Star Witness

by D. W. Buffa

  I had given up trying to interpret the sometimes enigmatic reactions of Stanley Roth, or perhaps I had just grown tired of his shifting moods, the sudden enthusiasms, the rapid descents into a kind of restless discontent. Whenever I asked him a question now, the answer tended to be vague, ambiguous, as if his mind were somewhere else and he could not be bothered with what I wanted to know. I asked about—rather I confronted him with—what his wife, Mary Margaret Flanders, had told Paul Erlich the day before she died. He dismissed it with a show of impatience, suggesting that anyone who knew her knew that what she said one day was not anything like what she would say the next day or the day after that. I thought it was probably more true about him.

  The plain fact was that we were both tired, and tired of each other. I was only now beginning to realize just how exhausted I was. I had been running on adrenaline since the trial stopped. All I wanted to do now was go home and sit out on the back deck with the breeze off the bay in my face and not think about Hollywood or Stanley Roth or anyone else involved in this case; just sit there and clear my mind of all of it until it was time to get ready again and I could start to see things in a new and different light.

  It does not seem like much, sitting alone at home, with just Marissa to keep me company, thinking about something other than Hollywood and Stanley Roth, but it was not nearly so easy as I had imagined or as I had hoped. Annabelle Van Roten had not wanted to wait to try Stanley Roth again; neither, it seemed, did anyone else. Writers who wanted to be famous; famous people who wanted to be writers; anyone who had ever known and loved Mary Margaret Flanders—and of course anyone who had known her now claimed to have loved her—anyone who had known and if not always hated, at least distrusted, Stanley Roth, was writing a book, or gave an interview, or lent their name to someone who did. Several of the police who investigated the crime, several of the witnesses who testified at the trial, as well as at least two members of the jury, hired agents and tried to sell their stories. Unable to find a publisher willing to come up with the kind of money he thought he deserved, Jack Walsh gave an exclusive interview to a national newsmagazine, released the same day as a twenty-minute segment taped for television, in which he blamed the jury’s failure to convict on the shameful incompetence of the prosecution. Detective Richard Crenshaw made no public comments of any kind. He was rumored to be somewhere in Arizona, working on a screenplay about the case.

  It was a form of genius, really; an instinct for the main chance, a perfect grasp of the way things had come to work in America. What was the point of becoming a name everyone knew—or a name that could be connected with a name everyone knew—if you did not take advantage of it while you still could, before you and what you knew, or claimed to know, became yesterday’s news and no one could quite remember why you had once been someone they thought they could never forget? What was the point of waiting eight months if you were someone who had already given up nearly a year of your life following the case against Stanley Roth because you knew you could write a bestseller if you were the first, or one of the first, to write the story of the murder of Mary Margaret Flanders? In a second trial, coming that long after the first, what would be left of the tension, the heightened sense of awareness, all the things that had riveted the attention of that vast celebrity-intoxicated public that had as its only fear the fear of not knowing what everyone else was interested in knowing right now, today, not yesterday or the day before that? No, if you were going to write a book it had to be the kind publishers had to have because it was the only thing the public at that moment wanted to read. Two months after the first trial of Stanley Roth ended in a mistrial, the number one bestseller in the country was something called A Death in Beverly Hills: How Stanley Roth Murdered Mary Margaret Flanders. The book jacket promised “shocking and previously unreported details of the crime.” Everyone talked about the author’s three-million- dollar advance; no one talked about what it all might do to Stanley Roth’s chance for a fair trial.

  “Come watch this,” said Marissa the evening I started it. “There’s something you should see,” she added with a teasing sparkle in her eyes.

  I was lying on the bed, my head propped up on two pillows. Taking the hand she offered, I followed her into the den where the television set was on and sat next to her on the sofa. An aging actress who years earlier had married a famous and aging leading man, an actress who had not made a movie in years, was insisting to a somewhat startled talk-show host that she had quite unexpectedly become the chosen instrument of God, capable not only of curing the sick, but of bringing love to the world. She said all this with something like the exuberant enthusiasm of a quiz show winner, someone who had just won the biggest prize of all.

  Clapping her hands in glee, Marissa seemed to smile several different ways at once. “Isn’t that wonderful! You knew sooner or later it had to happen. All these formerly famous people on all these hour-long things that play in the middle of the night, and now, finally, the first infomercial for God!”

  She stopped long enough to ask: “What was it Stanley Roth told you about that business—that people would do anything to get into it?”

  Marissa turned off the television. There was a slight trace of melancholy in her eyes. “They won’t just do anything to get into it; they’ll do anything to stay in it, won’t they? Once they’ve known what it’s like to be on camera and imagine themselves the center of attention for millions of people who want to be just like them, or like what they imagine them to be.”

