Sandrine's Case (9780802193520) (22 page)

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Testimony is set to continue today in the trial of Dr. Samuel Madison, the Coburn College professor accused in the death of his wife, Sandrine Madison. Throughout the investigation and trial, Dr. Madison has professed his innocence. It is not known whether he will testify in his own defense.

Coburn Sentinel
January 20, 2011

D
AY
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IX

Morning Session

Throughout the following evening, as I lay on my back in the darkness of the bedroom, I increasingly came to suspect that I did, indeed, now dangle in a web cleverly spun by Sandrine. Who, after all, could have more keenly intuited my dark desires, nor had a better motive to lay a trap for me should I act upon them. Had she seen in my soulless book its soulless author, surmised that I was indeed a sociopath capable of ridding myself of a woman who would with each passing day become more of a burden? Had Sandrine suspected that I wanted her dead and, in the throes of that suspicion, devised a way to make her destruction equally my own?

I couldn't reveal so grim a prospect to Alexandria, of course. Nor could I speak of it to Morty without sounding like a man so unhinged, so paranoid, so, well, sociopathic that in order to slither out of a murder conviction he was willing to lay the charge of attempted murder on the head of his dead wife. This meant that if Sandrine had, in fact, plotted to avenge her death, she'd done it in a way that not only prevented her plot from ever being discovered but just as thoroughly prevented it from even being discussed, let alone raised in court.

Such considerations were still imposing themselves upon me during the morning session of my trial, then into the afternoon session, Detective Alabrandi still on the stand, meticulously re-creating the many interviews he'd conducted both with me and with others during his investigation of Sandrine's death. At points during all the previous testimony, I'd sometimes found myself adrift in a grim miasma of unfathomable circumstances but, now, as Alabrandi began to offer a step-by-step analysis of the evidence that had ultimately come his way, I no longer felt at sea. Perhaps there was, and had always been, to employ the words of Henry James, a “pattern in the carpet.”

“Now, Detective Alabrandi, did you return to 237 Crescent Road on December 17?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“I did, yes.”

“And by then other issues had come to your attention regarding the death of Mrs. Madison, isn't that so?”

“Yes, they had.”

“And so you returned and spoke to the defendant . . . this would be the fifth time, I believe?”

“Yes.”

This time he'd come in the morning, while I was sitting in the sunroom with my first cup of coffee, staring at the wicker chair that had always been Sandrine's and wondering, still wondering, just how much digging Alabrandi had done since he'd last showed up at my door, and what he'd uncovered, a worrisome process made all the more relevant by his first statement, one made even before he'd entered my house that morning.

“If you don't mind, we'd like to have a look at Mrs. Madison's computer,” Alabrandi said.

“No, I don't mind,” I told him. “But it's not working.”

“Not working?”

“That's right,” I said. “Sandrine had been using my computer during the least few weeks.”

“You never thought to get it fixed?” Alabrandi asked.

“She said she'd rather just buy a new one,” I answered. “But she never got around to doing that.”

Alabrandi's gaze betrayed something I found quite disturbing, the sense that he found me personally repellant. “We'd like to look at your computer as well.” He smiled, but it was the smile of a man who held the winning cards, and knew it. “We could get a warrant, of course, but it's easier just to have your permission.”

“Take them both,” I said since I'd by then surmised that a demeanor that suggested a complete confidence in my innocence would play far better than my getting a lawyer or anything of that sort, a decision Morty had later thought quite foolish.

“The office we shared was small so we just had two laptops,” I added.

“Thanks,” Alabrandi said. “I'll pick them up on my way out.”

I nodded. “Sure.”

He took out his notebook. “Would you mind describing Mrs. Madison's general attitude during the weeks that led up to her death?”

He'd said “death” rather than “suicide,” but I'd gotten used to such sinister syntactical ploys, and so they no longer bothered me. I was a tenured professor of English literature, after all. I knew how to use language.

“Attitude?” I asked. “That's a very general term.”

