Sandrine's Case

by Thomas H. Cook

  I was jarred from this disturbing memory by the yellow paper Mr. Singleton now once again took from Alabrandi and lifted into the air, the way the jurors’ eyes followed it, the grim look on their faces, as if it were a pair of bloodstained panties.

  “And it was this paper that Mr. Madison described as a suicide note, wasn’t it?” he asked. “This paper that makes no reference whatsoever to suicide. Isn’t that true, Detective?”

  Alabrandi nodded. “Yes.”

  It was an answer that lingered in the air as Singleton stepped toward the judge, and in the stark quiet of the room he added simply, “I’d like to offer this note in evidence, Your Honor.” Then, no less quietly, he stepped away.

  Exhibit A

  In a movie, it would be called Exhibit A, the note Mr. Singleton called “Sandrine’s last message,” but I failed to notice the exact identification the court assigned to it. Clearly, save for melodramatic effect, it could not actually have been labeled “A,” since a host of material had already been handed over for such labeling. But in my trial, as I had learned by then, it was the small, incremental bits of circumstantial evidence, not the “Exhibit A” of courtroom dramas, that had entangled me, little sins of both omission and commission: a cold response, a silence when I should have spoken, a question I should have asked but hadn’t, these the winding fibers in the rope that could at some point hang me.

  And so I watched quite impassively as the single sheet of paper moved from desk to desk, making its slow rounds until it was finally taken away by one of the court officials. Officer Hill had described the paper as yellow, but in fact the color was beige, the paper tanned and textured to resemble papyrus, my gift to Sandrine on her fortieth birthday, and not one sheet of which she’d ever used prior to penning her final . . . what?

  True, I hadn’t read it before Officer Hill pointed it out, then politely asked if she could take it. But since then I’ve read it several times, so that nothing in what Mr. Singleton began to go over in court came as a surprise.

  “All right, Detective Alabrandi, after the matter of Cleopatra not being Egyptian, did you then proceed to raise another troubling issue with regard to Mrs. Madison’s death?”

  “I did.”

  “And what was that issue?”

  The issue had been “various information,” as Alabrandi had phrased it as we continued the second of our “interviews.” I recalled the way he sat back slightly before moving to the next issue, apparently trying to relax me and probably thinking that since I was obviously the bookish type, and by definition soft, I must find him rough and a bit scary.

  “According to our investigation, Mrs. Madison received her diagnosis from Dr. Ortins at just after twelve on the morning of April 12,” he told me. “Do you remember when she returned home?”

  “At just after six, I think. I’d just gotten back from my afternoon class when she came through the door.”

  “So for six hours after receiving such terrible news, she was . . . absent?”

  “In the sense that she didn’t come home, yes.”

  Alabrandi glanced at his note. “You had no classes between noon and five p.m. that day, right?”

  Ah, I thought, so they have tracked down and studied my daily schedule.

  “Right.”

  “Where were you during that time?”

  “I was here. Reading.”

  “And your wife knew that you were here at home?”

  “I suppose. I am a man of habits. She knew what those habits were.”

  “So she assumed that you were here, but she didn’t come back home to tell you what Dr. Ortins had told her?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did you ever wonder why she didn’t come home to you?” Alabrandi asked.

  It struck me that I had never in the least wondered why, given such devastating news, Sandrine had not come home to me.

  “No,” I answered softly. “But Sandrine had a certain solitary quality to her character. I suppose I just assumed that she’d gone to some place quiet and thought things over.”

  “Like where?”

  “Oh, maybe down by the river or over to the reservoir,” I said. “She liked to sit by the reservoir.”

  At that moment I recalled how often Sandrine had gone to the reservoir, strolled around it in her solitary way, sometimes on very cold days, with her hands deep in the pockets of her coat. With what facts had she been wrestling, I suddenly wondered, on those lonely, lonely walks?

  “They can be quite lonely, married people,” I said before I could stop myself.

  Alabrandi watched me silently for a moment, then nodded and jotted something into his notebook.

  “Sandrine did call me, though,” I added hurriedly, like a man in need of proving he’d been a loving husband. “That day, I mean. The day she spoke to Dr. Ortins. She called me at around three that afternoon.”

  Alabrandi continued to write in his notebook. “Yes, I know,” he said, as if it were a matter of course that he was by now fully aware Sandrine had called me at a particular time on a particular day.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  Alabrandi looked up, and I saw something that struck me as oddly sympathetic, though to whom this sympathy was offered was impossible to know until he spoke. “We’ve learned a lot about Mrs. Madison,” he said. Then just as quickly all signs of this sympathy vanished. “And about you.”

  “Me?”

  As I watched Detective Alabrandi on the stand so many weeks after this exchange, I recalled the exact look in his eyes at the moment I’d said “Me?” They’d been my father’s eyes when he’d caught me in some act I had fully expected to get away with. They’d seemed to say, What could you possibly have been thinking, Sammy? Just who do think you’re dealing with?

