Star Witness

by D. W. Buffa

  “It may have been a mistake taking Chloe away. I didn’t want her to have any part of that kind of life; but in her mind, Chloe thought of her the way children think of a fairy godmother. She kept that autographed picture as if it were a promise of all the love in the world. She was certain nothing bad would ever happen to her because she knew her mother was always there with her, an unseen presence, more real than anyone, watching over her.

  “We were gone nearly five years. We came back because it was time for Chloe to start school, and because without all the distractions of American life, her character had already taken form. She was six years old. She spoke English, French and Italian; she had been playing the violin since she was three. Two weeks after we got home I took her to see her mother.

  “Marian—Mary Margaret Flanders—was at the studio, Blue Zephyr. She was on a soundstage, shooting a movie; and we were taken to her dressing room to wait. Chloe was wearing her prettiest dress. I don’t think I had ever seen her quite so excited. We waited half an hour and she was beaming the whole time, ecstatic that finally she was going to be reunited with her mother who, as she often told her friends, was the most famous, the most beautiful woman in the world.

  “There was a commotion outside the door. Chloe’s little eyes lit up. The door opened and Marian swept in, swearing a blue streak, while two assistants swirled around her, one of them working on her dress, the other trying without success to calm her down. She was beside herself about something that had just happened on the set. It was apparent from the look on the faces of the two assistants that they were used to these outbursts of ill temper.

  “Chloe just stood there, her eyes wide open. She did not know what to do or what to think.

  “‘Hello, Marian,’”

  I said as calmly as I could.

  “She wheeled around, angry that someone was there; angrier still that anyone would dare use that name. For an instant she stared at me, without any idea who I was. Then I saw in her eyes a flash of recognition; and I saw something else: that look you see when someone suddenly remembers they have an obligation to do something with you, something they would rather not do. As soon as she realized what it was, she did it the same way I imagine she had trained herself to do a scene: She looked down at Chloe, took her hands, and pretended she had a daughter.

  “‘Let me get a good look at you. You’ve become such a beautiful young lady. I’m so proud of you, Chloe,’ she said.

  “She led her to a sofa and sat next to her, holding her hand.

  “‘You’re going to have to tell me all about what you’ve been doing. But not right now. I have to get back to the set. We’re making a movie. Isn’t that wonderful!’ Maybe she hoped Chloe would think so, too. ‘But I made them all stop working just so I could come and see you,’ she said. ‘And I’m so glad I did.’

  “Marian got to her feet, and with that smile with which, as they used to say so often in the publicity for her movies, she had captured the hearts of millions, broke the heart of a single little girl.

  “‘I have to get back now, but I’ll see you again soon. We’ll be able to spend a lot more time. I promise.’

  “Then she was gone. Chloe did not say a word, not one thing, until we were outside the studio. She was quite calm; whatever disappointment she felt—and she must have felt more disappointment than anything I have ever known—had somehow been put away, hidden from the world; hidden, perhaps, even from herself. She was clutching my hand.

  “‘I don’t think she likes me very much, does she, Daddy?’

  “I could not look her in the eye; I had to look away. I mumbled something about of course she loved her that we had just come at a bad time, that next time it would be a lot better. She gave my hand a squeeze, and I knew she did not believe me and that she wanted me to know it was enough that I had tried.”

  Resting the side of his head on the fingertips of his left hand, Paul Erlich narrowed his eyes into a desolate stare.

  “Marian and I had a child together; but Marian did not exist anymore,” said Erlich with the kind of conviction that has banished all doubt. “She was Mary Margaret Flanders and everything that had happened to her before had happened to someone else. They buried Mary Margaret Flanders the movie star last month; Marian Walsh, the girl I loved, the mother of my daughter, died ten years ago.”

