by D. W. Buffa
It was at this precise moment that I realized how seriously I had underestimated Richard Crenshaw. He was subtle, shrewd, completely aware of what he was doing and, more importantly, of what I was trying to do. He had thought it all through, considered each point in his prior testimony where he had either not told the truth or not told all of it. He was not going to deny anything. I knew that now. Had he decided to lie about it, he would have lied about going to the house, about meeting Mary Margaret Flanders the night her husband hit her, about his failure to file a report about what had happened. No, he was not going to lie; he was going to do something more dishonest still: He was going to take each fact I threw at him and give it a different meaning, put each thing he had done in a new light, one entirely to his own advantage.
I went back to my question, repeated it, insisted he repeat the answer, this time without the elaboration.
“Instead of letting the patrolman handle it, you told him to leave—isn’t that correct?”
“Yes.”
“You knew this was the home where Stanley Roth and Mary Margaret Flanders lived, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And that was the reason you decided to handle this matter yourself—because of who they were: Stanley Roth the producer, the director, the head of Blue Zephyr; Mary Margaret Flanders, the actress. Wasn’t it?”
“It’s what I said before. I could tell it wasn’t a dangerous situation. No one was running around, waving a gun. I didn’t need any assistance.”
“And you thought it would be perhaps your only opportunity to meet Stanley Roth, didn’t you?”
Crenshaw permitted himself a tolerant smile. “I was there because there was a call to 911, and because the officer first on the scene had not been able to gain entrance to the house.”
“You told Stanley Roth that you had written a screenplay and that you had not been able to find anyone who was interested in it?” I returned to the counsel table and retrieved a thin manuscript of not much more than a hundred pages from my briefcase. “This screenplay,” I said, holding the bound copy shoulder high. “The screenplay that you testified under oath you had never written. You remember that, don’t you, Detective Crenshaw? You remember—I just read it back to you and I can do it again if you like—you said, when I asked if you had ever thought about writing a screenplay of your own, that you ‘wouldn’t mind doing that someday’? But here it is, already done; the screenplay you wanted Stanley Roth to read; more than read, to use, to make into a movie, a major motion picture, Detective Crenshaw; a motion picture that would make you famous, that would make you rich, that would make you into the kind of celebrity for whom cops want to do favors, instead of staying one of the cops who want to do them. That is what was going on that night, wasn’t it? You were there to convince Stanley Roth that the only chance he had to keep what happened between he and his wife out of the papers was to buy your screenplay, and that was the only reason you were there, wasn’t it?”
Crenshaw shook his head emphatically. “No, that’s not true,” he said without rancor. “That is not true at all. That isn’t... ”
“It isn’t? It isn’t true that Stanley Roth agreed that night to read your screenplay? It isn’t true that the very next day you were sent a check ... This check,” I said, pulling from out of the briefcase the cancelled check Blue Zephyr Studio had issued to Richard Crenshaw. “A check in the amount of $250,000. Have you forgotten, Detective Crenshaw? Do you get a great many checks for that amount?”
“No, that’s the only check like that I’ve ever received. I haven’t forgotten.”
“That was the payment for your silence, wasn’t it, Detective Crenshaw? That was the price you got for your agreement to make sure that no one—not even your own police department—ever found out that Stanley Roth had in a moment of anger struck his wife, wasn’t it, Detective Crenshaw?”
Clasping his hands together, his eyes widened into a blank stare. It struck me as odd, the way he looked, like someone sitting on a train, watching out the window, lost in thoughts of his own, as the scenery rushes past. I was almost shouting, but I was not sure he had heard a word of it.
“Did you ever talk to her?” he said.
“What?” I asked, startled. At first I did not understand what he was asking.
“Did you ever meet her—Mary Margaret Flanders? Did you ever talk to her, hear that voice of hers when she was looking right at you, asking if you would do something for her?”
“I’m sorry, Detective Crenshaw, you’re here to answer my questions, not the other way around. Now, answer the question I asked. The payment of $250,000 was payment for your silence, wasn’t it?”
“No,” he replied, shaking his head again in that same slow way. “I was there, at their house, talking to her, trying to make sure things were going to be all right. I wanted them to relax. Mr. Roth was very agitated. I wanted to make some connection with him, put things on a different footing, make him feel that he wasn’t being questioned by a cop. I had been working on a screenplay—that’s true. I got the idea when, as I told you, I was approached about that police show, when they sent me to that acting class. It wasn’t finished; it was only a draft. I had not sent it to anyone; I hadn’t even thought of sending it to anyone. I brought it up only because it was something we had in common. No, not in common, something in which the authority was all on his side. You see, I was a police detective talking to someone involved in a potential domestic abuse situation. That put me n charge, but it also put him in a position where he wasn’t going to feel comfortable talking about anything. I wanted him to feel at ease, able to talk. That’s why I brought it up. And it worked. He started telling me how difficult it was when you were just starting out, how difficult it had been for him when he first came to Hollywood. He told me that almost everyone who had become a success in the business could point back to something that happened—someone who had seen them work somewhere, seen something they had done. Then he told me he’d like to see what I’d done, read what I’d written. He said he couldn’t promise me anything, only that he’d give it a fair reading. That’s what happened. That’s all that happened. There was no deal, no arrangement. I never said anything to him about what I was going to do about what had happened between he and his wife. That was between she and I.”