  I thought about that when I went back to A Death in Beverly Hills : the way in which it seemed not to matter what you did so long as it kept you at the center of public attention. Movie stars no one wanted to pay money to see any more could find something on television, featured parts if they were lucky, commercials for products sold to an older audience, if they were not. Those who had been really famous could put their names on ghostwritten books that told how Hollywood used to be for those who suffered nostalgia for what they thought they still remembered. Others, like that aging actress, could claim some spectral power to heal the living or make contact with the dead, turning what had once been sold only at carnivals into what in the age of television was applauded as the honest expression of a genuine spirituality. It was pathetic what once-famous people would do to remind people that they were still around and still worth watching. There was more self-respect in quitting things altogether, the way the owner of that English Tudor mansion where Louis Griffin later built his own home of stucco and glass had done. Watching on old reels of film someone he would never be again, he drank himself into oblivion and burned the house down all around him and died in the fire, but he had at least the decency to do it alone.

  It was too bad that he had not written something about his life and the changes he had seen when movies began to talk and people began to fly and everyone started to think they had to hurry not to fall behind. It would have been a more interesting book to read than the one the one I was reading and all the others that were being rushed into print. It reminded me of the long-forgotten and perhaps mistaken observation by Schopenhauer that with the advent of newspapers and journalists anyone could write for publication, and everyone else could read themselves stupid.

  Marissa came into the room and I closed the book and put it down. She sat on the bed next to me and picked it up. Opening it to a random page, she began to thumb through it. Something caught her eye. She held the book open on her knee and with an eager, gleeful look began to read.

  “It’s about you,” she said, glancing at me as she closed it. “I’m going to read it. Everyone is reading it.”

  I smiled, and then I laughed. “I told you it wasn’t any good.”

  Marissa raised her chin and tucked the book under her arm. “I want to see what else he writes about you.”

  Marissa knew about what I had said in open court to Julie Evans, and I think she knew much more than that, but she never asked what had happened and I was certain she never would. She did
make one remark, however, one that I found both touching and a little sad. She said that one of the things she liked most about me was how willing I was to fall in love with beautiful women about whom I knew nothing. Marissa knew so much more about me than I did myself. She was right. When I was with her, I did not think about anyone else; but when I was away somewhere, when I was in Los Angeles, for example, I was always doing that, falling in love with beautiful women I did not know and never would; the same way, I suppose, I had once fallen in love with Mary Margaret Flanders.

  She was almost to the doorway before she remembered.

  “Did you see the package that came for you? I left it on the table in the hall.”

  I started to get up, but she said she would bring it to me. It was a fairly thin package, mailed overnight from an address somewhere in Los Angeles. There was no name, nothing to indicate who had sent it, but when I opened it I knew at once who it was. There was a brief cover note asking me to call. For a long time I stared at the title on the cover of the screenplay. It was called Blue Zephyr, but as I realized before I had finished the first page, it was not the same Blue Zephyr Stanley Roth had given me before.

  Everyone was writing a book that told everyone what they already believed; Stanley Roth was intent on making a motion picture that would force people to see— literally to see—that what everyone believed was wrong, and not just wrong about what they thought, but guilty themselves for having been so quick, so eager, to condemn him for something he did not do. Orson Welles had used the radio to convince those who listened to the broadcast that Martians had landed in New Jersey; Stanley Roth was going to use the motion picture screen to convince those who watched that instead of a man who murdered his wife, he was as much a victim as the woman who had been killed. I did everything I could to talk him out of it.

  I FOUND STANLEY ROTH LIVING in Culver City, in a rented two-story condominium, a place without a view on a flat, wide four-lane street that whichever way you looked looked the same, a street that seemed to go on forever and yet never go anywhere at all. I parked the rental car next to the curb in front of a treeless brown-spotted lawn and walked up a crumbling sidewalk to the front door. The door was open a crack. Instead of knocking, I called his name. There was no response. I opened the screen door and stepped inside.

  The hardwood floors were stained and dirty and the blinds that were drawn on the windows to keep out the stark daytime heat were covered with a heavy layer of dust. The air was stale, stagnant with the dull, depressing scent of open half-empty liquor bottles and cheap smudged glasses filled with the warm water remains of melted ice.

  I looked around at the rickety furniture and the grim, barren walls, the walk-in kitchen and the narrow threadbare staircase just to the right of the front door. I started to feel what it must be like not only to fail, but to know that it was all over, that you had run out of chances, that all you had left were the bitter memories of what you might have been. It was the kind of place someone who had once been famous and had not saved a cent might be found living, surrounded by the indifference of strangers, none of whom remembered his name. It was all too close to what I sometimes thought might happen to me; too close to what had happened to more than one person about whom I had cared: abandoned and alone, forgotten by everyone who had once clamored to be their friend, driven each day a little more crazy by the certainty that nothing, absolutely nothing, was now ever going to change.

  I heard a noise upstairs, the sound of a door being shut. I thought it must be Stanley Roth, but then, when someone started down the stairs, I knew from the echo of the footsteps that it could not be him. Even when she was at the bottom of the staircase, her hand draped on the railing and her head tilted back, that familiar smile on her mouth; even when I knew that it had to be her, that it could not be anyone else, I hesitated, held back by a kind of last-minute doubt. The sparkle, the clear-eyed radiance, the high-spirited mischievous self-assurance, all of it had gone. Julie Evans looked like a woman on the edge of exhaustion. She greeted me with a kiss.

