Forcing Amaryllis

by Louise Ure

  24

  I pulled into the airport parking lot where Terry Blanken worked. The red, white, and blue pennants that hung over the office trailer made it look more like a used-car lot than a parking facility. The lot was only half full. I guess air travel really was down this year.

  A slim black man in a short-sleeved yellow uniform shirt came up to my car. “Are you parking, ma’am?”

  When did I cross that invisible line from being a Miss to being a Ma’am to strangers? “Yes.” I peered toward the back of the lot, looking for Blanken. My plan wouldn’t work unless I got close to him.

  “I’ll park it for you,” the young man said. “Our courtesy shuttle should be back for you in about five minutes.”

  I spotted Blanken getting out of a blue Thunderbird at the end of a row.

  “Oh, that’s okay. I’ll park it myself. I’ve got this thing about other people driving my car.” As if Giulia’s old Buick was the kind of car anybody else would even want to drive. I pulled away toward the far line of cars, and checked my rearview mirror to see the young man alerting Blanken to my craziness with a circling finger alongside his temple.

  Blanken watched my approach and indicated a space for me to pull into. I shut off the engine, twisted Amy’s turquoise flower ring to the inside of my hand, and hopped from the car. He didn’t seem to recognize me from that day at the police station, and that was fine with me.

  “Here, do you need the keys in case you have to move it?” I held the keys out but dropped them just inches away from his outstretched hand. We both bent down to get them, and I scraped across the back of his hand with the sharp-edged ring.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, it’s bleeding. Here, let me get you a Kleenex.”

  I took the courtesy shuttle to the airport but returned only twenty minutes later, saying my flight had been canceled. The ring was wrapped in a clean tissue and stowed in a tiny pocket in my purse. They didn’t even charge me for parking.

  The highway to Phoenix was almost empty, and I had an unobstructed view of the massive black-and-white billboard at Ruthrauff Road: “Pray for Tucson.” I thought more jobs, fewer golf courses, and more judicious water rationing would be better for the city than prayer.

  Semitrucks passed me with abandon until a Highway Patrol car, piloted by a tall, dark man with sunglasses, tucked in behind me. The trucks slowed down, and we all made a dignified procession north. I drove with the concentration of someone on a learner’s permit, trying not to give him an excuse to stop me.

  Just past the Casa Grande exit his lights and sirens bloomed behind me. I wasn’t speeding. Why was he pulling me over? The semis around us evaporated, happy not to have been selected.

  I pulled to the shoulder and searched the dashboard of Giulia’s car for the switch to the emergency flashers. I shut off the engine, unbuckled the seat belt, and opened the door.

  “Stay in the car,” his amplified voice boomed.

  I yanked both feet back in the car and shut the door. He made no move toward me, but it looked as if he was talking on the radio. Minutes passed. Now I was more mad than scared. I hadn’t done anything wrong.

  Suddenly he was beside me, and I hadn’t even heard his car door open or shut. He stood close to the driver’s-side window, his tall, wiry torso almost pressed to the glass. The rayed sun and copper star on his belt buckle were level with my eyes. I hoped that the identical belt I had in the paper bag on the seat beside me wasn’t visible.

  “License and registration, please.”

  I groped in my purse and the glove box for the information, rolled the window down two inches, and passed them through. Reflective, teardrop-shaped sunglasses covered his eyes—I couldn’t see much of his face.

  “What’s the problem, Officer? I wasn’t speeding, was I?” No reply.

  He jotted down the information from my license but didn’t hand me any kind of ticket or warning. A crackle of static and a garbled voice came through the radio mike attached to his shoulder. He clicked the mike and muttered a short answer I couldn’t hear, then tossed my ID through the cracked-open window. He touched his fingers to the brim of his hat, said “Ma’am,” and hurried back to his car.

  The siren wailed again, and tires squealed as he raced north on the freeway. My heart was still pounding, and my mouth was dry. I got out of the car and walked around it in an effort to clear my head. Was this just a random safety check or had someone heard I was trying to track down a highway patrolman with a penchant for rape and violence? If I wasn’t speeding, why had he stopped me?

