Star Witness

by D. W. Buffa

  “You were there—and you didn’t leave. You stayed there, hiding downstairs in the house, waiting until they came home—Stanley Roth and his wife—and then when you heard him shut the door and go down the hall to the other bedroom you went upstairs and you killed her.”

  Crenshaw shakes his head and starts to deny it. Antonelli holds up his hand and stops him cold.

  “You killed her. You met her that night, when you came to the house. You made that deal for the screenplay. Then you started calling her—didn’t you?—telling her you just wanted to make sure she was all right. You started going out to the studio—you were seen talking to her on the set—you started seeing her, privately, perhaps innocently at first; then things became more serious—or you wanted them to become more serious. What happened, Detective Crenshaw? Did she sleep with you once and then wouldn’t do it again? Did she sleep with you more than once and then, just when you thought she was in love with you, she broke it off, ended the affair? Is that the reason—that and the fact you wanted to get back at Stanley Roth—is that the reason you killed her?”

  Bradley is standing at the end of the jury box, shouting at the witness while Van Roten tries to object.

  “You killed her, and you covered Stanley Roth’s clothes in blood and then you just waited, hid in the house until Stanley Roth had left, until the body was discovered, until the police came. They were too busy to notice that you had not driven up the driveway in your car, that you just seemed to appear at the side of the pool. It was easy, wasn’t it? Everyone searching for the murder weapon and you had it tucked safely inside your jacket pocket. You killed her, Detective Crenshaw, but that wasn’t enough, was it?” he shouts over the courtroom noise as the crowd erupts and the judge beats his gavel hard. “You wanted to destroy Stanley Roth, ruin him, take everything away—his fame, his reputation, the woman he loved—turn him into someone no one would want to be seen with—turn him into the murderer you are!”

  There is no hung jury, no single juror holding out in obstinate dissent from what all the others wanted to do. The jury is out less than an hour. Stanley Roth is found not guilty of the murder that everyone now knows the police detective, Richard Crenshaw, had committed instead. Joseph Antonelli has saved an innocent man. It was in more than one respect quite the most remarkable film I had ever seen, and, as I knew better than anyone else, it was all a lie.

  Chapter Thirty One

  I TRIED TO TELL JULIE, but I could not get her to listen.

  “That’s why he shot the whole scene all over again; that’s why he paid hundreds of extras; that’s why he didn’t use the original—the real—tape of Mary Margaret Flanders outside that afternoon: It was the only way he could make it seem Crenshaw was there! My God, why did he do that—accuse him? Just to give a movie the kind of ending he wanted?”

  Julie was looking all around, taking in the crowd swirling outside the theater, all those hundreds of people still caught up in what they had just seen, reluctant to leave, afraid they might miss seeing something, or that someone might miss seeing them.

  “It was a great movie,” said Julie, her blue eyes shining as she continued to search the crowd. Suddenly her eyes stopped moving. “There he is!” she cried.

  We had been separated from Stanley Roth as soon as the house lights came on. Applauding, smiling, surging forward to shake his hand, the audience, or that part of it that could get to him, forced us out of the way. Now they were outside, lining up on the sidewalk to see him, all these people who had been so certain that Stanley Roth had murdered Mary Margaret Flanders, people who had only come tonight because they were curious to see what he had done and because everyone else was going to be there.

  Julie began to move toward him. I grabbed her arm and held her back. The noise of the crowd was all around us. I had to shout to make myself heard.

  “He fixed the jury,” I said, searching her eyes to see if she understood the enormity of what had been done. “He made this movie and makes it seem Crenshaw killed her.”

  She did not care about any of it. “It’s a great movie,” she repeated, her eyes feverish with excitement.

  Julie pulled her arm away and threaded her way through the crowd, determined to tell Stanley Roth that it had all been worth it: the work, the sleepless nights— that it was the best thing he had ever done. All I could do was watch.

