I bought a few drop-waisted jumpers to camouflage my growing belly and silently endured the ribbing I took about my change in style from tailored suits to Laura Ashley. For court appearances I found I could get away with leaving my skirt unbuttoned and keeping my jacket closed—at least for the first five months or so.
Secretly, I was elated. Every day I’d look in the mirror and lightly move my hand over my belly. Had it grown? Unlikely, since I’d checked it just hours ago. It was a thrill unlike any other I’d known to see the baby in the sonogram. My little boy was real! I could
see
his heartbeat. After amnio showed the baby was healthy, I was so happy I felt drunk.
During that time, I caught the Bardo case. I was still hiding my pregnancy, and I knew there was a very good chance I’d be in trial by the time I went into labor. (As it turned out, that case took so long to get to court that I’d long since given birth to Matthew.) But I still kept mum about the pregnancy well into my sixth month. I didn’t want to be treated as an invalid. (In hindsight I suppose my camouflage efforts fooled no one. But they let me act out the charade.) I felt great, at least most of the time. I’d ridden out the morning-sickness phase by sneaking animal crackers in court. They were the only thing that seemed to settle my queasy stomach. But morning sickness passed, and things were good for me.
Come month six, however, I had to tell my supervisor, an impersonal, imperious man, about my condition.
“I just wanted you to know that I’m pregnant.” It came tumbling out. “I’m not going to take any time off before the birth. And I won’t take a lot of maternity leave after I have the baby.” I braced myself for his reaction.
“No problem,” he said, barely looking up. “Ride that horse till it drops.”
During the preliminary hearings for Bardo, I was almost nine months pregnant. The press had been allowed to park a camera in the jury box, which meant they got a side view that made me look like Shamu. I joked with the cameraman that if he ever aired that shot, I’d move to have the press excluded. But the fact of the matter is, I loved it. I was really a mommy. My swollen silhouette proved it. What my friends couldn’t believe was how I always talked about this baby. And what I’d do for the next one.
“How can you even think about
another
baby?” they’d ask. “You haven’t even had this one yet.”
But, you see, I never considered having only one child. It would be two or none. I remembered all too well the six years of loneliness I’d felt until my brother was born. I wanted to make sure that my children were born as close together as my health and strength would allow. Then they would always have each other for company.
And so, I found myself pregnant again. This time, trying a double homicide. I was worried about being able to finish the case before I went into labor. But the judge ran a tight ship, and I figured things would move quickly.
Right in the middle of jury selection, however, the Rodney King verdict had come in. The riots shut us down for a few days. During that time, I fretted. Would our jury, which was shaping up to be largely African-American, take out their anger on me? It wasn’t a great time to be trying a case. Fortunately, the defendants thought so too. They moved for a mistrial, and the judge granted it.
That left me at loose ends, and still very pregnant. I got lucky. One of my friends in the Special Trials Unit, John Zajec, was getting ready to go to trial on another double homicide. For the past few months, whenever we met in the strip of hallway between our offices, John and I had been batting around the various legal and strategic issues on his case. When my case got bumped to the back burner, I’d go down to his office and hustle up some conversation. I was such a junkie, if I couldn’t have a case of my own, I’d glom onto someone else’s.
Over lunch, I’d come up with an idea. Maybe I could be his second chair.
“If you don’t like the idea, just tell me so,” I told him slyly. “But maybe having a pregnant chick next to you will get some jury sympathy. And I’ll put on all the boring stuff.”
“Sounds great,” he told me.
And that’s how I wound up arguing for the imposition of the death penalty exactly one week before giving birth to Tyler. My spirits were high, but my body wasn’t exactly cooperating. Although I was in good shape physically, my pelvic bones had loosened up, a natural occurrence that prepares women for birthing. I found that if I stood up too fast after I’d been sitting for a while, my legs felt like they’d come out of their sockets and I’d have to kind of shake them back into place.
