Sandrine's Case (9780802193520) (4 page)

“The motions were denied,” Morty continued. “The state can proceed with its case.”

I had also noticed that, in Morty's admirably neutral parlance, Mr. Singleton was no longer a man who was trying with all his skill and might to kill me. He was the state.

“There was no finding of incompetent, prejudicial, or wrongful conduct on the part of any party during the course of the investigation,” Morty went on.

This was a mouthful but I got the gist of it. No cops erred in matters either large or which could be made to look large. No minor official had expressed his or her dislike for me within the hearing of anyone else who was willing to report it to the court. No court official or duly designated officer of the court had done anything beyond the scope of his or her authorized duties. Every document that had needed to be signed had been signed, and no document had been signed by any person other than the one in full possession of the authority to have done so. Legally speaking, every
t
had been crossed and every
i
had been dotted.

“In other words,” Morty said, “all your constitutional rights have been protected.”

“God bless America,” I whispered.

Morty glared at me. “That's just the kind of smart-ass remark that can put a rope around your neck, Sam.”

“Sorry,” I said. But th
is sotto voce apology was not enough for Morty.

“How many times do I have to tell you this?” His eyes narrowed. “A trial isn't about what happened, it's about what a jury comes to believe happened. It's about appearances. And
believe me, making some snide remark about America doesn't play.”

“Sorry,” I repeated, hoping that would end it. But Morty was on a roll.

“You're not at some Ivy League faculty tea,” he continued. “This is Coburn, Georgia, for Christ's sake.”

“Believe me,” I said with a hint of resentment, “that much I know.”

“Well, I sure hope you do,” Morty shot back.

Surely this will end it, I thought, but I was wrong.

“You ever heard of a witch trial, Sam?” Morty asked. “Well, we're about to have one, if you're not careful.”

“I'll be careful,” I assured him since it was clearly this assurance that he sought.

He looked at me doubtfully.

“I will. I promise.”

Morty nodded crisply, then sank into paperwork. I looked across the aisle and saw that “the state” was doing the same, his pencil flying across a page.

I waited.

At last Judge Rutledge said, “Mr. Singleton, is the state ready to proceed?”

“It is, Your Honor.”

“Then please call your first witness.”

“Yes, Your Honor,” Mr. Singleton said, then he glanced into the crowd—or was it a mob?—that had gathered to follow my case and summoned his first witness to the stand.

Call Chanisa
Evangela Shipman

With those words it finally began, the actual substance of my trial, all else before it little more than practice before the game.

I watched as the first prosecution witness approached the witness box, the initial elements of Mr. Singleton's case against me to be offered by a short, compactly built black woman, one of the many telephone operators who worked the evening shift at the headquarters of the grandly named Coburn Office of Emergency Preparedness and Response, a name about which I'd once quipped that, after the World Trade Center tragedy, the town council had evidently concluded that Coburn would be next.

Once on the stand she took the oath, then, by way of answering Mr. Singleton's first routine question, she stated her name, and in one of those time shifts to which I'd recently fallen prey I went back to the evening when I'd made that 911 call and first heard the voice of Chanisa Evangela Shipman.

I'd come home from my last class of the day, gone directly to the “scriptorium,” the august name I'd given to the cramped space into which Sandrine and I crowded our two small wooden desks, and in which we planned our lessons and wrote our lectures. Once there I'd graded a few of the generally incoherent and sometimes subliterate papers the students in my survey of world literature class had handed in that same day, frightfully mindless little jottings filled with every imaginable error of grammar and spelling, not to mention the utter absence of interesting ideas. I'd managed to get through a few of them by sunset but I'd stopped in a seizure of frustration at the opening line of the latest of them:
You've probably heard the old joke about Rome falling because of led in there plates and cups.

It was then I'd gone looking for Sandrine, found her not in the little sunroom where she often read at the end of day but in our bedroom, in the dark, with even the table lamp turned off.

“I want it dark,” she explained as I opened the door and came into the room.

“Why?” I answered.

“Just let me stay in the dark,” she said sharply.

“Okay, but . . . are you all right, Sandrine?”

“Come back later.”

“You don't want any dinner?”

“No. I want to rest for a little while, then I want to talk to you.”

“Talk to me?” I asked cautiously.

“I have something I want to tell you.”

“Sandrine, I—”

“Later.”

“All right,” I said as I eased back out of the room.

Her tone had been dark and hard, with an undertone of anger that had sent a shiver of foreboding down my spine. Even so, I hadn't suspected that things were as bad as they'd later turned out to be, that this latest exchange was but prelude to a full-scale assault.

None of this had anything to do with the current testimony, of course, since it had preceded Sandrine's death by several hours, and so I tried to keep my mind from wandering, tried to stay focused on what was being said at present.

“Now, what is it that you prefer to be called, Ms. Shipman?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“I'm not a Ms.,” the witness corrected. “I been married fourteen years and have three kids. Just call me Evie. That's what people do.”

“All right, Evie,” Mr. Singleton said agreeably. “All right. So, tell me, what is your job?”

She had been a 911 dispatcher for six years. She'd first worked the day shift, but because her husband worked nights she'd changed to the night shift as soon as a position had become available. Had she not done so, she would not have been on duty and thus she would not have answered the call that came into the 911 switchboard at 1:14 a.m. on the evening of November 14, nor heard what she now described as a man's voice.

“Did this man identify himself?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“Yes. He said he was Professor Madison and that he was calling to report the death of his wife.”

“
Professor
Madison? He didn't introduce himself using his first name?”