  He’d been a factory worker, my father, the kind of man who drank beer and watched the game and had little respect for men who didn’t do the same. I’d been a perfect pussy in his eyes. He’d never shown the slightest interest in my schooling, and even less in the fact that I’d won an academic prize or landed a prestigious scholarship, least of all that I’d gotten into a well-regarded university, earned my coveted PhD. In fact, nothing I’d ever done had instilled the slightest respect for any of my achievements until I’d shown up with Sandrine glowing on my arm. Now that had gotten his attention.

  I suddenly remembered how, after years of estrangement, I’d called him a couple of days after marrying Sandrine, asked if I could bring her to meet him. At the time it had seemed an ordinary thing to do, but now I wondered if the driving force behind it was my still-aching need for his approval. Had this same, sad need also encouraged me to make a little extra noise in the bedroom that same night, knowing he would hear it?

  I felt Morty’s hand touch my arm. “Pay attention,” he whispered. “Stop drifting.”

  Like a schoolboy duly warned, I focused once again on Detective Alabrandi. By then he was edging toward the bombshell he had no doubt been waiting to deliver, gauging the moment, calculating the effect.

  “So, Detective Alabrandi, in the course of your investigation, did you have occasion to review Mrs. Madison’s cell phone records for April 12? I am speaking now of the day she had her consultation with Dr. Ortins, that is to say, the day she first received word of her diagnosis.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “And what did you discover?”

  “Well, Mr. Madison had said that his wife called him at three in the afternoon. In order to verify this statement we checked Mrs. Madison’s phone records.”

  “And had she in fact called her husband at that time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Madison was correct.”

  “Not entirely. He said that she had called him from the university library. That was not the case.”

  Sing
leton looked as if he’d never heard of any discrepancy during my long second interview with Detective Alabrandi.

  “Did you subsequently discover from where that phone call had been made?”

  “Yes, I did. She had made the call very near a local cell phone tower, which gave us a pretty good idea of where she’d been. What I mean is, it narrowed the search.”

  “But you further narrowed it, didn’t you, Detective Alabrandi?” Singleton asked.

  “Yes,” Alabrandi answered. “We cross-referenced the coverage of the tower with the addresses of Mrs. Madison’s known associates.”

  “And you found a known associate whose address was within the tower’s coverage, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “What address was that, Detective?”

  “4432 Devol Common. Here in Coburn.”

  “Is that a residence?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Whose residence?”

  “It is the residence of Malcolm Esterman.”

  Though I tried to obey Morty’s instruction to keep focused on the testimony currently being offered, I found myself returning to my first meeting with Malcolm. It had been at a faculty reception, an annual affair hosted by the college president. It was the moment when our colleagues had gotten their first look at us and, sure enough, they’d been dazzled by Sandrine. She’d worn a black cocktail dress and a single strand of white pearls, and upon entering the room, which was large and crowded, she’d caught every eye in the place, particularly Cleo Billings’s eye, the only man at Coburn College to whom I thought Sandrine might actually have been attracted and from whose riverside bungalow she might have telephoned me at three p.m. on the afternoon in question. In fact, when Detective Alabrandi had first raised the issue of the call, I’d felt my stomach tighten with that old familiar dread of betrayal and at that instant imagined Sandrine entwined with tall, tanned Cleo. But phone records don’t lie, as Mr. Singleton clearly understood, and the stark fact was as simple and straightforward as Detective Alabrandi’s demeanor when he stated it.

  “So we felt that someone had been deceitful,” Alabrandi said. “Either Mrs. Madison had misled her husband with regard to her actual whereabouts when making this call, or her husband, for some reason, had not wanted us to know that he had somehow been aware that Mrs. Madison had been with Mr. Esterman on this particular afternoon.”

  Been with.

  Now there, I thought, was a euphemism that certainly deserved the name.

  I looked at the members of the jury and saw that their minds were playing the same blue movie my brain had played as I’d sat in the living room and been told that Sandrine had “been with” Malcolm Esterman on an afternoon when, by all rights, she should have been with me, telling me of her diagnosis, seeking love and comfort.

  “How did Mr. Madison react when you informed him of the whereabouts of Mrs. Madison at three-thirty p.m. on the afternoon of April 12?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  Alabrandi paused for quite some time before he gave his answer, a quest for accuracy I’d gotten used to by then.

  “Disbelief,” Alabrandi said. “He asked if I had any idea why his wife was with Mr. Esterman. I told him that I didn’t, and asked if Mrs. Madison had ever mentioned going to Mr. Esterman’s house that afternoon. He said that she had not.”

  It had been at that moment, yes. Despite the fact that Alabrandi had been sitting quite comfortably in my living room as if we were two frat brothers chatting about some college prank, yes, it had been at that instant that I’d felt a genuine sense of everything going dreadfully wrong from this moment on, an investigation that would dig deeper than I’d expected and that was bound to unearth possibilities I had not imagined.

