Star Witness

by D. W. Buffa

  “That’s why he killed her.”

  Van Roten hesitated, certain I was going to object. She looked at me over her shoulder when I did not.

  “Do you wish to object?” asked Judge Honigman.

  I blinked. “I’m sorry,” I said with a perplexed expression. “I must not have been listening. Object to what?”

  Honigman’s head snapped up. He searched my eyes, trying to discover what I thought I was doing. “The witness just testified that the victim was going to leave the defendant and, quote, ‘That’s why he killed her,’ unquote. Do you wish to object?”

  I laughed. “Is that what he said?” I looked at Van Roten and smiled. “No, no objection, Your Honor.” Then I sat down.

  “And what was the reason your daughter gave you when she told you she was going to leave her husband, the defendant, Stanley Roth?” asked Van Roten, turning back to the witness. Walsh did not answer immediately. He slowly turned his shoulders and glared at Stanley Roth.

  “She said he had beaten her and she was afraid he was going to kill her.”

  I thought I heard a barely audible sigh of relief from Annabelle Van Roten when she announced to the court that she was through with the witness. The direct testimony of Jack Walsh, which had begun in the morning, had lasted into the middle of the afternoon, broken only by lunch. The small, creaking noises from the jury box, as the jurors tried to shift position to give some relief to their stiffening limbs, had, despite their self-conscious attempts to do it quietly, become more frequent and more noticeable. Honigman, clearly embarrassed by the inadequacies of his courtroom, was merciful. As soon as Van Roten had finished, he declared a ten-minute recess.

  I stood up to stretch. Van Roten, facing the opposite direction, was standing right next to me, so close that her arm bumped against mine.

  “There’s a rumor,” she whispered under her breath while she smiled at someone in the courtroom crowd, “that what happened to you wasn’t exactly an accident. Should I call you as a witness about your client’s predisposition toward violence?”

  She stepped away and began to confer with the assistant district attorney who was sitting second chair for the prosecution. Was there really a rumor, or had she guessed? Or had she just made it up, trying to cost me my concentration just before I began the cross-examination of the prosecution’s witness? She was capable of it: of inventing a lie to make me wonder if it was the truth. She was smart, and she knew it; she was good looking, and she knew that, too. I doubt that she had ever in her life thought there was any reason not to exploit any advantage she had. She would toss her head, tease me with her eyes, the whole time measuring me, seeing what she could do to get me off my guard. She reminded me of women I had known in college, the ones who would get you to call them and ask them out so they could say no and then laugh about it with their friends.

  Huffing and puffing with each slow step her stubby legs took, the clerk led the jury back into the courtroom. She cast a malevolent glance toward the bench and retreated to her desk. The jurors struggled into their accustomed places, smiling their apologies as they banged against each other.

  “Do you wish to cross-examine the witness?” asked Honigman routinely.

  Jack Walsh was waiting for me, sneering defiance. He was certain that after what he had already said, everyone was on his side.

  “You testified that your daughter told you that her husband had beaten her,” I reminded him in a quiet voice as I got to my feet.

  “That’s right,” he replied. His eyes followed me as I moved to the end of the jury box farthest from the witness stand.

  “She told you this?”

  “Yes,” insisted Walsh with a trace of annoyance. He did not want anyone to think that he would not be offended if someone questioned his word.

  “That her husband, Stanley Roth, had beaten her?”

  Walsh looked at Annabelle Van Roten, certain she should object. She was jotting a note to herself. She did not look up.

  “Did she tell you why she didn’t report this to the police?” I continued. “Or did she tell you why she didn’t leave him right then, when he beat her, if, as you testified, she was afraid he was going to kill her?”

  With a scowl, he crossed his arms, acting as if it was up to him whether he would answer or not.

  “How long had your daughter been married to Stanley Roth when this happened?”

  The question seemed to confuse him.

  “Well,how long had they been married when she died?”

  He could not help himself. “You mean, when she was murdered?”

  “How long?”

  He hesitated, trying to calculate the time.

  “Does five years sound about right to you?” I asked.

  “Five years,” he said, making it sound that he had just come to that very same conclusion on his own.

  “She had a child, didn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  “A child from another marriage?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re that child’s grandfather, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell us, then—tell the jury—when was the last time you saw your grandchild?”

  He seemed almost to shrink back into himself. His chin sagged onto his chest. His hands fell limp into his lap. Biting his lip, he lowered his eyes.

  “I was out of my daughter’s life for a long time,” he mumbled. He looked up. “I’ve already testified that after her mother divorced me I... ”

  “Have you ever seen your grandchild?”

  “No,” he admitted.

  “Do you know how old she is? Never mind,” I said, waving my hand in the air. “Tell us this, instead: Your daughter was married to Stanley Roth for five years, but they had no children. Did your daughter not like children?” he said what he thought he was supposed to say; what any decent, caring father would say about his daughter.

  “She loved children.”

