Sandrine's Case

by Thomas H. Cook

  The townspeople had considered all the professors at Coburn College similarly pampered, of course, but Sandrine’s death had put the spotlight squarely on me. She was beautiful, which is probably what had fueled the initial media interest. The local paper had published pictures of her in her twenties, most of them taken during our one great trip to Europe and the Mediterranean. In the most provocative of these photos she was in a bathing suit, her skin alabaster white against the black sands of Santorini, those long, perfectly shaped legs. In another, she posed seductively among the flowers of Giverney, and in their midst she seemed equally in exquisite bloom. How, these photos asked, could so gorgeous a woman have come to such a sad, despairing end? To die alone? To die in a dark room? Perhaps to have been murdered by her scheming husband? And if she’d been murdered, these photographs demanded, then what kind of man was I to have wanted such a woman, so bright and beautiful, dead? For God’s sake, those pictures said, could this woman’s husband not have known how lucky he was to have her?

  But what could such people know of Sandrine’s long hours, the endless private sessions she had with Coburn College’s eternally mediocre students? Had they ever felt neglected? Had they ever felt abandoned? Had they ever felt secondary to an ever changing cast of hopeless, uninspired students? Yet Sandrine had seen these students differently. To her they’d been so in need of help that they’d come to take the place of the poorer ones it had been her earlier and quite idealistic dream to teach. Worst of all, by devoting herself to teaching, she’d completely lost interest in the great book I’d expected her to write.

  I remembered a night when she’d come home particularly late and quite exhausted, so that I’d said, rather irritably, “Another night you’ve squandered when you could have been working on your book.”

  She swept past me, then stopped, whirled around, and said, “I’m never going to write a book, Sam. Not even a small book, much less that great one you think I should write.” Then she’d pointed a finger at herself as if it were a pistol. “I am my book.” Her gaze sharpened. “And just for the record, it’s not my unwritten book you resent, Sam, it’s yours.”

  How easy it had been to want such a woman dead, I thought suddenly, relieved, as I glanced at the jury, that such thoughts couldn’t be read.

  Why had this brutal exchange returned to me so suddenly, I wondered, as Morty and Mr. Singleton continued to argue their motions before the bench. Was it the sheer idleness imposed by endless courtroom procedures that had opened up that floodgate, or was I still responding to Morty’s earlier admonition that I must, simply must remember every­thing because in a murder investigation, as he’d warned, it is almost as bad to misremember as it is to lie.

  So had I recently fallen into the habit of obsessively reliving my life with Sandrine simply in order to cover my tracks? I couldn’t tell. I knew only that I’d think of something she said, then rifle through my memory in a desperate search for the specific occasion, the exact circumstances, where and when it had been said, what my response had been. Wisdom, Sandrine once remarked, is the comprehension of context.

  This quotation sent my mind off on yet another chase. Had Sandrine made this remark when we were young? Before or after we were married? Had we been in some foreign country when she said it or were we mired here in Coburn?

  Mired? It surprised me that so unforgiving a word had surfaced in my mind. And yet it was true, I admitted. I had felt mired in Coburn, a man going through the motions, with no sense of anything bubbling underneath, no lurking secret needs until that afternoon in the park when I’d stared into those famished eyes. Not Sandrine’s eyes. Not dark and searching as hers had been. But small, watery blue eyes that had given no hint of anything sinister, of a woman lurking in dark corners or hatching grim plots.

  I suddenly realized that it is a slow process, the numbing of a life, and that at the end of that process the road not taken must come to seem no better than the one you took.

  Perhaps it was this numbness I’d wanted to escape. I saw my fingers tapping out fanciful mentions of faraway places, of “escaping” Coburn, of “breaking chains,” of the unspecified “desperate measures” that would be necessary in order to break them, all of which had at last met the eyes of Detective Alabrandi.

  Another of Sandrine’s comments hit me suddenly, this one said only a few days after she’d first revealed the forbidding nature of things in the no less forbidding darkness of our bedroom: You only notice the little things you think you lost, not the great one you really did.

  What the hell had she meant by that? And who was you? Was it all mankind? Was it us? Or just me?

  It was on the heels of that question that I suddenly saw Sandrine as clearly as I’d seen her on the night I’d found her alone in the backyard, moving slowly in the swing that hung from the great oak there.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  She was dressed in a white blouse and long dark-blue skirt that lifted slightly as she drifted forward.

  “Sandrine?” I said, when she didn’t answer.

  For a time she remained silent, then, as if it were a hard-won truth, she said, “The problem with regret is that in the end it’s always pathetic.”

  Had that been the moment, I wondered now, had that been the moment, as I’d lingered in the cold eddies of that hard-won truth, when I’d first reached for the rapier in my gown?

  I looked at the judge’s bench, the opposing lawyers in my case still debating the merits of the latest motion. From the judge’s expression I got the feeling that he was denying one after another of Morty’s attempts to make some legalistic end run. His arguments were no doubt characteristically Talmudic, but they wouldn’t fly in down-to-earth Coburn. The charge against me would not be dismissed, as I well knew. Nor would it be lessened. Khayyám’s moving hand has written, and that was that. I would be tried for Sandrine’s murder by a jury of my peers in the presence of my daughter and anyone else who happened to find a seat in this crowded courtroom. No evidence would be excluded. My life would be dissected like a body in the morgue, my glistening innards spread across a steel table, everything displayed for all the world to see. That is the true horror of my current situation, I realized at that moment, the brute fact that nothing is too intimate to be exposed because, simply put, a trial is an evisceration.

  Strange as it would later seem to me, I had never actually thought it possible that my life might be so mercilessly probed until the first day of my trial. With surreal insistence, this unreality had maintained its iron grip upon my otherwise discerning consciousness. For weeks I’d acted as if this were just a long nightmare, one from which I would eventually awaken. But the nightmare had not ended, of course, so that I’d come to feel like Kafka’s baffled Joseph K, on trial, yes, but uncertain of the actual charge. Oh, sure, the charge was murder. But there was more to it than that. It had taken a long time for me to realize this but that morning, on the first day of my trial, I’d looked at the faces of the jury and, behind their expressionless stares, I’d seen quite clearly that I was charged, more than anything, with the crime of being me.

  Realizing this I also realized that no motion in the world could save me from this rising tide.

  And so the mystery that gripped me was how in the world, before now, I had failed to understand just how dire my situation was. Alabrandi had been right in what he’d said to me many weeks before. I was not going to get away with it, a fact that should have been clear the minute I’d seen the names on the prosecution’s witness list. And yet somehow I’d made myself believe that at a certain point it would all go away. Mr. Singleton would realize the thinness of his evidence, and being sensible, as well as politically astute, he would finally concede that though he suspected me of murder he lacked the evidence necessary to charge me.

  But just the opposite had occurred. With every rumor whispered in his ear, with every photograph of bright and bea
utiful Sandrine, with every report from the vigilant and highly competent Detective Alabrandi, Singleton had grown more certain of my crime and more determined to make sure that I would not get away with it. So you think you’re so goddamn smart, Professor Madison, he must have said to himself at some point during the investigation, well, let’s just wait and fucking see.

  The circle broke and Morty and Mr. Singleton made their way back to their desks. The judge looked thoroughly put upon and aggravated, a man eager to go home, put all this legal business behind him, a man already looking forward to his beige little den and leather easy chair, and who, even as he prepared to hear the first witness in my case, was probably considering whether tonight’s dinner would be surf or turf.

  “It’s just what we thought,” Morty said when he returned to his seat at the defense table.

  I had long ago noticed that with Morty everything was always “just as we thought.”

  “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 this 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.”