  Chapter Eight

  I AM NOT SURE WHEN I first became aware of Jack Walsh; became aware of him, that is, as something more than the name of Marian Walsh’s father. It was probably the same way I had first become aware of her, Mary Margaret Flanders. I must have noticed her right from the beginning—you could scarcely help noticing her; that was the gift she had: that talent for being noticed. I heard Jack Walsh’s name a half dozen different times before I realized that he was suddenly everywhere, the grief-stricken father of the girl he claimed always to have loved, demanding that his daughter’s killer get what he deserved.

  He was at it again, explaining on yet another daytime television show how he had always known that his daughter, Mary Margaret, was going to grow up to be a star. That is what he called her: Mary Margaret. Maybe he had forgotten the one he had given her, become so blinded by her fame, seen her name so often and in so many different places, that he convinced himself it must have been the one he had chosen, the only one she had ever had.

  I had just returned from Sausalito where I spent every weekend at home with Marissa, my only refuge from all the pressures of trying to prepare Stanley Roth’s defense, and the only place where I could escape the prying eyes and the shouted insistent questions of reporters desperate to run down the latest rumor or start one of their own. Unpacking my suitcase in the suite at the Chateau Marmont, the suite that was paid for whether I stayed there or not, I was not really listening to Jack Walsh, but then he was asked why if he loved his daughter so much he abandoned her when she was still a child. Setting the armload of dress shirts down on the bed, I pulled a chair up in front of the television set.

  “I did not abandon my daughter,” insisted Walsh. “It broke my heart when her mother told me she didn’t want to live with me anymore and asked me to leave. It didn’t break my heart that she wanted a divorce. It wasn’t a very good marriage, and I don’t doubt that a lot of the blame for that is mine; but I never wanted a divorce. I was raised in a broken home and that was the last thing I ever wanted for Mary Margaret.”

  In his early fifties now, with gray hair streaked with brown, Jack Walsh had the kind of crude good looks that had taught him to believe that he could talk, perhaps not any woman, but any woman who was not quite as young, not quite as attractive, as she once had been, into almost anything he wanted her to think. What might have passed for sincerity and charm in the eyes of a lonely, middleaged woman sitting in some suburban lounge out in the valley was lost completely on the smartly dressed talk show host who had both eyes focused firmly on the main chance. She pursued him with a relentless smile.

  “Two years ago, I interviewed Mary Margaret Flanders myself. She told me then that her father had abandoned her and her mother when she was just a child.”

  She had called him a liar, but watching him you knew that of all the things she could have done, that was the one thing for which he was most prepared. There was nothing in his eyes, nothing in his expression, to signal any feeling of resentment; certainly none of that bristling indignation by which more prominent people react to anything that seems to question their integrity. Jack Walsh had never had the luxury of standing on his reputation or insisting on his due. A lifetime of small acts of duplicity had proven to him over and over again that instead of telling the truth it was always better to claim that he had through no fault of his own been grievously misunderstood. Benevolent and forgiving, he looked into her harsh stare.

  “And if you had talked to her after that, you’d know that she now understood why I left. You’d know that the things she had been told by her mother ... well, weren’t all true.”

  Pausing, Walsh smiled sa
dly.

  “I’m sure her mother meant well. She probably thought it was the easiest way to start the new life she wanted. She got married again, you know; about six months later, as a matter of fact. I think he was the kind of man she had always wanted: good job, steady, someone who could give her the things she wanted. I was always kind of a dreamer, I guess,” said Walsh, shaking his head in a way that suggested that no matter how hard he tried, he was not the kind of man who could ever really settle down. “I just wanted something more out of life than a nine-to-five job somewhere. Mary Margaret was a lot like me that way, I think. As I say, I knew right away she was destined for bigger things.”

  He closed his mouth and clenched his teeth; his eyes became hard, unforgiving.

  “And now he’s ruined it; taken her away from me; taken her away from everybody. I’m not going to let him get away with it,” said Walsh, glaring defiantly. “He may think he’s going to get away with it; he may think he can bamboozle a jury with all his money and all his friends; but if Jack Walsh never does another thing in his life, I tell you he’s going to make sure that the murder of his daughter does not go unpunished!”

