Forcing Amaryllis

by Louise Ure

  “Did you get close enough to notice anything unusual about his hands?”

  “His hands? Except for the fact that they were all over Christie, no.” I guess I didn’t need to come back with Blanken’s picture. She probably would have remembered seeing that birthmark.

  Christie said the photo of Cates was a maybe. Lola said definitely not. I’d wait to see what Ellen thought of the fax before I’d cross this student-nurse attacker off the list. But Lola Uribe struck me as the kind of woman who would notice the leaves and not just the trees. If she hadn’t recognized Cates’s face from the photo lineup or said anything about a birthmark or a missing finger, then it probably wasn’t either one of them. Damn.

  19

  I still had work to do on the Rondo case. The citizens who had been called for jury duty were due in at nine, but the courthouse was bustling by eight thirty on Monday as lawyers, witnesses, clerks, and potential jurors vied for a last cup of coffee and a Danish before the court sessions began. Our courtroom door was already open, and I took a seat with Mr. Rondo and his attorneys at the plaintiff’s table, closest to the jury box.

  Mr. Rondo was playing his victim status for all it was worth. In previous meetings he had pinned his shirt or coat sleeve over the stump at the end of his missing arm. Today he wore a short-sleeved shirt with a tie: professional and pitiful. I was surprised he hadn’t painted the stump lime green.

  The jurors’ experiences and attitudes were going to be more important in our decisions than their demographics, so I had a host of questions for us to pursue during voir dire, the part of the trial where the lawyers get to know the jurors. I wanted to hear about their work history, gauge their respect for authority, and find out if any of the jurors were related to someone with a disability. That would give us a sense of how they viewed Mr. Rondo and whether they could appreciate the life-changing circumstances that a missing limb could cause.

  There’s no scientific way to know how a person is going to vote on a jury. You could look at demographics, lifestyle, background, political affiliations, clothing, and occupation and still not see a clear picture. You could ask them if they’d ever done jury service before and how that trial had concluded. You could probably use a Ouija board and have the same success rate.

  I’d heard about a lawyer in Globe who asks potential jurors a question about the bumper stickers on their cars. “Save the Whales: Collect the Whole Set.” “Baby on Board.” “If This Is Tourist Season, Why Can’t We Shoot Them?” If it’s important enough to put on your car and wear around for the whole world to see, then it’s probably a pretty defining characteristic for you.

  I put my copy of the jury questionnaires into the order the potential jurors were sitting and sketched a quick grid on a sheet of blank paper to keep them straight.

  Rondo’s lawyer, Tracy Drury, was a petite blonde with an elfin face and a rose-colored business suit that looked like it should have been part of a Republican Easter parade. She rose and approached the jury box. Her questions seemed random, but she included each potential juror, sometimes asking about their family and sometimes their background.

  There were a couple of jurors I really wanted to keep, like Rodrigues, the twenty-six-year-old black construction worker. When answering questions, he said that he believed “every man’s got to watch out for himself on the job” but that “sometimes the boss just doesn’t get it, he’s not the one doing the work.” The female telephone installer next to him added that sometimes it seemed as if “whoever writes these safety manuals has never operated the equipment.”

  The one juror I wanted to get rid of was Marshall in seat two. He was a sixty-four-year-old ex-Air Force captain who had strutted into the courtroom and taken the first seat in the gallery before anyone else could enter the row. As each name was called, he gave a sweeping gesture to the place in the jury box they should sit. This was a man who wanted to run things; he wanted to be jury foreman.

  I handed Tracy a note to ask Mr. Marshall how he felt about personal injury lawsuits. “It’s about goddam time these mealymouths started taking responsibility for their own actions,” he replied. Then he backpedaled and said he was sure he could be open-minded about the trial. I didn’t want him anywhere near the case.

  I conferred with Tracy, and we decided to use our peremptory challenges on Mr. Marshall and a businessman who said he thought people were “suit happy these days.”

