Without a Doubt

The Has-been

About the best thing you could say about my life before Monday, June 13, 1994, is that my problems were my problems. Nobody else was interested in them. No one except a handful of intimates, including my friend Lynn Reed, another deputy D.A. in the L.A. County District Attorney’s office. For weeks, she’d been urging me to file for divorce.

“Do it! Just do it!” she would tell me. I knew she was right. I’d been separated from my husband, Gordon, for about six months. In January he had moved out of our dilapidated tract house in Glendale, a suburb of Los Angeles. He was not deserting me; I’d asked him to leave. Our marriage had degenerated into the gray misery that appears vivid only in retrospect. I will not go into particulars because they are no one’s business but our own.

Suffice it to say that the previous year had been hell. I’d just left the D.A.‘s Special Trials Unit for a management job in Central Operations. That allowed me to spend evenings with my sons. Tyler was just a baby; Matthew was then a toddler. I enjoyed better prospects as a pencil pusher, but the work left me in a state of chronic discontent. The trade-off for a carpeted office and a shot at six figures, I discovered, is boredom. Absolute, brain-numbing boredom. Old line lawyers like me are adrenaline junkies. We like getting out on the streets with the police and arguing before juries. Scheduling cases for other attorneys to try is a drag.

So I was unhappy with my job and unhappy in my marriage. I knew I could limp along like this, or I could take some decisive action to turn my life around. In December 1993, I asked for my old job back. And I asked Gordon to leave.

I’d spent most of my adult life with a man under the same roof, and now, trying to cope with plumbing problems, cable bills, and the furious demands of being a working mother, I was constantly terrified. It was, I knew, a hell of my own devising-I had no grounds to complain about it. At times I was ready to break down and ask my husband to come back. Yet I resisted the temptation to return to a lousy marriage just for the sake of expediency. Even so, I let the separation drag on for six months before I took Lynn’s advice: “Let him know it’s over.” So I went out and bought myself one of those do-it-yourself divorce kits. Money was tight; it seemed like a good idea at the time. But the lawyer who represents herself has a fool for a client.

There were no reporters in the bushes, no paparazzi peeping through the windows, when I filed the divorce papers on June 10. Three days later, O. J. Simpson crashed into my life like a meteor.

On Monday morning, June 13, 1994, I was struggling to get out of the house. Any parent with a preschooler knows the drill.

Honey, we’re late.

I don’t want to go!

Shoe!

By the time he reaches nursery school, that same child will run off happily to play with his pals.

I had a parking space in the lot behind the Criminal Courts Building, and that morning when I pulled in I waved to one of the attendants, Arturo.

“Mucho trabajo hoy?” he called out to me.

“Sí, como siempre.”

In fact, that morning, I had no court appearances, no witness interviews. There was nothing on my calendar to indicate that this would be anything other than a short-skirt day. No need for a “believe me” suit.

It was 9:30, and I was late-as I usually am when I don’t have to make it in under the gavel. Well, the truth is, I am just chronically late. It’s a character flaw, but one I can’t seem to rectify. My friends even have a term for it: Marcia Standard Time.

I’m not proud of being late, but it does afford a slight advantage at the CCB. It allows one to avoid the crush at the elevators, which are, by far, the slowest in L.A. County. During rush hours, attorneys who are headed for Special Trials on the eighteenth floor and imprudent enough to arrive on time often find themselves fifteen to twenty minutes behind schedule for court, because the “express” elevator-specially designed by outside consultants-inevitably stops mid-route. Latecomers, however, running on Marcia Standard Time, often enjoy a clear shot.

At the eighteenth floor, the elevator doors open upon Mordor, Land of Darkness: my private name for the courthouse’s dreary labyrinth of smog-soiled cement hallways. On some mornings a touch of claustrophobia leaves me breathless until I open the door of my high-ceilinged office, where I find sunlight streaming through the window. For seconds afterward, motes of dust swirl like snowflakes in that strong, welcome light.

No civil servant takes a window for granted. Certainly not me. During my early years on the job, I toiled away in sunless, airless cubicles in a series of far-flung outposts of the L.A. District Attorney’s dominion. West L.A., Beverly Hills, Culver City. In my early days as a baby D.A., I caught mainly deuces-drunk driving charges. Every once in a while I’d get to do the preliminary hearings on a homicide. That was what made the overtime worthwhile. Murder is so much more compelling than other crimes. There’s more complexity, more sophisticated forms of evidence. You get tool marks. You get blood markers. There’s stuff to play with.

I was always itching to get beyond the preliminaries to trials. Real trials. Criminal trials where you have to think quickly, react quickly. I wanted to be drawn into an experience that was totally absorbing. Trial work is especially appealing to the workaholic. I’d go through the docket like Pac-Man, grabbing cases no one else would touch, putting in ten- to twelve-hour days in the process. What gave rise to this fervor is hard for me to explain. Work offers a defensible escape from a private life on the skids. Working myself to the point of exhaustion left me feeling purified. Exhilarated. I think it also gave me a sense that I was cheating mortality. Ever since I was small, I’ve been dogged by the premonition that I would die young. I couldn’t imagine living past forty. Forty-five, tops. That kind of deadline adds a sense of urgency to everything. It’s like-I can keep on living if I run fast enough.