I could hide most of that business sitting at counsel table. The awkward part came when I’d been standing at the lectern examining a witness. I’d just asked him if he’d like to refresh his memory by looking at the text of his statement. Yes, he told me, he would. I took a step, or rather tried to, when I realized that my leg wouldn’t go back where it belonged. I was struggling to coax it back into place when the judge, puzzled by the pause, asked, “Ms. Clark, would you like to approach the witness?”
“Yes… we ll… I’d like to, Your Honor.”
I was having to smother laughter. This was like a Buster Keaton routine. Finally, I shook the sucker back into joint and glided to the witness stand. Later when I told John what had happened, he just shook his head and said, “You women! I don’t know how you do it.”
The jurors returned a verdict of guilty. They later confided in me that they’d been taking bets as to whether I’d make it to the end.
I could never have imagined that motherhood would be so all-consuming. You spend the first thirty-six years of your life as a free agent—and pow. You’re responsible for the survival of a totally helpless humanoid. Colic! Life for the first four months is like one long wail. You’re frantic to ease the pain. Must be something you’re eating, right? So you add vegetables. Then you eliminate vegetables, cut out spices, reduce dairy intake.
Only time takes care of the problem.
My friends all warned me about what to expect when I went back to work. You think you’ll be glad to get out of the house, they said. But when the time comes, you’ll yearn to get back. You’ll actually find yourself calling home during the day just to hear the baby cry. They were right. Those same friends would later reassure me that it’s possible to love a second baby as much as the first. It’s true. I don’t know how that works, I guess the heart just expands.
Mothering, of course, complicated life exponentially. Suddenly, a trip to the grocery store became a major logistical ordeal. If I took a baby, or two of them, I’d have to bring a stroller or backpack carrier, a diaper bag, a bottle, and at least one toy. I’d reach in my purse for a pen and come up with a toy airplane or a G.I. Joe. Or I’d be sitting in court trying a case, and my beeper would go off with a call from home.
My colleagues were sympathetic. Even during the Simpson case, when we were all in the throes of monstrous stress, my teammates were all so sweet and considerate. It wasn’t unusual for our meetings to be interrupted by a phone call from the domestic front and Hank and Scott would riff on my transformation from Darth Vader to Mother Goose. Not until this Monday morning in February, when Johnnie hit me with his accusations that I had used my children—
used
them—had I come face-to-face with reality: not all the world loves a working mother.
I turned to the last page of the photo album and was mortified to realize that I hadn’t inserted any of the pictures taken over the last eight months. They were still up on the shelf in their plastic covers. When the trial was over, I’d get the album up-to-date, I promised myself.
I wanted to lock myself into the bathroom and scream, to pound on the walls. I wanted to mount an offensive that would lay waste to three countries. But I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t afford self-indulgence. I had to call a lawyer immediately to get the ball rolling.
Next morning, I slunk into work like a dog expecting to be hit. When I opened the door to my office I was overwhelmed by the sight and scent of flowers. There were red roses, yellow roses, white roses. There were stalks of gladiolus and eucalyptus, birds-of-paradise, pink and lavender freesias, knots of ‘sweet William and violets. My dank bureaucratic lair had been transformed into a hothouse in full riot. I read the cards on the first three or four bouquets to see who my well-wishers were. No one I knew—just strangers, from Texas, Connecticut, Washington, D.C. All over. They were sending me sympathy and wishing me luck.
Well, I’ll be dipped.
For months before this, supporters had been sending the team jewelry, cosmetics, clothing, and other trinkets. When the bottlers of Evian water saw that Chris and I kept Crystal Geyser on the counsel table, they air-freighted us cases of their own stuff. Someone even sent Chris an expensive leather flight jacket. Chris thought it was hilarious. He started calling this bounty “free shit,” FS for short.
But the FS we’d gotten to date was nothing compared to the avalanche that poured in during those days after Gordon’s custody filing. Scott dubbed the new influx “more free shit.” MFS! Before, I’d gotten flowers only from women; now I got them from men as well. And everybody wanted to know how they could help me out.
Amid this outpouring of goodwill there was a touching solicitude for me personally. A Holocaust survivor sent me a book on coping. My haggard appearance caused others to send cough medicine and vitamins. I got a lot of books on stress. I received angels of every kind. Ceramic, wood, papier-mâché. I kept them all.
