Sandrine's Case

  I’d known no such thing but I said, “Of course,” and waved him into the house.

  He glanced about but appeared to register very little, his face expressionless, eyes that told me nothing.

  “My wife is down there,” I said with a nod to the corridor.

  It was eight in the morning but Forsythe looked like a man who’d already worked a full shift, his movements slow, his gaze betraying none of the considerable powers of observation he actually possessed and about which I’d learned only after he’d completed his report.

  “My daughter came home at around four this morning,” I told him. “To be with me, I mean, after I told her what happened. She’s sleeping down the hallway.”

  “No need to disturb her,” Forsythe said amiably. “I won’t be here long.” He smiled. “And I’ll try to be quiet.” And with that he’d softly, and quite thoughtfully, padded down the corridor to where Sandrine still lay.

  As Mr. Forsythe continued his testimony, I unaccountably thought of my long-deceased mother, the easy way she’d dealt with people, the softness of her voice, how slow to anger she had been. She’d held down a job of killing monotony, and yet, from those small wages, and even after she’d finally divorced my utterly indifferent father, she’d sometimes sent the checks I’d find in the mail from time to time, ten dollars here, twenty dollars there, always with the notation: for my son. It was a memory that returned me to that younger man, so grateful for those small contributions, without bitterness, harboring no resentments, working on a novel I’d titled “The Pull of the Earth” and which I’d described to Sandrine as being about “the tenderness of things,” a man who now seemed far, far different from the one who’d escorted Mr. Forsythe into the bedroom of his dead wife.

  “And what did you observe at 237 Crescent Road, Mr. Forsythe?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  “Mr. Madison met me at the door, where I identified myself. Then he escorted me to a back bedroom. That’s where I found the victim.”

  Morty was on his feet again. “I don’t mean to hold things up, Your Honor, but for the record I’d like it noted that Sandrine Madison was a deceased person, not a ‘victim.’”

  “Duly noted,” the judge said with a nod to the stenographer. He then turned to the jury. “Ladies and gentlemen, please strike the word ‘victim’ from any thought you might have concerning Mrs. Madison. It has not been established that she was a victim of any act, criminal or otherwise, committed by the defendant or anyone else.”

  With a feeling of genuine surprise, I found myself rather admiring the exquisite fairness of this, the pains that were being taken to protect me, and to honor during this otherwise inconsequential and decidedly small-town judicial proceeding the august requirements of the Constitution of the United States.

  Judge Rutledge turned to Mr. Singleton. “Continue.”

  “Now, Mr. Forsythe,” Mr. Singleton began again. “Can you tell us what you observed in the bedroom Professor Madison escorted you to?”

  “I found a deceased female,” the coroner answered. “She was in the bed, lying on her back. She was naked from the waist. Whether she was completely naked wasn’t something I could tell because there was a sheet over the lower part of her body.”

  For the next few minutes, the coroner recited observations not unlike those of Officer Hill. The room is cluttered. There is a yellow piece of paper beside the bed. He also sees an empty glass “about the size you’d have with iced tea,” a pill container with the cap on, various books scattered about. “And there was a candle burning.”

  “A candle?” Mr. Singleton inquired.

  “Yes,” Mr. Forsythe answered.

  “Where was this candle?”

  It was on a small shelf near Sandrine’s bed, I recalled, and I’d put it there because she’d asked me to do it. We’d bought it many years before in Albi, the little French town that had been the last stop on what she had always called our “honeymoon trip,” though we’d been married for almost a year before my spinster aunt died unexpectedly, leaving me with a small behest. We’d thought of starting a little nest egg with this money but had decided on a trip instead. There’d be plenty of time to save money, Sandrine had pointed out, but the chance to travel around the Mediterranean, visit all those fabled places, might never come again.

  “A large red candle,” Mr. Forsythe added.

  Sandrine had wanted me to retrieve it from a box in the basement. There were quite a few such boxes, and it had taken me some time to find this particular candle. She’d smiled when I finally came into the room with it, taken it from my hand, and rather lovingly turned it beneath the lamp. Then she’d uttered one of her enigmatic remarks: I wish you could retrieve everything so easily.

  Retrieve, I thought now, a word Sandrine had no doubt chosen carefully, and which, at least for her, had surely been fraught with significance. But what had she meant? And did I now have to parse every sentence she’d uttered in order to retrieve its meaning?

  Rather than enter into this discussion with myself, I returned my attention to the courtroom.

  “Was this candle lit?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  “Yes,” Mr. Forsythe answered.

  It was lit because Sandrine had wanted it lit. She’d also wanted it placed in a particular spot on the shelf to the left of her bed. She’d asked me to light it when I came into the bedroom that last night, and, as if ignited by its flame, she’d then launched into her attack, her voice very cold and hard when she said, “That candle, Sam, that little candle, is all that’s left of Albi.”

  Singleton knew none of this, of course, so I couldn’t imagine why he bothered to ask Mr. Forsythe about a candle that had no relevance whatsoever to my trial.

