Truth Like the Sun (25 page)

He pretended not to hear any of this—his most effective punishment, and he knew it.

“See, I need this old man to tell us a story,” she added.

He looked up, finally curious, sporting more nose freckles than ever.

“It might be hard to follow, but it’ll be a good one. And I need to make sure the story he tells us is true, okay? And that’s why I want you to be with me, because nobody would lie around such a smart, good boy. So just look him in the eye when he looks at you, okay? Can you do that for me? And it might be a little smelly or gross in there, but that’ll be our secret, all right?”

The sliding doors didn’t respond to Elias Gulanos’s forty-three pounds, but once his mother caught up they opened into a small lobby and a long reception counter, in front of which an old woman was slouched in a wheelchair, her balding head listing precariously while a shirtless man holding a sack of fluids connected to a tube inserted into his bruised forearm paced back and forth, the both of them trying to get the attention of the nurse on the phone behind the counter.

“I don’t give half a rat’s ass about that, you hear me?… Uh-huh. That so? Well, you tell him he can …” She looked up—“Hold on”—and set the phone down. “What do
you
need?”

“We’re here to see Denny Carmichael,” Helen said.

“We?”
The woman squinted, then leaned over the counter to glance at Elias. “Family?”

Helen saw the visitors’ log and grabbed the pen. “Might as well be.” She scribbled her name and the time. “Denny’s still in 106, right?”

The woman dismissed her with wiggling fingers and resumed her conversation, the shirtless man still stammering for attention.

Helen knocked, then stepped inside the narrow, tile-floored room when nobody answered. Two loud televisions were blathering simultaneously on different channels, but a tiny bony man was asleep in the bed near the door. She watched Elias’s nose wrinkle at the barrage of odors—boiled vegetables, urine, bleach. The slumbering man looked too frail to have ever been a cop. She walked over to the curtain divider and called, “Mr. Carmichael?”

She waited, then peeked behind it and found an empty bed with rumpled sheets. A toilet flushed and the bathroom door swung open to a new stench as a gangly, white-haired man toddled out, panting,
shirtless and deflated, his skin sagging like a wrinkled sheet wherever there wasn’t enough bone to stretch it thin.

“Mr. Carmichael?” she said, her heart galloping.

He looked at her outstretched hand and slowly took it with his wet fingers. When she introduced Elias, he stared at him as if he hadn’t seen a child in years. “Shake Mr. Carmichael’s hand.” He stepped forward and stuck out his hand the way a trained dog lifts a paw.

“Airport’s fogged out, had to drive across,” she said, just to say something, and started to regret this goose chase with every cell in her body.

He clearly had no idea who she was or why she was there and looked too dazed to remember much of anything. Struggling to catch his breath, he gingerly tried to climb into bed, his right leg dangling off the side no matter how hard he strained. Finally, she gave him a hand, his calf muscle soft and loose as she hoisted it onto the mattress. He stared at her for a long moment, breathing heavily.

“Donald Yates says he’s been in touch with you about me visiting. I’m a reporter with the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
. This is my son, Elias.” When he did nothing but breathe, she explained that she was writing about the mayoral race and Roger Morgan. Still nothing. His eyes swiveled so he could study Elias without moving his head.

She described her lunch with Yates, “who assured me that you had some information and were willing to help.” Was this even Denny Carmichael, she wondered, then spotted a prescription vial on the bedside table. She leaned toward it, but the print was still too fine to read. “I’m sorry, sir, but I just drove four hours to see you. And I need to make sure I’m not wasting your time here. So with all due respect, my bossy editor wants to be sure you’re a reliable source of information. No offense, sir, but who’s the current president of the United States?”

His mouth sagged and his lips moved, but nothing came out until he said, in a grumbling monotone, “LBJ?” After holding the same bug-eyed expression for a few seconds, he broke into a bronchial laugh that sounded like he was strangling.

A whistling nurse waddled in, glancing at him and his visitors. “How we doin’, love?” She stepped into the bathroom, flushed the toilet again and waddled back out. “Let’s hook you back up, eh?” She fit some clear narrow tubing across his nostrils and over his ears and flipped a switch, and a small engine started humming. “Better? Daughter visitin’ you, Mr. Carmichael?”

“Hardly.”

She smiled. “Well, buzz when you need me, hon.” A slow-motion Victoria’s Secret commercial distracted her until some quiz show came back on and she left.

“So you think I’m senile,” he said, breathing almost normally now, his voice raspy but fluent. He snorted through his nose. “Wish like hell I
didn’t
know what was going on. So you wanna talk about Roger Morgan? That’s gotta be worth something to a big newspaper.”

