Without a Doubt

Marine to Marine

CAR TAPE. February 28. I’d like to trade lives with just about anybody right now. “County jail inmate” sounds good.

During the days before Mark Fuhrman took the stand, he was a pain in the ass. He’d hulk into the office in the company of three beefy bodyguards lent to him by the Metro Division. Chris was supposed to be looking after him, but instead went out of his way to stay clear of the scene. So Cheri Lewis usually drew the short straw and had to baby-sit. Once he settled into Cheri’s office, Mark would spend his hours sulking, throwing tantrums, or wailing about how the defense had ruined his life.

Not that I wasn’t sympathetic. At a personal level my heart went out to him. Publicity seekers, hucksters, disaffected cops and county workers, and wackos of every stripe were streaming out of the woodwork to recall supposed locker-room boasts that he’d had an affair with Nicole Brown or had painted swastikas on the lockers of fellow officers. IAD had looked into the allegations. They all turned out to be bullshit.

Mark was clearly the object of a witch-hunt. But I felt that we were spending entirely too many hours mollycoddling one witness. Mark Fuhrman just wasn’t that important. He’d found a single piece of evidence in a case that involved dozens of equally inculpatory findings. He’d had nothing at all to do with the blood at Bundy, the blood in the Bronco, the hair and fibers on Ron Goldman and on the knit cap, the blood and fibers on Simpson’s socks. Under normal circumstances, any one of these would have been enough to nail a defendant.

Fuhrman was a big deal only because the defense required a bogeyman to distract the jury from the devastating evidence against their client.

Almost every day, the defense made some attempt to inject race into the courtroom. It seemed to me the height of immorality-cynically exploiting a serious social issue for the benefit of a murderer who’d never lifted a damned finger to advance the cause of civil rights. O. J. Simpson wasn’t “rousted” by a band of racist cops-the evidence demanded that he be arrested and tried. You can call the cops sloppy, you can call me and my colleagues inept, but the facts showed that Simpson was guilty. The deliberate twisting of reality to distort this horrific murder into a racial cause was the biggest lie told in the entire case.

And by the time Mark Fuhrman hit the stand, the Big Lie had done its damage. It was even beginning to affect our own thinking. We spent way too much time playing defense. Every so often I had to shake myself back to reality. This case was about rage and control. It was about compelling and overwhelming circumstantial evidence pointing to the guilt of one man and one man alone. To the extent that we allowed ourselves to be distracted by false issues, we failed to fulfill our duty to the People.

As for our whining detective, the only question on the table, as far as I was concerned, was “Did Mark Fuhrman plant evidence?” The answer was an obvious “No.” We’d established beyond doubt that there was only one glove at Bundy when the first officers arrived. There was still only one glove there when Mark arrived two hours later. He couldn’t have planted evidence even if he’d wanted to. The issue of whether he was a racist was completely irrelevant. Or, at least, it should have been.

Lance Ito screwed us on that one.

Back in January, you’ll recall, we’d argued against allowing the defense to introduce evidence that Mark Fuhrman had ever uttered the word “nigger.” It would serve no purpose, we warned, but to antagonize the jury. Ito originally agreed with us, but then, as usual, reversed himself. Of the many errors Ito made during this trial, that one was the most blindly destructive. It was also the most far-reaching. Once he’d allowed the N-word in, he was forced to make a series of bad decisions all the way down the line. In the aggregate, they assured a miscarriage of justice.

The N-word ruling hung around our necks like an eight-hundred-pound albatross. We should have been able to have Mark Fuhrman testify to the very limited area of the case of which he had knowledge. Now, by putting him on the stand, we risked provoking a riot in the jury box.

So why didn’t we just refuse to call Fuhrman as a witness? Simple. Leaving him out would have been worse.

What would have happened if we hadn’t called him? It’s not as if he’d have disappeared from the case. The defense would ask every witness, at every opportunity, why Mark Fuhrman wasn’t at this trial. “Is he beyond subpoena power? Is he refusing to testify? No? I see.” Net result? We’d look like we were hiding him. Why would we do that? Because we had something to hide. And then, this theme would be sure to reach its crescendo during closing arguments, where the law explicitly permits either side to comment on the failure of the other to call a logical witness. The defense would blow us away.

Or, even worse, they might have called Fuhrman themselves! Gerald Uelmen had already announced their intention to do precisely that. Back in January, he’d made a not-so-veiled threat: if we didn’t present Fuhrman, “he will make another appearance in this case, being called as a hostile witness by the defense.” If that happened, they could really go crazy on us.

“Did the prosecution ever subpoena you?” they’d ask him. “Did they tell you why they didn’t? You found the glove at Rockingham, right? Would you agree that was a pretty important piece of evidence? Isn’t it true the prosecution didn’t call you because you’d be forced to admit that you planted that glove?”

Of course, we’d object. And our objections might have been sustained. But the damage would have been done.

Look, if I could have thwarted the race card by not calling Fuhrman, I would have crossed him off the witness list in a heartbeat. But failure to produce him would simply have aggravated the controversy. The only course open to us was to call Fuhrman and try to block the kicks.

I was guardedly optimistic about the possibilities for damage control. We had in our possession only three pieces of evidence to suggest that Mark had ever used the N-word: the Joseph Britton civil case against the city; the statements Fuhrman had made as part of his disability claim against the city; and, of course, the letter from Kathleen Bell. Only one of those three had a chance of getting admitted into court, and even that one had some pretty big credibility problems.

Britton, you’ll recall, was the African-American robbery suspect who’d been shot leaving an automated teller machine back in 1987. He’d claimed that the cop who shot him then planted a weapon at his feet to justify the shooting. On top of it all, the cop supposedly shouted, “You stupid nigger. Why did you run?” Fuhrman was one of the policemen who had apprehended Britton. Now the defense wanted to present Britton as a witness, apparently to finger Fuhrman as his tormentor. But once we checked them out, those allegations fell apart. In a deposition after the fact, he’d described the officer who’d shot him as having “red hair and a mustache.” Not our Fuhrman. And in an interview with CBS News in October 1994, Britton was asked point-blank if Fuhrman had said anything racial to him.

“At this point-no,” he replied. “I can’t say that he did.”

What the heck does that mean? At some point in the future, you’ll decide that he did?

Ito found the value of Britton’s testimony to be “highly speculative” and dismissed it out of hand.

Fuhrman’s disability claim was more complicated. There seemed to be no question that Mark had popped off to his shrinks about “Mexicans and niggers,” but even the doctors who examined him concluded that he was exaggerating, perhaps lying outright, about the degree of racial hostility he felt. The suit was dismissed after the examiners concluded that Mark was faking.

I could believe this. It is no secret around law enforcement that cops will tell whoppers to get an early pension. A pension can be quite a windfall. What troubled me was the nature of the lie. Why had he chosen to portray himself as a raving racist? I knew Mark had been assigned to some pretty rough neighborhoods. Gangs, dope, poverty-in South-Central and East L.A., all conspired to produce one of the highest rates of violence in the nation. A cop who butts heads with hoods day after day after day can suffer a nasty case of burnout. But Mark’s anger seemed directed at criminals in general-not minorities in particular.

Back in July, after I’d gotten the lowdown on Mark’s disability claim, I’d placed a confidential call to Ron Phillips to get his reading on Fuhrman. Ron wasn’t a close friend of Mark’s, but he’d supervised him. Ron told me that at the time Mark had made those statements to the shrinks, his first marriage had just fallen apart and he’d gone into an emotional tailspin. When Ron started working with Mark a few years later, he found him a hot dog: arrogant, mouthy, easily provoked to anger.

But over the next few years, Ron explained to me, Mark went through a sea change. The hostility subsided. His performance improved. Making detective gave him a world of confidence. His new marriage also seemed to stabilize him. Ron felt Mark Fuhrman had matured a good deal and had turned out to be not only a decent guy but one damned fine cop.

That opinion was shared by other officers, even black ones. When the charges of evidence-planting first surfaced, several black cops called our office to put in a good word for him. We got a memo from one guy from the West L.A. Division who told how he and other African Americans played early-morning basketball with Mark. “At no time,” he wrote, “have I heard him disrespect me or any other African American. Not even in jest.”

Prosecutors who’d had the opportunity to work with Mark in the past were also favorably impressed. Hank could vouch for the fact that Mark never pushed questionable filings. Any case he brought was well investigated and carefully prepared. My friend and fellow D.A. Lynn Reed, who worked in the West L.A. office, recalled how thoughtful Fuhrman had always been to her black rape victims. Once he’d gone to bat for a black suspect who, on the basis of witness reports and other evidence, seemed to have committed murder. Mark was the lead investigator; he could easily have ignored the suspect’s claims of innocence. But he was willing to check out the guy’s story, and after putting in some decent overtime, he wound up clearing him of all charges. These were hardly the actions of a dedicated racist.

Fuhrman also had an enthusiastic supporter in Danette Meyers, the African-American deputy D.A. he’d worked with in West L.A. During my brief turn in management I’d been her supervisor, and I admired the hell out of her. She was tough and hard-hitting-a trial junkie like me. She and Fuhrman often went out to lunch and dinner together. Danette had even baby-sat for Mark’s kids.

After the New Yorker piece appeared, I’d given her a call for a character reading on Fuhrman.

“Mark’s a good cop,” Danette told me. “He wouldn’t frame anyone.” She paused for a moment. “Don’t let them get you down, girl.”

Coming from Danette, this endorsement carried a lot of weight. It reinforced my own conviction that Mark, if he had ever had been a racist, had reformed. People do change.

In any case, the statements Fuhrman had made to the shrinks weren’t going to find their way into court. Ito did not find “a direct link between comments made in approximately 1980 and credibility in 1994.”

Another bullet whizzing past our ears.

That left Kathleen Bell.

Back in July, shortly after the New Yorker article appeared, someone dropped a facsimile of a letter on my desk. It was one page, typed all in caps.

“DEAR MR. COCHRAN…” it began. “OFFICER FERMAN [sic] WAS A MAN THAT I HAD THE MISFORTUNE OF MEETING… MR. FERMAN MAY BE MORE OF A RACIST THAN YOU COULD EVEN IMAGINE.”

