Without a Doubt

God, Do We Look Like Morons

“Marcia, it’s crazy here!”

It was the delicate, nervous voice of Suzanne Childs on my car phone. I’m weaving in and out of lanes, trying to balance the handset against my cigarette. The damned window on the driver’s side won’t roll up. I’m struggling to hear her over the traffic.

“You won’t believe what’s going on!”

“Calm down, Suzanne. Just calm down.”

Suzanne is our conscientious and permanently agitated media relations director. This is her third call to me that morning, and every one has been urgent. The press was hounding Gil for details about the Simpson case, she said. Please-did I have any more info I could pass along?

“Geez, Suzanne,” I told her. “You probably know more than I do.”

Which was true. I’d caught some of the press coverage on TV the night before, and right there in my car, the drive-time radio waves were inundated with breathless news breaks about the double murder at the home of the famous former “football great,” as the L.A. Times described our suspect in a long page-one story. The alarming part of all this was that the news reports were telling me all sorts of things I didn’t know, turning up witnesses I hadn’t even heard of. That meant that every attention-hungry wannabe within broadcast range of L.A. was going to be coming forward with “evidence.”

When I reached the office about half an hour later, Suzanne was waiting for me. “Do you think you could call Phil or Tom?” she asked anxiously.

I already had. Several times. They weren’t calling me back. I motioned Suzanne to follow me into my office, tossed my purse and files on the floor next to my desk, and picked up the phone to dial RHD. No luck.

“Let’s talk to Gil right now,” I said to her, hoping that by pooling our information, we could stay abreast of events until I could get with the detectives. We walked to Gil’s office, which was unfortunately located right next to the pressroom. Frances, the guard who sat by the door to the D.A.‘s office, was staring at a gang of reporters who milled around with jittery energy. As soon as they sighted me, the vultures descended. I waved them off.

“Has it been like this all morning?” I asked Suzanne.

“They’re driving us nuts,” she moaned.

We’ve got to get a handle on this, I told myself. It’s gonna spin out of control.

Gil was on the phone. When he saw me, he beckoned me in.

“Close the door,” he said.

Our first meeting on the Simpson case. I should remember it more clearly than I do. David was there; I know that. He stood with arms folded tightly, as he does when he’s under stress. Some of the brass were there, I believe. Frank Sundstedt and Bill Hodgman. Everyone looked agitated except Gil. He sat behind his desk, wearing his usual mask of composure. He looked toward me, a signal to begin the briefing.

Briefing. What a joke. I barely had more than the top-of-the-hour drive-time reports. But I plunged in gamely.

“Here’s what we know about the second victim,” I told them. “Ronald Goldman. Twenty-five years old. Would-be actor who works part-time as a waiter at Mezzaluna.”

I’d never been to Mezzaluna, but I’d noticed it driving through Brentwood. One of those trendy West L.A. bistros where tourists go in hopes of sitting next to Michelle Pfeiffer.

“The night of the murders, Nicole Brown-”

“Maiden name?” someone interrupted.

“Looks like it,” I replied.

To me, that fact spoke volumes. A woman who has children with her ex usually doesn’t choose to take back her maiden name unless she’s hell-bent upon reasserting her own identity.

David or someone put in that Nicole and her two children had eaten dinner at Mezzaluna, and Goldman happened to be on duty. She’d apparently dropped her glasses or something, and he went to her place to return them.

“Is that all he went there for?” I asked. No one had an answer. We’d have to check whether the two were lovers. I jotted this down on my legal pad.

“How about the search?” Gil wanted to know. “Did we find a weapon?”

Nothing yet.

Someone passed around a copy of the L.A. Times. It carried a report that Simpson had roughed up his wife one New Year’s Eve and that he’d pled nolo contendere, no contest. This is the standard plea a defendant cops to when he’s caught red-handed-and wants to save face.

“When was that?” I asked.

” ‘Eighty-nine,” David replied.

“Nothing more recent?”

“There may be, but we don’t have it.”

Now, the fact that O. J. Simpson had beaten his wife didn’t mean that he’d killed her. Not all the men who beat their wives end up killing them. But my years in law enforcement had shown me that men who kill their wives have often beaten or abused them in the past. Whether that was what we had here, I couldn’t tell. The fact that they’d been divorced for two years still bothered me. Do you carry a torch for an ex after the paperwork’s done? I remembered the photo of Nicole that Brad Roberts had pulled out from under Simpson’s bed. And I remembered the big glossy shots of her and the children mounted on the wall by the stairs. Yeah, I thought. It could happen.

“Any word from the cops?” Gil asked me.

“I’m on it,” I assured him.

For most of the morning, I’d been trying to reach Phil. After the meeting broke I put in a couple more calls. Finally, around noon, he rang me back.

“Phil, man. What is going on?”

He seemed flustered and apologetic.

“It’s the brass, Marcia. They don’t want us talking to you.”