Helen was speechless. He’d gone from zombie to extortionist far too quickly.

“At last, everybody finally wants to know about Roger Morgan,” he added. “Funny how that works.”

“Run for mayor,” Helen said patiently, “and people want to know everything about you.”

“Well, help me understand why I should talk to you instead of some other newspaper lady.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Carmichael,” she said as gently as possible, the two TVs behind her merging into one annoying blare. “We don’t pay for information.”

“That’s what y’all are supposed to say. You got a smoke?”

Her son walked up next to the bed and pointed at an old black-and-white of a boy about his age. “That’s you,” he said, his voice a small bell. “Isn’t it?”

He studied Elias. “Aren’t you observant?” he said, then turned to her. “When you got something that’s worth good money, you don’t just give it away. Least that’s how I was raised. You came a stretch to see me. If it’s that important to you, it’s gotta be worth something.”

Her patience was a punctured balloon. “I drove across the state because Mr. Yates assured me you’d be willing and ready to talk,
and that you’d have documents to back up whatever you said. If you can’t or won’t, or if you’re expecting to get paid, we won’t waste any more—”

“Your generation doesn’t bother with small talk, does it?” he interrupted. “Think I’ve got visitors rolling in here telling me about their vacations and bowling teams? Think there’s a whole lot of friends and family checking up on Uncle Denny?”

Helen glanced at the clock next to the bed and inhaled. “You’re lucky you’ve got air-conditioning,” she said slowly. “Still pushing ninety out there.”

He stared over her head at his television and what sounded like
Wheel of Fortune
.

“What’s your roommate like when he’s awake?” she asked. When he didn’t respond, she followed his eyes and saw Vanna cheerfully turning letters on the screen. “I’ve been researching the ’sixty-two fair,” she said. “Hard to imagine what that must’ve felt like. You were there, right? What do you remember about it?”

The sun dropped low enough to blast through the window and blind him. She stepped over and closed the filthy curtains, launching thousands of twirling dust motes into thin bars of light.

“Benny Goodman, eating crab at the Needle, all sorts of stuff,” he said. “And the girls.” Most of the teeth were missing in his jack-o’-lantern smile. “Gracie Hansen’s girls. ‘Paradise’ something or other. Went several times. They were seven feet tall and kicking their legs. And that Gracie had a real personality on her. She toured the science exhibits and told the newspapers, ‘It’s great, but science will never replace sex and cotton candy.’ ” He strangled on his laughter again, and his voice took a moment to clear. “Elias,” he finally said, “open this drawer here.”

The boy looked at his mother and then back at the old man, who was tapping the bedside table with a yellowed fingernail. “See if you can find a small gold key in there.”

After his mother nodded, he opened the drawer and felt blindly beneath papers, finding a paper clip, a penny, some toothpicks, an orange earplug.

“Closer to the front corner, son.”

Seconds later, Elias smiled triumphantly at the little key in his fingers.

“There you go. Now stick it in the little lock on the top left of that file cabinet there and turn it this way till the button pops out.”

The old man stared at Helen, puckered, then mimed smoking. She shook her head. He shut his eyes and waited until he heard the lock pop. “Now pull open the bottom drawer and bring me the envelopes with the blue rubber bands around them.”

Helen resisted helping as Eli widened his base, bent his knees, slid the drawer out and pawed delicately through the files before slowly removing a bound brick of weathered envelopes and carrying it like an altar boy to the bed. Carmichael thanked him, then started tugging feebly on bands. Helen again wanted to help, but didn’t dare risk distracting him. He finally removed one. Elias set the key on the bedside table and clasped his hands in front of him, awaiting his next assignment. The second band took longer, but finally a dozen brittle envelopes tumbled free into the old man’s lap.

“PARK HERE,”
Roger told Annie once he spotted the sanctimonious Prius with its
Eco-Warrior, Pollution Isn’t Pro-life
and
Nader for Prez
bumper stickers. He reached for his cane and stepped gingerly onto his bum ankle and out into the downpour. His aching hip accompanied his throbbing ankle as he groaned up the narrow flight of stone steps. With no bell in sight he rapped on the door. A light was on inside and he heard movement, though it was hard to be sure with the rain pounding maple leaves and asphalt shingles and gurgling in the gutters.

Agitated now, he whacked the door solidly with the cane handle three times, harder than he intended to, his breath ragged, his indignation snowballing. What had Yates ever done that wasn’t spiteful? Roger struck the door even harder. “Donald!” he shouted. “It’s me—Lucifer!” He glanced at the numbers above the entrance again, then noticed the touring bicycle suspended from the porch ceiling. Another facet of Donald Yates’s sanctimony—staying in impeccable shape in his mid-seventies while reducing his carbon footprint.

