Without a Doubt - [15]

“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