Star Witness

by D. W. Buffa

  “No,” I replied. “Don’t you?”

  There was a dead silence at the other end. At any moment I expected to hear him hang up. It was the only reason I did not do it first.

  “My apologies, Mr. Antonelli,” he said presently in a clear, firm voice that was all business. “My name is Stanley Roth. My wife—perhaps you’ve heard of her— was Mary Margaret Flanders, the actress.”

  Turning on the lamp, I swung my legs around and sat on the edge of the bed. “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Roth. It’s late, and I didn’t realize... ”

  “Mr. Antonelli, I wonder if you might come to Los Angeles tomorrow. There’s a matter I’d like to discuss with you. I know it’s rather short notice, but it’s really quite important. I’ll send my plane up. My office will make all the arrangements.”

  He was used to having his way, and I think it never occurred to him that I might say no.

  “What is it you want to see me about, Mr. Roth?”

  “I’d really rather discuss it in person,” he replied as if that should be the end of it.

  And it almost was. I discovered that I was not as immune to the attraction of celebrity as I had thought. With a conscious effort I resisted the temptation to agree immediately to what he asked.

  “I’d be very glad to see you, Mr. Roth,” I said, taking refuge in formality, “but I can’t possibly come there tomorrow.”

  Again he fell silent, but this time I did not expect him to hang up. He was thinking about what he was going to do next. When he finally spoke, there was a sense, not of panic exactly, but of concern, in his voice.

  “What if I come there? Is there someplace we could meet privately? If I come to your office, someone is going to find out, and right now, I can’t afford... ”

  He was talking faster, beginning to ramble, and, I thought, about to lose control.

  “Are you in some kind of trouble, Mr. Roth?” I interjected, trying to sound as calm as I could.

  The only response was a long, brooding silence. He had to be in trouble, serious trouble. Why else would he have called? No one, not even the supposedly enigmatic Stanley Roth, called a criminal defense attorney at midnight unless they were. How many times before had I been called in the middle of the night by people I did not know, people who could not wait until morning because they were afraid they might go crazy if they did not do something right away. I was still in my twenties, just out of law school, taking any case I could get, hoping I could make enough to cover the rent in the dreary two-room office in a nearly vacant Portland building, when those late-night calls started to come. Sometimes it was a drunk slurring his words from a pay phone in the jail; sometimes, as I began to acquire a reputation as a lawyer who almost never lost, the calls came from people accused of far more serious crimes. It was not long before I was the nighttime confidant of murderers, rapists, and thieves. Even after I could afford to take only the cases I wanted and had a number only a few people were supposed to know they still managed to call, desperate to talk, afraid to be alone with what they had done or what everyone was about to think they had done.

  Rich or poor, famous or completely unknown, it did not matter: There was one thing they all had to say. Perhaps it was simply hearing themselves say it out loud that made them feel better. In that respect, at least, Stanley Roth was just like everyone else.

  “I didn’t do it, Mr. Antonelli; I swear I didn’t.”

  They all said it, that simple, straightforward declaration of their innocence, but there was something about the way Stanley Roth said it that made me wonder whether the words had come to him unprompted, or whether he had recalled them from the memory of things he had seen, things he had heard, and perhaps even things he had written, in the movies he had made.

  I saw him again, standing at her grave, the last mourner left, husband and wife, director and star. And now I wondered, not what name he had called her, but whether in that last silent good-bye he had spoken any words about the way she had died or the reason she had been killed. All I knew was what everyone knew: The nude body of Mary Margaret Flanders had been found floating face down in the outdoor swimming pool, a single silk stocking stretched around her neck, apparently used to hold her fast while a knife blade slashed deep across her throat.

  “Have the police talked to you?” I asked, twisting the telephone cord between my fingers. “Or, rather, have you talked to the police?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Yesterday, the day before the funeral,” said Roth in a voice that now seemed tired. “They want to see me again. I think they’re going to arrest me. They think I murdered my wife. I need your help, Mr. Antonelli. I’ll pay you anything you ask.”

  I did not go to Los Angeles the next day. Stanley Roth was used to having people drop everything to do what he wanted. If I was going to represent him, I wanted him to know from the beginning that I would not take orders from him or anyone else. I wanted to establish a certain distance, an independence. I was the lawyer; he was the client: I decided what I was going to do and when I was going to do it.

  What a fool I was. I should have known that it would be impossible to treat Stanley Roth the same way I treated anyone else. I should have known that this was going to be a murder case unlike anything I had ever seen before or would ever see again. I should have known from the moment I got involved that it was going to change things, including things about myself, in ways I could not then have imagined. Because of Stanley Roth I was about to become not only the best-known lawyer but perhaps the least understood man in America. But then, how could I have known—how could anyone have known—when I boarded the private plane that would take me to Hollywood that before it was all over one of the most talked-about movies of all time would be a movie about me.

