Star Witness

by D. W. Buffa

  Alone and silent, stooped over the table, watching my hand slip across the page, filling up one line after another, I worked for several hours straight, and though I was no closer than I was before to solving the mystery of who killed Mary Margaret Flanders, felt better for having done it. It was late when I finished, but I wanted to talk to Marissa, to tell her goodnight, to tell her how hard I had been struggling with what was fast becoming the most difficult case I had ever had. I wanted to hear her voice, the way it came, clear and bright, the tender, sweet music of her soul. Marissa did not answer and I wondered where she had gone.

  I tried to go back to work, but I had gone through it so many times, thought about it so often, that I was in danger of making myself crazy with the sheer repetition of all the same facts and all the same questions. It was after midnight and I was tired, but I knew I could not sleep. I stared at the telephone. Why wasn’t Marissa home? If she had just gone out to dinner with a friend, why was she out so late? I picked up the receiver and called Stanley Roth. He invited me over.

  “It’s a little late,” I replied, laughing softly to myself.

  “Late for what? You called me.”

  “There were just a few things I wanted to ask.”

  “I’ve got a few things I want to ask you. Come on over.”

  Suddenly, I remembered what he had done.

  “You’re still there,” I said stupidly. “At Blue Zephyr. How long do you have before you have to leave?”

  “I told you before: no one was supposed to know until after the trial. But it doesn’t matter. I don’t have to leave. I keep the bungalow. It was part of the deal. I keep something else as well,” added Roth with a note of satisfaction. Whatever it was he had done, whatever price he had extracted for his resignation, he was not going to tell me about it on the telephone.

  “I’m dead tired. I have to go to bed. But we need to get together.”

  I paused, trying to think how to put what I wanted to ask.

  “I want to spend some more time at the house—your house—The Palms. And I want you there with me.”

  Roth had only one concern. The Palms had become a place where the curious still gathered to gawk at where Mary Margaret Flanders had been murdered, and if they no longer came in the same numbers they had in the immediate aftermath of her death, there were still enough of them that if Stanley Roth suddenly appeared, reporters and camera crews would not be far behind.

  “Let’s go early in the morning,” insisted Roth. “There won’t be so many people.”

  WHEN HE CAME FOR ME the next morning the sun had barely climbed to the crest of the desolate desert mountain range that ran like a spur just a few miles to the east. Slanting sideways to the sea, the light turned the still air a pale yellow-gold.

  Instead of the black limousine in which we had been chauffeured together back and forth to court, or one of the late model Mercedeses or Bentleys that dotted the studio’s executive parking lot, a dilapidated, faded blue four-door Pontiac pulled up in front of the Chateau Marmont a few minutes before seven.

  Roth looked as down and out as the car. He was wearing a faded green polo shirt as wrinkled as if he had slept in it, and the same nondescript tan windbreaker he had thrown on the night he had taken me from the bungalow at Blue Zephyr out to the beachfront park in Santa Monica. His pants ended high above his ankles, bare except for the straps of a pair of leather sandals. He had not shaved and he had not bothered to run a comb through the tangled mess of gray hair that flowed out from under a blue baseball cap. Small gold-rimmed black glasses fit snug against his eyes. He looked like an aging beachcomber, a hippie, a middle-aged man who still sees the world the same way he had when he was twenty-five. I would not have recognized him if I had passed him on the street, and anyone looking for a celebrity would not have looked at him at all.

  Stanley Roth did not want to be recognized, not anymore. He had become, for a all intents and purposes, a prisoner, unable to go anywhere except his bungalow where he was safe behind the gates of the studio, and to the courthouse where every day he ran a gauntlet of obstreperous reporters and crude, catcalling spectators who, behind the police lines set up in front, taunted him with their insults and accusations. This early morning journey to the house he had purchased as a wedding present for his new wife, the house so famous it had a name of its own, the house that from now on would be known less for the movie star who had lived there than the one who had died there, was the closest thing to a holiday Stanley Roth had had in months. Who could blame him if he wanted to go his way undistracted by the cruel and thoughtless demands of strangers?

  There was no one in front of the gates that guarded the entrance to The Palms. Roth swiped a magnetized plastic card through the narrow slot on the black metal box. It also housed the intercom by which visitors had to identify themselves before someone inside would activate the mechanism that opened the gate.

  “You don’t use the combination?” I asked, gesturing toward the keypad located on the same metal box.

  “This is faster,” explained Roth with a shrug. He put the card back inside his wallet. “I don’t even remember the combination.”

  “Who uses it, then? Who would you give it to?”

  “A few people—not too many. Mainly people who worked here: the gardener, the pool man, the security people ... a few friends. Louis, of course.”

  “Did Wirthlin have it?” I inquired as Roth drove toward the enormous brick-and-mortar mansion at the top of a long, twisting drive lined on both sides with thick Spanish date palms.

  “Wirthlin was never a friend.” Roth paused, a deeply cynical look on his face. “Not a friend of mine, anyway. But, no; I don’t think she would have given him the combination.”

