Star Witness

by D. W. Buffa

  I wanted him to go on, but he said nothing more and so I asked what I had asked before: “Who is it? Who is the ‘third man’? Who murders Welles’s wife in the new version, Stanley? Who is ‘right in front of your eyes’? Who murdered Mary Margaret?”

  I think he had been getting ready for this moment, rehearsing it in his mind, since the first time I asked him, when we were still standing next to the empty pool where the dead body of his wife had been found.

  “If I told you,” he said as he rose from the bench, “it would ruin the movie.”

  Chapter Twenty One

  THERE WAS TOO MUCH AT stake for Stanley Roth to keep secret what might help to save his life, but every time I asked him who he thought murdered his wife, he started talking about the motion picture he was now more than ever determined to make. He would not tell me because he did not know, and all the rest of it, the look suggesting he knew things at which I could only guess, the reminder that he always knew the ending before he started the beginning, was just false bravado, an attempt to convince himself that he was still in charge, that he could still create a world of his own in which everything made perfect sense. The odd part was that I believed him, not that he knew who had done it, but that someone had. I wanted to think it was instinct, something infallible on which I could always rely, something acquired after years of testing the reaction, the response, of people accused of things they swore they did not do; but perhaps it was only a refusal to look facts in the face. Whatever the reason, I could not let go of the belief that Stanley Roth was innocent and that someone else had murdered Mary Margaret Flanders. No one else believed it, especially after the way things had been going at trial.

  The second-guessing had begun the day I attempted to impeach the credibility of Jack Walsh by insisting that, contrary to his testimony, his daughter had reported her husband’s assault to the police. No one could quite remember a case in which the defense attorney, instead of the prosecution, had insisted on portraying the defendant as someone fully capable of an act of violence. The criticism had been severe; but it was nothing compared to what all those attorneys turned television experts had to say after I helped the prosecution establish a motive of jealousy and rage by forcing Michael Wirthlin to admit that he had been sleeping with Stanley Roth’s wife. I could almost feel them watching me, pencils in hand, all those lawyers who knew they should have had this case, waiting eagerly for their chance to show how much more they knew about how to conduct a defense.

  The jurors tried to appear indifferent, but not all of them could entirely conceal their intense curiosity at the appearance of Walker Bradley. They might have heard of Michael Wirthlin—some of them might even have seen his picture in the society section of the local papers or inside the pages of a movie magazine—but all of them had watched Walker Bradley in the movies. Some of them must have felt about him the same way I had felt about Mary Margaret Flanders: a stranger more familiar to them than most of the people they knew. A young woman in the first row of the jury box, the one who had once darted a quick smile at Stanley Roth, leaned forward as Bradley took the oath. She could barely wait to see what he was going to do next.

  The prosecution had called Bradley to testify about things that had happened during the filming of Mary Margaret Flanders’s last motion picture, the one that had not yet been finished at the time she was murdered. Dressed as if she were meeting someone important for lunch, Annabelle Van Roten wasted little time getting to the point.

  “This was not the first time you had worked with her on a motion picture, was it?”

  Walker Bradley moved his head a little to the side. His mouth partly open, ready to reply, he waited until she had finished the question. Lacing together the fingers of his two hands, he tapped his thumbs against each other.

  “No,” replied Bradley in that whispered, hesitant voice that had made him famous. “We had been in five or six films before that.”

  Van Roten stood at the side of the counsel table, one high-heeled shoe pushed slightly in front of the other. She smiled demurely.

  “Was there anything about the way she behaved— anything she might have said—that made you think she might be worried about something?”

  With the same breathless look, Bradley waited until the last echo had faded away and he could step into the silence, knowing that every eye had now turned to him.

  “Mary Margaret was always the complete professional,” he explained, moving his head to face the jury. “She never let anything get in the way of her work. But this time, something was wrong. She had a hard time concentrating; she’d forget her lines; right in the middle of a scene, she’d burst into tears.”

