Sandrine's Case (9780802193520) (18 page)

“Detective Alabrandi,” Judge Rutledge said, “the court reminds you that you are still under oath.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

The true detective looked completely relaxed as he prepared to hammer another plank onto my scaffold. He had done this before to other such miscreants, as he perceived me to be, and the smooth way he did it showed on his face, so very dispassionate, just a man doing his job, as if he had no feelings against me personally though I knew he had plenty of them.

How did I know?

I knew because he'd returned to 237 Crescent Road about a week after our first rainy day interview, and during which time I'd recognized the tiny hint of animus that was in his eyes as he'd taken his seat once more on my living room sofa, taken out his brown notebook, and with unceremonious speed fired his first question.

“Do you know Malcolm Esterman?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “He's teaches Greek history and mythology. He was in the same department as Sandrine. They were colleagues.”

“Colleagues,” Alabrandi repeated.

“Yes,” I told him firmly. “Colleagues.”

The look on his face caused me to lean forward slightly.

“What is this all about?” I asked. “What does Malcolm Esterman have to do with anything?”

“Your wife called him the day she died,” Alabrandi said. “Several times, actually.”

“I see.”

“Do you have any idea why she might have done that?”

“You'd have to ask Malcolm.”

“We have.”

“What did he say?”

“That they were close.”

“Close?” I asked quietly. “Sandrine and Malcolm weren't close.” I sat back. “What does that mean, anyway? Close?”

Alabrandi shrugged. “My job is simply to look into various possibilities, Mr. Madison,” he said. “When a woman the age of your wife, only forty-six, when she suddenly . . . ends up dead, we have—”

“Ends up dead?” I interrupted. “What is that supposed to mean?”

Alabrandi's gaze hardened. “What do you think it means?”

I sat back. “As you know, my wife was already dying,” I told him. “And it was going to be a terrible death.”

“And a long one,” Alabrandi said, then, like an actor who'd inadvertently jumped ahead in the play, he added, “Her death was going to be long and very difficult for you.”

“For her,” I barked back. “Difficult for Sandrine.”

“Too difficult for her to bear, is that what you're saying?” Alabrandi asked. “So that she began stockpiling Demerol?”

So he knows that, too, I thought.

“Yes,” I answered.

To my surprise, Detective Alabrandi didn't pursue the issue that would later emerge during the fourth day of my trial, the fact that it was I, not Sandrine, who'd asked Dr. Ortins for Demerol, that it was I, not Sandrine, who'd picked up every single refill at Gerald Wayland's pharmacy.

Nor had he yet brought these facts into play during his testimony, as I noticed at that point, but rather he'd continued to follow Mr. Singleton's careful lead.

“Now, Detective Alabrandi, before the recess, we were discussing your initial interrogation of Mr. Madison,” Mr. Singleton said.

“It wasn't an interrogation,” Alabrandi responded. “Mr. Madison had not been arrested at that point.”

“Shit,” Morty whispered, “he knows I called that recess to allow the jury to forget some of what you said, and now the little bastard is going over it again.”

Which was precisely what happened.

“Now, Detective Alabrandi,” Mr. Singleton said. “There were various issues that you'd found troubling, is that correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Would you tell us again what those issues were?”

As Detective Alabrandi meticulously ticked off these issues, I marveled at how few of them he'd brought up during our second conversation. He'd mentioned Malcolm Esterman, though without further elaboration and only a hint of innuendo. Throughout the interview (since, evidently, it had not been an interrogation though it had certainly felt like one) he'd been polite. No. More than polite. There'd been a cautiousness about him, so that he had seemed rather like a man forced to explore a disreputable atmosphere whose moral relativism had both surprised and embarrassed him. For that reason, he'd seemed to approach the troubling issues related to Sandrine's death quite carefully, like a computer technician who didn't actually want to know what might be on his client's computer.

On the witness stand, he still struck me as that technician, though now one who'd ultimately been compelled first to check out that hard drive, then reveal the dark things he found there.