  He glanced across at me, the cynicism less severe, but for all that, leaving the impression of something that was a more permanent part of what he had now become.

  “But you never know, do you?”

  “You didn’t ... ?”

  “Know about Wirthlin and Mary Margaret? Not until you dragged it out of him. Well, it had crossed my mind ... when I wrote Blue Zephyr. I thought about what could happen between people like that: an actress who didn’t want to think she owed her career to anyone, and someone rich and ambitious who would do anything to have her.”

  We pulled up to the front of the house and Roth turned off the engine. He lay back against the seat, with his eyes shut, rubbing the bridge of his nose. When he opened his eyes, he stared into the middle distance.

  “Maybe I did know. Maybe that’s how the idea—the thought of it—came to me.” Roth turned to me, certain I would know what he meant. “The way you know something has changed without quite knowing what it is: a look, a glance, a kind of distance, a slight hesitation, a caution in the way someone talks—suddenly more careful.” He paused, smiled, and then added, “Or far less careful, as if they wanted you to think they had no reason to conceal anything. I knew, I just didn’t know that I knew—if that makes any sense—until you forced him to admit it.”

  Inside the house, Roth stood in the middle of the living room, pointing at the thick overhead beams.

  “They came from an old castle, somewhere in Yorkshire, hand-hewn from English oak,” said Roth, turning the corners of his irregularly shaped mouth into an appraising look. “Then, four hundred years later, a drunken actor who got famous and rich making movies no one remembered ten minutes after they saw them thinks he has to have a home that will be something to remember him by.”

  I left Roth in the living room and went outside and stood by the pool, gazing at the spot where Mary Margaret Flanders had been murdered. The pool had been drained to get rid of the blood. A little rain and the runoff from the sprinklers on the lawn had left a foot or two of water at the deep end. Dead leaves and debris, some of it scraps of yellow plastic tape that had been used to seal off the crime scene, had choked the drain. After a few minutes I went upstairs to her bedroom— their bedroom when Stanley Roth did not have to get
up before dawn to get to the set. The clothes she had worn to the party had been accounted for: the dress was hanging in her closet; the shoes were on the rack where she kept them; the jewelry was back in the black velvet case inside the dresser drawer. There was not a rip, not a tear, nothing to suggest that someone had attacked her, torn off her clothes, and then, for some reason, neatly returned them to where she always kept them. She had taken off her clothes and was found naked in the pool. But if she had gone there to take a late night swim why had she not at least taken a towel? None had been found anywhere near the pool. She must have been meeting someone—or was already with someone. She did not go out to the pool to go swimming: she went out to the pool because it was far away from the upstairs bedrooms in which her husband was already asleep, and was the safest place on a warm California evening to make love—right there, on a chaise lounge, listening to the soft muffled sound of the water lapping gently against the edge of the pool.

  But what about the stocking, the stocking found wrapped around her neck, the stocking used to hold her fast from behind while the blade of the knife flashed through her throat? Had she undressed in front of him—the man she was going to sleep with, the man who killed her—teased him with it, made him grab at it, and then, when he caught it in his hand, led him silently out of the bedroom, careful not to awaken her husband a few rooms away; led him down the hall, down the stairs, outside to the pool? Or had she undressed alone and taken it with her when she went outside, taken it because that was the sort of thing they did together, the way she taunted him, excited him?

  I left the bedroom, following the path she must have taken, seeing it both ways in my mind: Mary Margaret Flanders, the only article of clothing the single stocking she held in her hand, a wisp of silk floating in the air as she descended the stairs—or pulled taut as someone clutched the other end tight in his hand. Alone, together, they both ended up here, at the side of the pool. They never got to the chaise lounge; they never fell into each other’s arms. The police had been over everything, had searched everywhere for evidence of sex. It was the great unspoken mystery of her murder: Why didn’t the killer have sex with her first? She was young, she was gorgeous, her picture had been on every magazine cover in America as the most desirable woman in the world, and the man who murdered her didn’t touch her. The police and the prosecution of course did not think it was a mystery at all: Stanley Roth killed her and that explained everything. It explained why she was naked, and it explained the stocking: she was getting undressed; they were having an argument; he grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her behind him down the stairs and outside. He took her stocking because he already knew what he was going to do to her. Or he tied the stocking around her throat and pulled her along that way. The stocking made the case for premeditation: It proved he did not kill her in a blind rage without any thought that he was going to do it. The stocking, and of course, the knife. He had not struck her with his fist, or picked up something and hit her with that. He had not in a moment of anger seized a gun that was lying within reach and shot her dead. No, Stanley Roth, according to the police and the prosecution, had tied that stocking around her neck and then with a knife he must have brought with him, cut her throat.

