Star Witness

by D. W. Buffa

  “Yes.”

  “You testified that Stanley Roth had been drinking?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he have a gun?”

  “No,” she replied, surprised anyone would ask.

  “A knife?”

  “No.”

  “Did he have any kind of weapon, any kind at all?”

  “No.”

  “So he came to the house without a weapon and traded insults with Michael Wirthlin. Is that what happened?”

  “Basically, yes, that’s what happened.”

  “And in a fit of anger, Stanley Roth threw a chair through a glass door?”

  “Yes.”

  A rueful smile crossed my mouth. “When I tried to break up the fight, I was knocked out. Was Stanley Roth knocked out?”

  “No, he wasn’t. He lay there for a moment and then got up. Then, I remember, he knelt down next to you to see how you were.”

  “So if he had wanted to hit Michael Wirthlin, he could have done so, but he didn’t, did he?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  I pressed my fingertips together and for a moment thought about the way I wanted to phrase the next question.

  “Michael Wirthlin wanted Blue Zephyr for himself— he wanted a studio of his own—isn’t that in effect what he said that night at Louis Griffin’s home?”

  “Yes, I think everyone there would have to agree that is what he said.”

  “A few days after this happened—after Stanley Roth had this altercation with Louis Griffin—Mr. Roth resigned, didn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Mr. Griffin has left as well?”

  “Yes, he has.”

  “What is Blue Zephyr now called, now that Mr. Roth and Mr. Griffin are gone?”

  “Wirthlin Productions.”

  “You’ve been in this business a long time, Ms. Evans. You were in effect second in command at Blue Zephyr, and now you’re in charge of day-to-day operations at Wirthlin Productions. Tell us this, if you would. Based on your knowledge of the motion picture industry and your knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of the three men in question, could this have happened, could Michael Wirthlin have forced out Louis Griffin and Stanley Roth from the studio they started, if Stanley Roth had not been accused and put on trial for the murder of his wife?”

  She did not have to answer. It was written in her eyes.

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  “I DIDN’T KNOW SHE WAS in love with me,” protested Stanley Roth.

  “Would it have made any difference if you had?”

  I was not really interested in whether it would or not. I was too concerned with the damage Annabelle Van Roten had done and how little the answers I had been able to coax out of Julie Evans had done to repair it. Stanley Roth would never have deliberately injured Michael Wirthlin—isn’t that what Julie had said?—but his lawyer, the one who was arguing that he could not possibly have murdered his wife, had thought the only way to stop him from killing his partner was to dive across a table and take a few stitches in the head for the trouble. Everything that had seemed to make so much sense, everything that had seemed so clear, so logical, while under the intoxicating influence of my own courtroom performance tasted like ashes now that the audience was gone and, like a drunk who wakes up sober, I remembered what I had done.

  The more I thought about it, the worse it seemed. Stanley Roth had felt so bad about hitting his wife that he told Julie Evans he wished he had killed her! Of course he had not really meant it: he said it only out of frustration. Besides, it was not as if this sort of thing had not happened before. They argued all the time, and about nothing more often than whether she was involved with other men, the very thing Roth had told the jury he had not wanted to know anything about. That did not matter, though, did it? Not when you realized that Mary Margaret Flanders had been at least as willing to use violence as her husband. After all, she was the one who had narrowly missed killing him when she hurled that heavy cut-glass ashtray across the room at his head. What did Roth tell the jury? That if his wife had been thinking about getting a divorce, he would have known it? The only thing right I had done all day was something I did not do: I did not ask Julie Evans whether she thought Stanley Roth could have killed his wife. Just in time, I remembered that I had asked her that question once before and I remembered what she had said.

  Roth was still thinking about what I had asked. “I might not have told her some of the things I did,” he said finally. “I wouldn’t have told her about a couple of the arguments I had with Mary Margaret. She made them sound more important than they were.”

