Forcing Amaryllis

by Louise Ure

  We stared at the food and the two big blowflies that hovered at eye level. A rain-heavy cloud passed overhead, leaving us in shivery shadow.

  I checked out the want ads on Thursday morning. Lots of opportunities for pipe fitters and hotel maintenance staff. Nothing for a near-middle-age researcher with a love of Mexican music and crossword puzzles. Where was that perfect job—the one that said “magnificent salary, no special skills, and no heavy lifting”?

  The call came in after lunch.

  “They’ve just alerted the attorneys. The jury is coming back,” Strike said. I couldn’t tell if this was good news or bad. They had been deliberating for less than two days. I exchanged my T-shirt and shorts for more businesslike attire and left for the courthouse.

  I found a parking place in a lot only two blocks from the courthouse and hurried up the south steps and into courtroom three. The chair next to me was empty, as if the other spectators had allowed me a cocoon of privacy. When the jury filed into the room, the stuntman and PR specialist stared at Cates. The librarian looked away. I realized I was grinding my teeth.

  “Has the jury reached a verdict?” Gutierrez asked.

  “We have, Your Honor.” It was the public relations rep in seat ten. The verdict slip made the rounds from her hands to the bailiff, the judge, then to the clerk, who read the words.

  “We the jury, duly impaneled and sworn upon our oaths, do find the defendant, Raymond Cates, not guilty of sexual assault and not guilty of murder in the first degree.”

  34

  Tonio and I marked the end of the trial with a bottle of Two-Buck Chuck at the little wishing shrine, El Tiradito. The shrine, an L-shaped, adobe-walled alcove off Main Avenue, was close to the courthouse and seemed an appropriate place to celebrate the end of my association with criminal litigation. Sprays of plastic flowers and votive candles in tiny glass jars were wired to the stucco walls of the building. Tattered notes of thanks and prayer were tucked into the cracks.

  Nobody knows how or why the wishing shrine was created, but legend has it that a handsome young Mexican man was found stabbed to death on that spot decades ago, his shiny silver pistol still tucked into the waistband of his pants. His body was never claimed by family or friends, so the neighbors, regretting that he had died alone and unloved, began to bring candles and flowers in remembrance. He was El Tiradito, “the Lost One,” “the Castaway.”

  “Look at this one.” I squatted next to the makeshift altar and smoothed a frayed yellow note that had been left at the wall. “‘Thank you, God, for my remaining testicle.’ Must be a cancer survivor. And this one: ‘Please send Jaime home to us.’ Well, this is certainly the place to pray for lost things.”

  My own faith was no longer as strong as that of the note writers. The left-right punch of losing my parents and Amy’s rape had taken away any vestige of belief in a kindly, protective Creator or the power of prayer. I thought of myself these days as a Roaming Catholic. Still willing to go to the magic show but watching for the sleight of hand all the same.

  Tonio sat on the sidewalk with his legs stretched out in front of him and his back braced against the stucco wall.

  “How’re you feeling, Calla?”

  I shook my head. “Confused. I really got caught up in this. I spent three months believing Cates killed Lydia Chavez and trying to prove he attacked Amy, when he shouldn’t even have been a suspect in either case. I can’t trust my own instincts anymore.” I stood and stretched my back, loosening the kinks.

  Strike skipped a piece of gravel off the sidewalk. “I told you early on that I didn’t think Ray attacked Amy, but I admit that I thought they had the right man for the Chavez murder. You can’t blame yourself for bad instincts. Mine were bad, too.”

  “Here’s to justice.” I raised the bottle of wine to my lips in a toast.

  I looked back over my shoulder at Strike. “Tonio, I never would have known this much about Amy’s attack except for you. The motel clerk. The probability that she knew her attacker. That it might have been a date rape. I’ve learned some things I didn’t want to know.

  “And I learned a lot about myself. I knew that what happened to Amy had rocked me, but I didn’t realize how much. I think I need to give myself the same advice I gave Miranda. ‘Go talk to a professional about this.’”

  “Whatever you need”—he rose to his feet—“I’ll still be here.”