Beyond that, the courtroom is the ideal venue for someone who likes to argue. For most of my life I’ve been contentious, and it’s gotten me into a lot of trouble. But verbal dexterity and strong opinions are welcomed at the bar. There are clearly delineated rules of combat, rules that favor reason. Humans may be capricious-but, to my naive way of thinking, justice was not.

I was assigned to the Juvenile Division, where, early on, I volunteered for the “county run.” That meant traveling an exhausting circuit of county juvenile court offices, some of them in neighborhoods so dangerous no one even went out for lunch. The advantage of the “run,” however, was that it allowed me to try one juvy case after another. In juvenile cases, unlike regular trials, the defendant almost always testifies. For the most part the defendants are kids pumped up on ego. They love the attention they get by simply taking the witness stand. It would have been sad, except that the juvy penalties aren’t terribly severe. Generally the kids get HOP, home on probation. So I logged in a lot of time cross-examining the accused. By the time I was finally transferred Downtown to Central Trials in 1984, I had a reputation as a hard charger.

Anyway, in 1984, the year I turned thirty, the district attorney, Ira Reiner, made it a policy to scout out the rising stars and apprentice them to veteran prosecutors. I was one of those who came to his attention. Reiner brought me over to the CCB and assigned me to a man I revered: Harvey Giss. Harvey was a courthouse legend. He was so handsome that women jurors swooned during his final arguments. He was also brilliant, irreverent, and one great trial attorney. To this day Harvey Giss remains the only prosecutor in L.A. County who has ever gotten a death-penalty conviction against a client of Leslie Abramson, the lawyer who would later mount the successful, if unorthodox, defense of Erik Menendez.

But a trial lawyer has only so many of those big cases in him. By the time I moved my files into the windowless office, hardly bigger than a utility closet, across from Harvey’s, he confessed to me that these cases were wearing him out. Harvey had been going through the wringer with a defendant named James Hawkins, a tough man to prosecute because his neighbors considered him a good Samaritan. One day, outside his father’s grocery store, Hawkins had shot a man who was supposedly trying to rob a local woman. Upon closer investigation, it turned out that our “hero” had gunned down his victim long after the woman had left the scene. That wasn’t all. Detectives looking into the murders of two drug dealers developed evidence that led to none other than James Hawkins. Harvey had fought like hell and won a conviction on the grocery store shooting; he’d just received that second case for filing. By the time I moved my files and scrawny potted philodendron into the CCB, the double homicide was nearing its trial date.

Harvey assigned me the ballistics part of the case. Every night I hauled home volumes of arcane texts on firearms, studying them until my eyes blurred. Eventually I gained such expertise that I could have passed the qualifying tests given to police firearms experts. As far as the Hawkins case was concerned, however, this was academic: we hadn’t found a murder weapon. A search warrant served on Hawkins’s home had turned up several different guns, but none capable of firing the bullets found in the bodies of our victims. Then, in one of several bizarre turns in this case, Hawkins escaped from a holding cell in the CCB and went on the lam.

In the wake of that escape, both Harvey and I were assigned around-the-clock security. For myself, I frankly thought this was overkill; the defendant had always been rather cordial to me. But Harvey, I knew, might well have been in danger. Hawkins blamed him personally for destroying his local-hero rep. Several weeks later, during a wild shoot-out, the fugitive was finally caught. The search of his car turned up two more guns-and they were the same make and caliber as the weapons used in the double homicide.

Hawkins had taken a metal file to the inside of both barrels, trying to obliterate the fine stria that leave their imprint on bullets. It wasn’t easy to tell if the guns had fired any rounds, let alone the ones that killed those drug dealers. But I finally got to put all my ballistics knowledge to use. Working with Sergeant Lou Barry of the Sheriffs Department, I was able to match the bullet from one of the victims’ bodies with the bullet Hawkins had fired into a wall during a random robbery. It was a coup, and it made me the deputy darling of the moment.

That trial was almost two years of pure hell. Hawkins’s attorney was a crafty, tenacious brawler named Barry Levin who made us fight for every motion. It took eight months to pick the jury and another excruciating thirteen months to try this monster. But I watched everything Harvey did, and I learned from him. I learned how to organize a big case, one with forty or fifty witnesses. I learned where you object and where you don’t. I learned how to keep my head up and take the hits.

I also learned how to hold up in the face of a difficult judge. Ours, Marsha Revel, was a former prosecutor, and like a lot of old D.A.s who’ve gone on to the bench, she seemed intent upon demonstrating her impartiality by favoring the defense. She lost no opportunity to discredit us. Harvey’s objections were overruled so frequently that I had to count paper clips to distract myself from the pain of it all. The worst came during closing arguments, when the defense objected over and over again, intent on throwing Harvey off stride. Though this is regarded as a bush-league tactic and most judges won’t tolerate it, Revel refused to intervene. The objections increased to the point that Harvey couldn’t utter three consecutive words without getting cut off. The judge called for a recess and Harvey returned to his seat. He looked beaten.

“Marcia,” he told me wearily, “it’s time to cut my losses. I’m going to end after the break.”

“But Harvey,” I replied, “you can’t just leave out the rest. It’s important.”

“You can cover it in your argument,” he told me. “Barry won’t want to bully you in front of the jury. This is best for the case. You can do it.”

It’s possible Judge Revel caught the look of panic on my face, because-in an uncharacteristic gesture of thoughtfulness-she recessed court for the weekend immediately after Harvey concluded.

