Sandrine's Case (9780802193520) (31 page)

“You probably don't like this place,” Morty said. “I chose it because we're less likely to run into anyone from Coburn College.”

I shrugged. “I'm past caring where I have dinner, Morty.”

He looked at me closely. “I warned you that you'd be pretty worn out by the end of the state's case.”

I nodded. “Well, that much is true.”

Morty took a swig from the enormous glass of beer he'd ordered. “What do you make of Jane Forbes?” he asked.

Before I could answer, the waitress stepped up. Morty ordered a steak with several sides and another beer. I wanted only a salad.

“I mean, I couldn't see anything all that damaging in her testimony,” Morty added. “You weren't the most approachable guy. Big deal. Your wife sometimes got blue, sometimes felt lonely. You're supposed to be hung for that?” He waved his hand. “Bullshit.”

His cross-examination of Jane had been polite but to the point. He'd gone over everything she'd said in answer to Mr. Singleton's questions, then, step by step, made Jane admit that she'd heard no fear in Sandrine's tone, nor any hint that she'd had the slightest suspicion that her husband might kill her. After that, he'd gone on to ask if she'd heard anything during her conversations with Sandrine that had alarmed her such that she'd warned her friend to be watchful or advised her to contact local authorities. That is to say, the police. To this, Jane had answered with a very definite “No.”

“But that note on Cleopatra,” Morty added after a quick sip from that enormous mug of beer. “That could backfire on Singleton, make your wife look like an egghead.” He shrugged. “Anyway, we're at the end of the state's case so I wanted us to go over the defense strategy one more time.”

The food came and Morty dove in. I picked at mine, a lack of appetite he immediately noticed.

“You're wasting away,” he said. “What's the problem?”

I shrugged. “A lack of will.”

“To what?”

“Go on.”

“Oh please,” Morty said with a dismissive wave of the hand, then looked more closely and said, “You're serious, aren't you? Is it because you know more is coming? From Sandrine, I mean?”

When I didn't answer, he leaned forward and gave me his best lawyerly, fatherly expression. “She's trying to kill you, Sam. You were right about that.”

Again, I said nothing.

“Which is actually something I wanted to bring up with regard to the defense,” Morty added. “The fact is, I think you should reconsider your decision not to, well, bring up a few possibilities with regard to your wife.”

My silence appeared to work on him like a spur.

“She is a black widow, that's the truth,” he said. “A classic black widow, and she's digging your grave from the moldy depths of her own and—”

“Stop,” I said softly. “Just stop, Morty.”

Then I rose.

“Thanks for dinner,” I said softly. “See you tomorrow.”

I didn't want to go directly home. Alexandria would be there, and what I wanted was to be alone so that I could work through the many conflicting ideas that were assaulting me, all of them having to do with Sandrine, what she was or was not doing to me, and why.

But there was no place I could go to sit and think, not even the library, which was the last place I'd tried to do exactly that, only to notice Mrs. Crenshaw eyeing me from a distant row of shelves. She was the widowed wife of the man who'd first hired Sandrine and me at Coburn College. It was her kindly late husband who'd worked so hard to bring us to Coburn. She'd quickly looked away when I had caught her in my eye, and because of that I'd known exactly what she was thinking, that I'd brought shame upon her husband's reputation, as well as that of the college he had worked so tirelessly to benefit, shame upon everything that was good about this old-fashioned and genuinely upright college town.

So the library was closed to me, and the market, and the general store, places that had once welcomed me but never would again. For no matter the outcome of my trial, I had raised a great ugly noise and it would echo through my life as long as I lived here. No question about it, I thought, I would have to leave. The big red
A
was painted on my chest. There were many other Coburnites upon whom it could with equal justice have been painted, of course, but my tepid affair had come to light in the most spectacular of ways, an explosion that would reverberate with every step I took in the town park or along one of its nicely shaded sidewalks.

And so I drove around and around, circulating among the various neighborhoods. At one point I recalled one of my uncle's war stories, how American fighter planes had sunk the flower of the Japanese fleet during the Battle of Midway. He was quite amused by the fact that the Japanese pilots who had tried to return to these ships found nothing but black smoke and burning oil slicks where their home ships should have been. I suppose I'd enjoyed a dark laugh at their expense, as well, but now I felt very much like one of those doomed pilots, hopelessly searching for a refuge that had sunk beneath the waves.

