Without a Doubt - [25]

You could have scraped me off the floor. Did he think this was a goddamned soundstage? “Simpson plea: take two!”

I watched helplessly as the judge allowed Shapiro’s outrageous request. This time Simpson, drawing on the thespian skills doubtless honed by his work in The Towering Inferno, reached down inside himself and hit the mark. He restated his plea of “Not guilty” in a clear, strong James Earl Jones cadence. Enraged, I watched as Shapiro, his comically heavy eyebrows knitted in a show of concern, patted his client on the shoulder, congratulating him on his improved performance.

And then suddenly, without warning, it was my turn to perform. Suzanne Childs grabbed me outside the courtroom. “Marcia, you’ve got to go downstairs with David and Gil,” she said. “The press is waiting.”

It wasn’t that I was a novice in front of the cameras. Bardo, you’ll recall, was one of the first cases broadcast live on Court TV, and the Hawkins case had received its share of headlines as well. I had never gotten comfortable with press conferences and interviews; the media had become such an intrusive presence in judicial proceedings that you could deplore them, but hardly ignore them.

This appearance would be particularly difficult since my own role in the case remained ambiguous.

For the past week, the media had been referring to me as “lead prosecutor.” Yet as Gil had emphasized so pointedly at Thursday night’s meeting, I was nothing of the sort. I was more of a co-prosecutor, with a partner to be named later. And so I was feeling overwhelmed and unsure of my mandate. I also felt that my energies should be focused not on this little tap dance but on the chamber upstairs where twenty-three jurors were twiddling their thumbs, waiting for me. Didn’t matter. I found myself being herded toward the cameras.

Press conferences were usually held in an antechamber off the D.A.‘s office, but this one had been slated for the much larger western lobby on the ground floor. David and I took the slower-than-weight-loss freight elevator for a few final seconds of strategizing. Suzanne Childs fussed with my hair and straightened my suit. “There’s going to be a lot of press,” she warned me. That was the under-fucking-statement of the year.

The elevator door opened onto a mob scene. The lobby was jammed wall-to-wall with bodies-broadcast androids trying to muscle out the print scruffs. Photographers were dangling from the mezzanine. I don’t think there had been a crush like this at a D.A.‘s press conference since the death of Bobby Kennedy.

For a moment I thought fright would get the best of me. That my voice might quaver. But then something remarkable happened. As I drifted toward that sea of reporters and cameras, I was enveloped by a sense of calm. All my life I’d felt sure that something would happen to me that would make my life bigger, more profound. As I walked toward the lectern, I felt I wasn’t even moving under my own power. To say that I felt a sense of destiny might be overstating it. But I do remember thinking, This is it. You were meant to do this.

“It was premeditated murder,” I heard myself saying. When one reporter asked me if the killings might be considered an act of passion, a “spontaneous meltdown,” I shook my head. “It was done with deliberation and premeditation. That is precisely what he is charged with, because that is what we will prove.”

“Are there plans to charge anyone else?” someone called.

“Mr. Simpson is charged alone,” I answered, “because he is the sole murderer.”

I’d blown it. Man, had I blown it. What I had meant to say, of course, was that Simpson was not the sole murderer, but the sole suspect. I realized my slip almost immediately, but by then I was fielding other questions and correcting my error would only call more attention to it. I was sure I’d take heat for not using the word “suspect.”

As it turned out, I did get heat-but not for that. The word that Robert Shapiro almost instantly seized upon when reporters spoke to him later that day was not “murderer,” but “sole.” The D.A.‘s office was not investigating other suspects, he charged. In fact, this was completely untrue; the investigation was still wide open.

That was no excuse for my blunder, however. I should have said that O. J. Simpson was the “prime suspect.” That first news conference alerted me to the unique perils of this case. I knew that from this point on, every word I spoke would be analyzed, scrutinized, and dissected in detail. Lesson learned. I had to move on. The grand jury was waiting.

Normally, I have weeks or even months to prepare for a grand jury. By the time a session formally convenes, I will have interviewed every witness at least once, often more. But now, the clock was ticking. We had to get the grand jury indictment within the ten days before the preliminary hearing was set to begin. If we didn’t, we’d have the same set of witnesses running between two courts to testify. You can imagine what a mess that would be. On the other hand, if we could just get that grand jury indictment, the entire matter would be settled. We could dispense with the preliminary hearing altogether. And so the need for haste.