If anyone was going to finish our opening arguments, it would have to be me. Yet, I found myself paralyzed. Over the months, I had been ground into the dirt by the same stresses that had gotten to Harvey. My spirits were at an all-time low. I didn’t have much fight left. Above all, I was inexperienced. I’d never delivered a summation where this much was on the line.

That weekend I went to a cousin’s wedding in a suburb of L.A. I shouldn’t have even attempted a social ordeal like this. I knew perfectly well that I was physically and mentally exhausted, that I should have spent my two days preparing, or better yet, getting some sleep. Instead, I tried to put on a happy face in front of friends and family. I was doing all right until I caught sight of my mother standing off to one side. You remember how it was when you were a kid? You’d fall and scrape your elbow and you could hold in the tears-until you caught sight of your mom? Then the dam would burst.

“What’s wrong?” she asked me. That’s all it took.

I threw my arms around her, sobbing. “I can’t do it, Mom. It’s just too much. I’ll never be able to pull it together.”

This was not the kind of scene that is welcome at a wedding. And, anyway, these outbursts were not my mother’s style.

She patted me on the shoulder.

“You’ll pull it off, Marcia. You always do.”

Her words hit me like a splash of cold water. But she was right. I wasn’t a child anymore. I was an adult. A professional. I couldn’t count on my mother-or anyone else-coming to my rescue. I realized, as I stood sniffling in the reception line, that if I were to be saved, I’d have to save myself. Life’s hardest lesson.

The following week, I marched back into court and delivered the rest of the damned summation. I don’t know that I did such a brilliant job of it. Probably not. The point is, I finished. I didn’t give in to despair. The memory of that experience gave me a world of confidence during the years, and trials, to come. As Lillian Hellman once said, “Half the battle is being able to take the punishment.”

We got our conviction. Harvey transferred out to a quieter post in Santa Monica. I moved into his office and became one of five deputies at Special Trials, the unit that handles L.A. County’s high-profile cases. Over the next five years, I caught some of the cases that might ordinarily have come to Harvey. One of these was the case of People v. Robert Bardo.

The Bardo case was known more popularly as the Rebecca Schaeffer case, after its victim, a pretty twenty-one-year-old actress who played Pam Dawber’s sister on the sitcom My Sister Sam. An obsessed fan named Robert Bardo wrote Rebecca a series of letters. Unfortunately, she wrote one back. It was just a generic thank-you-for-your-interest, but it was enough to make the twisted son of a bitch think they had made some kind of connection. He hired a private investigator, who turned up Rebecca’s address. Then he showed up at her apartment with a bag containing copies of his letters to her, a paperback of The Catcher in the Rye, her publicity photo, and a gun.

When he rang the bell, Rebecca answered it herself. That caught him off guard. I guess he was expecting she had servants to sweat the small stuff. She was gracious enough to shake his hand, but then eased the door shut on him. Bardo, apparently offended by the rebuff, retreated to a nearby restaurant to collect his wits. He went into a men’s rest room to load the last chamber in his handgun. Then he went back to Rebecca’s apartment. This time, when she came down to answer the buzzer, he gestured that he wanted to give her something. For whatever reason, she opened the door. And he shot her point-blank through the heart.

Bardo was my first “celebrity” case. I didn’t ask for it; it simply landed on my desk. The deputies at Special Trials do not as a rule clamor for big assignments like hounds after hush puppies. Our office has learned from hard experience that every celebrity case carries with it the potential for disaster. Though it can be a career-maker, as the Manson case was for Vincent Bugliosi, it is just as likely to be a sinkhole. And the more titanic the celebrity, the deeper the potential drop.

When Bardo landed on my desk, I’d never really had any experience with the press. To me, the attention this case attracted only created annoying complications. The trial was covered, gavel-to-gavel, by a new cable network called Court TV. In the Bardo case, the fact that hearings were broadcast seemed to have little impact on the proceedings. The real problems began when TV and print reporters “interviewed” witnesses, causing several to drop out of sight before we could get to them. Journalists invariably wound up telling their sources things about the case, which meant that the integrity of the witnesses’ memory was compromised. Only after I sat down with each of them and did a careful remedial interview was I able to get clean statements, unencumbered by hearsay.

It was my job to convict Bardo of the heinous crime of murder while “lying in wait”-one of several “special circumstances” that can put a defendant in line for the death penalty.

Bardo was claiming he suffered from a peculiar if convenient mental deficiency that precluded premeditation. Had he made this argument fly, he would have avoided the special-circumstances sanction. The defense hired Park Dietz, a psychiatrist of national renown, to examine Bardo. Then it submitted two hours of videotaped interviews between the two, offered as proof that the defendant could not have premeditated his gruesome crime.

At one point on tape Bardo reenacted his killing of Rebecca Schaeffer. As I watched that scene, something bothered me. I rewound it and watched it again. And again.

Bardo had claimed that the gun was in his bag, and that when he pulled it out to look for something else, Rebecca panicked and grabbed the weapon. In the struggle, he claimed, it discharged accidentally, killing her. But in Bardo’s reenactment, he kept his right arm behind his back and drew it out as though he were holding a gun. That was the physical equivalent of a Freudian slip-something that would tip the court off to the fact that this was no accidental or impulsive shooting. It did precisely that.

I played the tape for Dino Fulgoni, the brilliant no-nonsense judge who sat on this case. (Bardo had forgone his right to a jury trial.) Fulgoni could see with his own two eyes that this was no accidental or impulsive shooting. He sentenced Bardo to life without parole.

