Without a Doubt - [33]
That interview was one of the worst bits of police work I’d ever seen-but I kept my thoughts to myself. I couldn’t afford to alienate my chief investigators. Besides, it was spilt milk. Complaining about their ineptitude would not help me get through this case.
I had serious qualms about playing this interview tape before the grand jury. And in the months to come I would debate endlessly whether to play it at trial. It was a very risky gambit. That decision would rest largely upon the composition and sentiment of the jury. If we ended up with jurors who were star-struck by the defendant, would they be offended by his callousness toward his wife and lover, or would they be beguiled by his crude jocularity? Would they take his loss of memory and vague responses for evasion, or would they see an innocent man willing to talk to police despite his pain and exhaustion, and who got nothing but suspicion in return?
I decided to hold off.
Instead I had Phil summarize the interview. He touched briefly on Simpson’s self-pitying explanation of the beating on New Year’s, 1989, and then on what Simpson called an “altercation”-the 1993 incident that had also resulted in a 911 call. “I kicked her door or something,” Simpson had said.
That was as far as I intended to go into the issue of domestic violence for now. I’d handled DV cases before, and I knew they were very tricky. Husbands usually do not batter their wives in front of others. If a wife is killed, there is rarely an eyewitness to the murder. Or to the years of abuse that preceded it.
In this case, there was just too much we still didn’t know. Had friends ever seen them fight? Had they fought since the divorce? How recently? What were the flashpoint issues between them? I was willing to put domestic violence on the back burner for the time being-until Keith Zlomsowitch forced our hand.
Zlomsowitch, a thirtysomething restaurateur, was passed on to us by the LAPD. He claimed to have witnessed O. J. Simpson stalking and harassing his wife. Zlomsowitch lived out of state and was due to board a plane home the next day. Like it or not, David and I had to bring him in before the grand jury to preserve his testimony.
I had no idea what Keith Zlomsowitch intended to say, and didn’t get a chance to find out before he took the stand. Instead I spent our pre-interview trying to make sure he didn’t taint his testimony with hearsay evidence. Since his story involved the victim, I had to make sure that he didn’t repeat anything she might have said to him.
“Keith,” I told him, “please listen very carefully to my questions. Anything that you heard O. J. Simpson say is fair territory, but don’t tell me anything which Nicole may have said to you.”
Zlomsowitch said he understood.
So I wound up listening with innocent fascination-along with everyone else in the courtroom-as Keith told how he had met Nicole in Aspen about two years before her death. At that time, he was director of operations for the Mezzaluna restaurants’ Colorado and California operations. Nicole was legally separated from Simpson then and living at Gretna Green. In the spring of ‘92 he and Nicole became lovers, but only for about a month. During that time, Zlomsowitch said, O. J. Simpson would follow Nicole when she went out in the evening. Once Nicole and a party of friends showed up at the Mezzaluna in Beverly Hills, where Ziomsowitch was on duty. As he was sitting with her at her table, he noticed O. J. Simpson pull his car up to the parking attendant. Simpson came in and went directly to Nicole’s table. He leaned over, stared at Ziomsowitch, and said, “I’m O. J. Simpson and she’s still my wife.”
“How would you describe his tone of voice?” I asked.
“Serious, if not scary,” he said. “Just deep, threatening to the point of-yes, we were very intimidated.”
Ziomsowitch told of another incident, in April 1992, which occurred at a restaurant called Tryst. After waiting for a table, Keith, Nicole, and a few of Nicole’s friends had just sat down when Simpson appeared. This time, he walked past them and took a table about ten feet away. He pulled the chair around to face them and just stared. And stared. That freaked Ziomsowitch out.
Not long afterward, Keith went on another date with Nicole, this time to a comedy club where a friend of hers was performing. From there, they went dancing at a Hollywood club called Roxbury. They had been there less than an hour when Nicole said, “O.J. is here.”
I had to tell the jury to disregard the statement attributed to Nicole. At that point, though, they seemed to be hanging on Zlomsowitch’s every word, breathless to hear what happened next.
“We went back to Nicole’s house,” he continued. “We lit a few candles, put on a little music, poured a glass of wine, and we… began to become intimate.” After they’d had sex, Nicole told him she thought it best if he went home and she went to bed.
