Sandrine's Case (9780802193520) (9 page)

D
AY
F
OUR

Call Milton Douglas Forsythe

The man who answered to his name on the fourth day of my trial was rather short, and a little round, with such an abundance of snow-white hair I'd at first mistaken it for an Andy Warhol wig. It was no such thing, of course, yet even then, as he made his way to the witness stand, I had to think that some of the jurors were briefly of the same opinion. Two of them were bald and one had prematurely thinning hair. How could they not have suspected that Milton Douglas Forsythe was wearing a fright wig?

He was dressed in a beige suit, with a pale green shirt and brown tie, a mix Sandrine called “dirty salad.”

Where had she said that? I couldn't remember, though it sounded like something from her youth, something said on a bus or a subway, whispered into my ear and followed by a nod in the direction of the poor soul who'd drawn her fire, but also, and as a matter of course, her sympathy.

By the time I'd emerged from this surmise Mr. Forsythe had already been sworn in and identified himself as the Coburn County coroner, an alliterative job if ever there was one.

“How long have you served in this post?” Mr. Singleton inquired.

“I have been the coroner of Coburn County for the past thirty-two years,” Forsythe answered.

We were then treated to the usual list of professional societies to which the coroner belonged and the various training programs he'd attended and from which he had received certificates. This recitation moved us forward in time so that the jury at last found itself in Forsythe's office on the morning of November 15, when the phone rang.

“It was Detective Ray Alabrandi of the Coburn Police Department,” he informed the court. “He told me that earlier that morning he'd spoken to a uniformed officer about a death that had occurred here in town the night before.”

“Do you recall the name of that officer?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“Officer Wendy Hill.”

“And what had Officer Hill told Detective Alabrandi?”

“She'd given him information concerning the death of Sandrine Allegra Madison at 237 Crescent Road. And based on that information Detective Alabrandi thought I should look into it. The death had the appearance of a suicide, he told me.”

Appearance, I thought, yes.

“Detective Alabrandi wanted me to go to the house before the body was removed,” Mr. Forsythe continued.

“Why so quickly?”

“He said there were odd circumstances,” Mr. Forsythe answered. “So he wanted me to launch a formal investigation right away.”

“A formal investigation,” Mr. Singleton repeated. “And what would that entail?”

“Well, first of all, it would halt any effort to dispose of the body,” Mr. Forsythe answered. “Then there'd be an autopsy, of course. Any suspicion of a suicide would immediately trigger an autopsy. But in this case, as I said, Detective Alabrandi asked me to go to the address of the deceased.”

“All right, and did you subsequently go to the crime scene?”

Morty rose. “Objection, Your Honor, 237 Crescent Road is a house, not a ‘crime scene.'”

“Sustained,” the judge said. “Careful with prejudicial language, Mr. Singleton.”

“Sorry, Your Honor.” He returned his attention to Mr. Forsythe. “All right, did you subsequently go to 237 Crescent Road?”

“I did.”

And indeed he had gone to 237 Crescent Road, looking a bit tired, as I now recalled, a man edging toward retirement and with something in his eyes that suggested he'd seen too many dead bodies over the years.

“I'm Doug Forsythe,” he said when I opened the door. “I'm the Coburn County coroner. I'm very sorry for your loss.”

I couldn't tell if his small sad smile was genuine or official.

“I'm sure you understand that in a case like this,” he said, “a relatively young woman, the issue of a suicide, that the county requires that I make an investigation.”

I'd known no such thing but I said, “Of course,” and waved him into the house.

He glanced about but appeared to register very little, his face expressionless, eyes that told me nothing.

“My wife is down there,” I said with a nod to the corridor.

It was eight in the morning but Forsythe looked like a man who'd already worked a full shift, his movements slow, his gaze betraying none of the considerable powers of observation he actually possessed and about which I'd learned only after he'd completed his report.

“My daughter came home at around four this morning,” I told him. “To be with me, I mean, after I told her what happened. She's sleeping down the hallway.”

“No need to disturb her,” Forsythe said amiably. “I won't be here long.” He smiled. “And I'll try to be quiet.” And with that he'd softly, and quite thoughtfully, padded down the corridor to where Sandrine still lay.

As Mr. Forsythe continued his testimony, I unaccountably thought of my long-deceased mother, the easy way she'd dealt with people, the softness of her voice, how slow to anger she had been. She'd held down a job of killing monotony, and yet, from those small wages, and even after she'd finally divorced my utterly indifferent father, she'd sometimes sent the checks I'd find in the mail from time to time, ten dollars here, twenty dollars there, always with the notation: for my son. It was a memory that returned me to that younger man, so grateful for those small contributions, without bitterness, harboring no resentments, working on a novel I'd titled “The Pull of the Earth” and which I'd described to Sandrine as being about “the tenderness of things,” a man who now seemed far, far different from the one who'd escorted Mr. Forsythe into the bedroom of his dead wife.

“And what did you observe at 237 Crescent Road, Mr. Forsythe?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“Mr. Madison met me at the door, where I identified myself. Then he escorted me to a back bedroom. That's where I found the victim.”

Morty was on his feet again. “I don't mean to hold things up, Your Honor, but for the record I'd like it noted that Sandrine Madison was a deceased person, not a ‘victim.'”

“Duly noted,” the judge said with a nod to the stenographer. He then turned to the jury. “Ladies and gentlemen, please strike the word ‘victim' from any thought you might have concerning Mrs. Madison. It has not been established that she was a victim of any act, criminal or otherwise, committed by the defendant or anyone else.”

With a feeling of genuine surprise, I found myself rather admiring the exquisite fairness of this, the pains that were being taken to protect me, and to honor during this otherwise inconsequential and decidedly small-town judicial proceeding the august requirements of the Constitution of the United States.

