Sandrine's Case (9780802193520) (32 page)

“No,” April answered softly, then lowered her head again, the question doing exactly what Singleton wanted, so that her body suddenly began to tremble. “Oh, Clayton,” she said brokenly. “Clayton, I'm so sorry.”

As if beneath the weight of her husband's once illustrious but now besmirched name, April curled forward and hung her head.

In response, Singleton sprang toward the witness box.

“Who is the author of this story, Mrs. Blankenship?” Singleton asked sharply. “The author's name is on the title page. Please read that name.”

April straightened slightly as her eyes again fell to the page. “Samuel Madison.”

Singleton's gaze hardened, and for a moment he seemed, quite literally, to turn to stone. “Now these two lovers are going to kill their spouses, isn't that so, Mrs. Blankenship?”

“Yes,” April murmured.

“What is the motive for these murders?”

“To get rid of them,” April answered.

“So that they can be together, correct?”

“Yes.”

“These murders are first suggested by the male lover, right?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“Yes.”

“And this male lover, his wife is an invalid, isn't she?”

“Yes.”

“She's in the bed most of the time, or in a wheelchair, isn't that so?”

“Yes.”

“This wife is ‘in the way.' Aren't those the words the man uses to describe her? She's in the way and she has to be gotten rid of, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Now, Mrs. Blankenship, in what manner does the male lover in ‘The Lover's Plot'
plan to kill his wife?”

“He plans to poison her.”

“And how does he expect to get away with it?”

“He plans to make it look like a suicide.”

Mr. Singleton suddenly leaped from behind the lectern and all but hurled himself toward the witness.

“Mrs. Blankenship, did you and Samuel Madison plot the murder of Sandrine Allegra Madison?” Mr. Singleton demanded.

“No,” April answered. “No.” She lowered her head again, and again her body began to tremble, but this time more violently.

“Because she was in the way, isn't that right?” Singleton cried.

April pressed her face in the handkerchief as if to hide it from the world. “I never did that. Never.”

“So it was just a game to you?” Singleton yelped.

“It was just . . . supposed to be funny.”

“Funny?” Mr. Singleton bawled. “Funny? Well, it turned out to be anything by funny, didn't it?”

“It was just a . . .” She lifted her eyes toward the ceiling as if desperately seeking help from on high. “It was just like . . . we were in a movie.”

“But it wasn't a movie, was it?” Singleton said loudly, with a lightning glance toward the jury. “It was real.”

April's face now pressed again into the handkerchief, her hand trembling so violently I half expected it to tear away.

“It was real for Samuel Madison, wasn't it?” Singleton shouted. “A real lover's plot.”

“No!” April cried. “No!”

She began to sob uncontrollably, each sob followed by a desperate intake of breath, then by something that sounded inhuman, the wail of a wounded animal. “Naaaeoooo!” Her whole body now shook wildly. Her muscles seemed to shear away from her bones, everything buckling, warping, so that she abruptly collapsed into a quivering mound of flesh, her cries now soft and childlike, the whimpering of a stricken infant.

Mr. Singleton let this go on and on, while he stood pitilessly glaring at her.

Then, like an executioner charged with the coup de grâce, he said, “Your witness, Mr. Salberg.”

“Jesus Christ,” Morty breathed. He turned to me. “I'll make this quick,” he whispered, then rose and walked to the lectern. He paused a moment, as if to let his great weight settle, then said quite gently, “Good morning, Mrs. Blankenship.”

April nodded softly.

“Are you okay?” Morty asked sweetly. “We can wait a minute, if you're not.”

“No,” April said softly. “Please . . . let's go on.”

“All right,” Morty said gently, then began.

“Mrs. Blankenship, when you were approached by the police you made no attempt to deny having had a brief relationship with the defendant, is that correct?”

“No, I didn't deny it,” April said softly. Her watery, red eyes drifted over to me. “I made a mistake.”

With that answer she seemed to admit two mistakes at once, that she'd betrayed her husband and that I'd been the arid soul she'd mistakenly chosen as her lover, a man she saw through now, one who'd cared nothing for her, who'd halfway mocked her even as he'd used her . . . a sociopath.

“When was the last time you saw Mr. Madison . . . in that way?” Morty asked. “It was three months before Mrs. Madison was diagnosed, isn't that right?”

“Yes.”

“At that time, you and Mr. Madison were unaware of Mrs. Madison's condition?”

“We didn't know about it, no.”

“Now this story Mr. Madison wrote, you said that was a parody?”

“Yes.”

“Well, since we've had a few definitions offered here today, what is a parody?”

April stared at Morty blankly.

“A parody is a humorous representation, isn't it?” Morty asked.

“I guess.”

“A parody is not meant to be taken seriously, is it, Mrs. Blankenship?”

“It wasn't serious, no,” April answered.

“So nothing in that story had anything to do with a real wife or a real husband or a real plot to kill anybody, did it?”

“No,” April said.

Morty moved closer to April. “Mrs. Blankenship, within your hearing, did Mr. Madison ever once criticize his wife?”

“No.”

“Did he ever say she didn't understand him or any of the other things that men sometimes say in these situations?”

“No, he didn't.”

“Did he ever indicate any displeasure of any kind with his wife?”

“No.”

“Did he ever give any indication that he might wish her any harm?”

“No.”

“Even jokingly?”

“No, he never said anything bad about Mrs. Madison or that he would do anything to hurt her.”

Morty leaned forward slightly. “Mrs. Blankenship, you don't have any reason to protect Mr. Madison, do you?”

“No.”