  But if it was not Stanley Roth, if someone else had killed Mary Margaret Flanders, then the question was still there, waiting to be answered: Why had she not been touched? Had she said something, out here, at the side of the pool, something that drove him—whoever he was—to a lethal act of violence? And if that was it, how had he happened to have a knife? That was the one fact that could not be gotten around: She was killed here, outside, next to the pool, with a knife. Whoever killed her had come here, to this place, with a weapon he meant to use; or brought it with him because he thought he might use it, but had not yet made up his mind. Could it have been an act of jealousy, an act of revenge? Had she decided to stop seeing someone, but then agreed to see him one last time—sleep with him one last time— and then, when he could not talk her out of breaking it off, he killed her because he could not stand the thought of her being with someone else, could not stand the thought that instead of leaving her husband, she was going to stay married to Stanley Roth? Perhaps he had already told his own wife he was going to leave her. Perhaps ...

  “Haven’t you figured it out yet?”

  Startled, I looked up. Stanley Roth was standing on the other side of the pool, leaning against the doorway, his arms folded loosely over his chest, one foot crossed over the other. A casual, almost indolent smile flickered across his mouth.

  “You were concentrating so hard I thought you might forget where you were, take a step and fall in.”

  My eyes followed his to the edge of the pool, half a step from where I stood.

  “You really haven’t figured it out yet?” asked Roth, squinting against the sunlight that poured down from the blank white sky.

  I moved back from the edge.

  “No, I haven’t figured it out,” I admitted. “Why? Have you?”

  “Yes,” he replied, “I have.”

  With the baseball cap clutched in his hands, Stanley Roth took one last look around. He bent his graying head first to one side, then the other; surveying the scene the way I imagined he must have learned to measure a camera shot, studying the angle that would give it the meaning he wanted. His eye ran the same circuit three times at least: the doorway to the house; the sand colored cement deck where his wife had been murdered; the pool, now empty, into which her body had fallen, or perhaps been thrown; and then, each time, darting back to the doorway to the house.

  “Do you think it was Michael Wirthlin?” I asked across the empty weed-cluttered pool. Roth was gazing intently at the doorway to the house. He did not hear me.

  “You think Wirthlin killed her because she wouldn’t leave you? You think he killed her and then decided to protect himself by framing you for the murder?”

  If he heard me, he paid no attention. He looked across his shoulder, beyond the swimming pool to the close-cut grass sloping toward the heavy, impenetrable shrubbery that covered from view the black spike fence on the perimeter of the property. I was not sure whether he was measuring the distance or imagining something that had taken place on the lawn itself. Retracing the path, his eyes came back to the pool. I started to ask again if he suspected Michael Wirthlin. He held up his hand to stop me before I could interrupt his thought.

  When he finally looked at me, and he saw how irritated I had become, he put the cap back on his head and with a helpless shrug threw both hands in the air.

  “Sorry.

  “Have you seen everything you need to see?” he asked, suddenly anxious to leave. He looked down at the pool and shuddered. “I don’t like coming back here.”

  His gaze stayed fixed on the spot where, when it was full of water, his wife’s body had been found. He put his hands in his pockets and slowly raised his eyes.

  “I’m never coming back here again,” solemnly insisted Roth. “When the trial is over, I’m going to sell it.”

  I was still waiting to hear whether it was Michael Wirthlin or someone else Stanley Roth was so certain had murdered his wife, but it was clear that he was not going to talk about it until we had left. When we got to the car, he handed me the keys and asked if I would drive. Though there had not been anyone at the gate when we arrived, he was certain there would be now.

  He was right. Tourists and troublemakers, people who had come to stare and shrewd-eyed peddlers hawking T-shirts and buttons with short-worded slogans that ran from the mildly amusing to the utterly obscene, had gathered in front. By the time I was far enough down the driveway to see them, it was too late. The gate was opening and there was nothing I could do. Roth had climbed into the back and lay down on the floor, hiding beneath an old brown blanket he had brought along for that very purpose. I wished I had taken his advice and put on that awful-looking mustache and beard.

  The crowd moved back as the gate opened, and then slowly parted as I eased th
e car into the street.

  “It’s the lawyer!” a voice cried out.

  “Antonelli!” someone shouted.

  The crowd began to surge forward, surrounding the car, those in front pushed by those behind. They were fighting with each other, grabbing the shoulders of the ones in front of them, trying to pull them away so they could get closer. One moment a woman in her fifties was right next to my window; the next moment she disappeared, and another face, a man in his forties, was pressed up against the door, laughing that he had won, that he was as close as a single pane of glass. They were all around me, clawing at each other, shouting, swearing, screaming, without any idea why they were doing it except that everyone else was doing the very same thing.

  If I stopped, I might never be able to move; if I didn’t stop, somebody was going to get hurt, thrown down in front of the car and perhaps even killed. I slammed on the brakes and leaned on the horn. The sudden stop, the sudden noise, stunned them. I rolled down the window and with all the calm I could summon smiled and said that if they did not want to be arrested and taken to jail they had better let me pass.

  “How did you do that?” asked Roth, peeking out from beneath the blanket as we moved safely down the street. Making sure we were out of the sight of the crowd, he crawled into the front seat.

  “I didn’t think we were going to get out of there—not after they started shaking the car. How did you do that?” he asked again, straightening his jacket which had gotten all twisted up.

  “They didn’t know what they were doing,” I explained as if it had been something I had thought about in advance. “So when I told them what to do, they didn’t have any reason not to.”