  I bent over at the waist, put my hands on my knees, and took a deep breath. I saw Giulia’s license plate out of the corner of my eye. The tags had expired two months before. Of course. That was probably the reason he pulled my car over. Maybe there was no highway patrolman attacker at all. Maybe it was all in my mind. I shook my head, started the car again, and headed north toward Phoenix.

  It was almost sunset when Miranda returned home and found me slouched on the bottom step leading up to her condo. “You should have called,” she said. “I would have come home earlier.”

  “I only got here a minute ago.” I fanned my face with the crossword puzzle I’d been working on.

  “Come on in.” We ascended the steps together, and she unlatched the three dead bolts on the door.

  She had left the air conditioner running in her absence, and the rush of cool air gave me shivers after the heat outside. She directed me to a nubby white love seat and went to get cold drinks. I admired the art on the walls, mostly modern, representational work, all in hot, vibrant reds and yellows.

  When Miranda returned, I handed her the two belts I held coiled around my fist. “Could either of these be the belt your attacker wore?”

  Her eyes widened as if I had performed a feat of legerdemain. “Whose are they? Where did you get them?” She wouldn’t touch them.

  “Take a look at the buckles. Is it possible that one of them is the belt you remember?”

  Her hand crept toward the highway patrolman’s belt as if it were a sleeping snake. She uncurled it, held it behind her back, and moved both of her hands to cover the buckle. Her eyelids closed and flickered: a REM dream in broad daylight. She did the same with Cates’s belt. The tactile memory came back to her like a wave.

  “It could be either one of them, but this second belt seems to be more like I remember. Is it Cates’s?”

  I nodded. We could never use it to convict him. Miranda wasn’t sure enough, and there were probably a thousand buckles like that out there. I also didn’t know if Red Blanken had a sunburst belt as well.

  I wish Miranda had been able to rule out the highway patrolman’s belt. Now I’d still have to brace myself every time I spotted one of their officers, and I’d be stealing glances at their hands as they passed by.

  One way or another, I was getting closer to identifying that bogeyman under the bed. I wondered if my credit balance would stand up to one more round of DNA testing.

  25

  August twenty-first. It was the day I’d both dreaded and prayed for since I’d first seen Raymond Cates in the Pima County Jail more than two months ago. He was finally going to trial for the rape and murder of Lydia Chavez. Jury selection would take only a week or ten days. Then my forced association with Cates would be over.

  The courthouse was cool, a shocking change from the stultifying heat outside. My steps echoed as I made my way to courtroom three. The first batch of potential jurors milled in the hallway, some looking frustrated to be losing a day of work, and others peeking into the open courtrooms; their first look at the physical manifestation of the justice system. I missed the old, tile-domed courthouse with its arched, pink stucco walls and pillared walkways, but they only tried misdemeanors there now, and we were a long way from that sort of venial sin. We were in the new courthouse on Congress; a faceless multistory building with dark ribs and no heart.

  Until just this year Arizona juries weren’t involved in determining the sentence for capi
tal offenses. They simply sat in judgment of a defendant’s guilt or innocence, and then the judge determined whether the defendant would receive a death sentence, life without the possibility of parole, or life with parole. Of course, the jurors always had to be death-qualified anyway, to eliminate people who refused to vote for conviction because they believed the death penalty was wrong. Recently that death-qualification took on new meaning. The Supreme Court had found Arizona’s system unconstitutional, and now the jury had to select the sentence as well.

  This was the first time I would have to death-qualify a jury myself. All of my experience had been in civil trials, so Jessica, with heavy sighs and exasperated glances, helped me with the preparations.

  It seemed to me to be a system that was inherently disadvantageous to the defense. Not only did the questions get jurors thinking about the defendant’s guilt rather than his innocence but death-qualified jurors tended to favor the prosecution in the first place. I would have my work cut out for me if I hoped to find Cates an open-minded panel. But after discovering that belt and seeing Miranda’s visceral reaction to it, I wondered how hard I could really work to select a jury in his favor.

