by D. W. Buffa
“No, I suppose I don’t,” said Bannister, watching again the endless play of light in the darkness all around him.
They drove along in silence, the same route they had taken for years, the same route they had taken every few weeks when there was a dinner or a small gathering of friends and Roger remembered how much his sister liked to feel she was part of the Hollywood crowd.
“I tried to warn him about those two,” she said, shaking her head at all the sadness that might have been averted had anyone listened. “They may have been wonderful on the screen, but….The trouble they were always in, one scandal after another; all the liquor, all the drugs.”
“Roger seems to have cared about her, seems to have thought she could have been quite special.”
“That’s what Roger does,” she said, not to dismiss the importance of this, but rather to emphasize it. “He can see things in people: what they can be - what they will be with the right kind of training and support. That’s part of his genius, why he’s so incredibly good at what he does. He’s always been gifted that way.”
The conversation, like most of the ones they had, was punctuated by long silences, a blank interval between one train of thought and another one that was often completely different. Bannister was thinking about what Roger had said about the portrait he had commissioned and how it had, more than any photograph, captured the essence of what Gloria Baker really was. It struck him as a singular insight, a strange, eerie explanation of what had happened; the difference, so much more striking in her case than in most others, between what she was and what she could have been. It was all right there in that remarkable painting that some unknown artist had done, that look she had that followed you like a promise of everything you had ever wanted. It was no wonder she had driven nearly all of those who knew her a little crazy, this knowledge they had of what she could be, what she could have been all the time and not just up there on the screen. And, as Bannister had to admit, she had had that effect on him; driven him a little crazy and made him do something he wished more than anything he had not done.
The night was everywhere. Shadows leaped across the road under wind swept trees and a block from their house a cat darted into the street and ran past the swerving headlights of the car. A strange, fugitive smile stole across his mouth
“How would you feel,” he asked in a distant voice, “if you found out tomorrow – if you woke up and read in the papers – that I had murdered someone?”
“You, Walter?”
“Yes, me. I’m serious. How would you feel, what would you think? Imagine it: you pick up the paper, or you turn on the television, and there I am, being led away in handcuffs. ‘Judge Walter Bannister arrested for murder!’”
“What would I think?” she asked in the same light-hearted irritation. “That it was a practical joke. You murder someone….I mean, who would ever believe that?”
She waited while the gate opened and then drove slowly up the long, winding drive. There was something in his voice that made her uneasy. She knew what he was doing, and she did not like it.
“I really don’t understand you sometimes. We have this awful thing going on, this terrible murder, and now the trial, and I just tried to explain to you how difficult it’s been for Roger – with everything he’s going through – and you want to turn this into some kind of game where you play the murderer and I get to play the astonished wife who didn’t know she was married to a killer! Good grief, Walter – is that what you do all day in court: imagine what all those awful people are really like?”
“Sometimes,” he admitted in a voice that carried a hint of resentment she was too agitated to notice. “Yes, sometimes I’ve done that, wondered what it would be like to be one of them. Sometimes. But you didn’t tell me: what would you feel, what would you do?”
“Oh, Walter, for God’s sake - !”
Still shaking her head, she parked the car and without another word headed for the house. She had just opened the door and turned on the light when she turned back.
“If you’re going for one of your late night walks, be careful. There’s a real killer out there somewhere, someone killing cats and dogs. They found another one, a dog this time, two days ago.” Her anger abated, she waited until he was next to her and then kissed him gently on the side of his face. “I mean it, Walter; be careful. If you see anyone suspicious, don’t take any chances. Someone like that…who knows what they might do.”
Bannister promised that if he saw anyone like that, he would come right home. He shut the door behind them, said goodnight to his wife and went down the hallway to his study.
Pouring himself a stiff drink, scotch and barely a splash of soda, he sat for a long time in the darkness, staring out the window as he followed in his mind the secret thread only he possessed through the labyrinth only he knew existed. He watched it roll out from the beginning to the end, from the start of the chain of events that had led with what had been only retrospective inevitability to the death of Gloria Baker; and then traced backward from the night of her murder to that first important motion picture she had made. He knew the story both ways at once, knew it now all by heart, dazzled by the clarity with which each detail, each small episode, had played its part. If tragedy is the inability to escape a fate foretold, the death of Gloria Baker had certainly been that.
He sat there for nearly half an hour, thinking back over everything that had happened. Then, driven by the harsh requirements of his disciplined, orderly mind to make a record of what he thought worth remembering, he unlocked the drawer in which he kept what he had lately come to call his journal of evil, the place where he forced confession from the dark and unrepentant part of his soul.
“‘Tonight I asked Meredith what she would do if she found out I had murdered someone. She refused to take me seriously. No one takes me seriously. I am a judge; that is all: a judge, neutral and impartial, who never shows emotion, a moral albino, an intellectual eunuch; a living, breathing abstraction; a disembodied voice of reason that people listen to and then immediately forget. I am incapable of the kind of connection that makes one person believe passionately in another. I exist only as a temporary expedient, a source of certainty in the jarring confusion of other people’s lives when through their own stupidity they have to be reminded of what they should have known already. Meredith was right: no one would believe it – not at first.