I let loose a choice expletive.

Phil tried to placate me. “Listen, Marcia. It’s just temporary. I know we can work this thing out.”

I had a pretty good idea what this was all about. The brass at Parker Center had gotten their knickers twisted over Michael Jackson. What a fiasco that had been-a case of child molestation that went nowhere after Jackson’s lawyers reached a settlement in January 1994 with the father of the alleged victim. Not a surprising outcome when you consider that the father had been asking for money. But the cops blamed us, thinking we’d stepped in where we didn’t belong and botched a perfectly good case. Now that another celebrity suspect was in play, they were freezing us out.

There has never been any love lost between the D.A.‘s office and the LAPD. Invariably, there are disputes on the big cases, where everyone starts grabbing for turf. But never before had I encountered a flat-out stonewall. This could seriously damage our chances for prosecution, if and when we got there. The resistance wasn’t coming from Phil and Tom’s level. Nor did it seem to be coming from the office of the Chief. From where, then? The LAPD has such a labyrinthine hierarchy that it’s almost impossible to tell who’s accountable for any given order.

I wanted a showdown with the cops right then and there; so did some of the others. But Gil counseled restraint.

“Hang back,” he instructed us. “If the evidence is as strong as it sounds, they’ll have to pick him up in the next few hours.”

So we hung back, each of us working our private sources. I checked the police crime lab and found out they were testing blood samples. I sucked in my breath. Shit. Whenever I had a case requiring DNA testing, I tried to circumvent the Special Investigations Division, the semiautonomous agency under whose auspices the crime lab fell. Instead, wherever possible, I’d reroute samples to Cellmark Diagnostics in Maryland. Cellmark, a private lab, had done an outstanding job for me in that “no-body” case Phil and I had worked together. But now, stuck in hang-back mode, I was in no position to direct the Simpson samples anywhere. I knew the crime lab was doing a relatively simple DNA test called DQ alpha. I could live with that. With the suspect at large, it was crucial to get this screening test done quickly. If the preliminary markers linked Simpson to the crime scene, the police would have plenty of grounds to arrest.

Later that afternoon, we were huddling in the conference room, kicking around our options, when the call came in from SID. I took it. The blood on the walk at the murder scene matched O. J. Simpson’s.

Bingo! There was the evidence the cops needed to charge. I grinned jubilantly at David and Gil and held my wrists together, pantomiming handcuffs. I figured squad cars would be rolling toward Brentwood any minute now.

Like hell. O. J. Simpson remained at large.

And when I arrived at work on the following morning, Wednesday, June 15, he was still at large. The papers were filled with speculation about the case. Somehow the L.A. Times had gotten wind of the blood-test results. But we were still getting the freeze-out from the cops. Normally, we’d be getting witness statements and reports within twenty-four hours of a crime. This time, we hadn’t received so much as a single sheet of paper. Even Gil had realized it was time for a showdown, and he’d finally brokered a meeting with the cops for later that afternoon.

“So, what’s the deal?” I wanted to know. “Are they going to arrest?”

“I’m not saying that,” Gil replied. “Just go in there and meet with them.”

“We shouldn’t be kissing ass here!” I muttered to David and Bill as we walked the two blocks to LAPD Headquarters at Parker Center. “They should have kept him in custody. We should be looking at a filing. I think we should tell them we’re considering the grand jury.”

What I meant was this: if the cops wouldn’t arrest, we could unilaterally start an investigation of our own by taking the case to a grand jury. That way, the cops couldn’t stonewall us because we’d have the power to compel their testimony. Furthermore, if we took the case to a grand jury and got an indictment, the police would have no choice but to arrest Simpson. Still, going grand jury was risky. The cops would take it as an in-your-face insult. My guess was that the very mention of it would drive them crazy.

“Go easy,” David advised me. “Let’s just see what they have to say.” As we rode the elevator up to Robbery/Homicide, I tried to imagine what Bill Hodgman was thinking. He’d been the front man on the Jackson case, a role that had caused him to drop considerably in the LAPD’s popularity polls. But Bill was also a very sweet guy and the consummate diplomat. If anyone could soothe the cops’ hurt feelings, he could. My concern at that moment was focused more on the police brass-would they continue to hold out? Or would they put an end to this game and work with us?

The Robbery/Homicide Division bullpen was a large room with about twenty desks facing each other in two rows. Consequently, the homicide team that worked on the LAPD’s most sensitive cases had absolutely no privacy. Their notes and reports were in plain view of any clerk wandering through-it was Leak City. Tom Lange had repeatedly complained to his bosses about it. But nothing had been done.

I knew the bullpen pretty well. I had been there often to talk with my IOS, investigating officers. I liked it: bare bones; gritty; real cops working tough, nasty cases. I’d always get good-natured ribbing as I made my way through. That Wednesday afternoon, however, I nearly got frostbite.

