Star Witness

by D. W. Buffa

  Roth glanced slowly around the room until his eyes came to rest on the Oscar that sat in the middle of an otherwise vacant bookshelf.

  “You don’t have to be very smart to do well in this business. I’m not saying you can be completely stupid, but it doesn’t take what I would call serious talent. But one thing you have to have is an eye, the ability to see how someone will look on the screen. Or the way they can be made to look on the screen. I invented Mary Margaret Flanders. She was my best work. She was... ”

  He stopped, as if he had realized that he might be going too far.

  “All I’m trying to say is that in person, without all the makeup, without all the clothes, without all the lighting, without the camera ... That was it, the camera. I don’t mean how she looked on camera, I mean the camera.”

  He hesitated, trying to think of exactly the right words to explain it.

  “It’s the way someone reacts to a camera. Most people—most actors—become self-conscious. I don’t mean they shy away from it. It’s the other way around: They become too aware of themselves. They think about the way they’re going to look, and then they try to look a certain way. With her it was different. That’s what I could tell about her, the first time I saw her. When she was on camera, everything came alive—and it was all instinct... . It was like watching a woman who has just fallen in love: the glow, the uncanny sense of precisely the right way to move, the perfect intuitive grasp of what the man she’s in love with wants to see next—before he knows it himself. That’s what she was: a young woman in love, but not with a man—with a camera: any camera, not just a motion picture camera. You’ve seen photographs of her. You couldn’t take your eyes off her, could you? That’s what she lived for: to be on camera, to be on film, to have other people watch her. You should have seen her, watching one of her own movies. She couldn’t take her eyes off herself. She would sit there, in the dark, delighted, her mouth forming each of the words she was saying on screen, as if she was hearing them for the very first time.”

  Roth rolled his head from one side to the other and stared into space. A laugh, bitter and self-deprecating, escaped his lips.

  “Sometimes I thought the reason she had so little interest in making love was because there wasn’t a camera in the room. You know the story of Narcissus: He saw his own reflection in the pool and died because he could not stop looking at himself. Mary Margaret could have passed a mirror a thousand times and never given it more than a passing glance. She did not want to look at herself alone, she wanted everyone else to be looking at her. That’s when she felt really alive, when she was up there on that screen, with all those other people huddled together in the dark, watching her.”

  Roth had become his own audience, listening to what he said like someone hearing for the first time things he had thought about but never put into words. In the silence that followed, he seemed to be thinking about what he had just heard, trying to decide how close it really came to what he knew about the woman who had, in his own mind at least, been the creature of his own invention.

  “The marriage was ... convenient,” he said, looking up at me. It seemed deliberately ambiguous. Then he added, rather too quickly, I thought: “Don’t misunderstand. I loved her, I really did; but it wasn’t always easy.”

  I had the feeling he wanted to tell me more, but there would be plenty of time later to talk about his relationship with his wife; right now I needed to know more about what happened the night she died, and why he seemed so certain the police thought he had killed her.

  “Who found the body? Who was at the house?”

  “The maid. She found her—in the swimming pool.”

  “And the maid was there that night?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she didn’t hear anything, see anything?”

  “No. Her room is just behind the kitchen, at the opposite end of the house. She goes to bed early. She doesn’t speak that much English. I talk to her in Spanish. I asked her if she had heard Mary Margaret come in. She said she had not. I assume she told the police the same thing.”

  Though it would have been hard to imagine them living in anything else, I knew from the television coverage of her death that their house was one of those Beverly Hills mansions, hidden behind iron gates and tropical foliage, the only approach a long driveway curving up through a lawn tended with the same meticulous care lavished on the greens of country clubs that cater to the very rich. The house even had a name of its own, The Palms, given to it by its first owner, a star of the silent screen. For all those who believed in that shadowy, legendary epoch known as the Golden Age of Hollywood, it sounded much more romantic to hear that Stanley Roth had purchased The Palms as a wedding present for his wife, than that he had simply bought her a house.

  “I assume you had a fairly elaborate security system?”

  I wanted to learn everything I could about how an outsider might have gotten in.

  “No one broke in,” said Roth, watching me closely, measuring my reaction. “There are sensors all around the perimeter. If anyone comes across the wall, if anyone climbs over the gate, a silent alarm is set off at the security office and someone is there within two minutes. Surveillance cameras are activated and everything is captured on film. Nothing happened that night. There was no alarm; the cameras never went on.”

  I looked at him sitting behind his desk in the cool darkness of the room where he did the work that had made him famous and where he decided who the movie going public would fall in love with next, and wondered if he had thought about his own situation with the same kind of detachment with which he must have gone through every script change in every film he had ever made. There were only two possibilities left and he must have known what they were.

  “Everyone at the party said Mary Margaret left alone,” remarked Roth. He held his hand in front of his mouth and with the tip of his little finger scratched his chin. A world-weary smile, the kind a gambler gets when knows he has just lost everything, passed over his mouth.

