“What the fuck is going on down there?” I demanded.
“They were firing questions at him and he denied using racial slurs,” Alan reported. “I don’t know if Chris expected this setup would get him to admit it, or what. But whatever he expected, Mark hasn’t admitted to anything.”
“Where are they now?” I asked.
“I don’t know, it broke up a few minutes ago,” said Cheri. “I’m not sure where Chris is, maybe in with Terry.”
I was furious. This was just so typical of Chris. He loved to be the center of attention. He’d never do anything quietly if he could turn it into a sound-and-light show. That’s the problem with the team approach to prosecution. You can’t stay on top of what other members of the team are doing all the time; you have to give them a certain amount of autonomy. But if they’re willful, they’re likely to do ill-considered things. I kept my temper in check until the end of the day, when Chris himself finally thought to pay me a visit.
“Quite a spectacle,” I drawled sarcastically. “Who’s writing the screenplay?”
He came back defensively. “Hey, there wasn’t any air conditioning in my office, so I got Terry to open up the grand jury room for us. There were people hanging around. They wanted to give us ideas.” His voice trailed off. His back was half turned to me as he fiddled with the collection of ceramic mugs on my little refrigerator.
Finally, he turned. His previous bravado was gone. “Look, Marcia,” he said, “I can’t deal with that motherfucker. I don’t think I can do him.”
“You’re dumping him on me
now?
” I wailed. “You know I’m buried.”
It was true. I had a ton of work to do with Kato, plus at least two more days’ worth of interviewing with Allan Park. I was still searching for a use-of-force expert to explain how one man could quickly dispatch two victims with a knife. And I hadn’t even started on the hair and trace evidence.
Chris shrugged. “Let Hank do it.”
“Hank’s got his hands full with Dennis Fung.”
The only other alternative was a special prosecutor, but I dismissed that idea out of hand. It would send the wrong message to the jury.
“Well, I’m sorry, but I just can’t do it.”
I leaned forward and rested my head on my hands. There was no way around it. I would have to take Mark.
This would double my load over the next two weeks. Chris had not done much actual prep work with Fuhrman, which meant I would have to organize his testimony from scratch. I’d have to weave in all the reasons why he couldn’t and wouldn’t have planted evidence—but if I spent too much time talking about how he’d done nothing wrong, we’d look defensive. Spend too little and we’d leave holes for the defense to fill in with sinister fantasies. It would be yet another tightrope walk.
Damn. I only wished Chris had dumped him earlier.
“Chris?” I lifted my head but he was gone.
Was I pissed? I sure was. For about a hour. And then my anger softened. Chris was under pressure, too. Some of it I could only guess at. I reminded myself that home for him was a black working-class community where the prevailing sentiment was that Simpson had been framed. Chris had to worry about whether his best friends considered him an Uncle Tom. He’d been spat on. He’d been flipped off. Every day of the week he had to walk out his door prepared to take it on the chin.
I remembered one ugly incident when he and I had made a trip out to the offices of Nicole’s divorce attorneys in West L.A. As he entered the elevator, a young white woman beside us glanced up at Chris. Then she pulled her purse closer to her body. I’ll never forget the look on his face. One minute you’re an attorney, a civil servant, a full partner. The next minute you’re a suspected mugger. Chris had managed to keep his dignity in a dangerous, miserable, unfair world, and his courage often moved me. Beyond that, he had the greatness of soul to think beyond himself and his race and take up the cudgel for battered women. He’d gone to bat for DV—which, deep down, I knew lay at the center of this case. He’d picked up that burden when I’d felt too weak to carry it. He took on my demon issue.
The least I could do was take on his.
Early the following week, I’d polished off a bag of the pretzels I always nibble on and was scouting the office for more goodies. People were always sending us care packages. I’d nicknamed the War Room the Snack Vortex. I’d spotted a gift basket and was about to plunder a tin of pâté when Scott Gordon put his hand on my arm.
“Someone leaked the mock cross to
Newsweek
,” he whispered. His eyes were darting over my shoulder. He was clearly afraid of being overheard.
“Mark denied everything,” I whispered back. “What’s newsworthy about that?”
“Well, that’s not how the article reads.”