  My hand on the jury box railing, I lifted an eyebrow. “Her only child, however, lived with her first husband. He had custody, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  My hand still on the railing, I took a step forward, drawing just a little closer to him. “But she loved children. I take it, then, that she wanted more; wanted children with her second husband, Stanley Roth?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “But she didn’t have any children with Stanley Roth. Do you know why? Was it perhaps because she was too preoccupied with her career?” I asked tentatively, like someone honestly searching for an answer. Whatever Jack Walsh had talked about with Mary Margaret Flanders, I doubt the question of children had ever come up, not with the way he had treated her, his only child. But this was the kind of thing a daughter might be expected to talk to her father about; and Jack Walsh was never reluctant to pretend he was what he thought others thought he should be.

  “She wanted children,” he insisted. He bent forward, a look of anguish in his eyes. “She wouldn’t tell me the reason they didn’t have any.” He darted an angry glance toward the counsel table behind me where Stanley Roth was sitting quietly. “I had the feeling he couldn’t have any.”

  For a moment I did not say anything. Sliding my hand along the jury box railing, I moved another step closer.

  “You had the feeling he couldn’t have any,” I repeated. “You just testified that your daughter never told you the reason they didn’t have children, but you ‘had the feeling’?”

  I stared hard at him. “You have no more idea than anyone else here why they didn’t have children. Your daughter never talked to you about it: not just the reason she didn’t have children with Stanley Roth—but any of it. She didn’t talk to you about anything, did she? You showed up, asked her for money and she gave it to you. And then, when you kept asking, she finally got tired of it and said she didn’t want to see you again—isn’t that what happened?”

  “That’s not true!” exclaimed Walsh, bolting forward until he was on the very edge of the witness
chair.

  “Did she call the police?”

  It came so quick—it was so unexpected—it took him completely unawares. He must have remembered what I had asked him before, about why she had not called the police, the question I had not given him time to answer.

  “No,” he said without hesitation. “She didn’t want anyone to know.”

  “She told you that? She told you she didn’t call the police because she didn’t want anyone else to know?”

  “Yes,” insisted Walsh, bristling with hostility. I looked down at the floor, smiling to myself as I stroked my chin.

  “Are you sure?” I asked as I raised my eyes.

  There was a glimmer of uncertainty, a moment of doubt. He tensed, like someone who suddenly suspects a trap. It was too late. The last thing Jack Walsh would ever do is admit a lie.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” he insisted angrily.

  I nodded as if I had agreed with him all along.

  “Well, that would explain it—wouldn’t it? Why there is no police report about any such incident; why there is no one on the prosecution’s witness list to testify that any such report was ever made.”

  I returned to the counsel table and stood with my hands on the back of my empty chair.

  “But it wouldn’t explain—would it, Mr. Walsh?—why the defense is going to call a witness who will testify that your daughter—the daughter you abandoned when she was only five years old—in fact did call the police.”

  “Then he did hit her!” Walsh cried, as if in comparison with that, any lies he may have told were simply unimportant.

  “Yes, he did. Once. When he found out, Mr. Walsh, that behind his back your daughter had aborted his child, the child he was desperate to have.

  “No more questions,” I said, turning my eyes toward the bench, but no one heard me say it. The courtroom was bedlam. Honigman was pounding his gavel. Annabelle Van Roten had risen to her feet, but then something held her back. Her mouth still open, she wheeled around, peering at me from suspicious eyes, trying to figure out what I thought I was doing by telling the world that my client, Stanley Roth, accused of murder, was a violent man.

  For Jack Walsh all it meant was vindication. Outside the courtroom, surrounded by cameras and reporters, he insisted over and over again that everything he had said was the truth, that his daughter had told him Stanley Roth was a dangerous man, and now Stanley Roth’s own lawyer had admitted it.

  Chapter Seventeen

  WITH MY HANDS SPREAD APART, I leaned against the tile shower stall and let the hot, pulsating water beat against the back of my neck as I tried to forget everything that had happened. All day long in court I had concentrated on each word spoken, weighing it in my mind, measuring it against everything else the witness had said—everything everyone involved in the trial had said—afraid I might miss that one misstatement, that single, seemingly unimportant inconsistency, that minor inaccuracy, that could change the outcome of the trial. Then, when it was over, when the judge and the jury left for the day and there was nothing left to listen to, I started listening to the same thing all over as it played itself back in my mind, doing it again and again over my fierce objection until through sheer exhaustion the question, the answer, all the vivid memories of what happened that day gradually began to fade into the background and I could try to think about what was going to happen tomorrow when I had to do it again.

