Sandrine's Case (9780802193520) (15 page)

I'd assumed that she was thinking about her illness, the horrid way it would progress, all the powers that were at that very moment diminishing and would continue to diminish until they disappeared entirely. There really is a sorrow beyond words, and I suspected that in reaching into that copper basin Sandrine was touching that deep place.

When she sensed my presence, she turned and faced me. “I've made my decision,” she said.

I'd felt quite certain I knew exactly what that decision was, and had felt, God forgive me, a surge of relief that she had made it, that she would not put herself—or me—through years and years of grim decline.

But now, rethinking this scene, feeling the ghost of Sandrine's hands on my face, recalling the dark glint in her eyes as she made this announcement, I no longer felt so sure that I knew what her fateful decision had been, or even if it had been about herself at all.

How long the nights have become without her, I thought suddenly, or with her only in my memory, only as a ghost. If she were here, I realized with a truly tragic irony, I would discuss my case with her, go over all that led up to it, all that has been discovered as a result of it, and where it all might end. During the slowly moving hours I would describe the little quakes that have shaken me during these few days of my trial, along with what they have revealed about the woman for whose murder I stand accused, how this grave accounting has returned me to those first years with her.

On that thought, I abruptly remembered a morning in Antibes. The day before we'd been at Neapolis, in Siracusa, where we'd tested the famed acoustics of the Ear of Dionysius. Sandrine had thought the story of Dionysius having been able to hear his slaves hatching plots against him by means of their voices bouncing off the exposed stone quite unlikely, and she'd been right. I'd stood at the point said to be perfect for transferring sound to that tyrant's hearing and whispered, “I'm going to kill you,” and Sandrine, stationed at the king's listening post, had heard no word of murder.

Remembered joy is a heartbreaker, especially when the long view holds future tragedy, but at that moment I found myself quite rejoicing in this memory of Sandrine, the sweet life we'd led in those early days.

Thinking of that distant time returned me to music, and for a moment I considered putting on a CD and playing Sandrine's favorite piece, “Air on a G String,” a musical title that, given its inherent double entendre, she'd always found rather funny. But simple as it is, Bach's little air is decidedly classical, and so I recalled Morty's caution, and I wondered what might be the effect should some errant member of the jury pass within hearing distance of my house. Would those gentle, meditative tones be detrimental to my case, further proof of my elitism, my snobbery, the ethical morass into which my life was sunk, and which, taken collectively, had created a man so lacking in moral boundaries that he could easily slide into murder? I could almost hear the cautionary didacticism that would emerge from any of my so-called peers' consideration of all this, the fact that life is not a mountain or a valley but the slippery slope that leads from the heights of one to the depths of the other. I knew they'd put it just that way, use me as an example of how badly a life can go wrong.

The doorbell rang.

When I opened the door, he smiled.

“How'd it go?” he asked.

I looked at my neighbor Carl Santori and saw the product of his many ailments. He has lost one kidney and has had bypass surgery, and for these reasons I had certainly expected to outlive him. This is an expectation I can no longer entertain, however. In the words of Mr. Singleton: “The plot was too cruelly premeditated and carried out over too long a time not to warrant death.”

“Honestly, Carl, I never know,” I answered.

Carl nodded softly. He has dropped by once a week since Sandrine's death, always, as now, with a hot meal from his restaurant: spaghetti, manicotti, eggplant rollatini. We have been neighbors for eleven years. His life has been seasoned by misfortune. Along with his own poor health he has known widowhood, and his son, now fourteen, has never been well. We've borrowed tools from each other and from time to time had short conversations about nothing I could later recall, but it was the night I'd quite by accident saved his son's life that had turned acquaintance into friendship, at least in Carl's mind.

On that particular night, he had suddenly gotten the idea that he'd left one of the restaurant ovens on and had rushed to his car. He was barreling toward the street when I noticed his son, Anthony, facedown in the driveway. He'd had one of his seizures, and at that instant it was clear to me that he lay directly in the path of Carl's car. As anyone else would have done, I bolted for Anthony, swooped him up, and dove, with the boy in my arms, into the safety of the adjoining yard just in time to miss the right rear bumper of Carl's Saturn. We were still on the ground when Carl rushed over to us. He leaped from the car without first putting it in gear so that it had continued on down the driveway and rammed into the brick mailbox at the end of it. Carl had seen none of this, however. He was focused on Anthony. We both immediately dashed over to my car and rushed him to the local hospital, where he'd quickly recovered.

