by Louise Ure
The conversation between the desk clerk and Strike was a pantomime to me. Strike seemed to be asking questions and not getting many replies. He opened his wallet and pushed a bill across the desk. That’s when the conversation got serious.
The heat was becoming oppressive. After twenty minutes I gave up and went to join Strike in the air-conditioned lobby. He saw my approach, came out, and turned me back toward the car.
“What is it? What did he say?”
“Let’s stop over there and cool off for a minute,” he said, motioning to the Palomino Bar across the street. “I’ll tell you everything on the way back.”
The Palomino Bar was a squat, dark wood building, deeper than it was wide, with no windows on the front. We left the Shelby where it was, dodged the one car coming from the right, and trotted across the street.
The heavy door opened with a squeak. It was dim and cool inside, and a plaintive country-and-western song on the jukebox asked Ruby not to take her love to town.
I dawdled as the door squeaked closed behind me and scanned the long wooden bar. Three drinkers, one a female, leaned on the bar for support. One short Indian-looking man had spurs on his boots. At least this town had the horses and cattle to go with the spurs. When you saw spurs in Tucson, it just meant it was a tourist staying at a dude ranch.
We took stools at the near end of the bar, away from the other drinkers. A jar of pickled eggs and a rack of packaged potato chips hugged the corner. The smell of bacon and decades-old frying grease permeated the air.
The bartender, a well-worn gray-haired woman in her sixties, stubbed out her cigarette and approached with a bar rag in her hand.
“What’ll it be?”
“Tequila. No ice,” Strike said.
“Just water for me.” I looked around at the beer mirrors, the posted business cards, and the dusty array of bottles behind her.
When she returned with the drinks, Strike said, “Nice place. Have you been here long?”
“Donkey’s years. My husband bought this place back in the seventies.” She polished a circle on the bar in front of him.
“Is your husband still around?”
“Now why would you want to know that?” She reached for something under the bar. The timbre of her voice had attracted the attention of the drinkers at the other end of the bar. I put one foot on the floor in case we needed to make a quick getaway.
“No need for that baseball bat,” Strike said as if calming a growling dog. “I’m just looking for someone who might have been working here seven years ago.”
“Well, you’d probably have been looking for me instead of that lazy-ass son of a bitch anyway,” she said, relaxing. “He was around, but he didn’t do much work.”
Strike moved his shot glass in front of me and unfolded pictures of Cates and Amy on the bar. “Do you recognize either of these folks?”
“This one I know,” she said, tapping the picture of Cates with a long forefinger. “That’s Ray Cates. I don’t recognize the woman.”
“You know Cates well?”
“Not really. His family has a ranch outside of Patagonia, maybe thirty, thirty-five miles from here. He and his crew used to come in on weekends.”
I watched her eyes, but they gave no hint of any affection or distrust of Cates.
“When was the last time he was in?”
“Oh, Lord, it’s been years, now that I think about it. They used to come in a lot, but I haven’t seen him since my husband passed on, and that was more than six years ago.”
“And you’re sure you’ve never seen the woman?”
“Nothing’s sure in this life, mister. But she’s not a regular, I can tell you that.”
Amy was only nineteen when she was attacked—too young for legal drinking in Arizona—so I had never thought of her as a “regular” at any bar, but the woman’s words brought tears to my eyes anyway. I imagined a life for Amy that included meeting friends after a long shift at the hospital, the pulsing of a two-step country-and-western song on the jukebox, a sip of beer on a summer night. It was a dream that could never come true.
Strike left a five-dollar tip, and we returned to the car. The side trip to the Palomino had proved nothing. No one could place Cates and Amy in the bar together seven years ago. But it was interesting that Cates seemed to have changed his favorite drinking spot soon after Amy’s attack. Or maybe that was when he moved away from his father’s ranch and took up residence in Tucson.
We stayed quiet until we reached enough speed on the highway for the rushing air to have partially cooled the car’s interior. Strike stared straight ahead as he spoke. “You know, I told you Saturday that I start every investigation from the beginning, without any assumptions.” I nodded. “That’s what we’re doing here, too, going back to the motel to see if there’s any record or any memory of Amy being at the motel on Halloween or early on November first, seven years ago.
“You wouldn’t expect that kind of place to have much paperwork, and they don’t. But the motel manager has been there for fifteen years, and he said he would have been the one on duty. He remembers because his third child was born that year on November first, and he was worried that he’d have to find a replacement to take over the desk in case he needed to take his wife to the hospital on Halloween night.” He paused, as if trying to find the right words. I watched the road. I couldn’t look at him either.
“He said no one of Amy’s description came in that night. He would have remembered a young girl, all beat up like that, who came to the desk for help or who checked in by herself.
“I asked him if he remembered a room back then that was pretty messed up with blood. He said that happened all the time. Cowboys, bar fights. He doesn’t keep track of it.”
I swallowed my first reaction: you must be wrong. Then I paid more attention to his news. Why hadn’t I ever checked with the motel, even to see if they had seen someone fitting the Animal’s description someplace in the neighborhood? When I found Amy, I rushed her out of that room and straight to the hospital. I hadn’t given it a moment’s thought, except to be happy that she’d found someplace safe to hole up until I could get to her. I never even approached the front desk when I went back two days later to get her car.
