Star Witness

by D. W. Buffa

  “Did you ever dream about being a movie star when you were a kid?”

  She turned, looked past me to make sure no one was watching, and then, for just a moment, put her hand on my arm. “Every time I went to the movies,” she said quietly, passing in front of me as she rejoined the group that was just about to enter the house.

  With Judge Honigman in the lead, our small party made its way along the prearranged route upstairs to the second floor hallway and the bedroom that Stanley Roth had sometimes shared with his wife. The bailiff opened the door to the bathroom and waited while, one by one, the jurors were shown the location of the laundry hamper where, according to Detective Crenshaw’s testimony, Stanley Roth’s clothing, stained with the blood of Mary Margaret Flanders, had been found. While they waited for the others to take their turn, several of the women on the jury wandered around the bedroom, glancing at the photographs of Stanley Roth and his wife, taken in various famous places, sometimes the two of them alone, sometimes with a few of their well known friends. Certain no one was looking, the juror who had done a bit of acting and had once smiled at Stanley Roth craned her neck to glimpse through a door left partially open a large walk-in closet filled with dresses. Our eyes met and she knew I had seen what she had done. She began to gaze all around the room, as if the look inside the closet had no more meaning than anything else.

  At the other end of the hall, facing the front of the house, the jury was taken into the bedroom where Stanley Roth claimed he had spent the night. One of the men on the jury, impressed with the solid thickness of the door, gripped it between his thumb and forefinger. He had done the same thing with the master bedroom door. Someone could have been crying for help inside one of those rooms and, if the door had been shut, no one would have heard a sound.

  “Be careful,” cautioned Judge Honigman as he grasped the handrail and began to descend the gray stone staircase, each step sloping toward the middle after what was now close to a century of use.

  Outside, the bailiff, thoroughly schooled by Honigman, stood next to the swimming pool and with an economy of words described where, the witnesses had all agreed, the body of Mary Margaret Flanders had first been discovered. Consulting a diagram held in his hand, he pointed to the spot on the poolside deck where blood had been found. The upstairs curiosity; the chance to look behind the scenes at how people like Stanley Roth and his movie-star wife had lived; the close attention to the manner in which the physical characteristics of the house might in some measure affect the meaning of the evidence offered at trial; all of it faded from the jury’s eyes at the first mention of death. They huddled together in respectful silence while the bailiff, moving slowly the few feet from one place to the next, continued his spare recitation of the geography of a murder.

  When the bailiff bent down to point out the location of the blood spatters on the cement deck, Stanley Roth, who had been standing right beside me, turned away I found him a few minutes later, leaning against an oak tree next to a goldfish pond at the side of the house. He was looking out across the lawn that swept in a gentle arc down to the barely visible iron fence below, an empty expanse that had once been crowded with guests. Instinctively, my eye moved to the spot, just a few yards away from the pool, where the surveillance camera had caught Mary Margaret Flanders, surrounded by what seemed utterly anonymous faces, in the middle of that late afternoon event, only hours before she died.

  A cynical smile played on Roth’s mouth, as if he had just become certain of an unpleasant fact. When he heard me coming, he looked over his shoulder and shook his head.

  “She was screwing him,” said Roth, as we began to walk toward the front of the house where the bus was waiting to take us back to the courthouse. “That explains it,” he added cryptically.

  “Who are you talking about? What does it explain?”

  He looked at me, not with anger or disappointment or any other emotion you might expect on the face of an injured husband, but with an odd sense of triumph.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Roth, lowering his eyes as we approached the jurors lined up at the bus.

  He was doing this more and more now: saying things as if they explained something important, and then, a moment later, acting as if they did not explain anything at all. It was all part of what was happening to him: the months spent protesting his innocence while he waited for the trial to begin; the dawning realization that people he thought he knew and could trust suspected he might not be telling the truth; the unflattering photographs on the covers of magazines with made-up stories about some secret life that supplied the motive for his murdering his wife; the jeering courthouse crowds that chanted his guilt. No one could go through that and not be affected.

  Stanley Roth looked older, a lot older, than when I first met him. The lines in his forehead were deeper and more pronounced. His hands, which had started to tremble some months before, did so more often now. But what had happened to him physically was not the biggest change. He was now the most famous name in America, but except for the conversations he had with me, and those he sometimes still had with Louis Griffin, he did not talk to anyone. Isolated and alone, working long hours into the night, Roth lived more and more in a world of his own invention in which, like every work of fiction, everything connected neatly and inevitably with everything else. In putting him on the stand to testify in his own behalf, my biggest fear was not that he might become angry or confused under what I knew would be a withering cross-examination—I had prepared him for that—but that in a moment of what he thought inspiration he would suddenly go off on some strange, wandering monologue of his own, describing with that look of shrewd certainty how Mary Margaret Flanders had been murdered and why. It only shows how little I still understood Stanley Roth.

