A Dancer In the Dust

by Thomas H. Cook

  The result of this grim recollection had been a blinding streak of panic that had actually caused my hands to tremble.

  Morty had seen this, and in order to calm me down he’d casually leaned back in his leather chair. “It’s a completely circumstantial case, Sam,” he said. “And in terms of the so-called physical evidence, there’s not one thing the prosecution has uncovered that can’t be explained by your wife’s suicide.”

  “But I could have made it look like a suicide,” I replied cautiously. “Isn’t that what Singleton will try to make the jury believe?”

  Morty waved his hand as if to dismiss the entire case against me. “You need to understand one thing, Sam,” he said. “This prosecution is not being driven forward by the weight of the evidence.”

  “By what then?” I asked.

  “By Harold Singleton’s personal conviction that you killed your wife,” Morty said. “He truly believes that you carefully planned the whole thing.” He smiled. “He thinks you’re one cold fish, Sam,” he added. “And I got to tell you, you do come off that way, so before you get before a jury, you should work on your charm skills a little.”

  At that instant, with my hands now clammy, I’d thought of a moment many months before, the way Sandrine had glanced up from the book she was reading, a study of Iago, of all people, and peered at me quite intently before she’d finally spoken. “Cynics make good murderers,” she’d said. I’d thought this remark was about Iago, but later I’d not been so sure. Had Sandrine, in that piercing way of hers, seen that her death was on my mind?

  “The real shocker is that Singleton is going for the death penalty,” Morty added. “That’s the sort of prosecutorial overreaching that can come back to bite you in the ass. Of course he probably threatened you with that in order to pressure you into a confession. Then, once he made the threat, and you didn’t confess, he had to go through with it. It’s sort of a pissing game, you know, but believe me I can shoot my stream way farther than Harold Singleton.” He shrugged as if to dismiss the need for any further discussion. “It’ll be a short trial, that’s for damn sure,” he told me.

  Then he rose and escorted me to the door.

  “Don’t worry, Sam,” he said with the iron-clad assurance of his many years of defending with equal skill and success both the innocent and the guilty. “All you need is a good defense, and you’ve got the smartest Jew lawyer in Coburn County.”

  Perhaps so, but along with my unfortunate, seal-the-deal novella, there were fingerprints on the glass and emails to April and odd elements in Sandrine’s blood, disturbing Internet searches and jarring responses to various questions, a less than sturdy prosecutorial net in which to catch me, as I knew, but a net nonetheless. And there was that coldness, too, of course. I’d need to work on that.

  Still it was the location of my trial that had most concerned me as I’d departed Morty’s office that day. Coburn County was the problem, it seemed to me, a college town only seventy miles south of Atlanta, a quiet place whose privacy had been violated by the media coverage of Sandrine’s death, the subsequent investigation, and, still later, my arrest. Every step in the process had further served to turn the town against me, so that as I’d driven back through Coburn after leaving Morty’s office, I’d genuinely feared that no matter what the evidence—or lack of it—its stalwart citizens might well find me guilty at the end of my trial. Sandrine had once said that when she thought of hell, it was as an eternal walk through a shadowy alley. By the time of my trial, I’d come to imagine it as a never-ending fall through a gallows floor.

  As the yearlong investigation into Sandrine’s death had continued, I’d learned one thing for certain: my initial error had been to underestimate the extent to which little things could trip me up. For example, I’d never expected that first uniformed officer to notice a yellow piece of paper beside my wife’s deathbed, ask me about it, then write my response into her notebook. Later I’d realized that she had seen a dead woman lying in a bed, half naked and with no visible marks upon her face or body, and had quite naturally asked herself: How did this woman die? That is to say, she had cared about this death more than I’d expected and had almost immediately begun to look about the room more closely, a focused observation that had eventually settled her eyes on, among other things, that yellow piece of paper.

