Sandrine's Case

  “At least to you,” Alabrandi said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Well, there was a phone beside her bed,” Alabrandi said.

  I nodded. “Yes, there was a phone,” I said, now wondering if this was something Alabrandi had intentionally planted in my brain, the idea that Sandrine might have used that phone to call for help or—could she possibly have done this?—to say just as the drugs took effect that she had been murdered?

  “Anyway,” Alabrandi said, “calling you a sociopath, this was said as you were leaving for your class at the college?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Sociopath,” Alabrandi repeated as he wrote the word in his notebook. Then he looked up, his dark eyes quite intense now, so that I’d felt rather like a small animal caught in the crosshairs of a very powerful rifle.

  “You knew about the argument, didn’t you?” I asked him.

  Alabrandi said nothing, and since at that early date I hadn’t yet begun to have doubts about Alexandria, I suspected that he’d probably heard about it from Edith Whittier, our next-door neighbor, a woman divorced so early and for so long her life seemed spinsterish. It couldn’t have been Carl, because he’d taken his son on a camping trip that week. None of the other houses was close enough for the people living in them to have heard voices coming from inside 237 Crescent Road. It had to have been Edith, I thought as Alabrandi wrote something else in his notebook. Even so it wasn’t until I’d later seen her name on the prosecution witness list that my fears were confirmed. At the time, however, I’d surmised that if Edith had heard voices, then she’d probably heard the crash of that white porcelain cup.

  “Sandrine threw a cup at me,” I told Alabrandi in order to give the impression that I wasn’t trying to hide anything.

  The smooth movement of Alabrandi’s pen stopped abruptly as he glanced up from his notebook.

  “As I was leaving,” I added. “She threw it at me as I was leaving. It crashed against the door. It broke into lots of pieces.”

  “None of the officers reported seeing a broken cup,” Alabrandi said pointedly.

  “That’s because I cleaned it up,” I told him.

  “When?”

  “Before anyone got there.”

  Alabrandi made a note of this. “Where are those pieces?” he asked.

  “I threw them in the garbage, and a couple of days ago the garbage people picked it up. I suppose they’re in the town dump somewhere.”

  Detective Alabrandi didn’t appear particularly disturbed by any of this.

  “You were alone in the house during this argument?” he asked. “Except for your wife, I mean.”

  “Yes,” I answered. “Our daughter had gone out for some reason. Shopping for something, I don’t remember what. She got back a few minutes before I left. She was packing her things because she was going back to Atlanta that night.”

  “When did you leave for your class?”

  “A few minutes after Alexandria got back from whatever she’d been doing,” I answered. “I went into the scriptorium and—”

  “Scriptorium?”

  I shuddered at how pretentious Alabrandi must take this Latinate, but I’d said it, and as Morty had later pointed out you can’t unring a bell. “That little room with the books and our laptops.”

  Alabrandi said nothing.

  “Anyway, I went there and read for a while,” I told him. “I guess I was trying to calm down. Then Alexandria arrived, and we spoke briefly, and then I left for my classes.”

  This, too, went into Alabrandi’s notebook, the same one to which he now resorted in answer to Mr. Singleton’s question.

  “Now, Detective Alabrandi, at that point, you had the autopsy results on Mrs. Madison, correct?” Mr. Singleton asked him.

  “Yes,” Alabrandi answered.

  “And it was during this conversation that you revealed an important finding in the autopsy report, correct?”

  “I did, yes.”

  As Alabrandi continued, I saw myself once again in the living room, slumped in one of its motley chairs, watching as the good detective drew a few pages of neatly folded paper from his jacket pocket.

  “The autopsy report,” he said as he offered it to me.

  I didn’t take it. “You obviously have something you want to tell me about it,” I said, almost impatiently, as if the high drama of all this struck me as silly, a small town cop trying to act like some big screen cop he’d seen in the movies.

  It was an attitude Sandrine no doubt would have expected me to exhibit, I thought now, as Mr. Singleton handed Detective Alabrandi those same pages, and which I knew would soon pass into evidence as Exhibit Something. She would have known my tone would seem arrogant to Alabrandi, and that surely he would start to despise me at that moment, if he hadn’t already. How well and deeply she had known me, I thought, as Alabrandi glanced solemnly at the copy of Dr. Mortimer’s autopsy report Mr. Singleton now handed him.

  “At this time did you inform Mr. Madison of the autopsy findings?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  “Yes, I did,” Alabrandi answered. “I began by indicating the cause of death, the fact that Mrs. Madison had died of an overdose of Demerol mixed with alcohol.”

  Which is exactly what I’d expected, of course. The surprise was that antihistamines had been added to the mix.

  “Do you recall your wife taking antihistamines?” Alabrandi asked.

  “No.”

  “In some instances, they’re used to prevent vomiting,” Alabrandi added. “This may have been the case here.”

  “Well, Sandrine probably wanted to do it right,” I said.

  “Someone did, yes,” Alabrandi added casually, with no more emphasis than he might have used to read the ingredients on a label.

  Alabrandi slowly leaned forward, a movement that seemed calculated so that I’d abruptly felt like a diver deep in murky water who suddenly intuits the presence of a shark.