“You're not in love with him, are you?”

April's eyes suddenly bore into me, and in their stricken candor I saw the hardness I had added to her life.

“No,” she said.

“Do you know of anything—something Mr. Madison said or anything at all—that might cause you to believe that he would ever harm his wife?”

Here was the moment, as I knew, when April could hurt me if she wished to hurt me, truly and deeply and fatally get even with me for having broken the only promise I'd made to her, the breaking of which had brought her to this public whipping post.

“No,” she said, and on that word she hung her head and began to cry.

Morty let her remain in that a pose long enough for the jury to gain some sympathy for her, then he stepped back, like a man would from a good friend's coffin.

“No more questions,” he said.

The Saga of Shady Arms

I watched as April struggled to compose herself, slowly and mechanically smoothing wrinkles from her skirt before she rose, still trembling, and made her way down from the witness stand. Clayton had already risen and taken a few steps toward her. When she reached him, he offered her his arm, as if escorting an elegant lady from the ballroom floor, and together they decorously made their way down the aisle, watched by a throng of locals before whom, after so public an evisceration, they must surely have felt naked.

“What's next?” I asked wearily.

“More of the same but not as dramatic,” Morty answered.

By more of the same he meant various forms of corroborating evidence for my affair with April. And so Bart Lowell was next to take the stand, the owner of the squalid motel in whose bleak rooms April and I had met on those few occasions, and by whose answers to Mr. Singleton's questions the dreary saga of Shady Arms continued.

Yes, he had seen us often, seven times, as a matter of record, a number whose accuracy was demonstrated by the coffee-stained registration book he'd provided to Mr. Singleton.

Yes, we had used false names to sign that book.

In one question after another, the substance of the answers was the same. I was a liar and an adulterer and a fool. I laughed at convention and scorned all life's sacred values. I was unfaithful in love and arrogant in life and I had recklessly, wantonly, even laughingly torn to shreds the sacred fabric of the social order.

Under cross-examination, Morty made the witness admit that he had a record, two convictions for selling marijuana, and a third for postal fraud. He'd served light sentences in two cases, been put on probation for one. None of this did anything to impugn his earlier testimony, however, as Morty must have known. As he'd told me earlier, his intent here was to show that Singleton had scraped the bottom of the human barrel with regard to witnesses. There was no refuting their testimony, but they themselves could be made to look like pots calling kettles black. If jurors don't like a witness they tend not to believe him, was Morty's rule.

Willy Myers came next. He'd delivered pizza to our room at Shady Arms, during the course of which delivery he'd seen an uncorked bottle of wine on a bedside table, along with two glasses, one of which had lipstick stains. He'd also noticed a woman's slip hanging from the knob of a bathroom door and two sets of car keys in a glass ashtray. All of these Mr. Singleton shrewdly presented as visual metaphors for just the sort of back alley adultery I'd always referred to as
Butterfield 8,
and which I'd somehow distinguished from the high-toned infidelity of, say,
Anna Karenina,
though now it struck me that, in essence, adulteries, like Tolstoy's happy families, were all the same.

Morty's cross-examination attempted to paint Willy as a snoop and a gossip and, mercifully, he'd been arrested once as a Peeping Tom, though it appeared he'd been peeping into the window of the boys' shower room at his former high school rather than the hotel room of an adulterous couple.

After Willy, there were other witnesses whose testimony offered yet more seamy evidence for my crime. Phone records were presented to show a slew of calls from my cell phone to April's. There'd been e-mails, too, copies of which were waved before the jury like used condoms despite the fact that they sounded more like grocery orders than the hot-breathed exchanges of a couple carrying on a backstreet love affair.

It ended at around four in the afternoon, and after a brief conference with Morty, during which we discussed the fact that Mr. Singleton would likely rest his case the next day, I walked to the parking lot, where Alexandria was waiting for me, already behind the wheel.

“Morty says the prosecution's case is almost over,” I told her as I settled into the passenger seat.

“Good,” Alexandria said drily, then hit the accelerator and eased the car backward out of its place, then forward and out into Coburn's leisurely traffic.

She was silent for a long time, but I knew some dark bird was circling in her head.

“What is it?” I asked finally.

By then she'd pulled into the driveway of 237 Crescent Road.

“What?” I asked again when she didn't answer the first time.

She turned off the car and looked at me. “It's just another one of those dark thoughts,” she said.

“Care to share it?”

“Not really.”

“I think you should.”

“Why?”

“It might give you peace.”

An arid laugh burst from her. “You sound like a priest, Dad.”

“A little bit, maybe,” I admitted. “What's the dark thought?”

She hesitated, then came out with it. “That Mom had to have been some kind of saint . . .” She hesitated again, then added, “. . . to have lived with you.”

I said nothing in response to this, but Alexandria saw how deeply she had sunk the knife.

“I'm sorry, Dad,” she told me, “but you asked.”

I nodded but said nothing, and in that lack of response I felt a numbness settle in, the sense that I had lost any capacity to offer anything to anyone, nothing left for my students, should I ever have any again, nothing to offer friends, should I ever have any at all, and at last nothing to offer Alexandria, not a single word of counsel nor so much as a pithy remark on how she should live.

“Dad?” Alexandria whispered, and then, when there was still no response, she reached over and touched my hand. “Let's go inside.”

I got out of the car but had no desire whatsoever to go into a house that no longer held the slightest charm for me. And so, like a man looking for an avenue of escape, I glanced at the mailbox at the end of the driveway.

“I'll check the mail,” I said to Alexandria, then headed for the box.