Star Witness

by D. W. Buffa

  “You made her sound like a whore,” said Roth with a puzzled, plaintive glance. “Did you really have to do that? Make everyone think of her that way?”

  I put down my glass and turned in my chair, facing him directly.

  “You told me that you assumed that she had had affairs with other men. You were quite explicit about it: whenever she was on location. That’s what you said. Don’t you remember?”

  “I know what I said,” replied Roth, gazing again down at his glass, a subdued expression on his face. His tone was one of regret, whether at the thought of what his wife had done, or because in a moment of candor he had told me about it, I did not know. He raised his eyes.

  “But I don’t know why you had to use it.”

  I stared at him, at first in disbelief, and then, without quite knowing why, started to laugh. “Because I felt like it,” I said in a whispered shout. “Because I thought it would be fun.” I bent sideways until my elbow reached the desk. “Because I thought the trial was getting dull and I thought we should liven things up with a little sex. Why did I do it? What do you care why I did it?” I asked, starting to become angry. “We’re in a murder trial, your murder trial—a trial, I might remind you, in which all the evidence points to you—and you seem mainly interested in telling me how you and your good friend Louis outwitted Michael Wirthlin; how you managed to saddle him with all the debts and all the obligations while you get to keep the name—Blue Zephyr—and of course this wonderful place you like to call home,” I said with a gesture meant to take in the limited interior of the white stucco bungalow where Stanley Roth lived and worked. “We’re in a murder trial and there is a very good chance you’re going to be found guilty, and you’re upset that people might not think quite as highly of Mary Margaret Flanders as they did when all they knew about her was what you showed them on the screen and what they read in movie magazines?”

  I moved forward to the edge of the chair and spread open my hands, trying to get him to see that nothing less than his life depended on what was taking place in that small cramped courtroom downtown.

  “I’m sorry, Stanley, but the best thing that can happen right now is for that jury to believe that she was sleeping 320 D. W. BUFFA Final Pages 12/5 12/5/04 10:26 AM Page 320 around and that you had known about it for a long time. Because if you hadn’t known about it, if you had only just found out about it—found out she was sleeping with Wirthlin, or with Bradley: it doesn’t matter who—then you have a motive, you have a reason, one of the oldest reasons there is, to murder your wife. But if she had been sleeping with other men—the kind of ‘casual intimacy’ Bradley was forced to admit to—and you had known about it—or hadn’t known about it, but had always assumed it was something she did—then why would you suddenly decide to kill her for something that you had always known?”

  Roth lifted his eyebrows, pursed his lips. He nodded gravely, as if he had understood and agreed with everything I had said.

  “Unless,” he said, as he turned to me and drew himself up, “I finally just got tired of it, got tired of all the lying, all the cheap betrayals.”

  He said it with a kind of cold rationality, the way someone without a conscience might explain the intricate mechanism with which he had set off a bomb in a crowded public place.

  “I wouldn’t be the first man to kill his wife out of embarrassment and humiliation, would I? If you were the prosecutor, wouldn’t you argue that there is a limit to how many times a husband can forgive an unfaithful wife?”

  He was watching me, scratching his chin with the back of two fingers, curious to see what I would say. I began to suspect that he was not talking about himself at all; that he was trying out different possibilities, testing my reaction.

  “For the sake of argument,” he added when I did not immediately respond. “You told me that was what you liked about being a lawyer. Remember? The argument.”

  I was no longer angry, but I was still annoyed. “I told you why I did what I did today, why I made Walker Bradley say what he did about your wife. I didn’t know Bradley had slept with her. All I knew is what you had told me, and so I took a chance and asked him. I had to ask him. There wasn’t any choice, and not just because of what I said earlier. We don’t have a case, Stanley; nothing we can offer that shows, that proves, it wasn’t her blood on your clothes or that you were somewhere else when the murder took place. That means we’re left with their case, the prosecution’s case. We have to give the jury every reason we can to make them think that case isn’t that good; make them believe that someone is lying and that it isn’t you. Bradley lied about what you did, or tried to do, to Michael Wirthlin; and he tried to lie about what he had been doing with your wife. Wirthlin lied; and the cop, Crenshaw, lied.”

  Roth held up his hand to stop me. “And most of the lies they told—Wirthlin lying about what happened that night—were lies that helped.”

  “But the point is they lied. I’m going to put you on the stand and you’re going to tell the truth.”

  “And does the truth always win?”

  “Almost never,” I replied, suppressing a grin; “but it’s a lot easier to remember.”

  Roth thought for a moment. “Sometimes when they tell you that a picture you think is going to be great is really awful—they’re right.”

  The telephone rang. Roth picked it up before it rang twice. He held it to his ear and without saying hello, listened.

  I knew who it was. No one else used that line. Whatever was being said, Stanley Roth seemed to expect it, and more than that, feel some obligation to make it go as easily as possible. His eyes softened and a gentle halfsmile of something like regret formed on his mouth.

  “It’s a mistake,” he said finally. “I understand you think you have to do it ... but it’s a mistake.” He listened a while longer and then interrupted. “This isn’t a good time. We’ll talk about it later. When? I don’t know when. After the trial, I guess.”

