by D. W. Buffa
“You were sleeping with Mary Margaret Flanders, weren’t you? As a matter of fact, you had been sleeping with her on and off for years. Isn’t that true, Mr. Bradley?”
He stretched out one hand, his fingers spread far apart, the beginning of a gesture meant perhaps to convey the essential frailty of the human condition and the need not to judge too harshly those who might have strayed from the rigid requirements of a strict morality. It only got as far as that. Before he could say anything, Annabelle Van Roten stopped him with an objection.
“The victim isn’t on trial here, Your Honor. Unless Mr. Antonelli can show some connection between this alleged relationship between Mary Margaret Flanders and Mr. Bradley, this line of questioning is not only irrelevant but improper, an attempt to defame the deceased in the hope, I suppose, of suggesting ... What, Mr. Antonelli?” She pivoted on her heel until we were faceto- face. “That she deserved to die?”
“No, not that she deserved to die,” I countered, returning her condescending smile with one of my own;
“but that while she was married she had relationships with other men—that is men, plural—and not one man. Which is to say, Your Honor,” I went on, turning toward the bench, “that the fact of multiple affairs, if you will, argues against infidelity as a motive for murder—at least a motive that can be ascribed to her husband, the defendant in this case.”
Van Roten could not contain herself. She wheeled around, staring at me in disbelief, before she turned back to Judge Honigman.
“This is the strangest case I’ve ever seen, Your Honor. The defense insists the defendant is violent, and now wants to show that the affair the victim had with one man could not have been the motive because she had an affair with another. About the only thing Mr. Antonelli hasn’t done yet is insist that his client can’t have killed the victim on the day in question because he murdered her the day before!”
Mocking her with an exaggerated look of admiration, I bent toward her and in a stage whisper said: “That was really quite good. Are you sure you don’t want to have dinner?”
“Your Honor!” she protested, howling her indignation.
“Sorry, Your Honor,” I said quickly, flashing a bright, repentant smile. Before Honigman could say anything, I turned serious.
“This is a murder case, Your Honor. The defense is entitled to explore questions about the conduct and the character of the victim; questions which no matter how unorthodox or even unsavory they may seem are necessary to rebut the contention, implicit in the testimony elicited by the prosecution, that the defendant had a motive to murder his wife. And as far as I’m aware,” I added, darting a defiant glance at Annabelle Van Roten, “there is nothing that requires I do this in a manner first approved by counsel for the other side.”
Stung by this reproach, Van Roten retorted: “It has to be done in a manner permitted by the rules of evidence!”
Raising his hand, Honigman brought discussion to a close. “The objection is overruled,” he announced after a solemn pause. “But please keep to the point, Mr. Antonelli. I’m going to allow you some latitude, at least until I see where this is going—but only some latitude. I won’t permit any line of questioning offered solely for the sake of sensationalism. Are we understood?”
“Perfectly, Your Honor.”
I rested my hand on the railing of the jury box and stared down at the floor, creating some space between the colloquy that had engaged the attention of the jury and the testimony to which we were about to return.
“I don’t mean to embarrass you, Mr. Bradley,” I said, slowly raising my eyes. “But there is more at stake here than whatever discomfort this may cause you. Now, again—is it not true you at least on occasion slept with Mary Margaret Flanders?”
Casting a questioning glance at Van Roten in the hope that there was still something she could do, Bradley hesitated. But Van Roten pretended to be busy, making a note to herself. Bradley scratched his head, shrugged, and with a bashful, self-deprecating laugh, made a halfhearted reply.
“Yeah, well, there were a few nights ... when we were on location ... It wasn’t anything serious. We weren’t having an affair, or anything like that.”
Bradley lowered his eyes and stretched out his legs, slouching like a sullen adolescent intent on ignoring every attempt to inquire further into something he had done.
“You were sleeping with her, but you weren’t having an affair with her. Would you then perhaps describe the relationship you had with Mary Margaret Flanders as one of ‘casual intimacy’?”
