Without a Doubt - [11]

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.