In retrospect my assumptions seemed as flimsy as a three-year-old’s lie. Why would Amy, bloody and broken and still bound by strips of denim, have gone to the front desk of a motel and offered cash or her credit card for a room, when all she needed was a phone to reach me or the police? Wouldn’t she just have asked for help? Especially if she didn’t have a purse or any money with her. And if she was that confused or hysterical, then it was even more likely that the manager would have remembered her.
“Does he have any information on the people who did check in that night?”
“No. Almost all their business is done in cash. And he doesn’t get many single women except a couple of neighborhood hookers that he knows by name.” Strike sounded as disappointed as I was.
I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I knew now that there was a big, black, eight-legged lie sitting in the middle of the web of Amy’s story.
The Ford dealership in Green Valley was just off La Cañada Drive. Green Valley is best known as a retirement community, and the number of residents buzzing down the street in golf carts gave proof to the rumor.
“Just follow my lead,” Strike said. He pulled the Shelby into a space marked for visitors and revved the engine once before he shut it off. A half-dozen people in the glass-walled lobby looked our way. Well, nothing like making a quiet entrance.
A trim young man with pomaded hair and a striped polyester tie approached the car as we got out. “Howdy, folks. Can I help you with something?”
“I’m interested in a new truck.”
The salesman nodded with glee at Strike’s directness. No pussyfooting around. No “I’m just looking.”
“A friend of mine bought one from you and she loves it. The new F-350 …”
I nodde
d as if I loved it, too.
“It’s a fine truck,” the salesman replied. “Let me show you what we have in stock.” He gestured to the front parking lot, where the trucks shouldered together like the Cardinals’ defensive line on fourth down.
“Oh, it’s more than the basic truck. She added all kinds of things—leather interior, a rack of roof lights—”
“I’ll bet she got the big engine, too, honey,” I said. All I could think of was Amy in that motel room. I was having trouble keeping up my end of the charade.
The salesman bobbed his head like a dashboard doll. “Oh yes, I remember selling a truck like that—a red one, right?—not more than a month ago. We don’t get a lot of call down here for really hot trucks, you know.” He looked around to see if any Green Valley retirees had heard him disparage their taste in vehicles.
“The thing is,” Strike said, “the wife here won’t let me buy it unless we can get the same kind of great financing my friend got. One toy too many, you know what I mean?” He nodded at the Shelby.
The salesman glossed over Strike’s comment. “I’m sure we can make it work for you. Let me check out the details on that other truck. Will you be using the Mustang as a trade in?”
Strike paled. “Uh, I don’t know yet. Let’s see what you can do for us.”
The salesman ushered us into a small cubicle with two guest chairs less than a knee’s length away from his desk. He sat down, spun his chair sideways, and clicked several times on the computer keyboard to bring up the data he wanted. “Ah, here it is. Red, F-350, purchased four weeks ago.” Then he furrowed his brow. “I’m sure we can do a good deal for you, but your friend ordered it months ago and paid in cash.”
“Marta Veracruz paid cash?” Strike asked.
“No, sir. That’s not the name—”
Strike reached across the desk, pushed the salesman’s arm away, and swiveled the computer screen to face us.
“Patagonia Development Corporation?”
I preceded Strike into the house, flipped the switch on the swamp-box cooler, and opened the back door to get a draft going.
“Let’s see exactly who this Patagonia Development Corporation is.” All businesses and partnerships in Arizona had to file with the State. I logged on to the Secretary of State’s Web site.
I’d purchased my computer eight years ago when the ad agency was upgrading its equipment. These days the computer chips in talking dolls have more memory than my machine. I’d seen governments change faster than its page views. I groaned, waiting for the page to load.
When it was finally legible, Strike read the screen over my shoulder. “It’s a limited partnership … and George Cates is the only officer or director.”
“Maybe the truck really is just another ranch vehicle,” I said.
“Then why is it registered to Salsipuedes’s mother?”
“Maybe Salsipuedes didn’t want to put it in his name for tax reasons. Or maybe it was a gift. Cates did say that Salsipuedes was like a son to him.”
“A fifty-thousand-dollar gift to an employee?” Strike snorted with disbelief.
I shut off the computer and pushed the rewind button on the answering machine. The blinking light said I had missed two calls. The first was from the nursing home, asking again about payment. The second was from Giulia.
“Sit tight, girl. Seven years ago Raymond Cates owned three vehicles, and one of them was a black Dodge Ram pickup, with the license plate RAM ’EM. He sold it in November of that year.”
I thumbed the machine off. Amy had described a black truck, and Raymond Cates had owned one seven years ago. What were the odds that a man now accused of shoving a weapon inside a woman and killing her also had something wrong with his finger and used to own a black truck?
10
We had returned to town too late for me to get to the office so I left a message for Jessica that I had been sick, but I would still meet our client at the research facility for focus groups that evening.