The midnight hour came and went. At the stroke of one, I told myself that Alexandria would surely be asleep, and for that reason I could now drift into the driveway of 237 Crescent Road, creep into my own house, pad softly down the corridor, and finally lower myself into the bed and struggle through another sleepless night. Now, at least, I told myself, you can go to bed without further incident.

I was wrong.

She came up from behind me as I got out of my car, came up out of the shadows, like something from the deep, that shark one forever fears lurking beneath the waves. There was a slight, alerting sound, like leaves on leaves, and I turned to see her coming, quite literally, from behind the wall of untrimmed shrubbery that bordered the house.

“I left my car a few blocks away,” she said.

“April,” I murmured.

“I had to see you.”

Her slender body was wrapped in a black overcoat she'd tied at the waist, the collar up so that it spread out from her throat like small pointed wings. She'd knotted a paisley scarf around her neck, its ends tucked into the coat, and for a reason I could not fathom she was wearing black leather gloves as if this were a crime scene at which she did not wish to leave her fingerprints. But April, being April, had added a deeply incongruous pair of white sneakers.

For a moment she stood pointedly a few paces from me, like someone gauging the distance of a target on a firing range.

“I know I shouldn't be here,” she whispered. Her eyes flashed to the darkened house. “Your daughter's here, right?”

“She's asleep, I'm sure.”

“There was no place else to come,” she said. “No place to meet.”

“I know,” I told her, waited for her to add something, then, when she only stood frozenly, staring at me, I said in the casual way of a clerk addressing someone who'd just strolled into a store, “What can I for do for you, April?”

The sheer and thoughtless idiocy of what I'd said tore a snarling laugh from her. “Do for me?” she snapped, a show of buried rage I'd never expected to see in her, and which, to my relief, was very quickly suppressed. “God,” she breathed. “What a mess. What a mess.”

“What I mean is . . . April,” I sputtered. “What I mean is that if there's something you—”

“It's not me anymore,” she said, her voice now quite soft, with something shattered in it. “It's Clayton. He can't take it, Sam. He can't take me going on the stand.” She stared at me in that beggarly way, her shredded inner life hanging from her like flaps of skin. “He didn't deserve any of this. It was me who did it. You and me who did it.”

“What we did has nothing to do with my trial,” I told her weakly. “It should never have been—”

“So who's to blame, then?” April cut in with a hint of that earlier rage breaking the surface again. “The dog? The cat?”

“You know what I mean, April.”

“Who's to blame for what happened to Clayton?” April demanded. “Because one thing's for sure. He had nothing to do with what we did, Sam. Or what happened after that.”

She meant Sandrine's death, of course, and her reluctance to say it directly hinted that she might think it murder.

“They're going to say terrible things, Sam,” she went on, now crying softly. “They're going to say we made fun of Clayton and Sandrine.” She gazed at me plaintively. “Those names we picked, remember? And that story you wrote. They're going to make me read some of that, Sam!” She lowered her head and sobbed. “We're monsters,” she murmured. “Everyone will think we're monsters.”

“What do you want me to do, April?” I asked. “No, the question is what do you think I can do? Because it's all out of my hands. It's been out my hands for a long time.” I felt a wave hit me, red and boiling, one that lifted me and rolled me and flung me down with crushing force. “I am nothing!” I said vehemently. “I have nothing!”

She lifted her head and stared at me in dark wonder, as if I'd broken apart before her eyes, as if my arms had dropped away and my legs had buckled and I'd collapsed like a building in a cloud of dust. It was as if she'd seen the external manifestation of exactly what had happened in my soul and had no idea how she might respond to it, or even if there was a way to respond at all.

Finally, she said, “I sometimes wonder if you did it.”

“Don't,” I said softly. “Because I didn't.”

“If you did,” she added in a tone that impressed me with both its directness and its honesty, “I hope they find you guilty.”

“I'm sure you do, April.”

I remembered something Morty had said to me early on, the fact that the classically southern way to defend a murderer was to show that the murder victim deserved being murdered and that your client—­aggrieved, lied to, humiliated—was the perfect one do it.

