Sandrine's Case

by Thomas H. Cook

  “There,” she said and stepped back. “Okay. So are you ready to face the day?”

  “Ready,” I replied with a great show of self-assurance, a great show of being confident that nothing I would hear today or at any subsequent day during my trial could further shake the foundations of my life. “Absolutely ready,” I added.

  But I was not.

  “Good, let’s go then,” Alexandria said. “Because judges don’t like it when the defendant is late.”

  Defendant, yes. For more than ever, and even to myself, I felt myself to be precisely that.

  Call Detective

  Raymond Alabrandi

  There’s no story like a murder story. Mr. Singleton knows this quite well, and so I’d been expecting, though hardly anticipating, the moment when he would at last begin to present my case’s events in the way of a cheap detective yarn.

  With the calling of Detective Alabrandi, I knew that the moment had arrived.

  Detective Ray Alabrandi was perfect for the part he played, tall, lean, appropriately graying at the temples. He marched to the witness stand like a soldier in the field, took the oath, and then, following Mr. Singleton’s questions and in a clear, strong voice, he told the jury that he had been a policeman for seventeen years. Before that he’d been a soldier, but in a policeman’s role, assigned to army CID. This was impressive, as was Detective Alabrandi, a cool professional, not completely cynical, but used to being lied to, just like the homicide cops the jury saw nightly on television or read about—or so I assumed—in detective novels.

  He told the court that he’d arrived at 237 Crescent Road at 3:57 p.m. on the afternoon of Friday, November 21. He didn’t add that it was raining that afternoon, but it was, and as he carefully responded to Mr. Singleton’s questions I recalled how a line of raindrops had settled upon his dark blue overcoat by the time I opened the door.

  “Samuel Madison?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  He showed me his badge. “Would you mind if I came in? There are a few things we’d like to clear up.”

  I opened the door and escorted him into our book-lined living room. The shelves were packed with the great works but Alabrandi seemed to gather only one impression from them: the fact that I probably thought myself a great deal smarter than he was, an opinion with which I have no doubt he has since come quite confidently to disagree.

  This recollection was interrupted by the sound of Mr. Singleton’s commanding voice.

  “So troubling questions had been raised with regard to Sandrine Madison’s death, isn’t that correct, Detective Alabrandi?”

  “During the course of our initial investigation, yes,” Detective Alabrandi answered. “And the autopsy, of course.”

  “What questions?”

  They were questions that had not occurred to me until Detective Alabrandi had first confronted me with them on that rainy afternoon as we sat in the living room of a house whose clutter had earlier bothered Officer Hill, and which, by then, I’d somewhat cleaned up. But before the detective had launched into his substantive and disturbing questions, there’d been certain polite formalities of which Mr. Singleton wished the jury to be informed.

  “Now, when you met Professor Madison that morning, did he have any questions regarding his wife?”

  “Yes, he did,” Alabrandi answered. “He asked me about the disposition of Mrs. Madison’s body.” He took out a small brown notebook and flipped to the appropriate page. “He asked me, ‘Where’s Sandrine?’”

  “When did Mr. Madison inquire as to the whereabouts of his wife’s body?”

  “The minute he saw me,” Alabrandi told the jury. “I was still standing on that little porch at the front door of the house.”

  I’d asked immediately because I’d had a bizarre and very disturbing nightmare while taking a nap that same afternoon, Sandrine on a metal table fitted with drains, her pale but still beautiful body further whitened by the glare of fluorescent lights, a man poised over her with a scalpel in his hand. But that had not been the worst of it. In this horrible dream the masked pathologist had demanded to know who’d taken her life, and she’d opened her eyes and with a terrible virulence had hissed through her clinched teeth: Sam!

  “What did Mr. Madison say exactly?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  “He asked me if the autopsy had been done,” Alabrandi answered. “I told him no, but that it was scheduled for tomorrow morning.”

  At which point I could have responded only with a look of dread because some strange part of my disordered thinking at that moment argued that I would continue to be subject to this chilling nightmare until Sandrine had been cremated. And suppose I became disoriented by this nightmare, and while in the grip of some frantic need to escape it, an unguarded moment I could not anticipate, I blurted some incriminating remark? I was being watched now, and I knew it. Did it not make sense to rid myself of anything that might later damage my case?

  “How did Professor Madison respond to this?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  Because of this nightmare and the idiotic notion that I would keep having it until Sandrine’s body was no more, I’d responded by way of the bizarre literary reference Detective Alabrandi now revealed to the jury.

  “He said that her body was working on him like a telltale heart.”

  “A telltale heart?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  Detective Alabrandi nodded. “It’s a reference to a story by Edgar Allan Poe. That’s what Professor Madison told me.”

  “Did you consequently look up that story and read it?”

  He had indeed done just that, Alabrandi told the court, then went on to relate the story’s details. As he did so I noticed two jury members lean forward. So that’s what a good story does, I thought, at least minimally: it turns ordinary people into more sensitive observers.

