Truth Like the Sun Read online

  “What in God’s name?” Johnson mutters, distracted by the enormous Goodyear blimp that Teddy has apparently sent up to rescue his friend. Once it reaches restaurant level, the blimp’s electronic screen is easily readable: “Welcome to the Space Needle, Mr. Vice President!”

  Chapter Four

  APRIL 2001

  AFTER MONTHS of damp gloom, the low clouds finally lifted and bureaucrats and bums alike leaned against City Hall, their eyes closed, savoring the feeling of sunshine on their faces. It was only sixty-three degrees, but they wanted to strip off their clothes and sacrifice themselves to the stingy sun god. And when they finally opened their eyes again, the bay was brighter and the looming snowball of Mount Rainier had rolled a little closer to downtown.

  Helen tried not to fall for the scenery, but it was hard. The upside to all this background drizzle was that the ever-present moisture essentially backlit everything, which was why the grass looked greener and the sky bluer and the pavement blacker; why apples appeared juicier and skin healthier, why Chevrolet and Honda, she’d read, shot their commercials here and why just about everywhere else you went suddenly looked drab.

  This seasonal jolt of warmth and clear skies drew more Californians looking for tech jobs, as if they hadn’t heard or didn’t believe that the boom city had crashed once again. The highest unemployment in the country didn’t scare them off because they’d been told Seattle was different, a city that reinvents the world, right? That Newsweek cover was five years old, but the message lingered: Swimming to Seattle: Everybody else is moving there. Should you? The answer then and now was Hell yes! Sure, Microsoft was getting spanked by judges, and Boeing was mumbling about moving its headquarters to the Midwest. And while this wasn’t the same start-up Valhalla it was even a year ago, the venture caps would be back. They got rich even on bad ideas here, so everybody’s gearing up for the next big thing. Three of the world’s ten richest men still live here for a reason. Three!

  Helen passed the sun worshipers and went inside to watch the mayor. Douglas Rooney looked bigger than he did the last time she saw him, his suit bunching on his thighs and warping across his meaty back. Word had it he was a carb junkie—not a chip he could resist—yet it all added to his forcefulness. After running the show for seven years, he didn’t peek into rooms before entering, his head rarely swiveling on his expanding neck. He looked and moved forward, now toward the podium, pretending to engage the overflow of supporters, gophers and advisers who cornered reporters and whispered—not for attribution, okay?—that while the mayor didn’t suffer fools gladly, he’s a brilliant tactician. A third term? they asked rhetorically. Fait accompli.

  He hadn’t officially begun running, other than to set up The Nonpartisan Committee for Re-electing Mayor Rooney. Yet he’d been in campaign mode for months now, with a barrage of mailings touting all the new streetlights, sewer extensions and police substations. His flacks had fended off the media for a day and a half, promising the mayor would answer all questions—including those about the new entrant in the race—at his weekly briefing.

  He began, however, by stalling, first giving a numbing update on a feasibility study into replacing a treatment plant north of downtown, then an excruciatingly vague analysis of the upsides and downsides to potential light-rail routes before discussing his meaningless correspondence with sister cities in Costa Rica and Vietnam. Reporters rolled their eyes and feigned wrist slits, reminding Helen of the bridge jumper stepping into space. Snapping back to the present, she wondered how much the mayor’s haircut had cost. When he finally opened it up to questions, everybody shouted the same name.

  His lips curled into a snarl that bordered on a smile, so the cameras snapped. “I welcome anyone into the race who sincerely believes he has the skills and experience to do this job well.”

  “How well do you know Mr. Morgan?”

  “I know him”—he hesitated—“fairly well.” After a pause, he added, “Always welcomed his input through the years.”

  “Is he dissatisfied with how you’re running the city?”

  “You’d have to ask him, wouldn’t you?” He bristled. “Never said anything of the sort to me.”

  The mayor glowered as the Roger questions continued, the reporters knowing his quotes improve the more riled he gets. “Is he qualified?” Rooney asked, as if that was the stupidest question yet. “Any resident of this city is qualified. Look, nobody can diminish his role in bringing the fair here. What all he’s done since then that makes him believe he can lead this city in this new century, I’m not as clear on.” He paused, sweat glistening above his upper lip. “In fact, I don’t even know if he’s a Democrat or a Republican.”