  He raised his arm, ready to pull the telephone away from his ear. “Really, I understand. No, not tonight. I have to finish this thing I’m working on. After the trial. Good night,” he said curtly as he hung up.

  For a moment, Roth stared straight ahead, tapping his fingers together under his chin. Then his eyes came back into focus and he explained that Julie Evans had just informed him that she was going to stay on with “Wirthlin Productions.”

  “She’ll come back,” he said, trying, as I thought, to put the best face on things he could. “After the trial.”

  After the trial. That was the one constant, the one thing that never changed: this absolute certainty that he could not possibly lose. It was not that he thought people were never convicted of things they did not do. No, it was something more than a blind belief that things always turned out right in the end: it was the belief that things would always turn out right for him. His wife had been killed; he had lost the studio, Blue Zephyr, the studio he had spent so many years waiting to have; now he was on trial for murder; and yet he acted as if his life was no different than one of the screenplays he had written, one in which, as he had once tried to explain to me, he already knew the ending, and the ending was just the way he wanted it to be.

  Perhaps that was the reason Julie Evans was in love with him, this sense that while most other people live their lives dealing with their own fears and insecurities, Stanley Roth always seemed to know in advance what was going to happen. Wirthlin had offered her more than she was ever likely to get from Stanley Roth, even if he was eventually acquitted and could start up some new enterprise of his own. She had to take what Wirthlin was willing to give. She would have been a fool to bet everything on Stanley Roth when the odds were so much against him and he had done so little to make her think he was going to change the way he felt about her. But that had not made it any easier to tell Stanley Roth she was abandoning him for a position with the new Wirthlin Productions.

  If I had had time to think it through clearly, to consider all the difficult, confl
icting emotions with which Julie Evans must have had to deal, I would not have been quite so surprised to find her waiting for me in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont. Who else did she have with whom she could talk about what she had done? Not Stanley Roth, and certainly not Michael Wirthlin.

  Blonde and sleek, with that half-smile that made you think she was already secretly laughing at you, Julie looked like she did not have a care in the world. She rose from the dark green chair in which she had been waiting and walked straight toward me, one foot in front of the other, a teasing sparkle in her clear blue eyes. That I had not gone with her to Santa Barbara seemed more than ever a triumph of self-deception and I wondered how I could have been so stupid.

  She rose up on her toes and with one hand laid gently on my shoulder, brushed her lip against my cheek. “Take me to dinner,” she whispered in a way that made it sound like a dare. “I’ve lots to tell you.”

  We went to the restaurant Julie had taken me to lunch the first day we met, the day the police arrested Stanley Roth, and were given the same table, the one she apparently had every time she came. On the drive over she had avoided any discussion of the way in which our weekend plans had come apart. Nor had she said anything about her decision to take Michael Wirthlin’s offer. Now, after we ordered, she began to talk about Santa Barbara, but without any regret that she had gone alone. To the contrary, it had been just as well that I had not come. She said this as if it were an objective fact, about which she had no personal feelings one way or the other. It had given her time to think, she explained with a bright smile to indicate that she knew I understood.

  “And you decided to take Wirthlin’s offer, to head up the new studio—or the old one with the new name: ‘Wirthlin Productions.’”

  The half-smile on her mouth was replaced with a look less certain of itself. She was not sure whether I had simply assumed it, or whether I actually knew.

  “You were there—at the bungalow—when I talked to Stanley?”

  When I nodded that I had, Julie looked at me for a moment, hesitant, hoping that of my own volition I would tell her what Stanley Roth had said. The waiter brought the salads and, lowering my eyes, I began to poke around in it with a fork. I could feel her watching, waiting for me to say something.

  “What did he say?” she asked finally, as if she were only following where the conversation had led us.

  If she could pretend indifference toward Stanley Roth, I could do the same thing with her. Everything about her—the way she looked, the way she held herself when she walked, the coy self-confidence that kept everyone at the distance she wanted, the astonishing heat she generated in bed—made you want to do everything you could to make her think she had not been able to get to you after all, that you could have her one night and not think about her until the next time you happened to run into her when, if you were in the mood, you might spend the night, or part of it, with her again. It was the cruelty of self-defense, the knowledge that if you were not careful you would not be able to think about anything else, the aching, longing certainty that if you let that happen she would break your heart and not give it a second thought. She was in love with Stanley Roth, and so long as she was, she would treat other men the way he treated her.

  I put down the fork and looked up. “You want to know what Stanley Roth said about your decision to go with Michael Wirthlin, instead of staying with him? What makes you think he said anything?”

  I stretched my left arm over the back corner of the chair. With a cool, appraising glance, I asked her a question that I thought would put everything in perspective.

  “You’ve been with him for years. Have you ever known him to think about anyone but himself?”

  The long lashes that stood in such defiant posture seemed to weaken and then collapse, falling halfway down her eyes.

  “He said something, didn’t he?” she asked in a choking voice.