Anyone would have done what I did but Carl thought it heroic, and from that moment on he pledged to be my friend eternally. Since Sandrine's death, with his visits and his gifts of steaming Italian food, he has proven to be just that.

“I put in some garlic bread,” he said.

“Thank you, Carl.”

“Enjoy,” he said as he pressed the bag toward me.

He had always been deeply inarticulate, and the trouble I was in had only made him more so. Even under normal circumstances he would have had little to say. Now every word seemed the product of a long travail.

Carl eased away from me as if to the sound of a ticking bomb.

“Well, good night, Sam.”

“Good night, Carl.”

He seemed to dissolve almost instantly, leaving me alone and staring at the bag of food he'd brought me.

Normally I'd at least have a taste of that garlic bread, but at that moment I had no appetite for anything. In fact, encased within the bleakness of this occasion, I wondered if I'd ever have a taste for anything again. Whatever the food, it would remind me of Sandrine. If it were Middle Eastern I'd think of our few days in Istanbul. If it were French I'd think of her in Paris. If it were Italian I'd think of strolling the streets of Rome with her or swimming with her in Capri. Or would I think of Venice, drifting beneath the Bridge of Sighs, that storied kiss. Some years later, I'd asked her quite seriously if she thought that moment would perhaps be that the one she would most remember about our Mediterranean trip. Her answer had been swift and sure
.
No, she'd said, her gaze very soft and loving, that will be Albi.

Albi, I thought now, where that candle had come from. Albi, the page she dogeared in the travel book she'd taken to her bed on that last night.

“You really should try to get some sleep, Dad.”

I turned to find Alexandria standing a few feet away, backlit and motionless, a figure that struck me quite suddenly as rather sinister, a woman in the house who was not Sandrine. My daughter, yes, as I realized quite achingly, but even so a woman I did not actually know.

“A long day tomorrow, remember?” she added.

“I remember,” I said quietly. “Okay, I'll go to bed very soon. You should get some sleep yourself.”

She nodded, turned, then disappeared in the same ghostly way as Carl had vanished moments before.

I put the food Carl had brought me in the refrigerator, then washed, brushed my teeth, went to the toilet, and finally, with no alternative, crawled into bed.

It was late but I couldn't get to sleep. Alexandria was right. Tomorrow would be a long day. I had seen the witness list and so I knew that as of tomorrow the case against me would build steadily and grow more sinister.

I grabbed the remote and turned on the television.

On the screen, a beautiful young actress was talking to a middle-aged late-night host about her new movie. In the film she played a comic book character rather than a person.

“Is it easier to be a comic book character than a human being?” the host asked her in the slightly mischievous bad-boy way of late night hosts.

Surprisingly, the young actress appeared somewhat troubled by the question. A hint of gravity appeared in her eyes, as if she'd glimpsed the looming approach of a force bent on killing her.

“Safer,” she said.

Well, that much is true, I thought, then glanced over to the bureau where Sandrine had kept her scarves and blouses along with the faded jeans and floppy sweatshirts she'd often worn around the house. Beautiful women are even more beautiful, as Willa Cather once observed, in a state of dishabille. This had certainly been true of Sandrine, a fact made entirely evident by the photo that rested in a little chrome frame on top of this same bureau, and which showed her sitting on the steps of the Coburn College library.

I was still drifting in the remembered beauty of those early days when Alexandria tapped at my door.

“It's one-thirty, Dad,” she informed me. “You really should go to bed.”

“Sleep is for the dull,” I said, knowing quite well that there would be little sleep for me that night.

“Whatever,” Alexandria muttered.

The bedroom door was closed but I could hear her step away and move on down the corridor to her room. I couldn't see the expression on her face, of course, but I knew it was sour. She had previously made it clear that I was one of those people who always had an answer, and I had to admit that for most of my life I had, in fact, always had one. But since my trial it seems that I'd had only questions for which I can find no answers, though I continued to feel that they were there waiting for me, these answers, and that I would eventually find them. In one of Sandrine's unpublished essays, she wrote that there should be no distinction between questions for the head and questions for the heart because no compelling answer could be offered to either without giving voice to both.

Sociopath.

