Forcing Amaryllis

by Louise Ure

  “Have you ever seen this gentleman before?” Merchant asked, gesturing for a man in the middle of the second row of the gallery to stand. The bartender shook his head.

  “Are you sure? What if I told you that he was in your bar last week and that he gave you a bad time because you only gave him change for a ten when he gave you a twenty?” Very sly, Mr. Merchant.

  Pollock jumped to her feet in objection. “Your honor. Is defense counsel testifying himself? If he wants to introduce this testimony, he can call the witness when he presents his case.” The judge agreed, and Merchant apologized to the court.

  “I have no more questions for this witness,” he said. This time “witness” became a four-letter word in his mouth. Merchant would never have to call the mystery customer to the stand. He’d already made his point with the jury. The waitress on the jury nudged the stuntman sitting next to her.

  Pollock moved on to the eyewitness testimony from the bar patrons that night. We had taken depositions from them, so I knew what they were going to say. They had picked Cates out of a lineup, they were sure he had been in the bar between eight and nine thirty, and they were sure that he was sitting with Lydia Chavez for part of that time. Gideon Merchant rose and began to hammer at the certainty of their identification.

  “Had you ever seen Ray Cates before that night, Ms. Wilcox?” he asked the pretty thirty-year-old who had identified Cates. She wore low-heeled pumps, a silk skirt and jacket, and a string of pearls, as if she expected Publishers Clearinghouse to drop by any minute.

  “No,” she replied with a shake of her head. “I’m certain of it.”

  “And yet I see here that you attended the Symphony Gala four years ago, where an evening with Tucson’s most eligible bachelors was put up for auction.” He held up a program the size of a paperback book and tilted his head like an owl that hears a sound in the woods. “Raymond Cates was one of those bachelors.”

  Her mouth flopped open, but no sound came out.

  Merchant bored in. “Didn’t you see someone in the bar that night who reminded you of Raymond Cates, a man you’d met at a charity function four years earlier?”

  The public relations specialist on the jury looked from Yvonne Wilcox to Cates and back again, then made a note on her lined yellow notepad. Score one for the defense.

  Merchant also created doubt with the next witness, Gary Gilbert, a construction worker who said that he had been sitting next to Cates at the bar during the early part of the evening. He said Cates had spilled a beer on him as he got up to move to a table.

  “How much did you have to drink that night, Mr. Gilbert?”

  “Just beer.”

  “Not what did you have to drink. I asked how much.”

  “Three or four.”

  Merchant consulted a notepad in his hand. “Are you sure it wasn’t five or six, Mr. Gilbert?”

  Gilbert looked down at his shoes. “Maybe.”

  “When did you tell the police that you could identify the man in the bar?” Merchant asked.

  “It was four or five days later. I just got back from a fishing trip,” Gilbert replied. His callused hands looked out of place attached to a body in a button-down shirt and tie.

  “And what made you realize that you knew him?” Merchant asked. He stood halfway between the defense table and the witness chair, so his voice boomed over the courtroom.

  “It was when I saw his picture in the paper,” Gilbert muttered.

  “What was that? You’ll have to speak up, young man.”

  “I said, when I saw his picture in the paper.”

  Merchant let that sink in for a moment. “I see. You had five or six beers. Then, five days later, you saw this man’s picture in the paper as a suspect in a murder case. Then you went to the police and said, ‘I sat next to this man in the bar.’ And then you picked the same man out of a lineup?” He sounded more incredulous with each question.

  “Yes.” Gilbert’s voice was smaller now. Once again the lackluster student without the answers.

  “What a surprise,” Merchant said with a barely concealed sneer before he turned back to the defense table.

  Pollock aligned the stack of papers on the table in front of her and rose. Her back was straight, and her voice was strong. “The State rests, Your Honor.”

  As much as Merchant must have hated to leave the State’s evidence at the forefront of the jury’s mind over the weekend, there was no time to begin with his first witness. Judge Gutierrez reminded the jurors not to read newspaper reports of the case or discuss the testimony over the weekend, and adjourned at four o’clock.

