Star Witness

by D. W. Buffa

  We came around the bend and stopped at the gold tipped black iron gate between two rows of boxed hedges that hid from view everything except the first few yards of the circular drive. Julie rolled down her window, and pushed the speaker button on a metal intercom. Harsh with static, a voice asked her to identify herself. Patiently, she gave both our names. A moment later, the gate parted in the middle, and each half slowly pulled back to the side.

  It was seven o’clock precisely when we arrived in front of the house and turned the car over to the parking attendant. We were right on time, and we were the last to arrive. A Rolls-Royce, a Bentley, and three Mercedes were lined up together in the area reserved for guests at the far edge of the drive. I exchanged a glance with Julie as we walked toward the large sculpted double doors at the entrance.

  “It means everyone wanted to be here when you arrived.” She pushed the doorbell, a wry, fugitive smile on her mouth. “As of about two hours ago, when that press conference was first carried on television, you became the newest famous person in town.”

  Like someone getting ready for a formal appearance, Julie straightened up, quickly running her hand over her forehead, sweeping out of the way a single strand of hair.

  “Which means,” she added, adjusting her smile for the enthusiastic greeting she was ready to exchange the moment the door swung open, “you’re now the most famous person in town.”

  Without quite knowing why, I buttoned my jacket and slid my hand quickly across my shirt, making certain my tie was in place.

  Though he had servants who could have done it, Louis Griffin usually answered the door himself.

  “Hello, Louis,” said Julie, beaming right on cue when the door opened. She kissed Louis Griffin on the side of his face and then, her hand on his arm, introduced him to me.

  We shook hands; or, rather, I grasped his hand and he allowed me to do so, though only for an instant. Almost the moment I touched his soft, supple hand, he was letting go. Strangely enough, it did not convey unfriendliness, much less contempt; it seemed more an expression of discomfort, a kind of instinctive shy aversion to the kind of mauling, backslapping greeting often inflicted by people who want you to think you’re friends.

  Dressed in a tan jacket and a white dress shirt open at the collar, a pair of slacks slightly darker than the jacket, and a pair of brown woven loafers, Griffin was thin and angular. If you had seen him first in a photograph taken of him alone you would have thought him much taller than he actually was. In fact he was nearly as short as the man who had stared daggers when he found me sitting in Stanley Roth’s office, five foot six at the outside. He had a high forehead and a rather querulous mouth, as if over the years he had come to expect unpleasantness. What caught your attention immediately, however, were his eyes, not the way they looked, but the way they worked. He would turn toward you and in a strange, rapid rhythm, quickly blink twice. Only then would he speak.

  Griffin led us into the dining room where everyone had already been seated. As soon as we entered the room, they all circled around me, waiting to be introduced. Smiling to herself, Julie found her place at the table.

  Three of the people I met were people I had seen before, in movies that as best I could remember went back at least twenty or thirty years, famous faces that were always there on the magazines at every airport and grocery store, faces I saw more often than all but a few of my friends. Two of them, Walker Bradley and the much younger Carole Conrad, were husband and wife. It was said that he married her because she was the last woman he had slept with when he was single and there were not any more left. Whether it was the result of his legendary amorous adventures, or the consequence of repeated cosmetic surgery, Bradley had the wide-eyed, tired look of someone who had just jumped out of the shower after not having gone to bed the night before. His wife, decades younger, grasped my hand with both of hers and looked at me with such gushing sincerity that her eyes, squinting tight, began to grow moist.

  The other face I knew belonged to one of the loveliest women I had ever seen. If anything, Elizabeth Hawking was even more beautiful off the screen than she was on it. She had begun her career about the same time as Mary Margaret Flanders, but had not been quite so successful. She was considered too refined, too innocent, for the kind of explosive, sexually explicit parts that had made Mary Margaret Flanders such a box office draw. There was a sort of glittering eagerness about her that made you like her the moment you saw her. She was with a man I did not recognize. Melvin Shorenstein was the head of Universal Creative Management, UCM, the biggest agency in the business. Shorenstein represented Elizabeth Hawking. He had also represented, as he immediately mentioned, Mary Margaret Flanders. He shook my hand firmly.