I think what touched me most was a letter sent by a convent of Dominican nuns. This wonderful missive urged courage and fortitude; it was sort of the Dominican version of “Go, girlfriend.” I taped it to the wall next to my desk and turned to it several times a day for comfort.
Sisters, if you’re reading this, please accept my gratitude. The next few weeks would be the most trying of my life. Through it all, your prayers preserved my sanity.
And FS restored my faith in my fellow man.
M
arine to Marine
CAR TAPE.
February 28. I’d like to trade lives with just about anybody right now. “County jail inmate” sounds good
.
During the days before Mark Fuhrman took the stand, he was a pain in the ass. He’d hulk into the office in the company of three beefy bodyguards lent to him by the Metro Division. Chris was supposed to be looking after him, but instead went out of his way to stay clear of the scene. So Cheri Lewis usually drew the short straw and had to baby-sit. Once he settled into Cheri’s office, Mark would spend his hours sulking, throwing tantrums, or wailing about how the defense had ruined his life.
Not that I wasn’t sympathetic. At a personal level my heart went out to him. Publicity seekers, hucksters, disaffected cops and county workers, and wackos of every stripe were streaming out of the woodwork to recall supposed locker-room boasts that he’d had an affair with Nicole Brown or had painted swastikas on the lockers of fellow officers. IAD had looked into the allegations. They all turned out to be bullshit.
Mark was clearly the object of a witch-hunt. But I felt that we were spending entirely too many hours mollycoddling one witness. Mark Fuhrman just wasn’t that important. He’d found a single piece of evidence in a case that involved dozens of equally inculpatory findings. He’d had nothing at all to do with the blood at Bundy, the blood in the Bronco, the hair and fibers on Ron Goldman and on the knit cap, the blood and fibers on Simpson’s socks. Under normal circumstances, any one of these would have been enough to nail a defendant.
Fuhrman was a big deal only because the defense required a bogeyman to distract the jury from the devastating evidence against their client.
Almost every day, the defense made some attempt to inject race into the courtroom. It seemed to me the height of immorality—cynically exploiting a serious social issue for the benefit of a murderer who’d never lifted a damned finger to advance the cause of civil rights. O. J. Simpson wasn’t “rousted” by a band of racist cops—the
evidence
demanded that he be arrested and tried. You can call the cops sloppy, you can call me and my colleagues inept, but the facts showed that Simpson was guilty. The deliberate twisting of reality to distort this horrific murder into a racial cause was the biggest lie told in the entire case.
And by the time Mark Fuhrman hit the stand, the Big Lie had done its damage. It was even beginning to affect our own thinking. We spent way too much time playing defense. Every so often I had to shake myself back to reality. This case was about rage and control. It was about compelling and overwhelming circumstantial evidence pointing to the guilt of one man and one man alone. To the extent that we allowed ourselves to be distracted by false issues, we failed to fulfill our duty to the People.
As for our whining detective, the only question on the table, as far as I was concerned, was “Did Mark Fuhrman plant evidence?” The answer was an obvious “No.” We’d established beyond doubt that there was only one glove at Bundy when the first officers arrived. There was still only one glove there when Mark arrived two hours later. He couldn’t have planted evidence even if he’d wanted to. The issue of whether he was a racist was completely irrelevant. Or, at least, it should have been.
Lance Ito screwed us on that one.
Back in January, you’ll recall, we’d argued against allowing the defense to introduce evidence that Mark Fuhrman had ever uttered the word “nigger.” It would serve no purpose, we warned, but to antagonize the jury. Ito originally agreed with us, but then, as usual, reversed himself. Of the many errors Ito made during this trial, that one was the most blindly destructive. It was also the most far-reaching. Once he’d allowed the N-word in, he was forced to make a series of bad decisions all the way down the line. In the aggregate, they assured a miscarriage of justice.
The N-word ruling hung around our necks like an eight-hundred-pound albatross. We should have been able to have Mark Fuhrman testify to the very limited area of the case of which he had knowledge. Now, by putting him on the stand, we risked provoking a riot in the jury box.