by D. W. Buffa
Julie turned the corner on her way to her car in the parking lot and disappeared from view. She was gone, but Roth was still staring at where he had seen her last, that same smile playing on his mouth like a song that after the music stops keeps echoing in your mind. I was caught up in the mood, standing next to him, watching a good-looking young woman the way I used to watch good-looking girls, girls I didn’t know, girls I knew I’d never meet, wondering vaguely what might happen if I did. The summer scent of evening—the jasmine and the lush close-cut grass, the lemon trees and the orange trees, the bougainvillea and the daylong heat just slipping away— brought back memories of secret nighttime yearnings and shared and sometimes stolen frenzied intimacies.
Roth took a long look around, gazing up past the palms, out across the empty high-vaulted sky.
“That’s what we did when I was a kid growing up in the valley; that’s what summer was: Go to a movie when you could afford it, then stand around and watch the girls you knew would never look at you because you didn’t have a car and you weren’t any good at football or basketball or anything else. The best-looking girls you ever see in your life are the girls in high school who wouldn’t look at you twice.”
Roth rubbed his nose with the back of his finger. He looked at me and smiled.
“Sonia Melinkoff—there’s a name for you. I would have pumped gas in a service station for the rest of my life if she’d wanted to marry me. I don’t think I ever would have regretted it, either.”
He gazed again down the palm-lined street. The smile slowly vanished.
“Be careful what you say around Julie. She’s completely loyal to me, but if the time comes when she decides that’s not in her interest, she’ll betray me, not only without a second thought, but without any thought at all. She’s already told you she thinks I did it—killed Mary Margaret—hasn’t she?”
“Is that what she told you?” I replied, not certain what he knew and what, for reasons of his own, he was trying to find out.
“She did, didn’t she?” insisted Roth with a friendly grin, as if it were nothing very important; that it was, in fact, something he had always assumed—that everyone, at least everyone in that business, would always first look out for themselves.
“No, she did not.”
It was not a lie, but it was not the truth, either; not the whole truth, anyway.
“She didn’t say she thought you killed your wife. She did say,” I went on, changing slightly the context of the conversation I had had with her that first day we met, “that the only way you could have done a thing like that is if your wife had driven you to it.”
Before he could say anything in reply, I asked without any change of tone: “Is that what happened? Did she do something that drove you to it?”
I still was not sure. Sometimes I did not think I knew anything about Stanley Roth beyond the bare surface— the opinions, the attitudes, the simple, straightforward facts of his life. Perhaps that is all we ever know about anyone, what we see—or what we think we see—on the surface. It had come, not exactly as a shock, but as a kind of surprise, when I first realized that instead of being wiser, more knowing, than the dream world he created, Stanley Roth might actually share with the audiences that came to his movies the same blind belief that things always worked out for the best and that evil never went entirely unpunished. That is what made it possible that Julie Evans had been right: that he could have killed his wife if she had done something terrible, something that provoked him into a rage and made him think that she deserved to die.
“You hit her—you told me you wished you had killed her—because she aborted your child,” I reminded him when he began again to protest his innocence.
Roth stared hard at me; then, swearing into the night, marched inside the bungalow.
“Look,” he said as he dropped into the chair at his desk; “if you want off the case, just get the hell off. But quit asking me if I did it. I’ve told you a thousand times: I didn’t do it. Is saying it one more time going to make any difference?”
“You haven’t said it a thousand times,” I said sharply. “You’ve said it exactly three times: The first time was the first time we met, and the second time was two days ago—Friday—when I got the DNA results. The third time was just now.”
Roth’s arms dangled over the sides of the chair; his legs were sprawled out in front of him. With a look of exasperation, he emitted a low chugging sound, as if he was trying to extract something caught deep in his throat.
“I didn’t do it,” he said, in a voice suddenly lethargic. “I know it doesn’t look good. I don’t know how her blood got on that clothing, and I don’t know how that shirt got into my closet. I didn’t put it there.”