  If I had an answer on Blanken’s DNA from the scratch on his hand, or if Miranda had recognized the highway patrolman’s belt, I’d have a better idea of whether I should be encouraging Cates’s conviction or not. But when I told Giordano about the ring and Blanken’s skin sample, he sighed. “We don’t even have an open investigation into your sister’s attack, Calla. You can’t go around handpicking suspects and ask us to do DNA testing. That’s not how it works.” The frustration was clear in his voice.

  “Then I’ll do it myself.” Like the Little Red Hen from the children’s story. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the finances to back up my boast. The DNA lab had sent back the ring without testing it, telling me they couldn’t provide further services until they had been paid for the work they’d already done. The credit card company hadn’t processed their previous charges since I was already so far over my limit.

  I redirected my thoughts to Cates and the courtroom. We had sent out questionnaires two weeks ago and today would try to sort out the jurors.

  I wasn’t sure how I felt about the death penalty. In the abstract I knew that I could happily have asked for Amy’s attacker to be drawn and quartered, but in reality I thought it would be very hard to be one of those twelve people who sits in judgment and votes to put someone to death.

  I recognized Dee Dee Pollock at the prosecution table. With seventeen years’ experience, she had tried more capital offenses than anyone else in the county attorney’s office. She glanced at her watch and peered at her notes through Ben Franklin reading glasses. I wished that we had used a female to simulate her trial presence during our mock sessions, but we didn’t have a woman available whose delivery and instincts were as good as Pollock’s. Hopefully, Merchant’s performance playing her role had given us a perspective on jurors’ reactions to her probable strategy. We didn’t have any information on how jurors would respond to Dee Dee herself, but I’d never heard of her losing a jury’s trust and confidence.

  Merchant and McCullough were already seated at the defense table, with Cates sitting between them. I was glad that the chair left for me wasn’t beside Cates. I couldn’t have handled the proximity without recoiling, and I knew the jury would see it. Cates looked composed, almost smiling every time he turned to see who had entered the room. He ran his fingers through the long shock of hair tipping down his forehead.

  A door opened behind the judge’s bench and Judge Robert Gutierrez walked in, followed by a burly, splayfooted bailiff. Gutierrez was small, almost dwarfed by the flowing black robes, but his penetrating gaze belied the childlike image. He never lost control of a courtroom.

  It was time for the death-penalty questions. Only those citizens who passed through this screening and were found to be death-qualified would remain in the general jury pool for Cates’s trial.

  Gutierrez introduced the topic. “Ladies and gentlemen, this trial is going to be in two parts. The first part is the one you’re probably most familiar with from television shows, and that’s where you hear all the evidence and decide if Mr. Cates is innocent or guilty.” Nods all around. A couple of jurors looked at Cates with curiosity.

  “The second part of the trial would happen if you found Mr. Cates guilty, and that’s the sentencing phase. Now, of course, the defense doesn’t think we’re even going to get to part two. They believe you’re going to find him not guilty. But, in case you don’t, we have to talk about sentencing. Do you understand?” The jurors all nodded. All I understood was that he’d just wiped out Cates’s presumption of innocence.

  “In that second phase,” Gutierrez continued, “you would have three options. A sentence of death, life without the possibility of parole, or life with the possibility of parole. Do you understand these three options?” Nods again, but this time more hesitant.

  “So the question is, do you think you could remain open-minded during the sentencing phase, listen to all the evidence, and then realistically consider all three options if you thought it was appropriate?”

  A middle-aged woman in the front row raised her hand. “I don’t think I could vote for the death penalty,” she said. “It’s not right to take a life. Any life.”

  Gutierrez nodded, then asked if anyone else had second thoughts about being able to consider all three sentencing options. A man at the end of the first row raised his hand.