  “The police seem convinced there were only three people in the house when she was killed: Mary Margaret, the maid, and me. I can tell you something else,” he added, leaning forward, the smile a little larger. “No one thinks the maid did it.”

  It was not quite airtight; there was still a way a fourth person could have been there.

  “Do the cameras operate whenever someone drives through the gate?”

  The smile on Roth’s face became intense.

  “No, and that’s how it happened; that’s how it had to have happened. She may have left the party alone, but she brought someone here. The gate works on a combination. You enter the code, the system is deactivated, and the gate opens. The system is activated again when the garage door is closed. She brought someone home and whoever she brought home killed her.”

  “Did she ... ?” I began tentatively.

  “Did she often bring people home, late at night? I don’t know the answer to that. Did she sleep with other men? I’m sure she did; but I couldn’t say with any certainty who they were or when it happened. I imagine it happened every time she was away on location. It excited her to know that people wanted her.”

  The soft morning breeze rustled through the palm trees stretching high above the street outside. The light softened to a pale yellow as the shadows began to draw back across the thick green lawn. The scent of orange blossoms drifted through the room.

  “No one broke in. There were no signs of a struggle. I’m the only suspect, because I’m the only one they know was there.”

  He hesitated, as if he was struggling with himself, before he added: “I suppose there is something else you should know. I got into an argument with her—a bad argument—once. I lost my temper. I did more than that,” said Roth, looking at me from under his lowered brow. “I hit her, I hit her hard. The truth of it is, I damn near killed her.”

  He raised his head and looked straight at me, as if he wanted to show me he would not back down from what he wa
s about to say.

  “I should have killed her for what she did. There were times after that I wished I had. But I didn’t. I swear I didn’t.”

  Chapter Three

  STANLEY ROTH SHOVED HIMSELF BACK from the desk and got to his feet. There was a trace of belligerence in his eyes, as if he expected me to say that there could not be a reason ever to strike a woman. He looked down at the floor, shook his head, and then moved to the open sliding glass door. Leaning his shoulder against the wall, he stared through the screen door which, like the frames on a roll of film, divided the visible world into a series of small, discrete images, each almost identical with the next. Somewhere not far away a lawn mower started up; and then, from a different direction, the fizzing, pulsating sound of a sprinkler shooting water, one burst after another, as it moved back and forth through a half circle arc.

  “I’m fifty-three years old. I’ve been married twice. The first time was a long time ago. I was just a kid. I’m fifty-three years old,” he repeated as if, more than a measure of his own mortality, it was the mark of Cain. “Fifty-three years old, and I never had a child. I wanted one. We talked about it. We talked about it before we got married. That’s the reason—one of the reasons—I did it: I wanted a child, and I thought she wanted one, too.”

  He fell into a thoughtful silence. The room was filled with the rapid, clicking sound of the sprinklers and the whirring noise of the lawn mower.

  “The first I know she’s pregnant,” he said presently, “is when I find out she’s had an abortion. She did not tell me; we never discussed it. I saw the bill from the hospital. That’s how I knew: a bill from the hospital!”

  His arms were folded over his chest; his mouth was a portrait in cynicism.

  “You know what she said? That we could adopt. Adopt! A child to her was nothing more than a stage prop. It didn’t matter to her where it came from, who it belonged to. It didn’t matter to her who made it. It mattered to me, damn it! She had an abortion, and she’s telling me we can adopt! She didn’t want to be pregnant. That’s what it came down to. She didn’t want to be pregnant because she thought it would hurt her career. Her career!” he muttered with unconcealed contempt. “She should have been worried about her career.”

  Roth looked at me sharply, making certain, so I thought, that I was paying close attention to what he was about to say next.

  “It was not even what she had done, or even what she said; it was the attitude, the ‘Screw you, I’ll do whatever the hell I feel like’ attitude that did it. I don’t know what happened. I know people say that, but it’s true. I didn’t think about it; it just happened. I hit her, I hit her hard. It surprised me how hard I hit her. I caught her on the side of the face. I think she must have seen it coming. She must have been moving backward; otherwise I think I would have really hurt her, maybe broken something. She ended up with a black eye, but nothing worse. I didn’t mean to do it, but after I had done it, I didn’t care. No, that’s not true: I was glad I had done it. It was something real, something honest.”

  The telephone rang and with two quick steps Roth was at his desk to get it. Roth held the receiver to his ear and did not speak a word, not even hello.

  While Roth listened intently, I thought about what he had just told me. He did not have to tell me that he had hit his wife or the reason why he had done it, and he certainly did not have to tell me that he had not had any regrets about doing it. Did he want me to know that if I became his lawyer he would not hold anything back? Or did he just want me to believe that he would tell me the truth? The distinction made all the difference in the world.

  Roth’s expression began to change. He started to tense. He glanced at me for an instant, then looked away.

  “All right,” said Roth finally, “let them through. But send them to the main building,” he added, “not here. When they get there tell them I’m on the set and that you’ve already called. I’ll be over in ten minutes.”

