Sandrine's Case (9780802193520) (16 page)

Malcolm Esterman.

Of all people.

His name had once conjured up quite a different emotion than it did now. Actually, his name had called up no emotion at all before Sandrine's death and Detective Alabrandi's subsequent investigation. Now there were images I simply couldn't get out of my mind, all of them more or less pornographic, sheets and naked bodies equally twisted, both sweaty. For a sound track I heard heavy breathing, Sandrine's growing more rapid and shallow until she releases the last one, which is, of course, long, exhausted, and fantastically satisfied.

“I didn't really know him,” I told Alexandria. “I mean, I knew him. He's been teaching at Coburn for thirty years. Of course, I saw him around. At faculty meetings, graduations, that sort of thing. But the fact that he was—”

“Of course,” Alexandria interrupted.

She let the subject drop, and so did I. It would all be detailed at the trial today or tomorrow or the day following. Malcolm's name was on the witness list, after all.

Alexandria looked at the clock on the microwave. “We'd better get dressed. We're running late.”

With that, we parted, she to her room and I to mine. We did not see each other again until I strolled into the living room, where she was already waiting for me.

“Jesus, Dad,” she said as I came into the room. “Your tie's a mess.”

“I guess my fingers are a little unsteady,” I told her.

Reflexively, I started to fuss with the knot, but she stepped forward and began to work with it herself.

She has had a few relationships, but none had ever lasted long enough or proved deep enough for her to bring the fellow home to meet Sandrine and me. Perhaps she feared that I would have disapproved of whomever she brought to us, and I probably would have, though I would have kept quiet about it and been pleasant to the chap. But once Alexandria had left with him I'd have no doubt shaken my head and wondered what in the world she must be thinking to take this guy seriously. And throughout all this I would have thought myself quite tolerant, that I was judging this young man not by some high, intellectual standard but by some simpler aspect of his character, as Sandrine had once judged me:
because you're kind.

But lately I have come to think that it is Alexandria who is actually tolerant. After all, she has borne the shocking revelations of the investigation without once questioning the many secrets I kept from Sandrine and that she kept from me and that we both kept from our daughter. “You and Mom gave me the illusion that I lived in a happy home,” she said to me after the first scandalous details emerged, “and I guess I have to thank both of you for that.”

“This can't be fixed without undoing the whole thing,” Alexandria said as she unwound the mess I'd made of my tie.

I bowed to the hard-won truth that there were many things like that.

“Hold your head up, Dad,” Alexandria said as she pulled out the final knot and started over.

As she did this, her face was very near mine. I could feel her breath, and the simple fact that she was breathing, that my daughter lived, suddenly gave me a stroke of happiness, though not without an anguished sense of how easily we forget or take for granted these greatest and deepest of our good fortunes.

“There,” she said and stepped back. “Okay. So are you ready to face the day?”

“Ready,” I replied with a great show of self-assurance, a great show of being confident that nothing I would hear today or at any subsequent day during my trial could further shake the foundations of my life. “Absolutely ready,” I added.

But I was not.

“Good, let's go then,” Alexandria said. “Because judges don't like it when the defendant is late.”

Defendant, yes. For more than ever, and even to myself, I felt myself to be precisely that.

Call Detective
Raymond Alabrandi

There's no story like a murder story. Mr. Singleton knows this quite well, and so I'd been expecting, though hardly anticipating, the moment when he would at last begin to present my case's events in the way of a cheap detective yarn.

With the calling of Detective Alabrandi, I knew that the moment had arrived.

Detective Ray Alabrandi was perfect for the part he played, tall, lean, appropriately graying at the temples. He marched to the witness stand like a soldier in the field, took the oath, and then, following Mr. Singleton's questions and in a clear, strong voice, he told the jury that he had been a policeman for seventeen years. Before that he'd been a soldier, but in a policeman's role, assigned to army CID. This was impressive, as was Detective Alabrandi, a cool professional, not completely cynical, but used to being lied to, just like the homicide cops the jury saw nightly on television or read about—or so I assumed—in detective novels.

He told the court that he'd arrived at 237 Crescent Road at 3:57 p.m. on the afternoon of Friday, November 21. He didn't add that it was raining that afternoon, but it was, and as he carefully responded to Mr. Singleton's questions I recalled how a line of raindrops had settled upon his dark blue overcoat by the time I opened the door.

“Samuel Madison?” he asked.

I nodded.

He showed me his badge. “Would you mind if I came in? There are a few things we'd like to clear up.”

I opened the door and escorted him into our book-lined living room. The shelves were packed with the great works but Alabrandi seemed to gather only one impression from them: the fact that I probably thought myself a great deal smarter than he was, an opinion with which I have no doubt he has since come quite confidently to disagree.

This recollection was interrupted by the sound of Mr. Singleton's commanding voice.

“So troubling questions had been raised with regard to Sandrine Madison's death, isn't that correct, Detective Alabrandi?”

“During the course of our initial investigation, yes,” Detective Alabrandi answered. “And the autopsy, of course.”

“What questions?”

They were questions that had not occurred to me until Detective Alabrandi had first confronted me with them on that rainy afternoon as we sat in the living room of a house whose clutter had earlier bothered Officer Hill, and which, by then, I'd somewhat cleaned up. But before the detective had launched into his substantive and disturbing questions, there'd been certain polite formalities of which Mr. Singleton wished the jury to be informed.

“Now, when you met Professor Madison that morning, did he have any questions regarding his wife?”

“Yes, he did,” Alabrandi answered. “He asked me about the disposition of Mrs. Madison's body.” He took out a small brown notebook and flipped to the appropriate page. “He asked me, ‘Where's Sandrine?'”