Over the two years I worked on that case I got to know Rebecca Schaeffer’s parents-particularly her mother, Danna-extremely well. If anything will remind you that the practice of law is not just an intellectual exercise, it’s observing the effects of a homicide upon those who loved the victim. Misery spreads out from a murder in ripples, blighting everything it touches. Some survivors are too damaged to be helpful. Others are so driven by the desire for revenge that they can actually obstruct a prosecutor’s efforts. The Schaeffers were neither. They managed their grief with patience and dignity.

I was always happy to take Danna Schaeffer’s calls. Sometimes we talked about the legal aspects of the case. Sometimes she’d just want to talk about Rebecca. On a couple of occasions I sent her letters to express thoughts too painful to convey in person.

“Even as I’m writing this I’m crying again,” I wrote her on one occasion. “As I feared, once you start letting yourself feel, it’s an endless thing… If all goes well, the miserable slimy piece of cow dung will be convicted of everything. I can offer only that I will do everything in my power to see that her loss is avenged-I cannot promise justice because to me justice would mean Rebecca is alive and her murderer is dead. The one thing I can promise you is that when this is all over I will honestly be able to tell you that I gave it my all, my very best, without reservation. Beyond that you have my love and my empathy forever.”

After receiving that letter, Danna actually called to comfort me. She was so intelligent, so sensitive and caring-the kind of mother everyone should have. A guilty verdict was such a small thing to give that family in light of what they’d lost, but it seemed to bring them some measure of peace. It felt good to be their champion. It was the sort of feeling I’d missed during that year I spent in management: the exultation of exhausting myself for the sake of a principle, and in some small but significant way, avenging someone whose life had been stolen. The long days and late nights; my desk strewn with coffee cups, Werther’s candy wrappers, notepads, and dog-eared briefs: I missed all that.

I think I was probably the only person in departmental history actually to ask for a demotion. As I carried my potted philodendron back down the hall to take my place among the grunts, I almost could hear my colleagues whispering, “What kind of woman gives up a six-figure salary? Can’t she cut it?”

On June 13, 1994, after nearly six months back in Special Trials, my caseload still wasn’t up to speed. Arriving in the office that morning, I propped the door open with a wooden doorstop and confronted a desk that was nearly clean! For a moment I studied that expanse of scuffed cherry veneer. It struck me as a reproach. No case on my calendar was anywhere near trial. The only thing I had going was a kidnap-murder I’d just taken to the grand jury. My plans for the morning were to hole up and study the “murder book,” a large black binder of witness reports compiled by the investigating officers. Later in the day, I’d planned to go to Lynn Reed’s bridal shower.

The phone rang.

“Hey, Clark, got a minute?”

“I got one or two, man; what’s up?”

It was Detective Phil Vannatter of the LAPD’s Robbery/Homicide Division.

I liked Phil. We’d worked together on a murder case two years earlier. The body never turned up, but we’d managed to get a conviction based on the DNA in a single drop of blood. Phil was crusty and hard to push around, but somehow we got to be good friends. We’d run into each other all the time and go out for drinks. We talked a lot about how great it would be to work another case together. But he was close to retirement and it didn’t seem likely that we’d ever team again.

“I’ve got this double,” Phil continued evenly. “I need to run it by you.”

Cops often do this, call a D.A. to see if the facts of a case justify a search warrant.

“Okay,” I said, pulling out a fresh yellow county-issue notepad. “Fire away.”

“O. J. Simpson. Do you know who this guy is?”

The name stirred only a vague recollection.

“Wasn’t he in Naked Gun or something?”

I’ve never been much of a sports fan. I couldn’t even remember for sure what game O. J. Simpson had played. I just had the general impression that he was a has-been.

Phil ticked off the basics:

Two bodies-Simpson’s ex-wife, Nicole Brown, and an unidentified male companion. Murdered.

Location. Brentwood. On Bundy Drive.

A lot of blood, in fact a trail of blood, leading away from the bodies, but cause of death not immediately apparent.

A beeper. A blue knit ski cap. A brown leather glove.

Phil, his partner, Tom Lange, and two other detectives from the West L.A. station had gone out to Simpson’s house to notify him of his ex-wife’s death. They hadn’t found Simpson but they talked to his daughter, who left Phil with the impression that her father had taken an “unexpected flight.”

“You know when it left or where it was going?” I asked Phil.

“Chicago,” he told me. “I think it left around midnight or one.”

Phil also mentioned that they’d found a bloody glove on the pathway.

“Mate to the other?” I asked, referring to the glove at Bundy.

“Someone’s out there checking, but yeah,” Phil said. “It sure looked that way to me.”

What he wanted to know was, Would a judge approve the warrant?

Now, keep in mind that when a D.A. gives a cop advice on a warrant, that D.A. must rely solely upon the facts as represented by the officer. On the morning of June 13, all I knew about this case was what Phil had just told me. I trusted him. We were buds. I realized that Phil was doing me a favor: he was throwing business my way, and I appreciated it. This one looked promising. If there was blood, that meant lots of DNA work. Physical evidence was my specialty.

“Yeah,” I told him. “Sounds like you have enough there.”

I told Phil that I’d go out to Rockingham to baby-sit the cops serving the warrant if he wanted. He thought that was a good idea and said he’d call me after he got the warrant typed. About an hour or so later he phoned.

“Warrant’s signed,” he told me. “We’re on our way.”