  “Mr. Madison, when I was here last time, I asked if you knew a man named Malcolm Esterman. You said you did and that he was a colleague at Coburn College.”

  I nodded.

  There was a long pause before Alabrandi said, “Are you aware that Mr. Esterman was the last person to see your wife alive?”

  “Malcolm?” I blurted, and actually laughed at the absurdity of such a thing. “Malcolm Esterman? Why would . . .” I stopped because the look in Alabrandi’s eyes was a stone wall.

  “But Malcolm Esterman is just a . . .” I began, then stopped again.

  “A what?” Alabrandi asked.

  Because nothing else came to mind I said, “Just an associate professor, just a . . .” I stopped a third time, gathered my thoughts, then said, “How do you know this?”

  “Mr. Esterman has confirmed that Mrs. Madison came to his house at just after six on the evening of November 14, which was the night she died.”

  I could more easily have believed Sandrine, my atheist wife, would have gone to a parish priest. So why, on the last night of her life, would she have driven to Malcolm Esterman’s decidedly beige condominium?

  I began to stumble. “But what . . . why . . . what would she . . .”

  Alabrandi nodded toward the autopsy report. “Page four,” he said.

  I turned to the page, then read the one salient detail that froze my heart.

  “A pale circular band is noted around the lower quadrant of the ring finger of the left hand,” I read.

  “Did Mrs. Madison wear a wedding ring?” Alabrandi asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “When did you last see it?”

  “I don’t remember,” I said, “but what does it have to do with Malcolm Esterman?”

  Alabrandi took the autopsy report from me. “Mr. Esterman voluntarily
came into headquarters three days after your wife died. He’d come to the conclusion that given the circumstances of her death there would no doubt be an investigation, and he thought we needed to know that he’d had a relationship with Mrs. Madison.”

  “A relationship,” I whispered, and felt the sun and moon and all the stars fall upon me. “With Sandrine?”

  At that moment, sitting in my living room, facing Alabrandi, I’d felt only the surreal nature of this revelation. Sandrine with this froggish little man who lived in a condominium that looked as if it had been built entirely from scavenged materials? Associate professor Malcolm Esterman, who taught mostly freshmen classes to Coburn’s generally mindless students? I’d no way of putting this latest bombshell into perspective or any means of locating it within the fabric not only of our marriage but of everything I had ever thought about Sandrine. Still, it was then it had occurred to me that Sandrine, by some means, must have found out about April Blankenship, and thus, in a state of utter upheaval after our argument, had gone to poor, chalk-covered Malcolm and there, in a seizure of loathing and bent upon the only revenge she’d thought possible, had clamped her eyes shut and pinched her nose and clenched her teeth and done anything else she had to do to drive back her repugnance and, in that posture of revulsion, had “relations” with him.

  Fatally, before I could stop myself, and with the chest-thumping bellow of a wounded primate, I blurted, “Yes, of course. To get even with me.”

  Alabrandi’s body tensed but his voice was cool and measured. “Get even with you for what, Mr. Madison?”

  And I thought, My God, he knows that, too, and like a soul poised on the rim of hell I hesitated, then stepped over the edge. “For what I did. For my affair.”

  “You had an affair?” Alabrandi asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Did Mrs. Madison know about it?”

  “I guess she must have.”

  “Why do say that?”

  “Because of what Malcolm Esterman told you,” I said. “Why would Sandrine have had a relationship with him except to get even with me?”

  “I didn’t say that Mr. Esterman’s relationship with your wife was sexual,” Alabrandi said.

  And, of course, that was true.

  Lamely, I asked, “Was it?”

  “No,” Alabrandi answered. “According to Mr. Esterman they had a close friendship. That’s why she called on him the night of her death. She was upset, he said.”

  “With me?” I asked. “And so she pulled off her wedding ring and left it with Malcolm Esterman? Is that what he told you?”

  Alabrandi nodded. “Mr. Esterman says that he had intended to return it to her but he never got the chance.”

  “I see.” I drew in a deep, troubled breath and tried to regain some sense of composure. “Okay, well, let’s leave it at that.”

  Alabrandi’s face hardened. “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Mr. Madison.” His pen leaped to attention. “Who’s the woman?”

  “What woman?” I asked as if I’d entirely forgotten my blurted admission.

  “Please,” Alabrandi said quietly. “Just give me her name.”

  “I’d rather not do that,” I told him.

  Something went full metal jacket in Alabrandi’s eyes, and I could see the formidable army CID man behind his polite manner. “This is a murder investigation, Mr. Madison.”

  “Murder?” I breathed. “Sandrine wasn’t murdered. Sandrine . . .” I stopped dead. “And I’m the prime suspect, of course.”

  “Who was the woman, Mr. Madison?” Alabrandi repeated firmly.

  I felt the floor give way beneath me, a sense of falling through space. “But she had nothing to do with—”

  “Who?” Alabrandi demanded in a voice as hard as a pistol shot.

  I had made only one promise to April, that under no conditions would I let pass a word of our relationship to anyone. I had sworn this secrecy again and again, but at that moment, observing the way Alabrandi remained silent, simply staring, waiting, I conveniently convinced myself that surely he must already know what I then told him.

