Forcing Amaryllis

by Louise Ure

  “You obviously got a good look at the man. Can you tell me what he looked like? What he wore?”

  “Most of my impression of him is from when we were in the car, and he had a cowboy hat on, so I’m not sure how tall he was. But he was slim, in his thirties. I think he had light-colored hair and eyes, but you couldn’t see much underneath that hat.” She sniffled a couple of times, but the boxing-weight-lifting-martial-arts Miranda was coming back now.

  “You mentioned the belt buckle. Do you know if it had the rays of a sun on it?”

  She drew her hands behind her, the muscle memory of her fingers retracing the shape of the belt and buckle that had held her tight.

  “It could have.”

  “What about his hands? Did you notice anything unusual about his hands or fingers?”

  She closed her eyes to travel back to that time and place. “Nothing specific. He did wear a sharp-sided ring on his right hand, but I don’t know which finger. When he punched me, it left a corner-shaped cut under my eye.” She pointed to her face.

  I looked more closely. There was a light, right-angled scar near her cheekbone. I took a final sip of water, screwed the plastic cap back on, and looked around for a trash can.

  “There was something else,” she said. “He called me Sweet Thing.”

  My heart thudded in my throat.

  14

  Someone had called Miranda Lang “Sweet Thing” and raped her with a cactus. Someone had also called Amaryllis “Sweet Thing” and raped her with a knife. I knew now that we had two victims of the same man. But I didn’t know who that man was.

  And what about this ring? Cates didn’t have a ring on his right hand, but of course, he wasn’t allowed jewelry in jail. Anyway, it would have been difficult to get a ring sized properly to fit over the bulbous, mashed end of his ring finger, and then not be too big to fit the finger itself. Maybe the Sweet Thing rapist wasn’t Cates at all.

  At the last moment I decided not to show Miranda the photo array that Selena and I had put together. Her description of the man could have been Cates, and she might have been able to identify him right away. But the legal researcher in me balked. Miranda might be able to file charges against him, and I didn’t want any jury to think she’d been prejudiced by this informal, pre-lineup photo.

  I was also afraid of the Letter of Confidentiality I’d signed. It was a sure bet that finding someone else to testify against Cates would be considered a breach of that agreement.

  When Miranda saw my reaction to the words “Sweet Thing,” she grabbed my wrist. “You know who he is, don’t you? It’s the same man who attacked your sister. Who is he? You have to tell me.”

  “I don’t know anything.” I stood and prepared to leave.

  Now that it was possible that Miranda could take a measure of revenge on her rapist, she wasn’t about to let go. “Think about what he did to me,” she said. “Give me his name. No one has to know it came from you.”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t do it. I still believed in the justice system. I believed that accusations should come from evidence. That you’re innocent until proven guilty. I couldn’t serve up Raymond Cates as the Animal until I had proof. And right now I had none.

  I settled for a middle ground. “Did you work with the Tucson Police Department or the Pima County Sheriff’s Office when this happened?”

  “Both. But my primary contact was Detective Giordano at the police department,” she said. “The attack was outside the city limits at Gates Pass, but they called it a kidnapping and that happened inside the city limits, so the Tucson PD took the lead.”

  “I’ll tell you what. Go back to the police department. It’s been over a year since your attack, and they’re probably not pursuing it actively anymore. Remind them about it. Ask them if there have been any occurrences since you last spoke to them that might resemble your attack.”

  “But you said your sister was attacked seven years ago.”

  “Just ask them.”

  That left my conscience clear. Miranda would not have been following the Cates trial, since it was a hundred and twenty miles away. And for some reason the police department and the sheriff’s office hadn’t linked the two crimes. I would think that Gates Pass and the violent thrust of a weapon inside the women would be quite enough to tie the attacks together. Maybe they’d already looked into it and Cates had an alibi for the night of Miranda’s attack. Maybe they had no reason to look at him before at all and it was just his proximity to Lydia Chavez in the bar that made him look guilty.

  At least this way Miranda could move ahead, and I wouldn’t be fired.