Signed? I thought. Wasn’t he going to read me the final draft? I found that a little odd, but decided not to make an issue of it.

“Oh, Phil,” I caught him before he hung up. “Have you got someone really good on this?”

I meant the assignment of a criminalist, the technician from the police crime lab who bags and tags the evidence at a crime scene. A prosecutor’s fortunes at trial rise and fall on the strength of the criminalist’s work. If evidence is overlooked, mishandled, or destroyed, you can never recoup your loss. A great criminalist is both paranoid and anal-retentive. He’s suspicious of a pebble if it looks out of place. He seizes more rather than less. He makes sure everything is meticulously packaged, precisely labeled. He goes to Jesuitical lengths to ensure that the chain of evidence is intact. That’s the ideal, anyway; unfortunately, most of the technicians at the police crime lab fell well short of it. The decent ones moved up in the department, or out of it. The bad ones, unfortunately, stuck like barnacles to the hull of the county bureaucracy.

Over the years I’d gotten into beefs with the LAPD over who should be assigned to collect and analyze evidence. In the Hawkins case, I’d peppered the brass with letters and phone calls demanding that they give me more senior firearms experts to redo some of the haphazard work already performed. Tempers ran so high that they told me to take the case to the Sheriff’s Department, where, they figured, I’d be given the standard treatment for a pushy babe: the cold shoulder.

They were wrong. The Sheriff’s Department came through for me in spades. It loaned me a meticulous expert who helped me salvage what would otherwise have been a disaster. I’d scrapped with the LAPD on several other cases, too, hassling them to make sure they didn’t botch the fundamentals.

“How about Doreen Music?” I asked Phil. Doreen was a field criminalist who had recently been promoted to a supervisory position in the Firearms Section. Phil and I had worked with her on our no-body case, where she had been fantastic.

“We’ve already got someone on it,” Phil replied. I thought he sounded uneasy. “I heard he was okay,” he said.

“Okay” was not terribly reassuring. Typical LAPD, I thought to myself. Whoever’s next up gets it. “What’s his name?” I asked.

“Dennis Fung.”

Brentwood was definitely not my neck of the woods. The conventional wisdom about this upscale ‘hood was that it was a place where people air-kissed, compared implants, and did lunch. During my stint in Beverly Hills, I discovered that the clichés were pretty much true. The hills north of Sunset were jammed with multimillion-dollar estates hidden behind many millions more dollars’ worth of landscaping. All to create the illusion of privacy. The farther north you went, and the higher you climbed into the hills, the narrower the streets became, and the more obscure the street signs were. I strained to find Rockingham Drive.

There was a cruiser parked up ahead, where a uniformed officer directed traffic. A few civilians milled around outside an iron security gate. Some of them had the nervous, unfed look of reporters. Still, the scene was not exactly bustling with activity. I got the impression that the main show had come and gone.

I slipped unnoticed past the press and through the gate, where I got my first look at the larger Tudor-style house overhung with old eucalyptus trees. The manicured grounds seemed to glow an unnatural shade of green in the midday light. In one corner of the lawn stood a child’s playhouse. O. J. Simpson might be a has-been, I thought, but he must still be bringing in serious bucks to manage the upkeep on this place.

A white Ford Bronco sat nosed into the curb on Rockingham. Extending up the driveway from the rear of the vehicle was a trail of reddish-brown spots. The rust-colored droplets stopped several yards short of the house. The front door was open and in the foyer I could see more droplets. They appeared to be blood. Gingerly, careful to disturb nothing, I stepped inside.

Search warrant or no, it always felt weird to me to walk into the house of a stranger. But there’s also a voyeuristic fascination: what a person chooses to surround himself with tells you a lot about him. This interior of O. J. Simpson’s house was exquisitely appointed with overstuffed white furniture, Lalique glass, and Berber carpeting. And yet the place gave off a faint odor of mildew and neglect.

Beyond the living room lay the gleaming kitchen. Seated at a counter was Bert Luper, one of Phil’s buddies from Robbery/Homicide. Balding, with tufts of curly hair rimming his head and bifocals perched at the end of his nose, Bert was an old-timer in RHD. He had an offbeat sense of humor, and the two of us always clicked. It was good to see a familiar face. Bert motioned me over.

“Tom and Phil here?” I asked him.

“O.J. showed up here, back from Chicago,” he told me. “Phil and Tom scooped him up and took him downtown for questioning.”

The house seemed awfully quiet. No one was doing any searching that I could see.

“Where’s the team?” I asked.

“They left to check out the murder site, on Bundy.” The criminalists, Bert explained, had done some preliminary work here collecting blood from the driveway and foyer; they’d return later in the afternoon, when Phil and Tom could get back to oversee things. Great, I thought. No wonder things are moving at a worm’s pace. Still, I couldn’t fault Phil and Tom for leaving the crime scene to interview Simpson. You get your best shot before a suspect has had the chance to learn enough, or collect his wits sufficiently, to compose a convincing lie. By this point Simpson was, at the very least, a potential suspect.

I was checking my watch, wondering whether to return to the office, when I noticed a couple of guys in sports jackets approaching. They had the unmistakable swagger of detectives. I was familiar with most of the downtown guys and I knew these weren’t from Robbery/Homicide. They had to be from the West L.A. station, so Brentwood was their jurisdiction. The older of the two identified himself as Detective Ron Phillips. He introduced me to his companion, Detective Brad Roberts. We shook hands and they asked me whether anyone had shown me around the house. I was about to reply when a third detective joined the party. He was a real straight-arrow, hair closely trimmed, shirt pressed a little more neatly than the others’.

