by Louise Ure
He wheeled into a parking space and came around the car to open my door. He must have had a history of gentlemanly behavior; the politeness seemed to come naturally. Or maybe he was just used to transporting felons in the handleless backseat. We crossed the parking lot, and I looked up at the three-story, gray concrete ribs of the building. They looked like bars. I followed Giordano down a well-lit hallway to the elevator.
The detectives’ area was not divided into cubicles, just metal desks back-to-back, bristling with telephones, computer terminals, and stacks of paper. Only two of the twelve desks were occupied, and those detectives glanced up and then continued with their work. Giordano sat me in an armless chair at the side of his desk, then excused himself. When he came back, he had Miranda Lang in tow.
“I think you two know each other,” he said as introduction.
Miranda gave me a tight smile and gripped my right hand with her left, like we were two schoolgirls whistling in the dark. She looked less like a warrior today, wearing a dark cotton skirt and blouse with a thin ramie sweater tied over her shoulders. Giordano told me to wait while he took Miranda into the viewing room for the lineup.
I fidgeted at the desk, crossing and uncrossing my legs and trying to read his papers upside down. Ringing phones went unanswered, and one detective tried to calm a hysterical caller on another line. “Listen to me, Ella. Just slow down and listen to me for a minute.” It didn’t seem to be working.
After several minutes a group of four men exited from a door halfway down the hall on the right. I craned my neck around the corner to see them. All were about five eight or five nine, with sandy hair, and in their twenties or thirties. One man had short hair on top, but kept it long around the back so it cascaded over his shoulders. He brushed a lock of hair behind his ear, and I stared at his hand. The thumb and index finger and the web of flesh between them were bright red, as if he’d dipped his fingers in strawberry jam. Was he part of the lineup?
I stood and had turned toward the ladies’ room when Giordano and Miranda came around the corner from the other direction.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Miranda said, wiping the tears from her eyes. “I was positive I could recognize him, but I’m just not sure.” She walked to the window and stared down at the street.
Giordano toyed with his empty coffee cup. “Don’t worry, we’ll get him.” The disappointment was obvious on his face.
Two more doors opened and closed farther down the hall. I asked Giordano if he still needed to interview me, but his reply was cut short by a shout from the corridor.
“Hey! What are you doing here?” Cates said. His voice was full of indignation and threat.
Like a dog picking up a scent on the wind, Giordano turned to face me. “I’m sorry about that. I should have kept you both in the viewing room until the lineup participants cleared out. But now that you mention it, Ms. Gentry, I may have a few more questions for you.” His glance swung from Cates to me and back again.
A short, dark-haired officer cuffed Cates’s hands behind his back and prodded him farther down the hall for his return to the county jail. Miranda took Giordano’s offer of another officer to walk her to her car. That left the detective with all his attention on me.
“How do you know Ray Cates?” he asked.
“His lawyer hired my firm to help with his jury selection.” I didn’t elaborate.
“How does he fit into Miranda’s rape?”
“I don’t know that he does.” I wasn’t trying to dodge the question, but I didn’t know if pursuing Cates for other attacks would abrogate the Letter of Confidentiality I’d signed.
“Look, the only way I know Raymond Cates is that I was hired by his defense team. That’s why he recognized me and why he was probably surprised to see me here. I don’t know anything else about Miranda’s attack, but if I did, I couldn’t say anything because of my legal relationship with Mr. Cates.”
Giordano looked like he’d heard the punch line but didn’t get the joke. “There’s something else you haven’t told me,” he said, then waited for me to fill in the silence. When I didn’t, he gave a deep sigh. “You’re walking a very fine line here. And you’re bound to make more enemies than friends by doing it. I’d be careful if I were you.”
I nodded. “Who was that other man? The one with the red mark on his hand?”
Giordano looked at the group of departing men. “The guy that’s got the mullet going?” He saw the question on my face. “The hair. Short on top, long in the back. White trash-Brad Pitt-wrestler style.”
