Without a Doubt - [29]

It was a tough lesson for us, but a necessary one. In the Simpson case-as with no other case in history-there was an incentive for people to come up with phony stories in order to cash in on sudden fame.

In the end, the loss of Shively, thank God, was not ruinous. We had other time-line witnesses, and they turned out to be first-rate. The very best of the lot was the limo driver, Allan Park.

As usual, I got to talk with Park for only a few minutes before putting him on the stand. He struck me as a real straight shooter, well-groomed, well-spoken. He wasn’t eager to be there, but he wasn’t resisting. And unlike Kato Kaelin, he wasn’t beholden to Simpson and he had no ax to grind.

I had prepared a diagram of the Rockingham estate, and once Park was on the stand, I walked him through his story, marking where the limo was, and his line of sight, at every moment. He told the grand jury how he’d arrived at Rockingham twenty minutes before the 10:45 P.M. pickup time, and waited until 10:40 to ring the buzzer on the front gate.

“Did you notice any car parked in front?” I asked him.

“No, I did not,” he replied.

This was important, because Simpson had told police that the Bronco had been parked there since early evening.

Park recounted his repeated, futile buzzing, calling his boss, seeing Kato wave. He recalled seeing the black male crossing the lawn. In the police report, he’d pegged the time at 10:53. Since then, we’d had the opportunity to consult cell phone records, which placed the sighting of the black man at around 10:55 or 10:56 P.M. A minute later, Simpson answered the buzzer.

Park then described a bag that he had seen sitting by the Rolls. Kato, he recalled, had reached for it, but Simpson said, “No. No. That’s okay. I can get it.” This had to be the missing “knapsack” that Kato had mentioned earlier.

On the way to the airport, Park testified, Simpson kept complaining of being “hot.” He’d rolled his window down and turned on the air-conditioning. In fact, the night was unseasonably cool. Simpson then asked Park where the light was. In the rearview mirror, Park could see that Simpson was “checking his bags.” What was in those bags, I wondered. Perhaps… a murder weapon? Bloody clothes? I could see the grand jurors focusing closely on Park’s words; were they wondering the same thing?

All in all, Park’s testimony dovetailed snugly with Kato’s. And it had the effect of strengthening both.

Mezzaluna’s weekend bar manager, Karen Crawford, was up next. She testified that Nicole and her party left the restaurant between 8:30 and nine. Shortly afterward, she’d gotten a call from “the older woman in the party”-obviously Juditha Brown-saying she’d lost her glasses. Karen found them lying by the curb outside the restaurant and sealed them in an envelope.

“About five minutes later, there was another phone call,” she said. This one from Nicole.

“What time was that, approximately?” I asked.

“I would say it was between nine-thirty and nine-forty-five,” she answered. Crawford called Ron Goldman over to the phone to make arrangements to deliver the glasses. Then he left the restaurant carrying the envelope.

So where did that leave us in terms of time? Nicole and her mother spoke at around 9:45 P.M. Police had talked to the neighbor, Pablo Fenjves, who had reported being bothered by the wailing of a dog on the night of the murders. The barking, he thought, had begun between 10:15 and 10:30 P.M. By midnight the victims were dead. That’s when Sukru Boztepe and his wife, Bettina Rasmussen, came upon the body of Nicole Simpson.

Sukru and his wife were one of those Mutt-and-Jeff couples. He was large, burly, and dark, with a long ponytail. She was slender and fair, her blond hair cropped short just below her ears. The few minutes I had with Sukru before testimony were tense. He still hadn’t gotten over his discovery of a murder scene. He stammered and groped for words until finally, when he got to the point of telling how he’d first seen the body, his voice broke and he covered his eyes with one hand.

Taking the witness stand somehow seemed to calm him. He told how he’d come home to his apartment on Montana Avenue-only about six hundred feet from the crime scene-at around 11:40 P.M. He found his upstairs neighbor sitting with a big white Akita. This, though Sukru didn’t know it, was Nicole Brown’s dog, Kato. Sukru and Bettina offered to keep the dog until they could get it over to an animal shelter the following morning.

“How did it behave in your apartment?” I asked.

“He was pretty nervous, and he was going to the doors and windows, running around in the house.”

“Did you see anything unusual about his legs or his body?” I asked.

Sukru swallowed hard. “On the legs, there was blood.”

About midnight, the couple decided to take the animal out to see if they could find its owner. The animal headed toward 875 Bundy. Home.

“When we got closer to the place, he started to pull me a lot harder than normal,” Sukru said. “We were walking on the right side of Bundy and the dog stopped and turned right and looked at-”