  Everyone was trying to shake hands with Stanley Roth, eager to tell him that the movie was going to be a great success and that they had always known he had not done it, that he was innocent, that someone else had killed his wife. A few months earlier they would have crossed the street to avoid having to speak to him and now they were almost fighting with each other to get close enough to say a few words they could only hope he might later remember. It had once again become important to be known as someone who could call Stanley Roth a friend.

  Julie had disappeared into the crowd. I could not find her anywhere. Then, suddenly, I saw her, her arms around Stanley Roth’s neck, kissing him on the side of his face. He kept her next to him, his left arm around her waist, as he began to shake the next hand waiting. I had never seen her quite so radiant, quite so alive. Resting her right hand on Roth’s left shoulder, she brushed a strand of hair back from her forehead with her left. Suddenly, her mouth opened and a strange, puzzled look rushed onto her face. Instinctively, my eyes followed hers. Then I saw him, Jack Walsh, just a few steps away, moving forward, a cold smile on his mouth. He was extending his open right hand, as if, like everyone else, he could not wait to acknowledge in person this, the latest triumph of Stanley Roth.

  “Congratulations,” he said in a booming voice that seemed to freeze everyone where they stood. Taken by surprise, Roth did not have time to withdraw his hand and once Walsh had hold of it, he did not let go.

  “You killed her and you think you can wash it all away with a movie?”

  At the sound of the first shot, the crowd that was bunched tight around the two of them became a panic stricken mob, people screaming, knocking each other down as they tried desperately to get out of harm’s way. Except for Julie. The moment she saw the gun Jack Walsh was holding in his left hand, she threw herself in front of him, but nothing could have stopped Jack Walsh. He shoved her aside and, as she fell to the ground, fired three more times. With the gun still in his hand, Walsh turned around and looked right at me; but his eyes kept moving, searching for something. When he found it, he dropped the gun and slowly raised his hands.

  “He murdered my daughter; he murdered Mary Margaret Flanders,” said Jack Walsh in a calm, measured voice as he started to move toward the camera that had begun by filming Stanley Roth in the moment when he reclaimed his place as the leading moviemaker in Hollywood and had now captured forever the moment of his death.

  Whether it was outrage at the prospect of Stanley Roth rehabilitated in the public eye, or because, having acquired through his daughter’s death a certain celebrity of his own, he thought the world would consider what he had done a justifiable act, Jack Walsh expressed remorse for what he had done. He insisted that he had to do it to prevent a murderer from going free. He had to do it, he kept repeating, for his daughter. I think he believed it; I think he had convinced himself that it was true; and if he had known what I did he would have been all the more certain that he was right.

  A week after Stanley Roth’s death, I stood with a handful of mourners as his body was lowered into a grave next to the one where Marian Walsh was buried beneath a headstone engraved with the name of Mary Margaret Flanders. Julie Evans let a flower fall from her hand onto the lid of the casket. Louis Griffin tossed a handful of earth and with that gesture said his final farewell to the man to whom he had always thought he owed more than his life. When it was over and we walked down the hill, I remembered the day I had seen Stanley Roth standing all alone at the graveside of his wife and how, like today, the air seemed to be filled with a fine golden dust as the Southern California sun settled somewhere far out on the Pacific, and I real
ized he was still as much a mystery to me, still as unknown and elusive, as he had been then. I was too old and had been to too many funerals to think there was anything particularly strange about it. I did not know Stanley Roth, I did not really know anyone, and no one knew me. I wondered how many of us really know anything, even about ourselves, except what we thought we were supposed to show.

  We went to Louis Griffin’s home out on Mulholland Drive, the house that had been built where those others, each designed to demonstrate the permanence of what had been done, had been built before, and talked about Stanley Roth and what he had done that would last. After an hour or so, Griffin took me aside.

  We went into the dining room. I looked through the glass doors at the two swans gliding silently on mirror-like silver surface of the pond, moving together, each the shadow of the other. I smiled to myself, remembering what Griffin had said to Michael Wirthlin that night—the night Stanley Roth threw the chair that shattered the glass all over the floor—about loyalty and friendship and how the money did not matter.