It was difficult to believe, and if I had a hard time believing it, what was a jury going to think? The DNA results were beyond dispute, and as damning to the defense as anything the prosecution could have hoped for.
Roth claimed that because he had to be on the set early, he had been sleeping in another room the night his wife was murdered, but a bloodstained shirt had been found in a wicker laundry hamper inside Stanley Roth’s dressing room, just off the master bath. The blood belonged to Mary Margaret Flanders.
A sullen look in his eyes, Roth stuffed his hands inside his pants pockets and sank lower into the chair.
“I’d have to be pretty stupid, wouldn’t I? First I murder Mary Margaret—slash her throat with a knife— and then, though I’m smart enough to get rid of the murder weapon, I leave a shirt with her blood all over it in the laundry hamper in my own bathroom!”
It made no sense, not to him anyway; and that was all the proof he needed, all the proof, he ventured to suggest, anyone would need.
“It’s too obvious,” he insisted. Suddenly invigorated, he sprang to his feet.
“Want another?” he asked as he mixed himself a second scotch and soda. “Sure?” he asked when I declined.
He came back to his chair, but instead of sitting down placed his left hand on the back of it. While he took a drink he thought of how it worked to our advantage. In his director’s mind, one scene always led to another.
“I wouldn’t have done anything that stupid. Someone else had to have put it there. They wanted me to be blamed for Mary Margaret’s murder. This wasn’t some afterthought, some idea the killer got after the murder: This was something planned in advance. They came there that night, not just to murder Mary Margaret Flanders,” he said, talking now in the third person, “but to have Stanley Roth accused of murder.”
Roth looked at me, a somber expression on his face. He tapped his fingers together.
“Did you ever consider that possibility? That the real reason Mary Margaret was murdered was so that I could be blamed for it? That this whole thing was a plot to get me?”
“But who?” I asked. “Who would go to that kind of trouble—kill your wife—murder Mary Margaret Flanders—just so you could be blamed for it? Why would they murder her at all? If you were the one they wanted, why didn’t they just murder you instead?”
Roth opened the middle drawer of the desk and removed a small, tarnished key which he then used to unlock a double drawer on the lower right side. Reaching down, he pulled out a manuscript, perhaps a hundred fifty or two hundred pages long. He put it under his arm and got to his feet. I caught a glimpse of a white label pasted to the dark blue cover. On it was typed a two-word title.
“Blue Zephyr? You’re making a movie about the studio?”
Roth changed from his sports coat into a tan windbreaker. He put on a baseball cap and a pair of dark glasses.
“Come on,” he said as he headed toward the door, the manuscript tucked under his arm. “Let’s take a ride.”
He was at the door before I could answer.
“We’ll take your car,” he said as I caught up with him. “Any reporter outside will think you’re leaving and that I’m still here.”
We drove out the gate, Roth crouching down in the front seat
. He stayed there, the baseball cap shoved over his eyes until we were a few blocks away; then he pushed himself up, looked around to make sure no one was following and asked me to pull over. He hopped out and came round to my side.
“You mind if I drive?”
We changed places, but before Roth pulled away from the curb, he handed me the script for Blue Zephyr.
“There is one other copy. It’s in a safe place. Take this one; read it. I’ve been working on it for three years, every chance I get. It’s going to be the best thing I’ve ever done,” he said with complete self-assurance. His eyes were fixed on the road in front of him. “It’s going to be one of the best things anyone has ever done.”
Roth drove to Santa Monica and parked on the street next to a public park. We sat on top of a picnic table, our feet on the bench below, looking out across a white sandy beach at the ocean. The sun had vanished below the wide, flat horizon. The first star was visible in the darkening sky. A breeze came cool and clean off the water. A few children were running half-naked in front of the waves, darting like shadows in the ankle-high surf. Holding her sandals over her shoulder by the strap, a pretty young girl of seventeen or eighteen kicked sand with her feet, then scampered two or three steps ahead while an awkward young man struggled to keep up.
“When I first came here, just a kid who wanted to make movies, I lived here—just down the block. I grew up in the Central Valley, not far from Modesto. You ever been there? Hot, dry, flat, a hundred miles from the ocean. Might as well have been a million.”