  So much for looking under the bed. All I had managed to do was prove that the bogeyman was still there.

  On Monday, Jessica’s hard stare and tapping foot reminded me that I had clients other than Raymond Cates. The Rondo case was going to trial, and we had to begin jury selection next week. In the meantime, I also had work to do for Azchemco, the chemical company that had lost its polluted groundwater suit. We had worked with Azchemco from the very beginning, conducting focus groups, preparing trial graphics, planning strategies. They weren’t pleased when they lost that first lawsuit.

  I started the phone interviews with the jury foreman from the Azchemco trial. Was there early agreement in their discussions, or had there been great debate to reach a verdict? What was the most pivotal piece of evidence in his mind?

  “Well, I can’t remember specific pieces of evidence, but I can give you a pretty good idea about our thought process,” he said. He proceeded to give me a thorough summary of the plaintiff’s case against Azchemco.

  “What about the defense case from the chemical company?” I asked.

  “We had a hard time sifting through all the data and all their charts.” Damn. I was afraid that was going to be the answer.

  Three more phone calls confirmed my suspicions: Azchemco’s lawyers had been so in love with all the scientific data from the chemical company that they hadn’t concentrated on the most important points of their argument and had instead left a scattered and ineffective impression with the jury. TMI, as my computer-savvy friends would say—too much information.

  Juries do the best they can. And they usually get it right. Sometimes they can find their way through a rambling presentation or shoddy trial graphics. Sometimes they can even ignore the words of the law to reach the heart of the law. But this wasn’t one of those cases.

  I had seen Azchemco’s data. It was impossible that their spill caused all the problems cited in the lawsuit.

  “Remember, you’re talking to a bright twelve-year-old,” Jessica always counseled our clients when she described jury dynamics. They didn’t always listen.

  She had pleaded with them for simplicity, but they felt the overwhelming amount of scientific evidence would work to their advantage. It didn’t.

  I summarized my conclusions in a report for Azchemco. This was not the kind of news that Jessica liked to give a client. We should have fought harder to keep the message simple. But at least we knew how to improve their odds at the next trial.

  Anthony Strike was waiting at the curb when I arrived home that night. He looked good in jeans. There were lighter colors on the denim creases where the pants met his hips, as if they’d been bleached by countless hours riding horseback in the sun. I lifted the bag of groceries from the cargo area to my right hip and balanced it there while I dug for my keys.

  “Thought you could use a pick-me-up,” he said, bringing a bouquet of wilted white daisies from behind his back.

  He was six or seven inches taller than I, and my nose was even with the pearl snaps on his shirt. I breathed in the sweet, musty smell of sagebrush.

  “Oh, you’re right about that, Mr. Strike. I’m thinking that just about anything else would be a better career option right now.”

  “Call me Tony, please, or Tonio. Mr. Strike sounds too old.” He held the screen door open as I worked the key into the dead bolt on the front door.


  “Tonio? That sounds too soft for you.” I rummaged through a cupboard for a vase.

  “Ah, that’s because you don’t know me well enough yet.”

  Without asking his preference, I mixed lemonade and iced tea in a big pitcher and added the remaining sprigs of mint from my evening with Selena. I took the tray outside to the patio.

  “Have you given any more thought to the fact that Amy didn’t check into the No-Tell Motel?” he asked.

  I hadn’t been able to think about much of anything else. “It’s not that she didn’t check in,” I said. “It’s that she didn’t check in alone. So either she went to the motel with someone or someone attacked her and forced her there.”

  I poured more tea over the melting ice in my glass. “Amy would have told me if she’d been forced into that motel room.” I left the other half of the option—the possibility that she’d gone willingly—unsaid.

  He stared at a spot someplace between the rosebush and the mulberry tree by the back fence. “You know half of all rapes are date rapes?”

  I looked down at my lap and shook my head, both in answer to his question and in disbelief. “Fifty percent?”

  He nodded, still focused on that patch of crabgrass in the middle of the yard. “It doesn’t mean that Amaryllis did anything wrong. She just met up with someone who did.”

