Without a Doubt - [26]

David and I would have to grab our witnesses as we could get them. We went into court virtually cold, with only a few mounted photographic displays. These, as I look back upon them, were pretty damned impressive, considering we’d had to pull them together over the period of a couple of days.

Almost all of our first meetings with witnesses, even our expert witnesses, had to be done on the day of their appearance. David and I would usher them into the small conference room off the grand jury room, or, if there wasn’t even enough time for a fifteen-minute session, we’d huddle in the hallway. I’d do a quick rundown of the witness’s story, and try to make an instant assessment. Much of the time, really, was spent instructing them not to give any indirect evidence that might taint the record: “Only answer the question-don’t volunteer anything, don’t tell me what anybody told you,” I’d advise them. “That’s hearsay, and it’s inadmissible.”

It was a sobered, marginally more cooperative Kato Kaelin who returned to testify the morning of June 20. I led him back through the story of how he had met Nicole and convinced her to rent him the guest house. And I had him explain why, when Nicole later moved to Bundy, Simpson balked at Kato’s taking a room there. “He said it would probably not be right to be in the same house,” said Kato, who then accepted Simpson’s offer of quarters-rent-free-in the Rockingham compound.

Kato had mentioned to police that he’d witnessed a scuffle between Simpson and Nicole in the fall of 1993. Only later would I get the police report documenting that fight. A unit from West L.A. responded to a 911 call from 365 Gretna Green and found a terrified Nicole. “He’s in the back,” she told them, “He’s my ex-husband, he’s O.J.-I want him out of there!” She showed them to the back door, which, she said, Simpson had smashed. “French doors-wood frame splintered, door broken, still on hinges,” the cops wrote. Simpson was railing angrily out back in the guest house. “She’s been seeing other guys!” he yelled to the cops. The cops had recorded that Kato had apparently been trying to calm him down.

But today, Kato downplayed the episode. “I saw maybe an argument,” he admitted, twitching insistently.

“Do you recall the nature of the argument, or just that it was one. I asked.

“That it was one,” he said. He insisted that he didn’t know about any other fights.

Still, Kato’s testimony advanced us a few notches. He had admitted that Simpson was a jealous guy. Certainly jealous enough to manipulate his wife by buying her friends’ loyalty. And during my questioning about the night of the murder, Kato had substantially widened the time period during which Simpson was unaccounted for. Now the window was open between 9:45, when they’d returned from McDonald’s-which was fifteen minutes earlier than the estimate Kato had given the cops-and about 10:53, when Simpson responded to the limo driver.

Kato also gave a fuller account of the now-famous thump on the wall of his guest house, which he now recalled as a “three-thump noise.” I asked him to demonstrate what it sounded like, and he made a fist and pounded three times on the table in front of him. “Like that,” he said. It had been strong enough, he added, to tilt a picture on his wall, and scary enough to make him search the grounds for an intruder.

He would never actually say “intruder.” Back in the office when I’d tried to get him to tell me what he thought had caused the thump, he’d danced all around the question.

“Uh, uh… I don’t know what I was looking for.”

“A prowler,” I probed.

“Uh, I don’t know. Maybe.”

(Later, he would volunteer for the benefit of the plaintiffs in the civil trial that the thumps sounded like a body falling against his wall.)

On the stand, however, he did reveal, for the first time, having seen a “knapsack” lying on the grass. What happened was this. Kato had rounded the corner of the main house, flashlight in hand. He checked out the area behind the garage and, finding nothing, started back toward the front yard and then opened the gate to let the limo driver in. He noticed a golf bag on a bench by the front door. He went back to check the area behind his own room, and by the time he ventured out front again, Simpson himself was talking to the limo driver. But now Kaelin noticed something else on the grass near the driveway. It was “like, a bag,” he said, in Kato-speak. He didn’t recall the color, except to say it was dark.

“To the best of my recollection, it was like a knapsack-type bag,” he said.

That knapsack had not been found among the pieces of luggage Simpson brought back from Chicago. Could it have held evidence from the crime scene?

Not bad for a recalcitrant witness. But I was convinced even then that Kato knew a lot more than he was telling.

Outside, in the waiting room beyond the grand jury chamber, were a half-dozen prospective witnesses, crowded on benches like applicants for passports. These were Nicole’s neighbors, the limo driver, Ron Goldman’s co-workers, and our own technicians and criminalists.