The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson - [8]
Nicole called McKenna on Saturday night to ask when the FOR LEASE sign would go up in front of her condo. “She was anxious to have it up,” McKenna said, “because she wanted to get on with her life, but also because she wanted O.J. to see it, to say ‘Screw you’ to him.” As it turned out, McKenna was then in the process of switching real estate agencies, so she couldn’t locate an appropriate sign until the following day, Sunday, June 12. At about seven that evening, a colleague from McKenna’s new office dropped off a sign with her just as she was leaving for a dinner party. McKenna figured she would put it up at Nicole’s afterward. She put her hammer in the car.
McKenna’s dinner party was in Beverly Hills, so as she was driving home she had to decide which way she was going to turn on Bundy. “At the time,” McKenna remembered later, “I lived north on Bundy and she lived south. I remember looking at the clock in my car when I hit the intersection of Bundy and San Vicente. It was 10:15. It would have taken me five minutes to get to her house. I said, ‘Screw it, I’ll do it tomorrow.’ ”
On the night of June 12, 1994, Pablo Fenjves watched the top of the ten o’clock news with his wife, Jai, a costume designer, in their third-floor master bedroom. They lived about sixty yards north of Nicole Simpson’s condominium. Both Nicole’s and Fenjves’s backdoors opened onto the same alley, though they had never met. Nicole had moved into the neighborhood shortly after Fenjves. In fact, 875 South Bundy was on the market when Fenjves was looking at houses, and he had walked through it during his search. He had found it too narrow, too expensive, and too noisy, which were common opinions about the property.
Pablo Fenjves was forty-one years old in 1994 and starting to reap the benefits of many years’ toil in Hollywood. His parents, Holocaust survivors from Hungary, emigrated to Venezuela, and young Pablo went to Illinois for college and to Canada for a brief apprenticeship in journalism. From Montreal, he ventured to Florida in the late 1970s, where he went to work writing “human interest stories” for the National Enquirer. Even though the job brought him the opportunity to interview such notables as the world’s oldest Siamese twins (they were in their twenties and employed in a traveling freak show), Fenjves quickly soured on the Enquirer and left after about a year. He has since made his living writing screenplays.
Fenjves’s progress in the business was slow but steady. In 1986, he moved from the East Coast to an apartment in Santa Monica. There he began a long and fairly prosperous interlude in a sort of shadow Hollywood; he sold script after script, and they all languished unproduced, yet still he sold more scripts. Finally, as the 1990s began, his luck changed. The turning point came, at least in part, courtesy of the surefire topic of interracial romance. HBO Showcase bought (and made) The Affair, the story of a black soldier who falls in love with a white woman during World War II. Fenjves bought a BMW and a Mercedes and decided to move to Brentwood. Since Pablo Fenjves would spend “only” about half a million dollars on a home, he was pretty much limited to south of Sunset.
Sometime after 10:00 on the night of June 12, Pablo and Jai began to hear the sound of a dog barking. The actual time, Pablo later testified, was right around 10:15. A few moments later, Pablo walked downstairs to his study to fiddle with a script called The Last Bachelor, a romantic comedy about an amorous baseball player. Shortly before 11:00, he walked back up to the bedroom, where his wife had been watching Dynasty: The Reunion. The credits on the show were rolling, and the barking had still not stopped. Fenjves remembered the sound because it was not the ordinary chatter of a neighborhood dog.
The sound of the dog, Fenjves later testified, was like “a plaintive wail-sounded like a, you know, very unhappy animal.” Seven months before the murders, Fenjves had written a script called Frame-Up, a police drama that became a television movie on the USA Network. In the first scene of the screenplay, Fenjves wrote, “We hear the plaintive wail of a police siren.” In the best Hollywood tradition, Fenjves plagiarized, if only from himself, a line that had brought him a brief moment of renown.
Pablo Fenjves was not Nicole’s only neighbor who heard her grief-stricken Akita in the moments after 10:15. The “dog witnesses,” as they came to be known, reflected the peculiar nature of the neighborhood. Almost none of the residents, for example, had what most Americans would describe as a job-that is, a place of employment where one had to appear five days a week, eight hours a day. Rather, Nicole’s neighbors made their living as freelancers, mostly in the entertainment business-screenwriters, designers, and the like-and all were prowling for the big score that would catapult them north of Sunset. Many owned dogs, and in the atomized, car-oriented culture of Los Angeles, they tended to know only those neighbors who likewise walked their dogs. Finally, virtually every person in and around 875 South Bundy on the night of June 12 answered one question the same way: What were they doing at shortly after 10:00 P.M.? Watching television.