“‘I learned something tonight. Roger was in love with Gloria Baker. He claims it was more of an obsession, but that is really the same thing when you’re talking about someone as beautiful and bewitching as she was. What he said about the picture, the portrait he had someone paint, the one that hung above the sofa in the living room, told me things I would not otherwise have suspected. He was in love with her - there is no question about that - in love with what she could have been, what deep down she really was, though she may not have known it herself. Strange, and yet I suspect he probably was not far off the mark, when he said that what she was on screen involved less pretending than what she was off screen in the ‘real’ world.
“‘Roger is more intelligent than I had imagined. I think he’s right, that what we do in our work - whatever that work might be - says more about who we are than what we are when we are free to do whatever we like. She might have been playing a character empty-headed and frivolous, but doing that takes a level of single-minded concentration, a controlled energy, that we almost never bring to other things. Is that the reason so many things have become dull and uninspiring, the reason there doesn’t seem to be any great love affairs anymore? – No one knows how to devote themselves entirely to one great passion. Is that the reason this marriage of mine has for so many years been an empty shell? Is that the reason why I did what I did that night? All I have now are questions, all questions and no answers; none that make sense. I wish the trial was over. I wish I could forget everything. I wish I had never seen that picture.’”
Walter Bannister put down his pen and looked at what he ha
d written and knew that none of it, nothing he could ever write, could help him solve the problem that threatened to destroy him. More tired than he could remember, he locked the journal away and went for a long walk outside in the silent starlit darkness.
Chapter Seventeen
Yolanda Ross wanted to make a statement. She was not quite clear what kind of statement it should be. She was a witness for the prosecution. That suggested an aggressive quest for retribution against the defendant; but the victim had been her friend and did not that require something reserved and even subdued. It was a question of what she should wear. She could not dress in bright colors, that much she was sure of, and brown in any shade was too drab. Blue was all right, but it did not bring out the dark richness of her eyes or the marvelous bronze glow of her skin. She decided on black.
Looking through her closet, she remembered what she and Gloria Baker had told each other when they had been a couple of Hollywood unknowns, that all it took was to get noticed by someone who counted. Gloria had laughed, and later, after she had become famous, laughed again, convinced they had been right, that nothing happened unless you first caught someone’s eye. Yolanda did not doubt for a minute that her friend would have laughed again when she picked out the dress that would the day she wore it to court in a murder trial make all the papers.
Hector Alfonso was on his feet, announcing with his usual serious exuberance the next witness for the prosecution. The door at the back of the courtroom swung open and in the astonished silence that followed Yolanda Ross stepped out of the pages of Vogue. Dressed in a sleek black dress that fitted like a second skin and a large black hat of the kind worn by gorgeous young women on the fashionable streets of Milan, she moved with dazzled and sad indifference, moved without effort, alive with the knowledge that every eye was on her. When she had settled herself comfortably in the witness chair, she looked at Hector Alfonso and with a soft smile let him know he could begin.
Alfonso was too stunned to speak. He had interviewed her, gone over her testimony, made sure there would be no misunderstanding and no mistakes. He had seen her in his office on three separate occasions, the last time only two days earlier. She had dressed casually, once even wore jeans, and if she had worn any makeup it was nothing he had noticed. He had told her to dress conservatively when she came to court and she made some vague remark about wearing a dark colored dress. And now this! – A beautiful exotic from somewhere south of the border, far south of the border, Argentina or Brazil, looking as if she were on her way to a movie premiere and had just stopped by to say hello!
A stupid grin took sudden possession of Alfonso’s mouth. He threw up his hands and laughed out loud.
“You certainly know how to make an entrance, Ms. Ross!”
She smiled, said nothing, and waited.
Alfonso, no fool, looked at the jury and, as if taking them into his confidence, smiled.
“I would say that I’ve seldom seen anyone walk into a courtroom and have quite that effect,” he said as his eyes moved back to her. “But this is a courtroom, and we have some serious business to take care of, some questions that have to be answered. So, let’s begin.”
He paused to give her time to get ready, and then, to make it clear to everyone that this was still a murder trial, went immediately to her reaction the moment she discovered the body.
“What did you think, what was the first thing that entered your mind, when you found Gloria Baker lying dead on the living room floor?”
“That it had finally happened, that Driscoll had finally killed her!”
Harlowe came out of his chair so fast that the pen with which he had started to make a note went flying onto the floor.
“Objection! That’s outrageous! There’s no foundation, no facts – nothing! This is sheer speculation; this is -”
“Sustained!” cried Bannister before he could finish. Bannister was angry and he did nothing to conceal it. “Be careful, Mr. Alfonso, I won’t warn you again.” He looked past the district attorney to the jury. “The jury is instructed to ignore both the question and the answer. What the witness thought at the time is of no relevance whatsoever. Now, Mr. Alfonso, perhaps you could limit yourself to a legitimate line of inquiry.”
“Yes, your Honor,” replied Alfonso, bristling. Turning to the witness, he smiled sympathetically.
