Star Witness

by D. W. Buffa

  She pointed up the narrow road toward the bungalow where Stanley Roth did his work.

  “They’re all there—screening the movie: Stanley, Wirthlin, Griffin, Bill Pomeroy.”

  I pulled up in front and turned off the ignition.

  “That’s the reason I was trying to reach you. Stanley wanted you here.”

  “To see her last movie?”

  “He wants to know what you think—and he wants the others to hear it from you, too—about when it should be released.”

  “I thought they had already decided to release it right away, week after next.”

  Her response was to lift her eyebrows, flash a quick, doubtful smile and open the car door.

  “Why does his father-in-law hate him so much?” I asked as we walked up the sidewalk toward the tile-roofed bungalow.

  She turned to me, puzzled; then, when she understood, she laughed quietly.

  “I don’t think Stanley ever thought of Jack Walsh as his father-in-law. Why would he? Mary Margaret didn’t think of him as her father. As far as I know,” she added with a shrug, “she seldom thought of him at all.”

  She had not answered my question; or perhaps she had and I did not yet understand it. I asked again: “Why does Jack Walsh hate Stanley Roth?”

  Julie gave me a strange, mischievous glance. “You mean other than the fact that he thinks Stanley murdered his daughter?”

  The glance intensified. For a moment I had the feeling she was not going to say anything more.

  “I don’t know that Jack Walsh hates Stanley at all; I don’t know that he isn’t really a little grateful to him,” she said finally. “Thanks to Stanley, he’s becoming famous; and if you’re famous, you must be important— isn’t that right?”

  In the bungalow, off the hallway that led to Stanley Roth’s study, was a small projection room with eight thick padded theater chairs separated by a narrow aisleway into two rows of two seats on each side. The movie had just ended, the only thing on the blank white screen the shadow of cigar smoke curling through the air.

  “It’s her best movie,” said Louis Griffin thoughtfully as the lights came on. He was sitting alone on the right side of the front row, a melancholy look in his eyes as he considered the talent that had been lost.

  “It damn well better be,” said a cold, caustic voice from somewhere in the back. It was Michael Wirthlin, hunched down in the seat, growling at the thought of how far over budget the picture had run. “We lost money on her last two pictures. We better make it up on this one.”

  Rising from his place on the aisle, Stanley Roth shook his head in disgust. He was about to reply to Wirthlin when he saw me standing in the doorway next to Julie.

  “Come in,” he said, approaching me with his hand extended. “You know everyone, don’t you?”

  Besides his two partners and William Pomeroy, Walker Bradley, whom I had met at Griffin’s home, had come to watch the movie in which for the last time he co-starred with Mary Margaret Flanders

  “Sit down. You’re just in time,” said Roth as I took a chair across the aisle from where he had been sitting. His arms folded in front of him, Roth crossed one tassled loafer over the other and began to explain what they were trying to decide.

  “Mary Margaret’s last movie is ready to go,” said Roth, glancing toward Wirthlin so he could confirm it. “We need to be candid about this,” he added, looking at everyone in turn. “If we release it now, as scheduled, Mary Margaret is the story; if we wait until after the trial starts, then I’m the story and there might not be as much interest in the movie. From a strictly business point of view, there doesn’t seem to me to be anything left to decide.”

  Louis Griffin, always attentive, always composed, sat forward.

  “Yes, Stanley, we all agree on that: We all agree what should be done from a purely business point of view. But this can’t be just another business decision. This is a good deal more than that. Which of course is the reason we wanted you to join us, Mr. Antonelli,” said Griffin as he turned to me with a gracious smile.

  “If we put this out now, what effect might it have on the trial? What does it do to Stanley’s chances?”

  I had often been asked how something might affect the outcome of a trial, but never anything quite like this. The honest answer was I did not have the slightest idea. Before I could confess my ignorance, Wirthlin did it for me.

