by D. W. Buffa
On the other side of the round glass-topped table, Marissa sat with her chin resting in her hand, waiting for me to tell her what Annabelle Van Roten had said. She had the slightly amused look of an eager schoolgirl trying hard not to show how impatient she felt.
“She called to tell you she was glad the ‘ruthless and charismatic’ Joseph Antonelli won the Academy Award, didn’t she?” she asked in a lilting, pleasure-filled voice, when she could not wait a moment longer.
“Walker Bradley won the Academy Award.”
“Yes, but he won it for being you.”
Annabelle Van Roten had said almost the same thing. There were times, she had told me, while she was watching Walker Bradley’s performance when she thought he was more like me than I was. How strange and incongruous. Even in the world of intimate strangers with whom we live, we are seen as playing parts that might be performed better by someone else. I started to say something to Marissa, to explain what I felt, but it suddenly seemed a useless vanity, this urge to make myself understood. Shaking my head, I looked again out across the bay, toward the city, shimmering bright and mysterious in the distance under a sky filled with a thousand tiny silver stars. For a fleeting moment I had the feeling that we were all on a stage, under the watchful eyes of an audience we could not see, and I wondered if that was what it was like—being in front of a camera that recorded every little gesture, every spoken word, recording it all on film so you could become the center of attention of a vast, limitless audience that you could never touch and never see, but an audience that was always there, watching you, waiting to see what for their amusement you were going to do next.
I kept staring into the night, trying not so much to make sense of things—I had lived too long to think that there was any chance of that—but just to reconcile myself to the fact—a fact that carried with it a kind of solace of its own—that the most important questions could never be answered, at least by mortals like us.
“What is it?” I heard Marissa ask. Awakened from my reverie, I turned around. “What did she say?—Annabelle Van Roten.”
“She told me that the detective—Richard Crenshaw —is about to be indicted for the murder of Mary Margaret Flanders.” I paused for a moment before I added, “She told me she was glad she hadn’t convicted an innocent man.”
Marissa read it immediately in my eyes: the doubt, the hesitation, the dissatisfied sense of having failed to get finally to the heart of things. She studied me closely, her gaze becoming more intense, trying to be sure.
“He was innocent, wasn’t he? ... Stanley Roth.”
Everyone thought so: Annabelle Van Roten, Marissa ... everyone. It was the movie that had done it, the movie that Stanley Roth had always wanted to make. It had changed the way everyone thought about what had happened; it had changed the way everyone thought about him, Stanley Roth, the innocent victim of the public’s now quickly forgotten mistrust. I remembered watching it, certain that nothing in it was the truth, that everything in it was a lie. But then I had watched that other film, that film of Mary Margaret Flanders surrounded by hundreds of people you did not notice because you could not take your eyes off her, that film that caught Richard Crenshaw standing at the edge of the crowd on the sun-drenched lawn of her Hollywood home, the one so famous it had a name of its own. And then I believed what everyone who saw Stanley Roth’s movie believed: that Stanley Roth had, as he had always insisted, been falsely accused.
“He was innocent, wasn’t he? Stanley Roth,” repeated Marissa, staring into my eyes.
I looked away. “What do you think it says about us,” I asked, laughing quietly into the night, “that what we see in a movie—a work of fiction—becomes for so many of us the only reality we know? Stanley Roth innocent? ... Perhaps. But Richard Crenshaw guilty? ... Why? Because he was there—at The Palms—late that afternoon, with all those hundreds of other people? Because he was there—at The Palms—the next morning, after Mary Margaret Flanders’s naked dead body was found floating in the pool?” I looked at Marissa. “Those are really the only two provable facts.” A cryptic smile slid across my lips. “But of course everyone knows more than that, don’t they? Everyone knows Richard Crenshaw murdered Mary Margaret Flanders. He was in the house. They saw him there.”
Marissa twisted her head a little to the side. A startled, worried expression danced softly in her eyes.
“Are you saying he didn’t do it? Are you saying Stanley Roth did it after all?”
I remembered the way Stanley Roth had looked at me that day at The Palms when I asked him whom he thought had killed Mary Margaret Flanders, that look he had when he said he could not tell me because it would ruin the movie. That same look was on my face now.
“No one who sees Stanley Roth’s movie will ever think so.”
The End
A Note to my Readers: Thank you for reading Star Witness. Please let me know your thoughts about the book. You can send me email by visiting my website at http://www.dwbuffa.net.
OTHER BOOKS BY D. W. BUFFA
The Defense
The Prosecution
The Judgment
The Legacy
Breach of Trust
Trial by Fire
The Grand Master
The Swindlers
Rubicon (Released under pen name "Lawrence Alexander")