  I should have seized on some convenient lie, something that would make her feel better about having done what she had. If she had been anyone else; if she had been someone with whom I had not become intimately involved; someone I did not despise myself for wanting as much as I did; I would have told her what I knew she was desperate to hear—that Stanley Roth understood that she had to make the choice she had and that he only wanted what was best for her. Instead, I told her the truth, because, to my discredit, I knew it would hurt. I looked her straight in the eye.

  “All he said was that you’d come back after the trial.”

  She twisted her head to the side, searching my eyes until she was sure of it. She began to laugh, a low, furious laugh.

  “That I’ll come back after the trial!” she exclaimed, her eyes flashing with anger. “That is so much in character for him. He thinks I’ll do anything. Tell him I won’t. Tell him I’m not coming back—after the trial or ever!”

  She clutched her napkin in her hand, struggling herself. “Do you know what he told me, right after Mary Margaret was murdered? Do you know what he said?”

  “What did he tell you?” I asked, grasping her wrist to get her attention as her eyes darted past me.

  She was still looking over my shoulder, but her eyes kept climbing higher. There was a strange, puzzled expression on her face. Someone was standing right next to our table. Amazed at the intrusion, I looked at him sharply, expecting him to go away. Then I realized who it was. Jack Walsh was standing above me, looking all around the restaurant, making sure everyone had stopped what they were doing to watch.

  “How can you do this?” he demanded, shaking his fist at me. “Defend someone you know is guilty? Question the police, when you know they did everything right? Question the integrity of people who were just doing their jobs? Did you ever see my daughter?” he snarled. “See how beautiful she was? You go into court, dressed in your expensive suits and your expensive shoes, and you don’t care who you hurt, do you? Just so long as you convince some jury to acquit someone everyone knows is guilty. And you don’t care how you do it, either—do you? You don’t care if you have to drag my daughter in the dirt; you don’t care what you do to her reputation. You don’t care about anything, do you? You don’t care that Stanley Roth murdered Mary Margaret Flanders!” he exclaimed, his eyes burning with rage. “All you care about is winning. You’re the only person in the country who wants to celebrate letting a killer go free,” shouted Jack Walsh as he picked up the glass from the table in front of me and threw the water in my face.

  I bolted to my feet, using the napkin to wipe the water out of my eyes. Walsh had already turned and begun to walk away. There was a stunned silence in the restaurant, and then, as I stood there gaping, some people began to clap, applauding Jack Walsh for what he had done.

  Chapter Twenty Three

  AFTER WEEKS OF TESTIMONY, WEEKS of listening to among other things the smug self-certainty of experts in the various so-called sciences of forensic evidence proving what no one had ever really denied, that the blood found at the scene of the crime and on the clothing of the defendant belonged to the victim, the prosecution ended its case with a series of witnesses who together described Mary Margaret Flanders’s last day alive. The maid, the same one who the next morning would find her floating face-down in the pool, woke her at 8:00 A.M. After breakfast, Mary Margaret drove into Beverly Hills for an appointment at a hair salon. The stylist, sworn in under the name John Baker, but known to his wealthy and exclusive clientele as simply “Eduardo,” said she arrived at 10:15 and left an hour and a half later at 11:45. Gesturing with both hands, he said he thought she had looked “simply fabulous,” and then added with a sigh, “She always did.”

  According to her publicist, an energetic woman in her early forties who kept blinking her eyes and fidgeting with her fingers, she and the star were joined for lunch at The Bistro by two women, one a writer, the other an independent producer. They wanted to talk to her about a project they thought would allow her to show a side of her talent she had not been able to show before. Mary Margaret wa
s interested and agreed to look at the screenplay, but that was all.

  “Was that the first time she had met with anyone from outside Blue Zephyr?” asked Annabelle Van Roten.

  It was not. In recent months, the witness explained, the actress had appeared restive, eager to try something else, something new. She was bored with the kind of thing everyone now expected her to do, the same formula, over and over again, because everyone thought she was good at it and because no one wanted to risk losing the audience she had.

  Though the publicist could not be precise, she thought it must have been close to two-thirty when they finally left the restaurant. Mary Margaret drove home and, an hour later, the publicist followed. From four to six in the afternoon, Mary Margaret Flanders hosted a reception on the grounds of The Palms to raise money for the children’s wing of a local hospital.

  Dimming the courtroom lights, Annabelle Van Roten instructed a technician to show the videotape that had been taken. There were hundreds of people, women in large floppy hats, men in blue blazers with open-collar shirts, standing around the pool and out on the lawn, chattering among themselves. There were several famous faces, and more than a few that you thought you knew but could not quite place. There was one face, however, that made you forget about everyone else. Her first husband, Paul Erlich, had perhaps noticed it first, the night he had gone with her to the party at the home of some now forgotten producer: the way that when she entered a room everything around her seemed to stop, and not only stop but fade into the background or, rather, become the background. Watching that tape, taken from one of the surveillance cameras that were always in use when there was a gathering on the grounds—taken, in other words, without any thought to the artistic values of a motion picture—was like staring at a still photograph in which everything except the principal subject is blurred, slightly out of focus. She had that gift, given to the beautiful and not always to them, of making you feel more alive just by the sight of her. When the lights came back on in the courtroom, the muffled sounds of private mourning were all around me.