I smiled at the description. “Yes, who is he? What’s he doing here?”
He sorted through a stack of loose papers on his desk and tapped twice on a line at the top of a page. “Terrence ‘Red’ Blanken. He matched enough of Miranda’s description that we brought him down for the lineup, too.”
“Did she describe his hair like that? I thought she only remembered the cowboy hat.”
“She didn’t say anything about the hair, but he wasn’t wearing it like that last year. We picked him up when Miranda first reported her rape, but he had an alibi. I thought we’d try again today and see if we could shake that alibi loose.”
I waited until Giordano turned away to straighten the other papers on his desk, then scanned the rest of Blanken’s rap sheet. Twenty-eight. Tucson address. A dozen Peeping Tom convictions, then he finally escalated to house invasion and attempted rape when he was twenty-one.
“What about his car? Does he have a black Lincoln Town Car like Miranda remembers?” What I really wanted to ask was if he used to own a black pickup truck.
“He’s worked off and on for the last ten years at We Park—that big long-term parking lot out by the airport. He might have had access to lots of different cars.”
Giordano picked up Blanken’s file and tapped it on the edge of the desk. One loose sheet cartwheeled to the floor. I swooped down to get it and turned it over in my hands. It was the photo of a knife, with the sinuous design of a snake on the handle, writhing and ready to strike.
“Is this turquoise? And coral? And ivory?” I pointed at each of the snake’s scaly dimensions. He flipped the photo over, read the notes on the back, and confirmed it.
A turquoise snake knife? A shiver raced between my shoulder blades. Maybe Blanken was the Sweet Thing rapist and this was the same knife he had used on Amy.
Now I had two men who had been accused or convicted of a sexual assault, who owned or had access to black trucks, and who had something wrong with their hands. And one of them had a turquoise snake knife.
“What’s that on his hand? Is that a burn?”
“No, it’s a birthmark. Makes him easy to ID, unless he wears gloves.” So easy that Miranda would probably have noticed it if Blanken was her attacker. Maybe not, between the darkness and the terror that night.
“By the way,” I asked, “did Cates own a Lincoln Town Car a year ago?”
Giordano frowned. “Not registered to him. But his father has one.”
Two men with probable access to the right kind of cars for two different attacks. And one of them had the right knife.
I headed for the front door, hoping I’d be able to flag one of Tucson’s small fleet of taxis for a ride back home. “Red” Blanken was unlocking the door to a blue-gray Taurus in the public parking lot down the block. He glanced back at me and nodded, then got in the car. Despite the heat, a chill went up my spine as I watched him drive off.
It took twenty minutes before a tattered yellow taxi arrived. As I waited in front of the police station, my eyes traveled from the lacy white structure of St. Augustine Cathedral on my left to the drive-thru liquor store across the street. If you couldn’t get justice on one corner, a couple of other options for solace were available here as well.
18
Selena and I met Saturday night after the crowd at the restaurant had thinned. I had a glass of Perrier and a slice of peach pie, in keeping with the theme of the night. Late diners still lin
gered over coffee at two tables, but Enrique had turned off the outside lights to discourage any new arrivals.
After leaving bills on both their tables, Enrique sat down to join us. I told them about Miranda’s lineup and about Terry “Red” Blanken.
“I’ll look up his record,” Enrique said. “See if he was doing time on either a peeping or home-invasion charge when Amy was attacked.”
“Could you also check if Blanken was in prison when that other student nurse was raped? You know, the one you told us about?” Selena had broken the news to him that we had, in fact, contacted some of these women. She said his reaction had ranged from furious to curious, then finally to supportive.
“Will do. But remember, his alibi doesn’t have to be just prison time.”
“It’s a place to start.”
