Forcing Amaryllis

by Louise Ure

  I stopped to pick up a pizza on the way back from the nursing home, then settled in to try the homophonic puzzle. Crossword king Merl Reagle would have been proud of Giulia; this one was Sunday New York Times quality. But after perish, slay, pain, brute, and cruel turned up as halves of five separate homophonic pairs, I put it down unfinished.

  5

  I had a flat tire on the way to work Monday morning, so it was almost ten o’clock when I arrived. The temperature was already over a hundred degrees, and the tire-changing exertions left me with dark rings of sweat under my arms. My hair was as wet as if I’d been swimming, and my glasses were sliding off my nose.

  The receptionist handed me two pink message slips as I passed by the front desk. The first was from Mr. Rondo’s lawyers with a question on jury selection; the second was from Kevin McCullough.

  “Thanks, Alice. What did McCullough want?” I pushed my wet hair back off my forehead and glanced at Jessica’s closed door.

  “He wants to go ahead with some early focus groups. He said he’d give you the details when you call him back.”

  That was the last thing I wanted to do, so I headed into Jessica’s office, intending to hand over the project. She had the phone set to “speaker” and was taking notes from voice messages that had been left over the weekend. She held up one long, manicured finger in a “just a sec” sign and waved toward the guest chair. When she finished listening to the last message, she hit number three on the keypad for delete and hung up the phone.

  “Did you hear that?” she asked. “You’d think these lawyers couldn’t go to the toilet without having their hands held.” She checked the finish on her nails as if imagining the hand-holding she’d just been asked to do.

  “What is it? Does one of our clients require a little TLC?”

  “It’s this pit bull case. We have the research in affidavit form, but now the attorney wants me to present the findings in court,” she said. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Kevin McCullough wants to start focus groups on the Cates case right away.” I dropped the message on her desk. It was only a slip of paper, but I felt as if a ten-pound weight had been lifted off my shoulders as I let it go.

  “Oh, no, you don’t.” She waved off the offending note. “I can’t possibly get involved with Cates yet. I’ll be at the courthouse all afternoon on this dog research. You return his call. I’ll be able to pick it up again next week.” She turned back to the telephone, content with having delegated the project.

  “Look, Jessica, you asked me to attend one meeting last Friday, and I did it as a favor to you.” I heard Aunt Giulia’s voice in my head, Don’t let her push you around.

  “Do you have a legitimate conflict of interest here, Calla, or do you just not like the case?”

  I wanted to be honest with her. I truly did believe in our jury system, and I tried to keep an open mind about our clients. I didn’t want to assume that Cates was guilty of this or any other crime just because he’d been accused. But I also owed it to Jessica to let her know that I had reservations about working on the case.

  “It’s personal. Nothing that I could really call a justifiable conflict of interest,” I confessed. “But we had an agreement that I wouldn’t have to work on criminal cases.”

  She waved off my complaint. “I’ve got a lot on my mind right now. We’ll talk about it after I get back from court.” She pulled a gold-toned compact from her purse, opened the lid, and smiled at herself in the small mirror to check her lipstick and confirm her best angle.

  I headed into the break room and grabbed a bottle of water. Could I quit this job? No. The only other two jobs I had the skills for, advertising and market research, didn’t pay as well. And I enjoyed the notion that I was working for justice, even if that justice was only on the civil side of the legal world. I had my answer. I had to stay at Marley and Partners, and for the moment that meant doing the best job I could for Raymond Cates.

  I hadn’t heard back yet from Giulia with any news about Cates’s car from seven years ago, but I couldn’t get that shortened finger out of my mind. I knew I was being silly, but I had to at least know he hadn’t owned a black pickup to be able to work on his case. I sank into my chair and spun toward the window. They say the silhouette of the Santa Catalina Mountains looks like an elephant head, but I thought it looked more like a cowboy hat today, the kind with a little dimple, like a saddle, on the top. Cowboy hat. Cowboy. Ranch. Patagonia. How could I find out where Raymond Cates had been on Halloween seven years ago? At his father’s ranch near Patagonia? Or was he thirty miles away in Nogales at the rodeo grounds near the Mexican border? Seven years is a long time. Nobody would remember where they were or where Cates was. But if I could somehow prove he was miles away from where Amy was attacked, it would make me feel better about helping select his jury in this murder case.