  I felt good about the final selection. The men on the jury were predominantly blue-collar workers, a couple of whom said they “did their jobs their own way” and not the way their bosses originally showed them. We had more law-and-order-oriented retirees than I’d hoped for, but that’s what you get in Arizona. It’s not a place where people are dying to come; it’s where they’re coming to die. Judge Levy swore in the twelve jurors and two alternates.

  When I got back to the office at three o’clock, Jessica glared at me and looked at her watch.

  “Another sick day?” she asked.

  I looked up in surprise. “No, today was Rondo’s jury selection.”

  “Oh, that’s right.” She pirouetted on her stiletto heels, pushed past the receptionist, and charged back into her office.

  What had I done to piss her off? Sure, I had taken some personal time, but I didn’t think it was affecting my work.

  I pulled the ever-growing Cates file to the middle of my desk. I wanted the information on tire-tread evidence. There it was, the tire marks at the scene of Lydia Chavez’s murder were consistent with the treads of Cates’s Cadillac Escalade. It was still new on the night of the attack, with only three hundred miles on the odometer. The report didn’t say what color it was, but I was betting it was black and that it had tailed me home on Saturday night.

  Since Jessica was already mad at me for being out of the office, I waited until she left for a meeting before I snuck off to meet Strike. Enrique had copied the most relevant information from Terry Blanken’s file, and I wanted to find out more about him. Strike was parked across the street from the Redrock Bank complex, in a patch of shade that only covered the front half of his car. I got in and anchored the loose pages with my right thigh as he drove.

  I mentally replayed Strike’s story about the Arizona Robin Hood. Maybe it was time to put those horseshoes back on the right way and start moving ahead instead of backwards.

  Blanken could certainly be the man I called the Animal. The police records showed that Blanken had been raised in a foster home since he was eight and had been in trouble ever since.

  Strike stopped at a red light.

  “Why do you suppose Blanken was in a foster home at all?” I asked. It wasn’t clear from the notes we had. They just said that the boy’s parents left town, leaving him behind. I couldn’t imagine abandoning a child like that. Strike grunted.

  I looked back at the notes. By the time he was sixteen, Blanken had been picked up five times on Peeping Tom charges. His foster parents had, at first, just thought it was a normal growing-up prank and had not taken it seriously. But when he was sixteen, he had chosen to spy on a judge’s daughter and earned himself a year in a juvenile detention center.

  He’d been in and out of jail ever since then, once on a vagrancy charge, several times for Peeping Tom convictions, and then the latest, the home invasion and attempted rape when he was twenty-one. At this rate Blanken might want to change his permanent mailing address to the county jail.

  “His house is up ahead,” Strike said, indicating a square gray building on the right. It was little more than a shack, just unpainted concrete blocks and a tar paper roof. No car in the driveway, and the weeds growing there suggested there hadn’t been one for a long time.

  Two houses on the block were vacant and looked ready to be condemned. One screen door hung askew, and plywood had been nailed across a broken window.

  “Let’s see if the neighbors have anything to say.” Strike tried the houses on either side of Blanken’s. The only response was the angry retort of a massive
black dog on a chain.

  “I guess we’ll have to keep going backwards for a while,” I muttered, but Strike overheard me and smiled.

  He flipped through the papers I’d been holding. “Look at this. When he was growing up, Blanken’s foster family lived near Glenn and Country Club roads, and that means he probably went to Catalina High School. Let’s start there.”

  “That’s where Amy and I went to school.” Had Amy known Red Blanken? Had he been stalking her all these years?

  I drove past Catalina all the time but hadn’t returned for a visit to the school in over fifteen years. The blue and white sign at the entrance still gave the exhortation “Go Trojans!” That soldier mascot had been the butt of a lot of jokes through the years. We went up the broad steps and found the principal’s office near the entrance, the same place it had been in my own high school days.

  “We’re looking for an old Catalina yearbook, please,” Strike said. He’d counted back to Blanken’s sophomore year, assuming that he had been in a juvenile detention facility for at least part of his junior and senior years.

