Sandrine's Case

by Thomas H. Cook

“Enough for what?” I asked.

  “Enough to leave her in peace!” Alexandria said quite loudly, then, to my immense astonishment, she leaped up like a geyser of steam. “Mom was dying, but she wanted to live!” she cried. “She wanted to live, and then, suddenly . . . suddenly . . . she was gone.” She shook her head. “It doesn’t make sense,” she added vehemently, though now laboring quite forcefully to control herself. “It has never made any sense.”

  So there it was, I thought starkly. My daughter, were she a member of the jury in my case, would incontestably vote to convict me.

  I looked at her helplessly. “I don’t know what to say,” I told her. “I don’t know what to say to you.”

  Alexandria drew in a trembling breath. “That last day, when I left, Mom put her arms around me, and she said, ‘I love you . . . Ali.’”

  “Ali?” I repeated. “She never called you Ali.”

  “I know,” Alexandria said. “But she said she had always thought I was more of an ‘Ali and that to her I would always be Ali.” She smiled softly. “I guess it was her way of getting closer to me at the end.”

  Her way of getting closer to me.

  I suddenly envisioned this scene, Sandrine gazing softly at Alexandria as she called her Ali, and at that moment I heard a mental click, a sharp, stand-your-hair-on-end snap that turned my case on its head and brought its disparate elements into a radically new focus.

  Sandrine’s way of getting closer to Alexandria?

  What if it had been nothing of the kind, I thought. What if that entire scene, so tender and loving, had not been designed to bring Sandrine closer to Alexandria at all.

  What if, I thought grimly as the darkest conjecture I’d ever had began to take shape in my mind, what if Sandrine’s speaking so sweetly to “Ali” had been her way not of getting closer to her daughter on that last evening of her life but, instead, had been her fiendishly clever way of separating Alexandria from me?

  Now it was Morty’s voice I heard: You have no constitutional protection against your daughter, Sam.

  “My God,” I whispered. “What if . . .”

  Alexandria peered at me as if I were a microbe under a glass. “What?”

  I couldn’t tell her any part of the terrifying scenario that was at that very moment unfolding in my mind, unfolding step by step, thread by thread, so that I felt like a man in the process of seeing through and reconstructing a brilliant magician’s single most brilliant trick, every angle by which the audience was distracted, every false wall and trap door, all the blue smoke and mirrors.

  I thought of the deadly coil of circumstantial evidence that now entangled me, no one piece of Singleton’s case enough to convict me but how, when one connected to another, together they created a lethally persuasive argument for my guilt.

  Alexandria stared at me. “What are you thinking, Dad?”

  My latest surmise settled over me like a winter frost. My God, I asked myself, could it be true? I thought about asking Alexandria directly if Sandrine had told her about the terrible argument we’d had on that last evening, the cup whose shattered parts had still been strewn across our bedroom floor, and which, yes, Alexandria might have seen. And what if she had seen them and asked Sandrine about them, and what if Sandrine had then told her everything about that night, ended this no doubt masterfully constructed tale with the final word she’d shouted to my retreating back: sociopath.

  To open up that subject now struck me as dangerous to my case. If Alexandria had seen those incriminating fragments she’d never mentioned it. Nor, before now, had she mentioned anything about her final conversation with Sandrine. And so, given the fact that Alexandria had so far revealed nothing having to do with her last hour with her mother, I decided it was best for me to allow those lips to remain sealed. After all, what I didn’t know hadn’t hurt me yet.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.”

  In the chill of the following silence I considered all the pieces that had come together in such a way as to first engender and then steadily build a case against me: the “suicide note” that had been no such thing, a back injury of which Dr. Mortimer’s autopsy had found no evidence, my subsequent call to Dr. Ortins, the way I’d always been the one who’d picked up and signed for the Demerol because Sandrine had always had a class or a meeting or some other activity that had prevented her from going to Wayland’s, the coup de grâce of antihistamines in her blood, the incriminating research she’d done on my computer, claiming hers was on the blink, though a subsequent investigation had found it to be in perfect working order.

  Was it possible, I asked myself, in grave wonder that such a question could ever have occurred to me at all, was it possible that fiber by clever fiber Sandrine had fashioned the hangman’s noose that now dangled above my head?

  With that arctic question, I found myself coldly in awe of an intrigue whose elaborations had finally formed so subtle and oddly beautiful a design, elegant in the way mathematicians use the word, a beauty “cold and austere,” as Bertrand Russell once called it, a phrase often quoted by the brilliant wife I now found myself imagining as a master puppeteer, one who’d never shown her hand, each element arranged to be discovered at a slant, nothing too obvious, no bloody knife or smoking revolver, these stage props replaced by a couple of paragraphs on Cleopatra that she’d described to me as her “final word,” and which I, in turn, had described as a “suicide note” when it had been nothing of the kind. After that everything—even my pedantry, that ludicrous mention of Poe’s story—had fallen inexorably into place. How classically Greek, I thought, to set a trap by which a man’s own flawed character would destroy him.