  Raymond Cates probably wasn’t Amy’s attacker, but a little legal research couldn’t hurt in any case. And it might help me get justice for Amy—no matter who her attacker was. Marley and Partners hadn’t worked on any rape cases in the last two years, and I knew some laws had changed. Right now I wasn’t even sure what the statute of limitations was for a rape in Arizona.

  And what about attempted murder, for that’s certainly what Amy’s attack was. Whoever he was, he left her for dead, slashed inside and out, in the gravel lane of a vast, dark parking lot.

  Not working on criminal cases at Marley and Partners had left me with a lack of expertise. I was going to ask Jessica about the statute of limitations, but that would have opened a Pandora’s box of questions.

  I may not have had much experience with criminal trials, but I surely knew how to do research. And I had a place to start: the Santa Cruz County attorney’s office.

  I called Kevin McCullough and told him an emergency had come up and we couldn’t schedule a meeting until later. Then I told Jessica I was feeling sick and had to take the rest of the day off. I headed for Nogales.

  The big towns of the desert Southwest are as modern as any other cities—full of biochemists and CPAs and personal trainers. But there’s an echo of both the Old West and the Franciscan missionaries who settled the territory as well. Every man could be a cowboy, every day a miracle. The road to Nogales had some of both those influences.

  It was a landscape riddled with denial and promise: dry riverbeds, dust-choked sagebrush, and the soaring white towers of the Mission San Xavier del Bac. I slowed back down to the speed limit as I passed the centuries-old church. From this distance you couldn’t see the tiny mouse carved into one tower or the cat on the other. It was said that if the unfinished dome on the second tower was completed then the cat would catch the mouse and it would mean the end of the world, so the Indians and settlers through the centuries had left the church incomplete.

  Was that what I was doing now by investigating Amy’s attack? Was I finishing the construction of a tower that was never meant to be completed? I didn’t know if I felt like the cat or like the mouse.

  I was filling the gas tank at Tubac, halfway down the sixty-five-mile route to Nogales, when a more prosaic problem arose. I had signed a Letter of Confidentiality with Raymond Cates’s legal team. I was sworn to hold his information in confidence and to do nothing that would infringe upon his defense.

  Well, noticing an amputated finger could hardly be considered privileged communication, I chided myself. I wasn’t really using any information I heard from his lawyer. And knowing that he’d been charged with a sexual assault was hardly confidential. Hell, everybody in Arizona knew he’d been accused of rape and murder, thanks to all the publicity. Maybe this wasn’t a conflict at all.

  Optimism doesn’t sit comfortably at my table. I’d only driven thirty-five miles, and I’d already come up with two reasons not to go on. It wasn’t a new trait for me. When I was a little girl, I wrote fables that always ended sadly. “The Ladybug who Lost Her Way Home and Her House Burned Down,” “The Wildflower Who Grew So Tall and Proud That She W
as Pulled Out by the Roots.” I called it The True Book of Fairy Tales. I was a budding fatalist.

  Now, more than ever, I was sure that those tales reflected real life. If I unfurled and stood tall like the calla lily I was named after, then I too could be cut down, ripped from my anchorage and discarded, like Amy had been. My own personal San Xavier del Bac-style Armageddon.

  What could I do that might give me a chance to send the ladybug home in time, a chance to watch a flower blossom and unfurl? Maybe even a chance to wake a sleeping princess.

  I reached Nogales thirty minutes later. It was a town holding its Mexican neighbors at bay with tall walls, barbed-wire fences, and green-striped Border Patrol trucks every few hundred yards. I circled three times past the offices selling Mexican car insurance to tourists just before they crossed the border but I still couldn’t find the street I was looking for. I stopped a young border patrolman and asked directions. Alternating between Spanish and English, he pointed me north again, toward a newer, sand-colored building sprawled across the hilltop like a fat cat in the sun.

