Truth Like the Sun (31 page)

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.”

HELEN FELT
at an awkward disadvantage. Morgan seemed so comfortable in this preposterous building that he’d imagined and built above
his
fairgrounds and
his
city, which from up here looked more like the blinking motherboard of some massive computer than a breathing metropolis of more than one million residents. As he
pointed out various skyline relics—such as the red Roosevelt Hotel sign—Steele was obviously fascinated and starstruck. Why wouldn’t he be? He’d waged his entire career in a place where Morgan was a living legend, regardless of his merits or deceits. She checked her watch just as the first deadline passed and wondered with a panicky flicker exactly what the
Times
would have tomorrow. They hadn’t run anything in days, and the longer their stories held, the bigger they loomed in her mind. Her skin and throat were both itchy. She hadn’t slept more than a few hours a night for nearly a week and felt oddly volatile, as if she might weep before the questions began. It occurred to her again that tonight’s babysitter was far too young. Did she even warn her about peanuts? What was her name again? Teresa? No,
Tara
! She exhaled. “Mr. Morgan,” she interrupted gently, “We need to—”

“Of course you do.”

“Do you recall,” she said, going straight at him, “investing in an apartment building with Malcolm Turner in ’sixty-two on Roanoke near Broadway?”

His grin startled her, as if he welcomed the topic.

“I do! In fact,” he said, leaning back toward the window, “in just a minute or so it should swing into view. Right, Teddy? One of Mal’s earlier buildings, I believe.” They all scanned the northeastern skyline, craning to see which illuminated box he was pointing at.
“There,”
he said, “isn’t that it?”

Teddy swiveled his neck and grumbled, “Beats me.”

Somehow it had never occurred to her that the tower might still be standing. Its plainness made her feel disoriented and slightly queasy.

“Even the Mal Turners of the world start small,” Roger explained, as if she’d been thinking aloud.

“New Metropolitan Properties,” Steele interjected, as if he were simply there to jog memories. “That was his company at the time.”

Roger hesitated and then glanced at Teddy, who was fixing Steele with a drowsy scowl. “Oh, yeah?”

Helen shuffled papers and turned one sheet around so Roger and Teddy could see it in the candlelight. “Here’s the list of original investors in that building.”

“God almighty,” Teddy groused.

The maître d’ set a bourbon on ice next to his elbow. “Anybody want anything else?” she asked pleasantly. “Music all right, Mr. Morgan?”

“Perfect.”

HE WATCHED HELEN
jot
music, hostess, perfect
and
Miles Davis?
as he pulled reading glasses from an inside pocket, fixed them low on his nose and slid the sheet closer to the candle. The table quieted to tinkling ice as Teddy swirled his drink and Roger slowly read the nine names and the dollar figures next to them. It was hard not to audibly groan. He needed to stick a knife in this day. He’d been irritable in the debate and rushed his gratitude with the donors. He never should have agreed to this interview.

“Do you know,” she asked in a quavering voice, “what all those people on that list besides you, Eddie Mills and Dave Beck have in common?”

Roger took a swig of water and refocused on the names.

“Recognize anyone?” Steele said.

“Certainly, Mr. Steele. Anyone my age in this city—”

“They were all implicated,” Helen said, “in the gambling and graft investigation that began during the fair.”

“So
what
?” Teddy growled.

Roger was simultaneously fascinated and alarmed. What was he being accused of? He knew Dave Beck had invested in the apartments, but he threw money all over town. Then, for the first time in decades, he recalled that kid reporter asking him a similar question at the end of the fair. But nothing came of that, right? And that insufferable stiff from the U.S. attorney’s office—Gant?—had also asked him about Mal’s projects, but again that was the last of it.

“Ms. Gulanos,” he finally said, “it’s been a very long day. So what
is
your point, beyond insinuating that I should be embarrassed to show up on a forty-year-old list of names I’ve never seen before that might well be fraudulent?”

“We’re really just trying to understand things here,” Steele blurted.

“We’ve been told,” Helen said slowly, “that New Metropolitan Properties served as an investment arm for a
network
of city cops, officials and businessmen who profited from graft.”

“Yeah?” Roger said, his cheeks burning. “And who told you that?”

“Several sources, sir,” Steele answered.