  “Nobody can answer that,” he insisted with considerable irritation. “We shouldn’t even try to answer that; we have to make the best business decision we can. We don’t have any choice. We’re the officers of the company—that’s our obligation; not how it might or might not affect something else. Stanley agrees with that,” added Wirthlin, directing his remarks to Griffin.

  “He said so at the beginning. We all agreed after Mary Margaret died that the quicker we got this into theaters, the better. And now, at the last minute, you want to talk about pulling it, waiting until the trial’s over, whenever that might be?”

  Visibly agitated, Griffin asked sharply: “What kind of business decision leaves out the long-term best interest of the studio? What do you think would happen to Blue Zephyr if—God forbid!—Stanley was to be convicted? And let’s get something else straight. This was never just another business decision. We rushed everything through to a conclusion, we pulled people off of other projects, because we knew the public was going to be begging for a Mary Margaret Flanders movie after Mary Margaret had the great misfortune to get herself murdered. So don’t tell me about our obligations as officers of this company! I’ve been doing this a lot longer than you, and Stanley has been doing it a lot better than either you or I ever could.”

  With a wrathful glance, Michael Wirthlin retreated into a sullen silence, waiting, as everyone turned to me, to see what I was going to say. When I admitted that I did not know, a brief, taunting look of triumph entered Wirthlin’s small, calculating eyes.

  “Then we go ahead, just the way we decided before,” said Roth with an air of finality. He glanced across at a worried Louis Griffin. “It’s all right, Louis. If Joseph thought it was any threat to my chances, he would have said so. Everything is going to be just fine. You’ll see.”

  Nodding in agreement, Walker Bradley pulled himself out of his chair.

  “It’s a damn good picture,” he said with a look of encouragement. He put his hand on Stanley Roth’s shoulder and stared down at the floor. “Louis was right: It is the best thing she ever did.”

  “It may be the best thing you ever did, too, Walker,” said Bill Pomeroy.

  Rolling his head to the side until he caught his eye, Bradley gave the producer a searching look.

  “It could have been better,” said the actor in a way that suggested they both knew whose fault it was that it was not.

  Pomeroy ignored it, or tried to. He looked past Bradley to Roth.

  “It’s the best movie I ever made, Stanley. I won’t be surprised if both Mary Margaret and Walker are nominated.”

  “He says that about every picture he makes,” whispered Bradley in a jaded tone as he passed in front of me on his way out. I had the feeling he would have said the same thing to the cleaning lady if he had happened to pass her instead.

  Pomeroy, who seemed like a decent sort, began to talk to me about the movie, trying to assure me that releasing it before the trial could only help his good friend, Stanley Roth.

  “The character she plays is so likeable, so extraordinary— Mary Margaret is madly in love, and he’s madly in love with her; but she won’t marry him. Then he finds out the reason is because she’s dying and there is nothing anyone can do. She wants him to have a happy, normal life; she wants him to fall in love with someone else. He refuses. That’s the character Walker plays. He tells her that it doesn’t matter that one of them is dying; he wants them to be married forever. He doesn’t actually come out and say he believes in heaven or the hereafter or eternal life—nothing that specifically religious—but it has that spiritual angle, you
see. After people see it, they’re going to think that the last person in the world who would ever hurt her, for God’s sake, is the man who was lucky enough to marry her.”

  What would have been dismissed as the logic of a lunatic was, in the mouth of a Hollywood producer, almost persuasive.

  While Pomeroy explained without self-conscious irony the way a fiction would provide the perspective from which we viewed the facts of someone’s murder, Louis Griffin took Stanley Roth aside and spoke to him privately. Whatever they were talking about, Michael Wirthlin did not want to be left out. With barely controlled fury, he pushed his way between the two of them and began gesturing wildly as they all started to shout. Pomeroy stopped in midsentence and looked back over his shoulder. Julie Evans, who had sunk into a chair in the back, stood up, straining to hear.