  It was one story tall, with a peaked central roof and two long wings to anchor it to the hillside. I battled a hot, dry headwind across the parking lot, eased open the main doors, and crossed the herringbone-brick lobby. When I rang the buzzer for attention, a young Mexican woman shuffled from a hidden alcove and directed me through a glass security door and down the hall to the office of Margaret Lance, county attorney for Santa Cruz County, Arizona.

  Room 300 was labeled with a black decal on frosted glass. I knocked and entered a small anteroom that held a secretary’s desk and two chairs for visitors.

  “May I help you?” said a young woman coming in from an interior office. She wore a polyester suit that must have been like the seventh circle of hell in this heat, and she had short, plain fingernails with no polish. Her arms were full of files, and she tripped as she rounded the desk, spilling the pages like pickup-sticks across the surface. I helped her pat the files back into a stack and asked to see Ms. Lance.

  “I’m Margaret Lance.” She smiled at my surprise and reordered the files. “My secretary is off on her lunch break. I’m just cleaning out old files for her.”

  I wished the shock hadn’t shown on my face. Her eyes may have said Harvard, but the clothes said Kmart. I liked her at once.

  She looked a little younger than me—maybe thirty—with soft, wavy brown hair worn down past her shoulders. When she escorted me into her office, a glance at the photos and degrees on the wall told me I was right about Harvard.

  I sat across from her desk and put my purse and briefcase on the floor. “I’m here on behalf of a friend. She was assaulted here in Nogales seven years ago and wants to know if it’s too late to press charges.”

  She waited, wondering perhaps if this was the same kind of “friend” who needs advice from doctors at cocktail parties.

  “Assaulted as in raped?”

  “Yes, but he also used a knife on her. She almost died.”

  “It may not be too late,” she said. “It used to be that the State had to file charges within seven years of the offense. Sometimes that meant that we had to create a John Doe warrant—you know, no name on it, but using the DNA profile of the attacker that we’d recovered from the victim as the ID—just to get in under that seven-year time frame. But Governor Hull signed a bill just last year that eliminated the statute of limitations on sexual assaults. There could be cases from several years ago that we can solve now with new DNA techniques. Did your friend file a police report at the time?”

  “No. She went to the hospital and then went home. You see, she was attacked in a parking lot on her way home, but she thinks she may know now who the man was.” I picked up my purse and wound the strap around and between my fingers like a rosary.

  “She’s only just now recognized the man? How did that happen? It’s been seven years.”

  “She saw him again and a … a … physical trait of his jogged her memory.” I didn’t want to give her any more specific information in case it could be tracked back to Amy or to Cates. Or to my Letter of Confidentiality. “Do you think there’s any chance of filing charges now, rape or attempted murder, after such a long time?”

  “Well, it’s not easy. It’s hard to find witnesses and corroborative evidence after such a long delay. Is there any physical evidence? The clothes she was wearing that night? Did the hospital collect evidence or do a rape kit?”

  “I don’t know.” If the hospital had done a rape kit they hadn’t told me about it, and they hadn’t charged me for it on the bill. I still had the clothes Amy wore to the rodeo, but I didn’t know if there would be any kind of evidence there, except for the shreds of tattered denim that remained from her skirt.

  “Please have your friend come talk to me,” she said, handing me a business card. “I don’t know if we can help her with these charges, but we have a good victim assistance program if she wants to talk to someone.”

  I fought back an unexpected surge of tears. Oh, if only Amy could talk to someone. Or talk at all.

  I had a prepaid cell phone with a minimum number of minutes on it, to use in case of a road emergency. This qualified as one. It was almost two o’clock, and the lunch rush would have ended by now. When I got back to the Jeep, I rolled down the windows and called Alphabet City in Tucson while I waited for the interior to cool off enough to sit down.

