Star Witness

by D. W. Buffa

  I was taunting him with what he had done, perhaps because I was angry that he had not told me about all this before, and perhaps because I thought he deserved it for assuming he could buy his way out of trouble, that he was too important to be treated like anyone else. Whatever the reason, the more I said, the more I wanted to say. I leaned closer.

  “And if he does help convict you of murder, guess what’s going to happen then? While you sit in prison, waiting for the executioner, wondering what would have happened if you could have made Blue Zephyr, wondering whether you could have done something better than Orson Welles, maybe Richard Crenshaw will be writing another screenplay, this one about the detective who solved the murder of one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.”

  Roth put his hand on my sleeve, a calm, remorseless look in his eyes, like some fastidious assassin impervious to either pity or fear, an assassin who knows exactly what he is going to do and precisely how he is going to do it.

  “I’m not going to be convicted of anything. You never lose, Antonelli; and I didn’t kill Mary Margaret. I don’t give a damn what Crenshaw wanted; I don’t give a damn how he feels. I offered him money and he took it. That’s all there was to it.”

  Roth hopped out of the car and started to walk away. He thought of something that made him laugh. He turned around and opened the door.

  “But if you’re right—if he did hate me that much and for that reason—you’d be right again, wouldn’t you? What you were suggesting in court today: that someone else put those blood-soaked clothes in the laundry hamper; that someone was trying to frame me for the murder.”

  A harsh, bitter smile cut across his mouth and then, quick as a glance, vanished from view. He looked at me now with the eyes of someone convinced that he had been right all along, that he had been cheated, and that he was the only one who understood that he had.

  “Remember what I told you that night, the night I gave you Blue Zephyr to read: that they murdered Mary Margaret to destroy me? It isn’t that much different than what you just told me, is it?”

  Roth shut the door and signaled the driver it was time to go. The car turned around in the small cul-de-sac. Stanley Roth, his hands plunged despairingly into his pockets, walked toward his white stucco bungalow like a tired salesman home from a long day of failure, trying not to think too much about tomorrow. Just as he reached the steps to the porch, Julie Evans, who must have been waiting for him inside and seen him coming, burst out the front door. She stood directly in his path, gesticulating wildly, her face all twisted up. He listened for a moment, and then, as if that was the end of it, abruptly shook his head and pushed his way past her. She stared after him, her mouth open in amazement. Out of the corner of her eye, she became aware of the long limousine moving on the street behind her. She pulled herself together and in firm, decisive steps walked quickly up the steps and followed Stanley Roth inside.

  Whether Julie Evans was angry or just upset, there was no trace of any emotion that might have disturbed her self-possession when, a little over an hour later, she picked me up at the Chateau Marmont. She asked about the trial; she wanted to know everything that had happened that day. She listened politely, but three sentences after I began to tell her about Detective Crenshaw and his testimony, she suddenly turned to me and asked if I would mind if we did not have dinner alone.

  “There’s trouble at the studio. Louis wants me to come to the house. He wants you to come, too.”

  “What about Stanley?”

  She shook her head. “No. Michael is going to be there, and Louis didn’t think it would be a good idea.”

  “And he wants me there?”

  “Maybe he wants to make sure that whatever happens, there is somebody Stanley will trust to tell him the truth about it.” She paused, looked back at the road, smiling a little to herself. “No, I think the real reason is that he’s come to rely on you in certain ways.”

  “Rely on me?”

  Her chin tilted up, the smile on her mouth a bit brighter, a bit more certain of itself.

  “He feels more confident about things when you’re around. You have that effect on people, you know.” A kind of soft melancholy shadowed her eyes as she drove along in the failing light of evening. “You have that effect on me.”

  Cars swarmed all around us, darting in and out, like fireflies in the night, dashing off into the distance and then, somehow, out of nowhere, coming so close you think you can grab them with your hand.

  Julie started to say something more, then changed her mind. She did not say anything for a while, and then, with a serious, businesslike expression, she explained:

  “Michael Wirthlin is threatening to pull out of the studio. If he does that, Blue Zephyr is finished. Without his money, without his ability to raise money, it can’t survive.”

  “Is that what you were telling Roth outside the bungalow?”

  Perhaps she had not realized I had been in the car, or perhaps she did not want me to think she had known I had been watching her. She turned to me as if she were surprised.

  “Yes.”

  “How did he take it?” I asked as she gazed back at the twisted lines of traffic ahead of us. Julie tossed her head, a reluctant smile of grudging admiration on her mouth.

  “He said he didn’t give a damn what Michael Wirthlin did. He doesn’t believe Wirthlin will really do it—pull out of the studio; not while he thinks there is a chance he might get it all for himself.”

  “You mean, if Stanley Roth is convicted. But if that were to happen, why would Wirthlin end up with it? What about Griffin?”

  “Michael has always known that there was no point fighting Stanley on anything because Louis would always side with Stanley. Michael has always thought he was smarter than Louis; and with his control of the money— the sources of money—he doesn’t think Louis would dare try to stand in his way.”