Something hardened in Alabrandi's gaze. “How she seemed, is what I mean,” he said. “Her thoughts and feelings.”

“That's not much better with regard to generalities.”

Alabrandi shifted slightly. “Generalities are okay,” he said with a hint of irritability. “Generalities are just fine, Professor. Frankly, I don't see how I can be more specific, so may we, as they say, move on?”

“Well, in general then, she had become withdrawn,” I told him.

“Due to her illness?”

“Yes.”

“What about that last evening?”

He knows, I thought.

As Detective Alabrandi testified to this very exchange it struck me that it had not occurred to me at that moment that Alexandria might already have borne witness against me, that even at this early stage of the investigation a police informant might be embedded in what remained of my shattered household. Even now, I couldn't be sure, so that when I glanced back toward my daughter, met her gaze with my own, I felt, for the first time in my life, unsure of absolutely everything, a man now entirely unmoored. Had that also been part of Sandrine's plan, to so thoroughly unhinge me that my life, from now on, would be no more than a long slog through ever shifting sands, rootless, uncertain, and lonely beyond words.

Alexandria nodded toward the front of the courtroom, reminding me to pay attention.

When I turned back, Alabrandi had moved a few minutes further into his narration of our fifth interview.

“I began to ask Mr. Madison about the last evening of his wife's life,” he told the court.

And immediately I was back in my living room, facing him as fearlessly as I could manage.

“The last evening?” I asked hesitantly.

“Was she still withdrawn?”

“Not exactly.”

“So how would you describe Mrs. Madison's demeanor that evening?”

He knows, I repeated in my mind, though I could not be sure of this. And yet, if he knows, and if I lie or even diminish what happened between Sandrine and me that night, then I'll look as if I'm hiding something . . . and I would be.

“She was angry,” I said.

In fact, Sandrine had said such furiously hurtful things to me on that evening, egged me on so relentlessly that, by now, as I listened to what Alabrandi began to tell the jury about this very exchange—and given the plot I feared she might have hatched—I'd come to suspect that Sandrine's entire effort that night had been directed at forcing my hand, so that I would hesitate no longer to carry out what perhaps she had come to believe I was already plotting: her murder.

“Very angry,” I added as one after another of her accusations returned to me, all she'd first admired in me—the kindness, the simplicity, the sense of service—and all she had since come to despise: my snideness, my superiority, my endless sense of grievance, the shabby gift, as she'd found opportunity to repeat, of my disillusion.

“She was in an absolute rage,” I said coldly, before I could stop myself, a sudden loss of control that Sandrine would have expected, so that were souls immortal, as I suddenly imagined, she would doubtless have been smiling from on high.

“Rage?” Alabrandi repeated.

There was no going back. “Rage, yes,” I said.

With that answer, Alabrandi had taken out his notebook, opened it, written something into it, then looked up and leveled his gaze upon me. “Did you and your wife ever have any physical confrontations?”

I shook my head.

“Never,” I answered, then saw the cup she'd hurled at me, a white porcelain cup that had crashed on the door as I'd left and whose many jagged shards I'd quickly swept up before the calling 911.

Morty nudged me slightly. “What's going on, Sam? You look like shit.”

“I'm fine,” I said crisply.

“Well act it then,” Morty instructed. “Don't look like you just got hit by a fucking train.”

In fact, at that moment some months before, fixed in Alabrandi's glint-of-a-knife stare, I'd felt that indeed I had been hit by an idea no less powerful and destructive than a speeding locomotive, the notion that somehow Alabrandi had found out about that cup, a knowledge he'd been hinting at during the fifth interview, and upon which, now on this fifth day of my trial, Mr. Singleton was closing in.

And so I leaned forward and listened more attentively as Mr. Singleton continued his questioning of Detective Alabrandi.

“Now, Detective Alabrandi, at this time, did you inform Professor Madison of any information you had regarding the relationship between Mr. Madison and his wife?”

“No,” Alabrandi answered. “Not at that time. I simply let him talk.”

