What the hell could I say? What could I do?
As time passed, as it became clear the police were not going to make an early arrest in the Madigan deaths, I had more contact with Sandra Wilson.
I returned to her apartment occasionally after my initial visit, hoping to clarify a few things, but she remained in no shape to be interviewed. Same hollow-eyed gaze and monotonal voice. She’d invite me in, and we’d sit in her tiny kitchen until the silences between my tiptoe-y questions -- “So, Sandra, have you returned to work?” “Yes.” “Are you able to sleep any better these days?” “No, not really.” -- grew awkward.
Once, I noticed that the sink was empty of dishes and thought maybe the clouds were lifting for her, but on my next visit, the place looked like hell again. Then a change occurred, and she seemed to move to a different stage of grief. She began to reach out. To me, among others. She called about once a week. I knew the case as well as anyone except the police. Why not call me?
Sandra became able to deal with details, to answer whatever questions I had. But she almost invariably broke down toward the end of the conversations. They were usually on the phone, and once she came to my office.
Sandra returned to the question I’d asked in our first meeting: why did Carolyn Madigan go to her mother’s apartment that night?
I thought perhaps Diane was worried about the approaching hurricane, and her daughter -- who had gone to college in northern Florida and been through some storms -- had visited to reassure her. And perhaps to help her stock up on supplies.
I was wrong, according to Sandra. The storm, she maintained, had nothing to do with Carolyn’s presence. And Sandra hadn’t encouraged Carolyn’s visit, for any reason. Guilt hadn’t been a factor in her response to my awkward reporter’s questions at our initial meeting. She was just grieving.
“She was going over there first because Diane wanted her to meet someone,” Sandra said. “This cute guy Diane worked with. She always played matchmaker. I don’t know why. Carolyn could get a man in an eye’s blink. She was a gorgeous, sweet girl. Woman.”
“But the guy didn’t come over?”
“No. One of Diane’s co-workers told me he made an excuse at the last minute that day. He didn’t like the idea of being fixed up. What happened was that Carolyn came over anyway. This other friend of hers I talked to said she probably wanted to talk to her mother about quitting her job.”
“Carolyn worked in a book store, right?”
“Yeah, on Palm Beach. She hated it. She told me she thought the people were phonies. The customers and employees both. She didn’t like Palm Beach one bit.” Sandra’s voice took on an indignant quality. She almost seemed to be suggesting that if Carolyn had liked Palm Beach, had liked her job, she wouldn’t have been going to her mother’s that day and would be alive still. “Everyone looked down their noses at her -- that’s what she thought. She was just a working person from New Hampshire, who didn’t fit in.”
“So this friend said Carolyn was about to quit?”
“Right. She said she talked to Carolyn the day before they…the day before it happened. Carolyn said she was ready to quit. But…but she wanted to talk to her mother. She wanted to talk to her first.”
At this point, Sandra’s voice became choked, halting, on the verge of stopping altogether, or breaking into sobs. Sometimes when I spoke with her she interrupted herself, then said goodbye quickly and hung up. She would apologize later when that happened and I told her please not to.
This time she began to sob.
I said, “Sandra, it’s okay. Take it easy. I’ll talk to you later, all right?”
She said, “Sure, thanks,” and hung up.
Another time, another talk; just the other day, in fact:
“I’m so worried about that woman who said she saw something or heard something,” Sandra said. It was the first time she’d mentioned the possible witness to me.
“Is there something new with her?”
“This detective I talk to every couple of weeks said she thought some reporter had gotten her address and was going to start bothering her.”
“I don’t know who that could possibly be, Sandra.”
“Well, the witness apparently learned from the manager of her complex that this woman showed up one day, very well dressed and all that, and asked where the witness lived. Without referring to my sister, of course. I guess the witness lived . . . used to live . . . across from my sister but she moved, she got scared and moved somewhere else after . . . you know. After. The manager said she couldn’t tell her, but didn’t think fast enough just to lie and say the witness wasn’t there at all. So the reporter, if that’s who she was, knows where this poor woman is. I’m worried about her. I don’t want anything to happen to her. If that animal who did this knows . . .”
“Sandra, Sandra. First of all, there is no way that that person, if she was a reporter, is going to put her name on the air or in the paper, or even on the damn Internet. We don’t do that, believe me -- even the most irresponsible people in the business don’t pull stunts like that. And maybe this woman wasn’t a reporter. Maybe she was just a friend of Diane’s or Carolyn’s.”
“Investigating the case herself? I don’t think so.”
“Okay, Sandra, but even if you’re right, I don’t think you should dwell on it. You have enough to worry about. This possible witness is shielded by the police. They’re protecting her. Nothing’s going to happen to her.”
Of course I didn’t tell Sandra what I thought…
Labor Day. The blistering heat was worse than usual for that holiday -- the oven’s on in Florida until November -- and I was depressed as I drove to a restaurant out west, off the Galaxy Road exit off I-95. I disliked holidays in Florida, even the insignificant ones. They made me feel disconnected, without a foundation in the world. A common feeling among those who escape from somewhere else to live under the sweltering sun, the non-sheltering sky, but on holidays it became more intense, and hard to shake off.
I hadn’t been to the restaurant in a while, and had to watch the numbers. Focusing on the numbers made me focus on Galaxy Road. Focusing on Galaxy Road made me recall something I’d been told earlier by Detective Carpenter: the possible witness lived in a development off Galaxy.
But what was the name of the development? Was I anywhere near it? Still searching for the restaurant, I remembered the word “running” was in the name. How many developments fit that description, on Galaxy Road? A moment later I spotted the restaurant’s green roof and glass front. On impulse I drove by it. And now it seems almost inevitable, in the nature of things, that the next location I should see, set back slightly from the road, was “Running Fox Estates.” A development with a white gate and no security guard.
I remembered the potential witness’s name very well: Julie McAndrews. I’d gotten it from a neighbor of the Madigans. I ran it by Detective Carpenter, who lifted an eyebrow and declined to comment. “We have to protect this woman,” he said.
And so I drove into Running Fox Estates, found the management office, told the bubbly young woman who greeted me that I was looking for an apartment. She offered a tour of the grounds in one of those clunky carts those places use, but I declined. I did look at one model unit, pretended to like it, asked how much, when could I move in, where were the tennis courts, what kind of deposit was required? And I said casually during this charade that I thought I knew a woman who lived there, a Julie McAndrews. The bubbly, probably not too bright, sales person and greeter flinched when I mentioned the name, but then said yes, such a person did live there.
I said fine, and soon bid goodbye to Ms. Bubbly.
I figured she might never have been clued in by her bosses to McAndrews’ identity. Or she’d considered me harmless enough to confirm the presence of “my friend.”But what if Ms. Bubbly later mentioned in passing to McAndrews that a friend of hers had been looking for her? What then?
Until my conversation with Sandra Madigan, I’d almost forgotten about this episode. And until I talked to Sandra I’d underestimated the depth of McAndrews’ fear. I felt renewed guilt at my Labor Day foray into the refuge of a justifiably frightened woman.
What could I do? If I had to do it over again, I would not have inadvertently emulated the television woman -- for that’s surely who the inquiring reporter had to have been. Only a TV person would be that clumsy in asking about McAndrews, and freaking her out.
The media has a collective obligation to think about the consequences of its actions. Individually, I had not. I already felt I owed Sandra something -- my professional commitment to do useful work in examining the tragic murders; and a consistent effort at compassion that was not bogus and self-serving. A real empathy.
Now I felt I owed her even more.