Read Online Sandrine's Case (9780802193520) by Thomas H. Cook - Free Book Online

Officer Hill had seen nothing of Sandrine’s death room at that point, not her body in the bed, nor the books scattered around it, and certainly not that yellow tent of paper. So what had she seen, I wondered, what had she seen in my eyes?
    â€œDemonstrating prejudice is like shooting whales in a barrel,” Morty whispered cheerfully. He offered me a broadly reassuring look. “You’re the victim in this case, Sam. Don’t forget that. You’re a victim of unwarranted suspicions that put you on the police radar, and that’s what we’re going to show.”
    I had learned by then that this was to be Morty’s set-in-stone strategy. I will be portrayed as a victim of small town prejudices, and by this means my lawyer will turn the tables on the jury. He will show that these prejudices were vile and that they contorted the facts. If he is successful, the jurors will see that this is true and guard themselves against exhibiting these same prejudices. In effect, Morty will immunize them from themselves.
    It is all very clever, but suddenly it also seemed very sad, so that I felt an odd spark of buried feeling, a surprising ache of pity for something other than myself.
    â€œPeople are lost,” I whispered.
    Morty shrugged and returned to his notes, but the sadness and pity that had just swept over me lingered, and as it lingered it reminded me of the first feeling I’d gotten from books, particularly from Melville, tales I’d read long before I’d either taught or been taught them. I thought of the resigned way in which Starbuck had tossed his pipe into the sea, then the bleak sigh of “Oh humanity” that ends “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” At that moment, my mind turned unaccountably to Yeats, and I recalled the sorrows he’d glimpsed in Maud Gonne, the pilgrim soul he’d seen in her, sorrows that even her beauty could not sweep from her “changing face.”
    And somehow all of this returned me to Sandrine in her bed, with that one red rose, her hair arranged just so, a candle set at just the right position to cause that many-faceted reflection. By the time it was all over she’d been made to look for all the world like a woman with no expectation of death. Either that, or something still less incriminating, like a woman in a state of serene but blissful eroticism, one who’d welcomed death as if it were her demon lover.
    â€œSo let’s see now,” Judge Rutledge said. He was looking at the clock. “It’s getting rather late, I think.” He glanced at the jury, then at Mr. Singleton, and finally at Morty. “It seems to me that in light of the hour, it may be best to adjourn for the day,” he said. “Does either the defense or the prosecution have any objection to an adjournment?”
    Neither did.
    â€œAll right, then, we will resume tomorrow morning at nine a.m.,” Judge Rutledge said.
    We rose as the jury left the room. I stood silently, watching them file out, each of them careful not to glance in my direction, as if the way I looked was, itself, in some way prejudicial.
    â€œOkay,” Morty told me once the last of them had departed. “Get some sleep.”
    I turned to Alexandria, her face in that fixed look of strain and worry.
    â€œI’ll take you straight home,” she said, as if I were a deadly microbe, a creature, primitive and deadly, that shouldn’t be released into the air.
    I stepped away from the table, turned to leave the courtroom, then stopped cold at the sight of Jane Forbes, a fellow professor at Coburn College, a woman Sandrine had sometimes met for early morning trots around the reservoir. She was standing rigidly in a shadowy corner of the courtroom, wearing a burgundy overcoat, her hands sunk deep in its pockets, a woman whose eyes unaccountably returned me to the now thoroughly incriminating ones that had once gazed at me in the green shade of the park. I had no