  The blonde looked up from her computer screen and smiled. She was a knockout, and the cat’s-eye glasses she wore only seemed to emphasize it. She was all curves and gold and perfume. I glanced at Strike. He looked as love-struck as any acne-ridden teenager.

  “That’s in the library.” She smiled into Strike’s eyes and pointed to the right. “Ask for Miss Miller.”

  We thanked her and headed down the hall. “Put your tongue back in your mouth, Mr. Strike.” He almost blushed.

  I remembered the librarian from my own days at Catalina, and she hadn’t changed a bit. She could have been Miss Gorgeous’s grandmother; a soft, sweet-smelling woman with kind eyes and a bear-trap mind. She handed us the right yearbook after a four-second search.

  We found Blanken’s picture in the sophomore section. He certainly wasn’t wearing a mullet in those days; his picture showed a head shaved almost bald. Lips as taut as a tightrope. Terry Blanken wasn’t giving the world the benefit of the doubt.

  I flipped through the book, looking for any clubs or sports that Blanken might have participated in. Nothing. He was a loner even then.

  I flipped farther back in the book. There, amid the timid and arrogant faces of the junior class, was my beautiful baby sister.

  Had Amy known Terry Blanken? Even though they were a year apart in age, they would have been at the same school for at least two years. If she had seen him at the rodeo, would she have thought, Ah, there’s a face I remember from high school? Is that all it took to approach her and gain her confidence?

  I closed the book, my finger still marking the page with Blanken’s picture. Miss Miller was back at her desk.

  “Miss Miller, do you remember this young man?” I opened the book and pointed to Blanken.

  “Oh, young Mr. Blanken. Is he in trouble again?”

  20

  I drove to work the next day with one eye searching the rearview mirror for a big black SUV that stayed too long behind me. There was nothing.

  Jessica announced that she had a hair appointment and sashayed out at three o’clock. I took advantage of the absence-of-boss to do more research on Sharon Hamishfender from Patagonia. An internet search of white-page listings didn’t turn up any S. or Sharon Hamishfender anywhere in the country, but there were two listings for Hamishfender in the 520 area code, which included Patagonia.

  The first number rang unanswered, but the second one I called was picked up right away.

  I tried not to sound like a telemarketer. “I’m a friend of Sharon Hamishfender’s. We met several years ago, and I’m trying to get back in touch with her. Are you related to Sharon?”

  “I might be. What did you say your name was?”

  “Calla Gentry.”

  “I don’t remember Sharon telling me your name before. Where did you say you met her?”

  I wasn’t going to get anywhere with this protective relative unless I came clean, so I explained why I was trying to reach her.

  “I’m Sharon’s sister,” she said. “She lives in New York now and has an unlisted number that she doesn’t like me to give out. I’m sure you understand.” I gave her my home and office numbers and asked her to have Sharon call me.

  A few minutes later the receptionist said I had a call on line one. The caller wouldn’t give her name.

  “Ms. Gentry?” she asked.

  “Yes, is this Sharon Hamishfender?”

  “I don’t use that name anymore. It sounds like our two families have a lot in common. Two younger sisters who have been raped, and two older sisters who are the only ones who care enough to do something about it.” There was alcohol and veiled venom in her voice.

  “Tell me what happened to you. I don’t know any of the details.”

  “It was eight years ago. I got raped leaving work. Two men I’d met inside. I guess I hadn’t shown them enough attention.”

  “You’re a dancer, right?”

  “Yeah, I was working as an exotic dancer—an ecdysiast, if you prefer—out by Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.” The men had both raped and sodomized her. Her words in recounting the story were slurred, but the hatred was not.

  “You say your sister was the only one who tried to do something about it. Didn’t the police have any luck?”

  “I didn’t file a police report; my sister did. But I couldn’t go through with it.” Ice tinkled in a glass as she took a sip.

  “Why not?”