  Roth looked out his window as the limousine moved at a slow, steady pace along the freeway, the sunlight on the side of his face softening the lines etched deep across his brow.

  “You work with someone every day. Once in a while they notice you’re not in quite the same mood, that you’re a little preoccupied or a little depressed. They ask if anything is wrong. You mention you had an argument with your wife. That night you take your wife out to dinner. You don’t remember why you had the argument in the first place, and you can’t imagine that you’ll ever have another one. But you do of course—weeks later, months later—and you mention it again.”

  Roth turned and looked straight at me. “You don’t mention all the good times in between, all the things you’ve done. All that other person knows are the arguments you’ve had. You see what I’m getting at? Julie didn’t know what my marriage was like. She knew there were arguments—I told her that—and if she thought she was in love with me, then the idea that the marriage was not very good, was even in serious trouble, becomes almost irresistible, doesn’t it? Yes, I said ‘thought’ she was in love with me. She wasn’t. She was in love with Stanley Roth—you know, the Stanley Roth who used to run the movie business. She wasn’t in love with me. Remember what I told you about growing up in the valley? Julie Evans was the good-looking girl who went out with guys that came from wealthy families and drove new cars. She wouldn’t have looked at me... ”

  He laughed. “I was going to say ‘twice,’ but forget that—she wouldn’t have looked at me once. She was in love with me? What did she do when Blue Zephyr became Wirthlin Productions?”

  Roth laughed again, a defiant laugh that seemed false and hollow, as if he were trying to conceal a deep sense of hurt that despite his failure to give her any reason to stay, or even to ask, she had decided to leave. For some reason I could not have explained and did not really understand, I felt compelled to defend her against any suggestion of disloyalty.

  “She didn’t want to testify.”

  “Yeah, well, no one wants to do anything,” observed Roth with a trace of self-pity. Aware of it, and perhaps aware as well of how easily that emotion can threaten the ability to function, he abruptly changed the subject and, with it, his mood.

  “Look at it this way,” said Roth as if he had suddenly put everything into perspective. “You get to win this thing with your closing argument. It’s perfect. Everyone thinks the defendant did it; all the evidence says he did it; and then the defense attorney, in the greatest summation of his life, convinces the jury that they can’t possibly convict an innocent man. Too bad it’s a trial,” he added as he looked out the window. “It’s a great movie.”

  His voice was strong and full of confidence, as if he really were talking about a movie he had seen or a screenplay he had read, instead of a trial that had every chance of sending him to prison for the rest of his life if it did not send him to his own execution instead. Then I noticed his hands lying in his lap, trembling so slightly he was not even aware of it.

  When I got back to the hotel I went right to work, or rather I tried to work. I sat at the table where I had spent hours every night preparing for the next day at trial and sought to find some new angle, some new approach that would, as Stanley Roth had put it, convince the jury that they could not possibly convict an innocent man. I paced the floor, still wondering if he was innocent, and, i
f he was, what I had missed. I lay down on the bed and searched the ceiling for an answer, someplace where I could start. There was nothing, nothing at all; my mind was a blank page on which would suddenly appear a few ill-chosen and irrelevant words, the random, fragmentary thoughts of my own disordered imagination.

  Julie Evans was not really in love with Stanley Roth; she only thought so because he was Stanley Roth. What then had he thought about his wife? Did he think she would have looked at him—even once—when he was an awkward, plain-looking kid growing up in the valley? What had he been thinking that day at The Palms when he seemed to take a strange, almost perverse pleasure in my failure—a failure that was likely to cost him his freedom and maybe his life—to figure out what had happened the night Mary Margaret Flanders was murdered? If he had known anything, he would have told me; but he didn’t tell me, so he could not have known something that would help. But then that look he had on his face, as if he could, but for some reason would not ... It was too late now. Stanley Roth was right: the only chance left to win was to give the greatest closing of my life. I did not have even the faintest idea where to start.

