Star Witness

by D. W. Buffa

  I felt a tinge of embarrassment, proof that I was as vain as she had suggested. Before I could think of some self-deprecating remark that might make her think that I did not take myself quite so seriously, she picked up her cell phone and called her office.

  “You were right,” she said as she hung up, her eyes fixed on the road as she maneuvered through traffic. “The story is all over the place. The phone has been ringing off the hook. The publicity people aren’t sure what to do. They think the press release goes a little too far; they think... ”

  “I don’t give a damn what they think,” I said firmly. “That release goes the way it is. Call your office again,” I insisted. “Tell them Stanley Roth said to do it. Have they announced the press conference?”

  She was not sure they had. She called again, insisted the release go out at once and said that someone was going to have to answer for it if it did not. Whoever she was talking to then said something that for a moment seemed to take her breath away.

  “Tell me that again,” she said, her voice suddenly subdued. She turned off the phone, slipped it into her purse and stared ahead at the highway. Her hands gripped the wheel tightly and she fought back a tear. Slowly, bitterly, she began to shake her head.

  “Those bastards,” she muttered to herself.

  “What happened?”

  “They won’t put out the release. They won’t allow a press conference. They don’t think the studio should be involved.”

  The traffic had come to a grinding halt. We were sitting in the middle of the freeway, going nowhere. Julie sat back against the leather seat and sighed.

  “There’s nothing I can do,” she remarked, rolling her head a quarter turn until her eyes met mine. “The decision was made by both Lewis and Michael,” she said, referring to Stanley Roth’s two partners. “They’ll do everything they can to help,” she added, a cynical edge to her voice, “but the studio has to stay out of it. Whatever happens to Stanley, they’re not going to allow it to jeopardize Blue Zephyr. There is too much at stake.”

  “What are they telling the reporters who call?” I asked as I thought about what to do next.

  “Nothing, just the generic nonresponse: ‘The studio has no statement to make at this time.’”

  I started to smile. “Who do you work for: Stanley Roth or Blue Zephyr?”

  Puzzled by my smile, she answered, “Stanley Roth is Blue Zephyr.”

  I picked up her cell phone and handed it to her.

  “Good. Now call the L.A. Times, call the television stations, call the networks, call everyone you can think of. The studio won’t make a statement—we will.”

  “If I do that, it could cost me my job,” said Julie.

  “If you don’t do it, it could cost Stanley Roth his life.”

  By four o’clock that afternoon the crowd of reporters and television crews at the main entrance to Blue Zephyr was so large no one could get in or out. The afternoon sun bathed the iron-gated front in a soft golden haze. Designed by Stanley Roth to look like what people remembered about the Hollywood of the l940s, the studio was the perfect backdrop for the formal announcement that the director had been arrested for the murder of the star.

  At my signal, Julie Evans stepped forward, and in front of a battery of microphones faced the cameras. She stood straight and tall, a single sheet of paper held in her left hand.

  “I am Julie Evans,” she announced in a low, quietly confident voice, “executive assistant to Stanley Roth, head of Blue Zephyr Pictures.”

  She held the sheet of paper in both hands and began to read, pausing after every few words to look into the cameras. A seasoned actor could not have done it to better effect.

  “Earlier today, Stanley Roth voluntarily turned himself into the Los Angeles police department. Mr. Roth has been arrested in connection with the death of his wife, Mary Margaret Flanders. Mr. Roth has categorically denied any involvement in this awful crime. Mr. Roth has no doubt whatsoever that he will be fully exonerated.”

  Dropping her hand to the side, Julie lifted her chin and looked directly into the camera.

  “I’m sure that I speak for everyone at Blue Zephyr, as well as everyone who knows him, when I say that Stanley Roth could not possibly have had anything to do with the tragic death of his wife. The police have made a mistake. We can only hope they do not compound it by failing to continue their investigation into who is really responsible for the death of our dear friend, Mary Margaret Flanders.”

  Julie looked down at the ground as if she needed to collect herself. “From this point forward,” she said, lifting her eyes, “Joseph Antonelli will handle all inquiries about the case.”

  I had a short statement of my own. I began with the one thing I wanted everyone who was going to see this on the news, including especially anyone who might be called as a juror, to hear and to remember.

  “Stanley Roth swore to me that he did not murder his wife. He swore to me that he did not do it, and he swore to me that he does not know who did. He loved his wife and he was almost destroyed by her death; and now, as if he had not suffered enough, the police arrest him for a crime he did not commit because they can’t find anyone else to blame and because they don’t want to admit that they don’t know what they’re doing.”

  It was deliberately provocative, and, just as I hoped, it produced a response. From somewhere in the crowd a reporter shouted:

  “Are you accusing the police of arresting someone they know to be innocent?”

  I could feel on my face the glow of the hot dry sun. All around me, like a swarm of insects, I could hear the quick clicking noise as photographers snapped their cameras. At the far edge of the crowd one of the groundkeepers was holding his rake in front of him, watching with a look of disinterested detachment all the commotion. Things seemed more vivid, more real, everything more clearly distinguished, more sharply defined than I had seen them before. I was standing there, the center of attention, listening to the question, then listening to what I said in reply, an observer of my own performance, as detached, if not quite as disinterested, as that elderly stoop shouldered Hispanic leaning on his rake.

