Star Witness

by D. W. Buffa

  It was an article of faith, an instinctive judgment made by nearly every defendant, the first thing— sometimes the only thing—they thought about: the demand that their lawyer believe them, believe it so intensely, so passionately that they would put everything else aside and fight for the acquittal of an obviously innocent man.

  “That’s good. Why should you believe anything I say just because I say it? We don’t know each other. There’s no reason for you to trust me—not yet, anyway.”

  He started to step off the curb, hesitated, and then looked at me again, this time with an expression, not of fear exactly, but of intense interest.

  “What’s going to happen to me—after they arrest me?”

  “They’ll take you downtown, to the jail. They’ll take your fingerprints, your picture; then they’ll put you in a cell. You’ll have to stay in jail overnight. Tomorrow morning you’ll be taken to court. That’s when I’ll try to get you out on bail.”

  Roth eyed me cautiously. “Try to?”

  There was no point trying to hide the truth. “You might not get out at all,” I told him. “It’s murder; it’s a capital case. They don’t have to let you out on bail.”

  “I’ve been in jail before,” said Roth, his eyes steady.

  He saw my surprise, and it seemed to please him.

  “Couple times. On location,” he explained, the shadow of a smile flickering at the corners of his mouth. “A couple of weeks at Alcatraz in one picture; another time a month at the L.A. County Jail.”

  I felt like a fool saying it, but I said it anyway.

  “The difference is you don’t get to go home nights.”

  “You mean The Palms?” he remarked as we started toward the parking lot across the street. “I never much liked the place. Too much like a movie set,” he added without apparent irony. “That’s the reason Mary Margaret had to have it: The place was famous, part of ‘old Hollywood.’ It made her think that she had always been a part of it, that everything that had ever happened had happened because it was all leading up to her. She believed it, all of it, the whole Hollywood storybook dream.”

  We reached the main building, and a few minutes later, just outside his spacious studio office, we went through the ritual of surrendering to the police. I walked with him back outside the building to the police car and watched as they drove out the gate. I remembered seeing more than one movie that had ended with the suspect led away in handcuffs, driven off in a police car. Now that I thought about it, I thought about something else: My whole adult life I had been doing this kind of work and this was precisely where, instead of ending, the story always started.

  “Mr. Antonelli?”

  I turned around and found myself looking into the smart blue eyes of a young woman so striking that I immediately looked away, afraid that otherwise I would start to stare.

  “I’m Julie Evans, Stanley’s executive assistant. My car is just over here,” she said as she began moving toward the parking lot.

  She walked with her head held high, not a strand of the silky blonde hair that fell straight to her shoulders out of place. Dressed in a dark blue skirt and jacket and a soft white blouse, she moved with an easy assurance. She was used to being looked at, and she knew exactly what she was about.

  “Stanley asked me to make sure you had everything you needed,” said the confident Ms. Evans.

  She was talking to me the way I imagined she would have talked to someone Roth—or Stanley, as she seemed to make a point of calling him—had asked her to show around the studio. If she was disturbed that Roth had just been arrested for murder and taken to jail she did not show it. We got to her car, a four-door white Mercedes with tan leather interior. As she backed out from the parking spot, she dialed a number on her cell phone.

  “I’ll be gone most of the afternoon,” she said in a brisk voice, “but I’ll be checking messages.” She folded up the thin cell phone and put it back in her purse.

  “I thought we’d have lunch. Then I’ll check you into the hotel.”

  “How long have you worked for Stanley Roth?” I asked as she drove out the front gate of the studio.

  Whenever she spoke—even when, as now, she did not look at you—she raised her head and tilted it just slightly to the side.

  “Almost four years. I started as a script reader at the other studio; I’ve been his executive assistant since he started Blue Zephyr. How long have you been a lawyer?” asked Julie without a pause.

