by D. W. Buffa
“He can’t do this. He can’t make this movie. If he does—if he goes ahead with it—I can’t save him. I read the script, Julie.”
Gently, she pulled her wrist out of my hand.
“You didn’t read all of it. He didn’t send you everything. No one has seen the whole script.”
“Have you?”
She finished her coffee and put down the empty cup. She blinked her eyes and then looked around the dismal room as if she was seeing it for the first time. Suddenly, a smile flashed across her mouth.
“Isn’t Hollywood glamorous?”
She got up from the table and rinsed out her cup in the grime-covered stainless-steel sink.
“Nothing can stop him from doing this. It’s too late for that.” She thought about what she had just said. “It’s always been too late. I think he decided to do this—make this picture—the moment he first realized they were going to charge him with her murder. I think he decided he was going to do this before he asked you to come down and talk to him about becoming his lawyer. He’s put everything he’s got into this, and I don’t mean just his money. Everything. All his energy, all his emotion— his heart, his soul, his mind—everything. I live here, but only so I can do whatever he needs me to do. It’s the same as it was when he had Blue Zephyr, except then I went home at night. Now there isn’t any night; there is just the work, the picture that has to get made.”
“The trial is only months away,” I reminded her.
“That’s why he’s driving everyone so hard. It’s going to be released before the trial starts.”
“Which means I’m not going to be able to find a juror who hasn’t seen it; which means I’m not going to have anyone on this second jury who won’t be sitting there thinking what a liar Stanley Roth is while they’re listening to the testimony about what really happened. He’s making a movie about his own trial for murder and there isn’t a thing in it that’s true!”
Leaning against the sink, her slender hands folded in front of her, Julie gave me a strange look. “Stanley thinks it is,” she said after a while. Then, before I could reply, she laughed. “The lawyer saves his client. That part is true, isn’t it?”
I stared at her, speechless. “True?” I gasped. “We had a hung jury, remember? One juror—only one—didn’t think Stanley Roth should be convicted. Saves his client? It’s a miracle he isn’t already on death row! And now he’s making a movie in which the jury brings in a verdict of not guilty and you think it’s true?”
It had no effect. She kept looking at me with that smile that insisted she was right and I was wrong and that one day I would know it.
“But Stanley is innocent, so the jury should have returned a verdict of not guilty.”
It caught me completely off-guard, though I don’t know why it should have. That was, after all, the difference between what they did in the movies and the way things really worked in the world. It was the whole reason people went to the movies: the expectation that there was a logic in the story, a reason that made sense, a reason you could understand and accept, for the way it ended. Stanley Roth was innocent: The jury had to bring back a verdict of not guilty. A hung jury, a mistrial, months later a second trial with an outcome no one could predict: that was not the formula for a box-office success.
“Stanley wanted me to bring you out to The Palms. He thought you might be interested in watching them shoot. He said to tell you that the scene was not in the script you saw.”
I had come to try to talk him out of making the movie, not to watch him do it.
“No,” I said as I got ready to go.
I wanted to make some cutting remark, something that when she passed it on to him would convey how angry I was at the risk he was taking; but what I could easily at that moment have said to him I could not bring myself to say to her. It was true what I had said to her that day in court: I had started falling in love with her the first day I met her.
“Tell him I didn’t have time, that I had to get back.”
“You’ll come to the premiere, won’t you? You have to do that,” added Julie when she saw I was about to offer some excuse. “How would it look if you didn’t? Besides, I need a date.” She looked up at me, a whimsical smile curving along her mouth. “I know I look a mess now, but I clean up pretty well.”
“You have a date,” I reminded her, and realized at once that it sounded like the jealous complaint of someone who wished it was not true. She realized it, too.
“I’m here because he asked me to, and because I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t help him to do this one thing, this thing he’s wanted to do all his life and that he thinks he has to do now while he still has chance. I’m not in love with him anymore. I’m not. I know that now.”
She opened the door and we stepped outside into the white glare of the midday sun. Julie put her hand on my arm.
“So come with me to the premiere. You need to be there anyway,” she said as her blue eyes began to dance with mischief. “Don’t you want to see what Joseph Antonelli looks like played by Walker Bradley?”
Whether Stanley Roth finished the final scene that day or the next or the one after that, he finished it; and eventually the world knew that all the whispered rumors were true: Stanley Roth had been making a new motion picture and, according to a few usually well-informed sources, it was all about the murder of his wife. The story of what Roth had managed to do in almost total secrecy dominated the news. In the Sunday papers, front-page stories written by investigative reporters revealed what they had been able to discover about how without a studio of his own Stanley Roth had somehow produced a motion picture that those who had been involved in it were saying privately might be the best thing he had ever done. The reference to his impending second trial for murder, if there even was one, came only at the end, a kind of obligatory footnote, an empty formality that would barely register on the eye.
From the day word first leaked out that the picture had been made until the day the picture was released, it was impossible to pick up a paper or turn on the television without seeing or hearing something about Stanley Roth and the movie Blue Zephyr. The familiar face of Walker Bradley was everywhere, flashing that famous bashful, hesitant smile; waiting with his mouth partway open until the question had been asked and he could give the same practiced answer he had given a dozen different times that same day
“What made you decide to take on this role?” he was invariably asked, though never with any suggestion that he had been wrong to do so.
