Truth Like the Sun (29 page)

“Someone had to help with the pie.” Helen pulled out her card and slid it across the table. “See, I’m really not a realtor.”

The woman adjusted her reading glasses. “That’s Greek? Looks Hispanic.”

“As Greek as can be.”

“Nobody’s asked me about any of this in nearly forty years.”

“Well, we’re working on a story about—”

“The former governor?”

“Actually, no. We’ve been told Roger Morgan’s name came up repeatedly during those hearings.”

The lady studied the plaster-swirled ceiling. “Of course.”

“What?”

“A better question is whose name didn’t come up?”

“What do you—”

“So many names were kicked around. You have no idea. Even the U.S. attorney’s brother-in-law came up, as I remember. The governor at the time, Lopresti? His name came up too, I think.”

“Do you recall Roger Morgan being discussed?”

“Oh, maybe in passing. You sure we can talk about this now?
Criminal contempt
is what they called it at the time.”

“Nothing to worry about,” Helen said. “What about Malcolm Turner, the developer? His name pop up?”

“Yes.” She brightened. “And I remembered that when I read
about his bankruptcy. People like him going bankrupt? The whole country’s going to hell in a handbasket if you ask me.”

“So do you remember what was said about Turner?”

She hesitated. “Not really, other than maybe some of his real estate deals looking fishy.”

“Did anyone try to connect Roger Morgan to Turner?”

She shrugged. “Roger was the most popular guy in town.” She lowered her eyes. “Quite the looker, truth be told. Wouldn’t have complained if he’d left his slippers under my bed, if you know what I mean. But you can’t crave what you don’t taste, right? That other fella runnin’ the fair, he was s’posed to testify, as I recall.”

“Who’s that?”

“Tall fella.”

“Ted Severson?”

“Maybe. He had a stake in some tavern on Thirteenth or Fourteenth. Something like …” She hesitated, then blurted, “The Nite Cap Tavern.” She smiled proudly. “How do you like that?”

Helen stopped chewing. “You remember that after all this time?”

“Listen, I couldn’t tell you what somebody said yesterday, but I can tell you what my husband ordered for dinner on our first date. You have no idea how many pork chops I made for my Paul.” She shook her big head.

Helen felt her itch spreading to her tightening throat. “Mrs. Strovich, someone with the liquor board—it might’ve been a guy named Eddie Mills—told your jury that Roger Morgan was involved in a network that invested police payoffs in real estate with Malcolm Turner.”

“If you say so, but that doesn’t ring any bells for me.”

“I’m kind of surprised,” Helen said gently, “that you don’t remember anything more specific about what was said about Mr. Morgan.”

Mrs. Strovich bristled. “Well, aren’t you something? Surprised the hell out of myself I’ve pulled up as much as I have.”

“I’m sorry.” Helen sipped tea that tasted like dirty socks, her mind scrambling. “You’ve been very kind to talk to me, especially
this late.” She pushed her chair back. “Who are you voting for, anyway, ma’am?”

“What?”

“For mayor.”

“Guess.” She grinned sheepishly. “He’s so hopeful.”

“You know him personally?” Helen asked, her voice completely nasal now.

“Never met the man. More pie?”

STEELE HELD UP
a finger as she entered and pointed at the television, where unflattering images of Roger Morgan were flashing on the screen, then a slow-motion video of him talking that made him look old and intoxicated. “What do we really know about Roger Morgan?” asked the voice-over. “We know he’s reckless with facts when it comes to criticizing our city’s courageous police officers. We know we don’t need a divisive and unstable mayor. Re-elect Mayor Rooney. Leadership you can count on. Paid for by the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild.”

“Wow,” Helen said. “Anything else?”

“On what?”

“The news.”

“Nah. What happened? Was she a juror? You talked to her?”

After blowing her nose and sneezing and blowing it again, she told him, “She was evasive about Morgan, but she definitely remembered Governor Lopresti and Malcolm Turner being discussed.”

“My God, what’d she say about Turner?” He sat upright.

She briskly summarized the interview, its value shrinking the more thought she gave it. Finally, she sneezed. “Look, Bill. I’m gonna be useless tomorrow if I don’t call it a—”

“Head cold?”

“Allergies.”