  For a moment I thought of all the witnesses who’d testified against me in a trial that, until now, I’d thought the exclusive handiwork of Mr. Singleton, the product of his personal zeal for justice. But was it not possible that he, too, had been brilliantly manipulated, his suspicions aroused by one carefully planted piece of evidence, then subtly deepened by another and another and another, all the while believing himself at the helm of my trial when in fact, and from the beginning, he’d merely been the chief puppet in what was not now, nor ever had been, anything but Sandrine’s case?

  PART IV

  Testimony is set to continue today in the trial of Dr. Samuel Madison, the Coburn College professor accused in the death of his wife, Sandrine Madison. Throughout the investigation and trial, Dr. Madison has professed his innocence. It is not known whether he will testify in his own defense.

  Coburn Sentinel

  January 20, 2011

  DAY SIX

  Morning Session

  Throughout the following evening, as I lay on my back in the darkness of the bedroom, I increasingly came to suspect that I did, indeed, now dangle in a web cleverly spun by Sandrine. Who, after all, could have more keenly intuited my dark desires, nor had a better motive to lay a trap for me should I act upon them. Had she seen in my soulless book its soulless author, surmised that I was indeed a sociopath capable of ridding myself of a woman who would with each passing day become more of a burden? Had Sandrine suspected that I wanted her dead and, in the throes of that suspicion, devised a way to make her destruction equally my own?

  I couldn’t reveal so grim a prospect to Alexandria, of course. Nor could I speak of it to Morty without sounding like a man so unhinged, so paranoid, so, well, sociopathic that in order to slither out of a murder conviction he was willing to lay the charge of attempted murder on the head of his dead wife. This meant that if Sandrine had, in fact, plotted to avenge her death, she’d done it in a way that not only prevented her plot from ever being discovered but just as thoroughly prevented it from even being discussed, let alone raised in court.

  Such considerations were still imposing themselves upon me during the morning session of my trial, then into the afternoon session, Detective Alabrandi stil
l on the stand, meticulously re-creating the many interviews he’d conducted both with me and with others during his investigation of Sandrine’s death. At points during all the previous testimony, I’d sometimes found myself adrift in a grim miasma of unfathomable circumstances but, now, as Alabrandi began to offer a step-by-step analysis of the evidence that had ultimately come his way, I no longer felt at sea. Perhaps there was, and had always been, to employ the words of Henry James, a “pattern in the carpet.”

  “Now, Detective Alabrandi, did you return to 237 Crescent Road on December 17?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  “I did, yes.”

  “And by then other issues had come to your attention regarding the death of Mrs. Madison, isn’t that so?”

  “Yes, they had.”

  “And so you returned and spoke to the defendant . . . this would be the fifth time, I believe?”

  “Yes.”

  This time he’d come in the morning, while I was sitting in the sunroom with my first cup of coffee, staring at the wicker chair that had always been Sandrine’s and wondering, still wondering, just how much digging Alabrandi had done since he’d last showed up at my door, and what he’d uncovered, a worrisome process made all the more relevant by his first statement, one made even before he’d entered my house that morning.

  “If you don’t mind, we’d like to have a look at Mrs. Madison’s computer,” Alabrandi said.

  “No, I don’t mind,” I told him. “But it’s not working.”

  “Not working?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Sandrine had been using my computer during the least few weeks.”

  “You never thought to get it fixed?” Alabrandi asked.

  “She said she’d rather just buy a new one,” I answered. “But she never got around to doing that.”

  Alabrandi’s gaze betrayed something I found quite disturbing, the sense that he found me personally repellant. “We’d like to look at your computer as well.” He smiled, but it was the smile of a man who held the winning cards, and knew it. “We could get a warrant, of course, but it’s easier just to have your permission.”

  “Take them both,” I said since I’d by then surmised that a demeanor that suggested a complete confidence in my innocence would play far better than my getting a lawyer or anything of that sort, a decision Morty had later thought quite foolish.

  “The office we shared was small so we just had two laptops,” I added.

  “Thanks,” Alabrandi said. “I’ll pick them up on my way out.”

  I nodded. “Sure.”

  He took out his notebook. “Would you mind describing Mrs. Madison’s general attitude during the weeks that led up to her death?”

  He’d said “death” rather than “suicide,” but I’d gotten used to such sinister syntactical ploys, and so they no longer bothered me. I was a tenured professor of English literature, after all. I knew how to use language.

  “Attitude?” I asked. “That’s a very general term.”

  Something hardened in Alabrandi’s gaze. “How she seemed, is what I mean,” he said. “Her thoughts and feelings.”

  “That’s not much better with regard to generalities.”

  Alabrandi shifted slightly. “Generalities are okay,” he said with a hint of irritability. “Generalities are just fine, Professor. Frankly, I don’t see how I can be more specific, so may we, as they say, move on?”

  “Well, in general then, she had become withdrawn,” I told him.

  “Due to her illness?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about that last evening?”

  He knows, I thought.