He grabbed the head of the cane with his left hand, slid his right palm down to its rubber stopper, then pivoted until his shoulders were perpendicular to the window. “Think you can ruin me, Donald?” he yelled. The backswing was brief, but his pronating wrist gave him all the snap and speed he needed and the old single pane broke almost gratefully, as did the next two, though it wasn’t clear which one triggered the piercing alarm.
Too doo! Too doo! Too doo!
He waited there, listening, amazed, suddenly unsure whether this was even the right house, feeling strangely exhilarated yet distanced, his body awash in adrenaline and whiskey, the cane warm in his palm.

Descending the steps was more painful, and his peripheral vision seemed to be shrinking, as if the scenery was about to go black, which made him worry about aneurysms and caused him to hurry. At street level, he saw Annie, her head bobbing behind the wheel, lost in some raucous music she played whenever she was alone in the car. He considered turning the cane on the Prius too, but his anger was already skidding toward embarrassment. He opened the passenger door and ducked inside with a mounting headache. Annie switched off the music and smiled sheepishly before noticing his expression and lowering the window to better hear the home alarm over the rain.

“All I wanted,” he mumbled, “was to yell at him.”

DENNY CARMICHAEL
examined the envelope closest to him, then looked up. “Now find my reading glasses, son.”

Elias scanned the room as if he’d get extra points for speed, then hustled around the bed to the windowsill, grabbed the glasses and handed them over. Carmichael put them on, carefully opened the first envelope, pulled out a creased sheet of trifolded stationery and peeled back the top, then grunted and leaned back, his glasses clearly no longer powerful enough. He slowly fit the paper back into the envelope and gently set it at the back of the stack before brooding over God knows what.

Helen told herself to wait quietly, that old people can’t be rushed. She feigned repose, excused herself to go to the bathroom, filled three
plastic cups with water and waited some more, dialing herself calm. “Can you tell us about that time period in Seattle?” she said, passing him a cup. “What was going on with the police and the gambling and all that?”

Carmichael pulled another envelope loose and went through the same routine.

“Tell us a story,” Elias said, so sincerely that Carmichael’s smile ruined the vertical creases in his cheeks.

He opened the next envelope, then began, “I was a policeman in Seattle, and a good one,” he told the boy. “Takes courage to be a good one, you know?”

“Shoot anybody?” Elias asked.

“Elias,”
Helen scolded.

“Yes,” Carmichael said, “but I missed.”

“He shoot first?”

“Elias, let Mr. Carmichael talk.”

Carmichael shook his head, the breathing tubes loosening around one ear, tightening around the other. “I didn’t really know Roger Morgan,” he said abruptly. “Met him during the fair like everybody else. Never had anything against him. Still don’t. I held on to all this just to keep my backside covered, for all the good that did me.” His snort turned into a red-faced wheeze. “But I owe a guy who helped me out, see, and he made me promise to pull this crap out if Morgan ever ran for something that mattered. To tell you the truth, though, I think I’m changing my mind.”

He opened another envelope, the ventilator humming away.

“See, most of us could barely afford houses. So we were always looking for ways to make a little extra. And it was already in place, see. You worked certain beats, you collected these bonuses. It helped, you know. Could be the difference between renting and buying, or maybe sending a kid to college or not. But then I got promoted to sergeant, and the bonuses kept coming.” He paused, sipped his water, spilling some on his hairless chest and scooting the envelopes farther from the damp spot. He looked at Elias. “Hard to turn down free money, isn’t it?” Elias nodded knowingly, and Carmichael winced at Helen. “Was coming in from everywhere, you know—card rooms,
pinballs, punchboards, pull tabs, cathouses. And I was good with numbers, so they had me make sure everybody got the right amount. The beat cop took the first cut, then the sarge in charge, then the assistant chiefs, the prosecutor’s office, then over to city council, see? Patrol paid directly to the mayor’s office, I believe. There were separate payoffs for burglary and narcotics too, as I remember. Vice screwed the pooch, if you ask me, because suddenly liquor and food inspectors and all these other jokers were getting a piece too. Then even people on the outside. A banker, a stockbroker, you name it. And by then it was like a secret Rotary Club or something—we called it the network—and it made sense to invest as a group, you know? So we started getting into all kinds of stuff—gold and silver, racehorses, real estate. We bought land out by Redmond, then someone hooked us up with Malcolm Turner—you’ve heard of him, right?—who at the time was this young world-beater juggling projects and needing capital.”