The writer, Kathleen Bell, went on to explain how, between 1985 and 1986, she’d worked in a real estate agency located above a marine recruiting station near Mark’s neighborhood in Redondo Beach. She’d drop down to say hi to the marines working there. On a couple of occasions she’d seen Mark Fuhrman. She’d remembered him “distinctly” because of his height and build.

“OFFICER FERMAN SAID THAT WHEN HE SEES A ‘NIGGER’ (AS HE CALLED IT) DRIVING WITH A WHITE WOMAN, HE WOULD PULL THEM OVER,” Bell wrote. “BUT I ASKED WOULD [sic] IF HE DIDN’T HAVE A REASON. AND HE SAID THAT HE WOULD FIND ONE.” Fuhrman, Bell went on to say, would like nothing more than to see all niggers gathered together and killed. She was “almost certain” that she’d called the LAPD to complain about “Ferman” even though she did not know his last name at that time.

A couple of weeks after writing this letter Bell gave a longer statement to the defense, claiming that Fuhrman had told her, “If I had my way, they would take all the niggers, put them in a big group, and burn them.”

Kathleen Bell’s allegations struck me unlikely. First off, the comments about the black man and white woman in the car fit too neatly into the defense’s case. That is, Fuhrman is enraged when he sees Simpson with a Caucasian wife, so when he gets the chance he plants evidence to frame him. But the slurs Bell attributed to Fuhrman were mighty improbable, especially in the mid-eighties. A racist cop might talk trash in a locker room, but you would never hear that kind of bald, incendiary stuff in a public place-for the very reason Bell’s letter suggests. Somebody might call in a complaint, triggering an investigation by Internal Affairs. She seemed to recall Fuhrman’s remarks with suspicious particularity, given that they were ten years old.

We got wind that Bell would be putting in an appearance on Larry King Live. We asked Mark to watch it on the off chance he might say, “Yeah. I remember her.” Afterward, he called me to say, “Look, I may have met her. But she doesn’t look familiar. I really can’t say that I did.”

I assigned Cheri and an investigator to scope out the scene in Redondo Beach and get the lowdown on Bell. One of the marines described her as a “pudgy” woman who would come down to the recruiting station to flirt and invite marines out to lunch. Sometime during 1985 or 1986, Mark Fuhrman had visited the recruiting station to inquire about going into the reserves. A former marine pilot, Joseph Foss, recalled standing in front of the office with Fuhrman when Bell approached them. Foss introduced them. Then, he claimed, Bell apparently hit on Fuhrman, but he rebuffed her advances with what Foss described as a “gracious” rejection. Foss said he never heard Fuhrman make racially charged comments to Kathleen Bell or anyone else.

Two other marines assigned to the recruiting station had also been around when Fuhrman came in. One of them, a black man named Maximo Cordoba, was questioned by a private eye working for Mark. Neither marine ever saw him with Kathleen Bell-but we hadn’t heard the last of Max Cordoba.

We tried repeatedly to reach Kathleen Bell, but she’d gotten herself a lawyer and he was refusing our requests to speak with her. He charged that we were just trying to dig up something to impeach her with. So? This woman writes a letter to Johnnie Cochran of her own free will. Now, when no one else can corroborate her story, she doesn’t want to be questioned?

I’d suspected from the outset that Bell wasn’t motivated by a good citizen’s desire to blow the whistle on racism. We received a package of discovery material that lent weight to those suspicions. It contained a memo dated August 31, 1994, in which a defense investigator recounts a conversation with Ms. Bell’s lawyer:

I was contacted today by… an attorney who is representing Kathleen Bell… He told me that Ms. Bell has talked to the tabloids but no deal has been struck. He went on to say that he has known Ms. Bell a long time and that she is a credible and truthful person. However, she is “not a wealthy woman” and if a large sum of money was offered, she would consider it…

Could the message be any clearer? It sounded to me like she was saying, “I’ll go to the highest bidder.” We would have loved to use this material to impeach her when she appeared at trial. (And we knew she would; Ito had ruled that the Redondo Beach incidents were not too remote in time to be ruled inadmissible.) Unfortunately, we were in a bind. The more evidence we used to discredit Bell, the more latitude the defense would be given to introduce other evidence of the N-word in order to shore up Bell’s credibility. In the end, we had to cut our losses and go easy on Kathleen Bell.

In the frenzy of Monday-morning quarterbacking that followed the trial, pundits would soberly characterize Bell as a credible witness with no ax to grind. Give me a break. This woman was looking for a payday and, very possibly, for payback. What more satisfying revenge could you take on a man who has rejected you than to humiliate him before an entire nation? The supreme irony was that Mark Fuhrman didn’t even remember her. But we’d all have to deal with her in court, when Kathleen Bell would have a chance to savor her few minutes of fame.

The relationship between Chris and Mark continued to deteriorate. Chris would not spend more than five minutes in Mark’s company if he could help it. And Chris made it clear that he intended to treat Mark as a hostile witness. He didn’t intend to object to anything the defense said on cross. Just great, I thought. If it looks like we despise Fuhrman, the jury will not only feel free to hate him, but will conclude that we don’t believe him, and that we think he planted evidence.

The Sunday of Presidents’ Day weekend, I’d come into the office to fine-tune my direct of Kato Kaelin. I was plowing through a mountain of binders, on my fifth cigarette of the day, when Cheri knocked on the door.

“What’s up?” I asked her, grateful for a break. I leaned back and put my feet on the desk. I was wearing my usual weekend uniform: leggings, sneakers, and a sweatshirt. Cheri looked worried.

“I don’t know if you know what’s going on,” she said. “But Chris had Mark down in the grand jury room. There were about ten other deputies and law clerks firing questions at him.”

I shot forward in my chair and slammed my feet onto the floor. Why the grand jury room? Why the cast of thousands? If you want to act out a cross realistically, only one person should be doing the questioning.

Alan Yochelson, one of our deputies who was a good bud of Chris’s, stuck his head in the door.

“What the fuck is going on down there?” I demanded.

“They were firing questions at him and he denied using racial slurs,” Alan reported. “I don’t know if Chris expected this setup would get him to admit it, or what. But whatever he expected, Mark hasn’t admitted to anything.”

“Where are they now?” I asked.

“I don’t know, it broke up a few minutes ago,” said Cheri. “I’m not sure where Chris is, maybe in with Terry.”

I was furious. This was just so typical of Chris. He loved to be the center of attention. He’d never do anything quietly if he could turn it into a sound-and-light show. That’s the problem with the team approach to prosecution. You can’t stay on top of what other members of the team are doing all the time; you have to give them a certain amount of autonomy. But if they’re willful, they’re likely to do ill-considered things. I kept my temper in check until the end of the day, when Chris himself finally thought to pay me a visit.

“Quite a spectacle,” I drawled sarcastically. “Who’s writing the screenplay?”

He came back defensively. “Hey, there wasn’t any air conditioning in my office, so I got Terry to open up the grand jury room for us. There were people hanging around. They wanted to give us ideas.” His voice trailed off. His back was half turned to me as he fiddled with the collection of ceramic mugs on my little refrigerator.

Finally, he turned. His previous bravado was gone. “Look, Marcia,” he said, “I can’t deal with that motherfucker. I don’t think I can do him.”

“You’re dumping him on me now?” I wailed. “You know I’m buried.”

It was true. I had a ton of work to do with Kato, plus at least two more days’ worth of interviewing with Allan Park. I was still searching for a use-of-force expert to explain how one man could quickly dispatch two victims with a knife. And I hadn’t even started on the hair and trace evidence.

Chris shrugged. “Let Hank do it.”

“Hank’s got his hands full with Dennis Fung.”

The only other alternative was a special prosecutor, but I dismissed that idea out of hand. It would send the wrong message to the jury.

“Well, I’m sorry, but I just can’t do it.”

I leaned forward and rested my head on my hands. There was no way around it. I would have to take Mark.

This would double my load over the next two weeks. Chris had not done much actual prep work with Fuhrman, which meant I would have to organize his testimony from scratch. I’d have to weave in all the reasons why he couldn’t and wouldn’t have planted evidence-but if I spent too much time talking about how he’d done nothing wrong, we’d look defensive. Spend too little and we’d leave holes for the defense to fill in with sinister fantasies. It would be yet another tightrope walk.

Damn. I only wished Chris had dumped him earlier.

“Chris?” I lifted my head but he was gone.

Was I pissed? I sure was. For about a hour. And then my anger softened. Chris was under pressure, too. Some of it I could only guess at. I reminded myself that home for him was a black working-class community where the prevailing sentiment was that Simpson had been framed. Chris had to worry about whether his best friends considered him an Uncle Tom. He’d been spat on. He’d been flipped off. Every day of the week he had to walk out his door prepared to take it on the chin.

I remembered one ugly incident when he and I had made a trip out to the offices of Nicole’s divorce attorneys in West L.A. As he entered the elevator, a young white woman beside us glanced up at Chris. Then she pulled her purse closer to her body. I’ll never forget the look on his face. One minute you’re an attorney, a civil servant, a full partner. The next minute you’re a suspected mugger. Chris had managed to keep his dignity in a dangerous, miserable, unfair world, and his courage often moved me. Beyond that, he had the greatness of soul to think beyond himself and his race and take up the cudgel for battered women. He’d gone to bat for DV-which, deep down, I knew lay at the center of this case. He’d picked up that burden when I’d felt too weak to carry it. He took on my demon issue.

The least I could do was take on his.

Early the following week, I’d polished off a bag of the pretzels I always nibble on and was scouting the office for more goodies. People were always sending us care packages. I’d nicknamed the War Room the Snack Vortex. I’d spotted a gift basket and was about to plunder a tin of pâté when Scott Gordon put his hand on my arm.

“Someone leaked the mock cross to Newsweek,” he whispered. His eyes were darting over my shoulder. He was clearly afraid of being overheard.

“Mark denied everything,” I whispered back. “What’s newsworthy about that?”

“Well, that’s not how the article reads.”

The way it read, apparently, was that Detective Fuhrman had “admitted that he’d made racial slurs in the past.”

Oh, man. Could they hit us any lower? How could someone on our own team have gabbed to the press-and leaked lies to boot?

I caught up with Chris in Suzanne’s office. He was pacing furiously. Obviously, he’d heard the news.

“I want every single person on this team to take a polygraph!” he was saying. “Everyone! Right fucking now. I’m going to get to the bottom of this!”

I tried to lighten him up.