  I picked up the telephone to call home, to talk to Marissa, but I could not think of what I wanted to say. I wondered if she had heard anything, if there had been anything on the news, about what I had said in court, and how I was going to explain it away, or if I even wanted to try. I put down the receiver and made up my mind I had to write some kind of outline of what I was going to say on closing. I went into the other room and sat at the table and struggled again to find an argument that might convince the jury that the case against Stanley Roth had not been proved after all.

  The next morning, when I woke up and started getting dressed, I took my time, concentrating on each thing I did, trying to keep my mind from wandering back to all the questions I had not been able to answer and all the riddles I had not been able to solve about the murder, about the trial, about my own dubious existence. On the way to the courthouse, Roth and I barely exchanged a word. He thought I was thinking about what I was going to say; I thought he was thinking about what would happen if we lost. Shoulder to shoulder, our heads bent low, we pushed our way through the raucous, enveloping horde of waiting reporters and, for what would be the last time until the jury came back with its final verdict, took our places in that impoverished courtroom so different from the opulent private places in which Stanley Roth and Louis Griffin and Michael Wirthlin and all the other titans of that strange, mythic world so many people were so desperate to be a part of, lived their lives.

  “Did you write it out last night?” asked Roth, as much to make conversation as anything else.

  “The closing argument? No.”

  Roth’s eyes widened with admiration for what he then assumed I must have done. “You memorized the whole thing, without writing it out first?”

  He had not always been particularly curious about what was going on in court, but he was always interested, and at times, I thought, even a little obsessed, with technique.

  “No, I didn’t memorize it.”

  He stared at me, half smiling to himself, perhaps out of sympathy for the difficulty, which I was sure he had experienced himself, of finding the right words, or even figuring out what it is you want to say. It was unfair to leave him without at least some assurance.

  “I thought about it.”

  “Sometimes it’s better,” said Roth, nodding thoughtfully. “Better not to write everything down, not to try to memorize every word; better just to let it work itself out in your mind—let it simmer for a while. Then, when it’s time to do it, it comes out better than you could have written it.”

  It was too late to reply. The clerk, scowling defiance, stalked into the courtroom, perched on the front edge of her chair, ready to rise again the moment the bailiff, who had come in right behind her, announced the arrival of the Honorable Rudolph Honigman.

  “Keep your hands in your pockets or under the table,” I told Stanley Roth as we both stood up. “I don’t want the jury to see them trembling.”

  “My hands don’t tremble,” he protested as Honigman took his place on the bench and instructed the clerk to summon the jury.

  Annabelle Van Roten could scarcely wait to get started. She sat at an angle, one arm resting on the table in front of her, the other thrown back over the chair. Her head was held high, her mouth drawn tight across her teeth. There was a kind of eager malice in her shiny black eyes, the ravenous look of a predator closing in for the kill. I turned toward her and smiled, hoping to catch her off guard and perhaps cause her to lose just a little of her concentration. I was not more than three feet away; it might as well have been three hundred. I could have shouted at her and she would not have heard. When the judge told her she could begin, she sprang from the chair and bolted right past me. She was casebook perfect. She reviewed and summarized the testimony of the witnesses, reminding the jury by an allusion to something they had worn or some eccentricity they had displayed about witnesses the jurors could after all the long weeks of trial have easily forgotten. Beginning with the maid’s discovery of the naked body of Mary Margaret Flanders floating face down in the pool, her head covered in a cloud of blood, Annabelle Van Roten described in simple, straightforward language each piece of evidence that had been produced by the prosecution and explained why, taken together, they left no room for doubt that Stanley Roth and no one else had murdered his wife. When she began to talk about the clothing found in the laundry hamper, she stepped back from the jury box and pointed, not at the defendant, but at me.

  “Mr. Antonelli has tried to turn your attention away from the fact that the clothing belonged to the defendant and that the blood on them belonged to the victim. Who can blame him? He can’t deny the facts: Those were Mr. Roth’s clothes and that was Mary Margaret Flanders’s blood.”

