Star Witness

by D. W. Buffa

  “There was a time when we were very close, closer perhaps than I’ve ever been with anyone,” he remarked, holding his head high. He saw the question in my eyes, the question I had to ask but did not want to put into words.

  “No, nothing like that at all. I had just lost my daughter. She ... died. I was inconsolable; my wife was ... well, it was even harder for her. Everyone, of course, tried to be helpful, but it’s difficult to know what to do. There isn’t anything anyone can do. Except for Marian. She used to come every day. Sometimes she would just sit in a chair and not say anything—just be here, just in case I wanted someone to talk to. I called her Marian because, quite simply, that was her name, her real name, not the name of the movie star everyone went to see; the name of the young woman who had the decency to make me feel there was some reason to go on living. She became in a way a second daughter to me. She told me things about herself I don’t think she had ever told anyone before.”

  His eyes were filled with anguish and his voice heavy with sorrow when he added: “You can have no idea how much it hurt when she died, too.”

  Rubbing his hands together, he stared down at the floor, collecting himself.

  “She might have left Stanley one day, but it would not have been for Michael,” he said, lifting his eyes. “If she had left, it wouldn’t have been because she wanted out of the studio. She had everything she wanted, and she knew she always would—at least so long as I was there. The only way she would have left Blue Zephyr is if she had decided to get out of the business altogether.”

  He made it sound like something she had actually thought about doing. When I asked him, he gave me a strange look, as if the answer was more complicated than that.

  “Stanley made her a star, and she was grateful to him for that. But she also resented him for that. She was famous, she was idolized, she was what every young woman wants to be—and she resented him for that, resented him because she did not really want any of it, not after she had it. She thought she did, when she was growing up, when she was going to school, when she was trying to become an actress. But even then it wasn’t because she wanted it so much for herself. She told me about growing up, abandoned by her father, with that alcoholic mother of hers telling her all the time she had the looks to be a movie star. It was her mother’s dream before it was hers. Then, when she went to college, she falls in love and gets married and that’s what he wants, too.”

  “Paul Erlich? Her first husband? She thought that’s what he wanted—for her to become a movie star?”

  Then it came to me, like an echo in my mind, something Erlich had said about the way he felt when Marian Walsh was still auditioning for small parts in stock productions.

  “He didn’t mind the idea, her trying to become an actress. It never occurred to him that she might succeed, that she might really become a movie star.”

  Louis Griffin sadly shook his head. “And she was doing it all because of him, because she thought that was what had attracted him to her, made him want to be with her— what she could become. And then she became what she thought everyone wanted her to be, and ended up with everything except the only man she ever really loved.”

  “And her daughter,” I added.

  Griffin glanced away, his gaze settling on the photograph on the dresser.

  “Yes, and her daughter.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  STANLEY ROTH ACTED AS IF NOTHING had happened, and perhaps, in his mind, nothing had. He inspected the discolored gash sewn shut along the line of my eyebrow as if he were only dimly aware of how it had gotten there.

  “I’m sorry about the accident,” he said in a whispered voice just as the bailiff announced the impending entrance of the judge.

  I had barely time to give him a quick, incredulous glance before the door at the side opened and Judge Rudolph Honigman began the short three-step march to the bench. Was Stanley Roth trying to tell me he did not remember how I had been hurt; that he did not remember that he was about to hit Michael Wirthlin with a bottle or, if I was to believe Louis Griffin, merely threaten him with it; that he did not remember anything about the way I had tried to stop him, the way we had both been thrown to the floor by the force of our collision? Or was that just the way he chose to describe what he did? That he had not meant to hurt anyone; that it was an accident, one he regretted, one for which he felt responsible, but nothing for which he should be expected to feel guilty?

  “Mr. Antonelli,” said Honigman. He studied me with a benevolent, worried gaze. “The court was distressed to learn of your unfortunate accident. We’re glad to see that you’re apparently all right.”

  “I’m fine, Your Honor. Thank you. I’m sorry to have caused a delay.”