The way it read, apparently, was that Detective Fuhrman had “admitted that he’d made racial slurs in the past.”
Oh, man. Could they hit us any lower? How could someone on our own team have gabbed to the press—and leaked lies to boot?
I caught up with Chris in Suzanne’s office. He was pacing furiously. Obviously, he’d heard the news.
“I want every single person on this team to take a polygraph!” he was saying. “Everyone! Right fucking now. I’m going to get to the bottom of this!”
I tried to lighten him up.
“You know, I think everyone in the world should take polygraphs,” I said. Chris, however, was in no mood for jokes. He meant it.
Gil thought Chris’s polygraph idea was risky. “If the source is someone on the team,” he mused aloud, “don’t you think that person will leak the fact that we gave everyone a polygraph?”
I could see both sides. Sure, we needed to identify and isolate the culprit. Still, giving everyone polygraphs was just the kind of sensational, nasty development that was bound to get out. And if it did, we’d look like a bunch of paranoid jerks. I don’t think Gil was seriously considering it, but was trying to let Chris down gently.
Gil called a staff meeting in the conference room.
“I’m asking whoever it is to come forward and make a clean breast of it,” he said. “It can be done confidentially.” He spoke mildly, yet his words conveyed such sadness and disappointment I thought they might actually tweak a guilty conscience. When it was his turn to speak, though, Chris rejected the conciliatory approach.
“We’re going to have an investigation,” he ranted. “And I promise you, we’re going to find out which scumbag did this.”
I looked around the table. No one wore what I would call a guilty expression. But, then, what good attorney doesn’t have a poker face?
The leak and the suspicion that followed in its wake took their toll on the whole team. Speculation would settle on one person, and he’d be given the cold shoulder for a day or so. Then the onus would shift to another suspect. Chris just wouldn’t let the matter drop. Without consulting me, he’d engaged the informal assistance of Anthony Pellicano, the private eye who’d been volunteering his services to Fuhrman. He’d instructed Tony to “look for somebody close to Mark.” Which was dumb, because the last person who’d be the rat-fink was a friend of Mark’s. Far more likely, it was someone who held some grudge against Mark, or someone who was on the periphery of the case and wanted more of the limelight.
Not long afterward, Mark talked with Cheri Lewis. “Do you know Chris suspects you might be the leak?” he asked.
“Based on what?” she protested.
“I don’t know. That’s just what Chris told Pellicano.”
Cheri found Chris and confronted him head-on.
“I didn’t exactly say that,” Chris hedged. “I just told Tony to look at people who are close to Mark.”
“But that includes me,” Cheri complained. “Why on earth would you include me?”
“Well,” Chris replied with a sideways glance, “because I think you’re sleeping with him.”
“Are you out of your
mind?
” she gasped. “Why the hell would I jeopardize my career—with a married cop, no less? I demand to be given a polygraph!”
What a mess. Two of my closest friends, the people I most depended on to see this case through, were at each other’s throat. If the defense could see this, they’d be trading high fives for a solid hour. Maybe even Chris realized how out of control this thing had gotten, because he backed off. Eventually he and Cheri patched things up. But it was sickening to see deputy turn on deputy.
This may shock my critics, but I’m proud of the job I did with Mark Fuhrman—in spite of what would later reveal itself to be a time bomb ticking in my ear. I was under tremendous pressure; the structure of his direct had to be intricate and subtle. It required me to take him step-by-step through his role in the case, carefully layering beneath that superficial narrative the information that made it clear he couldn’t have framed Simpson. And I had to decide whether to bring out the Kathleen Bell allegations on direct. If I fronted them, we’d have to figure out a way to let the jury see that she wasn’t credible. And that would have to be done in a way that wouldn’t set
Mark
off. Fuhrman now had found ample grounds to mistrust everyone in the D.A.‘s office and was edgier than ever. A big part of my job became soothing him so that he wouldn’t flip out on the witness stand.
Chris’s disastrous mock cross complicated things considerably. I knew that Bailey would want to bring it up. I surely would, if I were him. It was also a fair bet that Ito would allow it. The problem was, I didn’t know for sure what had happened in the grand jury room; there was no transcript. At least, not a formal one. It was always possible that someone surreptitiously took notes and then, heaven shield us from horrors, slipped them to the defense. During a hearing after the
Newsweek
article appeared, Bailey had brought up the names of several deputies who I hadn’t even realized had been there. How he got that information, I don’t know. But it was one more indication that we had a traitor in our midst.