“Well, there was the matter of the note Mrs. Madison left behind,” he said. “Officer Hill had reported that Mr. Madison had called it a suicide note, but when we read it we found no mention of suicide in it. When I later asked Mr. Madison why he had called it a suicide note, he answered that he'd simply assumed that that's what it was.”

That had been a stumble, I thought instantly, and a stupid one, since there'd been no need for me to call Sandrine's note anything at all.

“Did you gather from that statement that Mr. Madison had been aware that his wife intended to commit suicide?”

Morty rose to object that Mr. Singleton's question called for a conclusion from the witness.

Judge Rutledge sustained the objection and, just like in the movies, Mr. Singleton rephrased his question.

“Did Mr. Madison tell you why he'd assumed the statement found beside his wife's bed to be a suicide note?”

“Yes, he did,” Detective Alabrandi answered. “He said that she'd called it her ‘final word.' He told me that when he found her dead, he'd assumed that she'd meant this last communication to be a suicide note.”

Instead, it had been her “final word” on Cleopatra, though it had ended not with the sense that she would write no more on this subject, but that she was only now beginning to explore it, a final word that had not in the least seemed final, a curious and perhaps sinister fact, which Detective Alabrandi now revealed to the jury.

“The note had nothing to do with suicide,” he said. “It had to do with Cleopatra.”

Mr. Singleton stepped over to the witness box and handed Sandrine's note to the witness.

“Is this the note you found beside Mrs. Madison's bed?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Would you read it to the jury, please?”

As Alabrandi read, I felt the utter strangeness of what Sandrine had written coil around me once again. Why had she written as if she'd had all the time in the world to pursue the elusive Cleopatra? Why had she indicated the nature of her future research? Why had she spoken of traveling to Egypt, walking the desert sands, and sailing up the Nile? I asked myself all these questions as Alabrandi began to read my wife's “final word.”

“‘More than anything, perhaps, Cleopatra's life represents a woman lost in time, the works of her chroniclers destroyed by fire or water, her own memoir unwritten, a woman all but erased, save for a likeness—or perhaps merely an imagined likeness—stamped on ancient coins.'”

The question that came toward me like a spear was the one summoned by the last line, which Alabrandi read slowly, pronouncing each word carefully so that the implication of what Sandrine had written could not be more clear.

“‘Over time, my hope would be to bring this elusive woman, along with the hard-won wisdom her life bequeathed, to a larger audience than those scholars who have already dismissed her, and according to whom she was but a pawn in a man's dark game.'”

Mr. Singleton allowed the jury to absorb those final words, then, just in case they hadn't, he repeated them. “A pawn in a man's dark game.” He looked at me, then back to the jury. “Yes.”

I looked at the jury as Alabrandi folded the yellow paper. I looked at them and saw that they'd heard what Sandrine had written not as the final, abandon-hope-all-ye sentence of a suicide note but as the clarion call of a passionately intelligent woman who'd conceived a life's mission for herself, and who was going to pursue it as long as she had the strength to do so, a life's mission, as Sandrine's last words appeared to suggest, that had been heartlessly terminated by “a man's dark game.”

I'm finished, I thought, a conclusion I labored to conceal from the jury by pretending to be deeply interested in what was currently being said in court.

“As far as your investigation has turned up, what you just read to the court is the last sentence Sandrine Allegra Madison left us, isn't it Detective Alabrandi?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“It is, yes, sir.”

With that, Singleton drew the paper from Alabrandi's hand, stared at it almost lovingly, then repeated, “Over time my hope would be . . .” He looked at Detective Alabrandi. “When did Mr. Madison indicate that his wife wrote those words?”

“He said the note was written on the afternoon of November 14,” Alabrandi answered.

“And when did Mrs. Madison die?”

“According to the autopsy, she died between the hours of six p.m. and midnight on November 14.”

