ma’am?”

She blinked rapidly. “He could have been a senator,” she whispered. “
Should
have been. Nobody believes it, but he started out so awkwardly. Couldn’t tell what he was saying till he was five. The words came out too quickly, don’t you see. It didn’t fall into place until he started acting.”

Helen tried to smile. “What do you think,” she asked loudly and succinctly, “of Roger running for mayor?”

Her forehead clenched. “Oh, no. Not that it’s beneath him, but we know who we are.”

Helen nodded along, waiting for more, then took a shot. “What ever happened to Roger’s father?”

“Oh, Robert passed away long ago, of course. Soon after he got out.”

Helen hesitated. “What was his full name again?”

“Robert Ignatius Dawkins.”

She studied her. “You mean, Robert Ignatius
Morgan
?”

“No, dear. Morgans are
my
side. Robert was most definitely a Dawkins.”

“But Roger—”

“Took my maiden name, of course. Changed it, don’t you know, when he turned eighteen.”

Helen bobbed her chin, as if she’d simply forgotten. “You said Robert died after he got
out
—of what?”

“Why the penitentiary, of course.”

“That’s right.” Helen hated herself for playing this game, but couldn’t stop now. “Why was he there again?”

“Oh, any number of things. He was never a man of in
-teg
-rity. What did you say your name was?”

“Helen. Helen Gu-la-nos.”

She smiled. “It’s so nice to visit with one of Roger’s friends. But if Sara does come in again, please do stand up. Out of respect, my dear. I can’t, of course, but you should.”

Helen sat up taller. “Ma’am, I’m not a
friend
of your son. As the nurse tried to explain, I’m a newspaper reporter. That’s why I’m taking notes.” She held up her notebook. “I’m working on an article about your son because he’s running for mayor.”

Mrs. Morgan’s rapid blinks resumed. “Of course,” she said, her voice suddenly officious. “Now do leave your name and phone number on the dresser before you go.”

“Certainly.” Helen wrote it out, very large, and ripped out the page.

When she looked up, Mrs. Morgan was smiling again. “Roger has always had a lot of newspaper friends. You people love him, don’t you? If it’s no great inconvenience, would you please send Sara back with some
black
tea, dear? Not to rush you, but I am tiring from all this talking. You mustn’t let me go on like this. And make sure it’s piping hot, if you would. Sara knows full well that I will send it back if it’s not
piping
hot.”

Helen took in the room one last time, saw a thick hardback in the nightstand and moved close enough to read the title:
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
. “Do you have grandchildren you read to?”

“Pardon me? Grandchildren? Oh heavens.” She grinned. “How old do you think I am?”

HIS NECK WAS BOWED
, chin low, ears jutting like funnels, as he pulled questions out of the students.

“It felt like reading my obit,” he said of today’s article. “I just kept picturing people saying to themselves, ‘Isn’t he dead already?’ ”

A student nervously asked if he had a gambling problem.

He smiled. “My problem is I don’t win as often as I’d like, but I do enjoy a good game of poker on occasion with the right company—Elvis Presley, for example.”

“Before or after he died?” asked another student.

As the questions dwindled, he strained to sustain their interest by recalling how students used to smoke pot on the grassy knoll behind Kane Hall and taunt the cops who weren’t allowed on campus. “I remember driving out to a rock concert on the Eastside back then. And before the bands started up there was this
piano drop
out in the field. That’s right. They dropped a piano from a helicopter just to hear what it would sound like. Everyone was on drugs, of course.”

“Were you?” asked a girl who looked too young to be in college yet. “Did you smoke pot?”

“Experimented,”
he clarified, raising an index finger, “but I never exhaled.”

The laughter attracted more students. He realized it was nearing the top of the hour and said, “Look, it’s time for me to do something good for this city. I need your help, obviously, but more importantly, the city needs it.”

Someone shouted, “Vote for the old guy!” A disjointed cheer rose and fell.

The crowd had dispersed by the time Helen Gulanos jogged into the square and found the intern Shrontz had dispatched to interview students about Morgan.

“What’d he say?” she demanded.