  In the presence of a beautiful woman vanity rushed forward like a coward running away. Instead of telling the truth, I exaggerated in the hope of making it seem a bigger lie than it really was.

  “About a hundred years,” I replied with a gruff laugh.

  “You’re in San Francisco now, but you used to be in Oregon—Portland—right?”

  She knew the answer before she asked the question. It was her way of letting me know that she knew all about me, that she had probably been the one who had first suggested my name to Stanley Roth.

  “Joseph Antonelli. Raised in Oregon, father a doctor. Undergraduate: University of Michigan; law school: Harvard. Criminal defense attorney: Portland until a year or so ago, now in San Francisco. Never married.”

  Her eyes fixed on the road ahead. Both hands were on the wheel, but two fingers of her right hand tapped on it constantly, stopping only when she had something to say.

  “Stanley says you’re the best there is.”

  For the first time, she glanced across at me. “What is that like—to be the best there is?”

  This time it had nothing to do with vanity; this time I told her the truth, the real truth.

  “After you’ve done something long enough, you acquire a certain reputation for it, and everyone thinks you’re better than you really are. You win cases, and that’s all anyone talks about—that you won; they don’t know how many mistakes you made, how many times you did something, said something, and immediately wished you had not. They don’t know how close you really came to losing. There’s something else they don’t know,” I said as I looked out the window, watching all the cars jammed together on the freeway.

  “What’s that? What else is it they don’t know?” I heard her ask.

  I turned my head and looked at her, all shiny and new, too young to have won anything yet on her own, and still certain she would never have to deal with defeat.

  “How often you win because the lawyer on the other side either isn’t very good, or isn’t willing to do what you have to do to win.”

  Her eyes brightened. A knowing smile flashed across her mouth.

  “Be as ruthless as you are?” she asked, certain she was right.

  It was not what I had meant at all.

  We had lunch in a small French restaurant where everyone from the young man who parked her car to the middle-aged waiter who served us called her Miss Evans. As soon as we had been shown to our table, she whipped out her cell phone and in a voice filled with soft efficiency asked if anyone from Louis Griffin’s office had called about this evening.

  “Seven o’clock. His place on Mulholland. Good. Who else?”

  She listened for a moment, leaning her shoulder against the sloping leather of the cylindrical booth, tapping her index finger on the white linen tablecloth, concentrating closely on what she was being told.

  “No, don’t send a driver. I’ll bring him with me.

  “You’re invited to dinner. Louis Griffin. He’s... ”

  “Yes, I know,” I interjected. “Stanley Roth told me I should see him.”

  “Stanley asked me to set up a meeting.”

  She lifted a glass of mineral water to her lips. “Louis is eager to talk to you,” she went on after she finished drinking. “He’s having a few people over tonight and was hoping you might come along.”

  “A few people?”

  She proceeded to recite from memory the list of names she had just been given. The list began with Michael Wirthlin, the other partner in Blue Zephyr. The one
Stanley Roth seemed to despise so much. It included an actor and an actress, both of them famous, it seemed, forever; each of them people about whom I had, like nearly everyone else, formed an opinion based on nothing but what I had seen on film and read in gossip columns. There were fourteen people, including the host and his wife. The dinner had been planned weeks before, and only because of the murder of Mary Margaret Flanders and the arrest of Stanley Roth had Julie Evans and I now been invited, in a manner of speaking, to take their places.

  “What can you tell me about them—Griffin and Wirthlin?” I asked after we ordered.

  “Stanley and Louis have known each other for years. Louis gave Stanley his first job as a director. They’ve both been in the business from the beginning. It’s all they’ve ever wanted to do—make movies. Michael comes from a family that made billions in just about every kind of business you can imagine. When he was thirty, his father bought him a studio. A few years later, Michael sold it to the Japanese for a lot more than was paid for it and bought a company that owned cable television networks. He made another fortune on that. Then he came in with Stanley and Louis on Blue Zephyr. Michael is smart, very smart—but he doesn’t know anything about making movies. Do you think he did it?” she asked, again without a pause. It was a technique which, whether or not she did it by design, managed each time to take me by surprise.