Her voice sounded so clearly in my mind at that moment that I actually spun around, as if expecting to see her standing before me as she had that night, her eyes aflame as she'd reached for that white cup.

Sociopath.

Perhaps she'd been right, I told myself, as I twisted around and turned off the light. Perhaps I am even now strangely disconnected to the very events that are most critical to my life, and thus increasingly hard-pressed to defend myself against the many charges made against me. The only thing about Catholicism that ever made sense to Sandrine was the confessional, and in this she was right. More, perhaps even more than someone to love and love us back, we need someone to whom we can tell the unvarnished truth about ourselves. That is what I found myself missing most at that moment as I stared into the darkness. What I missed more than ever, and would forever miss, was simply and irreducibly Sandrine, her heartbreaking truths, the way she'd released the last of them like an arrow into darkness.

You are nothing, Sam. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Her last words to me.

P
ART
III

County District Attorney Harold Singleton has said that he is now preparing the most crucial aspects of the state's case against Professor Samuel Madison for the murder of his wife, Professor Sandrine Madison, both of Coburn College, a trial that has captured the attention of both national and regional media and is thought to be the most famous ever held in Coburn County.

Coburn Sentinel
January 15, 2011

D
AY
F
IVE

Morning

I was surprised when, on the fifth day of my trial, I came into the kitchen and found Jenna sitting with Alexandria. But there they were, Sandrine's sister and Sandrine's daughter, poised around a butcher-block table. In a vague paranoia no doubt induced by a sleepless night they looked to me like two witches from
Macbeth,
keeping the pot astir, summoning toil and trouble.

“Good morning, Sam,” Jenna said.

“Hi,” I replied, somewhat drily, since I knew Jenna has always felt that in choosing me Sandrine had made the wrong choice.

“I happened to be in Atlanta,” Jenna said, “so I drove over to see how Alexandria is holding up.”

Meaning that for me she had not the slightest care, an attitude she'd exhibited quite thoroughly since Sandrine's death, distancing herself more or less completely. She'd stayed in touch with Alexandria but I'd dropped off her radar like a crashed plane. Still, I wasn't sure she'd gone so far as to think I'd murdered Sandrine. On that particular subject she had yet to weigh in.

“Alexandria's doing fine,” I assured her. “We Madisons are made of stern stuff.”

Jenna's smile could have cut a diamond. “I wanted to see that for myself.” The smile widened but kept its hardness. “I have only a few minutes, I'm afraid.”

“And then where are you off to?” I asked.

“I have a meeting in Chicago at noon tomorrow.”

“Then you're not spending the night here?” Alexandria asked.

Jenna shook her head. “I'd like to but I have to get back to Atlanta.”

Was that true, I wondered. Or was there something about this house that frightened Jenna, the notion perhaps of sharing it with a murderer?

“Well, I'm sorry you can't stay,” I said, though I doubted Jenna would believe this.

She was Sandrine's older sister, and she had always played the role of her protector. In that role, she'd doubtless hated the fact that her brilliant, beautiful sister had gotten involved with a scraggly graduate student, lived with him in grimy apartments, then unaccountably married him and had a baby with this same undistinguished soul.

Yet I had little doubt that her heart went out to Alexandria for my daughter's bad luck in being my only surviving relative, heir to the host of disreputable behaviors that had now culminated in, of all things, a murder trial.

“Alexandria tells me that today may be pretty tough,” Jenna said.

“It could be, yes.” I looked at Alexandria. “But we're getting used to it being rough, aren't we?”

Alexandria took a sip of coffee. “We have no idea how long it may last,” she said to Jenna. “The trial, I mean.”

I offered a dry laugh. “Or the appeals or the appeals of the appeals.”

“So it's going badly?” Jenna asked.

I suspected that the prospect of my case going badly was Jenna's devout hope. She would, it seemed to me, like nothing more than that I spend the rest of my life on my knees in a grimy cell giving head to a Mexican drug lord. After all, I'd betrayed her sister, and she may even believe I'd killed her. And yet she had to be cordial with me, if only for the sake of Alexandria. Such is the burden, along with the sorrow and the pity, of extended family.

I shrugged. “I have no idea how it's going, Jenna,” I told her.

“For one whole day it was the pathologist,” Alexandria said. “A Dr. Mortimer.”

“Aptly named,” I quipped. “For
mort,
which means death in French.”