Someone pointed us to a small room off the bullpen where the brass were gathered. There was Commander John White, chief of detectives; Lieutenant John Rogers, of Robbery/Homicide; and Captain William Gartland, head of RHD. And, of course, Phil and Tom. On the table in front of Tom was a stack of documents bound with a rubber band. Exactly what I’d been waiting for.

“Here’re the reports so far,” Tom told me. His tone was neutral. I glanced over at Phil, who was looking distinctly ill at ease. Our eyes met. Everything was still okay between us.

“Obviously, there’s a lot more to be done,” Tom said. “But this should get you started.”

“Thanks, Tom,” I said, not wanting to appear too eager, but itching to get my hands on those reports. We swapped some observations about the case, making nice. Nobody on the other side seemed willing to bring up the thorny issue of arrest.

So I hit it dead-on.

“When do you plan to bring this for filing?”

“We want to interview more witnesses,” Tom said slowly. “We were thinking maybe the early part of next week.”

Bill, David, and I were silent. The cops knew that this was not what we’d wanted to hear.

“Well, frankly,” I said, “we’re a little concerned about letting it go that long.” I paused to make sure they were paying attention. “We’ve been thinking about taking it to the grand jury.”

Gauntlet thrown.

“Well, that’s your prerogative,” Tom replied, looking to his superiors for support. “We can’t stop you. But we’d prefer to wait a little longer.”

They were not going to budge.

The fire escapes that lattice the exterior of the CCB were a favorite retreat of the smokers among us. The one I used offered a vertical-slatted view of Parker Center and the Federal Buildings. The narrow veranda was furnished with a couple of dinette-type chairs. Someone had dragged out one of those tall cylindrical trash cans, which was always overflowing. There was a broom propped in one corner in case anyone felt industrious and wanted to clean the place up. No one had for a while.

The fire escape is where I headed when I got back with my spoils from the LAPD. Documents and notepads in one hand, cigs in the other.

I took a chair, propped my feet on the other one, and began leafing through the slender sheaf of police reports. Until now, I’d had only a sketchy mental image of how the bodies at Bundy lay.

Now I learned that Nicole, upon whom death and the medical examiner had bestowed the designation “decedent 94-05136,” had been found at the foot of the stairs at the front gate. She was in fetal position on her left side, wearing a backless black dress. No shoes. Her arms were bent at the elbow, close to the body. Her arms, legs, and face were stained with blood. The coroner had found a “large, sharp force injury” to her neck.

Ron Goldman, “decedent 94-05135,” had been found to the north. He’d fallen or been pushed backward and was slumped against the stump of a palm tree. He was wearing blue jeans and a light cotton sweater. Lying near his right foot was a white envelope containing a pair of eyeglasses. Goldman had injuries to the neck, back, head, hands, thighs. He’d apparently put up a fierce struggle.

I absorbed the contents of these reports without emotion. Over the years, I’d learned to do that. I imagine that emergency-room physicians approach their work the same way-first treat the symptoms; only after the bleeding stops, notice the human beings. I knew with painful certainty that if I caught this case for keeps, the deaths described in these pages would become personal. And, like it or not, I would begin to grieve for the victims. Just as I’d written to Rebecca’s mother, Danna Schaeffer, once you start letting yourself feel, the misery is endless.

But at this moment, the facts were all I needed or wanted.

Cause of death? “Sharp force injuries from some kind of knife or bladed instrument.”

I hated that. With a bullet you can match striations to the barrel of a gun and be 99 percent sure that you have the murder weapon. Blade wounds are usually sloppy. The injuries often can’t be traced to a single instrument.

Murder weapon? No sign of one yet. The cops had checked trash receptacles and luggage lockers at LAX and were in the process of searching the fields around O’Hare. They apparently had a line on a German hunting knife that Simpson had bought at an establishment called Ross Cutlery close to the time of the murder. Promising, but a long shot. Barring some anomaly-like some pattern on the handle that got pressed into the victims’ skin-we would never get a 100 percent match.

Time of death? Coroner still working on that.

Suspect? I lit up a Dunhill and took a deep drag. Then, on a clean sheet of yellow notepaper, I wrote: “O. J. Simpson.” And after that, “ALIBI?”

During the first couple of days after the murders, Simpson’s attorney, Howard Weitzman, had been telling reporters that Simpson was en route to Chicago at the time of the murders. Weitzman put it at eleven o’clock. Turns out, however, that the red-eye left LAX at 11:45 P.M.

When was Nicole Brown last seen alive? I skimmed a report taken from the bar manager at Mezzaluna. She’d seen Ron Goldman leave the restaurant at about 9:30 or 9:45, on his way to Nicole’s house. Goldman had been talking to Nicole on the phone a few minutes earlier, so it was probably safe to say that she was still alive at around 9:45 P.M. O. J. Simpson’s plane is lifting off at 11:45. That’s a lot of time in between.