  He never once mentioned Roger or the other candidates by name, apparently hoping voters would think he didn’t have any challengers if he avoided naming them.

  “Were you at the World’s Fair?” Helen asked, and heads spun. Most city hall reporters didn’t recognize her, but they knew her byline, especially after her little front-page stunner about Morgan’s surprise announcement at the Olympic Hotel.

  The mayor found her face in the crowd and sighed, grateful for the digression. “I was thirteen. And I remember the Wild Mouse roller coaster and going up in the Space Needle, of course. And I remember the Roy Rogers show.” He brightened. “And eating with chopsticks! That was the very first time I ever used chopsticks.”

  It didn’t surprise her that the mayor gushed on cue. She’d heard similar responses a dozen times now. Ask people what they remembered about the fair and they smiled. Even Helen felt herself getting sucked in after reading an apparently sober historian claim the fair was at its core an act of rebellion, that Morgan and Severson went around city hall to make it happen. The Needle itself, he’d suggested, was a dagger to the belly of stuffy, postwar Seattle.

  After the news conference, she prowled antique shops until she found—tucked amid old books, necklaces, posters and art deco lamps—a junkyard shrine to the fair with Century 21 plates, teacups, shot glasses and cigarette lighters, a Seattle ’62 seat cushion, a World’s Fair bolo tie and three slender champagne flutes—at $50 a pop—that helped christen the Space Needle the night before the fair began. She held one up, marveling at the thought of it in someone’s hand—perhaps Morgan’s—up there, on that night.

  The shop owner hovered nearby, smirking beneath slicked-back hair. “You know where the Bubbleator ended up, right?”

  She looked up. “Tell me.”

  “Some old hippie couple uses it as a greenhouse in West Seattle now,” he said in an odd stage whisper. “Growing banana trees and orchids and God knows what else.”

  “Were you there?”

  “The fair? Of course.”

  “What sticks with you?”

  “Everything. Bird’s nest soup. A microwave oven. Polynesian dancers. Jackson Pollock’s paintings. Elvis.”

  “You saw him?”

  “No, but he was there.” She looked away from his yellow smile to the Farrah Fawcett poster behind him. “The King was definitely there. And so was I.”

  ROGER MORGAN rode shotgun across downtown, his new assistant at the wheel, Teddy napping in the back. He felt strangely alert and anxious from his toes to his scalp, noticing all the block-size craters, half-completed garages, idle cranes and other signs that the city was on hold. What better time to try to lead? He’d been bombarded with congratulations since the party, as if he’d already won something, though there weren’t even any notable endorsements yet. He tried to relax by noticing all the changes along Third Avenue.

  “Used to be Woolworth’s on that side of Pike, and Kress on the other side,” he told Annie. “Bookends for thirty or forty years at least, gone without a trace. And twenty-five years ago nobody could’ve imagined Fifth and Pine without Frederick & Nelson and its Frango mints. About the only thing that hasn’t changed is the Bon. But even that looks different.”

  “You know what?” Annie said. “You should give tours.”

  �
��Don’t encourage him,” Teddy mumbled. “We don’t need the eldery candidate reminiscing about the good old days.”

  Roger laughed but continued. “Used to be billboards all along here. Remember, Teddy?” His voice lowered into 1960s ad-man tenor: “ ‘Pan Am—the world’s most experienced airline.’ Chandler’s Shoes was over there. And a couple blocks over we had Ernst, Pay ’n Save and Abruzzi’s Pizza. Used to have all our own stuff, see. Now we’ve got what everybody else has. So people like me see ghosts whenever we drive through here. Remember Nick Abruzzi’s pizza pies, Teddy?” He glanced back and saw his pal’s head slumped awkwardly to the side, his eyes closed, his face worn thin by time, its once vast capacity for expression reduced to this scowling hatchet. Roger watched him until his chest rose, then recalled Nick shuffling out from behind the counter, flour misting off him, his voice a high giggle. Excuse me, but I want to make sure you all realize you have the good fortune of dining today with the great Roger Morgan, the real mayor of our soggy city.

