Star Witness

by D. W. Buffa

  “Well,” he shrugged, “it worked.”

  “You were a lot of help,” I remarked dryly.

  Roth looked out the window. “You should have worn a disguise. You’ve become damn near as famous as I am.”

  Chapter Twenty

  I STARTED TO DRIVE BACK to the Chateau Marmont, going the same way we had come. Roth continued to stare out the window, sunk into thoughts of his own. Suddenly, he sat up and in an unexpectedly cheerful voice suggested we go out to the beach.

  “No, really,” he insisted with a kind of boyish enthusiasm when I tried to beg off. “After what I did to you this week, least I can do is buy you lunch.”

  The beach Stanley Roth had in mind was not a place we were likely to encounter anyone he knew; or, for that matter, anyone who, if they had recognized him, would care that he was there. On Venice Beach, everyone was too preoccupied with their own absence of inhibition to notice much of anything about anyone else. Shining in the clear, sun-speckled air, girls with blue vacant-eyed stares and painted permanent smiles glided by on skates. The sight of those gorgeous barely dressed young women made me start to envy those bent-shouldered men with weathered faces who looked as if they never left the beach and, without all the troubles of normal, civilized life, had lost all sense of time.

  We walked along, Stanley Roth and I, unrecognized, a part of the crowd, on the wide cement promenade separating the beach from the storefronts painted with reckless intensity every wild, lurid color in a box of crayons. On an asphalt court in the middle of the sand, shirtless tight-muscled young men whooped out loud as they floated in the air, flicking with their outstretched fingers a basketball high above the rim. A little farther on, broad-shouldered men with tiny waists and bulging bowshaped legs grunted encouragement as they took turns raising iron bars that drooped at each end with circular weights. Out toward the edge of the sand, where the waves came in with barely a ripple, small children romped in the white, swirling ankle-high surf. Weight lifters, bodybuilders, jumpers, runners; young men, old men, middle-aged men with hair bleached blond by a shadowless sun; women and children; all of them in constant, smooth flowing motion; and everywhere that you look, that blank-eyed smiling look of a single-season year in which there are no yesterdays and no tomorrows, only the limitless day stretching out forever, a permanent present, where the only things that matter are how you look and how you feel. Stanley Roth seemed right at home.

  Roth jerked his head to the side and cut across the promenade. He stopped abruptly and with his hand held me back. Crouched low over her skates, a teenage girl, oblivious of everything except the music beating into her brain from the headset she wore, sailed past us like a missile launched from somewhere offshore. Roth dropped his hand, and with a few more steps we were in front of a dark green stucco building. A pink flamingo and a pale green palm tree flashed with neon brilliance in a small square window to the left side of the door.

  Roth entered with the self-assurance of someone who had been here before. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. We were in a small bar and café. Four tables were jammed together along the wall directly opposite the bar, two more around the corner from it.

  The bartender, with wiry, unkempt gray-streaked hair, and tired, rheumy blue eyes, could have been as old as sixty or as young as forty. Wearing a blue and maroon Hawaiian shirt, he stood listlessly behind the bar, his hands in his pockets, like someone standing on a corner on a Saturday night waiting for something to happen. He seemed not to notice us at all until we sat down and put our elbows on the bar; then he greeted Stanley Roth the way you would a familiar stranger, someone you had seen often enough to know you had seen him before. That was all he knew. From the expression in his dull eyes, I doubted it would have meant anything to him if Stanley Roth had told him his name.

  We each ordered a beer and he brought us two bottles. Mainly, I think, to see what he would do, I asked for a glass. He nodded, turned around, took a glass down from a shelf and set it down on the bar in front of my bottle. He did not ask Roth if he wanted one.

  Smiling to himself, Roth raised the bottle to his mouth, took a swig, and then wiped his wet lips with the back of his wrist.

  “Could we get a couple of burgers?” asked Roth, more at ease in this dark hole in the wall than I think I had ever seen him.

