Star Witness

by D. W. Buffa

  This jury looked more serious than most. Not a single juror looked at Stanley Roth or at me; none of them looked at Annabelle Van Roten. They did not look anywhere except down at the floor as they filed slowly into the jury box, like mourners making their way into a pew.

  Honigman took a deep breath as he pulled himself to his full height. “Has the jury reached a verdict?”

  Holding the verdict form in his hand, the heavyset juror in the back row, the one who had spent the entire trial with his knees wedged against the seat in front of him, rose awkwardly from his chair. He was on his feet, but he had not yet raised his eyes. He stood there, nodding thoughtfully, staring at a point on that dull scuffed linoleum floor between the jury box and bench. Finally, he looked up. Gazing steadily at the judge, he shook his head.

  “No, Your Honor,” he announced, “we haven’t reached a verdict.”

  “You haven’t reached a verdict?” inquired Honigman, surprised. He tried to hide his disappointment. He cleared his throat and asked: “Is there any chance that you might be able to reach a verdict with further deliberations?”

  “No, Your Honor; no chance at all. We’re completely deadlocked,” said the jury foreman grimly.

  The courtroom began to buzz. Honigman stopped it with a sharp look. He thought for a moment and then, with a civil smile, turned to the foreman.

  “If this jury doesn’t reach a verdict, then the case will have to be tried again with a new jury, one there is no reason to think will be better equipped than the twelve of you to decide the issue before us.”

  If Honigman thought this observation, sound so far as it went, would make any difference, he was wrong. The foreman’s large mouth clamped down tight, his gaze narrowed into the look of a shrewd-eyed appraisal.

  “Your Honor, we could meet till kingdom come and never reach a verdict.”

  Honigman raised his eyebrows. “I see. Very well. Then there is nothing we can do.” Seizing the gavel, he looked around the courtroom filled with faces, tense and expectant, staring back at him, waiting to see what he would do next. “In the matter of the People v. Stanley Roth,” he said, speaking in a formal voice, “I hereby declare a mistrial.”

  The gavel came down. I watched it fall and I saw it strike the hard wooden surface of the bench, but it did not make a sound. I had the strange, uncanny sensation of observing a singular, inexplicable breach of one of nature’s laws. Then I realized, instead of silence there had been a sudden explosion of deafening noise coming from everywhere at once. Everyone was shouting at everyone else, trying to make sense out of what had just happened; looking at each other with startled expressions that betrayed their surprise and in some cases their anger and even outrage. Cursing under their breath, reporters tripped over each other, struggling to get outside to be the first to report what in a matter of minutes everyone who had on a radio or a television would know. I caught a glimpse of Jack Walsh, standing at the back of the courtroom, shaking his fist while he shouted some impotent obscenity no one could hear. Annabelle Van Roten had sprung from her chair. Bent forward, her hands on the table, bracing herself as if she was about to spring forward again, she stared in speechless astonishment. Heads down, as if they expected at any moment to be assaulted by a rock-throwing mob, the jury retreated to the jury room. Judge Honigman had already vanished behind the door to his chambers. The clerk, moving at her accustomed pace, knitted her brow in disgust at all the commotion, as she made sure her chair was in the proper position behind her small desk before she waddled slowly out of the courtroom.

  Amidst what was pure bedlam, Stanley Roth remained completely calm. There was no visible sign of any feeling of relief; indeed, nothing to suggest he felt anything at all. He found Louis Griffin, waiting on the other side of the low railing behind the counsel table. They shook hands and whispered a few words that, though I was only a few feet away, I could not hear above all the courtroom noise.

  With Roth right behind me, we fought our way through the courtroom until we got to the doorway where Jack Walsh tried to stop us.

  “Get out of my way,” I shouted as I shoved him aside.

  “You murdered Mary Margaret,” he yelled as stumbled through the doorway. “You’re not going to get away with it, Roth!”

  Roth loosened his grip on my arm and started to turn around. I grabbed him and pulled him with me into the hallway.

  “Don’t say anything when we get outside,” I instructed as we walked at a rapid pace, people all around us, all of them trying to get a closer look.

  “There won’t be another trial,” said Roth without expression.

  “Of course there will,” I replied, looking straight ahead.

  The door that led outside was just a few steps ahead of us. Through the glass I could see a vast spreading circle of microphones and television cameras surrounding the willowy silhouette of Annabelle Van Roten. I could not see her face or hear her voice, but there was not any doubt in my mind what she was saying or how angry and defiant she looked while she was saying it.

  “You don’t really think she’s going to walk away from this because one jury couldn’t agree, do you? It was a mistrial, not an acquittal. What do you think she’s telling them right now? She’s making a promise that they’re going to try you again and she’s promising them that this time they’ll get a conviction,” I said as I pushed open the door.

  As soon as they saw us, they came after us, running away from the prosecutor to encircle the defendant, like an army lifting a siege on one place to impose it on another.

  “What do you think it means that the jury couldn’t reach a verdict?” one reporter shouted above the rest. With my hand on his sleeve, I held Roth to my side and slightly behind me, while I took a half step forward.

