Sandrine's Case

  “Did Mr. Madison provide any other reasons?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  “He said he didn’t want to think of her lying in a refrigerated vault,” Alabrandi answered. “He said he had a very vivid imagination, and this was a picture he didn’t want in his mind.”

  What else could I have told him at that time? I asked myself as he continued his testimony. He had come to believe that I wanted Sandrine cremated in order to get rid of evidence.

  “So it is your recollection, Detective Alabrandi,” Mr. Singleton continued, “it is your recollection that Professor Madison offered several quite different reasons for wanting his wife cremated as soon as possible.”

  “One right after the other, yes.”

  Mr. Singleton shot his right index finger into the air. “That somehow this would be in accordance with . . . well . . . Cleopatra?”

  “Yes.”

  A second finger saluted the day. “That he had a vivid imagination and didn’t want an image of his wife in a refrigerated vault.”

  “He said that too.”

  A third finger.

  “And, finally, that rituals such as funerals were expressions of various beliefs that he regarded as . . . what were his words again, Detective?”

  “Santa Claus for grown-ups,” Alabrandi answered in the measured voice of a true detective.

  Now Morty lifted his hand. “Your Honor, Mr. Madison gave his reasons and Detective Alabrandi has already stated them. Why go over this again?”

  Mr. Singleton glanced toward the bench. “Your Honor I am . . .”

  Judge Rutledge was now looking at Morty, who had by then gotten to his feet. “Yes, Mr. Salberg, is there something you want?”

  To my relief, there was.

  Request a Brief Recess

  Morty wanted a brief recess and, though he didn’t say it, I knew it was because he’d seen that I was becoming quite addled, and he’d wanted to break the relentless drumbeat of Detective Alabrandi’s testimony, the way my own words were painting me as an enemy of Christ, Yahweh, Allah, or any other deity to whose ears the respective hearers of my case cared to offer up their daily prayers.

  “I must come off as some kind of professional atheist,” I said, once the request had been granted and Morty and I were safely ensconced in a private room a few yards from the judge’s chambers. “Coburn’s version of Christopher Hitchens.”

  Morty grinned. “I wouldn’t worry about all that many members of the jury knowing who Christopher Hitchens was.” He eased his enormous frame into a waiting chair. “But I wish you’d contacted me before you talked to Alabrandi or anyone else. I’d have said four little words and hoped that you remembered them: lowest common fucking denominator. You should never underestimate the capacity of human beings to be swayed by prejudice.”

  I slumped into a chair. “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

  “Something like that.”

  I looked at him with genuine sympathy. “You’re extremely bright, Morty. You must surely get tired of playing these stupid games.”

  His response was unexpectedly serious. “Not when I’m trying to save someone’s life, Sam.” He unbuttoned his jacket with a broad gesture, as if happy to reveal just how amply his stomach spilled over his belt. “Try not to get too upset. I saw you were getting worked up, which is why I asked for this five-minute recess.”

  “Worked up?” I offered a vaguely contemptuous snort. “I feel like Meursault in The Stranger.”

  Morty laughed. “Be sure you mention that to the press, Sam, or better yet to the jury. I’m sure they’re all great fans of postwar existentialist French literature.” He leaned forward, folded his huge hands, and placed them on the table. “Why did you want Sandrine cremated so quickly? Or at all? I’ll be asking you that in the presence of the jury at some point. And believe me, that ancient history bullshit won’t fly. Was that answer even true?”

  “No,” I admitted. “I made it up on the spot.”

  “What was the real reason?”

  I felt suddenly quite heavy, the reason for my wanting Sandrine cremated quickly so cold and selfish and thoroughly reprehensible that I’d probably not recognized it myself until that very moment.

  “Sandrine was beautiful,” I told Morty. “And I wanted her to stay that way, or to disappear entirely.”

  “Is that why you later covered her face?” Morty asked. “In the bed, I mean, after the coroner left.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “It’s in the report made to the mortuary,” Morty answered. “That when they arrived her face was covered. Everyone else saw her face. Hill, the coroner. So it must have been uncovered when she died.”

  “It was, yes.”

  “So why did you cover it?”

  I shook my head and released a weary breath. “I covered her face because I couldn’t bear to look at her, how beautiful she was, knowing at the same time that I would never, ever . . . hold her again . . . that she was gone.” I hung my head for a moment, then lifted it. “Would the jury believe that?”

  Morty sat back and waved his hand. “Who knows? Anything can go in any direction. You got a couple women on the jury who aren’t exactly oil paintings. They might resent a beautiful woman. And the men? I doubt if they have women who looked like Sandrine waiting at home for them. They might not warm to a guy who did.” He thought this over, then added, “But then, there are plenty of homely women who don’t resent beautiful women. And every guy with an ugly wife doesn’t resent the guy who has a good-looking one.” He looked toward the window and seemed to see only the inscrutable nature of things. “It’s a fucking crapshoot, the human heart.” He glanced at the clock. “Okay, back into the ring,” he said.