  “Stanley didn’t do it,” said Shorenstein with a quick glance at the other people gathered around. “You can believe me about that,” he said earnestly, still gripping my hand. “Stanley didn’t do it. Stanley was in love with her. You can believe me about that,” he added as he finally let go.

  Standing behind Shorenstein, waiting for him to finish, was an attractive couple in their early forties, William S. Pomeroy, the producer, and his wife, Estelle, a writer. He seemed vaguely familiar. Then I remembered that his father had been a prominent and widely respected senator from Michigan, married to the daughter of one of the early, legendary figures in the automobile industry. I remembered what Stanley Roth had said about the privileged sons of wealthy parents who tried to get into the movie business, but Pomeroy could have made it on his own.

  Louis Griffin put his arm around my shoulder and turned me toward a tall, well-built man in his seventies with flowing snow-white hair and blue, curious eyes. An eager smile of baffled enthusiasm stretched across his strong mouth, lending him the look of someone determined to plunge ahead, confident in the belief that the good intentions of an honest heart will always triumph in the end.

  “You’re Robert Mansfield,” I blurted out before I could recover from the surprise of finding myself suddenly face to face with the idol of my youth.

  “Yes,” he replied, pumping my hand like we were old friends meeting after a protracted absence. “Yes,” he repeated, laughing heartily. The laughter stopped. He looked at me intently.

  “And you are?”

  “Joseph Antonelli,” I said quietly as if it was something that must just have slipped his mind. Mansfield brightened immediately. “Oh, yes. Joseph Antonelli. Yes, yes; that’s fine, just fine.”

  He pumped my hand twice more, then let go and turned to his wife, a handsome Latin woman of an age not much different than his own. She took her eyes off him only long enough to bestow upon me a gracious smile.

  “And these two beautiful women,” said Louis Griffin, putting his arm around both of them, “are my wife, Clarice, and Rebecca Wirthlin.”

  Michael Wirthlin was sitting at the table, talking to Julie. He was the only one who had not come to greet me. When I got a clear look at him, I was not surprised. He was the same man who had come into Stanley Roth’s office and found me sitting at his partner’s desk. When I sat down, we were introduced across the table. His only response was a single polite nod. Turning away, he resumed his conversation with Julie Evans, seated on his right.

  The dining room faced out onto a courtyard and a long shallow rectangular pond filled with water lilies. A pair of white swans glided effortlessly from one end to the other. Three silent waiters served dinner, while a fourth appeared out of nowhere whenever a glass needed refilling.

  “You’ve all had a chance to meet Joseph Antonelli,” said Louis Griffin after everyone had started on their salad. He turned to me. “All of us are very interested in anything you can tell us about the case—what you expect to happen—whether Stanley will have to stay in jail until the trial.”

  Griffin hesitated. As an embarrassed smile flashed across his mouth, he thought about what he was going to say. He quickly blinked twice.

  “This is a little awkward, of course; but I’m afraid that what has happened
affects us all.”

  Griffin seemed to think that I knew what he meant. He waited for me to tell him, to tell them all, what I thought. Just as I opened my mouth to express my bewilderment, I heard the voice that years before had so often held my attention and captured my imagination.