  “WOULD YOU PLEASE STATE YOUR name and spell your last for the record,” I said as soon as Roth had finished taking the oath and settled into the witness chair. The courtroom was packed. Reporters, part of the pool allowed in each day, sat forward on the edge of the benches, notebooks braced against their knees. Jack Walsh, having given his testimony, was back in court under his asserted right as the victim’s father. Louis Griffin, solid and reliable, the only friend Stanley Roth had left, was in what for all practical purposes had become his reserved seat in the first row, directly behind the counsel table where I stood next to the now empty chair. A few feet away, at the other counsel table, Annabelle Van Roten leaned forward on her elbows. Her hands held together under her chin, she joined both index fingers in the shape of a steeple, the apex pushing against her brooding lower lip. The clerk, with half-shut eyes, glanced at her watch.

  “Mr. Roth, did you murder your wife?”

  “No,” replied Roth firmly. He was all business and, for one of the first times since the trial started, fully engaged.

  “Mr. Roth, did you ever at any time strike or otherwise assault your wife?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  Moving behind the counsel table the few steps to the end of the jury box farthest from the witness stand, I asked him to describe what he had done and the circumstances in which it had happened.

  “That was the first time you knew your wife was pregnant—the day you found out she had had an abortion?” I asked when he finished, doing what I could to underscore the extraordinary nature of the event that had precipitated this single act of violence.

  “Yes,” he said, with a trace of both sadness and regret in his voice. “She hadn’t said anything to me, not a word.”

  “She knew you wanted a child?”

  “It was the reason—the main reason, anyway—we got married. Yes, she knew I wanted a child. She knew I wanted that more than anything.”

  “If she had told you that she wanted an abortion, that whether because of her career or some other reason she wasn’t ready to have a child, would you have gone along with that?”

  Roth did not answer right away. “I don’t know,” he admitted finally. “If she had said she wanted to wait—for a year, f
or some specific, definite period of time—if she had talked to me about it, about when she wanted to have a child, then ... maybe. But if she had just left it vague, like it was something she wasn’t really serious about, then I’m not sure. I don’t think the marriage would have survived it.”

  “But she didn’t talk to you about an abortion: she just did it. And when you found out about it, confronted her with it, you got so angry you hit her. And at that moment, the moment you hit her, you wanted to hurt her, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I did. I admit that. I was in a rage. If I had been younger, stronger, quicker, I might have hurt her ... more than I did. What she had done had hurt me, more than anything anyone had ever done to me before,” said Roth with a bitter look in his eye. “I didn’t do the right thing, but at that moment I didn’t care about that. I wanted to hurt her back.”

  “And then, after you hit her, she called the police?”

  “Yes. I told her to.” He paused. “That isn’t quite right: I dared her to do it. We were screaming at each other. Isn’t that awful?” he added, casting an embarrassed glance toward the jury. He lifted his eyebrows, an expression of disgust on his face. “Two grown adults, with everything anyone could ever want to have, screaming at each other like a couple of spoiled children who can’t have their way. It was sinful the way we behaved.”

  Roth looked down at his hands for a moment. A slight shudder ran through him as he thought about what he had done.

  “She was screaming,” he went on, still staring at his hands, “telling me how she was going to call the police. ‘See what the world thinks of the great Stanley Roth then,’ she said, taunting me with it. ‘Arrested for beating his wife!’”

  Roth lifted his head and in a disparaging gesture waved his hand back and forth in front of him. “I told her to go ahead, call the police. I’d be glad to go to trial and get convicted just for the chance to tell all her adoring fans how she was too damn worried about the way she looked on screen to have a child of her own.”

  With both hands on the arms of the chair, Roth opened his eyes wide. A pensive expression formed on his mouth.

  “I don’t think she would have done it, if I hadn’t said that, dared her that way. That was one thing you could never do with Mary Margaret: threaten her with any kind of consequence if she did something you didn’t want her to do. She was, I think, the most willful woman I ever knew. It’s what made her so good on the screen: the way she imposed her personality on everything around her, made you think she was the only one there, at least the only one worth paying attention to.”

  I was afraid he was about to go off on a tangent, something that made sense in his own peculiar scheme of things but had no obvious connection to the issue at hand, but he did not say another word about it. He looked at me and waited for the next question.

  “Describe to the jury, if you would, what happened when Detective Crenshaw arrived.”

  Set off by the dark blue fabric of his suit, Roth’s gray hair had a kind of silver sheen which, along with the deep-set eyes and craggy forehead, added to a general sense of authority, of someone used to making decisions. Or perhaps it was the other way round, and what we knew about him, what we knew about the famous Stanley Roth, gave the meaning to the way he looked.

  Roth cleared his throat. “Mary Margaret regretted what she had done,” he said in a full, rich voice. “We both regretted what had happened,” he added, nodding thoughtfully. “When the police officer first called from the gate, I tried to explain that there had been a misunderstanding, that everything was all right. He insisted he had to come up to the house. I’m afraid I wasn’t very polite. A few minutes later, Detective Crenshaw called from the gate.”

  With what I suppose must have been a director’s eye for detail and a screenwriter’s ear for dialogue, Stanley Roth described the way in which Richard Crenshaw had, without ever saying it, made clear what he wanted.

  “Let me be certain I understand this,” I said when he was through. “He brought up this business about his screenplay before he said anything about the way he was going to handle the incident he was supposedly there to investigate?”