“Well,” he said diplomatically, “it’s your story.”

She knew by his tone that he was playing her.

“Just think it’d be smart,” he added, while packing up, “to at
least write up what we
have
and what we
need
before the drones start weighing in first thing by telling us why the sky is blue and what the story should say.”

She left him sitting there with his forehead creased as she checked on Elias again and then pulled a sixteen-ounce Miller from the fridge. “Want one?”

He grimaced. “You a beer drinker?”

She cracked the can, took a deep swallow and plugged in her laptop. “Only when I write.”

Then she typed while Steele paced behind her with his shirt untucked, yakking nonstop in his half-whisper, the words flowing out of her fingers with rhythm and precision, each sentence lugging its share, writing fast and fearlessly as if they’ve already finished their reporting and all their speculations had been confirmed.

Steele stopped and breathed over her shoulder, nodding and muttering. “Well, all we can actually say at this point is … No, just keep … Well, yes. Yes. Exactly. You
think …
Excellent! Keep going.
Jesus
, Helen.
Yes
.” They switched places. She read her best quotes from Carmichael and Strovich aloud as he clumsily plunked them into their narrative, leaving blanks where they’d need responses from Morgan and Turner, forging on. Then she took over again, fixing his typos and thinking hard about how the story should feel, instructing him to list the facts that needed to be double-checked and the ingredients that were still missing.

ACROSS TOWN
, Roger Morgan was reading aloud to his mother. She loved these bedtime readings and the luxury of nodding off while her son was in mid-sentence. But tonight she’d had coffee after dinner in hopes of staying awake until the book was finished. He was a bit late, though, so he wasn’t even to the final chapter when her eyelids began sagging.

“ ‘ “Your potion, Harry,” said Mrs. Weasley quickly, wiping her eyes on the back of her hand. Harry drank it in one gulp. The effect was instantaneous. Heavy, irresistible waves of dreamless sleep broke over him; he fell back onto the pillows and thought no more.’ ”

Roger tucked her in—and even that hurt his swollen elbow. He flinched when he saw the stack of
P-I
s next to her bed. She’s reading the papers again? Then he turned off the bedside light, switched on the green night-light he’d bought her and slipped silently out the door.

WHEN SHE FINALLY
stopped typing, her fingers numb, she realized Steele has been silent for at least an hour, sprawled across the couch, his legs dangling over the arm. That a reporter his age still was so excited about stories suddenly seemed so endearing that she felt selfish for being reluctant to share this one with him.

She wrote her way out of that guilt and others as well: out of her recurring insecurities and shameful mistakes, her single-mom martyrdom, her embarrassment over her simple parents, her current exhaustion and every other thought or impulse that wasn’t helping make this draft as compelling and powerful as it needed to be.

Reading through it a second time, she typed parenthetical commentary in the text. She needed more proof of nearly everything, but she could feel the story’s potential rising inside her as the freeway quieted to just an occasional car and then nothing, a span of rare silence followed by rain that began like a murmured prayer and built until it sounded, in Helen’s ears, like applause.

THE NEXT AFTERNOON
they were waiting for her and Steele in Birnbaum’s office. Even the publisher was slouched on one end of the couch with his thin white beard and his tiny eyes fixed on her.

She speed-read the other faces. Marguerite looked oddly evasive. Webster and Shrontz and a few high-ranking mutes were gloomily sipping coffee. They clearly wanted to avoid the fishbowl so their reporters wouldn’t gossip about what the publisher was doing in the newsroom.

What
was
he doing here? The only time she’d met him he’d waxed in clichés about the pillars of a decent paper—fairness, vigilance and a duty to inform, the generic publisher’s speech that reporters want to hear.

Helen felt that fragile high she often experienced right before a crash and struggled to look relaxed as Birnbaum opened with: “Well, Helen, I hope you can understand just how awkward and embarrassing it was for me and Mr. Alexander to be blindsided this morning with allegations about your past.”

Her mouth dried up. “What do you mean?”

“Morgan’s attorney and campaign manager came in here and tried to make the case that you’re not an objective reporter and to request that you be removed from working on any future stories regarding his candidacy.”

“Oh, please,” Steele muttered.

“Bill,”
Birnbaum snapped.