I had moved back to the table and placed my left hand on the right shoulder of Stanley Roth, as if to comfort the injured husband of an unfaithful wife.
Frowning, Bradley lifted his head. “Yeah,” he said, biting the inside of his cheek. “I guess you could put it like that.”
“And was Mary Margaret Flanders the only woman with whom you had this kind of relationship? ‘Casual intimacy,’ we agreed to call it.”
He gave an angry start. The furrows in his forehead deepened. Exasperated, he turned his face upward, seeking some form of protection from the court.
“Do I have to ... ?”
“Again, Your Honor,” I insisted with the air of someone forced to a thankless task, “this goes to the same issue of the conduct and character of the victim, which in turn goes to the question of motive.”
Van Roten had gotten to her feet, signaling her readiness to renew her objection. Honigman seemed less than persuaded by what I had said, but after narrowing his eyes in a silent admonishment, he let me go on.
“Do you want me to repeat the question, Mr. Bradley?”
He turned to me with a look of growing irritation.
“No.” But that was all he said.
“Then answer it.”
“Yes.”
“There were other women with whom you had this same kind of ‘casual intimacy’?”
“Yes,” he mumbled.
“Louder.”
“Yes,” he almost shouted, shoving himself up in the chair.
“How many?”
His head jerked back and looked at me with contempt, as if only someone completely naïve—or a complete hypocrite—could think to ask such a question of him.
“I don’t know.”
“Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands?”
“I don’t know,” he repeated in a surly voice.
“In other words: a lot. Did Mary Margaret Flanders know this? Did she know that you were often involved— in terms of ‘casual intimacy’—with lots of different women?”
Van Roten again objected, but Honigman, bending forward, his eyes fastened on the witness, extended his arm and with an impatient motion of his hand overruled her.
“Yeah, I suppose she knew.”
“So she wasn’t sleeping with you because she thought there was something more involved than the ‘casual intimacy’ which, as you’ve testified, was all it was to you? In other words, Mr. Bradley, she wasn’t seduced into sex by the promise or the expectation of love?”
Bradley tried to put the best face on things he could.
“We were good friends. We worked a lot together. There were times when we were a little more than friends.”
“I take it that is a yes. She was perfectly willing to sleep with you just because she wanted to?”
It struck at his vanity. Without thinking, he replied indignantly: “I certainly didn’t force her.”
“She was a woman, then, who did what she wanted?”
“Yeah, she did what she wanted.”
“She wanted to sleep with you, so she slept with you.”
“Yeah,” he answered, wondering why I would even bother to ask
“And if she wanted to sleep with Michael Wirthlin, she slept with him?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“And if she wanted to sleep with anyone else, she did? How many other men did she sleep with, Mr. Bradley? As many men as you have slept with women?”
“Your Honor!”
cried Van Roten, but Honigman ignored her.
“I don’t know what she did,” said Bradley.
“But you knew that you and Michael Wirthlin weren’t the only men with whom she had slept during her marriage to Stanley Roth, didn’t you?”
Bradley took a deep breath and let it out as a long sigh. “Well, you know ... you hear things.”
“And you heard things about Mary Margaret Flanders?”
“Yeah.”
“You heard, didn’t you, Mr. Bradley, that she slept with almost everyone? Isn’t that the truth of it?”
Walker Bradley turned up his palms and shrugged. “You hear a lot of things in this town. It doesn’t mean they’re true.”
“But we do know one thing that is true, don’t we, Mr. Bradley? The real Mary Margaret Flanders, the woman you knew, wasn’t anything like the woman the rest of us thought we knew, the woman we all saw so often on the screen, was she?”
Chapter Twenty Two
STANLEY ROTH WANTED ME TO see for myself. He would not say what it was or why I had to see it with my own eyes, only that when I saw it, I would not believe it. The driver turned into the street that led to the entrance to Blue Zephyr. Roth tapped the fingers of his right hand nervously on the leather seat. He glanced across at me, raised his eyebrows and nodded rapidly as if he were afraid I might miss what I was supposed to see. When he saw that nothing had yet registered, he lost patience.