  “Not one damn dollar more!” yelled Wirthlin, redfaced and steaming, as he stalked out of the room. A moment later, the front door of the bungalow slammed shut behind him. Griffin exchanged a worried look with Roth, and then, shaking his head, told Pomeroy they had better go.

  “Michael isn’t always a very pleasant man,” said Griffin with an apologetic smile as he briefly shook my hand.

  Roth walked them to the front door. Through the venetian blinds I could see them standing outside, talking quietly among themselves, as I followed Julie down the short hallway to the study.

  “Want a drink?” asked Julie as she opened a cabinet on the other side of the room. She took a glass from a shelf and looked over her shoulder to see if I wanted to join her.

  “Scotch and soda.”

  “That’s what I’m having,” she remarked just as Roth entered the room. She waited to see if he wanted something as well, but he hurried right past her, too preoccupied to notice.

  Roth dropped into the wicker-backed chair at his desk. Immediately he started to tell me how he had been driven out of his house.

  “I had to move out. Have you seen that street in front of my house? It’s a campsite for tourists. Everybody in America wants to see where Mary Margaret Flanders was murdered,” said Roth, his mouth curled back into a contemptuous sneer. He waved his hand in front of his face. “Tourists, reporters—they go around asking people why they’re there. When I tried to get out, they surrounded the car, trying to get a better look. You should have seen those faces!” he exclaimed with a shudder. “They all think I did it. They looked at me like they wanted to kill me.”

  Julie brought me my drink and offered to Roth the one she had made for herself. He took it without a word and, as he continued his story, Julie went back to the small bar and made another one.

  “I moved in here day before yesterday. I have everything I need,” said Roth. “Julie brought me here. I had to hide in the trunk of the car.”

  Roth took a drink, and then, moving it around with his wrist, watched the ice rattle against the glass.

  “As long as I’m inside the gates, they—the media, all those goddamn gawking tourists—can’t get to me.”

  He raised his eyes and peered at me across the desk. With a pained expression he threw up his hands.

  “I don’t know if I’m going to live through all this. Mary Margaret—then they arrest me; and now I’m starting to feel the pressure here.”

  His eyes flashed with anger. He slammed his hand down on the desk. An ice cube flew out of the glass, slipped across the hard smooth surface and fell onto the floor.

  “Do you know what that was all about? What Wirthlin is so upset about? What my good friend Louis Griffin is so worried about? Whether we can hang onto Blue Zephyr.”

  A look of alarm swept over Julie’s face. “Stanley, I don’t think... ”

  With a quick, irritated glance, Roth let her know he was not about to be told what to say. Chastened, Julie pulled back.

  “We owe a lot of money, and a lot of what we owe is overdue. They won’t come right out and say it—Wirthlin because he’s a coward, and Louis because he’s my friend—but they both think it’s my fault, and maybe they’re right. We lost a fortune on Mary Margaret’s last two movies. The public doesn’t know that; only a couple of people inside the studio know it. Hollywood accounting is an art form all by itself.”

  I did not quite understand why Roth’s two partners would blame him for the financial failure of his wife’s last two pictures. Roth was quick to read my reaction, but more than that, he assumed that I did not know anything about the way his business worked. It was an assumption I think he was used to making about nearly everyone, including people who had spent as many years in the business as he had. Like other enormously successful men, Stanley Roth, whatever he might say in public, did not, underneath it all, believe that his achievement owed anything important to chance.

  “Mary Margaret got everything she asked for. If the picture had made money no one would have thought twice about it; but they lost money, and it doesn’t look good. Mary Margaret made millions—my wife made millions—and the studio I run lost millions. I didn’t negotiate those deals, by the way; Wirthlin did. It didn’t work out and he resents it. Who else does he have to blame? They’ll make it back with this picture,” said Roth, staring past me, a bitter look in his eyes. “Everyone is going to want to see the last picture of the woman everyone was in love with. Don’t you agree?” he asked, his eyes suddenly on me.