  Chapter Two

  FLASHING THROUGH THE BRIGHT MORNING sky, the plane sent by Stanley Roth passed along the California coast and then, above Los Angeles, began its descent. We landed at the Burbank airport and taxied past the blue-and- white stucco art-deco terminal. For a moment it made me feel that I was back in the l930s: I half expected to see Howard Hughes with his pencil-thin mustache, wearing goggles and a leather jacket, boosting himself out of the open cockpit of a two-seater biplane, back from a looping flight over the orange groves that once covered most of everything between here and the sand-covered Pacific beach. A few yards from where the plane came to a stop, a limousine was waiting. Holding his gray cap in his hand, the driver struck a languid pose next to the rear door. He looked like Howard Hughes, at least the mustache and the slick shiny black hair parted neatly high up on his scalp.

  While the driver took my bag, I stood on the tarmac, glancing at the pale empty sky. The air was still and it was already getting warm. The heat was different here, the sun glistening hot and dry on the skin with none of the steaming humid sweating that makes other, eastern places miserable in the summer. It lasted all year long, cloudless skies and the endless sun, as if nature and its harsh necessities had been banished by an act of imagination. Even the haze that hung across the horizon, a gritty gray during the day turned reddish orange at night, seemed less a reminder of the snarled long distance traffic than of the way everything was always becoming something else, taking off one identity and putting on another.

  At Blue Zephyr Pictures the guard waved the limousine through and the dark blue, gold-tipped front gate rolled shut behind us. The studio had the appearance of one of those military installations put up almost overnight during the Second World War and then never torn down because it was cheaper to maintain it than to build something more permanent in its place. Everywhere you looked there were odd-shaped hangarlike structures with round roofs and wire screen windows, flat-topped twostory barracks-style buildings, and enormous square-door garages, the kind that had once housed motor vehicles and munitions. We wound our way through a maze of almost uniform sameness, along a narrow two-lane road lined on both sides by palm trees taller than any of the buildings we passed. At the
end of the street we came out onto a circle. Stopping in front of a small, unpretentious bungalow, the driver told me this was where Stanley Roth had his office.

  We had passed the company headquarters, housed in one of the nondescript buildings on the way. Stanley Roth had most of his meetings there. It was where he did what he liked to call the company business. The bungalow was where he did what he called his real work, the work on the movies he still produced and directed. It had been built just for him, a perfect replica of the place he worked when he achieved his first success as a young director for the studio he later abandoned. It was the habit of superstition, the belief that you should never change anything once you had reached the point where each thing you did was as great, as successful, as what you had done before. Stanley Roth never let go of anything that had once brought him luck.

  The five-room bungalow was not just where Stanley Roth did his work; it was a museum of what he had already done. As soon as you stepped inside the door you knew this place was all about the movies and all about Stanley Roth. The walls were covered with posters, the kind that when he was a kid growing up in the Central Valley he used to make a few dollars putting up on telephone poles advertising the movies then playing at the only theater in town. I did not know if they still did that, and when I saw them, one for each movie he had made, framed in identical silver frames, I wondered if he had had them made especially so he could have something to remind him of how far he had come.

  The posters were only the beginning. The contract he had been given for his first job in the movies, assistant director on a picture I had never heard of and probably not more than a few people had ever seen, sat in a frame, one of a hundred different documents that chronicled with retrospective inevitability the steadily advancing career of Stanley Roth. There were letters written by famous people, including at least two Presidents, one of whom I had liked, acknowledging his importance; and photographs, hundreds of them, and all of them, as far as I could tell, related one way or the other to the movies he had made. In the room he used for his office, with a double set of French doors opening onto a private patio and a small pool, there were two photographs on the small bookshelf behind his desk. In the first, Mary Margaret Flanders stood next to him, beaming up at her husband, while he held aloft the Oscar he won that night for directing. In the second, with that same unforgettable smile, she stood by herself at the lectern, clutching to her bosom the Oscar for best actress she won two years later.

  Roth followed my eye.

  “I directed her in that picture.” He assumed the expression of someone who always thought about what he said. “I directed her in all her pictures, all the ones that were any good.”

  The room was dark and cool. Roth sat in the shadows behind his desk, his ankle crossed over his knee, his arms folded loosely across his chest. He seemed almost too tired, or too preoccupied, to lift his head. When he spoke, he managed to raise his eyes, but then, when he finished, his gaze would drift away. He was not inattentive; he listened quite carefully to everything I said. His eyes would narrow and he would bite down on the edge of his lower lip, the attitude of someone concentrating on what he thinks may be important.

  “I followed your advice, Mr. Antonelli. I told the police that I had already told them everything I knew, and that there was no point my telling them again.”

  He kept his eyes on me just long enough to measure my reaction, to see what effect this expression of confidence in my judgment had produced.

  “Do you still think they’re going to arrest you?” I asked. His eyes came back to me. He nodded his head.

  “Yeah. I’m almost sure of it.”

  “You told them everything you knew?” Before he could answer, I asked: “What exactly did you tell them?”

  We stared at each other, searching each other’s eyes, wondering how far we could trust one another, or whether we could trust each other at all.

  “There’s something I’ve been thinking about since the other night when we talked. You’re one of the most famous criminal lawyers in the country. You never lose, and... ”

  “That’s not true,” I interjected with a quick shake of my head. “I’ve lost.”