  “Yes. As I said, he didn’t seem all that interested in what had happened. He didn’t want to talk to Mary Margaret alone to make sure that I wasn’t trying to intimidate her; he didn’t ask how it happened, or even if I had hit her. Nothing. He wanted to talk about his screenplay. I didn’t have any choice but to tell him I’d take a look at it.”

  “And once you told him that—told him you would be interested in seeing his screenplay—that was it? He didn’t take a statement from your wife? He didn’t take a statement from you?”

  “He didn’t do anything. He told Mary Margaret she should have her eye looked at. Then he left. Mary Margaret walked him out to his car. He sent the screenplay to the studio the next day.”

  I turned and faced the jury. “Did you read it?”

  “No.”

  “But you bought it, didn’t you? Bought it for the studio?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much did you pay for it?”

  “We talked on the telephone. I asked him what he wanted for it. I paid him what he asked.”

  “And how much was that?”

  “Two hundred fifty thousand.”

  “How was this expenditure listed on the books of the studio? As a payment for an option on a screenplay?”

  “No. A decision has to be made whether to renew an option. I didn’t want anyone at the studio to know about this. It was put in the books as a consulting fee.”

  “Did Detective Crenshaw work as a consultant on any movie produced by Blue Zephyr?”

  “No.”

  “So, in other words, you paid Detective Crenshaw a quarter million dollars not to report what had happened that night, not to report that on that one occasion you struck your wife?”

  “Yes.”

  “In other words,” I asked, turning my head until my eyes met his, “Detective Crenshaw blackmailed you?”

  Roth thought for a moment. “No, at least not in the normal sense of the word. You see, I’m convinced he thought his screenplay was worth every penny I agreed to pay for it. I don’t think he thought there was anything wrong with taking advantage of the fact that he found himself with the chance to talk to me about the screenplay that he hadn’t been able to sell. When he testified here the other day that in his own mind the two things— the failure to file a report and the decision about his screenplay—were completely separate and apart, I think he was telling the truth. I think from the moment he realized Mary Margaret didn’t have anything more than a bruised eye he knew he wasn’t going to file a report. He wanted to do us a favor. Maybe he hoped I would do him one in return. I didn’t think this at first. I thought he just wanted the money. But later,” he went on, nodding in a way that signaled a conversation we had once had about it, “I began to realize that it was more than that. He wanted it made into a movie. He called me, repeatedly, left messages, asking when a decision was going to be made, when someone would tell him if any more work needed to be done on it.”

  “You never replied to those calls, did you?”

  “No. I hadn’t even read it. I paid him the money because that was the price—what I thought was the price—to keep what had happened out of the papers.”

  “You never read it? No one ever read it?”

  “Last week. I got it out of the files, just to see what it was like.”

  “And?”

  Roth slowly raised his eyebrows, as a rueful expression settled on his mouth. “It wasn’t bad.”

  I began to pace back and forth, a few steps each way, in front of the jury box.

  “So, he comes to your house, the night you struck your wife; he decides to do both of you a favor—keep it out of the papers by not making a formal report—and you tell him you’d love to see the screenplay he’s written.”

  I stopped still and gave him a searching look. “He sends it to you. You call him,
tell him the studio—Blue Zephyr—the most prestigious studio in Hollywood, wants to take an option on his script.”

  I paused and the look on my face turned to one of utter incredulity. “Not only that, not only does Blue Zephyr want it, you want it so badly you’ll pay whatever he wants for it. You’ve dealt with writers, with actors, producers, directors—people trying to get their first big break—he must have been ecstatic, on top of the world. Stanley Roth loved his screenplay! Blue Zephyr is going to make it into a movie! Richard Crenshaw—Detective Crenshaw—working homicide division on a civil servant’s salary is going to be famous, he’s going to be rich, he’s going to have a whole new career. And then you wouldn’t return his phone calls. How long do you think it was before it finally dawned on him what had happened: that you probably never bothered to read it, that you probably tossed it in the trash, that you were only interested in keeping him quiet? How long before he realized that he had tried to do you a favor and you in turn were treating him like a crook?”

  Roth let the question answer itself.

  “He must have hated you for that; hated you enough to make sure he was the first detective on the scene when he heard of your wife’s murder; hated you enough to make sure there was enough evidence to convict you by making certain some of your wife’s blood would be found on your clothes!”

  “Objection!” cried Annabelle Van Roten as she shot out of her chair.

  Before Honigman could sustain it, I kept the substance by surrendering the form. “Withdraw the question,” I announced with a smug smile of satisfied indifference.

  I walked to the counsel table, opened a thick black loose-leaf notebook in which were organized all the materials I needed for trial and, once I had found the one I wanted, made a show of carefully studying the page. It was a way of buying time, a way of making sure nothing else was allowed to intrude upon the jury’s silent reflection on the accusation of misconduct I had just thrown at the main witness for the prosecution. I could feel Van Roten’s eyes boring into me across the short distance that separated us. She was seething, angry at what I had done and angrier still that there was not yet anything she could do about it.