“I'm sure you do,” I repeated.

After a brief silence, she said, “I testify tomorrow.”

“I know.”

“Clayton's coming,” she added, her eyes glistening now. “He won't let me face it alone. He told me that. It's a matter of chivalry, he said. That's the word he used. Chivalry. And he believes in it too. That's the kind of man he is.”

“Go back to him,” I told her.

She shook her head. “He deserves better than me.”

She watched me a moment, and then, with no further word, she slowly turned and disappeared into the darkness beyond my lighted yard.

For a time, I remained outside, under the stars, listening to the soft pad of April's white sneakers on the sidewalk until they, too, had vanished. Then I turned toward the house and saw Alexandria standing at the window, motionless, but somehow moving, like the waving image of a ghostly hologram.

She was at the door by the time I reached it.

“So that's her,” she said.

She'd seen pictures of April in the paper and on local television.

“She looked older,” she added.

“Trouble ages you.”

“And she's not very pretty.”

“No, she's not very pretty,” I agreed, then swept past her and moved on into the house, where I'd expected to head directly to bed. In fact, I was halfway down the corridor when Alexandria's question stopped me.

“What was it about her, Dad?” she asked.

I turned to face my daughter. “It wasn't something about April,” I said. “It was something about me.”

“And what was that?”

“My failure, I suppose,” I said.

Alexandria's gaze grew oddly tender.

“A failure so deep I couldn't admit it, and so I put it on everybody else,” I added.

On the shock of that recognition, I felt loosen and fly away the last cohering particles of me. “Now you know, Alexandria,” I concluded bluntly. “And so do I.”

D
AY
N
INE

Call April Blankenship

She had taken a seat at the front of the courtroom, and there, just as he had nobly pledged, Clayton sat beside her, dressed in a fine black suit and with a small red rose in his lapel, a gentleman of the old breed, a man Sandrine had once called a chevalier, and whom she incontestably respected
.

They were already seated when I came into the room, but neither of them looked at me as I took my place at the defense table. In response, I made no effort to look at them but simply pretended to busy myself with some papers Morty provided, and which he knew to be nothing more than stage props I was to use whenever I felt overwhelmed or bored. “Just pretend you're reading something,” he'd told me at the beginning of my trial. “That shouldn't be hard for you.”

Yet on this, the ninth day of my trial, I found the charade no longer to my liking, and so I simply straightened the papers and lifted my head and stared directly ahead until her name resounded through the crowded courtroom.

“Call April Blankenship.”

I couldn't help but glance over as she rose shakily from her seat. She looked down at Clayton who reached up and very gently touched her hand, a gesture that reminded me of that dreadful moment in Oscar Wilde's life when he was being taken to prison. A single friend had found his way into the crowd that had gathered to jeer at the fallen playwright, a friend who, as Wilde went past him, had with a great show of reverence taken off his hat. Oh evil, evil men have spent eternity in paradise, Wilde had later written, for doing less than that. And so, I thought, would Clayton Blankenship.

On the stand, April looked entirely different from when she'd appeared at my house the night before. She wore a plain blue skirt and white blouse and, in those colors, she seemed to have all the weight and substance of a floating cloud. Her white hands lay in her lap like two dead birds. Well, not quite dead, since both of them were trembling. Her nails were painted pale pink, and she'd pulled her hair back and pinned it primly so that she seemed almost spinsterish. It was hard to imagine her as the “other woman,” and it struck me that, in fact, I had almost no memory of her in that role, so listless had it all been, so passionless and meaningless, along with every other “-less” that can drain the force of an otherwise substantive noun.

She would be easy pickings for Mr. Singleton, I knew, a thin sheet of paper he could effortlessly tear to ribbons and toss into the wind.

“All right now, Mrs. Blankenship,” he began, his voice pointedly emphasizing that April was a married woman. “How long have you lived in Coburn?”

She had lived here for seventeen years.

“And what sort of work do you do, Mrs. Blankenship?'

She did not work, by which the jury was to gather that she lived entirely at the expense of the good, hardworking husband she had callously betrayed.

“How long have you been married, Mrs. Blankenship?”

“Twelve years.”