What else have we got here?

“FENJVES, Pablo.” One of Nicole’s neighbors is watching the Channel 5 news at ten. I like witnesses who peg their memories to the TV Guide. They’re usually reliable. At about a quarter past to half past the hour he hears a dog barking “uncontrollably.” The dog continues barking for over an hour.

Nicole Brown’s dog was a big white Akita. His name was Kato. I’d learned that… God, where did I learn it? From the evening news? Probably. Anyhow, I’d learned that Kato-related in some loony but as yet unspecified way to the houseguest, Brian Kaelin-had been wandering the neighborhood with bloody paws when another neighbor walking his own dog had found him.

If you assumed, for argument’s sake, that the hound was Nicole’s Akita and that he began to bark when his mistress was murdered, that put the time of death-conservatively speaking-somewhere around 10:15 P.M. to 10:30 P.M.

What about O. J. Simpson? Was there any time during which he was unaccounted for?

The witness who seemed to have the most intimate knowledge of Simpson’s whereabouts on June 12 was Kato Kaelin. He’d told detectives at the West L.A. Police Station that Simpson had gone to his eight-year-old daughter Sydney’s dance recital, which had begun at five P.M., then returned home at…

The officers had not noted the time.

Kato then related-in what would become a familiar litany-how he and Simpson had gone out at about 9:30 P.M. to a McDonald’s on Santa Monica Boulevard. Kato wasn’t sure when they’d gotten back. Ten P.M., he thought. That was the last he saw of Simpson until around a quarter to eleven. Kato was back in his room on the phone to a friend when he heard “a thump” against his wall. When he went out to investigate, Kato said, he saw a white limousine sitting outside the gate.

“Limo… limo… limo…”

I flipped to the police interview with the limo driver who took Simpson to LAX for his 11:45 P.M. flight to Chicago. You’ve gotta figure that the livelihood of a limo driver depends upon close attention to the clock. Allan Park, as it turned out, was extremely conscientious about time.

He’d been scheduled to be at Rockingham by 10:45 P.M., but just to be on the safe side, he arrived twenty minutes ahead of schedule. After waiting around for a bit, he rang the buzzer at 10:40. He got no answer. For the next ten minutes he continued ringing without success. At 10:50 he called his boss for instructions. He was still on the line three minutes later when he saw a white male walk from the back of the house carrying a flashlight. Obviously, Kato checking out the thumps.

Simultaneously, Park saw a black man-he believed it was O. J. Simpson-walk quickly from the far side of the driveway to the front door. Park got out of the limo and rang the buzzer again. This time Simpson answered, saying, “I’m sorry, I overslept. I just got out of the shower and I’ll be down in a minute.”

I made a big mark through this with orange highlighter. Here was a crucial witness. One who could attest that up until 10:50 or so Simpson was not answering his buzzer. He could also attest that someone resembling Simpson walked into his house around 10:53 P.M. Shortly after that, Simpson answered the buzzer. O. J. Simpson, it appeared, had lied about having been in the shower!

If you believed Park’s account, it placed the suspect in his own front yard at 10:53 P.M. According to my rough calculations, Simpson had been off the radar for close to an hour. If Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman had been killed as early as 10:10, or even as late as 10:40, Simpson would have had time to drive the three miles or so from Bundy to Rockingham.

From where I was sitting, O. J. Simpson had no alibi.

And still, the police would not arrest.

By the next day, Thursday the sixteenth, the tension in our office was pushing into the red zone. I got a call from SID. The stain on the brown leather glove from Rockingham contained genetic markers from both victims, with a strong possibility that Simpson’s blood was in the mix. They’d also found Simpson’s blood on the interior of the door of his white Ford Bronco. The case was getting stronger by the hour. I’d never seen so much damning physical evidence. What were the cops waiting for? A sign from God?

If you ask the LAPD brass, they’ll probably tell you they were in no hurry to arrest because they knew exactly where the suspect was that day. In fact, most of the world knew where O. J. Simpson was that day: he was attending the funeral mass of Nicole Brown at St. Martin of Tours in Brentwood, and later, her burial in Orange County.

I caught a few minutes of news showing the Brown family at Nicole’s graveside. Simpson was there, all right. And he made a plausible show of grief. The slumping shoulders; dark glasses hinting at eyes too swollen with tears to look fellow mourners in the eye. I felt a jolt of revulsion when I saw him steering his two children toward the bier. They looked so innocent. So trusting. I had a momentary vision of them upstairs sleeping while their mother struggled with her killer.

In the months to come I would flash from from time to time on the image of those children sleeping. Sometimes a photo of them would trigger it. Sometimes it would be a document. Several weeks after the murders, I finally received a report I’d been requesting from an Officer Joan Vasquez. She’d been assigned to escort the Simpson children out back through the garage, never allowing them close to the crime scene.

