Sandrine's Case (9780802193520)

by Cook, Thomas H.

  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.

  A terrible numbness had settled into me after that, an emotional neuropathy that returned to me now as Morty and Mr. Singleton stepped away from the bench and headed back toward their respective tables, the little matter settled, evidently, so that Mr. Singleton was free to proceed to his next witness.

  But I wasn’t ready to proceed. I was still on Crescent Road, out in the yard, peering up at the night sky, though the hour had changed, and by then Sandrine was dead. And still I’d felt nothing. So had she been right in that last accusation, I’d asked myself, the one that had so wounded me? It was at that moment, while I was still gazing at the uncomprehending stars, that it had suddenly occurred to me I had a daughter, and that she had to be informed of her mother’s death. Even so, I’d waited for a while, trying to find the right words. I never really found them, and so, when Alexandria answered, I’d simply repeated that most common of introductions to grim tidings.

  “Alexandria, I have some bad news.”

  “It’s Mom, isn’t it?”

  I found it strange that my daughter had leaped so immediately to this conclusion, especially given the fact that she’d been with Sandrine that same afternoon, the two of them sitting in the sunroom, Sandrine in that vaguely African-looking caftan, Alexandria quite prim and proper in her dark pantsuit. Even so, I said only, “Yes, it is.” A breath then. “She’s dead, Alexandria. There were pills beside the bed.”

  “So she committed suicide?”

  “Yes.”

  After a silence, Alexandria said, “Why would she have done that, Dad?”

  “I think you know why.”

  “But she seemed so alive,” Alexandria said. “She was talking about a book.”

  “What book?”

  “A book about Cleopatra. She said it was better than any book she could have written about her.”

  “I doubt that,” I said with a hint of my long bitterness that Sandrine, my brilliant wife, had never gotten around to writing the great book I’d always felt certain was in her.

  There was another silence, this one curiously edgy.

  “It’s just hard for me to imagine that Mom was thinking about killing herself,” Alexandria said. “She just didn’t seem suicidal.”

  “Maybe that was all just a ruse,” I told her. “That business of seeming so excited or engaged or whatever it was. Maybe it was just your mother’s way of covering her tracks, putting you off the scent.”

  “The scent?” Alexandria asked, as if she found the word inappropriate.

  “That she was going to do it,” I explained.

  There was a third silence, during which it occurred to me that Alexandria hadn’t gasped or burst into tears or given any of the responses expected of a daughter who’d just been informed of her mother’s suicide.

  “All right,” she said finally. “I’ll drive down now.”

  “You can wait until later this morning, if you like.”

  “If I like?” Alexand
ria asked sharply. “My mother . . . your wife just killed herself, shouldn’t we be together?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose.”

  “Dad, you sound like you’re . . .”

  She hadn’t finished the sentence but Sandrine had finished it for her some hours before, the resounding accusation she’d so brutally hurled at me as she’d thrown that cup: a sociopath.

  “I’m in shock, I guess,” I explained quickly.

  “You sound perfectly calm.”

  “Well, how else should I sound?” I asked. “What’s done is done.”

  Alexandria said nothing in response to this, so that there was a long silence before I said, “Alexandria, are you all right?”

  “Yes,” she said, though she didn’t seem so. “I’m on my way.”

  “All right,” I said and started to hang up.

  “And Dad?”

  “Yes,” I said, expecting to hear some tender expression of love for her mother, or sympathy for me, so that her words took me entirely by surprise.

  “Don’t touch anything,” she said.

  Even at that early moment I asked myself, as this memory faded, had my daughter suspected me of murder? Suspected me even before the officer whose name Mr. Singleton now called as his second witness in my trial?

  Call Wendy Hill

  Her name when spoken, rather than read, was somewhat amusing, but I showed no hint of this amusement in my face. Morty had been quite stern in his admonition that no matter what I saw or heard in the courtroom I was, on no account, to be amused. My eyes might glisten. I was even permitted to weep. In fact, such dramatic demonstrations of intense feeling might serve my case. But under no circumstances was I to smile.

  And so I stared straight ahead, stone-faced, as Wendy Hill lifted her right hand and took the oath.

  She was of medium height, slender, and she was dressed in her police uniform. Her hair was gathered up and pinned at the back on this day one of my trial, but early on the morning of November 15, when she’d arrived at 237 Crescent Road, she’d worn it in a short ponytail that swept back and forth quite jauntily as she made her way toward me. I recalled this jauntiness because it had seemed so playful and light spirited considering the gravity of the circumstances, and at that moment I’d remembered Sandrine when she’d been about the same age as I assumed Officer Hill to be at first glance.

  She was older than I’d thought, however, a fact that came to light as she responded to Mr. Singleton’s initial questions.

  “I graduated from the state police academy three years ago,” she answered. “When I was twenty-three.”

  “And how long have you been a member of the Coburn Municipal Police Force?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  “Two years.”

  Before that, as her subsequent answers to Mr. Singleton’s questions made clear, Wendy Hill had served in the United States Navy, two tours in Iraq, thus a war veteran, and for that reason—at least in the jury members’ eyes—loyal, courageous, and truthful, thus quite pointedly my opposite number, even down to the fact that I’d never worn a uniform or served my country in any official capacity.

  “Now, Officer Hill, at approximately 1:33 a.m. on the morning of November 15, did the police dispatcher inform you of a recent death at 237 Crescent Road in the town of Coburn?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  Indeed, Chanisa Evangela “Evie” Shipman had so informed Officer Hill.