  Should I have kept that simple fact in mind as I’d struggled through draft after draft of “The Pull of the Earth,” I asked myself now, each rendering more academic than the other, more clever and more learned, but also more snide, so that by the time Sandrine had read the last one she’d declared it “cold and unloving.” I had, she said, “stripped it of every tenderness.”

  Had that been the first occasion when I’d actually found myself hating her, I asked myself now, hating Sandrine not because her critique had been false but because it had been so devastatingly true? “Your book has everything a great book should have, Sam,” she’d told me in that sad tone of hers, “but a soul.” How, in the wake of so dark and true a judgment, could I have not wanted her dead?

  “In this story, it’s the telltale heart that reveals the narrator’s crime?” Mr. Singleton asked once Alabrandi had summarized Poe’s tale. “It is the telltale heart that holds the key to his guilt?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Hm,” Mr. Singleton breathed softly, adding nothing else, thus careful not to suggest to the jury that a man should be convicted of murder on the basis of a literary inference. Instead, he paused a moment, then said, “All right, let’s go on.” He glanced at his notes. “Now, Detective Alabrandi, did you subsequently inform Mr. Madison that following the autopsy, Sandrine Madison’s body would not be cremated immediately?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “What was his reaction?”

  “There was no reaction.”

  “No reaction?”

  “He shrugged, I think. But he didn’t say anything.”

  This was true, and the reason for this admittedly unemotional reaction was that I’d seen another and now somewhat deeper suspicion in Alabrandi’s eyes as he’d informed me that the authorities intended to hold on to Sandrine’s body, a clear indication that they considered it evidence of some sort.

  “Now, at this time, Detective Alabrandi, did you have a few questions for Professor Madison?”

  “I
did, yes, sir.”

  There’d been quite a few of them, actually, and as Detective Alabrandi enumerated them I found myself once again in my living room, listening closely, and perhaps guardedly, as he began to discuss what he had initially called his “concerns.”

  “As you probably know, Mr. Madison, in a situation like this, we have to make inquiries,” he said.

  “A situation like this?”

  “A presumed suicide.”

  “Presumed?”

  “Until it’s proven to have been a suicide.”

  I sat back slightly. “I see.”

  “Your wife was young, and there was an initial mention of suicide, and so the fact is we have to investigate.”

  “You’re investigating Sandrine?”

  “Her death. And so, naturally, that extends to pretty much anything to do with her,” Alabrandi answered. “Her situation at work, the family. What her life was like.”

  Was, I thought to myself, and in that repetition I once more affirmed that Sandrine’s life must now be spoken of in the past tense.

  Even on this fifth day of my trial, attending carefully as Mr. Singleton moved Detective Alabrandi step by step through our first meeting, it was hard for me to think of Sandrine as no longer alive. More to the point, it was difficult for me to accept her life as unrecoverable, to face the hard fact that nothing could be done to put it on a better track. This was the dreadful truth I could not make myself admit: that not one word of her story could be taken back, not one passage edited, not one twist added, that the last page had been written and the book was closed. Sandrine had accepted this long before I had. Deep in the remembered gloom of the bedroom in which she died, I remembered her face in soft light, her voice a whisper, the sad truth she’d unflinchingly pronounced. For most people, Sam, she’d said to me, the cavalry does not arrive.

  I shook my head at the truth of this, now also understanding that it had not arrived for her.

  Morty suddenly gave me a little punch in the arm.

  “Hey,” he whispered sharply. “You’re shaking your head.”

  “Sorry,” I told him, “Just a memory.”

  “Well, kill the gestures, Sam,” he instructed me sternly. “The jury has no idea what you thinking about, and if you’re shaking your head at a piece of testimony that strikes them as obviously true, then you’ve lost some credibility points with them, understand?”

  “Yes,” I told him. “Sorry.”

  “Please, Sam, just stay off memory lane and pay attention to what’s being said in court.”

  “Right. Okay. I will.”

  What was being said in court was this.

  “Now, Detective Alabrandi, at this time did you indicate that Professor Madison was a suspect with regard to the death of his wife?”

  “No, sir,” Alabrandi answered. “Because he was not actually a suspect at that time.”

  “But a person of interest.”

  “Anyone could be a person of interest when you have a death whose cause is in doubt.”

  “In doubt, yes,” Mr. Singleton said. “And did you inform Professor Madison that the cause of his wife’s death was in doubt?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “And what was his reaction?”

  My reaction had been fear, and Alabrandi had seen it clearly, and because I’d seen in him what he’d seen in me I’d covered by immediately admitting it.

  “Mr. Madison said to me, ‘How strange,’” Alabrandi told the court.

  “How strange that the cause of his wife’s death was in doubt?” Mr. Singleton asked, though he knew better.

  “No, Mr. Madison said it was strange that he’d suddenly felt what he called ‘a stroke of fear.’”

  “A stroke of fear?” Mr. Singleton repeated the phrase as if this were all news to him. “Did Professor Madison indicate what he was afraid of?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “And what was that?”

  “He said that he was afraid he was about to become a character in a book,” Alabrandi answered, glancing again at the notes he’d taken in his brown notebook. “Those were his words, a ‘character in a book.’”

  “What kind of character?”