  Honigman nodded to his clerk. Grumbling beneath her breath, she shoved herself up from her chair and reluctantly made her way to the jury room.

  After the jury squeezed themselves into their tightfitting chairs, Richard Crenshaw was brought into the courtroom and reminded that he was still under oath.

  “Mr. Antonelli,” announced Honigman as he turned his attention to a bulging file folder he had brought with him into court, “you may resume your cross-examination of the witness.”

  The first time Crenshaw had taken the stand he had worn slacks and a sports jacket. Today he was dressed in a dark blue suit. Even more forcibly than before, I was struck with how much time he appeared to spend thinking about how he looked.

  “That’s a very nice suit you’re wearing, Detective Crenshaw,” I remarked as I rose from my chair. He flashed a consciously modest smile. “Thank you.”

  “A very expensive suit, I would think.”

  He shrugged as if to say that it was not anything worth talking about.

  “No, I mean it, Detective Crenshaw: That is a very expensive suit.”

  I hesitated, like someone not quite certain of something but willing to guess. “You must do fairly well consulting on movies. How many of these consulting jobs—besides the one you did on the movie with Mary Margaret Flanders—have you had?”

  “Just the one,” replied Crenshaw in that careful even-toned voice.

  I pretended surprise. “You were a consultant on a movie produced by Stanley Roth—a movie starring Mary Margaret Flanders—and you’ve never been asked to do another one? Why is that, Detective Crenshaw? Wasn’t your work very good?”

  He dismissed the question, and the suggestion, with a condescending glance. I shifted ground and came at him from a different angle.

  “Did you enjoy the work? I assume you were there to advise on—what? Police procedure ... that sort of thing?”

  He nodded, but without enthusiasm, as if it had been nothing more than a job which, like any job, was sometimes interesting and sometimes not.

  “Yes—to both questions.”

  “I see. Well, tell us this, then, Detective Crenshaw: What was she like?”

  His wrists rested on the arms of the witness chair, his hands dangled over the ends. He seemed at ease, confident, perhaps a little too confident. A smile played at the corners of his mouth as he called attention to the ambiguity in my question, not because he did not know what I meant, but to show the jury he could hold his own with a lawyer.

  “What was who like?”

  “Mary Margaret Flanders. You worked with her. You told Ms. Van Roten that you knew her. What was she like?”

  He drew his eyebrows together, knitting his brow, and pursed his lips.

  “She seemed like a very nice person,” said Crenshaw after a short pause. “She was certainly very nice to me.”

  Lowering my head, I drifted toward the jury box.

  “Did you talk to her very often?’ I asked, my eyes still focused on the floor.

  He tried to make it sound that the last thing he had meant to suggest was that they had become anything more than casual acquaintances: two people who just happened to be working at the same place.

  “No, not very often. A couple of times, perhaps—not more than that.”r />
  “On the set?”

  “Yes.”

  I leaned against the railing of the jury box and raised my head. I smiled to myself in a way to make him wonder what I knew, or what I thought I knew.

  “You’re sure you spoke to her on more than one occasion?”

  “A couple of times,” he replied with a look of indifference.

  “Do you remember what you talked about?”

  “Nothing in particular: just casual conversation.”

  “So she never said anything to you like: ‘I think my husband wants to kill me’? Nothing like: ‘I’m afraid of my husband: I think he wants to hurt me’? Nothing like: ‘He’s hurt me before and I’m afraid he’ll hurt me again’?”

  Crenshaw’s expression did not change: it was that same impassive look, the look of someone always in control of himself and of any situation in which he found himself. But I thought I saw in his eyes a slight alteration, like the kind of correction someone makes when they decide they might have been just a little off in the way they measured a distance, and begin to recalculate because they want to get it exactly right.

  “She never said anything like that to you, did she? She never said anything that made you think she might be in any danger, did she?”

  “No,” he had to admit, “she did not.”