  “April Blankenship,” I said.

  Out-of-Body Experience

  While Detective Alabrandi continued to relate all the further details of our fifth interview, I had what amounted to an out-of-body experience. Alabrandi had said April’s full name in open court, even adding her middle name, which is Bernice, and I’d glanced over to see that name recorded by the court stenographer, then to my right, where several local, three regional, and two national reporters were scratching it into their notebooks, and then to the various audiotaping devices that were recording it and finally to the room’s four surveillance cameras, each of which was dutifully doing the same. It was as if her name—April Bernice Blankenship—were echoing through all the hills and valleys of the republic, heard in shopping malls and elevators, in dance clubs and medical waiting rooms and sport stadiums, a name carried on quivering sound waves down hospital corridors and into the vast reaches of countless international airports: april bernice blankenship.

  That pitiful little whore.

  “That’s what they’ll call me, Sam,” she’d said to me at the end of our final, dreary tryst, “if anyone found out.”

  “No one will,” I told her, then glanced toward the deathly gray curtains that hung from the window of the spare little room. How in the world, I asked myself, had I come to be in such a tawdry place?

  “They can’t, Sam, ever.” Her eyes filled with puppy dog supplication. “It would kill Clayton if he found out. And he’s been good to me. He’s always been kind. I shouldn’t have done this. I don’t know why I did it. But, Sam if he ever . . . I just couldn’t, you know, live.”

  She’d gone on and on like that for another couple of minutes, a voice that grew more desperate and despairing as I put on first my pants, then my shirt, then my shoes. On that last day I’d even worn a tie, which I’d finished tying when her voice, small, incessant, pleading, had finally, mercifully stopped.

  I drew her into my arms. She felt like a sack of sticks. “No one will ever know, April,” I assured her. “I promise you that no one will ever know.” I smiled. “I have a lot to lose, too, you know.”

  She nodded. “I guess it’ll be okay then,” she said weakly.

  I started to kiss her on the mouth, then thought it a bad idea, and so darted to the right and gave her what amounted to little more than a peck on the cheek. “Trust me. It’s all okay.”

  We’d mutually decided to end it that very afternoon. It had always felt makeshift and contrived, our affair, two people who should have passed in the night but who somehow had gotten hooked on to each other instead. We’d been like two pieces of lint that had randomly joined as each swirled in the summer air. We’d become attached in a momentary lapse from the usual routine, so my later analysis had run, and for that reason had ended up in bed as randomly as a couple of disconnected bits of paper might meet in the same swirling drain.

  But I had to admit that I’d enjoyed the sheer conspiratorial nature of the thing, at least at the beginning. I’d rather shamelessly relished the clandestine drive to a neighboring town, waiting for April in a down-market motel room, one that had actually had a pink neon sign. In fact, it had probably been the back alley nature of the activity I’d most enjoyed about our rendezvous, the noir fiction shadowiness of it all. With April I could play the leading man, something that had been impossible with Sandrine. In the tiny solar system of my life, beautiful, brilliant Sandrine had always been a planet in orbit alongside me, while poor, drab, abysmally needy April, however briefly, had quite comfortably assumed the lowly position of a circling moon.

  April, however, had never been entirely comfortable with our affair. She had never cheated on Clayton, and she never managed to be very good at it. A gray-eyed dread hung from her like ragge
d clothes, and most of the time she’d been frozen by the fear of anyone finding out about us. She’d all her life been a “good girl,” she said, and there were times when she expressed an almost deer-in-the-headlights wonder at finding herself in bed with a man other than Clayton. He’d been twenty years her senior and had early run out of steam, but it wasn’t sex April craved; it was that old black magic love.

  “I wanted to love you and maybe that you would love me back, too,” she told me during the final forlorn minutes of our last drizzly afternoon at the all too aptly named Shady Arms motel. “But some things are just dreams, and if you try to make them real it doesn’t work, like in movies it always does, and so they turn on you and go bad.”

  There is a vulnerability about the unintelligent, and April, more than anything, gave off the raw bafflement of the deeply inarticulate. As a woman she’d had little to offer but loyalty, and by being with me she’d failed even at that. In the end, it was this failure that had hurt her more, in fact far more, than our failed affair. In betraying Clayton, she had betrayed herself, as she’d made clear in the one good line I ever heard her say, and which she’d uttered on my front porch the night she came to beg me to keep quiet: I killed the little angel in me, Sam.

  By then she’d heard of Sandrine’s death, and the nasty fearmonger in her soul had been busy whispering all kinds of dire warnings, how there’d probably be a police investigation, that in such cases the husband is always the first to be suspected, that the authorities were bound to be looking into any motive I might have had for killing Sandrine, she, herself, being the most obvious one.

  Still very much out of body, I now recalled April’s face in the yellow light of the alleyway where she’d asked that I meet her, our two cars parked in a remote corner, shielded from the roadway by an enormous green Dumpster. She’d come to my car, looking thin and all but featureless, everything girlishly small, her eyes, nose, mouth, a little doll’s face, though now a very frightened doll.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.