“When did Mr. Madison inquire as to the whereabouts of his wife's body?”

“The minute he saw me,” Alabrandi told the jury. “I was still standing on that little porch at the front door of the house.”

I'd asked immediately because I'd had a bizarre and very disturbing nightmare while taking a nap that same afternoon, Sandrine on a metal table fitted with drains, her pale but still beautiful body further whitened by the glare of fluorescent lights, a man poised over her with a scalpel in his hand. But that had not been the worst of it. In this horrible dream the masked pathologist had demanded to know who'd taken her life, and she'd opened her eyes and with a terrible virulence had hissed through her clinched teeth: Sam!

“What did Mr. Madison say exactly?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“He asked me if the autopsy had been done,” Alabrandi answered. “I told him no, but that it was scheduled for tomorrow morning.”

At which point I could have responded only with a look of dread because some strange part of my disordered thinking at that moment argued that I would continue to be subject to this chilling nightmare until Sandrine had been cremated. And suppose I became disoriented by this nightmare, and while in the grip of some frantic need to escape it, an unguarded moment I could not anticipate, I blurted some incriminating remark? I was being watched now, and I knew it. Did it not make sense to rid myself of anything that might later damage my case?

“How did Professor Madison respond to this?” Mr. Singleton asked.

Because of this nightmare and the idiotic notion that I would keep having it until Sandrine's body was no more, I'd responded by way of the bizarre literary reference Detective Alabrandi now revealed to the jury.

“He said that her body was working on him like a telltale heart.”

“A telltale heart?” Mr. Singleton asked.

Detective Alabrandi nodded. “It's a reference to a story by Edgar Allan Poe. That's what Professor Madison told me.”

“Did you consequently look up that story and read it?”

He had indeed done just that, Alabrandi told the court, then went on to relate the story's details. As he did so I noticed two jury members lean forward. So that's what a good story does, I thought, at least minimally: it turns ordinary people into more sensitive observers.

Should I have kept that simple fact in mind as I'd struggled through draft after draft of “The Pull of the Earth,” I asked myself now, each rendering more academic than the other, more clever and more learned, but also more snide, so that by the time Sandrine had read the last one she'd declared it “cold and unloving.” I had, she said, “stripped it of every tenderness.”

Had that been the first occasion when I'd actually found myself hating her, I asked myself now, hating Sandrine not because her critique had been false but because it had been so devastatingly true? “Your book has everything a great book should have, Sam,” she'd told me in that sad tone of hers, “but a soul.” How, in the wake of so dark and true a judgment, could I have not wanted her dead?

“In this story, it's the telltale heart that reveals the narrator's crime?” Mr. Singleton asked once Alabrandi had summarized Poe's tale. “It is the telltale heart that holds the key to his guilt?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hm,” Mr. Singleton breathed softly, adding nothing else, thus careful not to suggest to the jury that a man should be convicted of murder on the basis of a literary inference. Instead, he paused a moment, then said, “All right, let's go on.” He glanced at his notes. “Now, Detective Alabrandi, did you subsequently inform Mr. Madison that following the autopsy, Sandrine Madison's body would not be cremated immediately?”

“Yes, I did.”

“What was his reaction?”

“There was no reaction.”

“No reaction?”

“He shrugged, I think. But he didn't say anything.”

This was true, and the reason for this admittedly unemotional reaction was that I'd seen another and now somewhat deeper suspicion in Alabrandi's eyes as he'd informed me that the authorities intended to hold on to Sandrine's body, a clear indication that they considered it evidence of some sort.

“Now, at this time, Detective Alabrandi, did you have a few questions for Professor Madison?”

“I did, yes, sir.”

There'd been quite a few of them, actually, and as Detective Alabrandi enumerated them I found myself once again in my living room, listening closely, and perhaps guardedly, as he began to discuss what he had initially called his “concerns.”

“As you probably know, Mr. Madison, in a situation like this, we have to make inquiries,” he said.

“A situation like this?”

“A presumed suicide.”

“Presumed?”

“Until it's proven to have been a suicide.”

I sat back slightly. “I see.”

“Your wife was young, and there was an initial mention of suicide, and so the fact is we have to investigate.”

“You're investigating Sandrine?”

“Her death. And so, naturally, that extends to pretty much anything to do with her,” Alabrandi answered. “Her situation at work, the family. What her life was like.”

Was,
I thought to myself, and in that repetition I once more affirmed that Sandrine's life must now be spoken of in the past tense.

Even on this fifth day of my trial, attending carefully as Mr. Singleton moved Detective Alabrandi step by step through our first meeting, it was hard for me to think of Sandrine as no longer alive. More to the point, it was difficult for me to accept her life as unrecoverable, to face the hard fact that nothing could be done to put it on a better track. This was the dreadful truth I could not make myself admit: that not one word of her story could be taken back, not one passage edited, not one twist added, that the last page had been written and the book was closed. Sandrine had accepted this long before I had. Deep in the remembered gloom of the bedroom in which she died, I remembered her face in soft light, her voice a whisper, the sad truth she'd unflinchingly pronounced.
For most people, Sam, she'd said to me, the cavalry does not arrive.

I shook my head at the truth of this, now also understanding that it had not arrived for her.

Morty suddenly gave me a little punch in the arm.

“Hey,” he whispered sharply. “You're shaking your head.”

“Sorry,” I told him, “Just a memory.”

“Well, kill the gestures, Sam,” he instructed me sternly. “The jury has no idea what you thinking about, and if you're shaking your head at a piece of testimony that strikes them as obviously true, then you've lost some credibility points with them, understand?”

“Yes,” I told him. “Sorry.”

“Please, Sam, just stay off memory lane and pay attention to what's being said in court.”