Officer Vasquez reported that as the children sat in the back of the cruiser, Sydney whimpered, “Where’s my mommy?… I’m just tired and I want my mommy.”

Sydney and Justin stayed at the West L.A. station for almost five hours! Officer Vasquez, clearly a kind soul, tried to distract them with soda, candy, paper hats, paints. Over that long morning, she’d taught the children to spell their names in sign language and to play Hangman.

“I like the Power Rangers because I’m a green belt in karate,” six-year-old Justin told her. “My mommy is going to start going with me again.”

Sydney knew something was terribly wrong. At one point, she turned to her brother and said, “Justin, you know something happened to Mommy, or she would have come for us by now.”

“Why can’t Dad just come for us?” Justin asked her.

“Because he doesn’t stay with us sometimes,” she replied.

At about 6:30, their older stepsister, Arnelle, picked them up, and they left.

When I read this, I found it hard to keep back the tears. That may have been where the misery hit me in earnest. On the day of Nicole’s funeral, however, I was simply struck by how surreal it all seemed. You had Nicole’s California-perfect mother and sisters embracing and comforting O. J. Simpson. What was going on here?

I hadn’t yet met the Browns. Given the media frenzy surrounding this case, we all agreed it was proper that Gil make the first contact. During the chaos of the first week after the murders, however, he and Nicole’s father, Louis, had continually missed each other’s calls. How the Browns felt about their son-in-law now was unclear. I knew that they had suspicions. When Tom Lange called Denise Brown to tell her of her sister’s murder, the first words out of her mouth were “I knew that son of a bitch was going to do it!”

They had to know about the New Year’s Eve beating Simpson gave Nicole. And yet there he was being welcomed as a son and brother, holding the hands of his two children, weeping over the casket of their mother. Could the aura of a celebrity blind even the family of a murder victim?

During the four days since he’d been cut loose, Simpson had been the bereaved widower. He’d spent his time in seclusion, “under a doctor’s care for depression,” according to his new attorney, Robert Shapiro. Bob had surfaced when Howard Weitzman bowed out of the case citing his “personal friendship” with the suspect.

I’d always considered Weitzman a decent guy and a good attorney. I could never figure out why he didn’t insist upon being at his client’s interview with Vannatter and Lange. (Much later in the case, I found myself talking to Howard at a dinner party in West L.A. He told me that he’d cut out because the cops threatened not to talk to Simpson if he had an attorney present. That made no sense to me. What really happened, I suspect, is that Simpson’s colossal ego, combined with his confidence in his ability to sweet-talk and manipulate cops, had led him to dismiss his own attorney from the interview. Weitzman, or course, would have had no choice but to comply.)

When Weitzman dropped out of the picture, Robert Shapiro stepped right in. I was flabbergasted. O. J. Simpson’s got bucks coming out the wazoo, and this is the best he can do? Weitzman, at least, had credibility. Shapiro, to my way of thinking, wasn’t even a serious trial attorney. He had a stable of celebrity clients, Tina Sinatra, Christian Brando, and Erik Menendez among them. Still, he had a reputation around the Criminal Courts Building as a deal-maker, not a litigator. A lightweight.

One of Shapiro’s first moves was to write a letter to Vannatter and Lange saying that his client “would be willing to consider” taking a lie-detector test. The cops faxed me a copy and asked for my opinion.

Polygraphs are risky. A subject can dope himself up to pass, which is why cops don’t like to administer the test unless they’ve had the suspect in custody for a while. (Unbeknownst to me or the cops, Simpson had already taken a polygraph and scored a minus 22, meaning he failed every single question about the murder. I did not learn this until well after the verdict. Then I shook my head in amazement. It’s hard to imagine that a lawyer would be stupid enough to offer his client up for a second poly after he’d failed the first time.)

The offer seemed fishy. My advice: “Stay away from it.”

Shapiro also offered the services of his own experts-Dr. Michael Baden, director of forensic sciences for the New York State Police, and Dr. Henry Lee, director of the Connecticut State Police Forensic Science Laboratory-to “aid in the investigation.” Specifically, he was asking permission for Baden to reautopsy the bodies. “We… would like you to contact the next of kin for permission in this regard,” he wrote, “since I feel it would be inappropriate for me to contact them directly during this period of grief.”

I never answered him. But Nicole’s mother, Juditha, would later tell me that during the funeral Shapiro came up and flat-out asked her for permission to exhume the body. She was too taken aback to reply. Shapiro, no doubt realizing how unsympathetically this request would be viewed by the public, wisely let the matter drop.

After the funeral, Simpson dropped off the screen. He’d apparently attended a gathering at Nicole’s parents’ home down at Dana Point before returning to “seclusion” at Rockingham. By Thursday evening, I was climbing the walls. I called the cops to check up on him. That’s when I learned, to my amazement, that they did not have him under surveillance.

“Lack of manpower,” they said. “Besides, where’s he gonna go?”