  “That right there used to be Lamonts,” he whispered. “Never got used to that. For me, it’ll always be Rhodes—‘Seattle’s home-owned department store.’ Or what about the Polynesian Restaurant on Pier Fifty-one? Had a great run before they barged it to the Duwamish in ’81 and torched it for the firefighters. Everything has to be new, understand? So we tear down the old or blow it up. Just ask the Kingdome.”

  “Roger,” Teddy grumbled. “Focus. What’re you gonna tell these people?”

  He laughed. “The truth. What else do I got?” He shuts up, though, and tries to imagine everything that might entail.

  A couple moments later, Teddy rested a cold hand on his shoulder, slid it to his neck and squeezed. “Let ’em know you’ve always been on their side, and you hope they’ll be on yours. You’ve got it. Just don’t fly off the handle on the mayor or the police, for Chrissakes.”

  Of the many times he’d accompanied candidates into this conference room, he’d never seen it this packed. Fifteen burly men crowded the table. Another dozen lined the walls. Roger shook the closest hands, instantly feeling ancient and brittle as Teddy dropped too swiftly onto a wooden chair and muzzled a groan.

  As the room quieted, Roger thanked everyone for meeting on such short notice. They fidgeted, muscles twitching beneath hairy forearms. “As some of you may have noticed, I’ve been around awhile.” He expected snickers, at least grins, but missed entirely, then heard himself listing former union leaders he’d known. He knew how gauche this must sound. Ambition is fine, he used to tell candidates, as long as you don’t show it. “I’ve watched the power of unions shrink around here,” Roger said, wishing he’d shut up and listen. “Yet this is still a stronghold and just needs to be stronger.”

  Making eye contact wasn’t getting any easier, and he knew he was saying the same things politicians had said in this room since the beginning of time. So he cut to the companies he’d heard might be amenable—he almost said vulnerable—to organizing. The chairman yawned without opening his mouth. “Thanks, Mr. Morgan, but we’ve been working on them for years now.”

  When Roger asked what they were looking for in a mayor, they shifted in their seats until the chairman softly said, “I think you know.”

  “Then can we just lay it on the table here?” He bit off a smile that he knew looked phony. “What do I need to do to get your support?”

  He listened to the chairman tell him what he already knew while scolding himself for rushing this meeting in the first place. These people weren’t here to meet the next mayor. They were here to see a relic. His suit, his shoes, his hair—everything about him straight out of some wax museum. He heard belly laughs through the walls as they strolled out.

  “Blew that one,” he said once they stepped outside and Teddy lit a Pall Mall. He’d cut back during his sixties, but once he’d turned seventy he’d said the hell with it and went back to burgers, ice cream and unfiltered cigarettes.

  “You’ll find your way,” Teddy said, his breath catching on the smoke. “You were better in there than you think you were.”

  “Nah, I didn’t connect. Not even close. They didn’t know who I was.”

  “You kiddin’ me?” Teddy licked a knuckle to remove a tobacco speck from the tip of his tongue. “Why you think so many showed up? But you know what, I’m not helping you any. You should bring in that young hotshot Ryan what’s-his-name who ran Gilbey’s campaign. That kid is a shark, and he’d come cheap.”

  “Yeah, but I wouldn’t listen to him.” Roger started toward the car. “I barely listen to you.”

  Driving away, the city suddenly felt oddly foreign. Everywhere he looked people were muttering to themselves or mumbling on cell phones. Who could tell the difference anymore? And the half-empty office towers looked generic and disposable, like they’d get knocked down and hauled to the dump once the party was really over. Even the new street signs seemed hostile—Click it or Ticket! Litter and it hurts! Why the hell, he wondered, would anyone want to be mayor of a city he no longer recognized?

  “The machinists matter more anyhow,” Teddy volunteered. “What you just did was your practice round, okay? But you think you can get me home? I’m dragging a bit here, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  HELEN SAT ACROSS from a smiling, ponytailed man and read the button on his hemp jacket: I’ll have a mocha vodka marijuana latte to go, please.