  “Obviously it means that the prosecution wasn’t able to make its case beyond a reasonable doubt. Remember,” I went on, raising my voice to forestall the next question, “the defense doesn’t have to prove anything; the prosecution has that burden and they couldn’t meet it.”

  “At least some of the jurors must have thought so!” came the shouted retort. “Otherwise they would have brought in a verdict of not guilty!”

  “We don’t know how many jurors felt that way, and we may never know. All we know is that inside that jury room there was a reasonable doubt and that because of that reasonable doubt the prosecution didn’t get the conviction they kept promising everyone they were going to get.”

  “How do you feel, Mr. Roth?” asked a female reporter as I finished.

  I tightened my grip on Roth’s sleeve, ready to pull him away if he started to say something he should not. I need not have worried: His reply was perfect.

  “More determined than ever to prove my innocence.”

  “You still insist you’re innocent?” yelled someone from the back of the crowd. “Everyone else thinks you’re guilty.”

  Pulling Roth with me, I started moving down the steps. “The jury didn’t think so,” I shouted back as I elbowed my way through.

  I could not see who it was, but it was the same voice as before, a voice filled with cynicism and contempt.

  “Want to bet that most of them did?”

  It had been a guess, a stab in the dark, intended perhaps as nothing more than a reporter’s provocation, an attempt to get a reaction, an angry response that could be put in quotes and, taken out of context, made to seem controversial. That reporter had no more knowledge than the rest of us about what had gone on behind the closed doors of the jury room. Within hours of being dismissed, however, a few of the jurors had begun to talk, and they all told the same story.

  From the first ballot taken, immediately after selection of a foreman, a ballot taken for no other reason than to see how matters stood before they began to discuss the case, to the ballot taken just before they decided that the vote was never going to change, eleven jurors had consistently agreed on a verdict. There was one holdout, the same one each time. The eleven members of the majority had tried every
argument, but nothing worked. They thought the testimony read back to them would at least cause this lone dissenter to acknowledge the possibility they might be right, but it had no effect. Eleven members of that jury were convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that Stanley Roth was guilty, but they could not convince the twelfth. It was a mark of their own essential decency that not one of those who had been so certain they were right would divulge the identity of the juror they were convinced had been so wrong.

  It did not seem to bother Stanley Roth that he had been saved from the executioner by the slimmest of possible margins or that it might be only a temporary reprieve. When I suggested we start planning for the next trial, he replied with a touch of irritation that there was not much point to it until we knew for certain there was going to be one. The way he said it, not just with impatience, but with that same strange insistence with which he had said to me in the courtroom right after the jury had been dismissed that there would not be another trial, seemed almost ludicrous in light of what we now knew about how near he had come to conviction.

  I decided it must be the strain. Accused of murdering his wife; subject to the constant and unrelenting scrutiny of a media that, perhaps because it had once nearly worshipped him, had turned on him with a vengeance; compelled day after day to sit in silence while a parade of witnesses questioned his honesty and made a mockery of his marriage—who could blame him if he had started to imagine that with a mistrial, whatever its cause, his troubles might finally be over? I decided to let him lose himself in his work for a while. It would do him good not to think about what he was going to have to go through all over again: It had been hard enough the first time. I told him I would be back in touch when I knew something more definite. Then I made plans to leave Los Angeles and go home. Before I left, however, there was someone I had promised myself to see.

  I did not know how much of what Mary Margaret Flanders had said to Louis Griffin was true, and how much the result of nostalgia, the thought of things as they might have been, instead of the way they really were. Was her first husband really the only man with whom she had ever been in love? He was the only one with whom she had been willing to have a child. But that was long before she was famous, long before she had to think about what it might do to her career. Perhaps she had said it because with Louis Griffin, who had lost a daughter, she could make the kind of confessions she imagined someone like Marian Walsh might have made to the kind of father she wished she had had. It was too late to know, but it was not too late to tell Paul Erlich what she had said. I suppose I thought it might give him some solace, not so much for himself, but for the child he had in her mother’s absence raised alone. Had I had a child, I would have liked to know that the child’s mother loved me more than she ever loved anyone else again. Or so at least I told myself as I walked under the blossoming trees on my way across campus to Erlich’s tiny, anonymous office.

  The door was open. Erlich was talking to a student, an earnest-looking young man sitting in the rigid posture he thought the mark of formality he was supposed to convey. Smiling to myself, I leaned against the cinder block wall next to the door and listened with admiration as Paul Erlich, schooled in the ways of stammering adolescents filled with infinite promise, put him at his ease.

  “Don’t worry if you find this material difficult,” he said in a quiet, comforting voice. “Only worry if you’re not.”

  I wished I could have seen the young man’s face. With a kind of instinctive sympathy, I recalled my own look of grateful astonishment the first time I had been given a similar assurance that with time everything would become clear.