  He folded me in his arms, and I breathed in the smell of sagebrush and safety.

  I had overheard the interviews with the jury foreperson on the courthouse steps after the verdict had been announced. She looked as comfortable as if she was giving a press conference for one of her firm’s corporate clients.

  “There were several of us who understood right away that this was a case of mistaken identity,” she had explained. “Especially after we heard about this latest murder. And that parking ticket was just an error. The license plate number the deputy wrote down must have belonged to another car.”

  I should have given her more credit for being able to see through the coincidences and mistakes in the evidence. Even during the interviews I saw the glances she was giving Cates, the small smile of complicity she offered when asked if she had ever mistaken a person for someone else. She had the strength of personality to convince others if she knew she was right, but she hadn’t had to do it. The rest of the group understood as well.

  The librarian was probably a holdout at first. A mouth held as rigid as the spine of a book. A tabbed and color-coded mind that would have believed the evidence never lied. I’ll bet she was the reason the jury took two days in their deliberations.

  “Want to come over tonight?” I asked. Tonio nodded and grinned. When I reached down to grab his hand, I saw a flash of white shirt from the corner of my eye.

  There, on the corner of Main and Cushing, Terrence “Red” Blanken leaned against a lamppost and cleaned his nails with a long-bladed knife.

  I looked away before he saw the recognition in my eyes. “Tonio, there in the white shirt. It’s Blanken.”

  Strike spun around. “Where?”

  “There. By the lamppost.” I kept my head down.

  “There’s nobody there, Calla.”

  I looked left and right. “Where is he? He was standing right there!” I pointed at a businessman walking past. He looked alarmed at my raised voice and pointing gesture.

  We ran back to the corner and checked both directions. No white shirt. No knife. Great. First the highway patrolman in the courtroom and now Blanken. It wasn’t just my instincts that couldn’t be trusted, it was my sanity.

  “Let’s give Giordano a call anyway,” Strike said, taking the cell phone out of his pocket. “Maybe he ducked into an alley. The police need to know he might be around here.”

  We stopped to buy a bottle of champagne on the way back to the house, and Tonio decided to forsake the errands he was going to run to stay with me. I wondered if he thought that seeing Blanken was all in my imagination. I wondered the same thing. Maybe I’d just substituted one bogeyman for another. He made sure the house was empty and all the doors locked as I’d left them before he let me in.

  He took the sports section out to the patio, and I straightened the room and plumped pillows so the house would be fit for company.

  I had some duck in the freezer that Enrique had passed along from a weekend hunt. I ticked through the other ingredients I’d need: brown sugar, garlic, cayenne, ancho chile powder. Extra jalapeños. I’d be eating beans and rice for a month after this meal, but it would be worth it.

  I started mixing the sauce; the duck would need to braise for almost three hours, and at this rate we wouldn’t be eating until late. With the pan bubbling in the oven, I redirected my attention to the house, stacking and storing the information from all the rape interviews and wiping the counters in the bathroom and kitchen. I felt like a schoolgirl on a first date.

  Strike had helped me with the investigation of Amy’s rape and helped me understand her l
ies. Well, not lies really, just the half-truths of self-preservation. Maybe he could help me through this next phase, too. The one where I tried to get back my faith in mankind and tried to put the past behind me. I had promised Amy I would find the man who did this to her, but what good would it do now? It wouldn’t bring my sister back to me.

  “Tonio? I’m going to take a quick bath. Help yourself to something to drink if you want.”

  I luxuriated in the sweet-smelling suds and tried to put all thoughts of patrolmen, Blanken, rapes, and murders out of my head. I had just wrapped myself in the seersucker robe when the doorbell rang. I yanked the bathroom door open and raced through the living room. Wet mist billowed out around me.

  “Want me to get it?” Strike called from the backyard.

  “Nope, I’ve got it.”

  A quick glance through the peephole showed a man with sandy brown hair, but I couldn’t see his face. I opened the door as far as the chain guard would let it. Cates was slouched against the doorjamb and raised his right hand to push his hair off his forehead. I yelped and backpedaled across the room. I guess my body wasn’t as conditioned to his innocence as my head was.