  “My name is Randall Manga. I’m in favor of the death penalty. It makes sure they won’t do it again, and it costs too much to keep a man in prison.”

  “I see,” the judge said. “But if I told you to listen to all the evidence in part two of the trial and be open to considering all the sentencing options, do you think you could do that?”

  “Yeah, I guess.” In a pig’s eye. I had seen his answers in the jury questionnaire.

  When it was his turn, Merchant tried to keep the woman who didn’t believe in the death penalty. I agreed with him. She was a perfect defense juror. “Despite your views on the death penalty, could you follow the law and vote to convict if you found that the defendant was responsible for the death of Lydia Chavez?” he asked.

  The woman didn’t help him. “Not if it meant that he might be put to death. I couldn’t do it.”

  Merchant recognized the futility of further questioning and moved on to the other juror. His back was to me, and he spoke softly to the judge, but I could hear him clearly from my seat.

  “I’d like to strike Mr. Manga in seat six. Although he claims he’d be open-minded, it’s clear to me that his original answer is how the man truly feels. In addition, if you’ll note his written response to this question about lawyers. Quote: ‘All defense lawyers use tricks to get their clients off.’”

  I checked off one note on my own sheet of lined paper. That was the sentence I had highlighted for Merchant when we were reviewing the forms. It’s still a surprise to me how candid some people are when filling out jury questionnaires.

  I didn’t think their voices reached the jury box, but Pollock’s whispered reply was even louder than Merchant’s voice had been. “Your Honor, it’s perfectly acceptable for a juror to change his mind during questioning. I think Mr. Manga’s responses show a person who is open-minded to the death penalty but who would listen to the judge’s instructions.” I didn’t think so.

  “Thank you. That’s enough,” said Gutierrez. “Jurors number two and six, you’re excused.”

  It took almost a week to get enough candidates to begin the final selection of Raymond Cates’s jury, and each day I sat with perfect posture and polite attitude only two seats down from a man who might have tried to kill my sister. Outwardly, I presented a hard, professional shell, poring over jury forms, revising voir dire questions, and reviewing trial exhibits. Inside, I raged like a desert sandstorm. I needed evidence.

  At the end of the day Friday I hefted my briefcase to
my shoulder and said good-bye to McCullough. His disposition was still sunny. “That went well, don’t you think?” he asked. I didn’t tell him how concerned I was by all the gung-ho, hang-’em-high death penalty advocates we’d heard in the last week.

  I stopped at the supermarket on the way home and picked up milk and bread. It was still light when I pulled into the driveway. I turned the key in the lock and pushed the front door open with my hip.

  I stopped. Something was wrong, different. I set down the paper bag of groceries and tilted my overstuffed briefcase against the porch wall. I couldn’t see much from here, but the living room was brighter than it should have been, and a breeze drifted from the back of the house, belying a locked and closed room.

  I hotfooted it back to the car, locked myself in, and picked up the cell phone Enrique had loaned me after I lost mine to the swirling waters of the underpass. “I think my house has been broken into,” I told the 911 operator. “He may still be in there.”

  They arrived in less than ten minutes. “He could have gone over the back fence,” I told them, “but I haven’t seen any activity in the side yard and no one has come out the front door.” I’d left my phone on and my thumb poised over the send button while I waited.

  A female officer took up a position by the front door while her partner went in. He didn’t take long; it was only a couple of minutes before he came out holstering his gun. “I can’t tell if you’ve had a break-in or just left your door unlocked.” He ushered me into the house and showed me the open sliding glass door to the backyard.

  “No. Never. I always close it, and I use this dowel for security.” I pointed at the broom-length stick I always dropped into the track on the sliding door. It was propped up in the corner right where I leave it when it’s not in use. Had I really forgotten to secure the door?

  “Take a look around,” the officer said. “See if anything’s missing.” I kept my hands at my sides and glanced into each room. It was still tidy—well, my version of tidy. Nothing big was missing, but who’d want my television, anyway? It was so old it didn’t even have a remote control.