  While he spoke, Van Roten stood off to the side, the sympathetic observer, waiting with the next question.

  “And did you finally do something to find out why she was behaving in this manner? Did you try to find out what was wrong?”

  Bradley had a gift for the anguished expression, the look of regret for failing to understand what no one could have known. It was a way of feeling bad for something completely out of your control, a way of showing compassion for other people’s misfortunes. If you knew nothing else about Walker Bradley, you could be certain that, given the chance, he was sure to feel sorry for you. No one could have felt more sorry about what had happened to Mary Margaret Flanders, that gifted actress and irreplaceable friend.

  “Yeah,” said Bradley with reluctance, “I finally asked her.”

  Her hands folded in front of her, Van Roten was gazing down at the floor. “And?” she asked, lifting her eyes.

  Bradley shifted position. Looking across at Van Roten he dropped his head to the side and turned up his hands.

  “She did not want to say, not at first; but I kept after her until she told me. She said she was going to leave him—leave Stanley—that she couldn’t take it anymore, that she had to get out.”

  With a penetrating stare, Van Roten insisted he be sure. “She said she ‘couldn’t take it anymore’?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she said—definitely said—she was leaving him, her husband, Stanley Roth?”

  “Yes, she was very upset about it.”

  “That must have come as a great shock to you, didn’t it?” I asked as I got to my feet to begin my cross-examination.

  Bradley mumbled an answer. I did not understand what he said, but I did not care enough to ask that he repeat it.

  “A great shock, because in addition to your friendship with her, you had for a long time been a very close friend of Stanley Roth, hadn’t you?”

  My right hand grazed the top of my empty chair. I moved a step to the left and took a position directly behind the defendant. When Bradley looked at me, Stanley Roth was directly in front of him.

  “I’d known Stanley... ”

  “We’re in a court of law, Mr. Bradley,” I interrupted with irritation. “This isn’t some dinner-table conversation. You’ll please refer to the defendant as Mr. Roth.”

  Startled, Bradley drew back. His mouth twitched nervously.

  “I’d known Mr. Roth for quite a long time. That’s true,” he said, quickly regaining his composure.

  Placing my left hand on Stanley Roth’s shoulder, I started to smile. “‘Known him for quite a long time’? You weren’t close friends?”

  Bradley tried to dismiss it as a matter of minor importance. “I’m not saying we weren’t friends.”

  “Close friends,” I persisted, smiling at his attempt to distance himself in public the way he had in front of Michael Wirthlin and the others last week at the home of Louis Griffin. “That’s what you used to tell everyone, isn’t it, Mr. Bradley? That you and Stanley Roth were close friends?”

  I stepped back to my chair and picked a glossy magazine out of a folder.

  “That’s what it says here,” I said innocently as I opened it to a marked page and held it up for him to see. “Right below the picture of the two of you. You have your arm around him here, don’t you, Mr
. Bradley? Shall I read what it says—about how proud you are to have Stanley Roth as one of your—yes, it says it right here— one of your ‘closest friends.’”

  I tossed the magazine onto the table. “But of course that was before your ‘close friend’ was put on trial for murder, wasn’t it? It was when Stanley Roth could still do something for your career instead of embarrassing you with all your other ‘close friends.’”

  In a single, fluid motion, Annabelle Van Roten rose majestically from her chair. Standing tall in her black-strapped high-heeled shoes, she lifted her finely framed eyebrows into an attitude of overburdened patience.

  “While Mr. Antonelli’s disquisition on the degrees of friendship might be a fascinating subject for a graduate seminar in psychology, this is, after all, a court of law; this is—or at least I thought it was supposed to be—a cross-examination of a witness. The last time I looked, cross-examination takes the form of question and answer: not endless speeches to the jury.”

  Van Roten waited for the judge to tell me to move on, but Honigman did not say a word. The grating smile that had floated so easily onto her mouth became awkward and self-conscious, and then faded away. Her long black lashes blinked with nervous uncertainty; her lips twisted into a tense, cramped expression.

