Without a Doubt - [19]

I’d always considered Weitzman a decent guy and a good attorney. I could never figure out why he didn’t insist upon being at his client’s interview with Vannatter and Lange. (Much later in the case, I found myself talking to Howard at a dinner party in West L.A. He told me that he’d cut out because the cops threatened not to talk to Simpson if he had an attorney present. That made no sense to me. What really happened, I suspect, is that Simpson’s colossal ego, combined with his confidence in his ability to sweet-talk and manipulate cops, had led him to dismiss his own attorney from the interview. Weitzman, or course, would have had no choice but to comply.)

When Weitzman dropped out of the picture, Robert Shapiro stepped right in. I was flabbergasted. O. J. Simpson’s got bucks coming out the wazoo, and this is the best he can do? Weitzman, at least, had credibility. Shapiro, to my way of thinking, wasn’t even a serious trial attorney. He had a stable of celebrity clients, Tina Sinatra, Christian Brando, and Erik Menendez among them. Still, he had a reputation around the Criminal Courts Building as a deal-maker, not a litigator. A lightweight.

One of Shapiro’s first moves was to write a letter to Vannatter and Lange saying that his client “would be willing to consider” taking a lie-detector test. The cops faxed me a copy and asked for my opinion.

Polygraphs are risky. A subject can dope himself up to pass, which is why cops don’t like to administer the test unless they’ve had the suspect in custody for a while. (Unbeknownst to me or the cops, Simpson had already taken a polygraph and scored a minus 22, meaning he failed every single question about the murder. I did not learn this until well after the verdict. Then I shook my head in amazement. It’s hard to imagine that a lawyer would be stupid enough to offer his client up for a second poly after he’d failed the first time.)

The offer seemed fishy. My advice: “Stay away from it.”

Shapiro also offered the services of his own experts-Dr. Michael Baden, director of forensic sciences for the New York State Police, and Dr. Henry Lee, director of the Connecticut State Police Forensic Science Laboratory-to “aid in the investigation.” Specifically, he was asking permission for Baden to reautopsy the bodies. “We… would like you to contact the next of kin for permission in this regard,” he wrote, “since I feel it would be inappropriate for me to contact them directly during this period of grief.”

I never answered him. But Nicole’s mother, Juditha, would later tell me that during the funeral Shapiro came up and flat-out asked her for permission to exhume the body. She was too taken aback to reply. Shapiro, no doubt realizing how unsympathetically this request would be viewed by the public, wisely let the matter drop.

After the funeral, Simpson dropped off the screen. He’d apparently attended a gathering at Nicole’s parents’ home down at Dana Point before returning to “seclusion” at Rockingham. By Thursday evening, I was climbing the walls. I called the cops to check up on him. That’s when I learned, to my amazement, that they did not have him under surveillance.

“Lack of manpower,” they said. “Besides, where’s he gonna go?”

This was too much even for Gil. He called us all into his office that evening and put the question to us: “Do we go to the grand jury or wait for the police to file?”

We all agreed the case was well past the stage of being filable. The cops were playing strictly cover-your-ass politics, which might have been fine if they’d had the luxury of working without the constant scrutiny of the press. But that wasn’t the situation we had here. The media was broadcasting every tidbit it could get its hands on, and a lot of that information was amazingly on target. Some creep with access to documents was leaking like a rusty tub.

As the evidence piled up, so did O. J. Simpson’s incentive to flee.

“What if Simpson pulls a Polanski?” I asked Gil.

Film director Roman Polanski-allowed to remain at large while under investigation on charges of statutory rape-had fled to France. Why couldn’t it happen here? The clock was ticking, and we didn’t want to be the saps who failed to move because the cops didn’t give us permission.

There were other concerns as well.

“I’m worried about losing that guy Kaelin,” I told the others. “He’s very shaky. We need his testimony-now.”

“David,” Gil said at last, “tell Terry White [our office’s grand jury adviser] to arrange to convene the jurors for Friday afternoon. We’ll hear Kaelin’s testimony.”

Finally, we were moving. It wasn’t until everyone stood up and began to leave the conference room that Frank Sundstedt finally asked the question that was uppermost in my mind.

“So, does Marcia have the case?”

I held my breath. Suddenly it felt very important to me. While part of me-probably the rational part-recognized that this would not be a smooth prosecution, I wanted to hear that Gil had the confidence to let me handle a big one.

“Marcia has the case,” he said finally, catching my eye. “But not alone. She’s going to do it with someone else.”