  “Sorry, you startled me.” I unlatched the chain and let him in.

  “I can see that.” His appraisal took in my bathrobe and towel-wrapped hair, and he pushed a foil-topped bottle of champagne in my direction. “Here, I brought you this. Thought maybe we could celebrate.”

  “That’s really nice.” Now I was even more ashamed of my reaction to him at the door. “But I’m sorry, I’m not really ready for company right now.” I gestured at my turban headdress.

  He looked past me to see Strike opening the sliding glass door.

  “Hey, Ray. Congratulations,” Strike said.

  “Thanks. It looks like I’ve caught you at a bad time. I wanted to come by and drop this off for you.” He handed me the champagne. “Take it, with my thanks. You did a good job with the jury and everything.” He backed up two steps on the small front porch.

  “You’re welcome. I’m glad it all worked out.”

  I closed the door as he walked away, berating myself for my selfishness. He could have stayed and joined Tonio and me. But seeing him at the door with the outline of that big black Cadillac behind him brought back all the distrust from my summer-long spree of suspicion. I’d need more than one day to get used to seeing Raymond Cates out of jail. Aside from that, I kind of wanted Tonio all to myself.

  “That was nice of him,” Strike said. “We should probably be throwing him a party, not the other way around.” He stowed Cates’s champagne on a shelf in the refrigerator and opened the one he’d bought.

  Later, when we’d finished the duck and one bottle of champagne, Enrique called to ask if I wanted any company.

  “What did you tell him?” Strike asked when I hung up.

  “I told him I already had some.” I opened the second bottle of champagne.

  35

  Who do you think you are? Xena, Warrior Princess?” Giulia stubbed out her third cigarette in thirty minutes, grinding the butt into the ashtray with vigor. “You expected to do all this without the authorities?”

  She had always been an unrepentant smoker. I remember chiding her for her smoking when I was a child, coughing and blowing the wafting nimbus away with an energetic hand. “Calla, there are three things in this world that smoke,” she said. “Dragons, chimneys, and your Aunt Giulia. Get used to it.” I came to love the smell of fresh tobacco when she opened a new pack and took the first cigarette from the box.

  “You and Tony Strike have done a great job of digging up details about Amy’s attack. It’s enough to get the authorities to start a formal investigation,” she said.

  I stirred milk into my coffee and shook my head. “It’s nothing more than we had seven years ago. And it’s not enough. Look at Cates’s trial. They said they could place him at the scene, and they had tire marks, cat hair, and a bullet from a gun like his. All that evidence against an innocent man. I won’t be a party to doing that to someone else.”

  “We’ve got science on our side. They can compare the DNA samples you’ve got to their statewide database. There’s no arguing with DNA,” she said. “Unless you’re from Los Angeles, of course.” She took another deep hit off the cigarette. “Promise me something. Let’s go down and see that county attorney in Nogales—what was her name?”

  “Margaret Lance.”

  “Lance, that’s right. Now that Cates’s trial is over and you don’t have to worry about your confidentiality agreement, let’s lay out for her what you’ve found and ask her how to proceed.”

  I reluctantly agreed although my heart said we didn’t have enough to rouse the interest of the justice machine.

  A twenty-minute storm had cooled the air, and the drive to Nogales was redolent with the smell of creosote and wet sand. We had all the windows open so we could enjoy the desert renaissance and so that Giulia could smoke. I kept an eye on the rearview mirror for highway patrol cars.

  After ten minutes of silence Giulia said, “How about a puzzle where every answer is at least five letters and contains only one vowel?”

  “Like church? String? Prompt?”

  “Yep, but maybe more esoteric. More like myrrh, schism, gnarl. Maybe angst, phlegm … scrod.”

  “I think it would be easier to solve than it would be to plot out,” I said, imagining a Fantasia-dance of consonants teetering across the page.

  “I know what you mean. That’s what’s kept me so quiet over here.” We lapsed back into silence, each musing about vowel-challenged words. My thoughts went to Amy, who still slept. Ah, another five-letter word for Giulia’s puzzle.