  I bent forward, staring straight into the television camera, and in a single sentence went as far as I could to put the police on trial instead of Stanley Roth.

  “The police arrested the wrong man because they had no idea who the right man was and knew they never would.”

  “That’s a fairly serious charge, isn’t it?” demanded another reporter.

  “Murder is a fairly serious charge,” I countered. “One that shouldn’t be made without an investigation that attempts to find the truth instead of one that starts out by deciding who you want to be guilty.”

  There was a stunned reaction, a brief pause while, like an audience that thinks with one mind, they grasped the full implications of what I had just said. Then they exploded into a raucous shouting match, each of them trying to be the first to ask the question that had simultaneously become obvious and imperative to them all.

  “Are you saying the police framed Stanley Roth for the murder of his wife?”

  I had not said that at all, but it did not bother me they wanted me to say that I had. I waited for a second to reply, as if I were choosing my words with unusual care.

  “I’m sure anyone who watches this trial will be able to answer that question for themselves,” I said, adopting a slightly ominous tone.

  The old man at the back pushed his straw hat farther down on his forehead and began slowly and methodically to rake the grass. None of the reporters jammed together in front of where he had been noticed he was gone.

  “If Stanley Roth is innocent—if the police have really arrested the wrong man,” asked a rumpled-looking middle-aged reporter in a transparently cynical voice, “then who murdered Mary Margaret Flanders?”

  Without looking around, I could feel the eyes of Julie Evans, watching intently, waiting to hear what I was going to say. I turned until I was facing the reporter, singl
ing him out.

  “The killer of Mary Margaret Flanders was not her husband, but it was someone she knew,” I said with perfect confidence. “It was someone she brought home that night.”

  I paused just for an instant, and then, as if I knew a great deal more than I was going to say, added: “Someone she had known for a very long time.”

  It made them crazy. They were screaming, demanding to be heard. Who had she brought home? Who had she known for a long time? Who was it? Who killed her? Who killed Mary Margaret Flanders?

  I refused to say another word until they stopped; and when they did I still would not tell them what they wanted to know.

  “The answer to that,” I said with a grim smile, “will have to wait for the trial.”

  That was not good enough, not by half.

  “Then you don’t know who killed her, do you?” a voice yelled out.

  “I’ve told you all I can,” was my deliberately enigmatic reply. Before anyone could ask another question, I made a second announcement.

  “Stanley Roth has been arrested. Tomorrow morning, Mr. Roth will enter a plea of not guilty, and we will ask that a jury trial be scheduled for the earliest possible date. Stanley Roth wants to clear his name without delay, and he wants the police to begin a proper investigation into the murder of his wife.”

  I turned toward Julie Evans. She immediately stepped in front of me and announced that the press conference was over.

  “For someone who just got here this morning, you certainly sound like you know everything there is to know about this case,” whispered Julie as we slipped inside the gate and headed toward her studio office. “It sounds like you know who the murderer is.”

  The truth of course was that I did not know anything at all, except the importance of making it appear that I knew everything. That Stanley Roth had been arrested would be enough to make most people believe he was guilty. By insisting that the police were wrong, and perhaps even knew it; by claiming that the real killer was still out there, and suggesting that I had a pretty good idea who it might be, I had at least a chance to make a few of them think that Stanley Roth might not be guilty after all. First impressions are everything. When the television news first reported the arrest of Stanley Roth for the murder of his movie-star wife, the image I wanted them to see was not that of a killer finally caught, but of an innocent man falsely accused.

  “At least they haven’t changed the lock,” remarked Julie as we entered her office.

  There were three doors to Julie Evans’s office on the second floor of the building that housed all of the studio’s top executives. The one we had entered opened directly onto the hallway. The wooden door bore no markings of any kind, nothing to indicate who, or what, was behind it. Anyone with an appointment to see her went to the next door down the corridor, frosted glass with her name and title, executive assistant to Stanley Roth, lettered in gold. The third door connected her office to that of the great director and head of studio himself. It was closed and in the hushed atmosphere of her thick carpeted office I had the feeling that the only time it ever opened was when he came through it.

  “We have an hour before we have to go,” said Julie as she glanced at a cylindrical glass clock on the wall across from the rectangular glass table she used as a desk. It had no drawer, no place in which to file anything away. A telephone and a gold pen and pencil set were the only objects set on top. Behind her, a long credenza was stacked with what I assumed were movie scripts on which Stanley Roth was working and the countless memoranda of other things he wanted her to do.

  Lifting the telephone, she whispered a word. A few moments later the door to the outer office opened and a well-dressed woman with silver-gray hair and thick glasses brought in an armload of shiny black plastic folders and set them on the desk.

  “These are the studio files on Mary Margaret Flanders,” Julie explained. After tapping them into a perfect rectangle, she rose from her chair and took them into her arms.

  “Stanley said you should use his office,” said Julie.