  Thus had the investigation begun, one that had steadily grown darker and more dramatic, first with the coroner’s inquiry, then with the pathologist’s report, and after that—and with murder in mind—­Detective Alabrandi’s meticulous combing of phone and medical records, the seizing of computers, the questioning of friends, associates, neighbors, all of which had finally culminated in a grand jury indictment, which in turn had led, at last, to this first day of my trial, myself seated at the defense table with the best “Jew lawyer” in Coburn County beside me, both of us now watching silently as Mr. Singleton made his way to the lectern, glanced at his notes, then began.

  “Your Honor, ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” Mr. Singleton said, “from this first day onward, and step by step, we will prove to your complete satisfaction that Sandrine Allegra Madison did not take her own life.”

  He wore a dark blue suit that first day. It fit him poorly, so there was a slight rise, like a small snake, across the back of his neck. I could see this round bulge quite clearly because his back was to me when he faced the jury. He was short and very thin, with wire-rimmed glasses that added a sense of physical weakness, perhaps even ill health.

  “Singleton always looks like he’s going to sneeze on you,” Morty whispered with a quick smile he was careful to conceal from the jury.

  This was true, I thought, but the prosecutor’s physical problems didn’t end there. For one thing, he was nearly bald, and he often swabbed his pink head with a white handkerchief. Many months before, when he’d asked me to come to his office for a “preliminary discussion,” I’d noticed that his teeth were badly crooked, like rows of tilted tombstones in a desecrated cemetery. At that time, I wondered if he’d perhaps been a poor boy whose parents had not been able to afford braces, or whether he was simply the sort of man whose priorities did not include close attention to his looks. At any rate, the jagged configuration of his teeth had given him the half-starved countenance of a primitive creature, its every aspect adapted for survival in a mean environment.

  By then I’d come to realize that I was the target of his investigation, the one man in Sandrine’s life who, according to his discoveries, had had a reason to kill her—perhaps more than one reason—along with the moral benightedness required to do it.

  Watching him now, I recalled that first visit quite well, particularly how self-assured he’d seemed as he’d said, “Professor Madison, I’d like to acquaint you with a few facts.”

  He thinks I’m soft, I’d told myself at that moment. He thinks he can bully me because I’m a weak, ivory tower intellectual, a poodle to his bulldog. For that reason, I’d hidden my fear of these “facts,” put on a mask of complete confidence in my innocence of any charge he might level against me, replied, “I’m eager to hear them,” then casually leaned back in the chair, folded my arms over my chest, and waited for his next move as casually as a clubman anticipating his afternoon martini.

  For the next few minutes, Singleton had laid out his case against me, always in a grave voice, like a Spanish inquisitor enumerating all my many sins and heresies. There was the matter of this (antihistamines in Sandrine’s bloodstream) linked to that (a sinister research history on my computer). There’d also been correspondence that, as he’d discovered by then, I’d attempted to delete. Other grave issues had followed one after the other like the blows of a hammer, and as I’d listened to this recitation it had become clear to me that if I did not crack, perhaps hint at a plea bargain, Mr. Singleton would not rest until I dangled from a noose. That had scared me, and it was then, and far too late, that I’d finally gone to Morty and told him everything I’d heard in the prosecutor’s office.
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  Morty had quickly assured me that the case against me was absurdly weak, Singleton’s recitation a bluff, and so I’d been genuinely surprised when Detective Alabrandi subsequently showed up at my door, this time with a man I’d never seen, large, surly even when silent, with a thick neck, and looking very much like a sports bar bouncer.

  “You’re under arrest, Mr. Madison,” Alabrandi said politely, but with his gaze fixed in an icy glare.

  There are moments when you feel something shift and know—not just sense but know—that some great wheel has begun to crush you. One morning, somewhere within that netherworld of middle age, you look in the mirror and see that time is doing to you what it has done to everyone before you. Or you suddenly feel a squeezing sensation in your chest and realize that, although it is probably just heartburn, there is a chance, a genuine chance now, that it is something worse.