  Omar Duran was the executive director of Small Footprint, a one-man nonprofit advocating tiny cars and houses, less trash and fewer possessions. When Helen called for a quote on a global-warming story, she’d found him so entertaining that she profiled him a week later. The photos alone were worth it—six-foot-three Omar crammed inside his Smart Car, and another of him standing next to his tiny houseboat.

  “I’m no fan of the mayor, but at least we know what he’ll do.” He leaned across the table so only she could hear. “He’s into appearing green, not being green.” His eyes scanned hers for comprehension. “Makes pledges he has no intention of fulfilling. There’s no real commitment to anything beyond stroking his own carrot.”

  “Charming endorsement,” Helen said, increasingly impatient, though her tone remained gentle. “But I’m not writing about the mayor.”

  Having learned long ago not to socialize with radicals, she’d ducked Omar’s prior attempts to coax her out for coffee, yet here she was with this uncompromising enviro-madman on the edge of Pioneer Square sitting outside Café Bengodi in brilliant rush-hour daylight, a pint of Guinness on his side of the table, an ice water on hers, all because he’d hinted that he might have something on Roger Morgan.

  The sudden screech of a violin somewhere in the square launched a flock of pigeons into the sky behind him, followed by a messy two-octave scale in A minor and another piercingly high G sharp. Helen chided herself that this was how bad she’d sound if she didn’t practice more. Glancing back down, she caught Omar staring at the scar that ran like a pink bead of caulk across the base of her neck and resisted offering her standard explanation that the noose broke.

  “Look, I’m not an environmental reporter, and I’m not even covering this race, okay? I wrote a quickie daily because Morgan announced when I happened to be there. I’m writing about the fair, not …” She glanced at her ringing phone, saw her mother’s number flashing on the screen. “My editor,” she said. “I’ve gotta run, but please tell me what you’ve heard.”

  “Can I tell you something else first?”

  Checking her watch, she felt the mounting pressure to go pick up her son before she got trapped in traffic. Eight joggers grunted past, followed by the whoosh of three bicyclists in skin-tight neon. “No,” she said softly, “you can’t. And I’m sorry, but I doubt you’ve got anything really useful anyway.”

  He laughed and finished his beer. “O ye of no faith.”

  She grabbed her satchel, slid her chair back without any intention of leaving and listened to the deranged outdoor violinist make the opening to Bach’s Sonata no. 1 in G Mi
nor sound like a wounded cat.

  “There’s an old gadfly I’ve known ever since I moved here,” he said. “Used to make a career out of suing the city for this and that. Probably in his mid-seventies by now. Not an altogether appealing guy, to be honest, but his shit checks out.”

  She held her bag across her chest, as if she was still about to flee.

  “He challenged the cruise ships coming in here. Lots of people were pissed, though he’s the only one to give ’em hell at every turn. But he does everything behind the scenes. Practically nobody’s heard of him.”

  There was no obvious reason to find Omar appealing, especially if you broke him into parts—gap-toothed smile, boxer’s nose, sunken eyes and a receding hairline yanked back into a short ponytail he obsessively retightened. Maybe it was his irreverence, how he left price tags on his Value Village shirts so you could see how little he paid for them. Or perhaps his boyish enthusiasm reminded her of Elias. His Midwest roots also probably helped, though almost everybody she’d met came from somewhere else, which made this the perfect city, she thought, for fugitives like herself.

  “This guy lives alone on the backside of Queen Anne in a little dump filled with papers,” Omar continued, patting the air next to his chair to help her visualize the stacks. “It’s not that he’s insane, you know. Just a pack rat. Well, maybe he is nuts, but he keeps meticulous files on everyone he doesn’t like.”

  Helen had always been able to sense when somebody was about to say something that might give a story life. The catch was, you had to be the sort of person they wanted to tell it to, and everyone’s different. Some need to be shoved. With others you just hunkered down and waited quietly, like birds do when they feel the air thinning before a storm.

  Her phone went off again. It was Shrontz now. She turned off the ringer and looked back to Omar. “Yes?”