  I brushed a tear from my eye. Stop it, Calla. This is nothing to cry about. This is nothing worse than what you already thought happened to her. It doesn’t change the rending, the tearing, the horror that occurred. If you’re going to feel bad about something, feel bad that Amy didn’t have enough faith in you to tell you she was attacked by someone she knew. Who might she have met? Who became a rapist instead of a date?

  Strike lounged against the kitchen wall while I cooked. First he told me about his progress on Cates’s current case.

  “McCullough has got me jumping through hoops. He’s looking for ammunition against Lydia Chavez. Wants to make it look like she brought this on herself, and deflect the attention from Cates.”

  “He’s thinking about those comments we heard in the focus groups. ‘She got what she deserved, She shouldn’t have left her child alone.’ I know McCullough’s only doing his job, but I hate this part of it—blaming the victim.” I opened a package of corn tortillas and pulled tomatoes, lettuce, and leftover rice out of the refrigerator. “Did you ask McCullough what George Cates said about giving Salsipuedes the truck?”

  “Oh, he said it was more like a loan than a gift. Said Salsipuedes has been a good employee for years and was going to pay him back over time. He didn’t know why Salsipuedes had registered the truck in his mother’s name.”

  “Yeah, right, pay him back over the next forty years or so, based on his current salary.”

  Strike smiled. “Yeah, wish I could find a banker like that. There’s no way the prosecution can refute the story of a loan, but if they ask him about it on the stand, it’ll probably look fishy to the jurors.”

  I agreed with him. “What else did McCullough have you doing today?” I abandoned the dinner preparations and took the stool next to him.

  “I wanted to get to know Lydia Chavez better. See if we could come up with other suspects for her murder. Her next door neighbor, Sandy Lyle, seems to have known her best.”

  “What did she say?” I refilled the lemonade/tea mix in our glasses.

  “Nothing bad about Lydia, that’s for sure. They used to babysit for each other’s kids on a regular basis, and she found a note from Lydia on her front porch the next day, saying she was going to meet a potential new boss at the bar.”

  “Chavez just left a note and left her baby alone?”

  “I guess she thought her neighbor was going to be home within a couple of minutes, and she was, but the note got blown off the door. She didn’t find it until the next morning. She heard the baby crying about ten o’clock that night and went over. That’s when she started getting worried about Lydia.”

  I imagined the lonely wails from the Chavez baby coming from the house. What had happened to that little boy now that his mother was gone?

  “But nobody really said anything bad about her, huh?”

  “Not the neighbors, not her ex-boyfriend.”

  I had seen a picture of the ex-boyfriend, Bobby Minor, a small-time ex-con who now worked in an auto-body shop on Grant Road. Strike had told me that Minor had been picked up on a DUI charge the evening that Lydia died. It was probably the luckiest arrest of his life: sitting in a drunk tank is a great alibi when your ex-girlfriend gets killed.

  “What did the boyfriend have to say?”

  “Oh, he’s a piece of work. Claims that Lydia used to be a party girl but just wasn’t any fun after she had the baby. I think his words were, ‘She really changed. She really got old.’ Imagine that. After twenty hours of breast-feeding and changing diapers she doesn’t want to go clubbing with him.” Strike shook his head at the foolishness.

  Bobby Minor sounded too young and too selfish to be a father. “I’ll bet he had lots of excuses for why he should fund his own drinking habits and dance club evenings before he paid any child support, too.”

  Strike nodded. “But get this. Right at the end he says, ‘When they get this bastard, I’m gonna sue for emotional distress. He killed the mother of my child.’”

  I shook my head. I could dismiss Minor’s rantings as those of a selfish young punk, but he’d probably win the case.

  I warmed up refried beans along with the rice, stacked the tostadas, and turned our conversation to the investigation of Amy’s attack. I told Strike about the grid I’d worked out for the other rapes.

  “Enrique’s not going to be happy about you going to see these women.”