  His hand still on the telephone, he stared down at the desk, collecting himself. When he looked up there was a question in his eyes.

  “The police are here. They have a warrant for my arrest. We have a few minutes. I need to know if you’ll take my case.”

  I wonder if I would have made a different decision if I had known then what I know now. Another lawyer would have defended Stanley Roth, and the things that happened to me might have happened to him. And what happened to Stanley Roth ... Well, I’m not sure anything could have changed that.

  It is shameful to admit it, but the decision to represent Stanley Roth had already been made. It had been made the night he called. Perhaps in some strange sense it had been made a long time even before that, when I first saw Mary Margaret Flanders on the screen and when I first began to recognize Stanley Roth’s name. Stanley Roth was a celebrity, and celebrity had become the most important thing in America, more important than wealth, more important than politics, sometimes more important than life itself. I wanted to know what it was like to be someone like Stanley Roth, and I wanted to know how Marian Walsh had become what she was, or, rather, how she had become what she seemed, and how, because of that, she had in a strange way even managed to avoid her own death. Marian Walsh might lay buried at Forest Lawn, but Mary Margaret Flanders was still moving, dancing, speaking, laughing, crying, making love, over and over again, from now until eternity, as long as anyone still cared to watch her films and there was still film to watch.

  I knew what my answer was going to be, what it had to be, but I was not quite ready to tell Stanley Roth.

  “When you do a picture, you insist on complete control. When I defend someone, I decide what we’re going to do and when we’re going to do it.”

  “Do whatever you have to do. That’s all right. So long as you understand: If they want to accuse me of murdering my wife, they’re damn well going to have to prove it,” he said, thrusting his head forward to emphasize his point. “I’m not pleading to anything; I’m not going to take some deal because it’ll be better for me than if I’m convicted.”

  I nodded my agreement and Roth picked up the phone. He spoke in a quiet, unhurried voice, a voice that, at least on this line with whomever was on the other end, was used to communicating in fragmentary phrases and half-finished sentences.

  “Antonelli is in. Whatever he wants, anything he asks. Files, records.” He paused, his face twisted up tight as he tried to think. “Make a list: Mary Margaret, friends, others. Anyone he should know something about.” He paused again, but could think of nothing he wanted to add. “We’re leaving now.”

  Despite his agreement that I was in charge, as soon as we left the bungalow and started walking toward the main building, he began to issue orders. They were couched in the form of suggestions, but made in the tone of someone used to having the final word.

  “There are some people you might want to talk to. Start with Louis Griffin,” said Roth, referring to one of his two partners in Blue Zephyr. “Next to me he knows more about this business than anyone; and he knows everything about this town. Anything you need to know about Mary Margaret, Louis can find out.”

  “There is a third partner, isn’t there?” I asked as we walked at a brisk pace down the sidewalk.

  Roth stopped and took hold of my arm. “Michael Wirthlin.” Roth’s eyes bored into mine. “Even if he could help, he wouldn’t. He wants to run the whole thing himself.”

  He let go of my arm and I started to turn away, ready to resume the short walk to the main building. He caught hold of me before I could take the first step.

  “He could not run this studio by himself for a week. He doesn’t know anything more about this business than you do. And if you spent three weeks with me,” he went on, nodding approval of his own conclusion, “I could teach you more about running a studio than he could learn in a lifetime.”

  Roth gazed beyond the row of palm trees lining the long, circling drive, to the large hangarlike buildings clustered close together below. The sound of the pow
er mower came closer behind us and then, as it made its turn at the end of the lawn, gradually faded away. High above, a tiny silver speck slid across the sky, leaving behind a thin white trail dissolving into nothingness as the jet fell farther and farther away.

  “Michael was brought in because he has a certain genius for money and how to raise it. But that’s all he is- a money guy,” said Roth as his eyes came slowly back to mine. He looked at me, making sure I understood; then he put his hand on my elbow and we again started to walk.

  “All the money guys think they’re really more than that,” he explained with a caustic laugh. “There’re two kinds of people with money in this town: people who made it because of something they did in the business, and people who either made it doing something else or had it to start with. The ones who made it in the business understand the difference between what they do and what they get paid for doing it; the others don’t think there is a difference. Money is the only measure that counts. If you have more of it than someone else, that means you must be smarter. You have any idea how many people come out here—people with money—and try to buy their way in? They all want to be part of Hollywood. They like movies so they think they know how to make them. That’s the strange part,” said Roth, shaking his head. “How many people who like the symphony think they know how to conduct?”

  We had reached the corner. On the other side of the street was a parking lot filled with automobiles, most of them Mercedes or Jaguars, Bentleys or Rollses. Just beyond was the office building where the police were waiting to take Stanley Roth into custody.

  “You didn’t believe me back there, did you?” asked Roth. He stopped, his foot on the curb, peering at me, certain he was right. “You didn’t believe me when I told you I didn’t kill Mary Margaret.”