  She waited for me to open the door and then led me inside. As she put the files down on Stanley Roth’s desk, she stole a glance at me, eager to watch my reaction. I had never seen anything quite like it. Everything in the room, which must have been forty feet long and twenty or twenty-five feet wide, was white. Everything, not just the ceiling and the walls and a few pieces of furniture everything: his desk and the chair that went with it; the plush, deep-pile wall-to-wall carpet; the fireplace, including the bricks inside; the two facing sofas; the lamps; the curtains; the blinds; even a white pen and pencil set prominently displayed in the middle of the front edge of the desk.

  “Stanley is a traditionalist,” explained Julie with a straight face. “Samuel Goldwyn’s office was like this: everything white. It could be worse. David Selznick had everything green, and not a very nice green, either,” she said as she moved toward the door to her office. “And not just his office: he had his car painted that color. Do you believe it?”

  “And those were the people who made the movies I used to love,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Discouraging, isn’t it?” she said with a conciliatory smile as she left.

  There was not a great deal to be learned from the studio files on Mary Margaret Flanders, nothing that anyone who had seen her movies and read the gossip columns would not already have known. There were literally dozens of photographs, used over the years for publicity; endless press releases used to promote her pictures; and, of course, copies of all the contracts entered into between her and the studio for the films she had done for Blue Zephyr.

  I had been there for perhaps half an hour when the door opened, not the one to Julie Evans’s office, but another one, on the opposite side of the room. A man in a tan double-breasted suit with small dark eyes and a pinched mouth glared at me. He was short, five foot five if he was that. He kept staring at me, as if I had committed some unpardonable act.

  “Mr. Roth isn’t here,” I said as I started to rise from the chair. “My name is Joseph Antonelli. Can I help you in some way?”

  He glared at me with renewed intensity, as if what I had said had offended him even more. He turned on his heel and left, swinging the door shut behind him. I went back to what I was reading. Another thirty minutes went by, and I was nearly finished when Julie suddenly appeared.

  “It’s time we got started,” she said, reminding me that in traffic it could take an hour to get to the dinner at the home of Louis Griffin.

  I nodded and finished the last page.

  “This is a contract for a picture that apparently hasn’t been released,” I said as I closed the file.

  “Hasn’t been finished. I’m not sure what’s going to happen,” she began as she gathered up the files to take them back to her office. “There were still a few scenes left to shoot with Mary Margaret. They either have to shoot around her or they have to junk the picture. That would be a disaster. It’s already over budget, and the budget was a hundred million. Maybe we’ll find out tonight,” she said as we shut the door to Stanley Roth’s office behind us. “If they don’t shoot us first for what we did with the press.”

  Chapter Five

  THE HOUSE WHERE LOUIS GRIFFIN sometimes lived and frequently entertained was either the third or the fourth one built on what had originally been a chicken ranch on what eventually became Mulholland Drive. A silent film star bought the land a few years before the Depression and spent what was then considered a fortune on the construction of a Tudor mansion supposed to remind him of the England of his youth. That the actor in question had been born in Brooklyn with an unpronounceable Slovakian name had long since been forgotten, even, perhaps, by him. His career came to a gradual end and he lived a strange, embittered existence in which he scarcely ever left the house and was almost never sober. Sometime in the late l930s—l938 or ’39—by now a drunken wreck, he was running one of his favorite movies when the celluloid film caught fire, perhaps from a cigarette left
un-extinguished in an ashtray next to the projector. The house burned to the ground, and the charred remains of the actor, who had been too intoxicated to move, or too mesmerized by his own performance, was found in the chair in which he had been sitting, still facing what was left of the screen.

  It sat there, during the long years of the war, three , evil-looking chimneys towering high above a naked, twisted heap of jagged broken beams, coal gray bricks and melted leaded glass. In l946, an industrialist who had been paid millions to develop faster fighter planes for the Navy, but had not produced even one of them before the war ended, bought the property and in place of the old Tudor mansion built a new Spanish villa. When he died forty years later, an old man who had outlived three wives and mistresses without number, the house had fallen into disrepair. Behind the bougainvillea, huge cracks spread over the walls. On the few days each year when the rains came, the broken tiles on the roof let the water drip through to the floor below. It had finally achieved the look that had appealed so much to the uninformed imagination of his middle age, a house that could be mistaken for one built under the Spanish land grants by which California had originally been divided.

  Louis Griffin did not care how old it was, only that it was too small. Under the tutelage of his socially ambitious wife, he had become a collector of art, though neither he nor his wife knew all that much about it. By virtue of her husband’s large contributions, she became a member of the board of The Museum of Modern Art; by virtue of his wife’s insistent and very public enthusiasm, he became a major buyer of the works of almost anyone who had the wit to call what they did Postimpressionism. They tore down the forty-year-old Spanish villa and built in its place a glass and stucco contemporary with fifteen-foot ceilings and endless temperature-controlled corridors. Three months after it was finished, the house was shifted off its foundation and completely destroyed by an earthquake. Apart from a thin covering of dust, none of the pieces of their collection suffered any serious damage. Construction began again, this time with reinforced steel, and the house of Mr. and Mrs. Louis Griffin was given a second life.