“You know, I think everyone in the world should take polygraphs,” I said. Chris, however, was in no mood for jokes. He meant it.

Gil thought Chris’s polygraph idea was risky. “If the source is someone on the team,” he mused aloud, “don’t you think that person will leak the fact that we gave everyone a polygraph?”

I could see both sides. Sure, we needed to identify and isolate the culprit. Still, giving everyone polygraphs was just the kind of sensational, nasty development that was bound to get out. And if it did, we’d look like a bunch of paranoid jerks. I don’t think Gil was seriously considering it, but was trying to let Chris down gently.

Gil called a staff meeting in the conference room.

“I’m asking whoever it is to come forward and make a clean breast of it,” he said. “It can be done confidentially.” He spoke mildly, yet his words conveyed such sadness and disappointment I thought they might actually tweak a guilty conscience. When it was his turn to speak, though, Chris rejected the conciliatory approach.

“We’re going to have an investigation,” he ranted. “And I promise you, we’re going to find out which scumbag did this.”

I looked around the table. No one wore what I would call a guilty expression. But, then, what good attorney doesn’t have a poker face?

The leak and the suspicion that followed in its wake took their toll on the whole team. Speculation would settle on one person, and he’d be given the cold shoulder for a day or so. Then the onus would shift to another suspect. Chris just wouldn’t let the matter drop. Without consulting me, he’d engaged the informal assistance of Anthony Pellicano, the private eye who’d been volunteering his services to Fuhrman. He’d instructed Tony to “look for somebody close to Mark.” Which was dumb, because the last person who’d be the rat-fink was a friend of Mark’s. Far more likely, it was someone who held some grudge against Mark, or someone who was on the periphery of the case and wanted more of the limelight.

Not long afterward, Mark talked with Cheri Lewis. “Do you know Chris suspects you might be the leak?” he asked.

“Based on what?” she protested.

“I don’t know. That’s just what Chris told Pellicano.”

Cheri found Chris and confronted him head-on.

“I didn’t exactly say that,” Chris hedged. “I just told Tony to look at people who are close to Mark.”

“But that includes me,” Cheri complained. “Why on earth would you include me?”

“Well,” Chris replied with a sideways glance, “because I think you’re sleeping with him.”

“Are you out of your mind?” she gasped. “Why the hell would I jeopardize my career-with a married cop, no less? I demand to be given a polygraph!”

What a mess. Two of my closest friends, the people I most depended on to see this case through, were at each other’s throat. If the defense could see this, they’d be trading high fives for a solid hour. Maybe even Chris realized how out of control this thing had gotten, because he backed off. Eventually he and Cheri patched things up. But it was sickening to see deputy turn on deputy.

This may shock my critics, but I’m proud of the job I did with Mark Fuhrman-in spite of what would later reveal itself to be a time bomb ticking in my ear. I was under tremendous pressure; the structure of his direct had to be intricate and subtle. It required me to take him step-by-step through his role in the case, carefully layering beneath that superficial narrative the information that made it clear he couldn’t have framed Simpson. And I had to decide whether to bring out the Kathleen Bell allegations on direct. If I fronted them, we’d have to figure out a way to let the jury see that she wasn’t credible. And that would have to be done in a way that wouldn’t set Mark off. Fuhrman now had found ample grounds to mistrust everyone in the D.A.‘s office and was edgier than ever. A big part of my job became soothing him so that he wouldn’t flip out on the witness stand.

Chris’s disastrous mock cross complicated things considerably. I knew that Bailey would want to bring it up. I surely would, if I were him. It was also a fair bet that Ito would allow it. The problem was, I didn’t know for sure what had happened in the grand jury room; there was no transcript. At least, not a formal one. It was always possible that someone surreptitiously took notes and then, heaven shield us from horrors, slipped them to the defense. During a hearing after the Newsweek article appeared, Bailey had brought up the names of several deputies who I hadn’t even realized had been there. How he got that information, I don’t know. But it was one more indication that we had a traitor in our midst.

I called Chris into my office for a thorough debriefing. “So what exactly did you ask Fuhrman?” I said. But all Chris could remember for sure was that when he’d asked Fuhrman whether he’d used the slur in the past ten years, Fuhrman had denied it.

“No equivocation? Maybe he just couldn’t remember?” I asked hopefully.

“Nope,” Chris assured me. “He denied it completely and will not budge.”

I found it hard to believe that Mark had never uttered that word. Not after what I’d seen in the disability file. I did believe that he’d never said it to an African American, face-to-face. But never? Not over a beer? Not to his buddies? Not in private? That seemed unlikely to me. Could I get him to admit it? Judging from Chris’s experience with him, probably not. Perhaps I could get him to soften his denial to I don’t remember.” But a witness can be pushed only so far.

A prosecutor is in a tough position when she doesn’t fully believe her own witness. As I girded up for the encounter with Mark Fuhrman, I made a pact with myself: If I couldn’t shake him off his denial about the N-word, then I had an obligation to tell the jury that I had doubts about it. But I’d contrast it with that part of the testimony I was perfectly certain of: that he didn’t plant evidence.

At my request, Mark drew up a list of other cops on the scene who could help shore up his credibility. He’d looked over the Bundy crime-scene log and given us a few names, among them his partner, Brad Roberts. When I saw that name, I just shook my head and said to myself, He doesn’t get it.

Brad was a real good guy and a fine cop, but he couldn’t speak to the important issues of credibility. Brad had arrived at Bundy after Mark had, so he was in no position to attest to the fact that there had been only one glove between the bodies. Other cops who had been on the scene in advance of Fuhrman had already done that. Nor had Brad been with Mark when he’d found the glove at Rockingham.

About all Brad could say was that he, too, had seen what appeared to be a fingerprint on the gate at Bundy-not a good gambit since that putative print had never turned up. There was nothing he could offer our case, except to attest to his buddy’s being a straight-up guy. Just what we needed for this jury-a character reference from another white cop.

In preparation for his testimony, Mark showed up for our pretrial interview in the company of one of the most imposing men I’d ever seen in my life. Lieutenant Chuck Higbee, formerly of the LAPD, looked to be in his mid-fifties. He wore his hair in a buzz cut and stood about six-one. His T-shirt strained to cover his enormous shoulders and biceps. Higbee was a legend on the force, owing partly to his toughness but more to his willingness to lend a hand to cops in trouble. The LAPD had attached him to Fuhrman’s regular detail in the belief that he might exert a calming influence.

I extended my hand, and it was swallowed up by Higbee’s huge paw.

“Pleasure to meet you,” he said. The voice was smooth, his manner buoyant, in contrast to his stolid appearance. Could I count on him as an ally?

Mark hung back a bit until I offered him a seat.

“Guess it’s me and you,” I said, pulling out a yellow pad.

Mark wasn’t shy about telling me that he was glad I’d taken over. “Chris and I just couldn’t get along,” he told me. “I’d wait around for hours, then he’d come in and ask me some race questions and walk out.”

At the mention of “race questions,” his tone became hurt and angry.

“Okay,” I said. “I want to begin with where you were the day of the twelfth. Let’s account for all your movements from that point forward.”

“I was down in Palm Springs for an officers’ party,” he began. “I left there at about seven or eight P.M. Then I went home and got to bed about ten or eleven.”

I took him through the whole case. We worked for two hours straight before taking a break. Once again, I was reminded of why I’d been so impressed with Mark at the outset. This guy was really on top of the facts. I had a copy of his testimony from the preliminary hearing handy in case he needed to refresh his memory. But he never did. He had almost total recall.

Higbee was a champ. Whenever Mark ran on too long with an answer, he’d interrupt with a gentle “Hold on, Mark. Just answer the question. If you start volunteering, the defense will object and that will interrupt your testimony.” Higbee obviously knew his way around a courtroom.

During a break, Mark went into the hall to stretch. I took the opportunity to broach the race question with Higbee. Particularly Fuhrman’s insistence that he had never uttered the N-word in the past decade.

“It would really help if we could soften that denial a little,” I told him. “Is there anything we can do about it?”

Higbee thought for a moment. “If you want my advice, just leave it alone,” he finally said. “The more you push it, the worse he’ll get.”

“But don’t you agree it would be better to front the issue? Take it on first, and soften it with some kind of admission?”

“All you’ll do is alienate him,” Higbee warned. “Then he’ll take the stand in a hostile frame of mind. If you guys can just maintain a decent rapport, I’m sure it’ll all go smoothly.”

When Mark returned, we spent another hour going through the questions I intended to weave through his direct.

“When you stepped out of the house to go down the south pathway, did you know whether Kato had already gone down that pathway?”

“No.”

“Did you know whether Simpson had an alibi for the time of the murders?”

“No.”

“Did you know whether there was an eyewitness to the murders?”

“No.”

“Were you the first officer on the Bundy scene?”

“No.”

“How many officers were there by the time you arrived?”

“On the scene itself? About ten, I guess.”

“Did you know whether they’d examined the evidence and been all through the crime scene before you got there?”

“No.”

For an officer in this position to have planted evidence would have been an act of insanity. With no information about Simpson’s whereabouts-for all he knew, Simpson could have had an airtight alibi for the time of the murders-Fuhrman could have exposed himself to a major felony rap by monkeying with the evidence. It just didn’t make sense.

“Okay,” I pushed on. “Let’s talk about the 1985 baseball-bat-through-the-windshield thing. You could have arrested Simpson that day, couldn’t you?”

“Well, not at that time,” he explained. “Back then, we still needed the victim to cooperate to make an arrest…”

“What could you have done?”

“I could have written up a field identification card on the incident. I could have issued him a warning. I could have recommended a filing [of charges] to the city attorney,” he said.

“Did you do any of those things?” I asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I thought the situation looked under control,” Mark explained. “He was calm and polite. She looked very upset, but she didn’t want to cooperate. I couldn’t see any reason to aggravate the situation any further.”

Certainly a jury could not fail to grasp the point. If this guy was such a flaming racist-if he was the sort to go bonkers at the sight of a black man with a white woman-why hadn’t he seized this opportunity to hold O. J. Simpson’s feet to the fire? If anything, the baseball bat incident suggested that he was so in awe of Simpson that he had turned a blind eye to an incident of spousal abuse, just like the succession of cops before him.

