Star Witness

by D. W. Buffa

  Annabelle Van Roten paused and with a look of intense confidence stared at the jury. “We know that he killed her. We may never know what finally drove him to it, what words may have passed between them that fatal night, but we do know that Stanley Roth and no one else murdered Mary Margaret Flanders. Even without the blood of the victim on his clothing, clothing he tried to hide, Stanley Roth was the only one who could have killed her, because Stanley Roth was the only one who was there.”

  When it was finally my turn I had for the first time in my career the sense that it was already too late, that I had missed whatever chance I might ever have had to save Stanley Roth. That is what I had been thinking about when I should have been trying to get something down on paper to use at closing: what I had missed, that single piece of evidence that might have led me to the real killer. Annabelle Van Roten was right: all the evidence was against Stanley Roth. And yet, despite the fact that I knew he had not always told me the truth or the whole truth; even despite the fact that I had been a witness, and in a way, a victim, of his temper, I found myself at the end almost certain that he had not done it. It was nothing more than a feeling, an instinct, a hunch; nothing I could put into words, at least in a way that was likely to persuade anyone, especially a jury that had listened attentively to months of testimony making the case against him, that someone else had murdered Mary Margaret Flanders. But I tried.

  I stood looking around the courtroom, filled with spectators packed so close together they had as little room to move as the jurors crammed into that pathetically undersized jury box. Some of their faces had become familiar, regular visitors to the daily proceedings, more conversant with the details of the case than either the dull-eyed bailiff or the sullen-eyed clerk. Jack Walsh was sitting in the back row, craning his neck, perhaps to get a better view or, more likely, doing everything he could to be seen. He saw me look at him. The dull expression on his face changed immediately to one of open hostility. In the front row, sitting in the same place he had occupied for at least part of nearly every day of the trial, Louis Griffin, dressed as usual in a dark business suit, returned my glance with an encouraging smile. I turned back to the jury and for a moment looked each of them in the eye, or tried to. A number of them would not look back. It was not a good beginning.

  There was nothing to be gained by denying the obvious. I summarized the prosecution’s summary of the evidence and suggested by the way I did it that it was something of a mystery to me why Annabelle Van Roten had spent so much time on what no one doubted was true. Was it, I asked at the end of my brief recitation, because she did not want us to think too much about the questions she did not want us to ask because they were questions she could not answer?

  “Stanley Roth hit his wife. The defense, not the prosecution, told you that. He hit her in a rage when he found out that she had without his knowledge aborted the child she had not told him he had. Under that rather considerable provocation he did what he should not have done. He lost his temper: he didn’t think about it; he certainly didn’t get a knife; he didn’t drag her down the stairs outside to the pool; he didn’t wrap a stocking around her neck and with his knee on her spine pull her head back and slash her throat.

  “The prosecution told you that he was angry, beside himself, because—well, why exactly? Because she had been having an affair with another man? Because she had an affair with Michael Wirthlin? Because she had been sleeping with Walker Bradley? Or was it because of all the other men with whom she had apparently engaged in acts of ‘casual intimacy’? But how,” I asked, scratching the back of my head, “can you murder someone out of rage over something the prosecution insists Stanley Roth had known about for years?”

  Standing at the end of the jury box closest to the empty witness stand, I cast a sly glance toward Annabelle Van Roten. Impassive and utterly unimpressed, she stared back.

  “Was it because, as Stanley Roth himself had written in that screenplay—that screenplay on which he has been working for years, the one he calls Blue Zephyr—the movie-star wife was going to leave him for his partner who was then going to start a studio of his own?”

  Still gazing at Van Roten, I smiled to myself. “Murder her after she had already broken it off with Michael Wirthlin? No,” I said, turning away as Van Roten began to glare at me; “if anyone had a reason to murder her for what had happened then, it was Michael Wirthlin, not Stanley Roth; Michael Wirthlin, rejected and made a fool of by a woman he loved, married to a man he hated.