“When Stanley asked me, I couldn’t say no,” explained Bradley. “Stanley Roth is one of the few geniuses I’ve ever known, someone I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to call a friend. I couldn’t pass up the chance to work with him again.”
Not everyone who interviewed Walker Bradley had forgotten, or failed to research, his testimony as a witness for the prosecution. One or two of them suggested he might want to explain the apparent discrepancy between what he had said then and what he was saying now.
“You seemed a little reluctant to call Mr. Roth your friend when he was on trial for murder.”
With an indulgent smile, Bradley assured the questioner he was wrong.
“What I said was that I had never seen Stanley Roth threaten, much less strike, his wife, Mary Margaret Flanders.”
It is difficult to attack sincerity, even when it is disingenuous. The questioner moved on.
“What was it like to play the defense lawyer, someone who, if I remember correctly, gave you a pretty rough time on cross-examination?”
Bradley lifted his eyebrows. A reluctant smile stretched slowly across his lips.
“He was just doing his job. I think it was only after I started working on the part that I understood how difficult a job it is—ask a question, take the answer, then without a moment to think, ask the next one, and go on like that, one question after another, sometimes for hours. I have a hard enough time remembering my lines,” he added with a modest laugh. “I co
uld never do what he did.”
Shall I admit it? Despite myself, I was beginning to like Walker Bradley.
If Bradley seemed for a while to be everywhere at once, he was not the only member of the cast made available to the media. In a limited number of tightly controlled and always teasingly brief interviews, the young woman chosen to play Mary Margaret Flanders was introduced to the public and allowed to say a few carefully scripted words about what it felt like to play someone that famous in the first acting job of her career. Her name, or rather the name she had been given, was Dawn Cohelan, and as soon as I saw her I knew I had seen her somewhere before. At first I did not think it possible, but then I was sure. Perhaps simply to show he could, Stanley Roth had done it again: taken someone no one had ever heard of and turned her into a star.
“I know her,” I said to Julie Evans as we drove from the Chateau Marmont to the restaurant where we were going for dinner the night before the premiere.
Tanned and rested, her blonde, blue-eyed face glowing in the burnt orange light of dusk, Julie kept her eyes on the road.
“Who do you know?”
“The new Mary Margaret Flanders.”
Julie tossed her head. A half-smile of something like nostalgia settled gently on her mouth.
“She has that same quality—whatever it is. Stanley saw it right away. You watch her on screen and you can’t take your eyes off her. It was eerie. She doesn’t look like Mary Margaret—not much, anyway—but she has the same effect.”
Julie only now remembered what I had said. “You know her?”
“I met her the same time Stanley did. We were at some crummy bar out at Venice Beach. There were two girls there. One of them was good looking and knew it and thought she could become an actress. She was hustling us for drinks. The other girl—I don’t know what she was doing there. She was quiet, shy. She seemed embarrassed by her friend. When we left, Stanley said something about how she’d be good on camera. I thought he meant the good-looking one, the one with all the confidence, but he meant the other one, the quiet one. I’ve forgotten her name, but Stanley must have remembered. Now she’s Dawn Cohelan.”
I could still see the other girl sitting there, across the table from Stanley Roth, laughing in his face when he told her he was a movie producer. All she knew were the lies men told her, but then she had probably never given anyone a reason to tell her anything else.
“I wonder what the other girl thinks now,” I said aloud as we drove headlong into the night.
Out of the corner of her eye, Julie watched me as she pulled up in front of the restaurant. She handed the keys to the parking attendant and with a playful smile came toward me on the sidewalk.
“I know this is your favorite restaurant,” I said as I held open the door, “but I’m not sure it’s the place I would have picked.”
We were led toward the same table we had been given twice before, the table that was always available for her whenever she wanted it. The restaurant was crowded, but from the moment we entered conversation stopped, and the only sound was the murmured echo of the whispered questions of those few who did not know who we were. Julie held her head high, her face glistening with the reflected light of all those staring, wondering eyes. We sat down and all around the room the talk started up again, louder, more excited, driven by the need, the desire, to say what they were going to repeat again and again before the night was through.
“It’s the movie,” explained Julie, leaning across the table so no one would hear. “It’s what everyone is talking about. I’ve never seen such a sense of anticipation. You can almost feel it. No one thought Stanley would ever make another movie, and now they can’t wait to see what he’s done.”
The waiter took our order and a few moments later brought a glass of wine for Julie and a scotch and soda for me. I needed a drink. As I raised it to my mouth I remembered what had happened the last time I was sitting in this chair at this table, watching Julie’s eyes lift higher and higher until I turned around to see what she was looking at. I started to laugh.
“What do you think all these people would do if our old friend Jack Walsh showed up and threw another drink in my face? Do you think they’d react the way they did last time—applaud?”
She had to think about it, and even then was not sure.