  I started to walk back to the counsel table; then, as if I had just thought of it, I stopped and asked: “Who hired you to be a consultant on that picture?”

  “Someone from the studio. I don’t remember the name.”

  “I see. Then it wasn’t Stanley Roth, because I assume you’d remember his name, wouldn’t you?”

  He let his silence speak his agreement.

  “You had this one consulting job and no others. Have you done anything else in connection with the motion picture industry? Have you taken acting lessons, for example?”

  “Some. A few years ago.”

  I do not know why it surprised me, but it did. Everything about him suggested a self-conscious effort to achieve a certain effect: the clothes he wore, the way his hair was cut, the way he carried himself. Each movement, each gesture practically screamed for approval, if not for how well it was done then for how often it had been practiced; and none of it more obvious than the way he had trained his voice. He used it to make himself sound like someone who knew what he was about, someone who, like the talking heads on the evening news, could give an air of authority to two or three short sentences of otherwise doubtful importance.

  “You had acting lessons. Then you aren’t particularly interested in remaining a police officer? Excuse me—a detective?”

  He answered with an indulgent smile.

  “I had some acting lessons a few years ago because one of the television networks wanted to do a pilot for one of those real-life police shows. They thought I might be the narrator. So I went to an acting class—the one they sent me to—for a few weeks. But nothing came of it. They didn’t make the pilot, and I didn’t become an actor.”

  “I don’t know if I’d go that far, Detective Crenshaw. Given the way you handle yourself in court, I’d say that you learned those lessons fairly well.”

  Annabelle Van Roten rose straight up from her chair. She put her right hand on the corner of the table, and with her left made an expansive gesture meant to demonstrate that her dissatisfaction with what I had done was not confined to some narrow, arcane point of law.

  “I realize, Your Honor, that Mr. Antonelli received a rather nasty knock on the head—and perhaps that explains why instead of asking questions he keeps making statements, but... ”

  “I thought you liked my voice,” I interjected with a slightly bewildered look.

  A couple of jurors laughed. Van Roten turned a little red. Honigman gave me a mildly disapproving look. Van Roten quickly got control of herself.

  “The prosecution would have no objection to another day’s delay if Mr. Antonelli needs more time for his recovery.”

  I stood there, staring at her, stammering silently like a long-lost lover, waiting until her eyes left the bench and came triumphantly back around to me.

  “I don’t suppose you’d believe me if I told you I slipped and fell because I was thinking about you?”

  The dark eyes of Annabelle Van Roten flashed with anger, but also with a certain proud defiance. It suddenly struck me that she was—at least when she was not animated by a strong emotion—a remarkable-looking woman.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled, embarrassed by what I had done. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

  Quick to see her advantage, she did not hesitate to make the most of it. The corners of her mouth turned down. Her eyes mocked me with the staged pretense of disappointment.

  “You mean you weren’t thinking of me?”

  The same jurors who had laughed before laughed again. The court clerk frowned and checked the time.

  “Perhaps the two of you could fall in love over dinner in a restaurant somewhere instead of in my courtroom,” Honigman dryly remarked. “Now, did you have an objection you wanted to make, Ms. Van Roten?”

  “Yes, Your Honor, I was... ”

  “Mr. Antonelli, perhaps you could try to limit yourself to asking questions of this witness,” instructed the judge, stopping her before she could finish. I bowed to his wishes and picked up where I had left off.

  “You had acting lessons in preparation for a pilot that did not get made. Was there a script you read for the part of the narrator, the part they thought they wanted you to play?”

  “Yes, there was a script.”

  “When you served as a consultant on that one movie, the one during which you first met Mary Margaret Flanders, did you review a script—to make sure what it said about police procedure was accurate, or at least not too far removed from the way things are actually done by police detectives?”

  “Yes,” he replied, a question in his voice, as if he wanted to know why I was asking.

  “You have some familiarity, then, with the mode, the style, or perhaps I should say, the way in which a script is organized, the way each scene is described and the dialogue written within it. Is that correct?”