  “Then why is he threatening to pull out? Roth doesn’t think he’s serious. Is he just trying to make trouble?”

  “Michael never does anything without a reason, and he isn’t just trying to make trouble. Stanley is wrong about him; Stanley is wrong about a lot of things,” said Julie with a distant look.

  We were on Mulholland Drive, less than a quarter mile from Louis Griffin’s sprawling glass-and-stucco contemporary house, where no one now remembered either the Spanish villa or the English Tudor mansion, both of them built to last forever, that had stood there before, and only the hawks that circled the daytime sky seemed not to have forgotten the chickens that had roosted there long before that. Julie pulled off the side of the road and switched off the ignition. All of Los Angeles was spread out below us, like a flat, empty desert running straight out to the edge of the sea, glistening under the shelter of the bronze-colored sun.

  “Stanley is wrong,” said Julie. She lay her head back against the glass, a wistful expression on the smooth white contours of her face.

  “He thinks when the trial is over everything will be back to normal. He doesn’t understand that nothing is ever going to be normal again. Blue Zephyr is finished. Michael Wirthlin knows it. I think Louis knows it, too, though he doesn’t want to admit it. The only one who doesn’t know it is Stanley. He spends every night in that bungalow of his, cut off from everything, carrying on as if he was still in charge and that nothing was ever going to change. He doesn’t understand that it doesn’t matter if he’s acquitted. What matters is that everyone thinks he’s guilty. No one is going to risk their careers or their money on a man the world thinks murdered a woman everyone loved. Michael was not just making a threat to hear the way it sounded. He’s going to do something; it’s just a question of when. Blue Zephyr is dead. All that is left of it is the dream, the one Stanley still carries around in his head.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  LOUIS GRIFFIN SEEMED DISTRACTED. HE greeted us at the door with the same smooth polished smile and that soft touch of his hand as he gave it to you and then, just as you began to take hold of it, pulled it away; t
he by now unconscious reaction to the social necessity of allowing even perfect strangers to touch him. It was nothing like the way he had shaken my hand in the courtroom just a few hours earlier. Louis Griffin was worried, worried that something had happened and that, for all his experience at negotiating arrangements that left everyone reasonably content, this time he might not be able to put all the pieces back together again.

  “I meant what I said to you today. I may not know much about the law, but I know something about performances, and what you did with that detective was one of the best I’ve ever seen.”

  “Stanley thinks he should become an actor,” teased Julie.

  It was an offhand, casual remark, made for no reason than to put us all at our ease; but it made me wonder how much she knew, how much Stanley Roth told her about the conversations we had had since I first became his lawyer. It bothered me, the idea that he did not view what was said between us as a confidence that had to be kept.

  Griffin thought about what Julie had said. With a shrewd glance he suggested Stanley Roth was wrong.

  “I don’t think our friend here would be willing to follow anyone else’s direction. I don’t even think he’d be able to follow a script.” He shifted his gaze from Julie to me. “You know where you want to go when you’re examining a witness, don’t you?” asked Griffin rhetorically. “But you don’t always know in advance how you’re going to get there. Isn’t that right? You don’t always know the next question until you have the last answer. True?”

  “Not even always then,” I laughed as Griffin led us into the dining room.

  When I had come here that first time with Julie— when, as she had put it, after that press conference in front of the gates of Blue Zephyr, I had been the newest famous person in town—everyone had crowded around me, eager to meet me. Perhaps because we had already met, or perhaps because the murder of Mary Margaret Flanders now seemed less of a mystery and the innocence of her husband no longer quite so easy to insist upon, no one left the table to greet me. Instead, I stood next to Louis Griffin while, with one hand on my arm, he gestured in turn to each of his guests.

  “Of course you know Walker and Carole,” he went on, nodding across the table at Walker Bradley and Carole Conrad. His mouth half open, Bradley had a slightly pained expression, like someone who had been struggling with a thought and getting nowhere with it. Squinting her eyes, Carole Conrad looked up from her nearly empty wineglass and pushed out her hand as if she was trying to reach across to mine and gushed a quiet hello. She pulled back her hand and stared again into her glass.

  William Pomeroy stood up and shook my hand. His wife, Estelle, the writer, gave my sleeve a gentle tug when she said hello. They were friendly, and I liked them both; but there was something in the way they looked at me, not a warning exactly, more like a hint that there might be trouble and that I had better be careful.

  I had just finished saying hello to Griffin’s wife, Clarice, when he let go of my arm.

  “Michael of course you know,” he said in a voice suddenly hollow and cold. “And I’m sure you remember his wife.”

  Michael Wirthlin was hunched over the table, running his finger along the edge of the plate in front of him. He did not look up. A look of growing irritation on his mouth, he kept watching his finger as it moved slowly first one way, then the other, back and forth. I began to talk to his wife, a few stray remarks, a brief, inconsequential conversation that with each word made him more upset. He pulled his hand back from the plate and raised his eyes.

  “We were just talking about you. Louis was telling how well you did today in court, cross-examining that detective, the one who found Stanley’s blood-covered clothing.”

  Wirthlin swung around in his chair and put his elbow on the back corner of it. He fixed me with a grim, defiant stare.

