Without a Doubt - [34]

The following day, Ziomsowitch came back to the house and sat with Nicole by the pool as her children swam. She complained of a stiff neck; they went into a bedroom off the swimming pool where he began to give her a neck message. After about five minutes, Zlomsowitch recalled, O. J. Simpson appeared two feet in front of them and said, “I can’t believe it… Look what you are doing. The kids are right out here by the pool.”

According to Zlomsowitch, Simpson went on to say, “I watched you last night. I can’t believe you would do that in the house. I watched you… I saw everything you did.”

Then he demanded to speak with Nicole alone. Zlomsowitch, who was still sitting on Nicole’s back at that point, eased off slowly. He told us that he didn’t want to make any sudden moves that might incite Simpson to anger.

At Nicole’s urging, Keith left her alone to talk to her estranged husband. Several minutes later, O. J. Simpson emerged from the bedroom. Keith said he was frightened, but then, to his surprise, Simpson stuck out his hand. “No hard feelings, right?” he said, shaking Zlomsowitch’s hand. “I’m a very proud man.”

As Zlomsowitch spoke, I stood there with my mouth open in amazement. O. J. Simpson was spying on his wife in the bushes while she was having sex, then, the next day, shakes the hand of her lover? That was the weirdest thing I’d ever heard. (Since then, I’ve had a chance to learn a lot more about the nature of domestic violence. Batterers only rarely blame other men. It’s usually the wife or girlfriend, “the bitch,” who takes the heat. But at the time I first heard this story, Simpson’s behavior struck me as utterly incomprehensible.)

All in all, Zlomsowitch seemed an honorable guy. He’d been a pallbearer at Nicole’s funeral, and all he seemed to want out of this was to see justice done. The fact that he had been willing to recount events favorable to Simpson, like the handshake and apology, was reassuring proof of his honesty. And he had given us valuable new evidence-including the information about the stalking episodes-of Simpson’s behavior as a jealous husband.

David was as relieved as I was that Zlomsowitch had panned out. You take a risk putting any witness on blind, and here we were throwing one after another on the stand without a vetting.

“I can’t believe it,” David groused to me as we ate lunch on the afternoon break. “We have five minutes to put this case together for the grand jury, and law professors across the country are going to take months dissecting and critiquing every word.”

Man, if he only knew how true that would be.

Actually the grand jury was going pretty well. The only real screwup was Shively. I told myself we’d been lucky to find any witnesses whose testimony had not been tainted by pretrial publicity. The important thing was to proceed step by step and not be distracted by the babble of media around us. The grand jurors had been admonished to do the same thing. “Turn off your radio, don’t turn on your TV, don’t pick up a newspaper, don’t scan headlines at a newsstand.”

Grand jurors usually take their charge very seriously, but they are also human and as curious as anyone else. On Thursday, June 23, we were wrapping up the testimony and I had already started drafting my closing statement. I’d give it on Friday, and we’d be done. I think the jurors would have had more than enough evidence to give us the indictment. Then this hysterical pace would subside, at least until the trial started, which would be months from now. Maybe I could even go back to eating dinner at home again.

These were my thoughts as I walked down the hallway toward Suzanne’s office. I checked in with her at least once a day, usually around six o’clock. We’d kick back and shoot the breeze, or in more hectic times, like these, she’d fill me in on any brushfires that needed extinguishing. That night, I could smell smoke even before I reached her door. Suzanne and a visitor, a local television reporter, were sitting in front of the TV, riveted to the screen. There wasn’t much to see, as I recall. Just the staccato sound of a tape being played. The voice of an anguished young woman filled the room.

“He broke my door. He broke the whole back door in…”

A second voice, apparently that of a 911 operator, interrupted her: “And then he left and he came back?”

“Then he came and he practically knocked my upstairs door down, but he pounded it and then he screamed and hollered and I tried to get him out of the bedroom ‘cause the kids were sleeping there…”

“What the hell is this?” I asked Suzanne.

“Nicole,” she replied without taking her eyes from the screen. “A 911 tape.”

“What 911 tape?”

I knew that there had been police reports on the New Year’s Eve of 1989 and the door-kicking incident of 1993. Both had been triggered by Nicole’s calls to 911. But I was under the impression that the audiotapes of those calls had been destroyed in a routine recycling procedure.

My impression was wrong. It turns out that the city attorney’s office, which prosecuted that ‘93 case, had kept its own copies of the tapes. The press had tracked them down and petitioned under the state Public Records Act to get them. And somehow, they had gotten those tapes released-before I had even heard that they existed.