  I gave Miranda a hug and merged with the departing spectators. Merchant’s defense of Cates was going well. I didn’t think Cates would be spending many more weekends in jail.

  32

  After visiting Amy on Sunday, I met Giulia at her trailer for a late breakfast. I smelled the chorizo all the way from the car, and my mouth was watering by the time the screen door slapped shut behind me.

  “That smells great. Breakfast burritos?” I asked.

  “Remember how you used to love them when you were a kid?” She stirred the sausage in the pan and added the eggs. A pile of grated cheese on the cutting board waited its turn.

  We listened to a woodpecker try to tear the metal trailer apart as we chewed. “If evolution is the survival of the fittest, then that bird’s not going to be around long,” Giulia offered. “Not very bright.”

  I filled her in on the trial, on Merchant’s handling of the witnesses, and on the jurors’ reactions to the evidence. She listened but seemed to hear more than my words. When I paused, she said, “Calla, what are you doing in that courtroom? Your job doesn’t require you to attend the whole trial. What aren’t you telling me?”

  I took a sip of coffee. “I lost my job.”

  “Lost your job? Why, that good-for-nothing, lousy …” She gave Jessica several new honorary titles in her fury.

  “It’s not Jessica’s fault. She’s afraid the law firm is going to sue us for my meddling in Cates’s life outside my role as a trial consultant. I can’t blame her.” I explained about Giordano’s visit.

  Giulia snorted her disapproval, whether of Jessica, Giordano, or me, I wasn’t sure. “What are you going to do now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She picked up our plates and scraped them clean at the sink. Over her shoulder she said, “Can you remember what the flight attendants on airplanes say before takeoff?”

  “Have a nice trip?”

  “I’m serious. What are the instructions?”

  I didn’t know where she was headed, but I played along. “Well, they demonstrate how to put on a seat belt, for all of those air travelers who have never been in a car or on an amusement ride.”

  “Don’t be funny. What else?”

  “They say to obey all lighted signs and placards. Who talks that way, anyway?” I asked as an aside.

  “Never mind that. What else?”

  “They say an oxygen mask will drop from the ceiling in the case of sudden loss of pressure… .”

  “Go on.”

  What was this? I knew Giulia had something in mind, but this was like playing verbal charades. “They say to put your own mask on first before helping those around you.”

  “There. That’s it. That’s what I wanted you to remember.”

  “Put my own mask on before helping the person sitting next to me? I don’t think any of us needs oxygen, Giulia.”

  “But we do need help. And you won’t be able to help us until you help yourself.”

  I fought against the gloomy picture she was painting. “Giulia, I’m fine. I have a job … well, I’ll get another one. I’m healthy. I have friends. I have you.”

  “You’ve been looking out for everyone but yourself for the last seven years. How long has it been since you got laid?”

  “Giulia!”

  “You need to take your life back. That’s all I’m saying. Do something for yourself.
Be happy. You know I love you, but right now you’re just like Amy. It’s a life of suspended animation.” She had moved behind me and massaged my shoulders with long-practiced love.

  I changed the subject, and she let me, but Giulia’s words echoed in my ears. And La Llorona wailed.

  On Monday, Merchant started the defense presentation with what he probably thought was his strongest point, the alibi from Hector Salsipuedes. If even a few jurors believed him, it could swing the verdict Cates’s way. I couldn’t concentrate on Merchant’s words; I still heard Giulia’s verdict of “suspended animation” in my head.

  We hadn’t overly prepped Salsipuedes, in the hope that his answers would still seem genuine and not stilted, but nothing could overcome his bad case of nerves. He shook like a puppy in a thunderstorm.

  Merchant led him through the evening hours—what he’d done, when Cates had shown up, which car he had been driving, where they’d gone—then handed Salsipuedes over to the prosecution for cross-examination. Hector’s eyes tracked Pollock’s approach.