“Let’s start at the beginning. What was the reason you went to Gloria Baker’s home on the morning in question?”
With this question and several more that followed it, Alfonso led Yolanda Ross through the chronology of her employment as Gloria Baker’s personal assistant.
“And so you typically came to her house in the morning. Would you describe to the jury what happened that morning, the morning you found her?”
In a rich and sometimes breathless voice, her eyes growing wider as she spoke, Yolanda Ross recited from memory what she had told the district attorney in private.
“I got there a little after eight-thirty. I knocked, the way I always did, but it was only to let her know I was there. If the door was locked, as it sometimes was, I had my own key.”
“And was the door locked that morning?”
“No; it was closed, but it wasn’t locked.”
Alfonso stood next to the jury box, touching his right hand on the railing, using it as a point of reference, part of the three-cornered conversation that included the twelve men and women on the jury as much, or even more, than the prosecutor and the witness.
“You knocked, there wasn’t any answer, and you went in. What happened next?”
“My arms were full of things, screenplays she wanted to see, and I pushed open the door with my shoulder and must have taken three or four steps inside when I saw her, lying on the floor. I wasn’t looking at her directly; I just saw her out of the corner of my eye, and I started to laugh. I thought she must be doing some exercises, stretching, that kind of thing. Then I looked at her and I saw her eyes, that awful vacant stare, and her shirt ripped to pieces and blood everywhere. I just froze, I couldn’t move, I didn’t know what to do. I remember I opened my mouth to scream and nothing came out and I was surprised at that and thought maybe I was in a state of shock, that maybe I had lost my senses. Everything slowed down. If you’ve ever been in a car accident, when you know you are about to get hit – it was like that. I don’t know how long I just stood there, probably only a few seconds, but it felt like forever. I knew she was dead, I knew there was nothing I could do, I knew….The next thing I knew I was calling 911, telling them what had happened, that Gloria had been murdered.”
Alfonso’s eyes never moved from hers. There was a danger she would become overdramatic, destroying the credibility of what she had observed.
“You had been with Gloria Baker for a number of years, and you were more than her employee, weren’t you? She confided in you, didn’t she?”
“Gloria and I had known each other for a long time. We met when we were taking acting classes...”
“And she became the famous Hollywood star we all remember. And you continued to be her very good friend, didn’t you?”
“Yes, we stayed close. Gloria was the best friend I ever had,” she replied, struggling to keep her composure. “The best friend I’ll ever have.”
“You also knew the defendant, Driscoll Rose. How would you describe their relationship?”
She looked past Alfonso to the counsel table where Driscoll Rose sat without expression next to his lawyer. She tried to look at him with hatred, to show the courtroom what she felt, but seeing him now, she suddenly remembered less about her anger at her friend’s death than what she had lost. She had meant to stare contempt and defiance; she ended up in tears.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled, wiping her eyes. “It’s all so awful, so pointless. It should never have happened, and it’s my fault it did. I tried to warn her about him, but I couldn’t make her understand. I told her he was dangerous, out of control; that when he got angry – and he could get angry at anything
– there was no telling how far he would go. That night, months before the murder – that night he almost killed her, beat her so bad, broke her jaw, they had to hide her in a hospital so no one would know….And she still wouldn’t stop, still wouldn’t give him up.”
Alfonso handed her his handkerchief and waited while she dried her eyes. She looked up at him with a grateful smile and told him she was prepared to go on. Michael Harlowe wondered how much of this had been staged. It had certainly worked with the jury. Every eye was on her, and most of the jurors had moved forward in their seats. Hector Alfonso could make you want to believe him even when you knew that what he was telling you was not entirely the truth. He was the kind of man who could make lying almost respectable.
“You knew – you had direct knowledge – that the defendant, Driscoll Rose, almost beat her to death?”
“Yes, I did. I spent time with her in the hospital; I helped nurse her back to health. She told me what he did, how he beat her with his fists until she passed out and then he ran away, left her for dead. And she would have died, too, if she had not managed to make a phone call and get help.”
“They had been engaged, hadn’t they? Is that when this happened?”
“She had broken it off, told him they were through. She knew it would be a mistake, that it would never work. But no one ever says no to Driscoll Rose. He couldn’t stand it when she ended it. That’s the reason he tried to kill her that night, and that’s the reason he finally did it!” she cried, raising herself out of the chair as she pointed straight at Rose. “That’s the reason he murdered Gloria, because she didn’t want anything more to do with him!”
Alfonso expected an objection, but Harlowe did not make one. Perhaps Harlowe thought it was too late, that the jury had already heard what no instruction from the judge could remove from their minds; perhaps, suspected Alfonso, he hoped to use the anger bordering on hysteria to argue a reason to discount testimony that came with such an obvious bias. Alfonso retreated into a long silence, his gaze fixed on Yolanda Ross the way a parent might try to steady the nerves of an excitable child, waiting until the fire in her eyes started to cool, until the tension that had made her arms and shoulders rigid began to dissipate, waited until instead of vindictive contempt her expression changed into what could almost pass for contrition.