“No, sir. He said ‘Professor Madison,' and that his wife had died.”

“Did
Professor
Madison say how his wife died?”

“No, he didn't. He just said she was dead, so there was no need to hurry.”

“No need to hurry?”

“Because she was dead, I guess,” Evie explained.

Dead, yes, and lying on her back in the bed, the white sheets hardly ruffled, as I instantly recalled. Earlier that same evening, when I'd left her, there'd been a notebook on the table beside her bed, along with a few pens, a book, all of it amid the bedside clutter I'd gotten used to by then, a box of tissues, a tube of ChapStick, her Nano with its white earbuds.

“Now there is a procedure with regard to calls of this kind, isn't there, Evie?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“Yes.”

“What is that procedure?”

“Well, you have to find out if the dead person was expected to be dead.”

“Expected?”

“I mean, if it's an old person, like a grandmother, or somebody like that. Or somebody who's been sick a long time. Or under hospice care. So you've been expecting them to die, is what I mean, so you can just call the person's doctor to get a cause of death certificate. After that, you can call the funeral parlor or wherever you want the deceased person to be taken. What I mean is, if I get a call like that, I don't have to call the police.”

“I see,” Mr. Singleton said. “But you did call the police, didn't you?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Why?”

“Because we ask a few questions, and if it turns out, for example, that the dead person is young, then we send a police officer. That's what the rule says. In this case, the dead person was forty-six. That's young enough that a police officer is dispatched.”

For the next few minutes, Mr. Singleton took Evie through the other questions I was asked that night, none of them particularly relevant, but all of them designed to show that Chanisa Evangela “Evie” Shipman was a fully competent public service dispatcher. I noticed that Mr. Singleton did not, at any point, inquire about my tone of voice that night, whether I'd sounded frightened, angry, aggrieved, or even whether or not I'd shown any emotion at all at the time I'd reported Sandrine's death. Even before my trial, I'd seen enough courtroom dramas to gather that such questions would be asking for a conclusion of the witness, thus subject to defense objections. Such objections would distract the jury and slow down the proceedings, something Mr. Singleton obviously wanted to avoid. Mrs. Shipman's testimony was the opening chapter in the story of a murder, and he'd clearly decided that the flow of this sinister narrative was better left uninterrupted by show-stopping challenges from the defense.

And so, for a time, the witness continued her testimony, vaguely technical though it was, a well-trained woman simply doing what she had been trained to do.

Then, quite abruptly, and far more quickly than I'd expected, it was over.

“That will be all,” Mr. Singleton said to the witness. “Thank you.”

Morty rose, walked to the podium, and smiled sweetly at Chanisa Evangela “Evie” Shipman. Three members of the jury were black, and so he made sure to indicate that he had nothing but the highest regard for this dutiful civil servant.

“May I also call you Evie?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“All right, now. How many questions would you say you asked Mr. Madison when he called to report the death of his wife?”

Evie's eyes grew thoughtful as she made her calculation. “Well, I'd say, maybe ten or so. You have to get addresses and phone numbers and things like that.”

“Did Mr. Madison answer these questions without hesitation?”

“Yes.”

“And, later, did you find that any of the answers Mr. Madison gave you that evening were incorrect?”

“No, sir.”

“He told you that his wife was forty-six, isn't that right?”

“Yes.”

“I have here the birth certificate of Sandrine Madison,” Morty said. He handed the certificate to Evie. “Could you read the date of Mrs. Madison's birth?”

Evie did.

“How old was Sandrine Madison at her death?”

“Forty-six.”

“In fact, in every particular of those ten or so questions you asked Mr. Madison that evening, he gave you a correct answer, didn't he?”

“As far as I know, he did, yes.”

“And he gave these answers without hesitation, isn't that your prior testimony?”

“Yes, it is.”

Again Morty smiled. “Thank you for the work you do for our community, Evie,” he said, almost reverently. “No further questions.”

Evie left the stand, and because the byways of the mind are unknowable, it struck me that I'd pictured her as a considerably larger woman than she was. She'd had a husky, no-nonsense voice, like one of those enormous women you see in the grocery store or the mall, a huge rear end covered so tightly by stretch pants the fabric seems to groan with the strain of holding back all that flesh. But Evie was small and wiry, a little bantamweight of a woman. Her step was springy, and I suspected that she could tear up the dance floor, a woman who knew how to have a good time, but also one who, once at work, did her job carefully and without much sense of play.

She didn't look at me as she passed. Witnesses rarely do, according to Morty. They keep things impersonal, at a distance. Sorry if what I said helps send you to Death Row, they seem to say, but, hey, I gotta tell it like it is.

Within seconds she was gone, and Morty and Mr. Singleton were at the judge's bench discussing some detail.

My mind wandered again, and I recalled leaving the bedroom that last night, leaving it while Sandrine was still alive, leaving it in a sputtering rage at what she'd said to me, how cold and cruel it had been, and how quietly she'd said it: “Sam, I'd rather be dead than live with you another second. Do you know why? Because you're a . . .”

On hearing the final word she'd added to that sentence, and dodging the cup she'd hurled at me as she'd said it, I had immediately slammed the door of the room, walked out into the night, looked up at the stars, that storied immensity, and for a moment hoped I might find some way to recover from this attack, go back to her, do what I could to salvage what was left of all we'd once had. I had immediately dismissed that same hope, however, and with that final dismissal accepted the grim fact that I didn't want to go on this way because she'd made it clear that whatever love she'd once had for me now lay as shattered and irreparable as the cup she'd tossed at me as I fled our bedroom.