“Marcia,” said Ron Phillips, “this is Detective Mark Fuhrman.”

So much has been said and written about Fuhrman since then that it is difficult to conjure a pure and unbiased recollection of him. He seemed calm, professional, on top of his game. He was not particularly personable. Normally in a situation like this, you lighten the morbidness with some banter. But there was none of that with Mark Fuhrman. Instead, as I think back on it, he was politely condescending.

It was Fuhrman, however, who seemed most thoroughly familiar with the facts of the case. And it was Fuhrman who ended up giving me the Grand Tour. He led me out the back door of Simpson’s house, which opened onto a patio and an impressive little grotto. Off to one side, a waterfall cascaded over natural boulders into a large amoeba-shaped swimming pool. To the south of the pool lay a Jacuzzi and three adjoining guest rooms. As we strolled, Fuhrman gave me a clear, no-bullshit account of the events of the early morning.

The guest house on the left, he told me, was where Vannatter and Lange had found a young black woman named Arnelle, O. J. Simpson’s daughter by an earlier marriage. I remembered Phil had said she’d been pretty shaken up when he told her Nicole was dead.

Fuhrman himself hadn’t interviewed Arnelle. He’d gone to the middle guest house, where he’d found a white male named Brian Kaelin, who, for some reason, everyone called Kato. Fuhrman awakened Kaelin at around six A.M. and began to question him about the previous evening’s activities. Kato told him how he had heard “a thump” on his rear wall. The sound was so loud he thought it might have been an earthquake.

Fuhrman told me how he’d parked Kato in the kitchen to wait for Phil. Then, for my benefit, he retraced his own steps through the main house. I followed him past a large pool table and through a trophy room studded thickly with awards, plaques, and photos. We left by the front door. Then Mark turned left to an alleyway that cut along the south side of the house. I hadn’t even noticed it when I first walked up the drive. We went through one metal gate, then another. Even on that bright, sunny day, the overhanging trees left the path dark. The air back there felt damp. The ground was littered with leaves, dirt, and debris. When we got to the point where the back of an air conditioner overhung the path, Mark stopped.

“Here’s where I found the glove,” he said, pointing to the ground.

“So it was you who found it,” I said.

“Yeah, it was lying right about here.” He indicated a spot a foot or so in front of the air conditioner.

“You didn’t pick it up?” I asked him, already worrying about the possibility that he might have carelessly contaminated the evidence.

“No,” he answered scornfully. He knew what I was getting at. “I never picked it up. I left it there for the criminalist.

“I figure on his way down he must have run into this”-he indicated the air conditioner-“and he dropped the glove without knowing it.”

It was past noon, and yet the pathway was so dim and isolated that I actually felt relieved to get back into the sunlight.

We checked out the pool house, which was outfitted with a kitchen and a room that could function as a bedroom. I stuck my head in and looked around.

“Sure as hell nicer than any place I’ve ever lived,” I remarked.

Fuhrman didn’t comment. During this entire walk-through he’d refrained from small talk. Once I got used to it, I kind of admired the severe simplicity of his manner.

As we walked the lawn that sloped north toward Ashford, we came to a bronze statue of a man in football uniform. He was holding a helmet.

Fuhrman stopped in front of it.

“He got that when he won the Heisman Trophy,” he said, as if it was something I should know. I sneaked a look at Fuhrman out of the corner of my eye. He was staring at that statue with unguarded awe.

I’ve thought about that moment often. How ironic: Mark Fuhrman, the man who supposedly lived and breathed to frame O. J. Simpson, stood beside me in the bright June sunlight, indulging in a moment of outright hero worship.

Fuhrman would later claim to have found a bloody fingerprint on the back gate at Bundy, as well as an empty Swiss army knife box on the edge of the tub in O. J. Simpson’s master bathroom. It’s worth noting here that during our tour of Rockingham, he did not once mention either the print or knife box to me. (Later we found a line concerning the print in his notes, but by the time those reached my desk, the Bundy scene had long since been washed down.)

“Hey, Marcia, come upstairs. I want to show you something.”

It was Brad Roberts. I followed him up the spiral staircase, where the wall was lined with photographs, mostly shots of O. J. Simpson with various white fat cats.

It was on that stairway that I got my first look at the face of Nicole Brown Simpson.

She was blond, with handsome, almost mannish, features. Her hair, teeth, and skin all had that gloss peculiar to the West Side elite. In some of the photos she was with a pair of lovely brown-skinned children, a boy and a girl. They all wore ski attire. Her face was difficult to read. The expression in all the photos was uniformly happy, but her eyes were glazed. She had-how would you describe it-a thousand-yard stare.

By now, I knew that the Simpsons had been divorced for two years. I found it peculiar that he still had her pictures everywhere. The photos of my ex were long gone from walls and end tables. I peeked into the master bedroom suite. From that vantage point I could see only the top and one side of the bed. Brad Roberts knelt on the floor. He reached under the box spring and, using his fingertips, pulled out a framed photo. It showed Nicole and her husband in evening dress.

“Is that the way you found it?” I asked.

“Yep,” he replied. “Just like that. Facedown. Under the bed.”

“Make sure they get a photo of that,” I told him.