  “You know, Bogie was almost murdered,” announced Robert Mansfield with that slightly astonished look he always had whenever he said something that had just occurred to him. “When he first started seeing Lauren,” he explained. “It was his third wife—or was it his second? —Mayo, Mayo Methot. Yes, that was her name. By God, I never did know why he married her,” he said, leaning forward, his arms stretched out on the table. He looked slowly from side to side. “She was not at all attractive. He came home one night after drying out at a place somewhere down on Sunset Boulevard—can’t remember the name of it right now, but a lot of the fellows used to go there when they wanted to stop drinking for a while. Bogie comes home and Mayo is standing in the living room singing—singing, mind you!—‘Embraceable You.’ That was the song. Apparently, she sang it all the time, not because she liked it that much, but as a warning, a warning that she was going to do something. Well, she did something all right. She was holding a kitchen knife behind her back, singing ‘Embraceable You,’ and she lunged at him. She did not get him, though—not at first. Bogie ducked out of the way and tried to run. But she caught him, stabbed him in the back. He woke up on the floor, heard the doctor say it wasn’t that bad, that he was lucky, only the tip of the knife had gone in. Then he passed out again. Wasn’t like in the movies.”

  He was looking at me, that great baffled smile on his face, just the way I had always seen it.

  “Do you like the movies?” he asked. The smile did not change, it did not move; but something behind it seemed to go away, and what was left was something lonely, something a little lost.

  “Yes, I like the movies; although I have to admit I liked them a lot more when you were still making them. Those were my favorites. I haven’t seen anything as good since.”

  Part of him came back. There was a glimmer, not of gratitude exactly; more like recognition of something we both understood, a fact on which we could both agree.

  After the main course was served, Michael Wirthlin, who had not spoken a word to me, broke off a brief conversation he had been having with the actress Elizabeth Hawking.

  “Mr. Antonelli,” he said in a surprisingly rich, cultured voice, “Louis was asking your reaction about this terrible situation in which we now find ourselves.”

  He held his hands in front of him, dangling over the table, the tips of his fingers pressed together. A smile of purely artificial politeness covered his small closed mouth. Like a bookkeeper in the back room, his eyes began to take my measure.

  “Let me explain,” he went on, darting a brief glance to the end of the table, as if to signal Griffin that what he was about to say concerned him as well. “When Mary Margaret ... died,” said Wirthlin, consciously diplomatic, “we were just days away from finishing her last picture. The studio has over a hundred million invested in this project.”

  I kept looking at Wirthlin, but out of the corner of my eye I watched Julie’s reaction. She had told me this was the thing with which the studio would be most concerned. Her face was a mask of indifference, as if she found nothing unsavory or even unusual in calculating the economic consequences of someone’s death.

  “I’m sure you understand. We could not just walk away from it; we have to finish. It’s difficult, but Bill has pulled everything together,” said Wirthlin, nodding toward William Pomeroy. “The writers have come up with a new ending, one that works without Mary Margaret. It shouldn’t take more than a few weeks to finish.”

  Wirthlin permitted himself another brief, pointless smile.

  “We had planned to release the movie as soon as possible.”

  I was beginning to understand. I crossed my arms over my chest and smiled back.

  “While everyone still has her fresh in their minds,” I ventured to say.

  “Yes, of course,” he said, glad that I was not wholly ignorant of the way things in his world worked. “When something like this happens,” he added, just to be sure, “when someone famous dies, there is a period of time—a fairly short period of time—when that is all anyone wants to talk about. When Princess Diana died, for example. But wait a year, or even sometimes just a few months, and no one cares anymore. They have other things on their minds. It’s almost as if that person who was so well known, so well loved, had never really existed at all.”

  Wirthlin paused, waiting for some kind of response. I made no reply, and then, as if to impress upon me that there was some as yet undefined sense in which I was involved in this as well, he added:

  “It was Stanley’s idea. He insisted upon it. No, he demanded that we finish the picture and get it out.”

  “As a tribute to Mary Margaret,” said Pomeroy’s wife, apparently without thinking.

  Wirthlin shot a disapproving glance in her direction, like someone correcting a child.

  “That’s right,” said Wirthlin, as if she had only been echoing what he felt. “We all want this, her last movie— which, by the way, we all think is her best—to be a tribute to her memory. But, now, with that unfortunate business today, there may be a problem.”

  “A problem?” I asked.