“They wouldn’t applaud. That was during the trial. Now? I don’t know what they’d do. Look the other way, I suppose. Pretend it was none of their business. They probably wouldn’t be angry at him—they still remember that it was his daughter who was killed—but they wouldn’t think he was doing the right thing, either.”
We had finished dinner and were having coffee when I thought to ask how they had ever persuaded Walker Bradley to take the part. Julie’s eyes darted from side to side, glittering with a secret she was eager to share.
“Louis.”
I thought that was all she was going to say. “Louis?”
“Yes, Louis. He told Walker that he knew he didn’t want to play the part—Walker had said that night at the house that he didn’t want to be involved with anything Stanley might do—but that he thought Walker owed it to Stanley, and owed it to him, to tell them who he thought could do it. Louis gave him the script—the court scenes, the other ‘Antonelli’ scenes. As soon as he read it he knew it was the best role he could ever have. He told Louis he was willing to do it.” Julie paused, shaking her head in admiration. “And Louis told him to forget about it, that there wasn’t a chance in the world Stanley would let him do it, not after the way he tried to deny on the witness stand that they had ever been friends, not after he admitted he had been sleeping with Mary Margaret.”
“Was it true?”
“That Stanley wouldn’t let him do it? Of course not. Bradley was the only one Stanley thought could do it.” A thoughtful expression came into her clear blue eyes. “Stanley may have cared about Mary Margaret, but he doesn’t care about anything now—only the picture.”
She finished her coffee and then raised her eyes until they met mine.
“I’m not in love with him. I was once, for a long time, but I’m not anymore. And what about you, Joseph Antonelli? Are you in love with anyone?”
Chapter Thirty
THE NEXT EVENING I SAT in the same theater in which I had seen the last picture Mary Margaret Flanders ever made, and watched in amazement the way Stanley Roth had changed beyond recognition the reality I had known. As the movie begins the gate in front of The Palms slides open and the headlights of a dark Mercedes sweep along the drive veering toward the house. The car stops in front and the driver gets out and in the quiet stillness of the night silently goes inside. Upstairs, in the bedroom, sitting in front of the mirror, touching with her finger the corner of her mouth, a beautiful young woman wearing a silk slip is suddenly startled. She looks up and begins to smile.
“Sorry I’m late,” says her somewhat beleaguered looking husband as he bends down and kisses the cheek she offers.
Right from the beginning I could see Stanley Roth at work. Every shot, every scene, was done from a different angle, with the effect that after a while you began to assume that in even the most commonplace things there was something hidden, something you were not being shown, something you had to find out for yourself.
The car comes down the drive and stops just inside while the gate opens again. They drive through the cool Los Angeles night. He tells her that the picture on which he’s working is taking more time than he thought: He has to be back on the set by 4:30 the next morning. She tells him that it doesn’t matter how early he has to go, she wants him to stay with her, not use the other bedroom down the hall. They go to a small private party, two dozen people invited to celebrate the birthday of an old friend of them both, someone long established in the industry. Several of the guests tell her how much they enjoyed the afternoon, when they were among the guests at the charity event she had hosted on the grounds of The Palms.
The car is again at the gate. Then they are on the
stairs, then in the bedroom, then she has her arms around his neck. The camera moves back through the bedroom doorway as the two of them tumble into bed together. And then we see him, hidden in the shadows downstairs in the living room, a pair of eyes, cold, deadly, staring into the darkness, waiting. Upstairs, after she is asleep, her husband gives her a gentle kiss and, careful not to wake her, shuts the bedroom door behind him and goes down the hallway to the room where he will spend what is left of the night. At the sound of the second door shutting, the eyes of the intruder tighten, become more determined, more demonic. The camera moves in a slow half circle, turning the simple act of climbing the stairs into a dizzying, endless spiral. That was all you saw, the slow circling motion of a figure, dark and foreboding, an apparition of death, until it reaches the top of the stairs and then turns the corner and disappears down the hallway. The camera stays there, trained on that now empty space on the landing, leaving to the imagination of the audience all the grim graphic details of what was about to happen next. It was an imitation of the way movies used to be made, an imitation of something so old it seemed all this time new and original: a murder is committed and the act of violence is never shown.
An alarm clock rings. Stanley Roth—the actor playing Stanley Roth—turns it off and quickly gets dressed. He walks down the hallway, stops at the closed door to the bedroom where he had made love with his wife, starts to open it, and then, smiling to himself, decides not to bother her this early in the morning and walks away. The headlights of his car cut through the murky gray light of dawn. The gate opens and he drives out. Behind him, behind the gate, behind the house, the body of Mary Margaret Flanders is floating face down in the swimming pool.
Summoned by the maid, who was reduced to hysteria by what she has found, the police arrive. A few minutes later, while the uniformed officers prowl through the house looking for evidence, a plainclothes detective is peering down at the body, now placed on the deck next to the pool, slowly shaking his head. The look on his face seems to suggest more than the usual professional regret at another senseless killing. Perhaps, like everyone else, he had seen her so often in movies he thinks of her not as a stranger but as someone he knew. Whatever that look means, it is certain that this is not going to be just another homicide case.