A look of nostalgia crept slowly into Roth’s eyes. It was odd the way his eyes were the dominant feature in his face. He was not what anyone—man or woman—would call good-looking. Some men, when they reach their fifties, take on a certain air, have a way about them, something that, if it doesn’t make them handsome, makes them look interesting, like men who know what they want and have become used to getting it. Stanley Roth had nothing of that. He had a thin, crooked mouth, and heavy-lidded eyes that drooped at the corners. His nose was too large, too broad; it gave him a ponderous, sluggish aspect. His chin was small, with a delicate, feminine shape suggesting indecisiveness and a natural timidity. His eyes changed everything, but even they did not produce an immediate effect. It was only after you had been with him a while that you began to notice how perfectly they matched the emotions of the moment. They moved scarcely at all, and never with the darting uncertainty of a nervous or excited reaction. It was more subtle than that, and more effective: a slight change in how open, or how closed, they were; a different shade of light, a muted change of color, as he lowered or raised his fine black lashes. He could look at you, his face otherwise immobile, and with his eyes alone tell you everything he felt, or perhaps more accurately, everything he wanted you to think he felt.
Roth stared out toward the edge of the sea that ran in a flat silver line between the night and what was left of the day.
“I used to come out here every night and sit here and watch the way the light changed; the way, when the sunset was over and the sky stopped burning red and orange, how the breeze would come up, quiet, cool; and then, for a little while, how everything—the sky, the ocean, the hills to the north—everything turned a kind of midnight blue.”
He rested his chin on his hand, smiling at the memory of what it had been like, years ago, when all he had was the dream of what he wanted one day to do.
“That’s why I named the studio Blue Zephyr. Strange, isn’t it? It had so much significance for me, I thought it would have the same kind of meaning for other people too. It didn’t. No one has ever even asked me what it meant, or why we called it that.”
Clutching the edge of the table with his hands, Roth stared down at the bench on which he had planted his feet. He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and raised his eyes again to the distant horizon.
“That’s the color—not exactly midnight blue; more like the Duke Ellington song. You remember it—‘Mood Indigo’? That’s it—indigo blue. There’s something melancholy, heartbreaking, about it, that mood, that color. And then, the way the breeze comes off the ocean this time of night. When I thought about what I liked most about being here, when I first came here, when everything about L.A. was brand new for me, this is what it was—here, at the ocean, at the end of the day, that hour between day and night, when you can hear the silence, when the wind brings back all the memories of all those other nights when you were young and the girls were all lovely and everything was always just the way it was supposed to be. That’s why I called it Blue Zephyr: blue for the indigo night; Zephyr because it’s the name for the west wind, the wind that carries the dream.”
He stood up and took a few steps forward. It was as if he wanted to keep watching what was out there, at the far edge of the horizon, before it vanished finally forever into the night.
“I didn’t want to be just another director; I didn’t want Blue Zephyr to be just another studio,” he said, turning back to me. “Thirty years ago, when I came here, I wanted to do something serious. I wanted to be the next Orson Welles; I wanted to make a picture as good as—no, better than—Citizen Kane. Thirty years later, what have I done?”
“You won an Academy Award.”
“Can you tell me the name of the picture I won it for?”
I think he would only have been surprised if I had come right out with the name of it, instead of stumbling around for what I knew I would eventually remember if I had the chance to think about it for a while.
“But you remember Citizen Kane, don’t you? It was a great picture—some say the best picture ever made. Whether it is or it isn’t, it’s a picture that’s going to last forever; it’s something people are always going to want to see. How long has Orson Welles been dead? You think when I’m dead that long anyone is going to remember any of the pictures I ever did? Yes, I know—I won the Academy Award. Take a look sometime at the list of each year’s winners. How many of those pictures—how many of those names—do you really remember? And why should you? Most of them aren’t worth remembering.”