  “Yes, I have some familiarity with that.”

  “Did you ever think that perhaps you could write one of your own, one that was at least as good as the ones you had seen?”

  Crenshaw turned up the palms of his hands as if to show that this was far beyond any ambition of his own.

  “I wouldn’t mind trying that someday. I think it might be interesting.”

  I stared at him, incredulous. “You wouldn’t mind doing that someday,” I repeated slowly. “You’re trying to say you haven’t... ”

  I caught myself. I had thrown up my left hand, that gesture Stanley Roth had told me I did all wrong. I started to laugh, and I looked across to the counsel table to see if Roth had noticed it as well. He was sitting with his arms folded, lost in thought. He had not seen anything. He had not once looked up, neither today, nor the day before yesterday, while Richard Crenshaw was on the witness stand. Quickly, I turned back to Crenshaw. He was waiting for me, waiting to see what I was going to do next. Then I realized that he had not looked at Stanley Roth either, not once, from the first moment he stepped up to the stand. Stanley Roth had been right about him.

  “I have no further questions of this witness, Your Honor.”

  Richard Crenshaw was halfway to his feet when I added: “But I do intend to call him later as a witness for the defense.”

  His arms braced on the chair, Crenshaw cast an inquiring glance toward Annabelle Van Roten. She had no more idea than did he about why I might want him back. She looked down at the file folder open on the table in front of her, running her eye down the long list of names scheduled to be called as witnesses for the prosecution. Crenshaw stood up, threw back his shoulders, and remembered to smile one last time—a modest, friendly grin—at the jury. But when he turned away he became far more subdued. He was worried about something, and I thought I kne
w what it was.

  When the door at the back of the small, crowded courtroom had closed behind Detective Crenshaw, Annabelle Van Roten stood up. “Your Honor,” she announced, “the People call Jack Walsh.”

  I never knew whether Annabelle Van Roten really wanted to call Mary Margaret Flanders’s father as a witness, but I suspect she did not. Walsh was too full of his own—how shall I put it?—posthumous importance; too convinced that he should be seen almost as much a victim as his daughter, to confine himself to the truth. He would embellish things to put himself in the best possible light. A defense attorney would not have much trouble turning what he said into a marked advantage for the other side. Van Roten was intelligent and cunning. She had to have seen the danger, but she may have thought she had no choice. Jack Walsh had spent months promoting himself as the spokesman for his dead daughter and as the only person to whom she had confided her secret but real fear that Stanley Roth was going to kill her. It did not take much imagination to figure out what Jack Walsh would do if he was not called to testify and if Annabelle Van Roten then failed to convict Stanley Roth of murder.

  Walsh took the witness stand eager—too eager—to begin. Before Van Roten finished asking him to state his name and spell it for the record, he blurted it out. His voice was harsh, discordant, the harping echo of all the emotions swirling inside him.

  “Jack Walsh,” he repeated, forcing himself to say it again when Van Roten finished the question.

  “Jack Walsh,” he said a third time, the sound of it finally normal.

  It was curious, the way he worked, feeling his way, becoming a little more confident with each question he was asked. His answers, at first hesitant, uncertain and brief, became forceful, self-assured and endless. He began to deliver monologues. He testified for hours and it seemed like days. He managed to bring in everything he had ever said in public and, as near as I could tell, everything he had ever thought in private, about his daughter and about Stanley Roth. He told the jury—told them the way he would have told his twelve closest friends—if he had ever had that many friends—that whole lamentable story about his marriage and his divorce and how he had thought, perhaps mistakenly, that his daughter would be better off if he disappeared from her life. He told them how she had always had that something, that he had always known she was going to be a star. He told them how after all those wasted years of being apart, he had finally found her again, found her in time to tell her what had really happened: that he wouldn’t have left her for anything in the world if her mother had not been so insistent on a divorce. He told them how he had never liked Stanley Roth, and he told them how glad he was when his daughter told him, shortly before she died, that she was going to leave her husband.