While Crenshaw spoke, Stanley Roth shoved his chair a foot back from the counsel table, crossed one leg over the other. Intensely interested, he studied Crenshaw with a close scrutiny, as if he were watching an actor in a scene he wanted to get exactly right. His eyes were all over him, examining each movement, each gesture, ready, as it were, to insist on whatever small correction he thought necessary. I was much more interested in what Crenshaw was saying.
“And he read it, and the very next day sent you a check for $250,000?” I asked, doing nothing to conceal my incredulity. “For your screenplay—your unfinished screenplay—your first draft of a screenplay?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No, not for the screenplay; not alone, anyway. It was for the rights to the screenplay and to serve as a consultant.”
“Stanley Roth asked you to work—hired you to work—as a consultant at Blue Zephyr?”
“No. She did.”
“Mary Margaret Flanders?”
“Yes.”
“When?” I inquired, trying to hide my surprise.
“She called me the next day. She told me her husband—Mr. Roth—had received the screenplay, that he liked it, that it had promise, that with some work it might become a successful picture. She said they were working on a picture that was just about ready for production. It was a mystery. She played the part of a woman trying to find out who was really responsible for a murder for which her husband had been convicted. She asked if I’d like to work as a consultant on it.”
Crenshaw turned toward the jury. “The check was for both—the option on the screenplay and the fee to work as a consultant. I had already told them both that I did n
ot see any reason to file a formal report.”
“So your testimony now is that you were hired as a consultant—as you originally testified—and paid for this screenplay,” I said, picking up the script from the table, “which you did not mention in your original testimony?”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
“And that this all came about because you happened to arrive at the Roth residence to assist with a routine domestic disturbance, and that the way it was handled— the decision not to make it part of the public record— was taken independently of the offer to take an option on your screenplay and hire you as a consultant. Is that correct?” I asked with icy skepticism. “Is that now your testimony, Detective Crenshaw?”
“Yes.”
“The screenplay—the one Stanley Roth was supposedly so eager to have—it’s never been made into a movie, has it?”
“No, not yet.”
I threw up my hands, despairing of my inability to understand. “It was all so innocent, all so straightforward, and yet you came in here, a police officer, sworn to uphold the law, sworn again as a witness to tell the truth, and you tell the assistant district attorney, and you tell the jury, that you were acquainted with Mary Margaret Flanders and with Stanley Roth because you had met them during your work as a consultant on a movie. Will you at least admit, Detective Crenshaw, that your testimony was misleading?”
He did not even argue the point. “Yes, I agree; it was, in that respect, misleading.”
The script was still in my hand. I dropped it onto the table and put one hand on each side of where it fell. Leaning as far forward as I could, I fixed him with a piercing stare.
“And the reason you did that, Detective Crenshaw, the reason you misled the jury, was because you didn’t want anyone to know that you might have a motive to want Stanley Roth accused of the murder of his wife. It wasn’t just a draft, a not-yet-finished screenplay, you gave to Stanley Roth, was it, Detective Crenshaw? You had poured your heart and soul into it, you had worked on it, done everything you could with it. It was going to make your name, it was going to make you famous. Stanley Roth gave you the money, but he didn’t give you what you really wanted, did he? He didn’t give you the movie. It was worse than that, wasn’t it? When you tried to find out how things stood, when something might happen, when you could start to work on the movie itself, he wouldn’t even return your phone calls, would he? That’s why you hurried out there, the first detective on the scene: to get even for what he had done to you, for the way he had treated you. After what you had done for him—saved him from the public humiliation of being labeled a wife-beater and worse in every supermarket tabloid! You get there, the first detective on the scene, and all you can think is that Stanley Roth must have done it. He was the only one there and he had assaulted her once before. Stanley Roth is guilty! You’re sure of it, so you grab a shirt from his closet, wipe it in the blood—the blood that was all over the place next to the pool—and you put it in the laundry hamper, because, after all, Stanley Roth is guilty, and why not make certain you can prove it?”
Breathing hard, my face burning, I pushed myself up from the table and glared hard at him. “It’s true, isn’t it? That’s what happened. That’s the reason you lied about when you first met Mary Margaret Flanders!”
Crenshaw looked down at his hands, still clasped together. “You never met her,” he said in a distant voice, slowly raising his eyes. “I think if she had asked me that night to file a report that said she had assaulted her husband, I would have done it. I don’t know if it was because she was Mary Margaret Flanders the movie star, or if it was just something about her, something about the way she looked at me: as if she had always known me and known she could trust me. I don’t know. But I did what she asked me to do. I didn’t think it was asking too much. I believed her, I believed what she told me about what had happened. I did.”