  The thin arms of the bartender flapped inside the square sleeves of the Hawaiian shirt as he slowly shuffled along the raised lattice-like wooden flooring to a greasy black grill.

  “You won’t get a hamburger like this in Beverly Hills,” Roth assured me.

  “I’ll bet,” I replied with a dry laugh.

  Two girls, barely twenty years old, if that, had been watching from a table at the far end of the short bar, whispering to each other, laughing in a way that suggested one of them was eager to do something the other was not. They sensed I noticed. They stopped talking and their eyes drifted toward us and then stayed on us, waiting for a sign that we were interested. Biting my lip to stop the smile that was beginning to spread across my mouth, I poured what was left of the bottle of beer into my glass.

  “Want to buy us a drink?”

  I looked up. One of the girls was standing just behind me. I started to shake my head.

  “Sure, why not?”said Roth. “What would you and your friend like?”

  Roth gave the bartender the order, and we moved to their table. He introduced himself as Joe and I went along with it when he introduced me as Stan. In a maze of slow motion, the bartender placed two hamburgers on the bar and then, as if he had taken them ready made out of a refrigerator, the drinks Roth had ordered for the girls: iced glasses full of froth, dripping with the sweet scent of tropical fruit.

  “Where you from?” asked Roth as he munched on his hamburger like a teenager out on a date.

  The answers were vague and ambiguous, given with a kind of reluctance, as if where they came from, what they had done in the past, had no bearing on what they were now or what they wanted to become.

  “The Midwest,” said one.

  “Back east,” said the other.

  Roth paused between bites. “What do you do?” he asked, searching the eyes of first one, then the other. I was surprised at how interested he sounded.

  “We’re actresses,” said the one who called herself Shelley. She was blonde, good-looking, with cynical eyes. She had sharper features than her friend and was more assertive. She answered every question first.

  “Not yet,” quickly corrected the other one—Wilma, a quiet girl, with short brown hair and dark, rather mysterious eyes. A shy smile seemed to apologize for the embellishments of the other girl

  Roth put down the hamburger and leaned forward. “Maybe one of you will be the next Mary Margaret Flanders.”

  He said it calmly, without emotion, like an older, experienced man offering harmless encouragement to someone just starting out. In a way that I cannot quite describe, it was almost shocking, the utterly detached way he used his dead wife’s name. He could have said Greta Garbo or Elizabeth Taylor or any of a dozen other famous movie stars and it would not have had anything like the same effect on me. But then, as I immediately realized, no other name would have had the same effect on these two young women. All pretenses at sophistication fell away; they were suddenly two star-struck girls.

  “She was so beautiful!” uttered Wilma in a kind of ecstasy. The other girl gave her a patronizing glance, and then, proud and defiant, turned to Roth. “Maybe I could.”

  I wondered if Roth was thinking about the way he had made Marian Walsh into a star, and if he thought he could do it again with a girl like this. How much different was she really from what Mary Margaret Flanders had been when he first found her? A little less educated, a little less polished? What did that really matter when other, far more fashionable people would decide what she would wear, and when every word that came out of her mouth would be written by someone else? The only question was how she looked—not sitting across a table in a da
rk, deserted bar—but through the lens of a camera.

  “Maybe you could,” said Roth, seeming to agree with her own view of what she might eventually do. “Did you see her last movie? I missed it. Was it any good?”

  “It was wonderful!” said the other girl.

  Her dark eyes shimmered with a kind of possessive pride, as if she had taken over and made a part of herself what she had seen. It was, I realized, the same look I had witnessed on those rare occasions when I had taken my eyes off the screen and glanced at the faces around me, so completely caught up in what they were watching they had forgotten that none of it was real.

  The blonde girl, Shelley, was sipping on her drink through a straw, her gaze fixed on Stanley Roth. With a dry, rasping gurgle, she finished it. Teasing the end of the straw with her tongue, she waited for him to ask if she would like another.