  “And the last time I looked,” said Honigman after this lengthy, dramatic pause, “an objection needs to be stated as such.”

  Her mouth split back into a rigid, condescending smile; her eyes flared open. She almost spat out the words:

  “I object, Your Honor!”

  Slowly, with that false, benevolent smile still on his broad mouth, Rudolph Honigman turned his head until his eyes met mine.

  “You are supposed to be asking questions,” he reminded me gently; more mindful, I thought, of what those watching would think of the way he had delivered this admonition than of any effect it was likely to have on me.

  His gaze stayed on me a moment longer, not because he wanted to see my reaction or hear my reply, but because it was expected that he would wait to make sure I understood what I had now been directed to do. I made no response; not so much as a brief, indiscernible nod of my head; nothing to suggest that I had paid the slightest attention to what he had said. He seemed not to notice. He placed his hand on the side of his face and lowered his eyes to the notepad on which he occasionally jotted down something he wanted to remember. I turned back to the witness.

  “You used to describe yourself as a close friend of Stanley Roth. Now you seem to suggest that you were never really that close. Which is it, Mr. Bradley?” I asked, picking up where I had left off. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of Van Roten sitting at the table, her face locked in a smirking stare.

  Bradley retreated, but only a little. He acknowledged that Stanley Roth and he had known each other a long time and that they had been friends.

  “Good friends,” I insisted one last time and let Bradley’s determined silence speak for itself.

  “We were talking, Mr. Bradley, of how shocked you must have been when your friend, Mary Margaret Flanders, told you she was going to leave her husband. But as you seem rather insistent that you and the defendant were not such good friends after all, perhaps I was wrong. Were you shocked, Mr. Bradley, when you learned from Mary Margaret Flanders that she intended to leave Stanley Roth?”

  “I’m not sure ‘shocked’ is the word I would use,” replied Bradley with a baffled expression. “A little surprised, I guess.”

  “You testified that she gave as her reason that she—I believe the phrase was: ‘couldn’t take it anymore.’ What did you assume she meant by that? Couldn’t take what?”

  Bradley’s head hung down at an angle on the left. With the back of his fingers he stroked the side of his throat as he thought about the question.

  “Well, you know—Stanley. She meant she just couldn’t take Stanley anymore.”

  “No, Mr. Bradley, I’m afraid I don’t know; and I’m sure the jury doesn’t know. What do you mean, she ‘just couldn’t take Stanley anymore’?”

  “Stanley isn’t always the easiest person to be around,” said Bradley, lifting his head as he changed positions. He started to cross his legs, then placed both feet firmly on the floor. With his weight on his arms, he bent forward. He began to fidget with his fingers, tapping them against each other, then sliding them back and forth. He could not seem to sit still for more than a few moments at a time.

  “He can be quite demanding at times,” added Bradley. There was a look of discouragement on his face, as if to underscore his disappointment at having to say something so critical about someone he knew. “Stanley is a brilliant man, and maybe that’s why he expects so much out of other people. I don’t know.”

  I let go of Stanley Roth’s shoulder and moved around to the end of the counsel table. I was close enough to touch the first row juror farthest from the witness stand.

  “Then when she told you she couldn’t take it anymore, she didn’t mean she was in fear of her own safety, did she?”

  “No, she never said anything like that.”

  “Did you ever see Stanley Roth strike her?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Did you ever see Stanley Roth threaten to strike her?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever seen Stanley Roth act in a violent fashion toward anyone?” I asked with a civil smile, as if the question answered itself. He looked at me, searching my eyes, wondering how I wanted him to take the question. He crossed one leg over the other, dropped his head down and pretended to study his hands.

  “Let me ask the question this way, Mr. Bradley. Are you aware that Michael Wirthlin recently testified that he had never seen Stanley Roth commit an act of violence?”

  Bradley raised his eyes and nodded. “I read the papers.”