  A mocking expression played on his mouth as if I had in that moment been selected to represent all the mindless sentimentality of that great amorphous mass of moviegoers on whose maudlin taste Roth had built much of his career.

  “So long as they still think of her the way she was on the screen,” I replied, staring hard at him, “and don’t get too confused by reality.”

  The mocking expression faded from his lips. He looked at me a moment longer. For a second I thought there was something he wanted to say, something he wanted to ask; but then it was gone, replaced by the kind of cynicism that tries to pass itself off as irony.

  “We release the picture, then we have the trial. Exactly right. That’s what Wirthlin and Griffin both want; and I’m in no position to quarrel.”

  I took a drink of the scotch and soda, then put down the glass.

  “What can you tell me about your wife’s father, Jack Walsh? Why is he so damn certain you killed his daughter?”

  Roth’s head snapped back, as if he had just been hit with a jab. His eyes flashed with anger; his mouth pulled tight at the corners.

  “You don’t beat around the bush, do you? You know, I could get... ”

  “Another lawyer?” I asked, giving him back a little of what he had just given me. With both hands on the arms of the chair, I began to rise.

  “No, no; you know I don’t mean it. I’m a little on edge, that’s all,” said Roth, waving his hand for me to stay where I was. “You want to know about Jack Walsh? There have always been guys like Jack Walsh out here. There were guys like him in the gold rush, the ones who spent the rest of their lives talking about all the gold they almost found. They were here when I was a kid growing up in the valley: the quick-eyed speculators, the would-be investors in the latest sure thing.

  That’s what Jack Walsh is—always just on the verge of the deal that is going to make him rich. That was the real reason he left his wife— he needed a little more money. He already owed everyone he knew, so he took the money she kept hidden in a shoebox on the shelf of her closet, got into the car she drove every day to work, and left her and his five year- old daughter for good.

  “That’s what Jack Walsh is. He hadn’t seen his daughter for years; he never tried to see her until she was famous. Then he shows up, after all that time, and gives her some phony excuse about how her mother wanted the divorce. What he really wanted was money. He told her about some deal of his that hadn’t worked out and that he needed to pay off some of the people he owed. Her first mistake was to give him what he asked for, because of course he kept coming back for more. Finally, she had had enough. It wasn’t the money—what was that to her? She just
got sick of the sight of him, sick of remembering what he had done to her mother and what he had done to her. She cut him off, insisted she would never see him again. When I told him that he couldn’t come back again, he refused to believe it was her idea. He blamed me instead. Now she’s dead, and he goes around, the father of the victim, telling the world how wonderful she really was; how people would have loved her even more if they had known her the way he did. As if he knew her at all! You see what he’s doing? If I’m the one who murdered his daughter, instead of a husband who lost his wife, then he can play the one who lost the only one he loved. It’s one of the great hustles of all time.”

  Stanley Roth leaned back in his chair and gave me a strange look.

  “Jack Walsh had nothing—no talent, no money, nothing. And now, because his daughter’s dead, everyone is lining up to talk to him, ask him questions, hear what he has to say. The trial hasn’t started yet and he’s already got everyone convinced I murdered Mary Margaret. Who’s Jack Walsh? Right now he’s maybe the most powerful man in L.A.”

  Chapter Nine

  STANLEY ROTH STOOD ON THE front step of the bungalow as Julie Evans walked away down the narrow white sidewalk. High above, the palm trees whispered in the soft, insistent wind, blown from somewhere out on the Pacific, somewhere out beyond the far horizon, farther than the eye could see. Roth leaned his shoulder against the open doorway and followed her with his eyes, smiling to himself with the self-absorbed look of a man watching a woman who happened to catch his eye. It was Julie Evans, but it could have been anyone, anyone who was great-looking and knew it. That was essential—that she knew she was great-looking and that she knew everyone else knew it, too. It meant that she knew you were watching and that she wanted you to watch. It meant that for just that fleeting moment she had given you a kind of right in knowing who she was.