Without a Doubt - [48]

“Well, what exactly did you say… or did he claim you said?” I asked. I was hoping this was a tempest in a teapot. It is not an uncommon thing for government employees, especially cops, to try and get out early, with their pensions and benefits intact, on a stress disability claim. They would invent stories about how they were falling apart, couldn’t handle the job, were suicidal. The claims were often nonsense. And everybody knew it. “Anyway, I don’t know how anyone can get a shrink’s files,” I told him. “I thought that stuff was privileged.”

Why did he seem so certain that the press would get to it?

“I don’t know, but I know they will,” he insisted. “I just wanted you to be prepared.”

At the time, Mark’s concern sounded to me like paranoia. I couldn’t imagine what would be in those reports that would be so awful, nor could I understand how it could all become public knowledge as easily as he implied. As for being prepared, Mark was not helping me out with specifics. Once I got clear of the prelims, I would have to get that file myself. Certainly Mark could request it. For the moment, however, I wanted reassurance on one point only.

“Mark,” I asked slowly, “is there anything in that file that would affect the truth of what you said on the witness stand? Is your testimony all accurate?”

“Oh, absolutely,” he told me. “This has nothing to do with this case at all. That stuff was a long time ago.”

I’ve been asked a million times since why I didn’t know all about Mark Fuhrman and his disability-claim file. The truth is simple. No one told me. Phil Vannatter swore to me afterward that neither he nor Tom had a clue. I believe him. Cops generally do not gossip outside their own divisions. A guy from the Wilshire Division isn’t going to tell tales about the guys from his office even to cops in another area of town.

Frankly, I didn’t know what to do with the information Mark had given me. In hindsight, of course, I should have requested the file immediately. But in the heat of the moment, I just made a mental note to check it out. To be honest, it seemed that Mark was just getting a bit panicky at being thrust into the spotlight. I certainly had no reason to think that it would turn into a major issue. At that moment, the most important thing was getting back to the courtroom, where Phil Vannatter was due on the stand. If we lost the search-and-seizure motion, all the Mark Fuhrman evidence wouldn’t matter.

Gerald Uelmen had argued for the defense. The officers, he charged, were not so much interested in notifying Simpson or attempting to stop a potential crime in progress as in conducting an illegal investigation. He wound up by quoting Justice Louis Brandeis, hinting darkly that the Fourth Amendment itself was at risk.

When I took the podium I congratulated Uelmen on his rhetoric.

“But none of… the fine quotations can change the facts as they existed on those early morning hours,” I said. “He attempts to depict in very graphic terms the search… as though a Sherman tank were being driven through the backyard and being plowed in through the doors. In fact, nothing could be farther from the truth.” I refuted his arguments point by point, walking the judge through the June 13 events as the police saw them: Their vision of the scene at Bundy. Their uncertainty about what was happening at Rockingham. The blood. The thumps of an intruder. How quickly it all happened. How, if someone had been bleeding and cops had waited for a warrant, we now would all have been calling them derelict and incompetent.

Judge Kennedy-Powell agreed. She upheld the warrant.

I felt that we were home free. We’d already established a time line, and the next step was putting Simpson at the scene of the crime. That’s where the blood expert I had worked so hard to get on our team, Greg Matheson, came in. His testimony was pure dynamite. Only 0.5 percent of the population could have left the blood in the trail at Bundy. And Simpson was one of that tiny group! It was hard evidence that linked Simpson, and very few others, to the crime scene. Of those others, how many had blood in their cars and blood on their driveways? How many knew the victim, Nicole?

On Friday, July 8, Judge Kennedy-Powell ruled. “The court has carefully considered the evidence in this case and the arguments of counsel,” she said. “There is sufficient cause to believe this defendant guilty.”

I can’t represent it as a stunning victory. It was the outcome I’d expected. And yet, in this season of the unexpected, who knew?

For the next few days, as we ramped up preparation for the trial we now knew would be held, things almost seemed normal.

And then, suddenly, the timbers collapsed beneath our feet.

It was the third weekend in July, a little over a week after the end of the prelim. I had taken the kids to play at the home of one of my fellow D.A.s, who also had children. We were in the backyard when my beeper went off. I didn’t recognize the number, but that wasn’t unusual-I had been bombarded by calls since this case began. I went inside to return the call. It was Mark Fuhrman.