A chilly smile trembled on Jenna's lips. “I would, of course, know that, Sam,” she informed me icily, “having grown up in Montreal.”

I walked to the refrigerator, took out the milk, sniffed it because this is a compulsion of mine, then poured a small amount into a cup. I added coffee, but I had no appetite for anything more. Even if I had wanted an actual breakfast, I would have refrained from having it in front of Jenna. It would look unseemly, a big hearty southern breakfast of eggs, bacon, toast, butter, jam, the works, in a man on trial for the murder of her beautiful, brilliant, deserving of much better sister. That is one of the oddities of my case—or of any case like mine—that the ordinary pleasures, or at least the public enjoyment of them, quite convincingly argues not only that you are guilty of the crime of which you are accused but that, in addition, you feel not a speck of remorse. Smile or, God forbid, laugh when your child is missing and no one will doubt that you know where its body is.

I strategically stuck to coffee, a little milk, but absolutely no sugar.

“It's amazing how dull it is, a trial,” Alexandria went on in a tone that seemed quite disconcertingly matter-of-fact, as if, as my ordeal ground on, she'd begun to rate it as entertainment, a system that in my case would garner no more than two stars.

“So this Dr. Mortimer had nothing to say that would—” Jenna stopped, quite obviously at a loss as to how she should continue.

“Convict me?” I asked with a dry laugh. “No, not really. He confirmed that Sandrine died from an overdose of Demerol, along with a tumbler of vodka ‘seeded,' as he put it, with antihistamines.”

He'd gone on to testify that there'd been no bruises, cuts, or lacerations on her body, which indicated, of course, that there'd been no sign of a struggle. Either Sandrine had poisoned herself of her own volition, as Dr. Mortimer concluded, or someone had poisoned her.

“It's the antihistamines that are the problem,” Alexandria said.

“And the fact that they were crushed,” I added. “Which would evidently have made them undetectable. So that Sandrine wouldn't have known she was taking them. I mean, she wouldn't have tasted anything, and so, theoretically, I might have used them to . . .”

“I see,” Jenna interrupted. “But why would she have taken antihistamines at all?” she asked.

“To stop her from vomiting up the Demerol,” Alexandria answered. “That's what the prosecutor says. And so they were added to the vodka because Dad wanted Mom to keep down the Demerol.”

“I see,” Jenna repeated softly.

For a moment, she stared at her hands, then she looked up and her eyes whipped over to me. “Is it true someone was looking for antiemetics on your computer?” she said. “I read that in the Atlanta paper.”

“Yes,” I said. “It's true.”

I could now assume that Jenna had also learned that in addition to an effort to find “strong” antiemetic drugs, my computer had recorded several sinister searches having to do with “painless suicide,” as well as with various drugs that could bring it about, among which was Demerol, facts long made public, along with my less than adequate explanation that Sandrine's computer had been having problems so she'd used mine.

“Obviously, Sandrine wanted to die,” I said. “And naturally she wanted it to be painless.”

When Jenna looked at me doubtfully, I continued, “As for those antihistamines, I'm not positive Sandrine took them in order to make sure the Demerol did the job.”

“What other reason would she have had?” Jenna asked.

I gave the only answer that I thought made sense. “Sandrine was . . . kind. She wouldn't have wanted to make a mess.”

“A mess she knew you'd have to clean up, right?” Jenna asked.

“Yes.”

“How thoughtful she was, Sam,” Jenna said. Her gaze hardened. “And how loyal.”

“Loyal, yes,” I said, then fled back to the safer subject of incriminating evidence.

“Anyway, as far as the painless suicide research, I didn't know she'd done any of that,” I said.

A question clearly came into Jenna's mind, one she briefly hesitated to ask before at last giving in to her insurmountable urge to ask it.

“And if you had known?”

“Well, as I told Alexandria, maybe Sandrine had a right to do it. I mean, the Greeks—”

“The Greeks, right,” Jenna interrupted sharply, then immediately began to gather up her things. “I can do without pedantic references.”

There'd always been something hard about Jenna, something dead-eyed and unforgiving, perhaps even a tad mercenary, her character almost the direct opposite of Sandrine's, thus a woman, as I thought now, who would never have had the slightest impulse to teach in some little college or, God forbid, open a school in some remote corner of the globe.