  The restaurant would never be famous, but only a year after opening it was already infamous for its eclectic menu. Run by Selena Garza, my best friend from high school, Alphabet City was a tucked-away, tentable, hole-in-the-wall on Fourth Avenue, with a menu that changed daily based on a letter of the alphabet. One day might be C, when they offered crab, corned beef, cabbage, and custard. Another day might be M with macaroni, mustard greens and mousse. Ch got its own day, because of all options it presented; E days were to be avoided.

  “It’s Calla. What day is it?”

  “H.”

  “I’ll be right there.” I hoped the H did not include headcheese or herring. In truth, I would have gone to Alphabet City even if it had been an endive and eggplant day; I needed to see Selena’s brother more than I needed the food. Enrique helped out in the restaurant when he wasn’t assigned to Pima County sheriff’s department duties. And since Selena’s divorce in December, Enrique was spending even more time with his sister and her two boys.

  When I arrived at Alphabet City an hour later, the departing lunch crowd had freed up three parking places in front of the restaurant.

  “Hola, chica,” I said, spotting Selena at the hostess desk. “I’m sorry I haven’t been in for so long.”

  From across the room Selena was as shockingly beautiful as she had been in high school. Coal black hair, a trim waist, and bright white Chiclet teeth. But when she turned the right side of her face toward me, I could see the damage her ex-husband had done. The glass of her right eye stared straight ahead, a lodestar in the night sky of her face. She grinned, seeing me.

  “It’s been too long. How’s Amy? And how’s Aunt Giulia?” Selena wiped her hands on a damp towel.

  “There’s no change with Amy. Giulia and I are fine.” I sank into a seat at the front table. “Any chance your brother is around? I need help on something.”

  “Sure, he’s trying to fix the garbage disposal. I’ll get him.”

  I glanced at the menu while Selena disappeared to the back of the restaurant. Thank God, they included both halibut and hamburger under the offerings for H.

  When I looked up, Enrique was standing across the table from me. The laugh lines around his eyes deepened with his smile.

  “You’ve always been able to sneak up on me.” I got up to hug him.

  He was a man of uncommon grace, even at two hundred and thirty pounds, and I’d had a crush on him in our high school days. That teenage yearning had translated over the years to a feeling of comfort and security; Enrique was the only man I would have trusted with my life—and my sister’s.
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  He wore his black hair straight back from his forehead, like a resurrected Cesar Romero, and it gleamed in the overhead lights. At thirty-six Enrique carried a maturity and calmness that he hadn’t possessed in his wild teen years. Maybe it was the dozen years of drunks, car crashes, and illegal immigrants he had seen while on patrol with the sheriff’s department that had done it; maybe he had seen too much. He said that he could recite the exits off I-10 between Tucson and Phoenix as easily as he could the Lord’s Prayer. And sometimes they sounded the same.

  Enrique still had the heart of a big brother, railing against any injustice done to his family. I didn’t have any proof about what had happened to Selena’s ex-husband, but shortly after Selena lost her eye, the ex wound up in the hospital with both legs and both arms broken. He left town as soon as his injuries healed. Enrique never mentioned his name again.

  Selena came back to the table with three tall glasses of sweet, creamy horchata and sat down. “Tell us what’s on your mind. What can we help with?”

  Swearing them to secrecy, I told them about meeting Raymond Cates and realizing that he could be Amy’s rapist.

  “He lived near Nogales seven years ago. He has a damaged finger, and now he’s accused of a rape and murder that are similar to Amy’s attack. It’s not a lot, but he could be the one. And I can’t go to the authorities because of this Letter of Confidentiality I signed, but I also can’t sit back and do nothing.”

  “What did Amy say about his fingers that makes you think this is the guy?” Selena asked.

  “Oh, hell, it wasn’t anything specific. Those first few nights she had terrible nightmares and would wake up screaming. It sounded like ‘dedo,’ and her hand would be arched into a claw shape. I’m guessing she remembered something about his hands or his fingers.”

  “Maybe she just remembered his hands coming at her,” Selena suggested. “Or maybe your bilingual guess is wrong.” Her glance at Enrique told me she thought I was nuts.