“There,” he said, nodding faster as he shifted his eyes toward the front of the car, just beyond the chauffeur’s shoulder. “See it now?”
We were less than a block away. There was a car ahead of us at the gate. The guard was saying something to the driver, probably giving him directions after he had first checked to make sure it was someone authorized to pass inside. I felt stupid because nothing seemed any different from the way the front entrance of the studio had looked before. Roth was incredulous.
“You don’t see it? It’s right in front of your eyes. Look again.”
It had been a long, difficult day in court: I was not in the mood to be treated like some witless child. I whipped my head around, ready to let him know what I thought of this little game of his when I realized what I had just seen. I turned back to be sure. Immensely pleased that he had been right, that I would react the way he had thought I would, Roth leaned against the corner of the spacious back seat and rested his hands in his lap.
“When?” I asked, looking at him over my shoulder.
“This weekend.”
With a solitary wave of his hand, the guard let us through. The gate shut behind us, the gate that no longer led to Blue Zephyr Studio. The wrought-iron sign under which everyone entered now read WIRTHLIN PRODUCTIONS.
“Remember when I told you that I kept the bungalow and that I kept something else besides? The name. I kept the name. Blue Zephyr. It belongs to me. I told you— remember?—the first day you came here, that I could teach you more in a couple of weeks about running a studio than that idiot could learn in a lifetime.”
The driver dropped us at the bungalow. Roth instructed him to return in an hour to take me to the hotel. We went inside and I fell into a chair in front of Roth’s desk while he made us both a drink. The murmured sounds of quiet conversations drifted through the open French doors as the working day at the studio Stanley Roth had built almost single-handedly came to a close.
“Wirthlin Productions,” grunted Roth as he sank into the chair behind his desk.
He seemed completely without bitterness over what I would have thought must have been an emotionally wrenching turn of affairs. His apparent indifference seemed strange in light of the fact that, as it turned out, his resignation had not been necessary at all. He had allowed Michael Wirthlin to have his studio to prevent him from telling the jury that Stanley Roth had only the other night tried to kill him. And then, after Wirthlin had given him not only his silence but lied under oath about having ever seen him attempt to assault anyone, his own lawyer had proven out of the mouth of another witness the very fact he had paid such a high price to conceal. Yet all Roth seemed to care about was that he had managed to keep the name, Blue Zephyr, for himself. He could not stop talking about it.
“The name was everything, but Michael has too big an ego to see it. ‘Wirthlin Productions’!”
Roth put his feet up on the corner of the desk and held the drink with both hands in his lap. The late afternoon light softened the lines that cut deep across his forehead, lending a kind of thoughtful melancholy to his expression. He rolled his head to the side and for a moment looked at me as if he was deciding whether to let me in on a secret that was too good not to share.
“Have you ever done something, or tried to do something, and it worked exactly the way you wanted, but then something happened, something you did not anticipate—something you could not have anticipated— and it ends up working out even better than you hoped? That’s what happened here.”
“That you were able to keep the name—Blue Zephyr?” I asked as I sipped on the scotch and soda he had given me.
Roth stared pensively out the French doors. After a while he lifted the glass to his mouth. He held it there, after he had taken a drink from it, pressed against his lower lip. A smile, sad, certain, and a little cruel, stole across the rough contours of his mouth.
“Louis made me see it,” Roth began, slowly shaking his head, chagrined that he had not been able to see it for himself. “That night—after you stopped me from beating Wirthlin’s brains out. I was furious, beside myself. We bring him into Blue Zephyr and he’s telling me I have to resign? Then Louis showed me how to use it—how to use Wirthlin’s ego against him.”
Roth paused, reflecting on what he had just said.
“Do you have a friend?” he asked quite seriously. “Someone you can count on, no matter what—someone you know will always do anything they can for you, not because of something you can do for them, but because ... well, because that’s just who they are?”