  “The question of motive is not the only one the prosecution would prefer you not explore. There is also a question, a very serious question, about the evidence itself. Some of you may have noticed—and all of you need to consider when you begin your deliberations—that for all the talk about all the evidence the prosecution was able to assemble, Ms. Van Roten has been strangely silent about what after all is the most crucial piece of evidence in this case: the murder weapon, the knife used to slash the throat of Mary Margaret Flanders. Where is it? Why has it never been found? Because Stanley Roth hid it somewhere? The same Stanley Roth who had so little fear of discovery that he nonchalantly tossed his blood-stained clothing in the laundry hamper and went off to work?”

  I stepped away from the jury box so they would have a clear view of the counsel table where Roth sat with his hands folded in his lap, following with an earnest look everything that was going on.

  “You watched Stanley Roth answer every question the prosecution could think to ask him. You’ve seen him sitting here every day, listening to what other witnesses had to say, not all of it things he would have wanted to hear. Whatever else you may think about him, I think it fair to say that Stanley Roth is not a stupid man. He surely isn’t stupid enough to hide a weapon and not bother to get rid of his own bloodstained clothing.”

  Some of the jurors who had not been willing to look me in the eye when I started, were now gazing right at me, waiting to hear what I was going to say next.

  “The prosecution tells you that Stanley Roth must have killed his wife because they had sometimes argued about whether she was doing things she should not have been doing with other men. Then the prosecution tells you that Stanley Roth must have killed his wife because he was the only one there that night. But if Mary Margaret Flanders was involved with other men—and whether or not her husband knew about it at the time, there is no question but that she was: with Walker Bradley, with Michael Wirthlin, with God knows who else —then all the more reason to believe that she brought someone home with her that night, and took him upstairs to her bedroom. You’ve been to that house— you’ve been to The Palms—you’ve seen how large it is, how far it is from the master bedroom to the bedroom in which Stanley Roth was asleep; you’ve seen how thick those solid oak doors are. What happened after she took him upstairs, after she got undressed, we may never know; whether this man she had with her started strangling her there in the bedroom, then dragged her down the stairs and outside to the pool; or whether she came down with him, or whether he was already outside, waiting for her. What we do know is that all the evidence produced by the prosecution to prove the guilt of Stanley Roth could as easily be used to prove the guilt of anyone else who had a motive of—what did Ms. Van Roten say?—jealousy or greed or both? All this so-called irrefutable evidence would prove the guilt of Stanley Roth’s partner, Michael Wirthlin, for example, if he were the one brought there that night by the woman with whom by his own admission he had been having an affair, the woman—the very famous woman—who apparently did not want that affair to continue.

  “Stanley Roth killed her out of jealousy—or Michael Wirthlin killed her out of jealousy. Stanley Roth had something to gain financially from her death. The studio had a policy on her and the studio collects. The studio released her last picture and the studio made money on it. Stanley Roth started that studio, but Stanley Roth was accused of murder and forced to stand trial and Michael Wirthlin has taken control of the studio and driven Stanley Roth out.”

&nbs
p; I looked across my shoulder at Annabelle Van Roten. “Someone put blood on Stanley Roth’s clothing. Maybe it was not Detective Crenshaw after all. Maybe, despite all his tortured testimony, some of which clearly bordered on perjury, he really did find the clothing where he said he found it. Maybe Michael Wirthlin put it there. He would have had every reason to do so, if he was the one who murdered Mary Margaret Flanders. The point is: if you grant the possibility that someone else killed Mary Margaret Flanders, then all these things the prosecution wants you to believe prove the guilt of Stanley Roth, don’t prove that at all, do they? It is only if you begin by assuming, not his innocence as the law says you must, but his guilt, that they do.”

  I kept going back over it, the way the evidence could prove either the guilt or the innocence of Stanley Roth, depending on what you wanted to believe; reminding them, over and over again, that when the evidence could do that, all that had really been proven was that there was a reasonable doubt and a reasonable doubt meant they had no choice but to acquit the defendant.