I called Chris into my office for a thorough debriefing. “So what exactly did you ask Fuhrman?” I said. But all Chris could remember for sure was that when he’d asked Fuhrman whether he’d used the slur in the past ten years, Fuhrman had denied it.
“No equivocation? Maybe he just couldn’t remember?” I asked hopefully.
“Nope,” Chris assured me. “He denied it completely and will not budge.”
I found it hard to believe that Mark had never uttered that word. Not after what I’d seen in the disability file. I
did
believe that he’d never said it to an African American, face-to-face. But
never?
Not over a beer? Not to his buddies? Not in private? That seemed unlikely to me. Could I get him to admit it? Judging from Chris’s experience with him, probably not. Perhaps I could get him to soften his denial to I don’t remember.” But a witness can be pushed only so far.
A prosecutor is in a tough position when she doesn’t fully believe her own witness. As I girded up for the encounter with Mark Fuhrman, I made a pact with myself: If I couldn’t shake him off his denial about the N-word, then I had an obligation to tell the jury that I had doubts about it. But I’d contrast it with that part of the testimony I was perfectly certain of: that he didn’t plant evidence.
At my request, Mark drew up a list of other cops on the scene who could help shore up his credibility. He’d looked over the Bundy crime-scene log and given us a few names, among them his partner, Brad Roberts. When I saw that name, I just shook my head and said to myself,
He doesn’t get it
.
Brad was a real good guy and a fine cop, but he couldn’t speak to the important issues of credibility. Brad had arrived at Bundy
after
Mark had, so he was in no position to attest to the fact that there had been only one glove between the bodies. Other cops who had been on the scene in advance of Fuhrman had already done that. Nor had Brad been with Mark when he’d found the glove at Rockingham.
About all Brad could say was that he, too, had seen what appeared to be a fingerprint on the gate at Bundy—not a good gambit since that putative print had never turned up. There was nothing he could offer our case, except to attest to his buddy’s being a straight-up guy. Just what we needed for this jury—a character reference from another white cop.
In preparation for his testimony, Mark showed up for our pretrial interview in the company of one of the most imposing men I’d ever seen in my life. Lieutenant Chuck Higbee, formerly of the LAPD, looked to be in his mid-fifties. He wore his hair in a buzz cut and stood about six-one. His T-shirt strained to cover his enormous shoulders and biceps. Higbee was a legend on the force, owing partly to his toughness but more to his willingness to lend a hand to cops in trouble. The LAPD had attached him to Fuhrman’s regular detail in the belief that he might exert a calming influence.
I extended my hand, and it was swallowed up by Higbee’s huge paw.
“Pleasure to meet you,” he said. The voice was smooth, his manner buoyant, in contrast to his stolid appearance. Could I count on him as an ally?
Mark hung back a bit until I offered him a seat.
“Guess it’s me and you,” I said, pulling out a yellow pad.
Mark wasn’t shy about telling me that he was glad I’d taken over. “Chris and I just couldn’t get along,” he told me. “I’d wait around for hours, then he’d come in and ask me some race questions and walk out.”
At the mention of “race questions,” his tone became hurt and angry.
“Okay,” I said. “I want to begin with where you were the day of the twelfth. Let’s account for all your movements from that point forward.”
“I was down in Palm Springs for an officers’ party,” he began. “I left there at about seven or eight P.M. Then I went home and got to bed about ten or eleven.”
I took him through the whole case. We worked for two hours straight before taking a break. Once again, I was reminded of why I’d been so impressed with Mark at the outset. This guy was really on top of the facts. I had a copy of his testimony from the preliminary hearing handy in case he needed to refresh his memory. But he never did. He had almost total recall.
Higbee was a champ. Whenever Mark ran on too long with an answer, he’d interrupt with a gentle “Hold on, Mark. Just answer the question. If you start volunteering, the defense will object and that will interrupt your testimony.” Higbee obviously knew his way around a courtroom.