“The same day this . . . I really don't know what it is . . . but this . . . note was written?”

“Yes, sir.”

Morty leaned forward, the only indication I had of just how damaging he felt all this to be.

“Did Mr. Madison indicate to you whether he'd actually read the note?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“He said that he hadn't read it.”

“Did he ask you about the contents of the note?”

“Yes, and I told him it was more like a college essay or something of that nature.”

“And what was his reaction to that?”

“He smiled.”

“He smiled. Did he say anything about the note?”

“Yes. He said it was ‘typical.'”

“Detective Alabrandi, did Mr. Madison ever tell you what he found ‘typical' in the final communication of Sandrine Madison?”

“No,” Alabrandi answered.

Which is true, though the answer would have been easy: the grace of her writing, and how heartfelt it was.

“Now, when you read this note, you noticed that Mrs. Madison made no mention of suicide, is that correct, Detective Alabrandi?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“In fact, she only mentions herself twice, isn't that so?”

“Yes.”

Singleton handed the note back to Alabrandi.

“She mentions herself in the first line,” he said “Would you mind reading it again?”

Detective Alabrandi lowered his gaze to the paper and read: “‘I often think of Cleopatra.'”

“That ‘I' is Mrs. Madison's sole mention of herself until the last line, isn't it, Detective?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Did you have occasion to mention this to Mr. Madison?”

“In our initial interview, I did, yes,” Alabrandi answered. “I told him that the entire ‘suicide note' was about the Egyptian queen Cleopatra.”

“How did Mr. Madison respond?”

“He informed me that Cleopatra was not Egyptian.”

I glanced over as Morty released a very soft sigh, then a whispered, “Shit.”

“She was Greek evidently,” Alabrandi added. “A Macedonian, Mr. Madison told me. He said that Cleopatra was no more Egyptian than Elizabeth Taylor.”

Elizabeth Taylor.

It struck me as not at all strange that her name instantly returned me to Sandrine, a stunning young woman of twenty-one, fresh from her studies at the Sorbonne. She'd been fiery and passionate, a brightly burning blaze of a woman. Once, long into our marriage, we'd been watching Geneviève Bujold in the part of Antigone, and I'd leaned over and whispered, “That's you, Sandrine.” I had expected her to be pleased. Who wouldn't have been by such a comparison? But her eyes had darkened and she said, “Only in your mind. Because it's what you want me to be.”

I was jarred from this disturbing memory by the yellow paper Mr. Singleton now once again took from Alabrandi and lifted into the air, the way the jurors' eyes followed it, the grim look on their faces, as if it were a pair of bloodstained panties.

“And it was this paper that Mr. Madison described as a suicide note, wasn't it?” he asked. “This paper that makes no reference whatsoever to suicide. Isn't that true, Detective?”

Alabrandi nodded. “Yes.”

It was an answer that lingered in the air as Singleton stepped toward the judge, and in the stark quiet of the room he added simply, “I'd like to offer this note in evidence, Your Honor.” Then, no less quietly, he stepped away.

Exhibit A

In a movie, it would be called Exhibit A, the note Mr. Singleton called “Sandrine's last message,” but I failed to notice the exact identification the court assigned to it. Clearly, save for melodramatic effect, it could not actually have been labeled “A,” since a host of material had already been handed over for such labeling. But in my trial, as I had learned by then, it was the small, incremental bits of circumstantial evidence, not the “Exhibit A” of courtroom dramas, that had entangled me, little sins of both omission and commission: a cold response, a silence when I should have spoken, a question I should have asked but hadn't, these the winding fibers in the rope that could at some point hang me.

And so I watched quite impassively as the single sheet of paper moved from desk to desk, making its slow rounds until it was finally taken away by one of the court officials. Officer Hill had described the paper as yellow, but in fact the color was beige, the paper tanned and textured to resemble papyrus, my gift to Sandrine on her fortieth birthday, and not one sheet of which she'd ever used prior to penning her final . . . what?