By now, it was almost one o’clock, and the search team still had not returned. What the hell was going on? Bundy was on my way to the freeway, so I decided to swing by. And there I found the real mob scene. Jammed into the intersection of two winding residential streets were scores of neighbors, reporters, and lookie-loos straining for glimpses of a modest Mediterranean-style condo partially obscured by a screen of foliage. I muscled my way past them to a uniform guarding the perimeter and gave him my card.

“Vannatter called me,” I told him. “I just came from Rockingham. Any chance I can get in there?”

“Sorry, no one’s allowed,” he told me apologetically.

I suppressed my irritation. I hadn’t been formally assigned to this case, so I was in no position to pull rank.

“Okay if I look from here?” I asked him.

“Sure,” he said. “But watch out for the press.”

No shit. Pretty soon they were going to need riot police to keep this bunch in line.

Relegated to the status of a spectator, I stretched my neck to get a look past the front gate at what was left of the killing ground. From outside the yellow tape, I could see the stain that covered the landing of a set of cement steps. Someone had bled rivers here.

At every crime scene there’s some detail that catches your eye. It’s not necessarily the most significant in terms of its importance to the investigation, but it’s the thing that stimulates your first visceral connection to the case. This time-for me-it was the bloody paw prints of some animal, probably a large dog, that had tracked through the pool of blood on the landing, leaving a cockeyed trail down the walkway toward the street. Had the animal belonged to the victim? The killer? What had happened here?

I couldn’t see the members of the search team; they were too deep into the property. (Later, I would see many, many photos of the two criminalists, Dennis Fung and Andrea Mazzola, in their latex gloves and shower caps, combing the grounds for evidence.) What I could see was a police photographer standing at the top of the steps, his camera set on a tripod. He was taking careful perpendicular aim at something on the lower landing. I couldn’t make out what it was, but I guessed he was documenting the blood trail that Phil had described to me earlier that morning: the shoe prints leading away from the bodies to a gate at the rear of the property-and the drops of blood running parallel to the shoe prints.

It’s almost impossible for a criminal to get away from a crime scene without leaving something of himself there or taking something away. Usually, these things are traces, often invisible to the naked eye. In law enforcement circles this is known as the Locard exchange principle. It holds that when you enter an environment, the environment affects you, and you affect it. In this case, the killer had practically left his calling card.

This one could get interesting, I told myself. I couldn’t wait to tell David.

David Conn was my boss; he was also my good friend. Head of the Special Trials Unit, David was witty, temperate, and an excellent judge of character. He was a forceful trial attorney and a cunning tactician. But he didn’t have the screw-them-over mentality of so many aggressive prosecutors. I admired that. David had real strength.

When I got back to the CCB, I went directly to David’s office and dropped into one of his armchairs.

“You’re not going to believe this,” I told him. I laid out the details. The glove, the hangings on the wall. The blood on the walkway. The blood in O. J. Simpson’s foyer.

“Where’s he now?” David asked.

“Phil and Tom took him downtown. He’s at Parker Center.”

David was intrigued, I could tell.

“Sounds good,” he said. And a second later, “Do you want to take it?”

I have this superstition about running hard to get a case. Nothing good comes of it. Sometimes trouble will find you when you’re just running in place, so why go looking for it? But I’d been hoping for something bigger to fill out my caseload. And if I was going to catch this case eventually, better to be in on it from day one.

“Sure,” I told him. “I’m free. I mean, if you think it’s okay.”

“You’ve got it, as far as I’m concerned.”

“You think Gil’s gonna care about this one?”

Technically speaking, it was up to David to make this assignment. But, of course, his choice was subject to approval by the D.A. Frankly, I didn’t know if Gil Garcetti would warm to the idea of my taking this case. During my year in management, I’d been assistant to Bill Hodgman, the director of Central Operations. It had been my job to sit in on meetings with the D.A. when Bill couldn’t make it. I enjoyed a good working relationship with Gil, but I spoke my mind freely, sometimes a little too freely for the comfort of the brass.

Garcetti couldn’t fail to see my qualifications in terms of handling the DNA stuff. I had a strong record of convictions. I was willing to put in long hours. But it was also no secret around the D.A.‘s office that I had just filed for divorce, and consequently had incurred all the single-parenting complications that went along with it. I had also bailed out of a management position, which might cause him to doubt my political fealty.

I also knew that Gil had felt burned over assignments he’d made in recent years. The deputies he’d chosen to prosecute certain cases were tough but, from Gil’s perspective, too independent. They’d cut him out of the decision-making, and then it was Gil who’d taken the rap for a series of high-profile acquittals. I could see why he might worry about me. I’m no one’s idea of a lapdog. It wasn’t that Gil couldn’t tolerate assertive women; in fact, he went out of his way to promote them. But I could see how he might look at me and think, Loose cannon.

“I’ll talk to Gil,” David promised me. “In the meantime, you stay in touch with the cops.”

Patience is not my strong suit. Wherever I go, I bring a file or book with me in case, God forbid, I’m stuck waiting for someone. By now, I was beginning to feel edgy. Nearly five hours had passed since I’d last spoken with Phil Vannatter. I supposed that he and Tom Lange were finished interrogating Simpson and had him in lockup somewhere. Best not to bug them, I told myself.

So I held off calling. As I was looking back over my notes from the morning’s conversation with Phil, I suddenly realized I hadn’t called my friend Lynn. I’d completely missed the lunch in her honor. I rang her up and apologized.

“No big deal,” she assured me. Considerate, given that her upcoming wedding was a very big deal to her.