  “Do I think who did what?” I asked cautiously.

  The waiter brought the salad she had ordered and then began to serve me. She waited until he left before she explained.

  “Do you think Stanley killed his wife?” she asked with astonishing nonchalance as she bent over the plate and lifted her fork to her mouth.

  I watched her, wondering whether she had been asked by Stanley Roth to find out what I really thought about what he had told me, or whether she was asking on her own, hoping to become the one in whom I might confide things I would not tell even him.

  “What do you think? You know him much better than I do. Do you think Stanley Roth murdered his wife?”

  She put down her fork, lifted her head, tilted it slightly to the side and looked at me, a smile curling over her mouth.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I do.”

  Chapter Four

  THERE HAD BEEN NOT THE slightest hesitation, none of that deliberate troubled uncertainty by which people exhibit the reluctance they feel at saying what they have come to believe. Julie Evans had said she thought Stanley Roth had murdered his wife as if she had been asked a question about someone she had never met. I could not hide my surprise.

  “I didn’t say I thought he did it on purpose,” said Julie as she took a small bite of her salad. “I wouldn’t believe that at all. It wouldn’t have been something he planned to do. But lose control—do it without thinking—do it because he got so angry he didn’t know what he was doing until it was too late and she was already dead? Yes, I think that could have happened.”

  Laying down her fork, she placed both elbows on the table and laced her fingers together under her chin. Her blue eyes flared open; a rueful smile flashed across her mouth.

  “They fought a lot—about money, about the movies she was in, about the movies she wanted to be in—about other men... ” Her eyes moved past me, her smile becoming brittle, almost belligerent. Staring into the distance, she added, “About other women.” The smile faded away, and when she turned to me there was a wistful look in her eyes. “They fought all the time.”

  “Other women?” I asked, searching her eyes, almost certain that she had been talking about herself.

  “She thought so,” answered Julie. “It’s too bad she was wrong.”

  Why did I feel a slight twinge of disappointment? Was it was because the picture of Mary Margaret Flanders throwing an ashtray in a fit of jealous rage did not correspond to what I had thought she was like when I watched her making love to other men, imagining she was making love with me? Was it because Julie Evans, tangible and real, and not some cinematic creation that flickered in the shared solitude of a movie theater, was as much in love with Stanley Roth, and as little attracted to me, as had been his movie-star wife? I did not know. All I knew for sure was that the three of them—the actress, the director, the director’s assistant—lived separate and apart from people like me, people who could only watch and admire and even envy a little what they did.

  After lunch, Julie drove me to the hotel where someone at Blue Zephyr had decided I should stay. I would wonder later if it had been deliberate, or like so many other things that happened in Hollywood, the kind of chance decision that eventually took on a meaning all its own. From the beginning, the Chateau Marmont had been a place where what people believed was the only reality that mattered. Out on a lonely stretch of Sunset Boulevard, where just a few small houses were scattered in the hills among the sagebrush and tumbleweed; out in the empty space between Los Angeles and Beverly Hills; out so far in the middle of nowhere that when it first opened the telephone operator told anyone who called that it was fifteen minutes from everywhere; a Los Angeles attorney who had fallen in love with a medieval castle on the banks of the Loire designed an apartment building meant to look like a French château. Seen from a distance it had looked a little like the false front of a movie set.