  “We have heard a great deal about the reasons why Stanley Roth might have wanted to murder his wife. Let me tell you the reason why he would not. We know what we make, and we love what we know, and Stanley Roth made Mary Margaret Flanders. He took someone no one had heard of, a young woman of unproven talent with the unlikely name of Marian Walsh and made her into Mary Margaret Flanders, the most famous movie star in the world. He no more wanted to destroy this woman he had made than a parent wants to destroy his or her own child. He made her almost the same way a parent makes a child, and in the same way the parent loves what she makes— this creature that she knows so well because she is part of everything she is herself—Stanley Roth loved Mary Margaret Flanders. It was more than the way a husband loves a wife. He loved her as a woman, but he also loved her as part of himself. To kill her would have been in that sense to kill himself: It would have been less a murder than a suicide.”

  Stanley Roth had been right after all: I had not thought of it—at least had not heard myself think about it—until I said it.

  With the prosecution’s privilege of rebutting the defense’s only closing with a second closing of its own, Annabelle Van Roten moved immediately to dismiss what I had done.

  “He almost makes you want to believe him, doesn’t he? He makes you for a moment forget all the things you know, all the things you learned, all the evidence that, contrary to what Mr. Antonelli would like you to believe, points unequivocally to the guilt, not of Michael Wirthlin or some unknown secret lover Mary Margaret Flanders brought home, but of the defendant, Stanley Roth.”

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  WHEN I WAS JUST STARTING out, fired with all the enthusiasm of youth, I tried a case in which the prosecutor was so arrogant and overbearing, and the defendant, who should not have been charged in the first place, so humble and inoffensive, that the jury never left the jury box. At the close of the judge’s instructions, they stood up, ready to move to the jury room, but then, as if each of them had been thinking the same thing, they looked at each other and sat down again. The judge stared at them with a puzzled expression. A juror in the first row explained that they had a verdict and that they had a question. The verdict, he went on, was not guilty. The question was whether the district attorney’s office didn’t have something better to do than go around prosecuting people who clearly weren’t guilty of anything.

  I had other juries that were out for only twenty or thirty minutes, just long enough to elect a foreman and have a quick cup of coffee, but that was the only jury I ever had that returned a verdict that was not only unanimous, but instantaneous. I did not expect that or anything close to it from the jury that was to decide the fate of Stanley Roth, but neither did I expect them to be out as long as they were.

  Rudolph Honigman had given the jury their instructions Wednesday afternoon, immediately after Annabelle Van Roten’s second closing argument. For the next two days there was not a word, nothing to indicate what they were doing or how long they were going to do it. Late Friday, in the cryptic language of the courts, we were told that the jury had decided to work through the weekend. All we could do was wait.

  Stanley Roth stayed at the bungalow behind the gates of the studio that no longer belonged to him. I stayed at the Chateau Marmont waiting for the telephone to ring. I tried to watch television to keep my mind off things, but all I seemed to find were the self-assured absurdities that passed for expert commentary on the all but completed trial of Stanley Roth. Everyone claimed to know what the jury was going to decide. The ubiquitous Jack Walsh not only insisted that his daughter’s murderer was sure to be convicted but, through tape delay, could be seen doing it on several different channels at once.

  I began to wonder what would happen to him when it was finally over and the world moved on to the next scandal that would dominate the headlines and become the principal subject of discussion until it, too, faded into the oblivion of yesterday’s news. What happened to people like Jack Walsh, someone suddenly famous, someone to whom everyone else pays attention, and then, just as suddenly, no one knows their name? What must it feel like to call the people who had been calling you every day for weeks and never hear back from any of them? I did not mind, in fact I took some pleasure in the thought that this was almost certainly going to happen to him. Jack Walsh had done a little too well by the death of his daughter. He had abandoned her when she needed him the most; it served him right if he was now abandoned in turn.