After Mark and Higbee left, I curled up in my chair and stared out the window at the smoggy sunset. What should I do? Heed Higbee’s warning and stay away from race? Some of my own colleagues were warning me to keep Kathleen Bell’s allegations out of my direct examination. But if I did, the defense would play it as though I’d deliberately tried to hide that evidence from the jury. Still, if I pressed Mark about Bell, would he turn on me in court? The question troubled me.

The night before Mark was scheduled to begin testimony, I was tossing in bed when an inspiration came to me. What if I feathered Bell’s statements right into the testimony about the 1985 baseball bat incident? We’d intercut her comments about Mark’s shaking down interracial couples with the details of Mark’s 911 call to Rockingham, where’d he’d gone out of his way not to hassle O. J. Simpson. It could be a powerful juxtaposition.

As I drove into work the next morning, March 9, 1995, I played out the succession of questions in my head. Mark was waiting in my office. He looked a lot less assured than other times I’d seen him. I shut the door. Speaking as brightly and matter-of-factly as I could, I laid out the Bell strategy to him. I didn’t ask him; I simply told him what I intended to do. He just smiled and nodded his head in acquiescence. As I headed for court, I just prayed he’d stay calm and show the jury a human being instead of a race-baiting freak.

The courtroom was so thick with tension that you could practically feel the molecules bouncing off your skin. There was an unnatural quiet, like the pall of dead air before a storm. I had to find a way to relieve some of the pressure on Mark. I approached him easily and smiled.

“Detective Fuhrman,” I said. “Can you tell us how you feel about testifying today?”

“Nervous,” he replied. “Reluctant.”

“Can you tell us why?”

“Since June thirteenth, it seems that I’ve seen a lot of the evidence ignored, a lot of personal issues come to the forefront. I think it’s too bad.”

‘Heard a lot about yourself in the press, have you?”

“Daily.”

“You’ve indicated you feel nervous about testifying. Have you gone over your testimony in the presence of several district attorneys in order to prepare yourself [for court] and the allegations you may hear from the defense?”

He indicated that he had.

I directed his attention to the year 1985, when he was a young patrolman.

“Did you respond to a radio call which led you to the location of 360 North Rockingham in Brentwood?”

Mark told how he and his partner had arrived to find O. J. Simpson and a woman who was leaning on the hood of a Mercedes-Benz. “She had her hands to her face,” he said. “And she was sobbing.”

Mark moved smoothly through the incident, ending with the confession that he’d done nothing to pursue the case against Simpson, although he could have.

Time to feather. Deftly. Not too heavy-handed.

“Now, back in 1985 and 1986, sir,” I asked him, “can you tell us whether you knew someone or met someone by the name of Kathleen Bell?”

“Yes. I can tell you. I did not.”

Jonathan flashed Bell’s faxed letter to Cochran on the screen. I couldn’t present it any other way, to tell you the truth. The words were so offensive. Especially the genocidal remarks about burning. Maybe it’s being Jewish myself, or maybe it’s just being human, but I couldn’t bring myself to speak them aloud.

“Did the conversation Kathleen Bell describes in this letter occur?” I asked him.

“No, it did not.”

Mark sailed confidently through the rest of direct. He was smooth and relaxed. The irritability and childish petulance of the past few months had vanished. No one watching him on the stand today would ever believe all the hand-holding sessions that had led to this moment.

Throughout Mark’s testimony, opposing counsel was unexpectedly quiet. Lee Bailey was in charge of Fuhrman’s cross; he voiced no objections and he took no notes. I found that interesting. Now, it’s true that the prosecution’s witnesses seldom deviate from their written statements, which we hand over to the defense during discovery. But no one ever says the same thing in exactly the same way. Sometimes those variations are significant. If an attorney’s not taking notes, he’ll have a hard time remembering the distinctions when it’s time for cross.

Bailey’s failure to take notes told me one of two things. Either he had a hell of a memory-or he’d already prepared a cross-examination from which he would not deviate. I didn’t think it could be the first. At sidebar, his hands trembled so badly that he could barely read the papers he was holding. If the problem was alcohol, as rumor had it, then his memory couldn’t be all that great. The second scenario seemed more likely. If he truly did have a preset program, then it was likely to shake Bailey up a bit if I threw in something a little obscure. Something he might have overlooked.

That led me to a mistake. Mark had told me about a large plastic bag he’d found in the rear of the Bronco. It was his theory that Simpson might have intended to use it to carry Nicole’s body away from the murder site. I figured I’d throw it out to see what old Bailey made of it. So late on Friday afternoon, March 10, I ticked off an inventory of evidence from the Bronco, including a shovel “about five feet long” and a large piece of “heavy-gauge plastic” that had been tucked into a side pocket in the cargo area. Mark identified these items as the ones he’d seen when he looked through the window of the Bronco the morning of the thirteenth. Let the jurors draw their own conclusions.

It is an understatement to say that things didn’t work out as I’d planned. I was getting ready to end my direct when Ito decided to break for the day. That left Bailey with the entire weekend to figure out how to counter the bag business.

It turned out to be a no-brainer. That weekend, owners of Ford 4X4s all over America flooded our phone lines to report that the plastic bag was standard-issue in Broncos.

Man, did I want to hide under a bed.

On Monday morning, with Mark back on the stand, I swallowed hard and asked him about the plastic bag again. “Do you happen to know whether it belongs in a Bronco?”

“Well, now I do,” he said.

“And what is it?” I asked, setting up the punch line for which I was the joke.

“It is the spare-tire bag,” Mark said.

I vowed to swear off cute tricks for all eternity.

Much of the civilized world tuned in to catch the opening day of Bailey’s cross-examination of Mark Fuhrman. That’s just what Bailey had hoped for. For weeks now he’d been pounding his chest and blustering to the media how he would do the most “annihilating, character-assassinating” cross-examination ever. Now millions of viewers were dangling over the walls of the virtual Colosseum in eager anticipation of a bloodbath.

When Bailey approached the witness, he couldn’t resist jabbing the bamboo under our nails.

“Can you tell us when it was that you were enlightened to the fact the plastic you saw in Mr. Simpson’s Bronco comes with the car?”

“I believe it was Saturday,” Mark replied.

“So after nine months of investigation, you discovered on Saturday that this important piece of evidence was perfectly innocuous. Is that right?”

Ouch.

I have to say that I found myself admiring Bailey’s style. Unlike every other member of the Dream Team, who tended to meander and become mired in meaningless detail, Bailey kept his cross on course. I enjoyed watching him as I had enjoyed watching no other member of that defense. There was a glimmer of real lawyering here.

As he steered the cross to Kathleen Bell, I held my breath. I would have to practice a judicious restraint. I didn’t want to object unless I absolutely had to. We didn’t want to appear to have something to hide. Above all, I didn’t want to object and have Ito overrule us. That would make it look as if we were trying to “cover up a racist.” But I would have to be ready to jump in if the cross turned into a mêlée.

“Detective Fuhrman,” Bailey exhorted, “would you take a look at this photograph of a blond woman and tell me whether or not that is the person that was being interviewed on Larry King when you watched the show at the request of the prosecution?”

Bell’s photo was flashed on the screen. Mark turned to look at it.

“I do not recall ever meeting this woman in the recruiting station or anywhere else.”

“Ever had any contact with any relative or possible relative of Kathleen Bell in your capacity as a policeman?”

“I would have no way of knowing that,” Mark replied. “The name Ms. Bell does not ring a-”

“The name Bell doesn’t ring a bell, is that what you were trying to say,” Bailey said, finishing his sentence.

Chuckles rattled through the audience. Even a few of the jurors grinned.

Good, I thought to myself. A soft denial. That left room for the possibility that he could have met her, but had simply forgotten.

Mark was holding his own. He didn’t let Bailey push him into any categorical denials. That was good. And in the hours that followed, Fuhrman kept his cool under the questioning of the old warrior.

As we went on to day three, I thought I could detect a hint of desperation in Bailey’s voice. So far, he’d failed to deliver his Perry Mason moment. Now he locked in on the subject that he hoped would deliver a knockout blow.

He started by bringing up, as I’d dreaded, Chris’s misguided grand jury room session with Mark. During our arguments before Fuhrman’s testimony began, Bailey had displayed a great deal of knowledge about that mock session. He knew that the Bell letter had come up, and now he asked Mark about the racial epithets Bell had described.

“Did any of the questions [in the mock cross] require you to say whether or not language of that sort was part of your vocabulary?” asked Bailey.

“I might have offered that,” said Mark.

“Ah,” said Bailey. “Tell us please, what was it you offered these lawyers in that room about your vocabulary, Detective Fuhrman?”

I objected, claiming that it was irrelevant. It was, but Ito had already committed himself to allowing this filth. Overruled.

“Would you answer?” Bailey persisted.

“Yes,” said Fuhrman. “That I don’t use any type of language to describe people of any race such as what is alleged by Kathleen Bell.”

Bailey was circling in for the kill, and I couldn’t do a damned thing about it except hope that Mark would give himself some wiggle room. As Bailey began to ask Fuhrman the questions that would deny him that space, I objected, and though Ito sustained a couple of my objections because Bailey’s phrasing was vague, I knew I was only staving off the inevitable.

Bailey would not be denied. “Do you use the word ‘nigger’ in describing people?” he spat.

I had no choice. “Same objection,” I interjected again.

“Overruled.”

“No, sir,” Mark answered.

“Have you used that word in the past ten years?”

“Object,” Chris hissed at me. This was the guy who was going to treat Fuhrman as a hostile witness, right? Now he’s pushing me to run interference. But I couldn’t object again. I knew that very question had been asked of Mark by our side in the grand jury room session. If so, Bailey could make a fool of me if I spoke up: “Why would Miss Clark object to the very question that the prosecution themselves posed to Detective Fuhrman?” My objection would make me look like a liar and a racist myself-like I was trying to hide whatever offensive remarks Fuhrman had given to us.

A quick glance at the jury told me we couldn’t afford to be overruled on any more objections about race. They were glaring at me with hatred. They wanted to hear Fuhrman’s answers.

“Not that I recall, no,” Mark answered.

Mark’s competitive instincts, which he’d managed to hold in check until now, were finally rearing their head. What was it? A more prominent jutting of the chin? Was he leaning forward instead of back? I couldn’t put my finger on it. But I felt the shift.

“You mean if you called someone a nigger you have forgotten it?”

