Sandrine's Case (9780802193520) (7 page)

“Because you want to look beautiful to him, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Because you love him?”

“Yes.”

“Would you say that Sandrine Madison might have felt the same about her husband?”

Mr. Singleton rose immediately. “Asking for a conclusion, Your Honor.”

His objection was sustained, but Morty had made his point and he knew it.

He nodded softly. “Thank you, Officer Hill. No further questions.”

He was back in his chair at the defense table seconds later, looking quite satisfied with his cross-examination of Officer Hill.

“She despised me from the beginning,” I said after Morty returned to his seat beside me.

Morty's eyes shot over to me. “From the beginning?”

“When she first laid eyes on me.”

“When you met her at the door, you mean?”

“Yes.”

Suddenly I realized that Officer Hill had seen nothing of Sandrine's death room at that point, not her body in the bed, nor the books scattered around it, and certainly not that yellow tent of paper. So what had she seen, I wondered, what had she seen in my eyes?

“Demonstrating prejudice is like shooting whales in a barrel,” Morty whispered cheerfully. He offered me a broadly reassuring look. “You're the victim in this case, Sam. Don't forget that. You're a victim of unwarranted suspicions that put you on the police radar, and that's what we're going to show.”

I had learned by then that this was to be Morty's set-in-stone strategy. I will be portrayed as a victim of small town prejudices, and by this means my lawyer will turn the tables on the jury. He will show that these prejudices were vile and that they contorted the facts. If he is successful, the jurors will see that this is true and guard themselves against exhibiting these same prejudices. In effect, Morty will immunize them from themselves.

It is all very clever, but suddenly it also seemed very sad, so that I felt an odd spark of buried feeling, a surprising ache of pity for something other than myself.

“People are lost,” I whispered.

Morty shrugged and returned to his notes, but the sadness and pity that had just swept over me lingered, and as it lingered it reminded me of the first feeling I'd gotten from books, particularly from Melville, tales I'd read long before I'd either taught or been taught them. I thought of the resigned way in which Starbuck had tossed his pipe into the sea, then the bleak sigh of “Oh humanity” that ends “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” At that moment, my mind turned unaccountably to Yeats, and I recalled the sorrows he'd glimpsed in Maud Gonne, the pilgrim soul he'd seen in her, sorrows that even her beauty could not sweep from her “changing face.”

And somehow all of this returned me to Sandrine in her bed, with that one red rose, her hair arranged just so, a candle set at just the right position to cause that many-faceted reflection. By the time it was all over she'd been made to look for all the world like a woman with no expectation of death. Either that, or something still less incriminating, like a woman in a state of serene but blissful eroticism, one who'd welcomed death as if it were her demon lover.

“So let's see now,” Judge Rutledge said. He was looking at the clock. “It's getting rather late, I think.” He glanced at the jury, then at Mr. Singleton, and finally at Morty. “It seems to me that in light of the hour, it may be best to adjourn for the day,” he said. “Does either the defense or the prosecution have any objection to an adjournment?”

Neither did.

“All right, then, we will resume tomorrow morning at nine a.m.,” Judge Rutledge said.

We rose as the jury left the room. I stood silently, watching them file out, each of them careful not to glance in my direction, as if the way I looked was, itself, in some way prejudicial.

“Okay,” Morty told me once the last of them had departed. “Get some sleep.”

I turned to Alexandria, her face in that fixed look of strain and worry.

“I'll take you straight home,” she said, as if I were a deadly microbe, a creature, primitive and deadly, that shouldn't be released into the air.

I stepped away from the table, turned to leave the courtroom, then stopped cold at the sight of Jane Forbes, a fellow professor at Coburn College, a woman Sandrine had sometimes met for early morning trots around the reservoir. She was standing rigidly in a shadowy corner of the courtroom, wearing a burgundy overcoat, her hands sunk deep in its pockets, a woman whose eyes unaccountably returned me to the now thoroughly incriminating ones that had once gazed at me in the green shade of the park. I had no idea why Jane had chosen to attend my trial, and yet, at that moment, her presence suddenly suggested an as yet unrevealed aspect of my case, the key to a room I had not entered yet.

“Dad?” Alexandria called.

“Coming,” I said, then fell in behind her, moving quickly now, past the benches where reporters and spectators alike were gathering up their things, pulling on their coats and jackets, then more quickly still as I surged past them.

Once outside the courtroom we headed toward the parking lot, the corridor filled with the flotsam that inevitably swirls about any small town courthouse, people under restraining orders or seeking them, people answering summonses of various kinds, people in debt, people in trouble, the twisted knots in which so much of life seems perpetually entangled.

Ah, humanity, I heard in
the low, sorrowful voice I had long imagined as Melville's.

“What is it?” Alexandria asked. “You look . . .” She stopped, then shrugged. “I don't know . . . strange.”

We were outside the courthouse now, the parking lot only a few yards away, and unaccountably I'd stopped dead at the top of the stairs.

“Dad?” Alexandria asked worriedly.

I shook my head. “It's nothing,” I assured her as I returned to myself.

“Are you sure?”

I nodded, then found my legs and headed down the stairs. “Nothing,” I repeated.

But that was a lie. For it had indeed been something, a feeling I'd hardly recognized because it seemed so curious, a sense not of life's sorrow but of its wrathfulness, the conviction that it was a coiled serpent forever striking here then there, a slithering, poisonous thing whose malice no one could at last escape.

I glanced behind me, up the courthouse stairs, still shaken by this thought, fully expecting to see some B-movie river of blood cascade down those same stairs, red and thick, bent, consciously bent, upon engulfing everything.

A panic seized me, one so fierce I thought I might surely break into a run.