This was too much even for Gil. He called us all into his office that evening and put the question to us: “Do we go to the grand jury or wait for the police to file?”

We all agreed the case was well past the stage of being filable. The cops were playing strictly cover-your-ass politics, which might have been fine if they’d had the luxury of working without the constant scrutiny of the press. But that wasn’t the situation we had here. The media was broadcasting every tidbit it could get its hands on, and a lot of that information was amazingly on target. Some creep with access to documents was leaking like a rusty tub.

As the evidence piled up, so did O. J. Simpson’s incentive to flee.

“What if Simpson pulls a Polanski?” I asked Gil.

Film director Roman Polanski-allowed to remain at large while under investigation on charges of statutory rape-had fled to France. Why couldn’t it happen here? The clock was ticking, and we didn’t want to be the saps who failed to move because the cops didn’t give us permission.

There were other concerns as well.

“I’m worried about losing that guy Kaelin,” I told the others. “He’s very shaky. We need his testimony-now.”

“David,” Gil said at last, “tell Terry White [our office’s grand jury adviser] to arrange to convene the jurors for Friday afternoon. We’ll hear Kaelin’s testimony.”

Finally, we were moving. It wasn’t until everyone stood up and began to leave the conference room that Frank Sundstedt finally asked the question that was uppermost in my mind.

“So, does Marcia have the case?”

I held my breath. Suddenly it felt very important to me. While part of me-probably the rational part-recognized that this would not be a smooth prosecution, I wanted to hear that Gil had the confidence to let me handle a big one.

“Marcia has the case,” he said finally, catching my eye. “But not alone. She’s going to do it with someone else.”

There was a nervous shuffling in the room. Someone cleared his throat. Truth is, if you really trust a prosecutor, you make her the lead chair. No doubt what he intended was to pair me with another strong personality who would keep me in check. My pride wouldn’t let me show my disappointment.

But as David walked me back to my office, I fumed sotto voce.

“Why does he think I need someone else?”

David urged me to calm down. Think of it from Gil’s point of view, he said. The guy’s under a lot of pressure and he’s probably just hedging his bets. Your feelings are the least of his problems right now.

He was right, of course. For Gil, this wasn’t personal. If I had to pair up with someone, maybe Gil would let me have David?

“How about you?” I asked him. He shot back a look as if to say, “In your dreams, babe.” David was up to his ears in Menendez. He had all the alligators he could handle in that swamp.

Even before I left the office that night, I was hearing rumors that the LAPD brass were in negotiations with Robert Shapiro to allow O. J. Simpson to surrender voluntarily. Our threat to go grand jury must have lit a fire under them. But the news was a mixed bag. On one hand, the idea of a negotiated arrest made me nuts. Once again, O. J. Simpson’s celebrity status had gained him a legal advantage. A negotiated voluntary surrender signals to the public and potential jury pool that the suspect is someone who deserves special privileges. I’d much rather see a righteously arrested suspect step out of a squad car in handcuffs. Still, my annoyance was all relative. Compared to the act of cutting him loose in the first place, a negotiated surrender was a minor outrage. If it worked, we’d all be happy. But what if the negotiations failed? Would the police back down and delay the arrest again? Would they give Simpson a deadline? We wanted to keep our options open-and that meant proceeding full speed ahead with the grand jury.

First order of business: reel in Kato Kaelin. O. J. Simpson was clearly Kato’s benefactor. I could just about bet that had Kato known Simpson was a suspect, he would not have spoken so freely about the thump, for instance, and risk dumping his meal ticket. On the other hand, however, I’d had a chance to study his witness statement pretty thoroughly by now. I felt he had to know a lot more about the Simpsons’ private lives than he’d told the cops.

Early Friday morning I dispatched a couple of detectives to West L.A. to serve Kato with a subpoena. David and I were in conference with Gil when I got a call from one of the cops on the detail.

“Kaelin’s here with us,” he said. “But he says he won’t talk unless his lawyer’s with him.”

“Bring him in anyway,” I told him.

This was extremely unusual. Witnesses don’t arrive in the company of lawyers unless they’re worried about being charged with a crime. From what I could see, Brian Kaelin had no criminal liability. The events he’d witnessed on the night of June 12 had clearly occurred after the murders. I was afraid that his request for an attorney meant that Simpson had gotten to him.

The cops brought Kato into my office at a little past nine. I looked up from my paperwork and saw for the first time that wild mane of dirty-blond hair, casual hip clothes, goofy surfer-boy slouch. My first thought: Zone-out case.

“Hey, guy,” I greeted him. Casual seemed the way to go.

He shook my hand and fidgeted like a puppy.

“Have a seat while I call my boss.”

“Hi, sure, no problem.”

He plopped down in one of the chairs across the desk from me. David said he’d be delayed a few minutes, to start without him.