“I’m not sure I can answer the question the way you phrased it, sir.”

“Are you therefore saying that you have not used that word in the past ten years, Detective Fuhrman?”

“Yes,” Mark answered. “That is what I’m saying.”

“And you say under oath that you have not addressed any black person as nigger or spoken about black people as niggers in the past ten years, Detective Fuhrman?”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

Please, Mark, I was begging silently, how about something like, “I don’t know. Ten years is a long time. Ten years ago? I might have.”

But Mark Fuhrman was enjoying watching his adversary squirm. Bailey had failed to deliver on his boastful claims that he would “annihilate” him. Now that victory, as Mark saw it, was within reach, he wasn’t giving an inch.

“So that anyone who comes to this court and quotes you as using that word in dealing with African Americans would be a liar, would they not, Detective Fuhrman?”

“Yes, they would.”

“All of them, correct?”

“All of them.”

Mark had left himself no out. But that wasn’t the worst of it. He compounded his folly with arrogance. Bailey returned to the very first moments of Mark’s testimony, when Fuhrman mentioned the accusations being hurled against him. These, of course, included making racial slurs and planting evidence. But when Bailey asked Mark, “What were you thinking of when you talked of those problems?” Mark said, “Being accused of committing a felony in a capital crime.”

“Was that the only accusation that was troubling you as you took the witness stand?”

“That,” Mark blurted out, “is the only one I care about.”

Bailey saw his opportunity.

“The other one, the [accusation] that you used racial epithets, you don’t care about at all, is that correct?”

“I didn’t say them,” Mark insisted. “I don’t care about them.”

I was so mortified I felt as if my skin were on fire. You don’t care about that fucked-up statement? Don’t care! How can you not care? Someone just accused you of advocating genocide, for Christ’s sake. That at least has to offend you. How can you say you don’t care?

How could I deal with this? If, on redirect, I asked Mark to try and explain the comment, it could get a lot worse:

“What did you mean when you said you don’t care?”

“I don’t care because it isn’t true.”

“Yet the accusation that you’d planted evidence wasn’t true either, and you were upset by that…” And so on.

Even worse, he could ramble on in the spirit of “Well, I didn’t really mean I don’t care, I just mean…”

There was no coming back from it. And no chance that the jury had missed it, either.

Meanwhile, in sessions held out of the jury’s presence, Bailey and I were going at it tooth and nail. The defense was demanding that Ito let them call witnesses who could supposedly corroborate Kathleen Bell’s accusations of Fuhrman. One of these was Maximo Cordoba.

Cordoba, you’ll recall, was the black marine stationed at the recruiting station in Redondo Beach. We had originally considered calling him as a prosecution witness. But he was a real piece of work. He’d been interviewed several times by the LAPD as well as by Mark’s private investigator, Anthony Pellicano. In a taped interview with Pellicano on September 16, 1994, Cordoba couldn’t recall ever hearing Mark make the racially charged statements attributed to him by Kathleen Bell. In fact, he made no mention of hearing Mark use any racial slurs. In a telephone interview with a detective from the LAPD on January 17, 1995, Cordoba said he couldn’t recall ever seeing Mark and Kathleen Bell at the recruiting office at the same time. And again, no mention of racial slurs.

Three days later, Max came to our office, where he was interviewed by Cheri and Chris. Once again he insisted he’d never seen Mark and Bell together. Now, however, he seemed to remember that Fuhrman-or perhaps it was one of the marines, he couldn’t be sure-had called him “boy.” This witness’s “memory” was troubling. And it became increasingly dubious several months down the line when he told a reporter that the “boy” episode had come back to him in a dream. Max’s record was so riddled with inconsistent statements, we couldn’t possibly call him as a prosecution witness. The defense, however, did not feel similarly constrained.

On the second day of Fuhrman’s cross-examination, Bailey asked to address the court before the jury came in. Hoping to use it in his cross, he came up with yet another Max Cordoba story. According to this tale, Max had been in the station when Mark came in to hand him an application to join a reserve unit. Cordoba said he didn’t know anything about it and called to a fellow marine, “Hey, Roher. Your boy is here.” At this, Fuhrman turned on Cordoba saying, “Let’s get something straight. The only boy here is you, nigger.” Then, as Bailey told it, Fuhrman followed Cordoba into the parking lot to repeat the epithet.

Was this all Bailey hyperbole, or had Cordoba come up with yet another, more sensational version of the bullshit statement he’d given us in January? I stood up.

“These allegations get more outrageous by the minute,” I said. “He never made such a statement, and he never alleged that Mark Fuhrman had made such a statement.”

I demanded that Ito exclude any cross-examination on such a highly suspect statement. At the very least we should be allowed to call Cordoba to the witness stand outside the presence of the jury so that Ito could see for himself just how incredible this witness was before the jury heard his latest unfounded accusation. As a parting shot, I predicted that Cordoba would not, in fact, testify to the version given by Bailey.

“That,” I said, referring to the story Bailey told, “is something that is never going to be delivered on and the court will have allowed the jury to be inflamed by something that will evaporate in thin air.”

That goaded Lee into his big mistake. He jumped to his feet and proclaimed, “Your Honor, I have spoken to him on the phone personally, marine to marine. I haven’t the slightest doubt that he will march up to that witness stand and tell the world what Fuhrman called him, on no provocation whatsoever.”

Ito ruled that Bailey could ask Fuhrman about Cordoba only after we’d had another shot at interviewing him in light of this new allegation. But the need for another interview would soon be rendered moot.

That evening I agreed to meet the team for dinner at the Saratoga. Chris, Cheri, and a bunch of the law clerks were already there when I arrived. They slid down the booth to make room for me.

My head ached, I was kinked up with tension. I ordered a Scotch. Probably a bad idea, but I needed to relax. Scott Gordon joined us. So did a couple of young lawyers from media relations. We thought we might get some work done, but everybody was just too tired and beat up with the stress of having Fuhrman on the stand. So we cut loose. As the evening wore on, the subject of Maximo Cordoba seemed funnier and funnier. “Next time around he’ll probably remember that he was married to Kathleen Bell,” Cheri groused. We split our sides laughing. All anyone had to do was puff out his chest and grunt, “Marine to marine,” and we’d collapse in hysterics. Every team needs a good blowout.

That night, when I’d headed home and was preparing to drop into bed, Chris called me and told me to tune into Dateline. Quick. I switched on the TV in my bedroom and there was old Max Cordoba talking to Jane Pauley. He was denying ever having spoken to F. Lee Bailey. Not marine to marine. Not any other way.

Thank you, God.

The next morning, I awoke feeling as if trolls in knuckle studs had worked over my cerebral cortex. Mark Fuhrman was still on the stand. I groaned and pulled the covers tight over my head.

Now I accept it as a fundamental fact of survival that when one gets up in the morning, one must be prepared to do battle before the day is through. Not today. I couldn’t face it. I dragged myself into court intending to dump Bailey on Chris. But Chris would have none of it.

“C’mon, baby, you’ve got to do it.” He grinned. “Get in there and break off a piece for Daddy.”

I turned to Jonathan Fairtlough, who’d brought a copy of the Dateline tape.

“Cued up?” I asked him. My head was still pounding.

“All set, boss. You just say when.”

“No matter what you hear or see,” I instructed him, “when I tell you to play the tape, just do it.”

The point I rose to make that morning was a serious one indeed. An attorney for the defense had willfully misled the court. He’d claimed that he’d spoken to a witness when, in fact, he had not. It was this kind of fast-and-loose gamesmanship that in any other court would get a lawyer held in contempt.

“This is the kind of nonsense that gives lawyers a bad name, Your Honor,” I said. “He was intending to convey to the court that he had personal knowledge of what this man said because this man said it to him personally-‘marine to marine.’… That is nonsense.”

I asked Jonathan to roll the tape. Bailey saw what I was up to and began to yell at the top of his lungs that this was “outrageous.”

“Mr. Bailey-you can see how agitated he is-has been caught in a lie,” I observed to the court, “and you know something? Not in this case. You don’t get away with that. There are just too many people watching.”

Poor Jonathan looked like a deer caught in the headlights. But I calmly repeated, “Jonathan, roll the tape.”

Bailey continued screaming, but for once Ito wasn’t listening. He’d turned to watch as Cordoba, now blown up larger than life on the big screen, denied ever having spoken to Bailey. It was amazing. Only by seeing the events in his own courtroom on television could Lance understand what had happened! He asked me what sanction I felt should be imposed on the defense.

“I think that the witness should be precluded from testifying,” I said. “I think that Mr. Bailey should be cited for contempt and fined substantially. As an officer of the court, he has lied to this court.”

Bailey put his hand on the podium, trying to edge me out, but I wouldn’t budge.

“Excuse me, Mr. Bailey,” I told him. “Stand up and speak when it’s your turn.”

In a sidelong glance, I caught the hatred in his eyes. Bailey was an old-school lawyer. He was used to being able to bluster and bully his way through everything. He wasn’t prepared for a woman to take him on that way.

Lance looked thunderstruck. I could see he knew he’d been played for a fool. It was clear that Bailey would not be able to use his crazy Cordoba story in the Fuhrman cross, but I was really hoping Lance would also make Bailey pay for his deception. I was wrong. Bailey claimed he’d spoken to Cordoba through an investigator and how Cordoba had just forgotten that Bailey himself had come on the line to talk with him for a few moments.

Bottom line, Ito hated fighting more than he hated being duped. All he wanted to do was end the hostilities. He called Lee and me to apologize to each other and bury the hatchet.

I’m sure the look on my face said, Yeah, I’ll bury the hatchet-in his head, because when Lance saw it, he knew I was neither repentant nor inclined to fake it. He turned to Chris and asked him to try and reason with me.

“I don’t want to apologize,” I said under my breath. “I have nothing to apologize for. He lied and now he’s covering it up.”

But Chris didn’t listen to me. He turned to the bench and announced, “I’ll apologize for my warrior if you’ll apologize on behalf of yours.”

You motherfucker,” I mouthed to Chris. He’d just rolled me out like a Persian rug. When he returned to the table, I lit into him. “This is payback for the contempt thing. You’re still pissed about that, aren’t you? His expression was perfectly straight, but his shoulders shook with laughter. I couldn’t blame him. Lawyer gets caught lying on national TV. Judge won’t do a goddamned thing. What can you do but laugh?

