Truth Like the Sun (34 page)

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.

Right now, it felt like a victory party. He overheard reporters commenting on how festive his gathering was compared to Rooney’s and Norheim’s more subdued soirees. And the ballroom just kept filling, with a TV crew now interviewing ninety-six-year-old Hazel Molchan and then eighteen-year-old Ryan Tyler about why they were still so gung ho about Morgan. And it wasn’t lost on the press when former governor Ed Lopresti shuffled inside to shake his hand, along with other assorted city icons and activists who’d taken the trouble to be seen with him tonight. Clearly, attacking Roger was an assault on their version of history too.

By 8:50 p.m., the party tightened and so did the new vote tally, putting him a point ahead of Rooney and three over Norheim. Roger knew these votes were probably cast before lunch in precincts closest to the courthouse, and since that should have been his territory, this slippage was even more discouraging. Teddy sent a runner to the courthouse for the precinct turnout stats, so he could compare them with 1997 numbers. Then, based on the disparities, he passed out cell phones and divvied up calling assignments in Wallingford and Queen Anne, where turnouts were low and Roger should have fared well. The kids looked excited but confused.
The polls have already closed, right?

“As long as ballots are postmarked today, they’ll count,” Teddy told them, explaining that there was a post office near the airport that stayed open till midnight. “Tell ’em if they haven’t voted yet, we’ll come right to their house and pick their ballots up and mail
them ourselves. Annie will organize the pickups. Do whatever she says.”

Teddy hobbled back into the center of the room on his cane, turned on the microphone and started in on his Ed Sullivan impression, which if not particularly good was perfectly timed. People were desperate for diversions. Standing hunch-shouldered, with the backs of his wrists on his hips, talking in the distinct pitch and hesitating cadence of the long-dead showman, Teddy started listing off his guests tonight. “And what do you know? There’s Elvis … Presley … himself.”

With this cue, and to awkward applause, Roger swaggered to the stage and grabbed a stool.

“Mr. Presley? How do you feel about Roger … Morgan’s chances tonight?”

Roger played with an imaginary bouffant of hair, then mumbled, “Well, uh, Ed, can I call you Ed?”

“Feel free to call me Mr.… Sullivan,” Teddy replied.

“Well, uh, Mr. Sullivan, are we talking about Roger Morgan’s chances at the polls or in the sack?”

The applause was more strained during his Bob Hope impression, and by the time he’d finished his LBJ routine he was looking for an exit, when he spotted Meredith Stein in a purple dress and black scarf. Stranding Teddy, he walked directly over to her, not caring about the gossip and surprised by how touched he was that she’d come.

“You need to call me,” she told him.

He agreed and wanted to say more, but suddenly was overrun by others wanting a piece of him, people he assumed already would have abandoned him. Even Jonas Lange was here.

“First political event I’ve ever been to,” he said, shaking Roger’s hand. “You got a raw deal,” he added through clenched teeth. “Patricia would have found a dozen ways to make the
P-I
pay, not that I know how to do you any good. Just thought I’d at least be here.”

“How you managing without her?” Roger asked.

Jonas shrugged. “Like any other amputee, I guess.”

Then it was Linda Bancroft heading toward him. He hadn’t seen
her in at least fifteen years, but easily recognized his first fiancée by the exaggerated swing of her arms. The older she got, the more her simplicity appealed to him. She hugged harder these days too. And, amazingly, Malcolm Turner himself had broken out of his embattled reclusion, showing up in a sharkskin suit to navigate a crowd full of his critics and bankruptcy victims. Yet he came, and now was striding toward Roger with his hand extended. Democrats, Republicans, apoliticals, Christians, Jews, agnostics, everybody paying their respects. They were
all
here, though he noticed the savvier ones exiting before the next pile of votes got tallied.

His elderly supporters switched from wine to coffee as the crowd thinned, though the youngsters were still guzzling the free liquor. The 9:50 numbers were as devastating as Roger expected, showing him trailing Rooney by five points and the councilwoman by three. A chant erupted anyway. At first he was shocked they still didn’t get it, but then realized that in fact they did and were sticking it out regardless. By 10:45, the crowd was down by half and the kids were astonished when the latest count put him eight points behind Rooney and six back of Norheim.

He conceded in time for the eleven-o’clock news, earlier than Teddy thought he should, but he knew the numbers would only get worse.

“Do you regret running?” the KING-5 woman asked.

“You kidding me? I got to converse with so many people I would’ve never met otherwise, people who share my affection for this city. The whole thing was a wonderful and humbling adventure. And in the grand scheme of things, despite disappointing these generous people behind me, this isn’t all that big of a deal. This city will continue to be among the greatest, and I’ll continue working for it every way I can. We tend to overestimate the importance of who’s in office. And I guarantee you that in a couple weeks people will come up to me and ask, ‘How’s your campaign goin’? Go get ’em, Roger! Give ’em hell!’ And to those people I’ll say, ‘You bet I will.’ ”

“Anything you’d like to say about the impact of the controversial
Post-Intelligencer
article?”