  Saturday came and went and Sunday, too. On Monday, after lunch alone in the hotel, I called the court just in case they had tried to reach me while I was downstairs.

  “You’ll be notified,” the clerk snapped as if I should have known she had more important things to do.

  On Tuesday morning, the court called. The jury wanted to review part of the testimony of two witnesses, Detective Crenshaw and Julie Evans. At one-thirty, we were in court again, listening as the court reporter read back Crenshaw’s account of his financial relationship with the studio and Julie’s report that the studio’s own records proved that he had been there and her statement that she had seen him on the set talking with Mary Margaret Flanders. There could be only one reason they wanted that read back to them: They wanted to be sure Stanley Roth had lied about it. I went back to the hotel and, more worried than ever, waited again for the telephone to ring.

  At eleven o’clock the next morning, a week after the case had gone to the jury, the call I had been dreading finally came. I picked up the receiver and heard a single, hurried, unfriendly word: “Verdict.”

  I took my time. I called Stanley Roth and told him I would meet him at the courthouse in an hour. He suggested we go together, but I convinced him it would be easier to slip in through the back entrance and avoid reporters if he drove there by himself. I said I would take a cab. The truth was I did not want to see him; did not want to have to offer an encouragement I did not feel. There was an old belief that the longer a jury was out, the better it was for the defense. If the evidence was that great, if the prosecution’s case was that strong, so the reasoning ran, the jury would not have to take long to decide. I had tried too many cases and watched too many juries to believe you could read anything into how long they spent locked in the jury room.

  From the backseat of the cab I looked out at the skyline of Los Angeles, shimmering silver and gold in the dry, dusty midday sun. On a corner, waiting for the light to change, a slim-waisted woman in a black, tight-fitting dress, wearing dark glasses and a broad-brimmed white hat, held a leisurely grip on the leash of a black-faced, cream-colored Afghan hound. Standing a few feet away, a young Hispanic in running shoes and jeans balanced a tall stack of pizza boxes in his right hand, ready to race across the intersection. It was nice to know there were a few people left in L.A. who apparently did not care what was about to happen in a small courtroom just a few blocks away.

  When I arrived, Stanley Roth was waiting for me. He stood up, put his left hand on my shoul
der and, looking me straight in the eye, shook my hand.

  “Whatever happens here today, thanks,” he said in a clear, firm voice in which I could not detect the slightest uncertainty or fear.

  Annabelle Van Roten came in just behind me. She put her briefcase on the floor next to her chair and with a look of cool confidence stared straight ahead. A moment later, the clerk entered, followed immediately by the bailiff. At the sound of his voice, we were all on our feet, waiting as the door at the side opened and Rudolph Honigman walked briskly to the bench.

  Even here, in this squalid, barely functional room, this wretched tribute to public indifference, there was a sense of solemnity that I have never felt anywhere except in a courtroom or a church, the two places where most of the serious ceremonies of existence are held, one for good, the other for evil. There was something cathartic about standing here, part of the ordered formality by which, year after year, down through the generations, a dozen average strangers decide calmly and without emotion whether someone is guilty and whether someone has to die. And then, having done their duty, they go back to their own interrupted lives and never see each other again, and perhaps only later wonder if they got it right.

  We sat down and waited for the jury. If I did not know what to read into how long they had been out, neither did I know what to make of the way they came in. I once had a juror so eager to let the defendant know that his ordeal was over, as soon as she took her place in the jury box she looked at me and smiled. Things like that almost never happened. Juries knew that in every trial someone won and someone lost; they knew whatever they decided, someone was going to be disappointed. They never laughed and they seldom smiled; they always looked serious. It was what made you believe in them; it was what made you think that with all the deficiencies, all the shortcomings, all the blatant stupidities of judges and courts and lawyers and, yes, all the awful inadequacies of the law itself, there was, at the end, something to hold onto, something that allowed you the hope that justice would be done; this look they always had on their faces, this fixed and forward stare that said they had done all they could, all anyone could, to make it come out the way it should.