  In the daylight shadows of my hotel room, I crouched forward, my elbows resting on my knees, watching intently as Marian Walsh’s delinquent father talked of outrage and revenge. It was astonishing how in such a short time Jack Walsh had learned to take any question and turn it to his own advantage. He had an instinct for publicity.

  Stiff and alert, the host, someone who called herself Arlene Bascomb, made the obligatory gesture toward fair-minded impartiality:

  “Mr. Roth has been accused of the murder of your daughter, but he insists he isn’t guilty. He’s entitled to the presumption of innocence, isn’t he?”

  “What ‘presumption’ did Mary Margaret get? What was she entitled to?” demanded Walsh angrily. “Oh, I know—I hear it every day—the ‘rights of the accused.’ What about the rights of the victim? What about the rights of my daughter? But of course it’s too late for her, isn’t it?” asked Walsh with withering sarcasm. “She’s dead. Her killer is still alive, so everyone forgets about her and talks about him; about his right to a fair trial; about his right to be presumed innocent. Let them give him his fair trial,” said Walsh scornfully. “I want him to have a fair trial; I want everyone to hear all the evidence: I want everyone to know what Stanley Roth is really like. I knew she should never have married him.”

  Ready with her next question, Bascomb had been waiting for him to finish, but this last remark took her by surprise.

  “You didn’t think she should marry Stanley Roth? Whatever you think of him now, you couldn’t possibly have imagined that anything like this would happen.”

  He gave her a look that suggested she should not be so sure.

  “You couldn’t possibly have thought Stanley Roth was the kind of man who would murder his wife,” she insisted.

  “He did not love her,” said Walsh emphatically, “he just wanted to own her. He wanted to control her. He wanted to control everything: what pictures she was in; what she did; who she saw; what she did with her money,” he added with a contemptuous sneer. “That’s why he killed her.”

  “That’s why he killed her?” repeated Bascomb with a blank look. “Because he wanted to control her?”

  “Because she wouldn’t let him; because she was not going to put up with it anymore; because she was tired of it, tired of being beaten up.”

  I sprang to my feet, staring at the television set. Roth had told me about what he had done, how he had once hit his wife; but who had told Jack Walsh? Perhaps he was only guessing, jumping to the conclusion that if Roth had been willing to kill her, he might have committed some other act of violence against her before. It did not really matter. Jack Walsh had just told the world, and the world was not likely to insist on much in the way of proof before believing the worst about someone accused of murdering a woman as well known and as well loved as Mary Margaret Flanders.

  “Mary Margaret was going to leave him. That’s the reason he killed her. She was going to leave him and he couldn’t stand that,” claimed Jack Walsh. “No one leaves Stanley Roth.”

  Walsh had never said anything like this before. Bascomb’s telephone was going to be ringing off the hook. Other reporters, other journalists, people from network news shows were going to be asking her what she thought about what Jack Walsh had said and whether she had known in advance that he was going to say it. She was going to be asked to appear on who knows how many shows herself. Careers had been made on less. She what any investigative reporter would have done: She asked him how he knew.

  “Because she told me,” announced Walsh, raising his chin, a gesture of defiance to anyone who cared to challenge the veracity of what he said. “Just a week before he killed her.”

  Reaching for the small notebook I carried in the pocket of the jacket I had thrown over a chair, I started scribbling notes, trying to capture as close to verbatim as I could everything Jack Walsh had said.

  Concealing behind the bland exterior of her professional personality the excitement she must have felt, Bascomb asked him why he had not said anything about this before.

  “You’ve been interviewed quite a lot over the last several months, Mr. Walsh; why have you waited until your appearance here today to tell us that your daughter, Mary Margaret Flanders, was planning to divorce her husband, Stanley Roth?”

  Walsh nodded as he listened, then stopped moving his head when she was through.

  “I was not going to say anything until the trial, but when I read about what Stanley Roth was saying about how much they loved each other, I thought it was time to set the record straight.”