The truce between Lee Bailey and me lasted about two seconds. Once again he was up on his feet, asking to address the court out of the presence of the jury. He’d brought along some props: a plastic bag and a pair of brown leather gloves. He wanted permission to show Mark the plastic bag. He wanted to put the gloves inside the bag and demonstrate how the witness could have secreted the package in his sock-which, he claimed, was a habit of old marines. Of course, he had not one scintilla of evidence to prove that Mark had ever done such a thing. The defense had been discomfited by the revelation that Mark rarely wore a jacket. I’d introduced this fact during the cops’ testimony, through photos taken at the crime scene. So if he had no jacket, how the hell could he hide the glove until he could plant it? Now Bailey wanted to give the jury a fallback scenario: that Mark stuffed the glove in his sock.

By the way, this proposed stunt was strictly improper. The law stipulates that any experiment or attempt to re-create an event must duplicate the original circumstances as nearly as possible. The standard is “substantial similarity.” It doesn’t take a legal wizard to see that there were no “original circumstances” here. There was absolutely no evidence that anything like this had ever happened. The experiment proposed by Bailey would be substantially similar to-what? A nonoccurrence? What it had, however, was tons of graphic prejudicial value.

As Bailey continued to outline his proposal, I thought, I shouldn’t even have to respond to this, it’s so ludicrous. But I knew that if I held my peace, Ito might well allow it.

So I argued to the court that you couldn’t justify an experiment when there’s not only no evidence to support that the event occurred, but there is evidence to prove that it never occurred. No one ever said they saw a plastic bag in anyone’s possession that night. Not to mention that there was no second glove available at Bundy to go into that bag.

The gloves were lying on the defense table. I picked them up to study them. They were size small-not extra large, like the gloves in evidence. The defense was obviously afraid that if it used gloves of actual size, either they wouldn’t fit in the bag or the bag would make a conspicuous bulge in the sock.

“This is ridiculous,” I told the court. “There is no connection to this case. A leather glove of a different size, a different color, a different make, a different style, that has no relevance to this case… This is a fantasy concocted by the defense for which there is no evidentiary basis, no logical or factual connection to this case.”

Ito tried to sort this out for himself. There was a disparity between the sizes of the two sets of gloves…

“They are out of extra large, Your Honor,” Bailey explained lamely.

“Not only that,” I continued, turning the gloves over in my hands. “but the glove in issue is an Aris… I can’t even tell if [this] is a man’s or a woman’s glove.” Then some mischief came to me. “Size small,” I noted. “I guess it is Mr. Bailey’s.”

Talk about a cheap shot. No sooner did the words slip from my lips than I regretted them. Guess you can’t take the street out of the girl.

To be honest, Ito would have been within his rights to sanction me. Instead, he just looked at me and shook his head. He knew that everyone’s nerves were strained to the breaking point. Besides, the cold fact was, he hadn’t held Bailey in contempt for outright lying to the court; so how was he going to justify sending me to the slammer for one gibe, uh, below the belt?

Ito, thank God, did not punish me by allowing the defense to perform Bailey’s specious experiment. He shut Bailey down cold.

You want to know the funny thing about my tasteless jab? Bailey never got it. He would walk around saying to anyone who would listen, “Look. Anyone can see my hands are at least a medium, if not a large.” He’d spread his hands out for viewing. On the day we called Richard Rubin, our glove expert, Bailey raced over to him to get an expert opinion on the size of his hands. After Rubin confirmed that they did, indeed, appear to be a size large, Bailey looked at me as if to say, “You see?”

I nearly lost it.

CAR TAPE. March 15. Mark Fuhrman’s been on the stand for almost a week now, but he’s holding his own pretty well We may have gotten to the end of cross, and I think right now Chris and I are at odds about whether or not to do redirect. I wanted to not do any, which would really kind of send a nice message that he hasn’t been hurt. I’m really torn about this…

In the meantime, I get all these outrageous offers to be on all these television shows. I think I’ll just quit the case and do it. Oh, God. I really hate this. I feel so alone. I feel like I have three feet of vacuum around me everywhere I go. I don’t feel like anybody can penetrate it.

When Mark Fuhrman finally stepped down after six days on the stand, he was almost universally hailed as the victor in a grudge match against Bailey. The press showered him with praise. Cops and civilians alike sent him flowers, gifts, and baskets of food. The LAPD ordered up a cake for him and they celebrated alongside the deputies and the law clerks in the War Room.

I was in no mood for rejoicing. The last place I wanted to be was at a party for Mark Fuhrman.

I sent my regrets. Mark Fuhrman’s testimony had taken its toll on my spirits. I’d always prided myself on my clinical focus. Even as I waded hip-deep through the mud and blood, I could count on my discipline and detachment to serve as barriers against the ugliness. But sitting for days in that courtroom hearing Bailey bellow “nigger” had driven my morale to an all-time low. Chris had been right when he argued against the admissibility of the N-word back in January. No decent person can hear that word without feeling a shock down the spine. If it inspired revulsion in me, I could only imagine what it inspired in the jury.

My mind ached. My muscles ached. Most of all, my heart ached. I realized, I guess we all did, that we were taking this battering in the service of a lost cause. I do believe it takes a special kind of courage to drag yourself up to the front day after day to fight a losing battle. I wanted to think I had that kind of courage. Every day I made a point of considering the plight of the Goldmans and the Browns, who had suffered the worst loss possible. I owed them. If this ordeal proved too much for me, if I allowed myself to collapse under the strain, I knew I would spend the rest of my life in a limbo of self-loathing. When the bell rang at the end of fifteen rounds, the decision might not go my way, but I wanted to be standing. Bloody, staggering, puking, maybe. But still standing.

Across the room, of course, the lawyers on the Dream Team were bright-eyed, starched, and perky. The defense had a policy of alternating cross-examination so that no single lawyer took on more than two or three witnesses in a row. That was a very good strategy to avoid burning out any one lawyer, but it simply wasn’t an option for us. For the first part of the case, at least, we didn’t want the jurors to see the People’s advocates as a blurred succession of suits. We wanted them to become familiar with Chris and me as human beings, and bond with us, if they could.

It fell to me to carry the burden of this strategy. After Chris’s opening volley with the domestic violence witnesses, I had twenty-rive witnesses straight. It was an agonizing grind. At the conclusion of Fuhrman, I would have given my eyeteeth to be able to sit down and rest for a bit. But I had three more witnesses to go before our physical-evidence guys-Woody Clarke, Rock Harmon, Brian Kelberg, and Hank Goldberg-relieved me. It doesn’t sound like so much. But one of those three remaining witnesses was Kato Kaelin.

Kato was driving me to an early grave. I knew that he had a lot he could tell me about the brutality of O. J. Simpson. He’d been an eyewitness to the door-smashing incident of 1993, when the 911 tape revealed Simpson going after Nicole like a madman. But the only thing Kato would admit to seeing was “maybe an argument.” Kaelin’s insistence on minimizing stood to make his testimony more damaging than helpful to us.

It both amused and infuriated me when, after the trial was over, Kato tried to float the story that he would have been happy to cooperate with me if only I hadn’t intimidated him. Give me a break, Junior. I spent over thirty hours with that guy-wheedling, cajoling, talking dude-speak. I’d done everything but offer him rent-free lodging in my toolshed to induce him to come out with the truth.

Kato was holding back because he couldn’t tell which way the wind was blowing. He was obviously afraid that dumping on O. J. Simpson might hurt his so-called career. I would have been at a loss to unlock the riddle that was Kato if it hadn’t been for Kato’s old friend Grant Cramer, an actor with whom Kato crashed during the days after the murder. Grant was a man of good character and conscience who came forward and confided in us with a candor Kato could never manage.

The best we’d been able to get out of Kato was that during the trip to McDonald’s on the night of the murders, O. J. Simpson had seemed “tired” and “rushed.” But Kaelin was much more forthcoming with Grant in the murder’s aftermath. Grant told us that after arriving at his pad the afternoon of June 13, an agitated Kato said that on that Sunday evening Simpson seemed “frazzled and out of breath.” He certainly had not looked like he’d just awakened from sleep when the limo driver arrived.

While still at Cramer’s house, Kato began receiving calls from the Simpson camp: Howard Weitzman, Simpson’s assistant, Cathy Randa, and even Simpson himself. All of them wanted to know what he’d told the cops. After the third call, Kato asked Grant to drive him over to Rockingham. Grant pleaded with his friend not to go, but Kato wouldn’t listen. Grant didn’t see Kato for three days.

When Kato turned up again, he was distraught. He told Cramer that Simpson’s family and friends were at the residence, along with some attorneys. Kato said that the defendant had hugged him. “Thank God you were here,” Simpson said, “and you can say I was at home when this thing happened.”

“No, O.J., I can’t,” Kato replied. “I didn’t see you after we got back. When I walked back to my room you were still standing by the Bentley.” And that was the last Simpson had spoken to Kato, although Kato remained in the house, sometimes sleeping on the floor, for three days.

Not once in all our interview had Kato mentioned going back to Rockingham. When I confronted him with Grant’s information, he suddenly “remembered” it.

When I heard this, it clicked into place why Kato felt he’d needed to bring his attorney along to the grand jury way back when. Simpson was making what was, most likely, a ham-handed attempt to manipulate his testimony. Kato must have felt himself caught between a rock and a hard place. Clearly, he still felt that way, because I had to struggle for every shred of information from him. He never volunteered anything, and when I forced him to describe something, he’d give the sketchiest possible rendition, always skewed toward protecting his friend. It was like interviewing a defense witness.

Which, of course, he was.

And that meant I had to develop a strategy for handling him on the witness stand.

First, I figured, I would get all I could the nice way. I wouldn’t alienate him before extracting everything he’d give me without a fight. Then I’d see how he did on cross. If he screwed up-tried to backpedal-it would actually make his direct testimony look more credible, because the jury would see how much he loved the defense. Then, on redirect, I’d hit him with the hard stuff. And I had an idea for how to do just that.

Kato Kaelin took the stand the morning of March 21, wearing a fashionable blazer and black jeans. His direct testimony was every bit the struggle I’d anticipated. Every time I asked Kato how Simpson had behaved, looked, or spoken, Kato, running his hands through his hair and chopping up his sentences like a sushi chef, went out of his way to describe it as the picture of normalcy. Simpson was “tired, “rushed.” Perhaps a little “upset,” because Nicole hadn’t let him see Sydney. But never “frazzled” or “angry.”