  I glanced toward Morty and gave him a quizzical look. In response, he merely shrugged, as if to say, Sometimes testimony just goes off track. Don’t worry, Sam, the state will pull the train back onto the rails soon enough.

  And Singleton did, dropping the whole business of the candle and returning to the subject of the general condition of the bedroom. He’d anticipated Morty’s rebuttal and established that although a bit in disarray our bedroom gave no sign of a struggle. Nothing was overturned, nothing broken. Under Mr. Singleton’s questioning, Mr. Forsythe told the jury that he saw no bruises on Sandrine’s body, nor any sign that she had ever been physically abused. He used the word “angelic” to describe the features of Sandrine’s face, and it struck me that they’d been exactly so. He then told the jury she’d looked “at rest,” which she surely had, words that immediately returned me to the final moments of that last night’s fury, with what wicked depths I’d wanted never to hear her voice again or defend myself against her accusations, the thrashing wounded bull I’d been.

  “Now, Mr. Forsythe,” Mr. Singleton said, “at some point during your visit to 237 Crescent Road that morning, did you have occasion to speak to Professor Madison concerning the death of his wife?”

  He had had such occasion, of course.

  “Would you tell the court the gist of that conversation?”

  “He said that his wife had killed herself,” Mr. Forsythe answered.

  “Did he say how?”

  “He said his wife must have been stockpiling a painkiller for some weeks.”

  “Did he give you the name of this painkiller?”

  “Demerol.”

  “And did he suggest to you how Sandrine Madison had administered this drug on the night in question?”

  “He said that he’d picked up the glass beside the bed and it had smelled of vodka,” Mr. Forsythe informed the jury. “He said that his wife had probably taken the pills with this vodka.”

  “Did he say that he was with his wife when she took her own life?”

  “He said that he was not.”

  Mr. Forsythe went on to reveal additional facts regarding o
ur conversation that morning, none of which seemed particularly notable until he reached the point where, standing at the door, as he was about to leave the house, he’d turned back to me and said, “I noticed a guidebook.”

  “A guidebook?” I asked.

  “It was tucked just beneath the sheet,” Mr. Forsythe said. “I noticed it when I examined the body more closely.”

  I had not examined Sandrine’s body more closely, and so I hadn’t noticed the book at all and told him so.

  “What kind of guidebook?” I asked.

  “A travel guide,” Forsythe said. “The title was something like Around the Mediterranean.”

  “The Mediterranean,” I said softly. “She was probably thinking of the trip we took to the Mediterranean when we were young. It was the travel guide we used on that trip. It was twenty years old, but she never threw it away, I guess.”

  “So it was nostalgia, you think?” Mr. Forsythe asked. “The reason she was reading it?”

  “I suppose so, yes,” I said. “It was a good time for us. When we took that trip.” I paused, then before I could stop myself, added, “We were happier then.”

  Something in Forsythe’s eyes darkened. “I see,” he said. “So she hadn’t been planning a trip?”

  “No.”

  I was trying to recall the exact words of this exchange when Mr. Singleton suddenly turned, walked over to his desk, picked up our old travel guide, the one Alabrandi had later seized, and handed it to Mr. Forsythe.

  “Is this the book you saw in the bedroom at 237 Crescent Road?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And the title is what?”

  Mr. Forsythe shifted the book to get a better light. “Around the Countries of the Mediterranean, a Travel Guide,” he read.

  “All right, did you later have occasion to take a look at this travel guide?”

  He had.

  “And did you notice if any page had been marked.”

  “The corner of one page had been turned down, yes.”

  “And what did this turned-down page mark?”

  “A town in France,” the coroner answered.

  “Which town?”

  “The town was named Albi.”

  “Thank you,” Mr. Singleton said. “I have no further questions.”

  Morty gave my shoulder a reassuring squeeze as he rose from his chair. His hand was big, beefy, and I felt somewhat like a little boy whose father has just confidently signaled him that, despite the unexpected and steadily building odds against it, he will win the game.

  “Forgive me, Mr. Forsythe, but would you state again how long you have been the Coburn County coroner?” Morty asked.

  “Thirty-two years.”

  “And if you don’t mind, would you tell the court how old you are?”

  “I’m seventy-one.”

  “And just for the record, you did order that Mrs. Madison’s body be autopsied, correct?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “And that would be entirely routine, wouldn’t it? It was enough that Mr. Madison had mentioned suicide as a possible cause of death?”

  “Yes, that would have been enough.”

  “In fact, Mrs. Madison’s age alone might also have been enough for you to order an autopsy, yes?”

  “Yes,” Forsythe answered. “Unless her death had been expected.”

  I knew exactly what Morty was up to with this line of questioning, of course. He was going to show that had not Officer Hill gotten her “itch,” and subsequently reported it to Detective Alabrandi, then there would have been no reason for the wheels of justice to begin turning as rapidly as they had in my case. This speed had been the result of nothing but a few initial and very prejudicial observations, Morty was saying, and they were but the first of many that had, at last, made Samuel Joseph Madison, loving husband of Sandrine and loving father of Alexandria, the true victim in my case.