  Roth had no patience for what he thought false modesty. He cocked his head and gave me an incredulous look.

  “The murder of Jeremy Fullerton? The U.S. senator who wants to be President? The accused is a black kid no one in San Francisco wants to defend? The jury finds him guilty, and then you discover who the real killer is and you save an innocent man. You call that a loss? I call that a great movie.”

  A great movie? It seemed a strange way to characterize what had very nearly cost someone his life.

  “I’ve lost other cases, Mr. Roth; but that case was the first time a jury brought back a guilty verdict against a defendant I knew had not done a thing. You may not think that was a loss—maybe it would make a great movie—but if you knew how I really found out who killed Jeremy Fullerton you might not be quite so certain that things always work out the way they should.”

  A knowing smile darted across his mouth. He seemed to think I had proved his point.

  “Yes, exactly. Even when you lose, you somehow manage to win. That’s what I’ve been thinking about. If you’re my lawyer, won’t people start to believe I must be guilty because why otherwise would I need Joseph Antonelli?”

  Stanley Roth had spent his life convincing audiences that the way things looked was the way things were.

  “The only thing that counts, Mr. Roth, is what the prosecution can prove. It doesn’t matter what anyone believes.”

  “I meant before there is a trial, before I’m even charged.”

  A trace of impatience began to creep into his voice. “If I already have you, won’t people think I must have known I was in trouble, that I have something to hide?”

  He was still clinging to the hope that he might not be arrested after all; that the police might change their mind and look elsewhere for the killer. If he hired a criminal defense lawyer, would he not in effect be telling them that they were right in suspecting that he had something to hide?

  “Suppose we set aside for the moment the question about when—or even whether—I represent you. Let’s talk instead about what happened, that night, the night your wife was killed.”

  Roth put both feet on the floor and planted his elbows on the desk. A plaintive expression fell across his face.

  “I don’t know what happened that night.”

  “You were in the house ... when your wife was killed?” I asked tentatively. Roth had a sense for the subtle changes in the meaning of words. He also knew that the silence between them sometimes said more than the words themselves.

  “I was in the house; I don’t know that she was.”

  “She?”

  “My wife.”

  “Your wife?”

  “Yes, Mary Margaret,” he explained, wondering why he needed to.

  “You didn’t call her Marian?”

  “No, of course not.”

  He said it as if he had never known her by any other name than the one by which the world had known her. He must have known that her name was Marian, but from the slightly incredulous look he gave me I began to think that after years of calling her Mary Margaret he might have forgotten that it was not real.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know that she was? Why would you not know whether your wife was home?”

  “Mary Margaret had gone to a party. I’m in the middle of a picture—late nights, early mornings, very early mornings. I got in about eleven and went straight to bed. We were starting again at five and I had to be up at four. I was exhausted. If she came in, I didn’t hear her. When I got up, I got dressed and left.”

  He paused, moved back from the desk, and turned a little to the side. He was dressed in a light-colored pair of slacks and a faded tan sports jacket. The gray dress shirt he wore open at the collar revealed a few gray hairs curling from his chest. He had a deep tan, the kind tha
t in Southern California seems never to fade away. His eyes, bluish gray and not very large, moved slowly from one thing to the next, taking their time.

  “I was on the set when I first learned she was dead,” added Roth as he lowered his eyes. In a gesture that seemed oddly out of place, he spread his fingers and appeared to inspect his clean, close-cut nails. He had spoken of his wife’s death without emotion. I had assumed it was because of a decent impulse not to inflict upon someone still a stranger any of his own despair; now I was not sure what he felt, or if he felt anything at all.

  “Your wife was out. You went to bed. Early in the morning you got up, got dressed and left. Is that right?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

  He searched my eyes to find out what he had not made clear enough for me to understand.

  “You didn’t notice that your wife was not there when you got up, when you dressed, when you left?”

  He seemed almost relieved that it was so easy to explain.

  “When I was working, when I had to get up that early, I slept in a different room.”

  He read something else in my eyes, something I did not know was there.

  “I didn’t say we didn’t normally go to bed together. But I would sleep in the other room.”

  A slight smile hovered at the edge of his mouth, a brief advertisement of his own superiority, an admission that he knew everyone had wanted what he had. I started to ask another question, but he held up his hand and abruptly shook his head. He wanted to correct something he had just said.

  “We didn’t go to bed together very often.” A wry expression took hold of his mouth. He looked at me with sudden interest. “Do you know why? Because she was not all that attractive, and because she wasn’t all that sexy.”

  He paused, smiling to himself. “You have a hard time believing that, don’t you? You thought you knew her, Mary Margaret Flanders; you thought she was everything you’d ever want, didn’t you?”

  I started to protest, but he again cut me off.

  “A lot of people who come to see me pretend they’re not affected by what they see on the screen; that they’re too smart, too sophisticated to fantasize about someone they saw in a movie. But you did, didn’t you? I saw it in your eyes. That’s when I decided you might be someone I could trust.”