  The Court Reminds You

  “Detective Alabrandi,” Judge Rutledge said, “the court reminds you that you are still under oath.”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  The true detective looked completely relaxed as he prepared to hammer another plank onto my scaffold. He had done this before to other such miscreants, as he perceived me to be, and the smooth way he did it showed on his face, so very dispassionate, just a man doing his job, as if he had no feelings against me personally though I knew he had plenty of them.

  How did I know?

  I knew because he’d returned to 237 Crescent Road about a week after our first rainy day interview, and during which time I’d recognized the tiny hint of animus that was in his eyes as he’d taken his seat once more on my living room sofa, taken out his brown notebook, and with unceremonious speed fired his first question.

  “Do you know Malcolm Esterman?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “He’s teaches Greek history and mythology. He was in the same department as Sandrine. They were colleagues.”

  “Colleagues,” Alabrandi repeated.

  “Yes,” I told him firmly. “Colleagues.”

  The look on his face caused me to lean forward slightly.

  “What is this all about?” I asked. “What does Malcolm Esterman have to do with anything?”

  “Your wife called him the day she died,” Alabrandi said. “Several times, actually.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you have any idea why she might have done that?”

  “You’d have to ask Malcolm.”

  “We have.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That they were close.”

  “Close?” I asked quietly. “Sandrine and Malcolm weren’t close.” I sat back. “What does that mean, anyway? Close?”

  Alabrandi shrugged. “My job is simply to look into various possibilities, Mr. Madison,” he said. “When a woman the age of your wife, only forty-six, when she suddenly . . . ends up dead, we have—”

  “Ends up dead?” I interrupted. “What is t
hat supposed to mean?”

  Alabrandi’s gaze hardened. “What do you think it means?”

  I sat back. “As you know, my wife was already dying,” I told him. “And it was going to be a terrible death.”

  “And a long one,” Alabrandi said, then, like an actor who’d inadvertently jumped ahead in the play, he added, “Her death was going to be long and very difficult for you.”

  “For her,” I barked back. “Difficult for Sandrine.”

  “Too difficult for her to bear, is that what you’re saying?” Alabrandi asked. “So that she began stockpiling Demerol?”

  So he knows that, too, I thought.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  To my surprise, Detective Alabrandi didn’t pursue the issue that would later emerge during the fourth day of my trial, the fact that it was I, not Sandrine, who’d asked Dr. Ortins for Demerol, that it was I, not Sandrine, who’d picked up every single refill at Gerald Wayland’s pharmacy.

  Nor had he yet brought these facts into play during his testimony, as I noticed at that point, but rather he’d continued to follow Mr. Singleton’s careful lead.

  “Now, Detective Alabrandi, before the recess, we were discussing your initial interrogation of Mr. Madison,” Mr. Singleton said.

  “It wasn’t an interrogation,” Alabrandi responded. “Mr. Madison had not been arrested at that point.”

  “Shit,” Morty whispered, “he knows I called that recess to allow the jury to forget some of what you said, and now the little bastard is going over it again.”

  Which was precisely what happened.

  “Now, Detective Alabrandi,” Mr. Singleton said. “There were various issues that you’d found troubling, is that correct?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Would you tell us again what those issues were?”

  As Detective Alabrandi meticulously ticked off these issues, I marveled at how few of them he’d brought up during our second conversation. He’d mentioned Malcolm Esterman, though without further elaboration and only a hint of innuendo. Throughout the interview (since, evidently, it had not been an interrogation though it had certainly felt like one) he’d been polite. No. More than polite. There’d been a cautiousness about him, so that he had seemed rather like a man forced to explore a disreputable atmosphere whose moral relativism had both surprised and embarrassed him. For that reason, he’d seemed to approach the troubling issues related to Sandrine’s death quite carefully, like a computer technician who didn’t actually want to know what might be on his client’s computer.

  On the witness stand, he still struck me as that technician, though now one who’d ultimately been compelled first to check out that hard drive, then reveal the dark things he found there.

  “Well, there was the matter of the note Mrs. Madison left behind,” he said. “Officer Hill had reported that Mr. Madison had called it a suicide note, but when we read it we found no mention of suicide in it. When I later asked Mr. Madison why he had called it a suicide note, he answered that he’d simply assumed that that’s what it was.”

  That had been a stumble, I thought instantly, and a stupid one, since there’d been no need for me to call Sandrine’s note anything at all.

  “Did you gather from that statement that Mr. Madison had been aware that his wife intended to commit suicide?”

  Morty rose to object that Mr. Singleton’s question called for a conclusion from the witness.

  Judge Rutledge sustained the objection and, just like in the movies, Mr. Singleton rephrased his question.

  “Did Mr. Madison tell you why he’d assumed the statement found beside his wife’s bed to be a suicide note?”

  “Yes, he did,” Detective Alabrandi answered. “He said that she’d called it her ‘final word.’ He told me that when he found her dead, he’d assumed that she’d meant this last communication to be a suicide note.”

  Instead, it had been her “final word” on Cleopatra, though it had ended not with the sense that she would write no more on this subject, but that she was only now beginning to explore it, a final word that had not in the least seemed final, a curious and perhaps sinister fact, which Detective Alabrandi now revealed to the jury.