  “Because everybody else in my family made me feel like it was all my fault. You know how it goes—I had it coming, I deserved it for dancing half naked, nobody would believe it coming from a stripper anyway.” She knew the litany of their complaints too well for me to believe that she was past their condemnation.

  “But you were raped. They hurt you. Your family had to understand that, didn’t they?” I was asking myself the question as much as I was asking her. Why didn’t Amy think I would be able to understand? Was she, like Sharon, not convinced of her own innocence?

  “I think the way my father put it was, ‘What did you expect, wagging yourself in front of a man that way?’ That’s the last time I ever talked to him. Moved out the next day.”

  I asked if she could identify the men who had attacked her. She said she could; she even knew their names. I recognized the tightness in her voice: hatred can be a mirror image sometimes.

  “Who were they?”

  “Real names don’t matter. They were just two college kids. I’d seen them in the club before. Now I just think of them as Mutt and Jeff.”

  “Do you know the name Terry Blanken … Red Blanken?”

  “No, never heard of him.” She was neither hesitant nor curious in her reply.

  “Do you remember Raymond Cates from Patagonia?”

  She gave a quiet laugh. “Ray Cates? Sure, I remember him. It didn’t surprise me when my sister told me that he’d been arrested for murder.”

  I picked up a pen to take fast notes. “Why? What do you remember about him?”

  “Oh, I remember lots about him. He’s four years older than I am, so we never really went to school together. But when I was twelve, he grabbed me on the way home from school and started waving a knife around, saying he was going to cut me if I didn’t ‘suck him off.’ I didn’t even know what it meant.”

  “Did you tell anybody about it?”

  “Oh, sure, his family owned just about the whole town. I’m sure they would have taken me real seriously. Or maybe even then I thought it was all my fault.”

  That was a deep well of guilt she had fallen into. “This may sound like a silly question, but did either of your rapists ever call you Sweet Thing?”

  She gave a low laugh. “They called me lots of things, but that wasn’t one of them.”

  “May I call you back if I’ve got other questions?”

  Ice cubes rattled across the wires again. “Call who back? Sharon Hamishfender doesn’t exist anymore.”
/>   So Sharon knew who her rapists were, and neither one was likely to be the Sweet Thing rapist I was looking for. But I’d also learned that Cates had been a sexual bully during his high school years. Maybe he’d gotten better at it over time.

  I replaced the phone on its cradle and thought about the misnamed Thanksgiving Day when Amy tried to take her life. I knew now it was self-accusation that drove her to that haven of liquor, pills, and silence. That same shame echoed in Sharon’s voice. In Amy’s case there was more than enough guilt to go around, and I laid claim to my share.

  Even days after the rape Amy had seemed numb, as if the knife had severed her feelings and instincts as well as her muscles. She must have felt soiled, rent open beyond repair.

  Early that morning I had stuffed a turkey, sweetened the cranberries, and put potatoes in a pot of cold water. In other words, I pretended that it was just another Thanksgiving. Amy, like an uncooperative rag doll at a child’s tea party, refused to pretend along with me.

  “Amy, talk to me. You can say anything.”

  “There’s nothing I want to say.”

  Back then all I heard was, You can’t help me. There’s nothing you can do.

  “You can’t just ask for my help and then turn me away when it suits you. I want a full-time sister, not the shadow of one.”

  I had stormed from the room and focused my energy on the advertising job I had ignored for the last three weeks. Stacks of videocassettes from recent focus groups had been delivered from the ad agency and awaited my review. I filled a carafe with coffee and took it back to my bedroom. Then I loaded the first cassette into the VCR and donned earphones to better hear the focus group participants’ discussion of a new underarm deodorant our client wanted to introduce. Hours passed as I shuffled through the cassettes and took notes. If Amy didn’t want to talk to me, that was fine. I’d show her.

  I lost both my patience and my sister that day. The only reason I found Amy still alive was that I had to go to the bathroom.

  At the hospital, a caring paramedic tried to explain what had happened.