Judge Rutledge turned to Mr. Singleton. “Continue.”

“Now, Mr. Forsythe,” Mr. Singleton began again. “Can you tell us what you observed in the bedroom Professor Madison escorted you to?”

“I found a deceased female,” the coroner answered. “She was in the bed, lying on her back. She was naked from the waist. Whether she was completely naked wasn't something I could tell because there was a sheet over the lower part of her body.”

For the next few minutes, the coroner recited observations not unlike those of Officer Hill. The room is cluttered. There is a yellow piece of paper beside the bed. He also sees an empty glass “about the size you'd have with iced tea,” a pill container with the cap on, various books scattered about. “And there was a candle burning.”

“A candle?” Mr. Singleton inquired.

“Yes,” Mr. Forsythe answered.

“Where was this candle?”

It was on a small shelf near Sandrine's bed, I recalled, and I'd put it there because she'd asked me to do it. We'd bought it many years before in Albi, the little French town that had been the last stop on what she had always called our “honeymoon trip,” though we'd been married for almost a year before my spinster aunt died unexpectedly, leaving me with a small behest. We'd thought of starting a little nest egg with this money but had decided on a trip instead. There'd be plenty of time to save money, Sandrine had pointed out, but the chance to travel around the Mediterranean, visit all those fabled places, might never come again.

“A large red candle,” Mr. Forsythe added.

Sandrine had wanted me to retrieve it from a box in the basement. There were quite a few such boxes, and it had taken me some time to find this particular candle. She'd smiled when I finally came into the room with it, taken it from my hand, and rather lovingly turned it beneath the lamp. Then she'd uttered one of her enigmatic remarks: I wish you could retrieve everything so easily.

Retrieve,
I thought now, a word Sandrine had no doubt chosen carefully, and which, at least for her, had surely been fraught with significance. But what had she meant? And did I now have to parse every sentence she'd uttered in order to retrieve its meaning?

Rather than enter into this discussion with myself, I returned my attention to the courtroom.

“Was this candle lit?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“Yes,” Mr. Forsythe answered.

It was lit because Sandrine had wanted it lit. She'd also wanted it placed in a particular spot on the shelf to the left of her bed. She'd asked me to light it when I came into the bedroom that last night, and, as if ignited by its flame, she'd then launched into her attack, her voice very cold and hard when she said,
“That candle, Sam, that little candle, is all that's left of Albi.”

Singleton knew none of this, of course, so I couldn't imagine why he bothered to ask Mr. Forsythe about a candle that had no relevance whatsoever to my trial.

I glanced toward Morty and gave him a quizzical look. In response, he merely shrugged, as if to say, Sometimes testimony just goes off track. Don't worry, Sam, the state will pull the train back onto the rails soon enough.

And Singleton did, dropping the whole business of the candle and returning to the subject of the general condition of the bedroom. He'd anticipated Morty's rebuttal and established that although a bit in disarray our bedroom gave no sign of a struggle. Nothing was overturned, nothing broken. Under Mr. Singleton's questioning, Mr. Forsythe told the jury that he saw no bruises on Sandrine's body, nor any sign that she had ever been physically abused. He used the word “angelic” to describe the features of Sandrine's face, and it struck me that they'd been exactly so. He then told the jury she'd looked “at rest,” which she surely had, words that immediately returned me to the final moments of that last night's fury, with what wicked depths I'd wanted never to hear her voice again or defend myself against her accusations, the thrashing wounded bull I'd been.

“Now, Mr. Forsythe,” Mr. Singleton said, “at some point during your visit to 237 Crescent Road that morning, did you have occasion to speak to Professor Madison concerning the death of his wife?”

He had had such occasion, of course.

“Would you tell the court the gist of that conversation?”

“He said that his wife had killed herself,” Mr. Forsythe answered.

“Did he say how?”

“He said his wife must have been stockpiling a painkiller for some weeks.”

“Did he give you the name of this painkiller?”

“Demerol.”

“And did he suggest to you how Sandrine Madison had administered this drug on the night in question?”

“He said that he'd picked up the glass beside the bed and it had smelled of vodka,” Mr. Forsythe informed the jury. “He said that his wife had probably taken the pills with this vodka.”

“Did he say that he was with his wife when she took her own life?”

“He said that he was not.”

Mr. Forsythe went on to reveal additional facts regarding our conversation that morning, none of which seemed particularly notable until he reached the point where, standing at the door, as he was about to leave the house, he'd turned back to me and said, “I noticed a guidebook.”

“A guidebook?” I asked.

“It was tucked just beneath the sheet,” Mr. Forsythe said. “I noticed it when I examined the body more closely.”

I had not examined Sandrine's body more closely, and so I hadn't noticed the book at all and told him so.

“What kind of guidebook?” I asked.

“A travel guide,” Forsythe said. “The title was something like
Around the Mediterranean
.”

“The Mediterranean,” I said softly. “She was probably thinking of the trip we took to the Mediterranean when we were young. It was the travel guide we used on that trip. It was twenty years old, but she never threw it away, I guess.”

“So it was nostalgia, you think?” Mr. Forsythe asked. “The reason she was reading it?”

“I suppose so, yes,” I said. “It was a good time for us. When we took that trip.” I paused, then before I could stop myself, added, “We were happier then.”

Something in Forsythe's eyes darkened. “I see,” he said. “So she hadn't been planning a trip?”

“No.”

I was trying to recall the exact words of this exchange when Mr. Singleton suddenly turned, walked over to his desk, picked up our old travel guide, the one Alabrandi had later seized, and handed it to Mr. Forsythe.

“Is this the book you saw in the bedroom at 237 Crescent Road?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“And the title is what?”