  “The note had nothing to do with suicide,” he said. “It had to do with Cleopatra.”

  Mr. Singleton stepped over to the witness box and handed Sandrine’s note to the witness.

  “Is this the note you found beside Mrs. Madison’s bed?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Would you read it to the jury, please?”

  As Alabrandi read, I felt the utter strangeness of what Sandrine had written coil around me once again. Why had she written as if she’d had all the time in the world to pursue the elusive Cleopatra? Why had she indicated the nature of her future research? Why had she spoken of traveling to Egypt, walking the desert sands, and sailing up the Nile? I asked myself all these questions as Alabrandi began to read my wife’s “final word.”

  “‘More than anything, perhaps, Cleopatra’s life represents a woman lost in time, the works of her chroniclers destroyed by fire or water, her own memoir unwritten, a woman all but erased, save for a likeness—or perhaps merely an imagined likeness—stamped on ancient coins.’”

  The question that came toward me like a spear was the one summoned by the last line, which Alabrandi read slowly, pronouncing each word carefully so that the implication of what Sandrine had written could not be more clear.

  “‘Over time, my hope would be to bring this elusive woman, along with the hard-won wisdom her life bequeathed, to a larger audience than those scholars who have already dismissed her, and according to whom she was but a pawn in a man’s dark game.’”

  Mr. Singleton allowed the jury to absorb those final words, then, just in case they hadn’t, he repeated them. “A pawn in a man’s dark game.” He looked at me, then back to the jury. “Yes.”

  I looked at the jury as Alabrandi folded the yellow paper. I looked at them and saw that they’d heard what Sandrine had written not as the final, abandon-hope-all-ye sentence of a suicide note but as the clarion call of a passionately intelligent woman who’d conceived a life’s mission for herself, and who was going to pursue it as long as she had the strength to do so, a life’s mission, as Sandrine’s last words appeared to suggest, that had been heartlessly terminated by “a man’s dark game.”

  I’m finished, I thought, a conclusion I labored to conceal from the jury by pretending to be deeply interested in what was currently being said in court.

  “As far as your investigation has turned up, what you just read to the court is the last sentence Sandrine Allegra Madison left us, isn’t it Detective Alabrandi?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  “It is, yes, sir.”

  With that, Singleton drew the paper from Alabrandi’s hand, stared at it almost lovingly, then repeated, “Over time my hope would be . . .” He looked at Detective Alabrandi. “When did Mr. Madison indicate that his wife wrote those words?”

  “He said the note was written on the afternoon of November 14,” Alabrandi answered.

  “And when did Mrs. Madison die?”

  “According to the autopsy, she died between the hours of six p.m. and midnight on November 14.”

  “The same day this . . . I really don’t know what it is . . . but this . . . note was written?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Morty leaned forward, the only indication I had of just how damaging he felt all this to be.

  “Did Mr. Madison indicate to you whether he’d actually read the note?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  “He said that he hadn’t read it.”

  “Did he ask you about the contents of the note?”

  “Yes, and I told him it was more like a college essay or something of that nature.”

  “And what w
as his reaction to that?”

  “He smiled.”

  “He smiled. Did he say anything about the note?”

  “Yes. He said it was ‘typical.’”

  “Detective Alabrandi, did Mr. Madison ever tell you what he found ‘typical’ in the final communication of Sandrine Madison?”

  “No,” Alabrandi answered.

  Which is true, though the answer would have been easy: the grace of her writing, and how heartfelt it was.

  “Now, when you read this note, you noticed that Mrs. Madison made no mention of suicide, is that correct, Detective Alabrandi?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “In fact, she only mentions herself twice, isn’t that so?”

  “Yes.”

  Singleton handed the note back to Alabrandi.

  “She mentions herself in the first line,” he said “Would you mind reading it again?”

  Detective Alabrandi lowered his gaze to the paper and read: “‘I often think of Cleopatra.’”

  “That ‘I’ is Mrs. Madison’s sole mention of herself until the last line, isn’t it, Detective?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Did you have occasion to mention this to Mr. Madison?”

  “In our initial interview, I did, yes,” Alabrandi answered. “I told him that the entire ‘suicide note’ was about the Egyptian queen Cleopatra.”

  “How did Mr. Madison respond?”

  “He informed me that Cleopatra was not Egyptian.”

  I glanced over as Morty released a very soft sigh, then a whispered, “Shit.”

  “She was Greek evidently,” Alabrandi added. “A Macedonian, Mr. Madison told me. He said that Cleopatra was no more Egyptian than Elizabeth Taylor.”

  Elizabeth Taylor.

  It struck me as not at all strange that her name instantly returned me to Sandrine, a stunning young woman of twenty-one, fresh from her studies at the Sorbonne. She’d been fiery and passionate, a brightly burning blaze of a woman. Once, long into our marriage, we’d been watching Geneviève Bujold in the part of Antigone, and I’d leaned over and whispered, “That’s you, Sandrine.” I had expected her to be pleased. Who wouldn’t have been by such a comparison? But her eyes had darkened and she said, “Only in your mind. Because it’s what you want me to be.”