At eight o’clock that night, I sat behind the one-way glass with Kevin McCullough, waiting for the first focus group participants to leave the room. With only a mirror on his side of the room, a middle-aged Hispanic man seemed to stare at me while he straightened his tie and slicked back his hair.
I couldn’t get Cates’s black pickup out of my mind. Were he and the truck in Nogales on Halloween seven years ago? I forced my thoughts back to the work at hand.
The first focus group was made up of people we called “unaided aware”; they had read or heard enough about the case to recognize Cates’s name. Overall, their impression of Cates was not good. Like many law-abiding citizens, they thought that if the police arrested someone, he must be guilty. Two women in the group said they were sure Cates had committed the rape and murder “because there must be something wrong with a man who isn’t married by the time he’s thirty-eight.” McCullough didn’t seem pleased that the news reports about Cates’s arrest and upcoming trial had left such a negative impression.
The second focus group was for people who recognized Cates’s name only after they were reminded of the case. They hadn’t yet formed an opinion about his innocence or guilt. This was a group that McCullough’s planned PR campaign could influence.
The group moderator sat with her back to the two-way mirror and after a few moments of general conversation introduced the topic of crime in the city. Then she brought the discussion around to the Chavez murder and asked a number of hypothetical questions:
“How would you feel about Lydia Chavez if you knew she left her child alone that night to go to a bar?”
“How would you feel about Raymond Cates if you knew his family had been in Arizona for almost a hundred years?”
“Would you feel differently about Raymond Cates if you knew he had an alibi for the time of the attack?”
“Would you feel differently about this case if you knew Ms. Chavez’s ex-lover had a criminal record?”
Part of it was done to plan McCullough’s PR campaign, and part was to consider possible strategies for trial. Cates was getting his money’s worth.
Halfway through the two-hour session Strike slipped into the viewing room where McCullough and I listened to the discussion. His black hair was still long on top, but the white sidewalls that showed around his ears suggested that he, too, had indulged in a San Juan Day haircut after leaving my house. My own haircut seemed days ago instead of just this morning.
“We have to talk,” he whispered to McCullough. They moved to the back of the observation room so their hushed conversation wouldn’t leak out to the group on the other side of the mirror.
I knew what was coming, but I didn’t know how McCullough would take it.
“Cates’s alibi is starting to stink,” Strike told him. “Cates senior bought a new truck four weeks ago, with cash. Then three weeks ago he signed it over to a Marta Veracruz.”
McCullough raised his hands to his shoulders in a “so what” gesture.
“Marta Veracruz is Salsipuedes’s mother. It looks like a payoff for his alibi. And if I can find a payoff, the cops can, too.”
I lost McCullough’s reply in the conversation coming through the speakers from the other room. Strike nodded twice and went out.
What would that revelation mean for McCullough’s defense of his client? Would he focus on a case of mistaken identity? Concentrate on refuting the scientific evidence? Or would he push for a guilty plea and a plea bargain? I was more worried about the black Dodge truck that Cates had owned seven years ago.
McCullough’s attention was back on the focus group participants. A young woman with a blue polyester scarf tied tight around her neck said, “I’d never leave my child alone so I could go to a bar. She got what she deserved.” Several others nodded their agreement.
McCullough leaned toward me and whispered, “Maybe it’s time to put the victim on trial.”
The second set of focus groups on Tuesday night only whet McCullough’s appetite for a pretrial publ
icity campaign. He had called in a public-relations firm Monday night after our first research and started a barrage of leaked information that painted his client as a victim of mistaken identity, and Lydia Chavez as a reincarnation of the whore of Babylon.
The Wednesday morning Daily Star bore the first fruits of his labors. One article was an op-ed piece about the ineptness of the sheriff’s deputies for not looking more closely at Ms. Chavez’s lifestyle and associates. There was also a letter to the editor about the good works of the Cates family through the years. I noticed that when McCullough was quoted, he was not emphasizing Cates’s alibi witness quite as much as he had before.
Strike called at noon and asked me to meet him for lunch. I crunched the phone between my ear and shoulder and lowered my voice to a whisper. “I’d better not. Jessica’s hotter than forty dogs about my taking Monday off. I need to put in some face time around here.”
“Okay. Want me to come by this evening?”
“Sure.” I doodled a row of asterisks and pound signs on the notepad in front of me. “What are you doing today?”
“I’ve got some work to do for McCullough. Background, details on Lydia Chavez,” he said.
I added ampersands and exclamation points to the doodle on the page, turning it into a comic strip version of cusswords.
“Make sure you remember which one’s the victim here.”
There was an ocean-wide gap in the conversation. “I’m doing what I’m paid to do,” he said into the silence. Great. Kevin McCullough pays for your time, and you jump to his tune.
I sighed. “Sorry, I’m just being crabby. See you tonight about seven?”
“Okay.” He hung up with a quiet click that sounded like the severing of a lifeline.
The storage room behind the carport was cool, even though the rest of the house retained the day’s heat. I pushed aside the cardboard boxes that held Amy’s clothes and schoolbooks and opened the last box. After finding the bloody clothes in the other carton, I hadn’t looked any further. Maybe this box held the answers I needed.