Because of all this, it struck me as quite odd that during the last months of her life Sandrine had invited Jenna for several visits, offers she'd always accepted, stays of two or three days during which I would often find them in conversation in the afternoon, the two of them sitting in the little gazebo Sandrine had wanted for the backyard, one of those cheap prefabricated affairs, assembled in a single day, and which was already beginning to fall apart.

It had served her for a season, though, and she had often retreated there, either to read or listen to music on her Nano, and on occasion to talk with Jenna over glasses of white wine, both of them glancing over when they caught sight of me, their conversation instantly falling off.

“Tell me this, Jenna,” I blurted suddenly. Jenna was taken aback by how abruptly I'd called to her. “What did you talk about?” I asked her.

“Talk about?” Jenna asked tentatively.

“When you were with Sandrine,” I said. “In the gazebo.”

Jenna looked as if I'd posed this question with hostility.

“Nothing much,” she answered coolly.

“Nothing much?” I asked. “But you came here often during those last weeks, when Sandrine had drawn completely away from me. I mean, she hardly ever talked to me during that time, but she talked to you quite a lot, so I'm just wondering what you talked about, whether it was . . . intimate?”

“Intimate?” Jenna said a little sharply. “Why shouldn't she have talked intimately to me?”

After all, Jenna was saying, weren't you “intimate” with that little whore?

I felt myself wither under the hard edge of her gaze.

“I'm sorry,” I said softly. “Of course, she did. It's just that Sandrine wasn't talking to me much during those last weeks. She'd cut me off so I couldn't imagine—”

“Maybe she was tired of talking to you, Sam,” Jenna shot back.

“She told you that?”

“Well, wasn't it obvious?” Jenna demanded. “You just said that she'd practically stopped talking to you.”

“But why?”

“I don't know,” Jenna answered. “She never said.”

We both remained silent for a moment, then very quietly Jenna added, “We talked about life, Sam.” Her eyes glistened suddenly. “Sandrine was my sister.” She drew in a long breath and I could tell she was using it to regain her composure. “She was my only sister.”

“And sisters talk, Dad,” Alexandria added firmly, like a referee stepping between two boxers.

“Of course,” I muttered softly, then pasted on a gentle smile that was all for Jenna's benefit, and which I offered at that moment because I was evidently learning to be . . . kind. “Of course they do.”

Jenna resumed gathering up her things. “Stay safe,” she said to Alexandria in a way that struck me as somewhat conspiratorial, those two Shakespearean witches in dark conclave again.

“You don't have to go,” I said. “I'm not . . . evil, Jenna. I'm not . . . I . . .”

The fact was, I no longer knew what I was.

“Anyway,” I muttered. “Thanks for checking in . . . on Alexandria.”

Jenna had by then gotten on her coat, her eyes on me during the whole oddly frantic process. She seemed about to leave, but suddenly she stopped and faced me squarely. “Sandrine loved you, Sam.” Her gaze was very steady, like a middle school teacher making a point. “If that's in doubt somehow.”

And with that she left.

“What was that all about?” Alexandria demanded once Jenna was safely out of earshot.

“What was what all about?” I asked.

“Asking what Mom and Jenna talked about.” She was clearly irritated by the question. She looked at me sternly. “Jenna's not the one on trial, Dad.”

This was beyond the pale.

“And I am, right?” I snapped.

Alexandria both gave a little and held her ground. “You know what I mean,” she said.

“Not really, Alexandria,” I told her. “I know I have brought difficult times down on you, but I don't know what I can do about it. If you can think of something, please let me know.”

She gave me one of her puzzled yet penetrating looks, then asked a question I knew must surely have been dogging her for a long time.

“Did Mom know about that woman?”

So at last we had arrived at April.

“Not that I know of.”

“You never told her?”

“Confession is not my strong point, I'm afraid.”

She paused and, during that interval, I felt a terrible heat wafting from her.

“And what about Malcolm?” she asked. “Did you know about him?”

I shook my head. “Not the whole story, no.”

I saw that my daughter was reluctant to go any further into her parents' unfathomable marriage. I didn't want to go any further into it either, but at that moment I saw Malcolm Esterman quite vividly in my mind, an image of him strolling through the gold and yellow leaves of an autumnal Coburn College, balding and bespectacled, with his books under his arm, his jacket forever coated with a thin film of chalk dust. Central casting: Mr. Chips.