  “She was wonderful,” continued Wilma with a furtive, sad-eyed smile. “I don’t understand why her husband would have killed her, someone that beautiful, that nice.”

  “Because the guy’s a jerk,” exclaimed Shelley with a harsh, brittle laugh. “Because he wanted her money. Because she was sleeping around.” She turned her head and confronted Wilma directly. “If you were her—you were that famous—wouldn’t you?”

  The question, which would have offended most of the women I had known—women, it was true, of a different generation—did not appear to offend this dark-eyed girl who had quite clearly idolized Mary Margaret Flanders.

  “No,” she replied very seriously. “I wouldn’t throw it all away like that. Why would she? If she didn’t love him, she wouldn’t have married him.”

  Shelley’s mouth, which could one moment break into a dazzling smile of artificial sincerity, tightened into a coarse, caustic grin. She gave her friend a pitying glance.

  “She married him because he’s Stanley Roth.”

  “I don’t believe that,” said Wilma, shaking her head with utter conviction. “And I don’t believe he really killed her, either,” she continued after a short pause. “He couldn’t have done that—not to her. He loved her—he must have.”

  She lowered her gaze, a little embarrassed by how vehement she had become. “Don’t you think he did— loved her, I mean?” she asked, raising her eyes.

  She was looking at me, but I was not the one who gave her the answer she seemed almost desperate to have.

  “I’m sure of it,” said Stanley Roth with an air of quiet confidence. “And I don’t think he killed her, either.”

  Shelley was not that interested in continuing a conversation that had nothing directly to do with her.

  “What do you do, Joe?” she asked Roth. “Do you live here—in L.A.?”

  Roth asked Wilma if she wanted another drink. She had barely touched the one she had. She thanked him and said no. Roth went to the bar and waited while the bartender produced from out of nowhere another Polynesian concoction and then brought it back to the table. With the straw in her mouth, Shelley smiled and with her blue eyes tried another flirtation.

  “What do you do?” she repeated, squeezing the tip of the straw between two fingers. Her nails were painted pink.

  Roth lifted the beer bottle and took a short drink. “I’m a movie producer,” he said in an even voice, gazing back at her.

  She laughed. “No, really,” she insisted. “What do you do?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I just told you: I’m a producer.”

  It threw her off. A shadow of a doubt crossed her eyes, but only for a moment. She was certain he was lying. What would a producer—or anyone famous—be doing in a place like this? Famous people—movie people— went to expensive private places in Beverly Hills. If she had seen him in a place like that, even with the dark glasses and the baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, and the rough gray stubble on his unshaven face, she would have known he was what he said he was, and known she had seen him somewhere before, and then, if she had not yet realized it for herself, recognized him at once when someone told her who he was, that he was the great Stanley Roth. But not here, not in a place where everyone made up stories about who they were and where they came from and what they were going to be.

  “Come on,” said Roth to me as he got up from the table. “We have to get going.”

  Shelley looked up from her drink, her lower lip pressed against the tip of the straw. “You want to go somewhere with us?” she suggested.

  “We have to go,” said Roth, turning toward the other girl. “I enjoyed talking to you. I’m sure you’re right about Stanley Roth. I know you’re right about Mary Margaret Flanders.”

  “Have to get back to the studio, huh?” said Shelley, concealing the disappointment of a failed seduction behind a taunting, knowing laugh.

  Outside the bar, as we blinked into the blinding light, Roth remarked:

  “She could be the next Mary Margaret Flanders.” He sensed my doubt. “Not the blonde, the other one: the quiet one with the dark eyes. You notice that dreamy look, that way she has of drawing you toward her, of making you feel something about her, of wanting things to end up all right for her? You sympathized with her, didn’t you? The other one—you almost want her to fall on her face. That’s the difference. That’s all it is—but you can’t teach it, you can’t produce it. You have it, or you don’t. Mary Margaret had it—maybe more than anyone I ever knew.”