“Lots of stuff.” He flipped anxiously through scribbled pages. “People really liked him.”

“Forget your notes. Just talk to me.”

He smiled awkwardly. “Well, he kind of said he smoked pot with Elvis.”

“What?”

He riffled through his notes again. “Gambled with him for sure, I think.
Experimented
with pot. ‘Never exhaled.’ Elvis was at the fair, right?”

“Never exhaled or
inhaled
?”

“Think he said exhaled, but—”

“You recorded it, right?”

“No, I, uh, just wrote it out … and not that well, apparently.”

Helen took a breath. “These kinds of scenes aren’t easy. Any other reporters here?”

“I only saw one. Works for
The Daily
. I know her.”

“If she recorded, get her to loan it to you, okay? Where’d Morgan go?”

HE WAS REGALING
volunteers and students with stories about Seattle goofballs, including a man who claimed he’d climbed Mount Rainier barefoot. “When a photo of him shoeless on the summit didn’t satisfy people, he put on demonstrations around town, standing on blocks
of ice until his bare feet melted through to the concrete.” He noticed her midway into his next story about a perennial mayoral candidate who always wore a suit and top hat when he jumped into Elliott Bay after every defeat.

She looked older in this context, like a distraught young mother instead of a kid reporter, her messy mound of hair bouncing along like tumbleweed on a pogo stick. He briefly hoped she hadn’t spotted him, but it was obvious she had. He glanced back at the students crowding his table in the food court. “Give me a few minutes here, please.” They turned in unison to see her closing in, jean jacket swung wide, sweat glistening, her neck scar gleaming like a strand of pearls.

“What a coincidence,” he said as the kids scattered.

Catching her breath, she slid her satchel off her shoulder and sat down. “Sorry to interrupt, but I know you’re upset about the story,” she began, her chest heaving, “and I wanted to talk to you about it.”

“Teddy’s upset,” he said.

She took a moment to digest that. “Your attorney’s asking for corrections.”

“That’s true.” This had been Roger’s idea. Let Teddy vent and Sully threaten while he stayed cordial. The catch was that Teddy didn’t have to fake anything. He was furious.

“So are
you
asking for corrections?” she asked, setting a tape recorder on the table that was already recording.

He shrugged. Teddy had made him promise to duck any more interviews with her.

“You consider the story accurate?”

“Not particularly, but that’s the nature of being written about, isn’t it? You work with what you have, and I’m certainly not an easy study. So given all that, I thought it was … amusing.”

She exhaled. “Mr. Severson says you never represented any Republican campaigns.”

“He’s technically right,” he said finally. “I never was paid during their election cycles, but I did offer advice, as I indicated, and I’ve done other things for them.”

“And your gambling comment?”

“Blown out of proportion, in my opinion, but that’s the way these things go.”

“What about the Space Needle restaurant? They say—”

“Again, you’re both right. What you wrote isn’t false, but the insinuation isn’t fair.”

She took off her jacket, slid one sleeve up to her elbow and moved closer. “I’m sorry I missed your campus talk, but did you just tell the students you gambled and smoked pot with Elvis?”

“See?” He chuckled. “Jokes and asides rarely survive translation.”

“So you were joking?”

“Ms. Gulanos, do you have anything substantive you’d like to discuss before I have to go to my next song and dance?”

She looked away, then swung back at him, knowing it was best to ask delicate questions as directly as possible. “Did you change your name when you were eighteen from Dawkins to Morgan?”

His head jerked as if he’d caught himself dozing. “How do you even come up with something like that?”

“I visited your mother today.”

His eyes widened. “Now,
that
surprises me.” The tightening of his jaw made him look like a ventriloquist when he said, “I mistook you for a … Didn’t I
specifically
ask you not to bother her?”

“Sorry to agitate you, Mr. Morgan, but you’re not in charge of me.” Her voice dipped into an almost sympathetic tone. “You can’t tell me who I can talk to.”

He stared at her for a few breaths. “You don’t understand. She doesn’t have a firm handle. You can’t just take what she says and—”

“I might not quote her at all, but I have to ask you about some things she said.”