One of the facts that Kato had let slip during our pretrial interviews was that Simpson and Paula Barbieri had had a blowup on the night before the murders. Paula wanted to attend Sydney’s dance recital the following day as a show of good faith on Simpson’s part. She apparently wanted him to announce to Nicole and his ex-in-laws that she was his woman now. Paula was stung at Simpson’s refusal, and she ended up skipping to Las Vegas, where she checked into the Mirage Hotel as one of a party on a reservation guaranteed by singer Michael Bolton. But if Simpson attended the recital unaccompanied, hoping to patch things up with Nicole, his own hopes were dashed. Nicole wouldn’t have him. To make it worse, she dissed him in front of everyone by pointedly excluding him from the family celebration at Mezzaluna.

When he returned home to Rockingham in the wake of that disappointment, he said something disparaging to Kato about the sexy little black dress Nicole wore to the recital. Kato recalled the remark to me as something like, “Man, I see Nicole and her friends in those little tight-ass dresses and I wonder what they’re going to do when they’re grandmas.” At the grand jury, however, Kato said Simpson had simply appeared to be “joking” about the dress.

Now, on the stand, Kato once again did his best to downplay the implications of Simpson’s remark. The matter came up late, after his halting direct testimony, and, as I suspected, a cross-exam where Bob Shapiro cuddled up to him like a buddy.

It was now my redirect, and I was ready. “Your Honor,” I said to Ito, “I am going to ask the Court to take this witness as a hostile witness.”

There were several advantages in doing this. For one thing, it would underscore that Kato was a defense witness. That would give the jury notice that any evidence he gave to incriminate Simpson was the real goods. But even more important, once a witness is declared to be hostile, you get to ask leading questions. Ordinarily, when a lawyer calls a witness, he has to ask open-ended questions that don’t suggest the answer-that’s what distinguishes direct examination from cross-exam. With a hostile witness, in effect, you get to cross-examine your own witness.

Only then, with the freedom to ask leading questions, did I get Kato to concede that Simpson’s comment about Nicole’s little black dress was spoken with a certain degree of “upsetness.”

“Now, is it your testimony today that he was more upset about [Nicole not letting him see] Sydney than he was about Nicole wearing the tight dresses?” I bore into him.

“Yes.”

“But that was not your testimony before, was it, Mr. Kaelin?”

“No.”

“Earlier you had testified that he was ‘relaxed’ and ‘nonchalant’ when he spoke about Sydney and the recital?”

“That’s what I remember.”

“Isn’t it also true that you testified previously in this trial that he was more upset about Nicole wearing the tight dresses than he was about not being able to see Sydney, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Now you are changing that testimony; is that what you are doing, sir?”

“Yes.”

After the verdict, when it became clear that Simpson’s acquittal would not restore his former status, Kato lost the surfer-boy stutter, bought a pair of specs and a blazer, and experienced a spell of enhanced memory. For the benefit of the plaintiffs in the Browns’ and Goldmans’ civil suits against Simpson, Kato could suddenly recall that Simpson had been upset and unsettled about Nicole since the day before the murders, when he’d watched The World According to Garp. The film’s oral-sex scene had reminded him of Nicole’s tryst on the couch with Keith Zlomsowitch. He’d been upset with Nicole at the recital and accused her of playing “hardball” by not letting him see Sydney. Kato Kaelin certainly wasn’t the only one to remember the truth by the time the civil trial came around. But he typified the appalling, self-absorbed popularity junkies with no moral compass who came creeping out of the woodwork to offer information that they’d shamefully refused to give us.

The weird thing about Kato’s trial appearance was that, despite all the pulled punches, his essential testimony would have been devastating to the defense if a thoughtful jury had listened. Take, for instance, his account of the trip to McDonald’s. Something about that whole business had struck me as phony from day one. Simpson comes to Kato’s room saying he needs to borrow five dollars to pay the skycap? All he’s got is hundred-dollar bills. In the next breath he’s saying that he’s going out to get something to eat. Common sense compels one to ask, “If he’s going out, can’t he get change himself?”

Kato then gives him a twenty but when it comes time to pay for the food at the drive-in window, Kato pays again. And Simpson gives him back all the change. By now, Simpson has had two opportunities to get change, but he bypassed them both. Why?

Because he intended all along to set Kato up as an alibi.

When Simpson went out back to the guest house to ask Kato for change, it was solely for the purpose of having Kato notice he was at home, and to give his McDonald’s outing as an explanation for his impending absence. But then Kato invited himself along and screwed up the plan. I had to chuckle privately at Simpson’s predicament. He thinks he’s home free when Kato-that perennial wad of gum stuck to the Bruno Magli loafer-crashes the dinner party. He can’t refuse to take Kato. That would look worse than not having spoken to him at all.

“You invited yourself to go with him?” I had asked Kaelin while still on direct. “He seemed real excited to have you come?”

Kaelin paused for a moment. “Wouldn’t you?”

Laughter rippled through the courtroom. But Kato had succeeded in sidestepping an important point. The moment was lost. I could have choked the little creep.

The fact is, Kato’s tagging along uninvited tightened the schedule that Simpson had given himself for committing murder. That explained why Simpson ate his burger while driving instead of taking it into the house, as Kato had. It would also explain why, when they returned to Rockingham and Kato began walking toward the front door, Simpson hung back at the Bentley. When Kato finally got the hint that Simpson had no intention of spending any more time with him, he returned to his room in the guest quarters.

Before he lost sight of Simpson standing by the Bentley, watching him, Kato noticed that he was wearing “blue, dark blue or black” sweats. I had him describe those clothes in some detail. The reason would become apparent later: they were the source of the blue-black fibers that our FBI expert, Doug Deedrick, found on Ron Goldman’s shirt, the Rockingham glove, and Simpson’s bloody socks.

Simpson’s setup had backfired. Not only did Kato fail to give him an alibi, but he was the one who established conclusively that Simpson’s whereabouts were unknown from approximately 9:36 P.M. until 10:53 P.M.(precise times established through phone records). No two ways about it. O. J. Simpson had a window of seventy-two to seventy-seven minutes to commit murder.

All in all, Kato’s testimony gave lie to nearly every single one of the defense theories.

Defense Theory Number 1: The cops went over to Simpson’s house because they considered Simpson a suspect.

Kato: They interrogated me. They examined my eyes, searched my room, checked the bottoms of my shoes for blood. They treated me like a suspect. I never saw any of the detectives search the house or the grounds.

(In other words, even after jumping the fence at Rockingham, the cops had their options open. They weren’t doing any of the things they should have been doing if they’d already concluded that Simpson was the murderer; instead, they treated the houseguest as a suspect.)

Defense Theory Number 2: The cops planted Simpson’s blood at Rockingham.

Kato: I saw blood in the foyer of Rockingham at seven-thirty A.M., after the cops woke me.

(That was before Simpson even left Chicago. Which meant they didn’t even have his blood to plant when Kato saw those drops-nor would they for another eight hours, when Simpson yielded a blood sample.)

Defense Theory Number 3: Mark Fuhrman planted a glove on the south pathway.

Kato: I heard the thumps on the wall between ten-forty and ten-forty-five.

(Someone was bumping behind Kato’s room a good six hours or so before Mark Fuhrman even arrived at Rockingham and found the glove there on the other side of Kato’s wall.)

Defense Theory Number 4: Fuhrman got into the Bronco and smeared the bloody glove around the console and tracked blood onto the floormat.

Kato: Detective Vannatter asked me if I knew where to find a key to the Bronco. I looked but never could find one.

(How could Fuhrman have done this dirty work? The Bronco was locked and the cops couldn’t get into it until it was hauled to the impound lot.)

When you look at that testimony-given by a witness desperate to assist the defense!-you can see that it confirmed to the jury that the detectives-not only Fuhrman, but Vannatter and Lange as well-told them the truth on every major point. There was, indeed, no conspiracy. To persist in believing the space-invader theories, you would have to reject Kato’s testimony out of hand.

But, of course, a jury hell-bent on acquittal could do just that.

CAR TAPE. Monday, March 27. Coming up, Allan Park. That’s gonna be a knock-down-drag-out. Johnnie’s gonna take that witness, unfortunately. Kinda wouldn’t mind seeing Bailey at work again. He did good cross on Fuhrman. Boy, was that a painful time.

If ever there was an antidote to the despicable, mendacious opportunism of Kato Kaelin, it could be found in our limo-driver witness, Allan Park. Even the Dream Team, I learned later, privately referred to him as Young Abe Lincoln.

Early on in the investigation, Allan had gotten burned by the defense. On June 14 he’d spoken to Bob Shapiro, telling him what had happened at Rockingham two nights earlier. Unbeknownst to Park, Shapiro was taping their phone conversation. We didn’t learn about this until we made a discovery request to the defense at the preliminary hearing in July. Shapiro had to turn over the tape. I should point out that it’s illegal in the state of California to tape a phone conversation without the knowledge of both parties.

Shapiro had inadvertently left the tape running after the interview with Park was finished. The last thing Allan had told him was that on the way to the airport, Simpson had complained repeatedly of being hot, even though the night was cool and there was air-conditioning on in the limo. After Allan hung up, Shapiro turned to Skip Taft and said, “Hmm, does he always run hot after a shower?”

I just looked at the tape recorder. “No, you dolt,” I said, out loud. “He always runs hot after murdering two people.”

Allan did not find the taping episode amusing, to say the least. After that, he brought his mother with him whenever he was called in on case-related business. This was not as strange as it sounds, since his mother was a criminal defense attorney. After some initial wariness, Mrs. Park, a small, direct woman with very large eyes, warmed to me. By the time the case came to trial, we’d all gotten pretty close. She confided in me that Lee Bailey had called Allan to try to persuade him to participate in an “experiment.” They wanted him literally to recreate his trip to Rockingham. To drive the limo up to the gate and listen for car sounds to see if he could have heard a Bronco. Then they’d have someone walk where Allan said he saw Simpson, and they’d ask him to describe what he saw. Mrs. Park told Bailey that she wouldn’t mind as long as the prosecution could be present to observe the “experiment” as well. After that, they’d gotten hinky on her, setting up meetings, canceling at the last minute. When she asked if they’d notified us about this outing, they evaded the question. Finally, she put the kibosh on the whole idea.

