up, clearly frustrated.
By the time I picked up, I heard Slip say, "I'm sorry to bother you on
the weekend, but I need you to contact "
"Slip, it's Samantha."
"You mean I made the cut? I've earned some honors in my career, but
"
"Slip, it's eleven o'clock on a Friday night. Get to the point."
"I looked at the present you dropped on me this afternoon. Needless to
say, I want to check it out, the sooner the better."
"So check it out," I said, "and tell me if you find anything."
"That's why I'm calling so late. I want to track it down with the
banks tomorrow, but the bureau won't release the key to my investigator
without your OK."
"That's fine. Whom do I need to call?"
"I'm sorry about this, but they need a fax."
What a pain in the ass. I jotted down the fax number for the property
room and assured him I'd figure out something.
When I hung up, Chuck threw me a skeptical look. "Why do I have a
feeling that I don't want to know why a defense attorney's calling you
at home?"
"Because you probably don't."
"Most guys, their girlfriend gets a phone call from another man late at
night, it means one thing. If only I had it so good. Just promise me
you're not doing anything dangerous."
"Hardly, unless you consider clerical work dangerous." I tried to hide
my glee that he'd used the girlfriend word. Down the road, he'd need
to settle on more mature verbiage. For now, though, I reveled in the
general sentiment.
"Get back over here, then," he said.
"Sorry. I've got one more thing to do. I can either drive to Kinko's
or figure out how to send a fax on my computer."
"You have no idea how to use your computer, do you?"
"Sure. It's a giant typewriter with a button that puts me on the
Internet."
"I'll make a deal with you. I'll send your fax and you turn off
Matthews and get your ass in bed. And no sleeping."
It was a win-win situation.
OOl
Eleven.
I kicked Chuck out the next morning so I could get to work, but not
before convincing him to pull DMV photos of Larry Gunderson and Billy
Minkins for me.
At first he balked. "My lieutenant will be all over me about Saturday
OT on Jackson," he said, "unless, of course, I can tell him why it was
essential."
When that didn't get an explanation out of me about who Gunderson and
Minkins were and why I wanted their pictures, he finally relented. I
was ready to go by noon.
I'd get the pictures to Slip soon enough, but my first priority was the
downtown public library.
No doubt about it, the library crowd's an interesting one: Birkenstock
moms, amateur academics, and burnt-out hippie homeless people, all in
one quiet beautiful place.
I pulled the volumes I was looking for and searched for an empty table.
Finding a work spot was not an easy task, given my criteria: no
children, schizoids, or stinky people.
I finally dumped the books on a corner table, retrieved a county map
and the envelope from Jenna Markson from my briefcase, and settled in
for what I thought would be the first day in a full weekend of
research. As it turned out, the task at hand tracking down Gunderson's
stake in the urban growth boundary over the years was easier than I had
imagined.
First, I marked all of Gunderson's seven properties on the map. Without
exception, the properties would have been considered the boonies when I
was a kid, but they had been developed by the time I was out of
college. The next step was to figure out where the properties fell
along the growth boundary.
Fortunately, the library maintained a series of maps depicting the
original boundary line and all the changes made in the twenty-five
years since. The trend became obvious immediately. Six of Gunderson's
seven properties fell just inside the original boundary line. The land
would have been rural at the time, then made valuable by the sudden
restriction against future growth. The seventh was brought within the
urban area after the first boundary expansion.
Either Larry Gunderson was the luckiest landowner in Portland or I was
on to something.
I found a records librarian and asked her if she could pull the
legislative history for the Smart Growth Act, which had established the
original growth boundary in the summer of 1980. She looked at me like
I had to be kidding, then sighed heavily and walked away when she
realized I wasn't.
A good hour later, she reemerged with a handcart stacked with ragged
and dusty binders. "I can't tell you exactly where it is in here, but
each binder has an index by bill number. Do you need help finding the
number too?"
"No, I've got it. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it."
I gathered from her look of confusion that she rarely heard those
words.
The rest of the afternoon was spent wading through hundreds of pages of
legislative findings, debates, floor speeches, and other forms of word
combinations that hardly deserve to be called part of the English
language. Most of the talk was about whether to limit urban growth and
how. What captured my attention, however, were the pages detailing the
debates about where to draw the boundary line itself. I couldn't make
sense of it all, so I fell back on my handy dandy anti confusion
treatment, list-making.
Using a legal pad, I listed the various property areas in dispute, then
located each on my map. Four of the six Gunderson properties within
the eventual boundary had not been included for development under the
original proposal.
Next I turned to the legislators involved in the debates, noting their
names and where they stood on permitting development within each
disputed geographic area. For the most part, predictable
pro-development and pro-environment patterns emerged, with the act's
opponents favoring open development across the board while proponents
favored restrictions. But one legislator was clearly pushing the
expansions that favored Gunderson more than he was pushing others:
Representative Clifford Brigg.
I went back to the records librarian and asked for anything she could
give me on Brigg within six months of August 1980.
"Unfortunately," she said, "the articles from back then aren't
computerized, so you're going to have to do it by hand." She led me to
a table in another corner that contained the old microfilm machines,
pulled a couple of notebooks from a nearby shelf, and explained they
were the indexes of Oregonian articles from 1980 through 1981. If I