  “What did you do in response to that information, Officer?”

  “I went to the address she gave me.”

  I remembered that the air had been crisp and cool in those early morning hours, but in my memory’s more dramatic reconstruction it is very dark and there is a thickness to it, so that I’d felt a strange sense of suffocation. The patrol car’s flashers weren’t pulsing as it pulled into the driveway at what I would have described—had I been asked—as a leisurely pace. Obviously, the dispatcher had told the officer behind the wheel that there was no need to hurry. A woman was dead and nothing could be done about it.

  “What happened when you arrived, Officer Hill?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  She met me, or should I say I met her, at the door. She was in uniform, of course, and I noticed that her holstered automatic pistol hung low, like a western gunslinger, and that her hand cradled its handle in the wary manner of one unsure of what to expect.

  “I understand there’s been a death,” she said.

  I nodded. “My wife.”

  “Where is she?”

  “In the bedroom. I’ll show you.”

  I led her down the corridor and into the room Officer Hill now began to describe to the court.

  “The room was in a mess,” Officer Hill informed the jury. “There were papers all around. And books. It was really sort of a cluttered place, because everything was covered with stuff. Mostly books and magazines, that sort of thing.”

  Our bedroom had always looked in disarray, so I’d made no apologies for it as I’d led Officer Hill into the room. Even so, I’d earlier thought of straightening it up a bit, then heard Alexandria’s warning in my mind, and for that reason I touched nothing at all within the room save those scattered bits of porcelain cup, which I’d carefully swept into a dust pan and deposited in the large plastic garbage receptacle on the back deck, an act I’d hardly considered incriminating at the time.

  “Where was Professor Madison at this point?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  I’d been standing in the door of the bedroom, watching as Officer Hill glanced about the room. She’d seemed to find it strange, all the many books and papers, how untidy it all was, and which I now suspected to have generated her first suspicion that perhaps all was not well ordered at 237 Crescent Road. Could it be that this was the reason, I wondered, as she continued her testimony, she’d later reported the bedroom’s disarray to Detective Alabrandi? Had a murder, or the idea that there might have been one, first begun to take shape in this former navy recruit’s sense that some sort of domestic dispute had taken place in this room? Had we thrown these books at each other, Sandrine and I? Had things gotten tossed about during the course of a struggle?

  “Did you notice any of these books?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  “I noticed the one that was open.”

  “Where was this book?”

  “On the floor beside the bed. I guess Mrs. Madison had been reading it. But it looked like she’d put it on the floor before she died.”

  “Do you remember the subject of that book?”

  “It was about Cleopatra. It showed a picture of her, and the title was in big letters.”

  “What else did you notice?”

  “A piece of yellow paper. Legal size.”

  “Where was this paper?”

  “It was also on the floor beside the bed.”

  “Next to the book?”

  “Right beside it.”

  “It was lying flat?”

  “No. It was folded in the middle and sort of made to stand up. Like a tent.”

  “Was anything written on the outside of the paper?”

  “No.”

  “Did you read the paper, Officer Hill?”

  “Not at that time.”

  Not at that time, because it was then that two EMS workers had arrived, dispatched no doubt by Chanisa Evangela “Evie” Shipman, presumably as a matter of established practice in such cases. They’d come in an ambulance, Orville Todd and Leno Kaneda, and, according to their report, they had found Sandrine “apparently deceased,” a surmise later confirmed by a stethoscope (Leno’s).

  While Officer Hill recounted these activities, I was left to recall them, the flashing light of the ambulance, the way it had rhythmically swept the room, the puzzled look on Orville Todd’s face when he first saw Sandrine, how beautiful she was, perhaps as beautiful in the seren
ity of death as she had ever been in life, a beauty both EMS workers had obviously noticed. I’d seen the way they looked at her, then glanced knowingly at each other as if to say—guy to guy—Jesus, what a waste.

  “All right,” Mr. Singleton said. He was obviously impatient with the methodical but somewhat lethargic way Officer Hill had just chronicled the arrival, actions, and departure of the EMS workers. As testimony it had been matter-of-fact but to the jury, as he clearly feared, way too slow, a lag in the action that threw off his presentation’s carefully calculated pace.

  “All right,” he repeated. “Now, Officer Hill, did you have occasion at this point, after the EMS workers had left the room, did you have at that point occasion to look at that yellow paper you’d noticed earlier?” He glanced at the jury as if to remind them to be attentive. “The one that was folded and placed upright beside the bed, as I believe you have earlier testified, like a tent.”

  She’d had such occasion, but she hadn’t picked up the paper until she asked me a question.

  “I asked Mr. Madison what that was, that paper,” Officer Hill informed the court.

  “What was his answer?”

  “He said it was probably a suicide note.”

  “Was this Professor Madison’s first statement to you with regard to the cause of Sandrine Madison’s death?”

  “Yes, it was.”

  Mr. Singleton nodded. “Could you tell us if Professor Madison said anything else regarding the paper he referred to as a suicide note?”

  “He said I could take it.”

  Because I’d assumed she would anyway.

  “Did he indicate that he’d read it?”

  “He said that he hadn’t.”

  Which was true. I hadn’t read it. Why? Because in order to read it I would have had to pick it up, and so once again my caution had betrayed me. Who would have thought, I asked myself as Officer Hill continued her testimony, that being careful might have such perilous results?