  “I know, but I think he’ll understand.” I remembered Enrique’s own ability to bend the rules when his baby sister was involved.

  “I’ve got two ‘maybes’ out of this group,” I said. “Christie Parstac, the student nurse, and Miranda Lang at the Mariachi Festival. They don’t have much in common, but they were both raped by an object—a bottle or a cactus branch.” I shuddered, remembering Miranda Lang’s interminable night of pain.

  “And in both cases they were attacked by someone they’d just met. Someone who picked them up.” Maybe three cases, if I added Amy to the list.

  I put a bottle of Tabasco on the table along with the salads and gave him the rest of the details from the investigation Selena and I had been doing.

  After a first big bite Strike grunted his thanks and spoke around the food in his mouth. “It sounds like there are a couple of things I can follow up on for you. I can track down Christie Parstac’s friends from the bar and see if they remember the man who picked her up. And I can try to find Sharon Hamishfender. Her case may not be as relevant, but I think it’s interesting that she’s from Patagonia, like Cates is.”

  “I appreciate the offer, but I’ll follow up on those leads. It might be difficult to explain how an investigator got their names, and I don’t want to get Enrique in trouble.” He nodded and continued eating as I spoke. “And maybe they’ll be more willing to talk to a woman.”

  If these witnesses were going to be scared off by rampant virility, this guy could do it. He radiated masculinity like a steroid stove. But somehow it conveyed warmth and confidence rather than the fire of his sexuality. Hmmm.

  “You know, I appreciate everything you’re doing.” I cleared the plates and tried to rid my mind of the image of Strike bare-chested.

  “You mean you actually trust me to do my job without you tagging along?”

  “We’ll see.” I smiled back at his grinning face.

  “Oh, speaking of doing my job without you, I forgot to tell you about the Blue Moon.”

  “The bar where Cates and Chavez supposedly met that night?”

  He nodded and swirled the melting ice in his glass. “The bartender says it was really busy that night. He didn’t recognize the picture of Lydia Chavez but says he remembers Cates. Says
he was acting like a big shot, buying lots of drinks and then accusing the guy of shortchanging him.”

  “If it was Cates, it sounds like he made a pest of himself. But it doesn’t confirm that he was sitting with Chavez that night, does it?”

  “No, but it gets worse. The bartender is a big basketball fan, and the NCAA finals were on TV. Cates was making a scene about getting his bill, right when the guy wanted to watch the game.”

  “So?”

  “The guy can peg the time right down to the minute. Eight minutes to go on the clock. Maryland had just pulled ahead of Indiana. I checked. That happened at nine thirty-five. It means that Cates was in Tucson at nine thirty and not near Patagonia like Salsipuedes says.”

  My dinner dropped in my stomach like a stone. “So Salsipuedes is lying?”

  “Not necessarily. Maybe we can prove that it wasn’t Cates, that the bartender misidentified him. I’m going back over his credit card receipts from that night to find other witnesses—see what they remember.”

  We knew that Chavez had arrived at the bar at eight o’clock to meet the mysterious new boss. Did he ever show, or did she wait impatiently for an hour and a half? Who had she been sitting with if it wasn’t Cates?

  When I walked Strike out, he hesitated in the doorway, one arm braced on the doorjamb. He reached back with the other hand to cup me at the waist.

  “Thank you for dinner,” he said. “And for keeping an open mind on my trustworthiness.”

  His kiss was slow and gentle. I’d finally found something soft enough about him to merit the nickname Tonio.

  15

  I didn’t hear back from Strike on Tuesday, but when I got home, a small white card was tucked into the front door, right next to the knob. I half hoped it was a note from him, maybe checking to see if he could come by that night, and I practically skipped up the front walk to retrieve it.

  It wasn’t. It was a business card from a Detective Giordano, with the Tucson Police Department. His handwritten note on the back gave a cell phone number and asked me to call. My guess was that Miranda Lang had contacted the Tucson PD immediately after my departure, and now they wanted to know where I fit into all of this. I turned on the swamp-box cooler and decided on a shower before I called him back.