  First she hammered him on the time, since he didn’t wear a watch. Then she attacked his sobriety, questioning how many beers he’d already consumed before he saw Cates. He was bearing up well until she started asking about the new truck. We were right to try to prepare Salsipuedes for this line of questioning. Clearly, when the prosecution had learned about the truck, they, too, thought the gift was more than coincidental.

  “Isn’t it true that Raymond Cates’s father gave you that truck so that you would provide an alibi for his son?” she asked, her voice raised to stentorian levels.

  With each demur, she phrased the questions more aggressively: “Do you expect us to believe …” and “Why did you register the truck in your mother’s name? …” and “How are you—making less than seven thousand dollars a year—supposed to pay him back? …” and “Let me remind you that there’s a penalty for perjury, Mr. Salsipuedes.”

  Maybe he really was going to pay Cates back for the truck. Or maybe it was a thank-you for being a good employee and for standing up for his son, just like George Cates said. Merchant’s cross-examination had convinced me that the witnesses who identified Cates in the bar were mistaken, but I wasn’t sure that the jury would agree with me. Salsipuedes’s delivery made it look as if his testimony was bought and paid for. He hung his head as he left the stand.

  Merchant called Vicki Tenning, the witness he mentioned in his opening statement who would say Lydia Chavez was not sitting with Cates in the bar. I hadn’t heard her testimony before, but Merchant had described it as “a Tiffany-wrapped package for the defense.” She was an elementary-school teacher who lived in Lydia’s neighborhood. She said she was in the Blue Moon Bar that night and saw Chavez there.

  “I know Lydia,” she insisted. “We waved at each other when she came in. But the man she sat down with was not the defendant. That man was much darker and stockier.” Merchant got her to say that she thought Lydia was drinking heavily and seemed to be having a good time, touching the man on the arm and leaning into him.

  With this testimony and Hector’s alibi, the jury would surely have enough doubt to return a verdict of not guilty. Especially if they ever heard anything about the new murder.

  Pollock strode to the stand. She did not seem as convinced as I was. “How’s your vision, Ms. Tenning?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “I see on your license that you’re required to wear corrective lenses while driving,” Pollock continued.

  “I do have glasses, but I don’t really need them.”

  “You don’t have glasses on here today in court. Did you wear your glasses at the Blue Moon Bar that night?”

  “I don’t remember. Probably not. I don’t wear them much if I’m not driving.”

  Dee Dee asked a man at the back of the courtroom to stand. “Tell me what magazine he’s holding up, Ms. Tenning.” The TIME magazine logo looked as big as a pizza box to me, but Tenning couldn’t see it. “No more questions for this witness.”

  Merchant stood behind the defense table. “The defense calls Rowena Purcell.” I raised questioning eyebrows to Miranda, who shrugged her ignorance of the name. A stocky black woman with close-cropped hair and long earrings took the stand.

  “Please tell us what your job is, Ms. Purcell,” McCullough said.

  “I work in the communications department of the sheriff’s office. We handle the radio calls from officers in the field.”

  “And on the night of April first, did you take a call from Deputy Niles?”

  She looked chagrined. “Yes, I did. He requested the registration information on a car he was ticketing at Gates Pass.”

  “Did you have any difficulty with the license number he provided?” McCullough seemed almost kindly with his questions.

  “It’s kind of a joke in our group. Ernie—Deputy Niles—is dyslexic, and sometimes he gets the numbers mixed up.”

  “Did he mix up the numbers on that call?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say he mixed them up,” she said, looking over to Pollock at the prosecution table. “But we did have to go through the numbers three times before it came back registered to a Cadillac Escalade.”

  I looked for the jurors’ reaction. Several were shaking their heads as they jotted notes on the lined legal pads that they’d been given. Merchant had diminished the power of that parking ticket with one simple sentence: “We had to go through the numbers three times.”

  Merchant waited a beat for the information to sink in, then recalled the Pima County coroner to the stand. I guessed that he had been granted the right to bring in the new murder as exculpatory evidence.

  “I direct your attention to last Friday morning. Were you called to a crime scene in Madera Canyon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Please tell us what you found there.”