  I followed Roth as he walked onto the beach, my shoes sinking into the soft sand with each step I took. On a wooden bench next to a small playground where a couple of young boys were trying to see which could go higher on the swing set, Roth stretched out his legs and gazed idly toward the water’s edge. The sun, barely started on its afternoon descent, seemed to burn a hole through the sky. Roth fell into a long, brooding silence. A beach ball bounced in front of us. A boy of five or six hurtled by in stumbling pursuit. Roth did not seem to notice. He kept staring with narrowed eyes at some point in the distance, working his jaw slowly back and forth.

  “You asked me—back at the house—if I knew who killed Mary Margaret,” said Roth finally and quite unexpectedly. “You really haven’t figured it out yet?”

  “Who do you think did it?” I insisted. “Wirthlin?”

  There was nothing in his expression, nothing in the way he looked at me, that gave me so much as a hint as to what he thought. And from the next thing he said, I wondered if he had even heard the question, or whether, like an actor who knows only his own lines, he had been concentrating solely on what, as soon as I had finished speaking, he was going to say.

  “You read Blue Zephyr. I told you I wanted to do something as good as Citizen Kane. I’ll tell you a secret. Whenever I write a screenplay, I always start with the ending. I know what’s going to happen—how it is going to end—before I start the beginning. I didn’t do that with Blue Zephyr. I couldn’t. I couldn’t let the story take care of itself, because I started with the character, the main character. And because I wanted him to be like Kane—a modern day version of Kane—I had to let it, the character, develop by itself, so to speak. But then I couldn’t decide how it should end—not exactly. You read it. There are two endings. They aren’t that far apart: in both of them Welles dies, but in one he’s murdered, and in the other he has a heart attack.

  “I decided to go back to the beginning, work my way all the way through it—treat it like it was nothing but a rough first draft, instead of something finished except for that one little detail about which ending to use. That’s when I realized that there was something missing: the action. Don’t you see? The action. Welles can’t just die. He has to be put into an impossible situation. He can’t just have things happen to him—his movie-star wife leaving him to run off with his partner and start another studio—he has to have done something himself. He has to be accused of something. Welles doesn’t die: his wife does.”

  I saw where he was going and I wondered why I had not thought of it before. Everything for Stanley Roth— even Stanley Roth—had meaning only when it c
ould be told as a story, a story that could then be made into a movie.

  “And Welles is accused of her murder,” I said, finishing the thought. “And then Welles goes to trial. Is that the action you’re talking about?”

  Roth was eager to tell me more. I stopped him with a different question.

  “Welles didn’t do it. Who did?”

  A cryptic smile flickered on his lips, like a secret that will tell you only that it exists. “Do you remember that other Orson Welles picture?”

  I thought he meant the other one we had once talked about, Compulsion, but that was not it at all.

  “The Third Man. It was made in Britain. They say it’s the best British movie ever made.” Roth shook his head in a kind of despair. “Welles was twenty-six—twenty-six, for God’s sake!—when he made Citizen Kane. Then, seven or eight years later, he stars in The Third Man. I’m twice as old as he was when he made Kane and... ”

  He shook his head again, accompanied this time by a short, self-deprecating laugh.

  “The camera angles were always at an angle. That sounds odd, but I mean it. Two people are having a conversation. The camera is on one of them—only one of them—and the camera is looking at that person, straight in front the way you normally look at someone who is talking, but from an angle below, looking up; then, from above, looking down; and then tilted at a forty-five-degree angle. The effect is to isolate whomever the camera is on, show them in their individual characters; but also, to show things so nothing is ever seen the same way. And that of course is related directly to the action of the movie, to the mystery of the third man. You remember who the third man is? Three men carry away the dead body of Harry Lime after he is hit by a car. Two of them are identified. A witness sees the third man. Who is the third man? It is always there, right in front of your eyes—the third man. Remember?” asked Roth, a strange, almost mocking look in his eyes.