Night had fallen; there was no light left in the sky. The tall metal lamps near the sidewalk had come on. Roth was still wearing his dark glasses. Perhaps he was used to seeing things in the darkness. He turned up the collar on his windbreaker and shoved his hands into the coat pockets.
“Everybody thinks I’m lucky—or they did until Mary Margaret was killed. They all thought I had everything. Not just money, not just a movie-star wife, not just the Academy Award and the studio and everything that goes with it. No, more than all of that, more than all of it put together, I was lucky because I was me, Stanley Roth; because everyone knew who Stanley Roth was. I was famous. No,” he said, shaking his head emphatically, “I was a celebrity, someone everyone thinks they know, someone everyone wants to be around. It’s the damnedest thing. I’ve never been on screen, never did what Hitchcock did and played a bit part in my own movie; but I’m on more magazine covers than any movie star. I can’t go anywhere without someone asking for an autograph.”
Roth rose up on the balls of his feet, tossed back his head, opened his mouth wide and gulped the air. With his hands still plunged in his pockets, he hopped stiff legged twice, then stopped still. He batted his eyes as if he was trying to clear his mind of all the unimportant, inconsequential things that had made him lose sight of what he had once wanted to become.
“It wasn’t my fault I became famous; it wasn’t anything I set out to be. That first picture, the first one they let me direct—it was just a job, something I did to learn how to do it better. I didn’t think it was going to do anything—break even, I hoped; but nothing like what it did. There wasn’t anything interesting about it: just a simple story without any subtle characterizations, and everybody loved it. They loved it, and I was finished as a serious director before I began. No one wanted me to make movies that made anyone think, that made anyone uncomfortable. I had the gift of making the kind of movies everyone wanted to see, the kind
that ... Well, you know the kind,” said Roth with a shrug that seemed to signal contempt for what he had done and what he had become because of it.
Roth paced slowly back and forth on the grass in front of the table where I sat, leaning forward, waiting for him to go on. He stopped and kicked half-heartedly at the ground.
“That was the whole reason for Blue Zephyr, the whole reason I wanted a studio of my own: to make the pictures I wanted. I wanted at least to try to do something important, something serious, something that people would remember the way they remember Citizen Kane.”
“There have been other great pictures,” I observed, struck by his apparent obsession with what Welles had done. “You never mention them.”
“I studied Citizen Kane, studied it every way I knew,” said Roth, a shrewd glint in his eye. “I watched it, over and over again; I read the script dozens of times. I wanted to know the reason it was such a great picture. I don’t mean the technical reasons—the way Welles shot all those different black and white angles, the visual artistry of it. That was genius. No, I mean besides that. You can watch that movie now, fifty years later, and you’re still drawn into it. Why? Because of who the story is about—William Randolph Hearst—and because of what Hearst was all about,” said Roth, eager to explain it to me.
“Hearst was the first media celebrity, a man who did not just influence what people thought through the newspapers he owned, but a man who became famous because he didn’t hide the influence he had. Think about that. It took me a while to figure it out, to understand what you would have to do to make a picture like that today. Who is there today like Hearst—a media celebrity—not a performer, not someone who plays a part—but the one who controls it all, all the parts of the story that gets told, the way Hearst used to control all the news that got published?”
I understood now whom he meant, and he knew it, too.
“Yes, exactly. Me, Stanley Roth. I’m Charles Foster Kane; and Blue Zephyr, the movie I’m going to make, is next Citizen Kane. Read it,” he urged. “See if I’m wrong. It’s the story of how somebody who wanted to make great motion pictures got caught up in all the glamour, all the corruption, all the phony celebrity of Hollywood, and gave up everything he believed in because he got addicted to his own success. You want to know who would kill Mary Margaret to have me accused of murder? You want to know why they just didn’t kill me if they wanted me out of the way? Because they can’t kill me, they have to discredit me. They have to discredit me because it’s the only way they can discredit the movie that will get made whether I’m dead or alive. The only way they can stop Blue Zephyr from destroying the careers of some of the most powerful people in this town is to destroy the reputation of the man who wrote it. And what better way to do that, than to have him convicted of the murder of his own wife?”