  You are under arrest.

  It was at that moment that I’d first begun to experience one of life’s deepest lessons: you are the most alive when you feel the most vulnerable, not when the arrow is still in the quiver but when it has been released by the string and is flying toward you. The inexorable gears of modest little Coburn’s justice system have begun to grind, I’d thought at that instant, and you, my dear fellow, so perfectly insulated before now, aloof and professorial, armored by advanced degrees and unknowable depths of arcane information, you, Dr. Samuel Joseph Madison, tenured professor of English and American literature, are the perfect grist for its mill.

  “We will prove it was that man,” Mr. Singleton said as he turned and pointed toward me, “that man, seated there, who took the life of Sandrine Allegra Madison and made her his victim.”

  Victim? Sandrine?

  I’d known her in her youth. I’d known her as a lover, a wife, the mother of our now grown daughter. I’d known her as a student and as a teacher. At no point in my life had I ever imagined her as a victim of anything. And yet it was as a victim that a great many others had come to view her by the first day of my trial, and thus to view me as a man who had much to explain, much to confess, much to repent, and much—very, very much—for which he should be punished.

  “Sandrine Allegra Madison was the victim of a cold and vicious plot,” Mr. Singleton said. “She was the victim of a murder that was premeditated for weeks, as we will show, and carried out by a man with many motives to take her life.”

  He’d used her full name throughout his initial remarks to the jury, but Morty had earlier that morning alerted me to the fact that Mr. Singleton would probably begin calling her “Sandrine” as the trial proceeded, and perhaps even “Sandy” during his closing argument, a diminutive I knew she would have hated. For Sandrine was no Sandy. She’d been studying ancient history when I met her, and it was history she’d addressed in the opening words of her last written statement: I often think of Cleopatra in desert exile at twenty-one, surrounded by those blistering sands, she whose feet had walked on onyx.

  Morty had also advised me that, at some point during the trial, Mr. Singleton would certainly read this last note or letter or essay or whatever it was to the jury, and that he would do this in order to support his contention that Sandrine hadn’t killed herself. Although it had remained unsaid, I’d learned enough about courtroom strategies by then to know that Morty’s hope was that the last words Sandrine had committed to paper would make her look pretentious, writing about Cleopatra in her final moments when she should have been penning a loving—or at least explanatory—letter to her husband or her daughter. Unfair though the idea might be—and this Morty had said to me directly—it would work to my advantage if the jury came to think of Sandrine as an egghead. From this I’d gathered that it is easier to find a man accused of murdering his wife not guilty if his victim, during her last moments, was thinking of Cleopatra.

  Yet was Sandrine’s last bit of writing pretentious? I hadn’t thought so when I read it. It was simply how Sandrine wrote, always in a tone that was slightly old-fashioned, but which was also graceful and carefully measured. She had used such connectives as “into whose” and “by which” and “according to whom” in order to string thoughts together, and she had taught her students to do the same. For her, the task of writing was to relate insights to information, or vice versa. “Sentences must join like the fingers of a hand,” she’d said to me one evening in New York, when we’d both still been young and the wine bottle two-thirds full, “otherwise, they can’t hold water.”

  Water, by which she’d meant wisdom, the collected fruit of those hard-won truths, all of which inevitably led to what she called “the bottom line,” and by which she meant the irreducible and unavoidable facts of life.

  One thing was certain. Sandrine had loved language the way others love food, and so, understandably, no doubt it had been the loss of that command of language she’d most dreaded in the end, the terrible fact that eventually she would begin to slur, not to mention drool and blubber.

  “We will prove that a miserable charade was concocted by that man,” Mr. Singleton continued. “It was a veil he hoped to conceal a murder.”

  It was a veil behind which he hoped to conceal a murder, I corrected Mr. Singleton in exactly the way Sandrine would doubtless have corrected him.

  “That man,” Mr. Singleton all but shouted.