Selena poured more water in my glass. She had asked the student nurse, Christie Parstac, for information on the two friends who had been with her in the bar. Although her attack was six years ago, I still had high hopes that her friends, also from the adult education program at the community college, might remember her drinking partner in the bar that night. One girl had moved to Chicago, and we’d have to wait until tomorrow to phone her. The other was still in Tucson, and I planned to see her in person.
Selena looked tired. Between her boys and the restaurant, her days were long. I kissed her on the cheek, yelled good-bye to Enrique over the sound of the dishwasher, and went home.
I wouldn’t have noticed the car except that he kept his lights off. I had just turned off Fourth Avenue and headed east on Speedway, savoring the dry, dusty air as it cooled the night. The SUV’s engine started as I drove past, and its boxy, dark shape took position a half block behind me. I flicked my own lights off and on twice, thinking the driver might notice that his lights were off, but he maintained a dark and ominous presence behind me. Three turns later it was still on my tail.
I picked up my cell phone and tried to find the buttons for Alphabet City as I rounded the corner. It rang three times before Selena answered.
“Is Enrique still there? I need help.”
Selena must have run outside with her cordless phone; her voice carried over the sound of an engine starting up. I had just caught him. When she handed Enrique the phone, I explained my concern.
“It’s a black SUV, a big one, like a Suburban, and it’s been on my tail for the last three turns with its lights off.” I wondered what kind of car Cates owned these days and whether the police would have given back his car after comparing tire treads. Unless there had been a jailbreak, it couldn’t be Cates behind the wheel. But my run-in with Salsipuedes had convinced me that Cates still had plenty of loyal friends on the street.
I couldn’t imagine that I would have attracted the attention of Red Blanken at the police station, so I didn’t think he was the likely driver of the big black car, and I had seen him the day before in a Taurus. But he did have access to other cars from the airport parking lot.
And I couldn’t think of anybody else I’d pissed off recently, except for Jessica because of all my absences.
I glanced at the green street sign on the corner to give Enrique my latest location and signed off. I kept going straight so that he could find us, hoping that he’d get there before the black car made a move. Although we were still on city streets, there was no other traffic in sight, and the houses I passed weren’t lit. Everyone was asleep or enjoying a warm summer night on the town. Ignoring my own advice, I speeded up to lose the big car, turned off my headlights, and ducked into an alley.
The black car approached as silent as a hunter, tapped my rear bumper, and sent the Jeep’s steering wheel shuddering. I gripped the wheel and accelerated. Then a second wrenching crunch, this time sending the Jeep in a sideways slide as the alley crossed a larger street.
An engine behind me revved high, but I didn’t realize it was Enrique until he pulled up even with the giant black SUV.
The windows were darkened; I couldn’t see who was in the car. Suddenly the SUV braked and reversed in a semicircle to head back the way we’d come. Enrique slowed to check on me, then turned back in pursuit. I waited, my pulse racing like the end of a sprint, and the night settled back, quiet and dark, around me.
When Enrique returned, the frustration was clear on his face. “I didn’t catch the car or get the plate number. Are you okay?”
I lied. I said I was.
We made a two-car parade back to my house, but Enrique wouldn’t let me go in until he’d checked inside and made sure the doors and windows were secure.
“If you’re going to get involved in tracking down a rapist and would-be murderer, you’re going to need more security than a cell phone. At least an alarm system. And maybe a guard dog or a gun.”
He was right. Up until the time of Amy’s attack I thought I could talk my way out of any situation. Language—words, the power of reason—held all the answers for me, whether they were the persuasive words I’d researched for thirty seconds of advertising, the solution words to crossword puzzles, or the comforting words of the psalms I’d read as a child. Words were truth, somehow. And they were all I needed to rise above any trouble that came my way.
From the moment I saw Amy’s broken body, I knew I could no longer rely on the power of those gentle swords. Language alone didn’t save Amy, and it couldn’t save me. Words had lost their strength.