  “You bribed that juror on your own, didn’t you?” I asked. “You made a deal with her—offered her a part— if she made sure he wasn’t convicted.”

  Louis Griffin put his hand gently on my shoulder. A sad, faraway smile passed over his benevolent mouth.

  “I’ve never spoken to her in my life.”

  At first I did not understand. “Then, how ... ?”

  “I spoke to her agent, but we never discussed the trial. I told him I wanted her in Stanley Roth’s next film—if there was another Stanley Roth film. I don’t know what he might have told her.”

  I brushed aside the polished, civilized cunning by which Louis Griffin had tried to keep a distance between himself and what he wanted someone else to do. “But why? Why did you think you needed to do it?”

  Griffin removed his hand from my shoulder and sat down at the table. He stared out the window, watching as I had the two swans moving side by side.

  “I told you what Stanley did: how he saved my daughter’s life. I think you also know he tried to save her a second time.”

  He paused and seemed to draw into himself, and as he did I could see the signs of age on his hands and around his eyes. He was worn out, exhausted by the effort to set an example, to keep control of himself.

  “I would have done that for him if I had thought he was guilty,” he said finally. “But I didn’t have to. I knew he was innocent.”

  “I know you were his friend. But how can you be so sure?”

  “Julie knows,” said Griffin as he led me out of the dining room to rejoin the others. “She’ll take you to the studio. She’ll show you there.”

  “The studio? Then you did it? You got it back from Wirthlin?” I asked.

  “Stanley always said that Michael didn’t know anything about making movies. It turns out, he didn’t know much about business either.”

  A single sliver of reddish orange streaked the horizon of the dark purple sky when we got there. The painters had left their ladders propped against the stone pillars. Wirthlin Productions no longer existed. The newly painted letters arching over the blue-and-gold iron gate again read BLUE ZEPHYR.

  “It was Louis’s idea,” explained Julie as we drove through the gate. “On the brass plaque on the stone pillars it is going to say, ‘Founded by Stanley Roth.’ That was my idea,” she added with a misty-eyed smile.

  “I wasn’t in love with him,” she said in a quiet voice. High overhead, a breeze rustled through the palm trees, chasing shadows across the narrow asphalt street. “Not really in love with him, but I... ”

  We pulled up in front of the bungalow where Stanley Roth had lived and worked during all the long and difficult months of the trial. Julie switched off the engine and in the fading light turned to me, her eyes filled with tears.

  “You don’t understand. It’s my fault. It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t promised Stanley I wouldn’t tell.”

  I started to ask her what she had promised, why it would have made a difference, but she bolted out of the car and, walking fast, headed for the door to the bungalow. I followed her inside and watched in silence as she wiped away a tear and slid a video cassette into the machine in what had been Stanley Roth’s private theater. I fell into a chair just below the projector. It was the same scene I had seen in the movie.

  “That’s what I kept trying to tell you,” I said when the scene came to an end and she turned it off. “It isn’t real. It didn’t happen. That’s the reason he didn’t use the original film, the one that was shown in court. It’s all a lie.”

  Julie paid no attention. She removed the cassette and put in another. It was the real video, the one taken at The Palms the day before she was killed, the one Annabelle Van Roten had shown to the jury. I was confused. What was the point of it? I had seen it all before. Julie stopped the film.

  “That’s what you saw in court, right?”

  “Yes, but... ”

  “Watch,” she said with a strange intensity in her voice. It was the same thing I had just been watching: Mary Margaret Flanders, surrounded by her guests, hundreds of them, spilling out over the lawn.

  “I still don’t see what... ”

  Then I saw it, and my heart stopped. Out near the very edge of the crowd, just where Stanley Roth had put him when he staged it for the movie—the movie he had always wanted to make—where you would not look twice at who it was or wonder why he was there, was Richard Crenshaw. Julie turned on the lights.