  “He said it was the type of book in which the main character suddenly discovers that life has caught up with him,” Alabrandi answered. “He named some Russian book that was like this. The death of someone. A Russian name.” He flipped a page in the notebook. “Ivan Ilyich.”

  Mr. Singleton glanced toward the jury, then back to Detective Alabrandi. “Now, at a certain point, did you begin to inform Professor Madison of questions that had arisen with regard to the death of his wife?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  And indeed he had. After that first polite exchange, Detective Alabrandi had wasted no time getting to the point. As if I were once again facing him, I saw him lean forward, his eyes quite piercing, something of a bird of prey in the way he watched me.

  “Mr. Madison, you assumed your wife’s death was a suicide, and you did this without examining her, is that right?” Alabrandi asked me.

  “I never touched her,” I told him.

  Albrandi winced slightly, as if my answer had pricked him quite as palpably as the point of a knife.

  “So why did you assume she committed suicide?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “She was ill, and so—”

  “But you described the paper found beside her bed as a suicide note,” Alabrandi interrupted.

  I nodded.

  “Why?”

  “Because at some point that day, when I’d noticed her writing in that yellow pad, she’d told me that this was her ‘final word.’” I shrugged. “I hadn’t interpreted that response as a suicide note, but later, after she died, I assumed that it was precisely that, her ‘final word,’ meaning a suicide note.”

  “Hm,” Alabrandi said softly as he wrote this down. Then he glanced up from his notebook. “Your wife evidently hadn’t mentioned to anyone that she wished to be cremated,” he said.

  “She mentioned it to me,” I tell him.

  “But no one else,” Alabrandi says. “According to Officer Hill, you wanted your wife’s body to be cremated right away.”

  “Why wait?”

  Had that sounded cold? I asked myself as Detective Alabrandi re-created this same exchange for the jury. If so, my explanation must have sounded no less arctic.

  “In ancient times, cremations were done soon after death,” I’d told him. “Sandrine, I think, would have wanted her own to be the same. She was a historian, as I’m sure you know. Her specialty was ancient history, and she was—”

  “Ancient history, yes,” Alabrandi again interrupted. “In her written statement, she mentions Cleopatra.”

  I noticed that he’d called Sandrine’s last writings a “statement,” not a suicide note, and from this I’d gathered that Detective Alabrandi had already decided that I was a man who used words to confuse or conceal things.

  But this had not seemed the moment to argue over what to call the yellow sheet of paper Officer Hill had earlier noticed beside Sandrine’s bed, and so I’d let the matter drop.

  “Cleopatra was as close as Sandrine ever came to having a passionate intellectual interest,” I told Detective Alabrandi.

  “So you thought she would want her body to be treated like Cleopatra’s had been after death?” Detective Alabrandi asked.

  Without thinking, I answered, “Something like that, yes.”

  “Well, I looked it up, and it turns out that Cleopatra was buried, rather than cremated,” Alabrandi said. A pause, then, “In fact, she wasn’t buried until several days after she died.” He smiled coolly. “Your wife, of course, would have known that.”

  I was astonished t
hat Alabrandi had done this sort of research, but I tried not to let him know just how surprised I was. I’d gathered by then that he had assigned me the role of suspect, and in response I was already playing the part.

  “That’s true,” I said. I offered a slight smile that even as I made it I feared he might find snide. “I guess you’re what they call a crack investigator.”

  Alabrandi’s eyes squeezed together slightly. “I do my job,” he said.

  All of this part of our exchange now came into the record, every pompous, pedantic reference I’d made to the arcane rituals of the ancient world paraded before the jury until Singleton finally closed in upon the even more disastrous comment I’d later made to Alabrandi.

  “Detective Alabrandi, when you pointed out that Cleopatra had not been cremated, did Mr. Madison come up with another reason why he wanted his wife cremated?”

  Morty lifted his hand. “Objection to the phrase ‘come up with,’ Your Honor. As prejudicial.”

  “Sustained,” Judge Rutledge ruled. He smiled pointedly. “Come up with a better question, Mr. Singleton,” he added, and in response to which a ripple of laughed swept the gallery.

  “Yes, Your Honor,” Singleton responded stiffly, like a little boy scolded. “All right, Detective, did the professor express another reason for his wanting to have his wife cremated?”

  “Yes, he did,” Alabrandi answered. “He said they were both atheists and that neither had any use for ceremony. Funerals, rituals of that sort, that stuff was just Santa Claus for grown-ups.”

  Mr. Singleton suppressed a smile. “Those were his words, ‘Santa Claus for grown-ups’?”

  This struck me as wholly prejudicial, of course, and so I flashed a look at Morty, expecting him to object. But he only shook his head and whispered, “Too late, buddy. If I object, it’ll just be repeated.” He gave my wrist a gentle squeeze. “You can’t unring a bell.”

  And so, undeterred, Detective Alabrandi tugged at yet more loose threads in the hope of unraveling what he had, by the time he first appeared at my door, no doubt conceived of as a murder plot.

  “I asked Mr. Madison if there might be any other reason for wanting his wife cremated as soon as possible,” he told the court.