  “But this mention of a suicide alone wouldn’t have been enough to make you call upon Mr. Madison the very next morning, would it, Mr. Forsythe?”

  “Probably not.”

  “It was Detective Alabrandi’s phone call that gave you this sense of urgency, isn’t that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And, as you’ve stated, you went to 237 Crescent Road, and after returning from there you ordered Dr. Benjamin Mortimer to conduct an autopsy on the body of Sandrine Madison, isn’t that true?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  This time, Morty had brought his notes to the lectern. He glanced at them, then looked up. “Now, Mr. Forsythe, would you say that you’ve seen several suicides during your career?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  “All right, and from your experience, you’ve learned a few things about what a suicide looks like. It would be fair to say that, wouldn’t it?”

  “It would.”

  “Mr. Forsythe, did you see anything in Mrs. Madison’s bedroom that indicated to you that her death had been caused by anyone other than herself? By this I mean, did you see anything physical that might have given you that impression?”

  Mr. Forsythe hesitated slightly. He was obviously an old hand at giving testimony, and so he knew that this was a heavily loaded question. For a moment, I watched him closely, suspecting that he might find a way to slither out of answering with a flat no, perhaps give an evasive answer, or one more damaging to me. He was, after all, a prosecution witness.

  “No,” he said.

  “Nothing at all that indicated a murder?”

  “No, nothing,” Mr. Forsythe answered firmly.

  It was an answer so completely honest and professional that I was quite surprised by it.

  And so I offered him a tiny smile, almost invisible, but one I hoped sufficient to express my appreciation for his simple honesty. Subtle though it was, the coroner appeared to see this smile, though he made no response to it that could be read by anyone but me.

  “Thank you,” Morty said. “No more questions.”

  Mr. Forsythe didn’t look at me as he left the stand but stared straight ahead, and within seconds his “dirty salad” suit was just a swath of beige in my peripheral vision.

  I turned my attention toward the judge’s bench. Morty and Mr. Singleton were talking to Judge Rutledge. Then both turned and headed back to their respective tables.

  “There’s going to be a short delay,” Morty said. “Singleton’s next witness is just now parking.” He smiled. “Well, the coroner didn’t hurt us.”

  I nodded in agreement though I had little doubt that Morty would have said the same even if the coroner had produced whatever in my case would be the smoking gun.

  He sat back casually. “So what’s the deal with that candle?”

  I shrugged. “We bought it in Albi, a little French town. It was when we were young, that first trip we took.”

  “The page your wife turned down in that guide, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s so important about this town?”

  “I don’t know.” I thought a moment, then added, “Well, it’s what started the argument. Sandrine mentioned Albi, and somehow from there we got into that fight.”

  “What fight?”

  “The last one,” I answered. “The one I told you about, the one we had that night.”

  I recalled again the fury of our final exchange, how raw and hurtful it had been, with what ferocity Sandrine had attacked me and with what terrible final statement I had struck back.

  “I can’t imagine why Singleton would ask anything about that candle,” I added. “It was just a cheap souvenir. Like everything else on that trip, I bought it with a little money I got after my aunt died.”

  I saw something catch in Morty’s brain. “How did your
aunt die, by the way?” he asked.

  “After a long illness.”

  “Were you there when she died?”

  “You mean, in the room?”

  “In the vicinity.”

  I gazed at him bleakly. “For Christ’s sake, Morty, do you think I killed my aunt too?”

  Morty stared at me silently.

  “No, not in the vicinity,” I said flatly. “My aunt was in Minneapolis. I was in New York.” I glared at him. “If you need any further proof that I didn’t murder my aunt, I’ll try to provide it.”

  “I don’t think that will be necessary,” Morty said. He smiled but it was a cold dead smile. “I was just checking, Sam. There is nothing more damning than innuendo, or worse than a surprise.”

  “There won’t be any surprises,” I told him. “You know everything there is to know.”

  And it was already far too much, as I’d learned by then, far, far more than I would have thought possible before my trial, though I also suspected that Mr. Singleton’s little paws were still at work.

  When I looked back at Morty, he had a curious and uncharacteristically troubled look on his face.

  “The time line, Sam. When did you leave your wife? The day she died, I mean.”

  “I left her twice that day. Once for my afternoon class and, later, for my evening class.”

  “The second time you left, that was after you had that fight, correct? When she threw that cup at you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where was Alexandria at that point?” Morty asked.

  “Why does it matter?”

  “It matters because if Singleton got desperate he could call her as a witness.” He saw how surprised I was by this. “You have no constitutional protection against your daughter, Sam,” he reminded me.

  “Alexandria would never testify against me,” I said. “Besides, there’s nothing she could testify about.”

  Morty’s gaze remained steady. “What about that last fight you and your wife had?”

  For some reason, the image that returned to me was of Alexandria making lunch that day, standing in the kitchen, cutting bread. She hadn’t turned when I called to tell her that I was headed for my noon class but only given a short jerk of the knife.