During one of our office interviews, Allan, his mother, and I ended up going through a blow-by-blow description of the evening of June 12, beginning with his boss giving him the assignment to pick up Simpson. He’d used the cell phone in the limo, which meant we could use the phone records to confirm the timing of each event. When we got to the point where Allan was driving up Rockingham, I asked him how he was able to locate Simpson’s house.

“I was looking at addresses,” he replied.

At that point his mother jumped in.

“You mean on the curb? The numbers on the curb?” she asked.

She and I just looked at each other.

“So did you see Simpson’s address on the Rockingham curb?” I asked.

“Yes, I saw it,” Allan replied slowly. “I remember I had to stop and back up to make sure. It was painted on the curb: 360.”

When the police arrived at Rockingham in the early-morning hours of the thirteenth, the Bronco had been parked a few feet north of the street number. If Allan saw the address painted on the curb, he couldn’t have missed noticing the Bronco if it had, indeed, been parked there.

“Do you remember what time it was when you first pulled up to Rockingham and saw the address on the curb?”

“I looked at the clock, just to make sure I was on time, and I was early. It was ten-twenty-two.”

Man, oh man, I thought. Is Johnnie going to go crazy over this one.

Again, at about 10:35, Allan decided to drive over to the Rockingham gate to see if that entrance would be easier to pull into than the Ashford gate. He drove down Rockingham and pulled parallel to the gate to look inside. In that position, he would have been right next to the Bronco if it had been there.

“Was it?”

“No.”

The Bronco was not there at 10:22. It was not there at 10:35. So much for Rosa Lopez.

The rest of Allan’s times dovetailed perfectly with Kato’s testimony. Kato said he’d left his guest cottage a couple of minutes after hearing the “thumps.” He was spotted by Park around 10:53 or 10:54. This was only seconds before Allan saw the six-foot, two-hundred-pound black person dressed in dark clothing stride quickly into the house. (Working backward from Park’s cell-phone records, we managed to establish that Kato had heard the thumps at about 10:51 or 10:52.) Then, the lights went on and O. J. Simpson answered the buzzer. “I overslept,” he said. “I just got out of the shower. I’ll be down in a minute.”

The one-two punch of Kaelin and Park pretty much clinched it. If you believed their accounts, you would have no choice but to conclude that O. J. Simpson was lying about his whereabouts on the night of the murders. And if he was lying, you’d have to ask yourself why.

When I called Allan to the witness stand on Tuesday, March 28, he laid out the facts with the sturdy decency that was his hallmark. He was simply a citizen coming forward with evidence about a crime. No book deal, no TV shows. He wouldn’t surmise anything. He gave precisely what he’d heard and seen. Nothing more; nothing less.

At one point I asked Simpson to stand. “Can you tell us if that appears to be the size of the person you saw enter the front entrance of the house at Rockingham?” I asked Park, pointing to Simpson. Johnnie objected, but Lance overruled him.

Simpson, who’d been fidgeting nervously, now stooped, trying to make himself less imposing.

“Yes, around the size,” Allan answered.

To me that was the defining moment of the case. If you believe Allan Park, you have Simpson walking into his house and then answering the intercom. It all unravels from there. He was not at home asleep. He was lying to Park. And he was lying because he was covering up the fact that he had just returned from murdering Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman.

I felt great about Allan’s testimony. The only place he tripped up was in his recollection of the number of cars in the driveway when he’d pulled in. There were two, he thought. One was the Bentley. The other, parked right behind it, was a small dark car, possibly a Saab. I knew he was wrong about that. Arnelle’s car was a black Saab, but it hadn’t been there at eleven o’clock, because she’d been out at the movies with friends. She didn’t return until about 1:30 A.M. Photos taken later on the thirteenth showed her car parked behind the Bentley. Perhaps Allan had seen those photos so many times he’d come to believe that he’d seen the car that night, upon his arrival.

It was an inconsequential point. Even Johnnie, who mounted a spirited assault upon Allan during cross, chuckled when he came to this one. The issue of the second car was so meaningless that no one even mentioned it during closing arguments. Yet Park’s recollection of a second car would come back to haunt us in ways we could never have imagined.

My streak of witnesses ended strongly with James Williams, the skycap from LAX. The direct was short and sweet. James, who’d checked Simpson’s bags through to Chicago, never saw the small, dark bag that both Kato and Park had seen lying on the lawn at Rockingham.

Is there a trash can anywhere near the stand where you work?” I asked him.

“Yes, just to the left of it,” he replied.

The implication I’d wanted to produce, of course, was that Simpson could have disposed of the knife-and perhaps the black bag-right then and there. And in doing so, I’d laid a trap for the defense. On cross-examination Carl Douglas tumbled right into it. In fact, he made the worst error that a lawyer can ever make on cross: asking a question he doesn’t have the answer to.

“Mr. Williams,” he said with a sneer. “You don’t recall ever seeing Mr. Simpson anywhere near that trash can on June the twelfth, do you, sir?”

“Yes,” James replied ingenuously. “He was standing near the trash can.”

I had to put my hand against my face to keep the jury from seeing how hard I was laughing.

I had to get away from this case. I also needed to get away from my life. The pressures were killing me.

During the frenzy surrounding Mark Fuhrman’s testimony, I was constantly getting beeped, finding myself called in to the civil courthouse for my own case. Even though the civil court was virtually across the street from the CCB, I couldn’t just walk there-dozens of reporters would follow. Instead, Lieutenant Gary Schram and his men would escort me to the underground parking lot of the CCB, where they’d put me in a car and drive through a connecting tunnel to the underground lot of the civil courthouse. There, they would turn me over to sheriff’s deputies. The deputies would then take me up in the service elevator and through a labyrinth of corridors to the courtroom.

I had a new lawyer, Judy Forman. She was not only a decent person she would become one of my closest friends and confidantes but also one tough cookie. Judy was trying to make sure that certain issues presented in the divorce case were kept confidential.

Chris knew the stress I was under and he offered to go with me to family court. I always declined. I didn’t want to burden him with my problems. He had his own share of sorrow. His brother, Michael, was dying of AIDs. As I listened to Chris describe Michael’s skull-like face and impossibly shrunken body, I knew this deathwatch was sheer agony for him. I vowed to myself that I wouldn’t ask for help unless I was desperate.

As the custody case progressed, though, desperate was exactly what I became. Gordon’s lawyers were demanding to take my deposition. That process could run on for days, during which time I would be subjected to intense personal questioning, about my private life… everything. Depositions in custody matters are harrowing under the most ordinary circumstances. These were not ordinary.

I was under the worst pressure I’d ever experienced. I was in the middle of this incredible trial. I was exhausted. One afternoon the thought of doing the deposition simply overwhelmed me. I sat at my desk staring dumbly at the documents in front of me, unable to focus.

I looked up to see Chris standing at the door. His expression was concerned. He knew what was going down.

“I’ll go with you,” he said quietly.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No, I’m not. I’ll go with you. You know I got your back, G.”

Chris did go with me. I can’t tell you what went down at the deposition. The custody case file has been sealed at my request, in the interests of protecting my children. It severely limits what I myself can say. But I can tell you this. Being able to exchange supportive glances with my compadre and joke with him during the breaks made a huge difference to me. I’ll never forget it.

Come the last week in March, Chris was taking a trip to the Bay Area to visit his family. He also wanted to spend some time with his teenaged daughter, Jenee. It was sweet to hear him talk about her. He was a tender, doting father. Of course, San Francisco was my old stamping ground; I said wistfully that I missed the place.

“Wanna join me?” he asked.

It was a weekend when the boys would be with their father. So 1 thought about it. The Bay. Long walks. Irish coffees. A world that had nothing to do with this craziness.

“I sure as hell would.”

We made the five-hour drive in Chris’s Toyota Camry. I was so paranoid about being spotted that when we stopped at a gas station, I pulled the hood of my parka over my face. But the farther north we got, the more relaxed I felt. We could talk for once without running the risk of being overheard. We vented about Fuhrman, Johnnie, Ito, the goddamned media. TFC, TFC, This Fucking Case.

“When this is over,” I told him, “I’m gonna take about a year off and do nothing but read murder mysteries and play with my kids.”

“Man, I’ll tell you what,” he replied. “When this case is over, I’m gonna take about a year off and do nothing but kick it in my crib, drink beer, and watch the games.”

Is it me, or do men seem to lack imagination?

That weekend I was in a state of absolute euphoria. Chris and I checked into the Fairmont-taking separate rooms, for those of you keeping score. He introduced me to his family. One night his sisters and I went out to a place near the wharf. People recognized us-hell, all that airtime had made us the two most recognizable civil servants in the country-but they kept their distance. I felt lighter, more hopeful than I had in months. It seemed possible that someday life might return to normal.

On the trip home I remained enveloped in this euphoria, until we stopped at a fast-food joint. I ran inside to pick up a quick dinner. I hadn’t been standing in line but a few seconds when I felt it. People were staring. We must be getting close to L.A. I fumbled for my wallet, grabbed the bags, and ran back to the car.

The weekend had been an illusion. Nothing had changed. I was still a featured player in a freak show. There was nothing I could do to keep back the tears.

Chris, who was about to pull out of the lot, caught me in a sidelong glance and said, “Hey, what’s up with you?”

Last he knew, we were having a pretty good time.

“I can’t face it,” I whispered, tears now streaming freely down my cheeks. “I want it all to be over.”

“Yeah, me too,” Chris said quietly. “But look at the bright side. People all over the world are naming their baby girls Marcia. Marcia, Marcia, Marcia. They’ll probably come out with Marcia dolls. They’ll argue with everyone and accuse them of wearing gloves in size small.”

A few seconds into this riff I was doubled over with laughter and coming back with my own ideas for a Chris doll. It would say “Mmm, ummm, hummm” after everything and get held in contempt.

We laughed the rest of the way home. Once again, Chris had snatched me back from the brink of despair.

There’s been a lot of speculation about whether Chris and I were lovers. And if there’s any one of you out there with lingering curiosity on this point, I’m truly sorry. The question is irrelevant. Fact of the matter is, Chris Darden and I were closer than lovers. And unless you’ve been through what we went through, you can’t possibly know what that means.