  The apartments were too expensive and almost before it opened it became a hotel. The legends started at once. Everyone believed that Rudolph Valentino had been one of the very first guests, though when it opened in l929 he had been dead for more than two years. Clark Gable supposedly proposed to Carole Lombard in the penthouse, though it turns out he never lived there. Lauren Bacall denied it, but before she married Humphrey Bogart they were said to have frequently stayed there together. Joanne Woodward claimed it was “pure Hollywood legend,” but according to the legend, it was the place where Paul Newman asked her to marry him. Lucille Ball threw a valise filled with money at Desi Arnaz from the balcony of their suite at the Chateau Marmont as he walked away below. She missed him, the valise hit the pavement, and money flew all over the lawn. It was not the kind of thing anyone would ever likely forget, but no one was ever found who remembered seeing it. Bill Tilden was supposed to have been the tennis pro at the hotel, though the Marmont never had one. Proving the ultimate fiction of what everyone took for the truth, there was for a time a story that the Marmont was secretly owned by none other than Greta Garbo herself.

  Julie glanced around the suite making certain everything was the way it was supposed to be. Then she pulled out a small leather-covered notebook and asked me what I needed.

  I gestured toward one of the two silk damask sofas that faced each other in front of a marble fireplace. She sat at an angle on the edge of the sofa, her long sleek legs pressed together, her skirt just above her knees.

  “It’s been two hours since Roth was picked up. It won’t be long before everyone knows he’s been arrested. The calls are going to start coming in. Who is going to handle this at the studio?”

  She had been looking at me with the efficient gaze of someone never caught short, someone always one step ahead, but she had not thought of this. Her lips parted and then closed, as she tried to come up with an answer.

  “I want everything to go through you,” I said as I got to my feet.

  She started to object. “We have a whole publicity department.” She thought of something else. “What about Louis Griffin? What about Michael Wirthlin? They’ll insist any statement on behalf of Blue Zephyr is cleared by them first.”

  “Stanley Roth is head of Blue Zephyr, right?” I asked, looking down at her.

  “Yes, but... ”

  “He speaks for Blue Zephyr, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes, but... ”

  “Well, I represent Stanley Roth, and I speak for him. So here is what we’re going to do,” I said as I walked toward the desk on the other side of the room. I opened my briefcase, took out a legal pad, and sat down. “We’re going to draft a press release for Blue Zephyr Pictures and we—I mean you—are going to
call a press conference at the studio for four o’clock this afternoon.”

  We wrote a simple, straightforward release in which the studio announced that Stanley Roth had voluntarily turned himself into the Los Angeles police department; that he was being charged with the murder of his wife, the actress Mary Margaret Flanders; that he declared categorically that he was innocent of those charges; and that he had no doubt whatsoever that after a trial by jury he would be exonerated completely. The last sentence read:

  “Everyone at Blue Zephyr, everyone who knows Stanley Roth, knows he could not possibly have been responsible for the murder of Mary Margaret Flanders, the woman he loved, the woman whose death has left him devastated.”

  Julie cocked her head and raised an eyebrow.

  “Everyone,” I repeated. We spent a few more minutes going over it, changing a word, adding a phrase, until we were both satisfied.

  “Can you call it in, have someone at the studio put it out? Along with the announcement of the press conference?”

  While she was on the phone, I went into the bathroom and put on a fresh shirt and a new tie. I threw some water on my face and tried to convince myself that I had agreed to defend Stanley Roth because I thought he might actually be innocent and not because, like some star struck teenager, I wanted to be close to the famous people who made movies. The tie, a blue-and-gold regimental stripe, did not work: the line where the two colors met would look like a blur on television. I took it off and put on a solid, dark blue.

  “I should have gotten a haircut,” I remarked, irritated with myself, as we left the hotel.

  I was still complaining about the way I looked when the car was brought round. Julie adjusted the rearview mirror. She ran her fingertip quickly over the lashes of her left eye, then briefly touched her chin. “Damn,” she muttered softly. Reaching inside her purse, she found her lipstick. “There,” she said, satisfied for the moment with the way she looked. She replaced the cap on the lipstick and put it away.

  “You look fine,” she added as she merged with the traffic on Sunset Boulevard. A faint, teasing smile edged its way onto her mouth. “Would you like to have someone come over from makeup before the press conference?”