I began by asking Kato how much sleep he’d gotten that night. Did he feel prepared to go before a grand jury? He answered in half sentences, nodding a lot, managing to say very little. Great, I thought, this guy can barely handle small talk-what’s going to happen when we put him on the stand?

I cut to the chase: “Do you remember what you were doing when you heard the thump on your wall?”

“I think I was talking to my friend Rachel. Yeah, I was talking to Rachel.”

Okay; that was what he had told the cops.

“Did you tell her about what you’d heard?”

“I really don’t… um… you know… want to say anything until my attorney gets here. I mean, you seem real nice and all, and… um… I really want to help you out. But… um… I really can’t talk about the case without him. I’m real sorry, really, Marcia. I am.”

His words tumbled over each other as he squirmed in his seat and cast me a beseeching look.

I wasn’t buying this act. Kato wasn’t as dumb as he appeared. He’d cut off the questioning expertly.

“Kato, I don’t get it,” I told him. “Why do you think you need a lawyer? As far as I can tell, you have no liability whatsoever. If there’s more to it, please say so now and I won’t say another word until your lawyer arrives.”

“No, no. It’s not that. It’s just that my lawyer told me I shouldn’t say anything unless he’s here.”

When David finally showed up, he, too, lobbed Kato a few low and slow ones. No dice. Then, Kato’s lawyer, a young guy named William Genego, finally arrived and demanded that we stop talking to his client until he could read the witness report. David offered them his office as a conference room. It was only about 9:30; Kato didn’t need to get on the witness stand until early afternoon. But Genego said that wasn’t good enough. He’d need the whole weekend to go over the statement.

That was ridiculous. The statement was only two pages long. David laid it on the line.

“Your client was subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury at one-thirty this afternoon. Make sure he’s there.”

The tussle with Kato was small-time compared to the trouble brewing beyond the walls of the Criminal Courts Building. I was oblivious to the rumblings until about noon, when I was paged by the office’s indomitable senior legal assistant, Patti Jo Fairbanks. Patti Jo had the authoritative air of a four-star general and the voice of a drill sergeant.

“Marcia!” she bellowed. “I need to see you in my office, right now!”

Sounded serious. I walked the few short steps between her office and mine, poked my head in, and asked, “What’s the deal?”

“Come in and close the door.”

Good news never comes when they tell you to close the door.

“It’s Simpson,” she said. “He was supposed to turn himself in at Parker Center this morning and he didn’t show.”

What?

Shapiro, Patti Jo told me, was to have brought Simpson in to Parker Center by eleven o’clock. An hour later, still no sign of him.

“The cops are plenty pissed,” she told me. “They’re going to send a unit out there to get him.”

“I thought they didn’t know where he was.”

“He’s staying over at Kardashian’s place in the Valley,” Patti Jo replied. She was referring to Robert Kardashian. Up till then, I’d never heard of the guy, but he was apparently a longtime buddy of O. J. Simpson.

Curiouser and curioser. How did so much manage to happen without our knowledge? I’d never seen this before-and it was certainly a bad sign.

The phone rang. Robert Shapiro.

“Let me talk to him,” I mouthed to Patti Jo.

“Just a minute,” she told him. “Marcia’s sitting right here.”

She handed me the phone.

I dispensed with pleasantries.

“What’s going on, Bob?” I said. “This is no time to screw around.”

“Marcia, I promise you. He’s coming in. We just need to do a few things,” said Shapiro.

“What do you mean?” I shot back. “He’s had all week to get his things together. What are you guys doing?”

“He’s being checked out by some doctors,” said Shapiro. His speech was infuriatingly slow, his tone condescending. “I’m sure you’ve heard that he’s very depressed. We Just need to be sure that he doesn’t go into custody in a suicidal frame of mind.”

“Oh, I’m sure he’s depressed.” I snorted. “He’s got very good reason to be depressed. I just want to hear back from you in half an hour telling me he’s left.”

Over the next few minutes, there was a flurry of calls between us. Shapiro kept insisting that “It’s going to be a little longer than we thought.” Simpson would need another hour, he insisted. Then, inexplicably, he passed the receiver to someone else.

“Who’s this?” I asked the stranger.

“Saul Faerstein.”

I knew that name. Faerstein was a forensic psychiatrist who testified in criminal courts around L.A. County. The line on him was good. What the hell was he doing at Kardashian’s? Were they laying the groundwork for some kind of diminished-capacity defense? I asked Faerstein for directions to the house and he gave me some convoluted reply. When I tried to clarify them, he became even more evasive. Finally, I lost my patience.

“Doctor, you’d better stop playing games here,” I said. “Do you understand that you’re obstructing justice? That’s a criminal charge, and I don’t think you need a record like that, do you?”

He must have tossed the phone like a hot potato; in an instant Shapiro was back on the line. I was in the process of extracting directions from him when Patti Jo signaled me to break away. She had the LAPD’s Valley Division chief on the line. They’d finally gotten their own fix on the safe house and were on their way.