  “It’s good to see you,” she said quietly. “Really good,” she added, squeezing my hand.

  Perhaps she read in my eyes the reaction to the way she looked, or perhaps she would have done it anyway. With an apologetic and half-embarrassed smile, she moved slowly from one window to the next, first raising the blinds and then opening them to let in the air. Plunging her fingers inside them, she gathered up the glasses and carried them to the sink. It was almost eleven in the morning and she looked as if she had just woken up.

  It was none of my business, but I could not help asking: “You’re living here, too?”

  She tilted her head to the side and frowned as if not quite certain what to say.

  “Not really,” she said finally in a tentative voice. “Stanley needed a place where he could work in private, somewhere no one could find him. He sleeps here, too—when he sleeps.”

  I did not understand. He had the bungalow at the studio; he had The Palms. What was he doing here— what were they doing here—in this awful end-of-the-line place?

  “It isn’t that bad,” Julie assured me.

  She was becoming more alert, her movements less lethargic. Something of the cheerful quickness I remembered came back into her eyes. She poured us both a cup of coffee and we sat down at a small circular table shoved up against the kitchen wall.

  “The bungalow was better, of course. It had the kind of privacy he needed. But after what happened at the trial... ”

  A kind of wistful half-smile floated over her mouth as she remembered what happened.

  “Let’s just say that Michael wasn’t happy when a certain defense lawyer tried to make him out to be the killer. He gave orders that no one was to let Stanley through the gate.”

  “It was part of the contract, part of the deal,” I objected.

  “Yes, it was,” mused Julie, looking at me over the cup she held with both hands in front of her mouth. “And Michael said he could sue him about it if he wanted, but until he did there was no way Stanley Roth was going to set foot on the property of Wirthlin Productions again. I had to go over and get all of Stanley’s things out of there. I think Michael would have had all of it thrown away.”

  “But what about The Palms?”

  As soon as I asked I remembered the last time I had been there, the day the jurors had been taken to see for themselves where Mary Margaret Flanders had lived her supposedly fairytale life and died her awful, gruesome death. I could see him standing there, gazing out across the lawn, anxious to leave.

  “It’s been sold,” said Julie, breathing slowly. “Louis made all the arrangements. No one knows about it yet. Stanley insisted on that. He still has one more scene to shoot there.”

  That explained where some of the money was coming from. Louis Griffin had meant what he said that night to Michael Wirthlin: He and his old friend could always find the money to do one more picture. I glanced at the dull, dingy walls and found myself feeling if not exactly admiration then a kind of renewed respect for Stanley Roth. There were not many people left willing to trade in all the luxury of their comfortable affluent existence for nothing more than the chance to keep on with their work. Roth had been for a while one of the wealthiest men in America. Who would have believed that the money had never really meant a thing? Stanley Roth was a throwback, or perhaps a figment of his own inspired imagination, a character of the kind he used to see in movies when he was a kid growing up: a man who never did anything for money, a man who would tell anyone with money to go to hell if they tried to tell him what to do.

  “That’s where he is now—at The Palms—shooting the last scene.” She saw the confusion in my eyes. “It is the last scene that has to be shot; it isn’t the last scene of the picture. Stanley left it to the end because he didn’t want anyone to put the whole story together until he’s ready to show it.”

  “Stanley isn’t here?” I asked, annoyed but not entirely surprised. “I told him I was coming; I told hi
m I had to see him—and he’s at The Palms shooting a scene?”

  Something in her eyes told me I was wasting my time and that the only question was why I did not know it.

  “That’s the reason you’re here, isn’t it?—to tell me that Stanley is off shooting somewhere and that he isn’t going to be able to see me.”

  She shook her head, not in disagreement with what I had said but over what it meant.

  “He didn’t know until late last night—or I suppose I should say early this morning. God, I don’t know anymore if it’s day or night,” she sighed with a weary, self-effacing smile. “You know what he was like during the trial—working every night until three or four in the morning and then all day and half the night on the weekend. It’s worse now. I don’t think he sleeps more than two or three hours at a time and there are days when he doesn’t do even that. He’s obsessed with this thing, and the strange part is he seems to thrive on it, this single-minded determination to do it, make the movie, do this one picture the way he’s always wanted to—the way he always thought he could.”

  She kept drinking coffee and the more she drank the better she seemed able to concentrate on what she was saying.

  “We don’t really live here; we work here. There are two bedrooms upstairs. Stanley watches film in one and then in the other, on a desk next to the bed, he makes the changes he thinks he needs in the script. I got to bed this morning a little after seven, just after Stanley let the crew know he wanted to shoot the same scene they did yesterday. He didn’t like one of the camera angles. The shading wasn’t quite what he wanted,” she explained with puzzled amusement, as if she could not quite understand how after all it had taken out of her she could still find so fascinating his compulsive attention to detail. Reaching across, I took her wrist in my hand and held it firmly on the table.