by Jim Lynch
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-Is 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.”
The publisher sat up and Birnbaum jingled some keys as Steele slowly read the opening five paragraphs, which to Helen sounded premature and reckless.
“He changed his name?” Birnbaum blurted. “Has that ever been written before? How long have we known that? But what about the sourcing? You’ve got a convicted liar, an old woman and—”
“I said it needs work, but after hearing its potential, can’t we agree that this might explain why these hacks are trying to smear Helen and scare you off a story we haven’t even finished reporting yet? And as far as these people trying to run our newsroom, I say, and this comes from the heart, fuck ’em.”
After a prolonged shuffling of legs and rubbing of faces, the publisher quietly said, “Yes.” His face tilted upward, his eyes brightening. “Yes!” he repeated, louder this time. “Fuck ’em!”
Everybody was nodding and blushing now. Marguerite raised her arms as if they’d just kicked a field goal. “Fuck them!”
Chapter Nineteen
OCTOBER 22, 1962
THE PECULIAR DEATH of Rudy Costello gets little attention the day after the closing ceremonies, when the vandals and vultures descend on the fairgrounds wielding sledges, prying nails and loading trucks as if this was merely a circus being packed up—Space Needle and all—that would be reassembled next month in Barcelona, Geneva or Tokyo. Most of it is trash anyway, yet there are plenty of exotic artifacts—Filipino lamps, Chinese dolls and so much more—amid the instantly nostalgic shrapnel of placards, trinkets and brochures. Coverage of yesterday’s finale rules the newsday, of course, so it isn’t more than an aside that Mr. Costello, who owned the contracts for the county’s 1,217 pinball machines, drowned in five feet of water beside his fifty-three-foot yacht in front of his Lake Washington mansion.
Roger can’t place the name or picture the face, in part because he’s distracted by reports that the northern span of the freeway from Roanoke to Ravenna will open earlier than expected next month and that the mayor pledged to tighten gaming policies and eliminate what he calls “the poor image of law enforcement.” Roger’s digestion of all this is further disrupted by Jenny Sunshine, who informs him that a tall, officious-looking man came looking for him but declined to leave his name.
“How tall?”
She reaches as high as she can.
“Did he say when he’d be back?”
“He wanted to know when you’d be in, and I told him I had no idea,” she says playfully, “seeing as how this is the first day of your new life.”
He hastily sorts his office into piles before realizing how badly he doesn’t want to be here when Ned Gance returns, then grabs his coat and heads out to do what he’s been putting off for months now. Riding the monorail downtown, he broods over what he’ll say, every combination of words sounding so inadequate. He steps off and trudges along Fifth Avenue toward Frederick & Nelson with the gait of a man who doesn’t truly want to get where he’s going.
From a distance, coat in arm, he watches her unlock glass cabinets, cheerfully showing necklaces to one woman, rings
to another. He is tempted to postpone this drama, at least for several hours, or maybe even another day, until he admits to himself that he’s leaning toward leaving town tomorrow. Finally, both shoppers waddle out.
As he closes in on her, she looks as pretty as ever, with the sort of radiance only found in someone who is genuinely happy, and he feels a reflexive desire to add to her joy, to surprise her by taking her to lunch wherever she wants to go. When she spots him, however, it’s not with the look of a fiancée but the cordial mask of a saleswoman. “Can I help you?”
“I’m sorry,” he begins, plummeting immediately to where he needs to go. “I shouldn’t have waited this long.”
“You don’t have to do this now,” she says levelly. “You’ve already said it a million different ways.”
His words catch in his throat and he clears it, astounded she’s this composed, as if all this fine jewelry gave her strength. He stalls, looking at necklaces beneath the glass until he sees the fourteen-karat Space Needle charm for $39.50 and his own pinched expression in a small oval mirror.
“If you’d been paying attention,” she says softly, “you’d have noticed I haven’t sent the invitations out yet.”
She tries to slide the ring off, but it catches on her knuckle. She spins it around once and studies it, as if making sure it’s the right one. “I don’t want to marry you either, Roger. I want someone who adores everything about me.”
He wants to help her with the ring or say something soothing but can’t seem to do anything but watch as she tugs futilely. “Please,” he whispers, “just keep it.”
She doesn’t seem to hear, then looks up not with anger but something closer to sympathy. “Don’t worry. I’ll find someone to love me.”
Right now he wished it was him.
She pulls on the diamond again and then looks past him, her taut lips sliding into a magazine smile. “Hello there, ma’am. Can I help you?”
Afterward, he drifts back to the fairgrounds and bounces around the clean-up projects, unable to let go of this spectacle, he realizes, until it’s entirely gone. Apparently the mayor is caught in this same vortex, because he’s here too, gushing about how swell everything was.