“So,” she said, “what do you think?”

“Of what?”

“Of this guy Simpson.”

It was the first of an infinite number of queries about this case that will likely continue until I am lowered into my grave.

“The evidence is looking pretty strong so far,” I said. “I can’t wait to find out what he’s saying to the cops.”

As I was signing off with Lynn, David poked his head into my doorway. “Why don’t you give them a call?” he said, sitting down across from me.

He was right. Why sit here like some deb waiting for a prom date?

I rang Parker Center.

“Lange, here.”

“Tom, it’s Marcia. Just called to find out what our man had to say.”

“We talked to him for a while. Took his blood. Got some photos.” Typical Tom, wasting no words. He did tell me that Simpson’s attorney, a local heavy hitter named Howard Weitzman, had gone to get coffee or something, leaving his client to go into the interview alone. That was odd. What could Weitzman have been thinking?

“Did you tape?” I asked him. This was really important. If they got the thing on tape, we wouldn’t have to cope with challenges to their note-taking or memories.

“You bet,” he assured me.

“So where’re you holding him?” I asked.

“We let him go.”

Let… him… go??

I couldn’t fucking believe it!

“You let him… go?” I was looking at David, whose jaw had dropped.

“He’s not going anywhere,” Tom told me, sounding a little defensive. “He’s too famous.”

Give me a break. Sure, he was famous. Sure, it seemed unlikely that he might bolt. But we had a lot more to worry about than whether O. J. Simpson could find a place to hide. “What if he decides to destroy evidence?” I wanted to ask Tom. “What if he starts to intimidate witnesses?” But I kept it buttoned. The last thing you want to do is get into a pissing match with your investigating officers. I told myself, unconvincingly, that Phil and Tom were doing the best they could, considering that they’d been up since at least two or three A.M. Lange handed me off to Vannatter, and I could hear the fatigue in Phil’s voice as he summarized, rather disjointedly, the interview with O. J. Simpson.

“Suspect has a golfing date… Suspect attends his daughter’s dance recital… Suspect drives aimlessly in his Bronco making calls from a cell phone.” From there it was back to Rockingham, a limo to the airport, and then a flight to Chicago.

“I don’t know whether you heard about it,” Phil paused to say, “but when we met him at Rockingham, he had a big old bandage on the middle finger of his left hand.”

Of course. The blood drops running parallel to the footprints on the drive.

“No shit!” I said. “Where’d he say he got it?”

First, Simpson told them he’d gotten the cut in Chicago, which left him having to explain the blood in his driveway and foyer. But then he seemed to cover himself, saying he’d noticed the bleeding before he left, as he was rushing to get to the airport for the outbound flight. The way Phil told it, it was difficult for me to figure out whether we had an incriminating slip or just a confused explanation. I needed to hear that tape.

“What’s doing with the search?” I asked him, hoping earnestly that the search team was not rooting around Rockingham unsupervised.

“We’re on our way out there now,” he assured me.

“Keep me posted.”

“Sure thing.” Phil hung up.

I looked at David. For a minute, the two of us said nothing, both silently assessing the magnitude of the cops’ blunder. Why had they let Simpson walk? It was true that once the police formally arrest someone, they must be prepared to charge him within forty-eight hours. If they’re not sure of their evidence, they can cut him loose, then pick him up later when they have something more solid. But why in this case, where the evidence seemed so strong?

I had never seen the cops this jittery. It was not so much what they said as the reticence in their voices. Something in Phil Vannatter’s tone reminded me of Mark Fuhrman’s as, earlier in the afternoon, he’d gone out of his way to tell me about Simpson’s record on the playing field. At one level, I was hearing the perfectly ordinary sound of people talking. And beneath it, the cackle of It’s the Juice, man. Can you believe it? It’s the fucking Juice!

I didn’t work late that night. The cops had made it clear that they weren’t going to let me into the loop until they were good and ready.

I caught sight of my baby’s head bobbing behind the crocheted curtains of the picture window. The sight of him always gave me a rush of joy.

No sooner had I gotten into the house than a tiny hand grabbed mine and dragged me down the small flight of stairs to the crudely appended addition that was my bedroom. I called it the Swamp. Whenever it rained, water cascaded down the wall behind my four-poster bed, causing mold to grow. I was allergic to it. During the rainy seasons, spring and fall, I was sick all the time with respiratory infections. There seemed to be nothing I could do to get rid of either the dampness or the mold.

There on a patch of well-discolored wall behind the bureau was an evil-looking arachnid the size of a pinball. She was starting a web, apparently at home in the squalor.

Oh, swell.

For the millionth time, I told myself, “We gotta get outta this place.” What invariably followed was the dismal realization that we had nowhere to go. I was struggling just to make the mortgage payment on this dump.

Thoughts like these usually triggered an orgy of self-reproach. But not tonight. I found, to my surprise, that I was in an indestructibly good mood. True, the cops had cut loose the suspect in a double homicide when they had a mountain of evidence to hold him. True, they were holding me at arm’s length. But you work with what you’ve got.

The fact of the matter was, I loved having a new case. A new case is like a secret lover. You think about it. Plan for it. It infuses unrelated events with a sense of purpose. We ordered in Chinese food that night, and as we struggled with chopsticks, I found myself mentally composing witness lists. That’s how it’s supposed to feel. Mind and heart engaged, neither tripping over the other. I hadn’t been that happy in a long time.