Without a Doubt - [49]

“I guess you know about The New Yorker,” he said glumly.

Dread started its prickly progress up my spine.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“I’m sitting here with a couple of executives from Channel Seven. They want to give me a spot to tell my side of the story. Marcia, I really think I should do this.”

Mark thought his new friends at Channel Seven were real “straight shooters,” and he handed me over to a young woman who proceeded to read to me from an advance copy of a New Yorker article by a writer named Jeffrey Toobin: “An Incendiary Defense.”

In it, a lawyer for the defense, who spoke on condition of anonymity, laid out how the Simpson team intended to portray Fuhrman as a racist rogue cop who had planted the bloody glove at Rockingham in an attempt to frame Simpson. Shapiro, I thought. It had to be Shapiro. The idea that he would even attempt such a thing was monstrous. My nausea deepened when the cheery TV producer read me quotes from Fuhrman’s psychiatric file. How out of control is this? Not only am I first hearing this information from the press, but even that account is secondhand.

How on earth did a reporter get hold of a cop’s psychiatric records? The only legal way I know of getting into an officer’s personnel file is by bringing what is called a Pitchess motion. The defense usually files one when a defendant is charged with assault on a police officer or with resisting arrest. If the defense can show that the cop had a history of such misconduct, it’s a great way to pump up the credibility of that claim. But that wasn’t an issue in this case. Fuhrman hadn’t even seen Simpson, let alone arrested him.

According to the story, Fuhrman had been an enthusiastic marine, but he had purportedly told Dr. Ronald Koegler that he had stopped enjoying his military service because “there were these Mexicans, niggers, volunteers, and they would tell me they weren’t going to do something.” He told another shrink, a Dr. John Hochman, that his work among street gangs in East L.A. had given him “the urge to kill people that upset me.”

I just couldn’t imagine Mark having said things this awful. I couldn’t believe that was how he felt. I asked the producer for the date of the report. It went back to the early eighties. That was a long time ago. Had he really believed all that, or was he just saying something outrageous to support a disability claim?

After Mark had made his urgent but vague references to this file in the hallway after his testimony, I’d made a note to follow up. A week later, it was still on my “To Do” list.

I’ve thought about that a lot in retrospect. And when I find myself beating myself up over it, I stop myself and ask, “Would history have been changed so radically if I’d run right down and filed a request for that disability file right after Mark told me about it?” Probably not. After all, it was too late to keep Mark off the stand. He’d already testified. About the only advantage I would have had was not being blindsided by this call from Channel Seven.

“Let me talk to Mark,” I said to the producer firmly. My tone must have scared her; she put him back on immediately.

“Do you believe that shit, Marcia?” he asked me.

“About planting the glove? That’s ridiculous. But it may not matter what I think once people get a load of those shrinks’ reports.”

“I never said that stuff! That’s what I was trying to tell you before. I just told him I hated gang bangers. I couldn’t stand the way they screwed over innocent people. I don’t know how he got all that shit in there.”

“Is that how you feel now?”

“Hell, no. I’m no racist, Marcia. You can ask anyone. Some of my good friends are black. Shit, ask Danette Meyers if you don’t believe me.”

I knew Danette Meyers, a striking African-American woman who was a D.A. in Santa Monica. She was smart, feisty, and nobody’s fool. She certainly wouldn’t tolerate racist crap from anyone. I needed to talk to her. But for the moment, I had to take a very, very deep breath and think this through.

What were the actual chances of Fuhrman’s shrink report coming into evidence? Pretty slim. I felt I could successfully argue that a shrink’s report from a decade before the crime in question was too ancient to be admissible. But in practical terms, what would it matter? The article, with all the attendant publicity, would ensure that anyone out there with a pulse would know about Mark’s statements to his psychiatrists. Which is exactly what Shapiro wanted when he planted his poison with a stooge holding a press card.

So the nightmare began. It was, however, not unprecedented. In countless cases involving a black defendant, the defense makes some effort to play the race card. But in this case, one would have thought that this particular odious card just wasn’t in the deck. It just seemed so patently inappropriate: O. J. Simpson lived a rich man’s life among friends who were, by and large, white. His ex-wife and current girlfriend were white. His entire legal team was white. How, I wondered, could Shapiro or Uelmen sell a racial defense?