  The coroner was as straightforward and comfortable as he had been in his earlier testimony. I’ve often thought that the State’s forensic specialists, even though they are part of the prosecution team, are the most objective participants in a trial. They’re not testifying, the evidence is.

  He described the broken, mangled body of Bonnie DeGroot, positioned facedown in the picnic area with her feet spread like a starfish across the sand. He said her hands were tied in front of her and he described the rope and the knots. It sounded just like Deputy Thompson’s testimony about Lydia Chavez.

  “Did you find a bullet at the scene?” Merchant asked.

  “Yes, a .41 Magnum.”

  “And have you compared this bullet to the bullet used in the murder of Lydia Chavez?” This was it. The big question. The one that would let Raymond Cates go free.

  “Yes. Both bullets have five lands and grooves with a right twist and similar markings. I believe the same gun was used in both murders.”

  I exhaled a breath I didn’t know I was holding. Merchant stepped back to the defense table.

  “The defense rests, Your Honor.”

  The young woman from the public relations agency was in seat ten in the jury box and was one of the last to file out. She turned and looked squarely at Cates, eyes wide and unblinking. She wasn’t waiting for deliberations. She’d already made up her mind.

  33

  My nerves were as taut as high wires in a strong wind. I couldn’t wait anywhere near the courtroom, so Aunt Giulia, Selena, and I met for a picnic at Sabino Canyon. The day was egg-cooking hot, but black clouds were building on the horizon. We parked at the circular lot near the visitors’ information center and gathered our supplies. I looked over the big Plexiglas map that was posted on the patio. Bird Canyon, Rattlesnake Canyon, the wriggly dimensions of Sabino Canyon, and the remote Seven Falls area almost four miles farther away. The spiny mountain ridges between them were as well defined as a half-closed fan.

  We hiked in a half mile to the picnic tables next to the Sabino Creek. Ash, cottonwood, and willows provided the shade that the stately saguaros did not.

  When I w
as a girl, the Sabino Canyon Recreation Area had not been this developed and tamed. There had been scratchy dirt trails to the cooler glens and waterfalls, but no asphalt roads and motorized trams as there were today. Back then you could find privacy and peace in the sheltered canyons. Now, on just about any Sunday afternoon, you were likely to see old friends and make new ones on the crisscrossing trails that led to government-approved picnic areas. Seven Falls, unreachable by road, remained wilder and more primitive.

  “Watch out for snakes,” Giulia warned. Her bony, big-knuckled hands unwrapped foot-long sandwiches piled high with cold cuts, jalapeños, and iceberg lettuce. “They like the warm concrete here around the picnic area.” Selena set out the black-eyed-pea salad called Texas Caviar.

  Miranda had gone back to Phoenix, and I was glad. I would do everything I could to help her find the Sweet Thing rapist, but it wasn’t likely that it was Cates. We’d start with Red Blanken and then find out more about highway patrolmen who might have been in both Nogales and Tucson.

  “Tonio is waiting at the courthouse,” I said. “He’ll call us if the jury comes back in.” I gestured at Enrique’s loaner cell phone clipped to my belt. Giulia parceled out the sandwiches, but no one ate.

  “What if they find him guilty?” Selena asked.

  “They won’t. Not after finding Bonnie DeGroot’s body.”

  “But a not-guilty verdict wouldn’t necessarily mean that he didn’t attack Amy,” Giulia said.

  “In my mind it does,” I said. “I wouldn’t even have noticed him or thought about Amy’s rape if it wasn’t for this murder charge against him. I mean, why would I ever have picked him out from all the men in Southern Arizona with a damaged finger and a black truck?

  Giulia huffed at my response.

  “It’s like your crossword puzzles, Giulia. What’s a four-letter word for ‘press’? It could be ‘urge.’ But it could also be ‘iron.’ You have to fill in some of the other squares before you know. And even if you filled in the second space with the letter R, you still wouldn’t know which word it was. ‘Urge’ or ‘iron’? I’m reconciled to it now. I let a damaged finger and a black truck make me think I had the answer, but I didn’t. All I had was a four letter word and that R.”