“Neither Shrontz here nor anybody else was aware you had
two
libel suits back in Ohio, the most recent of which was just settled, correct? A settlement that included front-page corrections, didn’t it?”

Helen tried to find her voice. “That was—”

“Can you see how that makes us look a little uninformed? Perhaps we would’ve been able to do a better job of defending you if—”

“It didn’t occur to me,” she whispered, “to bring up some of the most stressful moments of my life during a job interview.” Shrontz had sunk into such a deep pout he wouldn’t look at her. “We were sued by a jailed congressman,” she said, gaining volume. “The guy sexually harassed his staff and rigged contracts for companies that a judge later determined were linked to the mob.”

The stress and thrill of that story, she realized, still flickered inside her. “I said he was arrested for a DUI, which is what the arrest stated, though the courts later reduced it to what they call a
wet neg
, basically the same thing, though of course I wish I’d clarified that.” She tried to clear her throat and ended up coughing. “Still, they never should’ve run those corrections the way they did, but I was gone by then.”

Steele handed her his coffee. She sipped it, rotating the mug so they couldn’t see her fingers twitching.

“Okay, Helen, but as you know, there’s more.” Birnbaum glanced down at a Post-it note. “There’s a web site called ‘The Twenty-three Lies of Helen Gulanos!’ in which another target of yours accuses you of getting things wrong and ruining his reputation.”

“Gregory P. Conover,” she said, her skin tightening, “is a psychopath who ran a boot camp for troubled teens in central Ohio. After one of the kids died of dehydration, I looked into Conover’s past and found that two other teens had died of easily avoidable causes at a camp he’d run in Utah. It seemed relevant.” Her vision pulsing, she lifted her hair off her neck and flapped her blouse. The man had screamed into the phone that he would
destroy
her.

“Take it easy, Helen,” Marguerite whispered.

Looking at Birnbaum, Helen saw that more was coming and suddenly feared that she wouldn’t be spared anything today.

“They also claim,” he said hesitantly, “that you got your biggest story in D.C., the one about that South Carolina senator’s penchant for porn, and these are Ted Severson’s words, by sleeping with an aide on his staff.”

She shut her eyes and let the words bang around in her chest.

“This is bullshit,” Steele said. “Why do we care what—”

“Bill,”
Birnbaum barked.

“I did have a relationship with a guy in Senator Honeycutt’s office,” she said softly, “but that was after I reported and wrote those stories.”

“Did he father your son?” Birnbaum asked. “I’m sorry, Helen, but that’s the allegation.”

The room quieted. Finally, she said, “That’s not your business.”

Birnbaum stretched his neck, tugged at his tie. “I’m sorry to agitate you. I really am. But these are things we had to discuss. You understand, right?”

She gave no response, but what she realized was that the timelines of the story and the romance—from flirtation to conception—would never matter to anyone but her.

“They haven’t said they’ll sue yet, but if you write anything else they don’t like, they clearly intend to drag all this into the light. Wouldn’t you say that was the drift, Stan?”

The publisher nodded, but since he’d been doing this pretty much nonstop, its meaning was hard to gauge.

“Can I say anything yet?” Steele asked, rolling his left shirtsleeve up past his elbows.

“Bill,” Birnbaum said, “this isn’t—”

“Let him talk,” the publisher told him.

“If I haven’t pissed anyone off in a while,” Steele began, rolling up the other sleeve now, “I figure I’m not working hard enough. But maybe that’s just me. What I do know is that we’ve all written sentences and stories we’d love to have back for one last rewrite. That said, after sitting behind Helen for almost a year it’s obvious—regardless of what anyone
claims
—that she’s one of the most diligent and gutsy hires this paper has made in the past decade or so.”

“Nobody’s saying—” Marguerite began.

“Think about it,” Steele interrupted. “What message would you send if you give Morgan to someone else? And why would we possibly”—he was looking directly at the publisher now—“want to surrender a war we’re currently winning? You think the
Times
wouldn’t have run her Morgan stories, much less the one we’ve got in the works? While I was passed out on her couch last night, or early this morning, whenever it was, Helen was pounding out a draft—a very rough one—of what we think we know so far. And, trust me, we understand this needs a whole lot of confirmation before it’s ready, but just listen.”