Without a Doubt - [17]

Ron Goldman, “decedent 94-05135,” had been found to the north. He’d fallen or been pushed backward and was slumped against the stump of a palm tree. He was wearing blue jeans and a light cotton sweater. Lying near his right foot was a white envelope containing a pair of eyeglasses. Goldman had injuries to the neck, back, head, hands, thighs. He’d apparently put up a fierce struggle.

I absorbed the contents of these reports without emotion. Over the years, I’d learned to do that. I imagine that emergency-room physicians approach their work the same way-first treat the symptoms; only after the bleeding stops, notice the human beings. I knew with painful certainty that if I caught this case for keeps, the deaths described in these pages would become personal. And, like it or not, I would begin to grieve for the victims. Just as I’d written to Rebecca’s mother, Danna Schaeffer, once you start letting yourself feel, the misery is endless.

But at this moment, the facts were all I needed or wanted.

Cause of death? “Sharp force injuries from some kind of knife or bladed instrument.”

I hated that. With a bullet you can match striations to the barrel of a gun and be 99 percent sure that you have the murder weapon. Blade wounds are usually sloppy. The injuries often can’t be traced to a single instrument.

Murder weapon? No sign of one yet. The cops had checked trash receptacles and luggage lockers at LAX and were in the process of searching the fields around O’Hare. They apparently had a line on a German hunting knife that Simpson had bought at an establishment called Ross Cutlery close to the time of the murder. Promising, but a long shot. Barring some anomaly-like some pattern on the handle that got pressed into the victims’ skin-we would never get a 100 percent match.

Time of death? Coroner still working on that.

Suspect? I lit up a Dunhill and took a deep drag. Then, on a clean sheet of yellow notepaper, I wrote: “O. J. Simpson.” And after that, “ALIBI?”

During the first couple of days after the murders, Simpson’s attorney, Howard Weitzman, had been telling reporters that Simpson was en route to Chicago at the time of the murders. Weitzman put it at eleven o’clock. Turns out, however, that the red-eye left LAX at 11:45 P.M.

When was Nicole Brown last seen alive? I skimmed a report taken from the bar manager at Mezzaluna. She’d seen Ron Goldman leave the restaurant at about 9:30 or 9:45, on his way to Nicole’s house. Goldman had been talking to Nicole on the phone a few minutes earlier, so it was probably safe to say that she was still alive at around 9:45 P.M. O. J. Simpson’s plane is lifting off at 11:45. That’s a lot of time in between.

What else have we got here?

“FENJVES, Pablo.” One of Nicole’s neighbors is watching the Channel 5 news at ten. I like witnesses who peg their memories to the TV Guide. They’re usually reliable. At about a quarter past to half past the hour he hears a dog barking “uncontrollably.” The dog continues barking for over an hour.

Nicole Brown’s dog was a big white Akita. His name was Kato. I’d learned that… God, where did I learn it? From the evening news? Probably. Anyhow, I’d learned that Kato-related in some loony but as yet unspecified way to the houseguest, Brian Kaelin-had been wandering the neighborhood with bloody paws when another neighbor walking his own dog had found him.

If you assumed, for argument’s sake, that the hound was Nicole’s Akita and that he began to bark when his mistress was murdered, that put the time of death-conservatively speaking-somewhere around 10:15 P.M. to 10:30 P.M.

What about O. J. Simpson? Was there any time during which he was unaccounted for?

The witness who seemed to have the most intimate knowledge of Simpson’s whereabouts on June 12 was Kato Kaelin. He’d told detectives at the West L.A. Police Station that Simpson had gone to his eight-year-old daughter Sydney’s dance recital, which had begun at five P.M., then returned home at…

The officers had not noted the time.

Kato then related-in what would become a familiar litany-how he and Simpson had gone out at about 9:30 P.M. to a McDonald’s on Santa Monica Boulevard. Kato wasn’t sure when they’d gotten back. Ten P.M., he thought. That was the last he saw of Simpson until around a quarter to eleven. Kato was back in his room on the phone to a friend when he heard “a thump” against his wall. When he went out to investigate, Kato said, he saw a white limousine sitting outside the gate.

“Limo… limo… limo…”

I flipped to the police interview with the limo driver who took Simpson to LAX for his 11:45 P.M. flight to Chicago. You’ve gotta figure that the livelihood of a limo driver depends upon close attention to the clock. Allan Park, as it turned out, was extremely conscientious about time.

He’d been scheduled to be at Rockingham by 10:45 P.M., but just to be on the safe side, he arrived twenty minutes ahead of schedule. After waiting around for a bit, he rang the buzzer at 10:40. He got no answer. For the next ten minutes he continued ringing without success. At 10:50 he called his boss for instructions. He was still on the line three minutes later when he saw a white male walk from the back of the house carrying a flashlight. Obviously, Kato checking out the thumps.