  Walsh bent closer, as if he were about to impart something equally devastating to the defense.

  “If he was innocent, why would he have to get one of the most expensive lawyers in the country?” he asked with the smirking certainty of someone who knows already what the verdict should be. “You think the people Joseph Antonelli defends are innocent? You think all those people he keeps off death row are innocent victims arrested by mistake?”

  The show went to commercial and I went into orbit. I picked up the telephone and called Stanley Roth at home. No one answered. I looked in my book for the other numbers I had for him when the phone started ringing for me. It was Julie Evans. She had been trying to reach me all day.

  “I just got in,” I explained. “Did Roth go on television this weekend while I was gone?”

  She could tell I was angry, and I had the answer I needed by the hesitation I heard in her voice.

  “Tell him to get another lawyer,” I said abruptly. Without giving her a chance to reply, I hung up the phone. Two minutes later, the phone rang again.

  “I’m serious, Julie; tell him I’m through. I told him at the beginning that either he did what I told him or I would not take the case.”

  It was not Julie; it was Stanley Roth.

  “Yes, you did; and you were right. I shouldn’t have done what I did. If it makes any difference, I didn’t do it on purpose. A reporter I know came to the house. I didn’t invite her. She didn’t have a camera. We just talked. Then she went on the air and told everyone what I said. I didn’t say much; just that I loved Mary Margaret and she loved me.”

  I could hear in the background the muted voices of at least one woman and several men.

  “Look, this isn’t a good time to talk about this. Can you come over? That’s why Julie was calling: We’re at the studio. I’ve moved out of the house; I’m staying at the bungalow.”

  IN THE PALE YELLOW-GRAY light of a late Southern California afternoon, the heat rising from the sunbaked asphalt, I threaded my way across town. The traffic stopped and started, a great swirling mass that gave the illusion of everyone moving together in a single direction. Even when the jam had broken, and everyone was free to drive as fast as they wanted, there was not the same sense of frenetic urgency you felt when you were caught on a highway somewhe
re else. Maybe it was the weather; maybe it was the way everyone seemed to pay more attention to the conversations they had on their cell phones than to the traffic around them; or maybe it was just that here they spent so much time in their cars, moving from one unsettled place to another, that after a while they were more comfortable going somewhere than they were when they finally arrived.

  Turning the corner from behind a block of modest white stucco apartment buildings lined sideways to the street, I came into view of the graceful high sloping palm trees in front of the studio. I had been here at least a dozen times, and, as I now realized, had never once wondered why it had been called Blue Zephyr or, for that matter, what it was supposed to mean. Perhaps it did not mean anything, perhaps it had been chosen because of the way it sounded, the way a baby, caught up in the first rhythms of spoken speech babbles nonsense with such great delight.

  As I got closer I noticed the slender figure of Julie Evans waiting just inside the dark blue gold-tipped iron gate, next to the station where the security guard checked everyone who came in or out. Instead of flowing long and loose over her shoulder, her blonde hair was pulled tight along the sides of her head and tied at the back. Wearing dark glasses, she kept glancing up and down the street as if afraid someone might be watching.

  The gate shut behind me, and Julie got into the car, a wry expression on her face. Reaching across, she patted me gently on the shoulder, her way of letting me know that she knew what I had said to Roth on the telephone.

  “It wasn’t Stanley’s fault. I admit he probably shouldn’t have talked to her at all, but Madeleine Madden is an old friend. She’s an entertainment reporter, not a news reporter...”

  Julie laughed at what she had just said, struck by how that distinction, in this town always incongruous, had with this case become nothing short of absurd.

  “It was a mistake,” conceded Julie with a gentle smile; “but I’m as guilty as anyone. I was there when she came to the house. I thought she was just there to give him moral support. Besides, it wouldn’t have made any difference if he hadn’t talked to her. Jack Walsh would have found another reason to go after Stanley.”