  We were the only visitors in the echoing lobby of the Santa Cruz County complex. After introducing ourselves to the receptionist we only had to wait a few minutes to see the county attorney. Giulia greeted her like an old friend. “My niece has told me so much about you, I feel like we’ve already met.”

  I began by confessing that my hypothetical “friend” was actually my comatose half sister. Lance nodded with understanding. I think she had suspected all along that it was either a relative or myself I’d been describing. I told her everything, from the nightmare ride to the hospital the night of the rape to Amy’s description of the coral and turquoise snake knife, the black truck, the suicide attempt, and my guess as to the meaning of “day-doh.” I described our investigation at the No-Tell Motel, the new DNA evidence from the denim strips, and the rape kit from the hospital. I told her about getting a sample of Red Blanken’s DNA but not having enough money to test it and about my recent association with Raymond Cates’s defense team.

  “And Pima County is looking at Red Blanken now for the murder of Bonnie DeGroot.”

  The only thing I didn’t tell her was the information about the other rape victims. I didn’t think I had enough evidence, and I didn’t want to get Enrique in trouble for telling us about them.

  She took fast notes and asked lots of questions. Then, after several minutes of silence as Lance checked and cross-checked her notes, Giulia asked, “Is this enough information to open an investigation of my niece’s attack?”

  Lance sounded as if she were weighing her words on the scales of justice. “Look at it this way. First, a lot of this is just hearsay—the truck, the finger, the belt buckle, the knife. Second, the DNA evidence you have from the clothing could go a long way toward confirming the attacker’s identity, but the defense would argue that the evidence has been in your possession for seven years and may not be reliable.”

  I bristled at that last remark. “They would say that I tampered with the evidence?”

  “Maybe. Even if we got a match to someone in our database, they could say the results were unreliable because there was no documented chain of custody. Or the sample had degenerated in the heat of the garage.” She shrugged as if all the explanations made equal sense to her.

  “You aren’t even going to run a DNA comparison to Blanken?�
�

  “And third,” she continued as if she hadn’t heard me, “we’ve got this time lag working against us. The rape was seven years ago. Amy never filed a police report. And even you admit you haven’t been able to dig up any witnesses. There’s not much evidence here.”

  I sputtered like a gaffed catfish. I didn’t think all our work could be so easily dismissed.

  Giulia took it more in stride. “You’re saying that you won’t start an investigation?”

  “Not right now. Santa Cruz County is barely operating within its budget as it is; I have to save our office’s time and money for cases I think I can win. Let’s see what Pima County comes up with against Blanken. Then maybe we can consider adding on charges.” Lance put her slim hand over Giulia’s knobby fingers on the desk. “I know it seems harsh, but those are the kind of decisions I have to make. I’m sorry.”

  We thanked her but didn’t mean it and left the office in silence. Giulia’s back was straight and steady, but she leaned on my arm as we descended the front stairs on the way to the car. I walked as if in a fog—all my hopes and plans blurring before me.

  “Let’s go find a hole-in-the-wall,” Giulia said when we reached the sidewalk. I questioned her with a glance, then nodded my understanding.

  I’ve often thought that the city of Nogales is like an old man with a stroke. On the U.S. side of the border he shows his age but still has strength and energy. On the Mexican side his stroke is evident. Within a hundred yards of the border crossing there are one-legged urchins hawking overpriced packets of Chiclets, streets with potholes as wide as the cars traversing them, and gaggles of out-of-work laborers lounging and drinking at the corners.

  Originally, our hole-in-the-wall had been La Caverna, on the Mexican side of the border. My memories of it were still strong, even though it had erupted in a ferocious grease fire that closed the restaurant more than fifteen years ago. It was truly a cavern, as the name implied, and a cool place of refuge from the dusty, sweating streets around it. Romex wiring, like hardy metal vines, crawled to hammered-tin sconces set against the stone walls. It was icebox cool, underground-spring wet, and margarita-blender noisy. The house specialty had been sopa de cahuama, green turtle soup, a taste to heal all wounds.