  Every trial was different, every trial had something that set it apart from the others; but the trial of Stanley Roth was so far removed from anything in my experience that there was really nothing to which I could compare it. Stanley Roth was famous, powerful, and rich; but he was also intelligent, and so obsessed with what he thought was the importance of what he did that he viewed the trial—the trial in which he might be found guilty of murder—as a kind of minor annoyance that in some strange sense had very little to do with him. If there had been a way around it, I don’t think he would have attended the trial at all. He would have left the whole thing to me, the way I imagine he left to other producers, other directors, movies made by Blue Zephyr in which he had no particular interest. Sometimes, during a lull in the trial, when a witness was being sworn or had just been excused, I would turn to see how he was. It would take a moment before he realized I was looking at him. It was like being back in college, sitting next to someone so bored with the lecture that while he pretended to be taking notes was actually reading something from another class.

  I turned off the water and stepped out of the shower. With the heel of my hand I rubbed a clearing in the steam-covered bathroom mirror. The stitches above my eye looked stiff and crooked, woven in and out of the eyebrow matted wet to my skin. When I first started practicing law, defending the kind of people who settled everything with violence, I used to think that some day, because I had lost their case or made the mistake of telling them what I really thought about them, one of them might try to kill me, but none of them ever had. They let me alone and nearly always treated me with a certain respect. I had to wait for Stanley Roth before I finally got into a situation where I needed the help of a doctor. And then he sat there, pretending that he did not know anything about what had happened, pretending that I had had an accident, that I had slipped and fallen, the way it had been reported to the court and to the press.

  With two fingers, I pushed tentatively against the cut to see if it was still tender. It did not hurt, and I pushed harder. There was still no pain; and I felt better because of it, indulging myself in the illusion that I was still young enough to heal quickly.

  The telephone was ringing. I walked into the bedroom, a towel around my waist. It was Stanley Roth.

  “You’re mad at me, aren’t you?”

  He was like an eighteen-year-old who knew he could always talk his way out of trouble because he knew that everyone liked him and that they knew, or at least wanted to believe, that no matter what he might have done, it was never with the deliberate purpose of hurting them or anyone else. Age had changed nothing. Gray hair curled up over the back collar of his shirt and deep lines were embedded in his forehead and along the sides of his face, but beneath all the charm and all the ruthlessness, beneath all the polished civility and all the explosive, primitive rage, he was still the same eager adolescent he had been that first time he had stared out at the Pacific, dreaming about the movies he wanted to make.

  “You’re mad at me,” he repeated when I did not answer.

  “What do you want, Stanley?” I asked. I sat at the edge of the bed, watching the tendons stretch like bowstrings when I flexed my toes.

  “Are you coming over tonight, so we can talk about the case?”

  I crossed my ankle over my knee and began to massage the sole of my foot.

  “No.”

  I was not going to give him a reason, but then, almost against my will, heard myself doing precisely that.

  “I’ve got too much to do to get ready for tomorrow.”

  “You’re mad at me, aren’t you?”

  I let go of my foot.

  “You’re damn right I’m mad,” I said firmly as I stood up. “This case is difficult enough without having to defend you against yourself. You could have killed Wirthlin! And for what?—because you got upset?”

  “I knew you were mad at me. Louis told me what you did—how you thought I was going to smash Michael’s head with a wine bottle—how you jumped over the table to stop me—how you got hurt.”

  There was a silence and I knew he was listening in his mind to the way what he was about to say was going to sound, and wondering what I would think when I heard it.

  “Louis bends over backward to make excuses for me,” he said, speaking with deliberate care. “Someday I’ll tell you why. But you were right: I was going to hit that son of a bitch with that bottle; hit him as hard as I could. Did I want to kill him? I don’t know. I came over there because I wanted to tell him what I thought of him: to let him know there wasn’t any way I was going to walk away from Blue Zephyr a
nd let him have it all. But then, when I saw him sitting there—that smug, stupid face of his—I knew there wasn’t any point to it, that nothing I could say would make any difference. That’s why I did it; that’s why I went after him. If you hadn’t stopped me, maybe I would have killed him. I know damn well I would have hit him.”

  He paused, and when he spoke again, he sounded tired and discouraged.

  “I know you’re mad. You have every right to be. But for what it’s worth I’m sorry about what I did.”

  He laughed quietly, a low, self-deprecating laugh, a detached commentary on his own mixed emotions.

  “I’m not all that sorry I went after Michael; but I’m damn sorry you got hurt because of it. And you’re right: you did defend me against myself, and it isn’t your job, but I’m grateful, and I’ll always be grateful, that you did. Nobody else there did. They were all too busy worrying about themselves. Except Louis,” added Roth immediately. “That is one of his failings: He always thinks first about other people and only then about himself.”

  It seemed a strange thing to say under the circumstances. “You think that’s a failing?” I asked, a little irritated. “After what he did for you?”

  “It’s a failing in this business. If you don’t think about yourself first, no one else will.”

  I wondered if he meant it, or if it was something that his own sense of who he had become had taught him to say. Stanley Roth, the cynical manipulator, the one in charge, the one who could give everyone what they wanted or take it all away: the great Stanley Roth who did not give a second thought to what happened to anyone.