Roger winced and bit his lower lip. “It didn’t feel fair or accurate
to me. I didn’t recognize the man they wrote about. Life is a challenging and often inexplicable odyssey that doesn’t translate easily into newspaper stories. If that article was all I knew about me, I would have voted for someone else too.”

THREE WEEKS LATER
he was emerging from yet another funeral. Just sixty-two, Jenny Sunshine left behind a weepy husband, four kids and eleven rambunctious grandchildren, all of them crammed into the front rows at the University Unitarian Church. Having been asked to speak, Roger recounted her first day at the fair, when she dropped a pot of coffee in his office and couldn’t stop laughing. He dipped in and out of several other mini-debacles that were no match for his secretary’s high spirits. “She was supremely gifted in the happiness department.”

Afterward, he felt oddly exhilarated, as if his fever had finally broken and he was himself again. He had Teddy in the backseat and his mother in the front. They were both ready for naps, but he wanted to take a drive.

It had taken him more than two weeks to get over the sting of the primary, yet somehow getting skewered in the press
and
losing so dramatically had boosted his stature. And it was inspiring that people still wanted more of him after seeing his life cast in such a dismal light. More strangers than ever were hailing him on the streets, and he was getting more speaking requests than he had since the ’70s. The Rotary and Kiwanis were no-brainers, sure, but the Historical Society, the League of Women Voters, the Mountaineers, People for Puget Sound and Washington Conservation Voters? Some invitations, no doubt, were driven by sympathy or morbid curiosity, though people suddenly wanted him—needed him—to explain their city to them, to help put its historical seediness into perspective, especially in light of the
P-I’s
series on Mal Turner and the graft heydays.
Find me a great city that wasn’t built by visionaries and scoundrels
was one of his favorite new lines. Two authors and a literary agent called to see if he was interested in doing a memoir. The sky was a flawless, cheerful blue. He felt stunningly good.

Teddy and his mother were both snoozing by the time he drove past the Needle and popped up on the Viaduct, with glassy skyscrapers to the left, serrated mountains to the right and sparkling water in between. He nudged his mother, the curl of her spine exaggerated by the seat. “Mum,” he whispered. “Look, Mummy.” He slowed down, flipped on the hazards, jostled her again.

She finally woke up, blinking slowly. “Oh, this is so lovely.”

He thought about trying to stir Teddy then decided to let him sleep. Seeing the Bremerton ferry approaching the Coleman Dock now, he patted his pockets and pulled out his phone.

SHE WAS PICKING
blackberries with Elias and Omar a few blocks from her apartment, where the aggressive vines had taken over a vacant lot next to the Burke-Gilman Trail, the drooping berries so ripe and heavy they were falling on their own and leaving purple explosions on the paved path. Loud chatty women sped past behind shaggy retrievers on long leashes, followed by bicyclists as colorful as tropical fish, two pierced teens on skateboards and a solo exhibitionist on a unicycle wearing nothing but Converse high-tops and purple body paint. Helen’s cell rang, and she was startled by the incoming number.

He hadn’t returned any of her three calls since the story ran. She’d typed him a quick letter the night it went to press, admitting how disappointed she was with its tone. The letter momentarily salved her guilt, though she didn’t intend to send it, particularly not after the congratulatory raves from the publisher and so many others poured in. Marguerite called the story a “wing walker,” whatever that meant, and several
Times
reporters and friends in Ohio and D.C. had gushed over it. Yet in hindsight, to her it felt more like a stepping-stone to the next bell-ringer.

The morning it ran, Helen and Steele started receiving anonymously faxed lists of private investors for almost every Malcolm Turner construction project over the past four decades. These lists suggested that all his buildings were financed, at least in part, by local investors, mostly cops, who’d been implicated in graft investigations.
On the Monday following the primary, Steele’s story detailed how Turner’s bold strategy had finally backfired when the dot-com bust left him with a million square feet of empty office space. Among his many creditors were more than two hundred “investor friends”—many of whom were now suing him in hopes of liquidating his assets and seeing some return on the $160 million he owed them. Yet it was this continuing thread of dirty money, not the bankruptcy saga, that made the story explosive. A graphic re-creation of the downtown skyline showed Turner’s buildings in red beneath the headline: “A City Built on Bribes?” That provocative question, coupled with Helen’s sidebar on the construction and financing of the Space Needle, had people looking at their city differently.

It was hard for her to dig up more than thirdhand accounts, but she still told the story, as best she could, of how the Needle was built on an extremely tight timeline. After the city and county refused to help, Morgan and Severson found private backing from four well-known local tycoons, including Jack Vierling. Yet, as Helen pointed out, there were also “silent partners” who helped repay the $4.5 million construction loan, including young Malcolm Turner, who was overseeing Vierling’s real estate ventures at the time. Vierling’s son told her that Turner had come up with a fourth of his father’s share. To her astonishment, Turner discussed it with her as well. In a terse six-minute phone chat, he confirmed his involvement but wouldn’t say how much he invested or where he got the cash. “I was doing my damndest to help, you understand? And I was honored to be part of it. I wasn’t asking questions. Find me anybody who does background checks on their investors. When people have given me money, my typical reaction has been, ‘Thank you very much.’ ”