  As Detective Alabrandi testified to this very exchange it struck me that it had not occurred to me at that moment that Alexandria might already have borne witness against me, that even at this early stage of the investigation a police informant might be embedded in what remained of my shattered household. Even now, I couldn’t be sure, so that when I glanced back toward my daughter, met her gaze with my own, I felt, for the first time in my life, unsure of absolutely everything, a man now entirely unmoored. Had that also been part of Sandrine’s plan, to so thoroughly unhinge me that my life, from now on, would be no more than a long slog through ever shifting sands, rootless, uncertain, and lonely beyond words.

  Alexandria nodded toward the front of the courtroom, reminding me to pay attention.

  When I turned back, Alabrandi had moved a few minutes further into his narration of our fifth interview.

  “I began to ask Mr. Madison about the last evening of his wife’s life,” he told the court.

  And immediately I was back in my living room, facing him as fearlessly as I could manage.

  “The last evening?” I asked hesitantly.

  “Was she still withdrawn?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “So how would you describe Mrs. Madison’s demeanor that evening?”

  He knows, I repeated in my mind, though I could not be sure of this. And yet, if he knows, and if I lie or even diminish what happened between Sandrine and me that night, then I’ll look as if I’m hiding something . . . and I would be.

  “She was angry,” I said.

  In fact, Sandrine had said such furiously hurtful things to me on that evening, egged me on so relentlessly that, by now, as I listened to what Alabrandi began to tell the jury about this very exchange—and given the plot I feared she might have hatched—I’d come to suspect that Sandrine’s entire effort that night had been directed at forcing my hand, so that I would hesitate no longer to carry out what perhaps she had come to believe I was already plotting: her murder.

  “Very angry,” I added as one after another of her accusations returned to me, all she’d first admired in me—the kindness, the simplicity, the sense of service—and all she had since come to despise: my snideness, my superiority, my endless sense of grievance, the shabby gift, as she’d found opportunity to repeat, of my disillusion.

  “She was in an absolute rage,” I said coldly, before I could stop myself, a sudden loss of control that Sandrine would have expected, so that were souls immortal, as I suddenly imagined, she would doubtless have been smiling from on high.

  “Rage?” Alabrandi repeated.

  There was no going back. “Rage, yes,” I said.

  With that answer, Alabrandi had taken out his notebook, opened it, written something into it, then looked up and leveled his gaze upon me. “Did you and your wife ever have any physical confrontations?”

  I shook my head.

  “Never,” I answered, then saw the cup she’d hurled at me, a white porcelain cup that had crashed on the door as I’d left and whose many jagged shards I’d quickly swept up before the calling 911.

  Morty nudged me slightly. “What’s going on, Sam? You look like shit.”

  “I’m fine,” I said crisply.

  “Well act it then,” Morty instructed. “Don’t look like you just got hit by a fucking train.”

  In fact, at that moment some months before, fixed in Alabrandi’s glint-of-a-knife stare, I’d felt that indeed I had been hit by an idea no less powerful and destructive than a speeding locomotive, the notion that somehow Alabrandi had found out about that cup, a knowledge he’d been hinting at during the fifth interview, and upon which, now on this fifth day of my trial, Mr. Singleton was closing in.

  And so I leaned forward and listened more attentively as Mr. Singleton continued his questioning of Detective Alabrandi.

  “Now, Detective Alabrandi, at this time, did you inform Professor Madison of any information you had regarding the relationship between Mr. Madison and his wife?”

  “No,” Alabrandi answered. “Not at that time. I simply let him talk.”

  Yes, indeed, I thought, he’d let me talk, and talk I had. I’d described Sandrine
’s increasingly withdrawn behavior, her long hours in the sunroom or in the scriptorium, the way she’d listen to music for hours on end. Alabrandi had listened to all this without comment so that it was only when I’d come to the end of this recitation that he finally tossed his spear.

  “Mr. Madison, that last night, when your wife, as you said, was in a rage, there was an argument, I suppose?”

  “Yes, we had an argument,” I answered.

  Alabrandi jotted a note in that strictly by-the-book way of his, like a man simply recording a few routine details. “Can you be more specific?”

  “It was around six,” I went on. “Lots of Coburn students have to work, and so we have many evening classes. I had two classes that night and I didn’t get home until sometime after ten.”

  “Do you recall what the argument was about?” Alabrandi asked.

  “Lots of things, really,” I said.

  “Lots of things?” Alabrandi asked.

  “That I was distant, that I was cold.”

  “Anything else?”

  “There were probably other things,” I admitted. “But I don’t remember what they were.”

  “How did it end, this argument?”

  “It ended with Sandrine bringing up Alexandria,” I said. “She thought I’d not been a very good father to our daughter.”

  “In what way not a good father?”

  “That I’d often made it obvious I was disappointed in her because she hadn’t lived up to some idea of what our daughter should be. A writer or a scholar. Something like that.” I shrugged. “I got quite defensive, of course, and she said that was typical, too, that nothing she, or anyone else, said or did could ever penetrate what she called my ‘shell.’ When I started to leave, she yelled at me very loudly.”

  “What did she yell?” Alabrandi asked.

  As if I were in that darkened room again I heard Sandrine’s voice split the air.

  “She screamed, ‘You’re a sociopath,’” I said, “and that I was nothing to her. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.” I felt a shudder. “As far as I know, those were her last words.”