I knew better than to do anything like that however, and so I simply straightened my shoulders and headed down the stairs.

“Let's go home” was all I said.

Home Bound

“I'll drive,” Alexandria said as we approached the car. She was reaching into her purse, searching for the keys, a gesture that told me she did not intend to argue the point. I'd just appeared mysteriously shaken, and so I was to be driven home, and that was that.

“Okay,” I said.

I'd learned by then that an accusation, any accusation, leaves the accused decidedly weakened. An accused person is a straggler in the herd. This is a recognition I'd come to slowly, and had fully understood only after the various local news media had labeled me a “person of interest” in regard to the investigation into Sandrine's death. No charges had been made against me at that point, and certainly I'd not been arrested. But the accusation had been enough for Charles Higgins, the young, go-getter president of Coburn College, to summon me to his office and, while I sat silently and a little dazed by what I was hearing, request—unofficially, of course—my resignation. The college was in the middle of a fund-raising campaign to build a new sports center, he'd explained, and my “situation,” as he'd called it, might threaten its success.

“As you must know, Sam,” the president said gravely, “attendance at sporting events brings in a great deal of money.” As if this weren't enough to sink the spear, he added, “And, of course, there's always the question of alumni donations, which can easily drop off in the face of poor publicity.”

Given all the damage I was doing the right course was clear. I should do my duty to dear old Coburn College and resign.

Charley ran his fingers down his lapels and waited for my response, his gaze neutral, save for the supplication, as if Coburn were a homeless shelter whose residents my staying on would cast into the cruel cold.

It was impossible for me to guess whether he thought I'd killed Sandrine. It wouldn't have mattered anyway. Being a distraction is, itself, a sort of crime, the minimum penalty for which is the loss of your job. I suppose that, had I considered my circumstances more clearly, I would have expected this to happen. Even so, I made a little show of being treated unfairly. After all, as I might have reminded him, my trial had not yet even begun. But it had by then become obvious to me that the presumption of innocence was a legal nicety the athletic program at Coburn College simply could not afford.

“But what am I supposed to do, Charley?” I asked helplessly. “I mean, if I resign.”

“Well, perhaps you could work on your novel,” he answered.

“I haven't worked on my novel in twenty years,” I informed him coolly. “My novel is a dead baby.”

He looked at me expressionlessly though I could tell that he regretted he'd been unable to use the book myth most of my colleagues entertained, their way of convincing themselves they still had something to say along with the will and the talent to say it.

“I see,” Charley said. “Well, at any rate, I'm sure you'll find something to do.”

He had no moral ground to stand on and he knew it but that couldn't matter either. He had other responsibilities. Coburn was the bottom rung for him, a springboard to some later, more distinguished college presidency. He was young, with miles to go before he slept, and he would not let my current predicament get in his way.

I knew all this, but losing my job would be so ruinous I was compelled to state the simple, if humiliating, truth. “I have bills to pay, Charley,” I told him. “Big bills. Legal bills.”

Higgins shook his head. “I sorry, Sam. I truly am. And I hope this whole unfortunate matter will clear up in time.” His gaze turned stony. “But for now I'm afraid the board has left me no choice. We could be sued, you know. I don't know for what, but some lawyer could figure something out, I'm sure. We are responsible for our faculty, for exposing our students to our teachers.”

So no alleged murderers on board, I thought.

“If I don't resign, you'll fire me?” I asked.

“It would be suspension without pay,” Charley answered.

“You've already thought this through,” I said. “Laid out the steps if I refuse to resign.”

“I'm afraid so.” He shrugged. “I hope things eventually clear up and I can reconsider your appointment,” he added. “After you've resigned, I mean.” He shrugged again. “Until then,” he said, and shrugged a third time.

Until then I would be out of work.

No, not “until then.” Forever.

No matter what the outcome of my trial I would be radioactive at Coburn College. And beyond Coburn, what college would hire a professor who'd brought such a cataract of bad publicity to his school?

And so I'd left the president's office knowing full well that I would never teach again, but the loss of my job had paled compared to this other loss, the one made painfully obvious by Alexandria now sitting at the wheel of my car, the loss of the traditional powers of fatherhood, the fact that I had become a kind of invalid to my own daughter.

This was not a subject I wanted to discuss with her, however, and so I said, “How do you think it went in court today?”

She turned on to Crescent Road. “Okay.”

Her voice was flat, inexpressive, a nod to the fact that she simply had no way of knowing how it had gone, what the silent members of the jury might now be thinking. With that recognition, the inexplicable nature of my situation settled over me again. How had so clever a fellow ended up like this?

This was a question I'd asked myself at each stage in the process that had begun with Sandrine's death. Even late in that legal process I'd kept expecting it to halt. But it hadn't, and so as Alexandria turned the wheel and we glided smoothly into the driveway of the house on Crescent Road, I could no longer be certain that it ever would.

“Edith's out sweeping the driveway,” I said drily with a nod to the woman who lived next door, Edith Whittier, long divorced, head-over-the-hedge friend of Sandrine, but nonetheless one of the last people to see her alive, a name recently added to Mr. Singleton's list of prosecution witnesses. She nodded back, but coolly, and with a hint of repugnance, as if she'd just recently discovered my name on the state's sex offender registry.

“She hates me, too,” I said mordantly.

Alexandria wheeled the car into the driveway. “Ignore her,” she said.

Once in the house, I went to the scriptorium and read while Alexandria made dinner. I'd been perfectly capable of making dinner but she felt that I needed time to relax after a day in court. She'd been right, and yet even as I tried to lose myself in a book I incessantly replayed Morty's earlier remark to me, how prejudice could be easily unearthed in a witness. But what would Officer Hill have had against me?

I mentioned this to Alexandria over dinner.