“And you are married to Dr. Clayton Blankenship, a professor of southern history at Coburn College, isn't that right?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you meet Dr. Blankenship?”

“I worked in one of the department offices at the college.”

“Which department?”

“The History Department.”

Ah, so she was a lowly clerk who'd caught the attention of a lonely old widower, probably by lifting her skirt to an inappropriate height, or by sidling up to him at the water cooler, or by means of some other equally whorish trick.

I stole a glance to my right and saw that all of this was also going through Clayton Blankenship's mind, as well, his expression grave, sorrowful, helpless, a classically appointed gentleman who'd first had to confront his wife's betrayal and now faced her humiliation at the hands of a very ungentlemanly public prosecutor.

“You don't have any postgraduate degrees, do you, Mrs. Blankenship?” Singleton asked.

“No.”

“Or college degrees at all?”

“No.”

“I see. Well, then, just how far did you get in school, Mrs. Blankenship?”

“I graduated from high school.”

“High school,” Mr. Singleton repeated in a sotte voce
aside designed to reinforce the notion that so learned a man as Clayton Blankenship could not have been interested in poor, uneducated April save for the most obvious and lurid of reasons.

With that suggestion, Clayton all but shuddered, a moment so pitiful in its
Blue Angel p
athos that I turned away and focused once again on April.

She had taken a white handkerchief from one of her pockets and was frantically kneading it in her thin, birdlike fingers.

“Now, in the course of your work at Coburn College, you met another professor, didn't you?” Mr. Singleton asked. “A professor in the English Department this time, Dr. Samuel Joseph Madison?”

April nodded.

“We need a voiced response, Mrs. Blankenship,” Mr. Singleton instructed sternly. “Nodding won't do.”

“Yes,” April said weakly.

“When did you meet Professor Madison?”

“I don't know when exactly, it could have been—”

“I don't mean for you to come up with a precise date,” Mr. Singleton interrupted. “Let's put it this way, was there a time when you became involved with Dr. Madison? You know what I mean by ‘involved,' don't you, Mrs. Blankenship?”

“Yes, we became . . . we . . . had . . .”

“You had an affair, correct?”

“Yes.”

“And how did this affair begin?”

For the next few minutes, Singleton took an increasingly agitated April through the dreary steps by which we had finally arrived at the Shady Arms motel in nearby Raylesford, a depressed little town, with its storefront churches and abandoned textile mills, the place least likely to be visited by any of our fellow Coburnites. It was there, April said, now daubing the handkerchief at the corner of her eyes, that we'd found what she called simply “a place to meet,” then, in response to yet another question, given its loaded name in little above a whisper.

“Shady Arms.”

“Did you say
Shady Arms
?” Mr. Singleton asked loudly.

“Yes.”

“The Shady Arms is a motel, isn't it?” Singleton asked.

“Yes.”

“Could you speak up, Mrs. Blankenship,” Singleton called to her. “Your words have to be recorded.” He glanced at the jury as if to say,
What a pathetic little whore, t
hen returned his smoldering attention to April. “Do you remember the date?”

“No.”

“Well, do you remember the name you used when you signed in at the Shady Arms?”

“Yes.”

“Please, speak up.”

“Yes.”

“What was that name?”

I felt my body tighten. Surely, surely, I thought, there was no need for this.

“Rose,” April answered.

“But your name isn't Rose, is it, Mrs. Blankenship?” Singleton demanded.

“No, it isn't.”

“Did you choose a false last name too?”

“Yes.”

“What was that name?”

Now April's hands were twitching birds, frantic, fluttering, as if on their backs, strings tightening around their necks.

“Loomis.”

“Rose Loomis!” Mr. Singleton bawled. “That is the name you used to register at the Shady Arms motel on those occasions when you met with the defendant?”

“Yes.”

“But your name isn't Rose Loomis, is it?”

“No.”

“Well, where did you get that name, Mrs. Blankenship?”

April lowered her head.

“Mrs. Blankenship?”

Her head remained down.

“From a movie,” she said. “It was Marilyn Monroe's name in a movie.”

The name had been my idea, and we'd laughed about the choice because the character had been so utterly unlike April. It had been our only laugh.