The only person I could think of was Marissa, but it seemed somehow improper, as if I were betraying her again, to assume that kind of unselfish devotion. I remembered other people I had known, other people who had trusted me as well, but they were gone now, dead, or far away, living a life of which I was no longer a part.
“No one like Louis Griffin,” was my reluctant reply.
“It was finished with Wirthlin,” continued Roth. “That was not as clear to me as it was to Louis. Maybe it was because of Mary Margaret. I don’t know. But Wirthlin was determined to break me if he could. The choice was either let him walk away, and try to hang onto the studio without his money and the money he can raise—or let him have the studio for himself. With me it was personal; with Louis it was business. I wanted to kill Wirthlin for even thinking he could have what I built; Louis wanted him to have a business that even with Mary Margaret’s last picture was so far in debt we might never dig our way out of it. Louis put it all together. He knew exactly the way Wirthlin would react. He went to him the next morning, as if he was there to apologize for what I had done. It wasn’t the first time Louis had done that. He told Wirthlin that he knew how he felt, how angry he must be, but that there was too much at stake—that I was on trial for murder— and that he couldn’t let anyone know what had happened. It would make people think I might be guilty after all.”
Roth hesitated, as if there was something he was not quite sure he should tell me. He shook his head and laughed quietly.
“You know what the son-of-a-bitch said? ‘Everyone already thinks he’s guilty.’”
With a weary, troubled sigh, Roth lowered his eyes to the glass, searching for more clarity there than he had found in the things that had happened.
“Anyway, you see what Louis did. He made Michael believe that he had the upper hand. Just to be sure, Louis told him he knew things could not go on the way they had and that I understood that, too. He told him that while I didn’t want to, I realized now that there was really no other way; that,
given what had happened— that’s what he said: ‘given what had happened’—I was willing to resign.”
Roth looked up, a smile, shrewd, calculating, full of admiration, on his mouth. “Louis wasn’t done. He knew there was something more Wirthlin would want. ‘I know you’ll want to make a fresh start here,’ he told him. ‘I’ll of course resign as well.’”
Roth pulled his feet off the corner of the desk and sat up. Placing one elbow on top of the desk, he rubbed the knuckle of his forefinger back and forth across the hollow between his chin and lower lip.
“Do you have any idea how good it makes someone like Michael Wirthlin feel when they think they can force someone out? They think they’re indestructible. They think they can do anything. They think the first thought—any thought at all—that comes into their head is the pinnacle, the very summation, of human wisdom. They think they can give lessons to Machiavelli. ‘You want to keep the name Blue Zephyr? Why not? Why would I, the great Michael Wirthlin, want a name someone else thought of? Why would I want any name, except my own?’”
His eyes wide with wonder, Stanley Roth threw out his hands and sank back into the chair.
“Everything went perfectly. It couldn’t have gone better. At least I didn’t think it could until you decided— though I have to admit I’m still a little unclear why you decided—to prove to everyone that poor Michael is a liar.” A grim, satisfied expression entered his eyes. “One of the few times in his life he actually tried to keep a promise and all he gets for it is to have everyone think he perjured himself. Well, that won’t bother him much,” said Roth reflectively. “Not with ‘Wirthlin Productions’ to run.”
Roth reached for the half-empty glass sitting on the edge of the desk. He brought it to his lips, but then, changing his mind, brought it down to his lap and wrapped both hands around it. He sat there, with lowered eyes, gnawing gently on his upper lip as he meditated on something that appeared to trouble him more deeply than anything connected with Michael Wirthlin. The longer he stared at the glass, the more disturbed and withdrawn he seemed to become. His eyebrows drew closer together. Two parallel lines deepened into perpendicular grooves down his forehead to the bridge of his nose. He clenched his jaw, relaxed it, and clenched it again, faster and faster. Then it stopped entirely. He opened his mouth, just enough to take in a single short gasp of breath.