Show time. I took a deep breath and pushed through the doors to the grand jury room. I flashed my best warm-up smile to the jurors seated in the little three-tiered amphitheater. I tried not to betray my anxiety as I first welcomed them and then had to explain our departure from ordinary procedure. I would be deferring my opening statement until Monday.

“For today,” I said, “we are convened for the testimony of only one witness.” And I called Brian Kaelin to the stand.

“Mr. Kaelin,” said the foreperson when Kaelin stumbled to the witness chair, “please state and spell your full name, speaking directly into the microphone.”

He looked a bit dazed. “B-R-I-A-N G-E-R-A-R-D K-A-E-L-I-N.” Well, at least he could spell his name.

I turned to him. “Mr. Kaelin, were you acquainted with a woman by the name of Nicole Simpson?”

He fidgeted a bit, and then looked down at a piece of legal paper. Finally he spoke, in the tremulous tones of a child reciting a poem he doesn’t quite understand. “On the advice of my attorney,” he said, “I must respectfully decline to answer and assert my constitutional right to remain silent.”

God damn.

“You seem to be reading from a piece of yellow paper,” I said. “Did your attorney write that out for you this morning?”

“On the advice of my attorney, I must respectfully decline to answer and assert my constitutional right to remain silent.”

I couldn’t believe that this twerp was taking the Fifth! He read from that paper three more times before the foreperson warned him that his refusal to answer questions was “without legal cause” and that if he persisted in his refusal, he would be held in contempt. Now we had to find a judge to do just that, pronto. When Kato stepped down, David and I went down to the court of Judge Stephen Czuleger, a former federal prosecutor who was the designated hitter for issues that arose before the grand jury, to ask him for a ruling on the plea. I’d always pegged Czuleger as smart and forceful and I hoped he’d put an end to this nonsense.

He didn’t. At least not 100 percent. While agreeing that Kato’s situation did not seem to warrant his invoking the Fifth Amendment, the judge didn’t find it unreasonable to allow him and his attorney the weekend to confer.

I humbled myself before the grand jury, apologizing as handsomely as I could for having dragged them in for nothing. I silently prayed they wouldn’t hold it against me. Even worse, would they reject any of Kato’s future testimony because he had taken the Fifth?

Great. What a way to start.

Shortly after I got back to my office, Phil called. I could tell from the agitation in his voice that something awful had happened.

“Simpson’s escaped,” he said.

Dear God, I thought, do we ever look like morons.

The events of the next few hours defy linear recall. I’d never seen David so furious. And Gil? Poor Gil was in the unenviable position of having been left out of the loop in the surrender negotiations by the cops, and then having to take heat for it. He handled it with his usual cool, even taking pains to defend the police department for a commendable job in preparing the evidence.

Me? It’s difficult in retrospect to sort out all the conflicting feelings I had that afternoon. I know I had one secret, unworthy thought. I’d been getting a bad feeling about this case. Maybe I’d gotten myself into something I couldn’t handle. Part of me was thinking, The most graceful way out of all this would be if Simpson went on the lam-and disappeared off the face of the earth…

News of the escape spread like a Santa Ana wind. The phones in the press office were ringing wild. I felt strangely numb. As I drove home that night, I was too bummed to listen to the nonstop reports on drive-time radio.

The boys were with their father that weekend. I just tossed my bags into a corner and slumped into a chair at the kitchen table, trying to summon the energy to throw something together for dinner. Shoulda picked up fast food. At 6:30 P.M., maybe a little after, the phone rang. It was Phil.

“Turn on your TV,” he told me.

There he was. Our fugitive in a white Ford Bronco, ghosting down the freeway, police cruisers following at a discreet distance. Commentators were calling it a chase, but it looked more like a presidential motorcade. Of course, unless he’s assassinated, a president never gets this kind of coverage. I surfed the dial. It was incredible. This surreal slo-mo spectacle was being carried by all three networks. (NBC even cut away briefly from the NBA playoff game. This was serious.)

Certain images burned themselves into my memory. The sunlight streaming across Al Cowlings’s jaw. The ghoulish frenzy of spectators waving placards: “Go, Juice.” An amorphous dark blob in which popular historians would struggle to find the outline of a man holding a gun to his head. Ninety-five million people watching a police drama unfolding in prime time! It was one of those peculiarly American experiences that, for years afterward, would lead strangers to ask one another, “Where were you when O. J. skipped?”

On the evening of June 17, 1994, I knew that I was at the very epicenter of this event, and yet I felt light-years away from it. I couldn’t watch for more than a few minutes. I don’t know if that was because it was too painful, or because I was just too disgusted. Sometimes you have to distance yourself from things to stay objective. I told myself that the risk to public safety was minimal. Simpson did have a gun, but he was not a serial killer. He would be caught, or he would be shot.

The jerk.