“What movie?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“
Niagara.
”

“And in that movie, Rose Loomis is an adulteress, isn't she?”

“Yes.”

“In fact, she wants to kill her husband, doesn't she?”

April began to cry, but through her tears she managed a faint “Yes.”

“Because her husband is old and weak, isn't that right?”

“Yes.”

“Old and weak and it's pretty clear in the movie that he's impotent, correct?”

April nodded.

“Please answer the question,” Singleton barked. “The husband in that movie, the husband of Rose Loomis, the Marilyn Monroe character whose name you took when you signed in at the Shady Arms motel, her husband is old and weak and impotent and she has a young lover and she wants her husband dead, isn't that right, Mrs. Blankenship?”

“Yes,” April said weakly.

I looked at Clayton Blankenship, his head still unbowed, but with something broken in his eyes.

“So this woman, this Rose Loomis, this adulteress whose name you chose to take during your assignations with Professor Madison, this woman wanted her husband dead, isn't that right? Wanted to be rid of him because she couldn't stand the sound of his voice, or the look on his face, or the touch of his hands?”

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Blankenship, during these meetings with Professor Madison, did you discuss killing your husband?” Singleton demanded.

April's eyes widened, “No,” she cried. Her eyes flashed to Clayton and filled with a desperate denial combined with a broken plea for forgiveness.

Mr. Singleton whirled around, marched to the prosecution table, snatched up a manuscript, then strode over and placed it in April's shaking hands.

“Do you recognize this story, Mrs. Blankenship?” he asked.

April nodded faintly.

“We need a spoken answer, please,” Singleton said irritably.

“Yes.”

“It was a story especially written for you, wasn't it?”

“Yes.”

“For your eyes only.”

“Yes, but it was just a . . . a . . . he called it a parody.”

“Read the title please,” Mr. Singleton commanded in a voice as flat and hard as a hammer hitting steel.

April's gaze fell to the title page. “The Lover's Plot.”

And what a splendid literary effort that had been, I thought, as I recalled April beneath my arm, sweetly asking me to write something for her. But what could I have written for April Blankenship, I'd asked myself at the time. Certainly nothing as complicated or ambitious as any of my many failed attempts at “The Pull of the Earth.”
Subtlety and nuance would have been no problem for Sandrine, nor would any work dotted with obscure literary or historical references. April had been another case altogether. And so I'd penned a hothouse pulp fiction parody filled with side-of-the-mouth tough talk and imagery that was raw and violent, with character names stolen from noir films, my narrator a cynical Bible salesman named Johnny O'Clock, addicted to barbiturates, particularly Nembutal, because, as he says, “if I overdose on that, at least the morgue will smell like pears.” It had all been like that, my last attempt at fiction, cold and mordant, snide and cruel, every word of it written by a writer whose vision of life could be summed up in a sneer.

Good God, I thought, as April's testimony continued, how far “The Lover's Plot”
had fallen from the actual pull of the earth, from kindness, from the abiding tenderness of things.

“Now, the word ‘plot,' it means a secret plan, doesn't it?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“Yes,” April answered, then went on to explain. “But it's like a play on words, Sam said, because it's like the plan is the plot, yes, but it's also the plot that they end up digging in the ground. Like, a grave plot . . . and so . . . well . . . like a double meaning thing.”

Singleton released a weary sign.

“In this case, we're only concerned with one meaning for the word ‘plot,'” he said, then retrieved a dictionary from his desk, walked to the witness box, and thrust it toward the witness.

“Read the third definition of ‘plot,' Mrs. Blankenship,” Singleton demanded.

April, her voice already beginning to break, read the definition. “‘A secret plan usually for an evil and unlawful end.'”

Mr. Singleton snatched the dictionary from April's shaky grasp and returned the book to his desk. Then he turned back to the witness.

“Now, in terms of the title of this story, it refers to a plot hatched by two lovers, isn't that correct?” he asked.

“Yes,” April answered weakly.

“The lovers' ‘evil plan' is to murder each other's spouses, correct?” Singleton demanded. “The man's wife and the woman's husband, isn't that right?”

“Yes,” April muttered.

A smile slithered onto Mr. Singleton's lips. “Did you plan to murder your husband, Mrs. Blankenship?”