  That man, of course, was me, Samuel Joseph Madison, husband to the late Sandrine and father to our daughter, Alexandria, who sat behind me that first day, dressed entirely in black, with close-cropped hair, a daughter nowhere near as physically beautiful or intellectually gifted as her mother. Because of that, I’d found myself wondering if Sandrine’s death had removed a competitor from the field. After all, with her dazzling mother dead, Alexandria would never be unfavorably compared to her again, and surely that would bring her a certain, unmistakable relief. There is nothing quite so painful as invidious comparison, after all, and for that reason I’d sometimes wondered if Sandrine’s death might not have been altogether unwelcomed by her only daughter.

  Dark thoughts.

  Such dark thoughts.

  Murder’s bedfellows.

  “It was a crude and cruel act of selfishness that Samuel Madison attempted to disguise as suicide,” Mr. Singleton declared.

  I glanced behind me and noticed that Alexandria’s expression had turned scornful at this latest of Mr. Singleton’s pronouncements. Even so, it was impossible for me to know if she believed Coburn’s lean and hungry prosecutor or whether she’d accepted my version of her mother’s death: that it had been by her own hand and that I’d had nothing to do with it. A few weeks before, I’d dined with my daughter at Le Petit Court, Coburn’s notion of a French bistro, and she’d bluntly asked, “You really had no idea, Dad?”

  “There were hints,” I admitted. “But nothing solid.”

  “It just seems so strange that she would do it, well, out of the blue, the way she did,” Alexandria continued. “You go to your class and you come back and she’s dead. I mean, that she would just suddenly decide that she had… that she’d just had enough.”

  I shrugged. “Your mother had a mind of her own.”

  “But that night, if you’d known what she was going to do, what would you have done, Dad?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “If your mother wanted to die, didn’t she have that right? The Greeks would have given it to her, after all.”

  It was then I’d suddenly glanced left and right, noticed my fellow diners at Le Petit Court, noticed those first stares, heard those first whispers, and sensed that the shock troops of Coburn were gathering against me.

  Even so, I’d boldly proceeded on.

  “This case is made for scandalmongers,” I said.

  Alexandria’s gaze grew darkly still but she said nothing, so different from her mother, as I’d thought at that moment, less able to accuse me of every crime imaginable, save the one I’d actually committed.

  “It’s made to order for the type of people who read those tabloid news
papers,” I added. “First of all, it’s a case involving two college professors, and intellectuals are still the most hated people on earth. To have one accused of murdering the other? It’s red meat for their fangs. Especially a woman like your mother, so very … photogenic. My God, how much juicier can it get?”

  But in his opening argument Mr. Singleton had made it even juicier than various media outlets—both local and national—had already made it. In the most perfervid language of which he was capable, he’d described a deadly intrigue hatched in the hothouse atmosphere of a small town liberal arts college, with emphasis, of course, on “liberal.”

  That wasn’t all.

  I don’t read genre literature but I’d seen enough movies based upon those sorts of books to understand that into Coburn’s pristine, even pastoral setting Mr. Singleton had introduced a generous helping of noir. He’d pointed out Sandrine’s insurance policy, for example, a rather obvious nod to Double Indemnity. And, based on that first salvo, I’d guessed that as the trial moved forward he’d almost certainly describe me in such a way as to ensure that the jury would indeed hear the postman ring twice. He would build his case against me brick by brick. By the time of final arguments he would have painted the portrait of an arrogant and foolish man—by any standard an immoralist—who’d clumsily conceived and even more clumsily carried out a plot to kill his wife, his motivation being money, sex, or simple selfishness, take your pick. The jury would hear all this and, after they’d heard it, they would cheerfully send me to the Great State of Georgia’s heart-stopping, muscle-relaxing equivalent of the gallows.

  “Sandrine Allegra Madison did not die of natural causes,” Mr. Singleton gravely intoned in the final line of his opening argument. “Sandrine Allegra Madison was murdered.”