  It was also at this instant that the truth of something Sandrine had once said to me revealed itself. We’d come to New York from Coburn with no particular plan and so had ended up in one of those basement theaters that dotted Greenwich Village, rows of metal chairs in a windowless concrete box whose walls had been painted black. I no longer remember the play but it had surely been one of those overwrought productions that took aim at bourgeois pretentions, a huge target if ever there was one. And so, for two interminable hours, we’d watched and listened as the playwright fired his juvenile salvos, fired them over and over again so that, by the time the curtain at last fell, we’d both felt as if we had spent days in a metal drum beaten on all sides by imbecilic kids wielding iron bars.

  For relief, we stopped into a local diner, ordered strong coffee, and sat, our minds ringing with the clanging foolishness of it all, lost in our own thoughts, or at least trying to become lost in them.

  “The problem is that nothing is done subtly anymore,” I said irritably. “Everything has to be big and loud.”

  Sandrine nodded, took a sip of her coffee, then let her gaze drift out the window, to where the various denizens of Village nightlife were annoying one another in the usual ways.

  “I can take an actor who’s over the top,” I added, “but a whole play shouldn’t be.”

  Sandrine shrugged. “It’s a little problem, Sam.”

  “A little problem?” I asked.

  Her gaze once again returned to the street and, as she did so, she released a tired breath.

  This had become one of the ways she moved away from me, moved away from my trumpeted opinions, my sharpened sensibilities, my resentment of all that struck me as puerile.

  “It’s not a little problem, Sandrine,” I said as a way to draw her back.

  Sandrine continued to stare out the window.

  “If you’re going to write, you ought to write about something,” I said angrily.

  Suddenly, her eyes whipped over to me. “What would you write about now?” she demanded. “If you were still writing your book, what would it be about, Sam?”

  I knew this question was offered as a challenge, and so I thought my answer through before I gave it.

  “I suppose I’d write about how hard it is for excellence to overcome mediocrity,” I said.

  Her eyes drifted back to the window.

  “And you?” I demanded.

  Without hesitation she said, “Fear, I suppose.”

  “Fear?” I said with a soft laugh. “That’s pretty general. Which one?”

  “Mine.”

  “And what fear is that?”

  She faced me then and her eyes glittered darkly. “You don’t have any idea what I’m most afraid of, do you, Sam?”

  “Evidently not, so please tell me.”

  Now her eyes glistened. “That when my life is over, all over and done with, it will all just seem like an enormous waste of time.”

  It was the hard thud of Judge Rutledge’s gavel that brought me back from that distant evening, the animal fear I’d glimpsed in Sandrine’s eyes and from which I should have understood that this deepest of all human fears was precisely her fear too.

  To my surprise everyone rose and the jury filed out.

  “What’s going on?” I asked Morty.

  He looked at me, puzzled. “You don’t know, Sam?”

  I shook my head. “Drifting, I guess.”

  Rather than scold me, Morty simply laughed. “It’s just chow time, guy.”

  Adjournment for Lunch

  During the lunch adjournment, I couldn’t keep the scene with Sandrine and me in that Greenwich Village diner from replaying in my mind. But it wasn’t this scene alone. For by then I’d begun to rethink not only the last weeks of Sandrine’s life but all the years before that, all the classes, the student conferences, the faculty meetings, retreats, teas, all the graduations, the long drumbeat of our years together. I wondered if Sandrine had died with these same scenes playing in her mind, wondering too how thin it was, the line that had divided her life from an enormous waste of time.

&
nbsp; Morty was having lunch with some fellow lawyers, and Alexandria had gone out to get us a couple of sandwiches, so I was alone in the room, alone with these thoughts. Had Sandrine finally come to believe that in marrying me she had made not only a grave mistake but the one great mistake of her life, the error from which all later errors flowed? And as the years passed, and without consciously being aware of it, had I grown increasingly defensive with regard to Sandrine, and was it my own pent-up disappointment that had finally exploded on that last night of her life?

  This was all icily disturbing, and like a man fleeing the voices in his head I walked to the window and looked out. I could see the front grounds of the courthouse, with its squat war memorials, marble columns that erupted from the green here and there and upon which the names of the local fallen had been inscribed. There was also a statue of some regionally renowned Civil War commander who’d distinguished himself at Gettysburg . . . or was it Spotsylvania? Coburn’s monuments were like Coburn, I thought, untouched by any distinction.

  My gaze drifted about the grounds. The lawn was dotted with the sort of sunlight poets and bad writers inevitably call “dappled.” The town traffic was moving with its usual lethargy, a pace I’d long ago labeled “sub-Saharan” and which I thought typical of the average Coburnite’s failure to find anything of true moment to do.

  Nothing in this Norman Rockwell tableau caught my attention until I saw Mr. Singleton and Detective Alabrandi as they moved down one of the courtyard square’s concrete sidewalks. They were walking shoulder to shoulder. There they are, I thought, my twin nemeses, utterly convinced that they have seen through my plot, equally determined to make sure that I pay with my life.

  I would have turned away but, just as they reached the street, a brown Ford station wagon pulled into one of the parking spaces a few feet away. It was a car I recognized, because it had always struck me as odd that a single man, as Malcolm Esterman certainly was, would buy a car that says family all over it, a car for transporting kids to school, games, lessons, for taking long in-country vacations to such faraway and exotic locales as, say, Charleston.