Without a Doubt - [18]

Simultaneously, Park saw a black man-he believed it was O. J. Simpson-walk quickly from the far side of the driveway to the front door. Park got out of the limo and rang the buzzer again. This time Simpson answered, saying, “I’m sorry, I overslept. I just got out of the shower and I’ll be down in a minute.”

I made a big mark through this with orange highlighter. Here was a crucial witness. One who could attest that up until 10:50 or so Simpson was not answering his buzzer. He could also attest that someone resembling Simpson walked into his house around 10:53 P.M. Shortly after that, Simpson answered the buzzer. O. J. Simpson, it appeared, had lied about having been in the shower!

If you believed Park’s account, it placed the suspect in his own front yard at 10:53 P.M. According to my rough calculations, Simpson had been off the radar for close to an hour. If Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman had been killed as early as 10:10, or even as late as 10:40, Simpson would have had time to drive the three miles or so from Bundy to Rockingham.

From where I was sitting, O. J. Simpson had no alibi.

And still, the police would not arrest.

By the next day, Thursday the sixteenth, the tension in our office was pushing into the red zone. I got a call from SID. The stain on the brown leather glove from Rockingham contained genetic markers from both victims, with a strong possibility that Simpson’s blood was in the mix. They’d also found Simpson’s blood on the interior of the door of his white Ford Bronco. The case was getting stronger by the hour. I’d never seen so much damning physical evidence. What were the cops waiting for? A sign from God?

If you ask the LAPD brass, they’ll probably tell you they were in no hurry to arrest because they knew exactly where the suspect was that day. In fact, most of the world knew where O. J. Simpson was that day: he was attending the funeral mass of Nicole Brown at St. Martin of Tours in Brentwood, and later, her burial in Orange County.

I caught a few minutes of news showing the Brown family at Nicole’s graveside. Simpson was there, all right. And he made a plausible show of grief. The slumping shoulders; dark glasses hinting at eyes too swollen with tears to look fellow mourners in the eye. I felt a jolt of revulsion when I saw him steering his two children toward the bier. They looked so innocent. So trusting. I had a momentary vision of them upstairs sleeping while their mother struggled with her killer.

In the months to come I would flash from from time to time on the image of those children sleeping. Sometimes a photo of them would trigger it. Sometimes it would be a document. Several weeks after the murders, I finally received a report I’d been requesting from an Officer Joan Vasquez. She’d been assigned to escort the Simpson children out back through the garage, never allowing them close to the crime scene.

Officer Vasquez reported that as the children sat in the back of the cruiser, Sydney whimpered, “Where’s my mommy?… I’m just tired and I want my mommy.”

Sydney and Justin stayed at the West L.A. station for almost five hours! Officer Vasquez, clearly a kind soul, tried to distract them with soda, candy, paper hats, paints. Over that long morning, she’d taught the children to spell their names in sign language and to play Hangman.

“I like the Power Rangers because I’m a green belt in karate,” six-year-old Justin told her. “My mommy is going to start going with me again.”

Sydney knew something was terribly wrong. At one point, she turned to her brother and said, “Justin, you know something happened to Mommy, or she would have come for us by now.”

“Why can’t Dad just come for us?” Justin asked her.

“Because he doesn’t stay with us sometimes,” she replied.

At about 6:30, their older stepsister, Arnelle, picked them up, and they left.

When I read this, I found it hard to keep back the tears. That may have been where the misery hit me in earnest. On the day of Nicole’s funeral, however, I was simply struck by how surreal it all seemed. You had Nicole’s California-perfect mother and sisters embracing and comforting O. J. Simpson. What was going on here?

I hadn’t yet met the Browns. Given the media frenzy surrounding this case, we all agreed it was proper that Gil make the first contact. During the chaos of the first week after the murders, however, he and Nicole’s father, Louis, had continually missed each other’s calls. How the Browns felt about their son-in-law now was unclear. I knew that they had suspicions. When Tom Lange called Denise Brown to tell her of her sister’s murder, the first words out of her mouth were “I knew that son of a bitch was going to do it!”

They had to know about the New Year’s Eve beating Simpson gave Nicole. And yet there he was being welcomed as a son and brother, holding the hands of his two children, weeping over the casket of their mother. Could the aura of a celebrity blind even the family of a murder victim?

During the four days since he’d been cut loose, Simpson had been the bereaved widower. He’d spent his time in seclusion, “under a doctor’s care for depression,” according to his new attorney, Robert Shapiro. Bob had surfaced when Howard Weitzman bowed out of the case citing his “personal friendship” with the suspect.