After I brought Amy home from the hospital, I had changed the locks, put a peephole in the front door, and beefed up the locks on every door and window. Walks were now taken with my house key or car key thrust between the two middle fingers of my right hand like a short spike. I wore a whistle around my neck. But none of it really made me feel safe, and I couldn’t afford the guns or big security systems that would.
These days my trust in words only extended as far as crossword puzzles and menus. Puzzles allowed me to feel a bit of order in the universe—gridded squares, exactly the right number of letters, only one possible right answer. I still loved them for the same reason I loved Selena’s menus. They gave protected, finite borders to the options in my world. They had black-and-white clarity. They were my truth and my comfort, my new psalms.
I wrote myself a note to look at Cates’s file for information on his car. If the police had matched his tire tracks to the Chavez killing, then the information on make and model would be listed. I wondered if he still favored large black cars. And whom he trusted the keys to.
Could Cates have been mad enough at seeing me in the police station yesterday that he used his phone privileges at the jail to tell someone to follow me? To do what? Scare me? Well, whoever was doing it, it was working.
I closed all the curtains and called the nursing home to check on Amy. With an ear tuned to the sounds of cars on the street, I watched three TV cooking shows in a row, then treated myself to a package of Kraft macaroni and cheese.
Sunday morning I took advantage of the time difference and called Ellen Dunlop in Chicago. She had been with Christie Parstac the night of the attack and might remember what the man at the bar looked like.
She was breathless when she answered the phone. I explained who I was and why I was phoning, and that gave her enough time to catch her breath.
“Sorry, I just came in from a run,” she panted. “I felt so bad about Christie. We never should have left her, but everything seemed to be okay.”
“What do you remember about the man?”
She paused to pull up the memory. “He had sandy brown hair. I thought he was really handsome until I got up close.”
“Why do you say that? What was different up close?”
“He kept his mouth shut most of the time. Kind of a thin-lipped smile, you know? But when he did smile, you could see he had really bad teeth. Yuck.” That hadn’t been in the police report.
“Bad teeth? Like someone who doesn’t take care of his teeth or someone who needs braces?” Cates didn’t have bad teeth. I tried to remember if Blanken’s photo on his ra
p sheet had showed him smiling. Probably not.
“They weren’t misshapen. Just yellow. That really turns me off.” I imagined Ellen: a runner-thin twenty-seven-year-old with a brilliant smile and perfect skin.
“Did you notice anything about his hands?” Missing finger? A birthmark the size of an Idaho potato?
“Just that he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. That’s the first thing we always looked for.” I promised to fax the photo lineup, and she said she’d call back with her reaction.
It was only a short trip to Kinko’s, and there was no one in line ahead of me. I keyed in her fax number and watched the paper coil through the machine, then went to meet Christie’s second friend, Lola Uribe, at Tucson Medical Center.
I didn’t know how much good this description of yellowed teeth would be. Christie Parstac hadn’t mentioned it in the police report or when she talked to Selena. And Amy hadn’t said anything about her attacker having yellow teeth.
Lola Uribe was a small woman with large, strong hands. After nursing school she had decided on a specialty in pediatric oncology and was on the seven-to-three shift in the cancer ward at TMC. She held a thin, quiet baby over a basin with her left arm and sponged his hair with her right.
“We call them our Pantene babies,” she said with a smile, massaging the shampoo into his scalp. “Sometimes just the water, the rocking, and the silky hair can make them feel better.” Sometimes it made me feel better, too.
“I hope you can remember that night six years ago. Can you help me identify Christie’s attacker?” I asked after I explained my mission.
“Maybe. I’ve sure thought about him a lot since that night.” I showed her the five photos I’d put together with Selena. I wished now that I had a picture of Blanken to include. She craned her head to get a better look without having to readjust the baby in her arms.
“He’s not there. I’m sure.” My heart sank.
“Ellen mentioned that she remembered his yellow teeth. Does that sound familiar?”
“I never got close enough to him to notice. But I sure got close enough to see his face. He’s not one of these,” she said, indicating the photos with her chin.