  “Yes. It’s what you said today, in that press conference, the one you held outside the studio. You said that whoever killed Mary Margaret was someone she brought home with her.”

  I wanted him to say exactly what he had on his mind. I stretched out my legs under the table, crossing one ankle over the other, and then lowered my head.

  “How is that a problem?” I asked, narrowing my eyes as I looked at him from under my brow.

  He pulled his head a little way back and for a moment searched my eyes.

  “Because it suggests that there was something illicit going on.”

  “Christ, Michael, she was murdered! And you’re worried about ‘illicit’?” exclaimed Elizabeth Hawking in a sarcastic, high-pitched voice that was nothing like the smooth gentility of the one she used in her movies.

  Wirthlin winced, but did not waste time on a look.

  “Mary Margaret Flanders had a certain image,” he went on, concentrating his attention on me; “an image carefully cultivated, and at considerable expense, over a long period of time. No one is minimizing the tragedy of her death, but—and I think Stanley would agree with this—the one thing that could make what’s happened even worse is if her public were to turn on her because of some vague suspicions surrounding her death. I’m sure you can find a way to defend Stanley without subjecting his wife to innuendo and without damaging the substantial interests of the studio he helped to create and she did so much to make successful.”

  I took my eyes off Wirthlin long enough to glance at Julie Evans. Avoiding my gaze, she began to pick at her food.

  My first impulse was to tell Wirthlin that it was none of his business what I did; my second was to let him know what I thought by ignoring what he had said. I turned away from Wirthlin and caught the eye of Walker Bradley.

  “You knew Mary Margaret Flanders. Who do you think she might have brought home with her late at night, when her husband was already asleep and she knew she would not be disturbed?”

  Even when he was not in a movie, Bradley always played himself. In the same way I had seen him do it dozens of times before, he moved his head a little to the side and, with his mouth partly open, ready to reply, waited while I finished the question.

  “No,” he insisted, “I don’t know anyone she would have done that with.”

  Holding his wife’s hand, he drew himself up and with all the sincerity he could muster insisted again, “I can’t believe it could have been someone she knew. Everybody loved her.”

  “Did Stanley love her?” asked Elizabeth Hawking out loud. “I wonder if he really did?”

  “What do you mean b
y that?” asked Clarice Griffin, not so much offended, as interested, in the suggestion implicit in the question. Everyone around the table turned to see what Elizabeth Hawking was going to say next.

  At first she did not say anything at all. A wistful smile floated across her mouth, the brief reflection of something remembered, some sorrow left in her own heart, made perhaps inevitable by who and what she had become.

  “Rita Hayworth played the lead in a movie called Gilda, the movie that made her a star... .”

  “Gilda!” cried Robert Mansfield with a sudden burst of energy. “Oh, yes, I knew Gilda!”

  The spark was back in his wintry eyes. He was ready to regale us with another dimly remembered episode from his embellished past. His wife placed a cautionary hand on his sleeve. Suddenly subdued, he bent his forehead and instead of speaking, cleared his throat.

  “Rita Hayworth supposedly said,” continued Hawking, “that her problem with men was that they went to bed with Gilda and woke up with her. That’s what I meant, about whether Stanley Roth loved—really loved—Mary Margaret. That’s all.”

  I stole a glimpse at the aging Robert Mansfield. He was staring down at the table, a curious smile crossing his still remarkably handsome face, listening, I imagined, to all the things about Gilda he had now to keep to himself.

  Michael Wirthlin’s small mouth hardened into an expression of irritation. He put his hands once again in front of him, only now, instead of pressing his fingers together, he began to tap them against each other. His eyes were focused on them, or rather on something just the other side of them.

  “So what you’re saying,” he said, his stare becoming more intense, “is that, contrary to what Antonelli here was telling us—what he was telling the world just a few hours ago—that she brought someone back to the house with her who killed her, Stanley Roth, the head of the studio, did it after all?”