  I kept smiling, allowing Bradley time to wonder where I was going with this, how close to the edge of the truth I was willing to go. I went back to the empty chair at the counsel table. My hands plunged into my pockets, I glanced down at Roth, then across to where Annabelle Van Roten was sitting.

  “And we both know—don’t we, Mr. Bradley?—that Michael Wirthlin was lying.”

  My eyes stayed on Van Roten, watching as she tried hard not to react.

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

  “You don’t know what I mean?” I asked, wheeling toward him. “You were there, Mr. Bradley. We were both there that night last week at the home of Louis Griffin when Stanley Roth assaulted—or tried to assault— Michael Wirthlin. You did see that, didn’t you?”

  Bradley seemed mystified, not about where he had been and what he had seen, but by what I was doing, asking something so clearly detrimental to Stanley Roth. He did not doubt, however, that he better not agree that Michael Wirthlin was dishonest. The same impulse that had driven him to distance himself from Stanley Roth drove him closer to the new controlling authority at the studio.

  “But he—I mean Stanley—didn’t actually hit him, did he? Michael was probably just trying to protect Stanley. Stanley had too much to drink. Michael knew he didn’t mean it. He knew what everyone would think. He knew they’d say it proved Stanley had a violent temper.”

  “Yes, yes,” I agreed, “they would—and perhaps they will; but, as I reminded you once before, Mr. Bradley, this is a court of law. We’re not here to put the best face on things; we’re not here to cover up our mistakes; we’re here, Mr. Bradley, to tell the truth, and the truth is that when Michael Wirthlin told the jury that he had not only never seen Stanley Roth strike anyone, but he had never seen him attempt to do so, he was lying, wasn’t he?”

  Bradley had been sitting on his left hip; he changed positions and sat on his right.

  “I don’t think it’s my place to comment on what someone else said,” he replied with a helpless shrug.

  “You saw Stanley Roth attempt to strike Michael Wirthlin. Is that, or is that not, correct?”

  “Yeah, I saw him,”
Bradley grudgingly admitted.

  “You’ve known Stanley Roth a long time?”

  “Yes, a long time.”

  “Had you ever seen him attempt to hit anyone before that night, last week, when he tried to hit Michael Wirthlin?”

  “No, never.”

  “And you’ve already testified that if he had ever engaged in violence, or threatened violence, against his wife, she never said anything about it to you. Correct?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you ever observe anything—anything at all— that made you think Stanley Roth had ever physically abused Mary Margaret Flanders?”

  “No, I didn’t,” said Bradley, squinting his eyes in a way that wrinkled his nose. He scratched the side of his head and then looked down at his shoes.

  “You were very close to Mary Margaret Flanders, weren’t you?” I asked in a sympathetic tone. Bradley looked up. “We were good friends. I thought the world of her. She was the best.”

  “She would have told you, then, if Stanley Roth had threatened her, wouldn’t she?”

  “I don’t know. I think so,” said Bradley, scratching his head again.

  “Did you know she had been having an affair with Michael Wirthlin?”

  “That’s not the kind of thing she would have talked about, even with me.”

  “Whether or not she talked about it,” I persisted, “did you know?”

  Bradley shook his head and said he had not known anything about it until it had come out in court. I listened attentively to his answer and moved a step closer to the witness stand.

  “If you didn’t know she was having an affair with Michael Wirthlin, does that mean he didn’t know that you had been having an affair with her as well?”

  It was like an abrupt change in the weather, a storm that gathers so quickly there is barely time to run for cover. The silence in the courtroom was suddenly weighted with tension. Every eye was on Walker Bradley as everyone concentrated on the answer he was about to give. Everyone, that is, except Stanley Roth: He was staring up at me, a troubled, questioning look on his face. I kept watching Walker Bradley, boring in on him, attempting by sheer force of will to make him speak. His mouth, parted the way it always was when he was listening, had fallen farther open still. He blinked once, and then he blinked again.