  “Mr. Antonelli,” exclaimed Paul Erlich with only mild surprise when I stepped into the doorway after the young man, his face flushed with barely suppressed excitement, had gone. “I heard about the verdict—or should I say lack of one? What’s going to happen now?” he asked, motioning for me to take the empty chair at the side of his desk. “Another trial?”

  “I’m afraid so,” I replied with a rather dispirited shrug. I scarcely knew him; we had talked just once before; but I found myself at ease in his presence, without the need to mask my feelings or measure my words. “The only real question is how long it is going to be before we start all over again. I’m not looking forward to it.”

  Sitting forward, the fingers of his hands intertwined, he seemed to study me for a moment, a faint, rather shy smile on his finely sculpted mouth.

  “But you must have learned something from the trial, something that will help you in the second one.”

  “I think I know less about the case now than I did at the beginning,” I confessed, glad for the chance finally to tell someone the truth of it. “There is one thing, though, that I learned; which is the reason I’m here.”

  I told him what Louis Griffin had told me and explained the circumstances in which Mary Margaret Flanders had come to confide so much about herself He listened, staring into the middle distance, an earnest, wistful look in his eyes.

  “We were young,” he said, his gaze coming back to me. “We didn’t see what was going to happen when other things started to seem as important as what we felt about each other, when being in love stopped being the only thing that mattered.

  “I had never known anyone like her. I haven’t met anyone like her since.” He paused before he added: “She wasn’t what you saw on the screen. Or maybe she was.”

  He thought about this last remark, wondering, it seemed, whether it was true. Then he let it go, another question that could never be answered.

  “You came all the way out here to tell me that? What an extraordinarily kind thing to do. I’m sorry, I wish there was something I could do to help.”

  I examined him closely, trying to discover if he meant what I thought he did.

  “You don’t think Stanley Roth killed her, do you?”

  “No,” he replied calmly and without hesitation.

  “Everyone else seems to think so. Why don’t you?”

  “Because I stood across from him at her grave and I looked into his eyes and the grief I saw there was real. I think he still loved her, the way I had still loved her, even though I knew the marriage was over.”

  I did not understand what he meant. What did the fact that Paul Erlich had still loved her after he knew they were going to divorce have to do with the way Stanley Roth had felt?

  “They had already agreed to separate,” explained Erlich when he saw the look of confusion on my face.

  “How would you know a thing like that?” I asked, stunned at the utter self-assurance with which he had said it.

  “She told me,” he replied, for some reason surprised at my reaction. “You didn’t know they were separating?”

  Alert and suddenly intense, I bent toward him, searching his eyes. “When did she tell you this?”

  “That morning.”

  “Which morning?”

  “The morning before she was killed. She called me. She had never done that before. She said she wanted to see me. She said she and Stanley were splitting up. They hadn’t actually decided on a divorce, only a separation, but she made it clear the marriage was over.”

  “And she wanted to see you?”

  “Yes, that afternoon.”

  “Did she say why?”

  “She said she was worried about something. She said something had gotten out of control and she wasn’t quite sure what to do about it.”

  “But you don’t think it was about Roth?”

  “No, I think it was something else. It wasn’t a very long conversation. She asked me if I could come by. She said there was a charity event of some kind at the house late that afternoon and there would be a lot of people but that it would be easy for her to step away inside and we could talk then.”

  “But you didn’t go?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  His gaze went to the only photograph he kept in his office. “Because she never once asked about Chloe, and because the whole time she w
as talking to me I kept seeing in my mind what she had done that day I brought our daughter—her daughter—to see her at the studio.”

  I knew what he was thinking and I tried to get him to stop. “It wouldn’t have made any difference had you gone to see her.”

  “Are you sure? If I had gone there that afternoon, the way she asked—talked to her, listened to her—how do you know what would have happened? Maybe she would have done something else that night ... gone somewhere else ... stayed somewhere else. It was the only time in all the years after our divorce that she had ever asked me for anything, and all I could think about was getting even. It isn’t much to be proud of, is it?”

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  A WEEK AFTER STANDING ON the courthouse steps, shaking with anger as she swore to try the case again, Annabelle Van Roten, true to her word, filed on behalf of the prosecution the formal request for a retrial in the matter of the People v. Stanley Roth. An intelligent and resourceful lawyer who in all the endless distractions of the first trial had never lost sight of the principal issue at hand, she was so convinced of Roth’s guilt, so certain she had proven it, so determined to prove it again, that I think she was genuinely puzzled that the court did not share her sense of urgency about when the second trial should begin. It was not, as she seemed to think it was, simply a matter of impaneling another jury. There was a tremendous backlog of cases, civil cases in which the parties had been waiting for years for the chance to have a trial on the merits, criminal cases in which imprisoned defendants, after all, were entitled to a speedy trial. The second trial of Stanley Roth would have to wait its turn, and the earliest opening was almost eight months away, just around the corner in terms of the way the judiciary looked at such things; a lifetime, if the ashen expression on Annabelle Van Roten’s disappointed face was any indication; and a date without any meaning at all from the shrug of indifference with which Stanley Roth greeted the news.