“No, you certainly do not.” He kept staring. “She used to invent stories to pass the time, to put me to sleep. Understand? I don’t know when the lines blurred, but by now they’re gone. I asked you, plain as day, not to bother her.”

“Okay,” Helen said gently. “We’ve already discussed that. I’m asking you now, on the record, did you legally change your name? And, if so, why?”

“What I did,” he began sharply, then stopped and reconsidered, “is nobody’s business and of no interest to anyone.”

“I disagree,” she said. “I think people would want to know why.”

“Let them wonder.”

“That’s your choice, but people might find it odd that someone who’s waged such a candid campaign won’t talk about something as basic as his name. I mean, I imagine you’d agree that it’s one thing if you changed your name because you’re running from something, and another if you did it for a stage career or whatever.”

He looked away. “You intend to write a story about this.”

“I don’t know what this is yet.”

“But you’ll write about it.”

“If we think it’s relevant, yes, we’ll probably mention it.”

“Does a sense of fairness ever play into your thinking?”

“I’m here
right now
out of fairness.” Her voice rose. “This whole discussion is out of a sense of fairness.”

Her defiance surprised him. He didn’t know whether to get up and leave or not. Perhaps if he calmed himself he could talk his way out of this. “My grandfather Morgan was a professor here.”

“I know,” she said, “you already told me.”

“I’m telling you again.” He then patiently described the little man, his bowlegged walk, his missing thumbnail, his ever-present odor of rum-cured pipe tobacco.

Helen noticed that his posture had improved and how carefully he was selecting his words, as if his grandfather had just sat down at the table behind them.

“He was very comfortable with silence,” he said, “but nobody could talk much better. He had more wisdom than the next ten men combined and a voice like an airline pilot.”

Helen waited for him to reach some relevant point, but he seemed to be finished. “And what about your father?” she asked. “You grew up with him?”

Roger hesitated. “Till I was thirteen.”

“You two get along?”

He reached toward his sports coat. “We’re not gonna do this.”

“Sorry, but I have to ask the questions. It’s up to you whether you respond.”

“My feelings about him are mine.”

“But if you changed your name—”

“To honor my grandpa, which is why I just described him to you.”

“Thank you for that, but how did you feel about your father? Perhaps you don’t even have any clear memories of him.”

He shook his head and leaned forward. “He wore cuffed pants and rolled his shirtsleeves midway up his biceps and had a gold bracelet he’d twirl when he was nervous and a mole right here on the left side of his chin that went from brown to black when he got angry. And he always sang off-key, but he didn’t care. He had a whole lot of personality. That’s what people said about him:
What a charming man
. He had no problem getting sales jobs, but couldn’t hold them. So we kept moving every few months. He smelled like Listerine in the morning and aftershave at night. I hated the smell of Aqua Velva because it meant he was going out. More? He was a jokester. He could wiggle his ears, fart on command and convincingly turn his head all the way around like an owl. He’d bring home used toys from Goodwill, and he’d call my mother
Sweetie
right before he started insulting her. When he really yelled at her, I felt like a coward because I didn’t try to stop him. My grandfather was there, finally, for one of those, and he rose up on those bowed legs and spoke real calmly, as if he had a gun in his hand. ‘Pack it up, Robert.’ ”

Roger paused and looked up. “We through?”

Helen cleared her throat. “Your mother says,” she whispered, “that he died shortly after getting out of prison.”

He blushed. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

“What?”

“She makes things up.”

“I’ll let you know,” Helen said, “what our research librarians find.”

“No,
please
don’t, though that probably won’t stop you.”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“What they find.”

He stood up and grabbed his coat, then leaned over the table. “I do have one question for you.”

She smelled beer on his breath. His smile was unconvincing but not menacing, his voice level, his eyes aglitter.

“Why would any sane person run for anything?”

She stared up at him, all eight pints of her blood racing.

“Well?” he prodded. “Cat got your tongue?”

She didn’t speak at first, just held on to the table. “I’m gonna need to talk to you again soon, Mr. Morgan, about a variety of things, including your finances.”