  “Do you think you’ll do that well with me?”

  I knew what he was talking about, but from the puzzled expressions on the faces of several of the other people there it appeared I was one of the few who did.

  “Michael has been subpoenaed as a witness for the prosecution,” explained Louis Griffin.

  I went to my place on the other side of the table. While everyone else talked about this latest bit of news, I looked out through the glass wall into the where the pair of white swans were gliding silently across the smooth, unruffled surface of the pond.

  “But why have you been subpoenaed as a witness, Michael?” asked William Pomeroy. “And why as a witness for the prosecution and not for the defense?” he asked, darting an inquiring glance at me.

  I tried to dismiss it as a matter of at best only minor importance, something that was merely routine, the sort of thing the prosecution did in every case of this kind.

  “I imagine they want to get into the financial situation at Blue Zephyr,” I remarked with a show of indifference. “The obvious person with whom to do that is the chief financial officer of the company.”

  “You don’t seem surprised,” observed Pomeroy.

  “No,” I replied as I plunged my fork into the salad that had just been served. “The prosecution has to give me a list of the witnesses they intend to call. I’ve known for quite a while they were going to call Michael Wirthlin.”

  “Well, I haven’t known it for ‘quite a while,’” spat Wirthlin, glaring at me from his place two seats down on the other side of the table. “You might have mentioned it. I was subpoenaed yesterday.”

  I finished swallowing, and then replied:

  “I’m not your lawyer, Mr. Wirthlin; and I don’t go around advising witnesses for the prosecution that they’re about to be subpoenaed.”

  “But I still don’t understand,” said William Pomeroy. He was sitting forward, trying to concentrate. “Why would the prosecution want to know about the financial situation of the studio? This is a murder case. What difference would it make?”

  Wirthlin looked at him like he was a fool. He looked at a lot of people that way. It was one of the things I disliked about him most.

  “They think he might have killed her for the money,” said Wirthlin.

  Resting his hands in his lap, he lifted his chin and gazed pensively into the distance as if he were considering the sufficiency of the motive and the circumstances in which it might apply. Dressed in a dark, doublebreasted suit and a white, collarless shirt fastened at the top, he had the fashionable look that, as he must have known, marked him out as a major Hollywood player.

  “They have a point,” said Wirthlin, his eyes coming back into focus. “Mary Margaret’s death did bring with it certain financial advantages.”

  “Michael, I think that’s quite enough!” exclaimed Louis Griffin, tossing his napkin down on the table. “I understand you’re upset about being subpoenaed to testify. I don’t blame you. But, for God’s sake, that’s no reason to start talking as if you actually believe Stanley had anything to do with Mary Margaret’s murder.”

  With an intense, malevolent stare, Wirthlin sneered: “I don’t know if he did it or not; but if you think I don’t think he could have done it; that he was perfectly capable of doing it... ”

  I was not sure which of them would break it off first, which of them would finally look away, they seemed so determined not to give pride of place to the other.

  “That doesn’t say anything at all,” I said derisively; “that Stanley Roth, or anyone else, could have done something, or was capable of doing something.”

  Angrily, Wirthlin wheeled around.

  “After all,” I went on before he could speak, “you could have said the same thing about yourself, couldn’t you?”

  Whatever he was going to say, this stopped him. The anger seemed to dissipate. He became cautious.

  “Exactly what do you mean by that?” he asked, carefully searching my eyes.

  I smiled and waited while the salad plates were removed and the next course was served. The conversation moved back into more normal channels. There was talk about how well Mary Margaret Fland
ers’s last movie had done, not only at the box office but with the critics. Pomeroy was more convinced than ever that there were going to be several Oscar nominations. He repeated what I had heard him say the night of the first private screening: that it was the best film Mary Margaret had ever made and the best work Walker Bradley had yet done. This time Bradley did not disagree.

  There was an almost tangible sense of relief that nothing more was being said about either the trial or Stanley Roth; but there was also a sense of foreboding, a tension that underlay everything that was said. It was as if everyone was just waiting to see who would bring it up first. A strange kind of frenzy took hold. People laughed at the slightest hint of something funny and the laughter itself had a certain manic quality, as if they were all afraid that when it stopped the screaming would begin. Everyone was drinking, some more than others and no one more than Michael Wirthlin who never laughed at all. He sat there, barely talking, keeping to himself, all the time aware that the atmosphere around that table had been darkened by his mood. That was the fact of it: all the others—the actor and the actress, the director and the writer, certainly Julie Evans, but even the gracious Louis Griffin and his socially anxious wife—were one way or the other dependent on Michael Wirthlin, their lives in some measure affected by what he decided to do, and by nothing so much as what he decided to do about Blue Zephyr.

  “Walker has been subpoenaed, too,” announced Carole Conrad with an eager smile. As soon as she said it, her cheeks began to color, as if she realized too late that she should not have said anything.

  “What do they want you to testify about, Walker?” asked Louis Griffin. Before Bradley turned to Griffin, he patted his wife on the wrist, assuring her that there was nothing to worry about.