  She tucked in her chin and stared at me with a kind of mock sympathy, letting the jury know that I had tried to get away with something, but that I had failed. “Stanley Roth did not kill his wife: Detective Crenshaw just wants us to think so.” With a taunting, scornful laugh, she turned back to the jury. “And just why is it that Detective Crenshaw went to all this trouble: ran upstairs—you’ve been to the house; you’ve seen how far it is to go— rummaged through the closets until he found something that Mr. Roth might have worn, ran back downstairs, went outside, dragged the clothing through the blood, and then ran back down the hall, through the master bedroom into the bathroom—by the way, without knowing where the laundry hamper was, or even if there was one—where he put those clothes so he can turn right around again and claim to find them there!”

  Van Roten sighed, and then rubbed the back of her neck, a puzzled expression on her face. “That’s a lot of trouble to go to, isn’t it? And for what? Because after being paid a quarter of a million dollars, Mr. Roth had not yet made his screenplay into a movie! That, after all, is the reason—the only reason—the defense managed to come up with. And what evidence have we been given for this? Why, Mr. Roth, of course! He told us—do you remember?—that while he didn’t really think so at the time, he now realizes—he now realizes!—that Detective Crenshaw might have become a little unhappy that Mr. Roth had not done anything with his screenplay. This of course is the same Mr. Roth who insisted—do you remember?—that despite the fact that the contract Detective Crenshaw had with the studio was to serve as a consultant, Detective Crenshaw never did any consulting. Yes, well, the studio’s own records prove something rather different, don’t they? And so does the testimony of Mr. Roth’s own executive assistant, doesn’t it?”

  Dropping her head, she moved one foot in front of the other, intent on what she wanted to say next. “What Detective Crenshaw did was wrong,” she said with a solemn expression, looking each juror in the eye. “He should have reported that act of domestic violence. It wasn’t his place—he didn’t have the right—not to report it, no matter how decent his motivation may have been; and he should have told us about
it right away, instead of waiting until he was confronted with it during the trial; but none of that changes the facts of the case. Detective Crenshaw found clothing belonging to the defendant and that clothing was covered with the victim’s blood and there is not a shred of evidence that he did not, nothing except the irresponsible allegations of the defense, desperate to find some way around the evidence that proves beyond any doubt, reasonable or otherwise, that Stanley Roth murdered his wife.

  “Why did he do it? After everything we’ve heard, the real question may be: Why had it not happened earlier? Stanley Roth is a violent man, married to a woman too indignant—too strong-willed, if you prefer—to become an object of his abuse. They argued all the time. No, they fought all the time. The defendant told you under oath that he didn’t know about any other men, though,” she added with a caustic sneer, “he admitted he was not entirely surprised when he heard of her involvement with both his partner, Michael Wirthlin, and his wife’s frequent co-star, Walker Bradley. He didn’t want to know—that’s what he told us. He told Julie Evans, whom he trusted implicitly, something completely different, though, didn’t he? He told her—and she told us—that they fought all the time about other men.

  “Why did he kill her? Jealousy. Jealousy, and greed as well. Her father, who had no reason to lie, told us that Mary Margaret Flanders was going to divorce Stanley Roth. Walker Bradley told us that she was going to leave him. By his own admission, Stanley Roth hit her and wished later that he had killed her, when she decided— what she had every legal right to decide—to abort a pregnancy she did not want. What do you think his reaction must have been when he discovered that she did not want anything more to do with him? And even if he did not know she was going to get a divorce, we know for an absolute certainty that Mary Margaret Flanders had affairs with other men and that she and Stanley Roth had arguments, some of them violent, because of it. We know, in other words, that Stanley Roth was jealous; we know that he was violent; we know that financially he had a great deal to gain and nothing at all to lose by his wife’s death. And we know something else as well, don’t we?”