Yes, indeed, I thought, he'd let me talk, and talk I had. I'd described Sandrine's increasingly withdrawn behavior, her long hours in the sunroom or in the scriptorium, the way she'd listen to music for hours on end. Alabrandi had listened to all this without comment so that it was only when I'd come to the end of this recitation that he finally tossed his spear.

“Mr. Madison, that last night, when your wife, as you said, was in a rage, there was an argument, I suppose?”

“Yes, we had an argument,” I answered.

Alabrandi jotted a note in that strictly by-the-book way of his, like a man simply recording a few routine details. “Can you be more specific?”

“It was around six,” I went on. “Lots of Coburn students have to work, and so we have many evening classes. I had two classes that night and I didn't get home until sometime after ten.”

“Do you recall what the argument was about?” Alabrandi asked.

“Lots of things, really,” I said.

“Lots of things?” Alabrandi asked.

“That I was distant, that I was cold.”

“Anything else?”

“There were probably other things,” I admitted. “But I don't remember what they were.”

“How did it end, this argument?”

“It ended with Sandrine bringing up Alexandria,” I said. “She thought I'd not been a very good father to our daughter.”

“In what way not a good father?”

“That I'd often made it obvious I was disappointed in her because she hadn't lived up to some idea of what our daughter should be. A writer or a scholar. Something like that.” I shrugged. “I got quite defensive, of course, and she said that was typical, too, that nothing she, or anyone else, said or did could ever penetrate what she called my ‘shell.' When I started to leave, she yelled at me very loudly.”

“What did she yell?” Alabrandi asked.

As if I were in that darkened room again I heard Sandrine's voice split the air.

“She screamed, ‘You're a sociopath,'” I said, “and that I was nothing to her. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.” I felt a shudder. “As far as I know, those were her last words.”

“At least to you,” Alabrandi said.

“What?” I asked.

“Well, there was a phone beside her bed,” Alabrandi said.

I nodded. “Yes, there was a phone,” I said, now wondering if this was something Alabrandi had intentionally planted in my brain, the idea that Sandrine might have used that phone to call for help or—could she possibly have done this?—to say just as the drugs took effect that she had been murdered?

“Anyway,” Alabrandi said, “calling you a sociopath, this was said as you were leaving for your class at the college?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Sociopath,” Alabrandi repeated as he wrote the word in his notebook. Then he looked up, his dark eyes quite intense now, so that I'd felt rather like a small animal caught in the crosshairs of a very powerful rifle.

“You knew about the argument, didn't you?” I asked him.

Alabrandi said nothing, and since at that early date I hadn't yet begun to have doubts about Alexandria, I suspected that he'd probably heard about it from Edith Whittier, our next-door neighbor, a woman divorced so early and for so long her life seemed spinsterish. It couldn't have been Carl, because he'd taken his son on a camping trip that week. None of the other houses was close enough for the people living in them to have heard voices coming from inside 237 Crescent Road. It had to have been Edith, I thought as Alabrandi wrote something else in his notebook. Even so it wasn't until I'd later seen her name on the prosecution witness list that my fears were confirmed. At the time, however, I'd surmised that if Edith had heard voices, then she'd probably heard the crash of that white porcelain cup.

“Sandrine threw a cup at me,” I told Alabrandi in order to give the impression that I wasn't trying to hide anything.

The smooth movement of Alabrandi's pen stopped abruptly as he glanced up from his notebook.

“As I was leaving,” I added. “She threw it at me as I was leaving. It crashed against the door. It broke into lots of pieces.”

“None of the officers reported seeing a broken cup,” Alabrandi said pointedly.

“That's because I cleaned it up,” I told him.

“When?”

“Before anyone got there.”

Alabrandi made a note of this. “Where are those pieces?” he asked.

“I threw them in the garbage, and a couple of days ago the garbage people picked it up. I suppose they're in the town dump somewhere.”

Detective Alabrandi didn't appear particularly disturbed by any of this.

“You were alone in the house during this argument?” he asked. “Except for your wife, I mean.”