Crenshaw straightened up. An apologetic smile crossed his mouth. “You want to know why I didn’t tell you, didn’t tell the jury about when I first met them? Cowardice, pure and simple. I didn’t want to have to admit that I’m the one responsible for her death. I could have prevented it. If I hadn’t done what she asked, if I had gone ahead and filed a report, charges might have been brought, something might have been done—and maybe none of this would have happened. I was the first detective on the scene. You’re right, I went there the moment I heard about it, but it wasn’t because I wanted to do something to make sure Stanley Roth was convicted of murder—I kept praying that it wasn’t Stanley Roth. Don’t you see?” he cried plaintively. “If it had been someone else—anyone else—it wouldn’t have been my fault! Having Stanley Roth guilty of the murder of Mary Margaret Flanders is the worst thing that has ever happened to me!”
Chapter Twenty Four
ROTH SAID HE WOULD NEVER go there again, but he had no choice. While the police held back the pressing crowd of busy narrow-eyed reporters trying to find something to write and gawking wide-eyed tourists eager to see whatever they could, the overworked engine of the ancient public facility bus hissed and groaned as it rumbled through the just-opened gate of The Palms. We were a strange looking bunch, the judge and the jury, the clerk and the court reporter, the bailiff, the prosecutor, the lawyer for the defense, and, sitting all alone behind the driver, Stanley Roth. Everyone had a full seat to themselves and under instructions not to discuss the case no one had said a word during the forty-five minutes since we first boarded the bus outside the courthouse downtown. Someone passing by us might have thought we were on our way to an obligatory company picnic in which all the employees had worn casual clothing while their employers, who took themselves much more seriously, wore the same coats and ties they wore every day to the office. I grew up watching movies in which juries were always made up of well-dressed men; I could count on the fingers of a single hand the times anyone had worn a suit and tie in any trial of my own.
These average men and women, brought from the obscurity of their everyday, anonymous lives to sit in judgment on Stanley Roth, had never seen anything quite like the private splendor of the gated estate that only film stars and their wealthy and powerful friends had been allowed to step inside. The Hearst Castle had become a public park, a place where uniformed tour guides gave the impression it had been vacant for years by remarking that Marion Davies, the mistress of William Randolph Hearst, had been a film star in the “early days of Hollywood.” Though just as old, The Palms was a place where people, famous people, actually lived, and if not with the same massive opulence, with something that was still far beyond the scale of the normal aspirations of the great American middle class. From the rapt expressions on their faces, this is what the jurors had imagined; almost, I think, what they had hoped for.
The one person who seemed to have no interest at all in a closer look at the scene of Mary Margaret Flanders’s murder was Annabelle Van Roten. She had opposed the request that the jury view the place where the murder occurred with a combination of moral outrage and caustic charm.
“What’s next?” she asked, throwing up her hand. “Do you want to exhume the body so they can view the corpse?”
We were in chambers, a word, with its suggestion of dark, quiet places filled with leather-bound volumes and leather-backed chairs, that scarcely conveys the ugly simplicity of Rudolph Honigman’s tin-box office. With his ordinary expression of benevolent boredom, the judge raised a single eyebrow and looked at me.
“That’s been done already,” I said. “Surely you remember all those photographs you insisted on introducing at the beginning of the trial. If you thought it necessary that the jury see what she looked like when she died, it is a little difficult to understand why you don’t want them to see where it happened.”
Van Roten’s head snapped up. Her coal-dark eyes flared.
“Those photographs showed the manner of her death. What you’re proposing is nothing more than a sideshow, a diversion.” She turned to Honigman. “It doesn’t have any evidentia
ry value whatsoever.”
“A little outing might improve your mood,” I could not resist suggesting. “A little fresh air would do you good.”
She flashed a taunting smile. “After the trial we can go to the beach. You know how much I love listening to your voice.
“It’s a waste of time, Your Honor,” she said, turning immediately back to Honigman.
“It’s anything but a waste of time,” I insisted. “We’ve had testimony about where the victim was found and how she was killed. We’ve had testimony about where the blood-soaked clothing of the defendant was found. We’ve had testimony about the location of the bedrooms. The jury needs to have a clear understanding about distance and direction, how far it is from one place to the other in that house and the route you have to travel to get there. A diagram on a blackboard, or even a scale model of the layout of the house, won’t provide anything close to what the reality of it is. It’s a murder case, Your Honor,” I pled. “This won’t take more than half a day.”
Annabelle Van Roten sat on the bus, gazing through her dark glasses out the window with the petulant look of a reluctant tourist, a woman accompanying her husband only from the fear that in her absence some greater mischief might occur. This was not the first time I had noticed that look. It was always there, just below the surface, a kind of habitual discontent; a sense of dissatisfaction, I thought, with the way things were—not with the trial, but with herself: the fact that she wasn’t doing something else, that she wasn’t someone else. When we climbed off the bus and assembled in front of the house to listen to Honigman instruct the jurors about where they were going to be taken and what they were going to be shown, I looked over my shoulder and saw her standing a few steps off, facing the other way, taking in the view of everything that had once belonged to Mary Margaret Flanders. While Honigman droned on, I moved next to her.