  “He didn’t tell us until after the trial,” she explained.

  I knew the answer, but I asked the question anyway; I suppose because I kept hoping I was wrong. “But he knew before the trial was over?”

  “He had the surveillance tapes. He checked them after they showed part of them in court. He said no one would have noticed Crenshaw unless they were looking for him.”

  Roth was right about that. I could have looked at that tape a hundred times and never seen him. No one standing that far away from Mary Margaret Flanders was ever noticed.

  I tried to give Julie what comfort I could, but it did not help very much. She could have told the police, or told me, and then everyone, perhaps even Jack Walsh, would have known that Stanley Roth had had nothing to do with his wife’s death; but then there would have been no movie to make, and Stanley Roth would not have been able to do what he had always wanted to do.

  “I’m the one that should feel guilty,” I said, “not you. Stanley practically told me he knew what happened. He told me he wouldn’t tell me because if he did, it would ruin the movie. It never occurred to me he was serious.”

  In the same way that the murder of Mary Margaret Flanders had drawn huge crowds to see her last motion picture, the death of Stanley Roth made Blue Zephyr another box-office sensation. Stanley Roth was innocent and Stanley Roth was dead, and because of the movie everyone knew, or thought they knew, everything there was to know about everything that had happened. When Jack Walsh was arraigned in court for murder, hardly anyone noticed; and when he avoided the gas chamber by pleading guilty and was sentenced to life in prison no one much cared.

  Never one to forget his friends, or those who had tried to help his friends, Louis Griffin invited me to be his guest at the Academy Awards. Blue Zephyr had been nominated for seven Oscars. I decided to stay home and watch on television instead. Perhaps because Hollywood wants nothing so much as to keep people coming back for more, the awards for both best picture and best director went to people with many more movies to make. Blue Zephyr did pick up one important Oscar. Walker Bradley won best actor for his portrayal of “the ruthless and charismatic attorney, Joseph Antonelli.” Bradley thanked nearly everyone it was possible to thank. He mentioned his wife, he mentioned his friend Louis Griffin, and he mentioned the head of Blue Zephyr Pictures which had produced it, Julie Evans. He did not say a word about Stanley Roth.

  After it was all over, after the last award had been given, after all the famous flashing f
aces had waved and smiled their final good-byes into the hollow lens of every camera they could find, I turned off the television set and wandered into the night. For a long time I stood alone on the back deck, staring out across the mystic black waters of the bay, thinking about all the things that happened from the night Stanley Roth called to ask if I would come to L.A. until the night he captured Hollywood all over again and was shot down dead because of it. I kept thinking about what he had told me—I could hear his voice telling it to me again, as if he were standing right next to me, whispering it eagerly in my ear—that great secret of how he made movies: that he always knew the ending before he started on the beginning. It echoed in my mind, haunting me with the question—that dread, awful question—whether it would have made any difference if I had known at the beginning what I knew now, whether Stanley Roth would still be alive, whether I could have done something to make the ending come out the way it should.

  I heard the telephone ring inside and a moment later I heard Marissa’s soft whisper of a voice. Still gazing out at the night, I felt her coming, drawing near, moving that way she did: smooth, graceful, her head held at just the right angle, floating across the room and through the open sliding glass door. I turned around and found myself face-to-face with the laughing mischief in her eyes.

  “A friend of yours from L.A.,” she said with a tender, teasing smile, covering the telephone with her hand. For a brief moment she paused, letting me imagine whom she meant. “Annabelle Van Roten,” she said, certain I had thought it was someone else. Taking Marissa by the wrist, I let her know with a glance that I wanted her to stay. And then in the cool California night I listened to my one-time adversary, the passionate and intelligent Annabelle Van Roten, the woman who had been so damnably certain that Stanley Roth had murdered his wife, tell me more than she had to about what she thought now. When she was finished, when there was nothing more to say, we said good-bye with the strange, bittersweet nostalgia of two old friends who have only learned the truth when it does not much matter anymore.