Without a Doubt - [50]

As for the planting theory, it was more bizarre than anything I’d heard of so far. How would Shapiro account for the fact that other cops had been at the Bundy crime scene and viewed the evidence before Mark arrived?

“So what do you think about my talking to Channel Seven?” Mark asked me again.

“I want to talk to Gil about this,” I told him. “Tell them to sit tight for now.”

I don’t think I’d ever paged Gil Garcetti before. “Sorry to bother you on a weekend,” I told him when he called me back, “but there’s something you should know about.” I laid out the damage.

He had no instant panacea, and who would have expected one? This isn’t one of the situations they teach you about in law school. “Just when you think you’ve heard them all…” he finally said, his voice trailing off. “Let me think about this. I’ll call you back.”

Gil phoned me again about a half an hour later and told me to deny Mark permission to do the interview. “I think we have to keep playing by our usual rules,” he said. Mark wasn’t happy when I told him, but he agreed to go along with us. I promised him we’d talk on Monday.

Outside in the sunlit yard, the children were giggling uncontrollably. I shut out everything for the moment except the sweetness of that scene. Fortunately, they hadn’t a clue about the misery that could befall adults. I needed to regain my perspective. In the months to come I would find myself grasping at the strangest diversions to restore that precious clarity. But at the moment it was enough to join the kids on the swing set and let them push me until I could see my feet against the sky.

S trange Days

On most days Jim Morrison hovers on the periphery of my consciousness. During my last few years as a deputy, I kept a four-foot-high poster of him mounted on the wall behind my desk. Jim is onstage, wearing tight leather pants and that signature pout. As a teen, I was a big fan of the Doors, and Morrison’s expression just hooked me. Here was a guy who looked Strangeness in the eye without blinking. Well, ultimately he did blink. But it was my guess that throughout the preliminary hearings, Morrison was parked on a couch in the Valhalla of dead icons, watching CNN and grinning.

This is the strangest life I’ve ever known. It was Morrison’s line, but I found myself saying it over and over. In the days following the prelims I could not believe what was happening. What a freaking spectacle. In the space of three weeks this case had grown from a straightforward double homicide-which incidentally concerned a celebrity-into a national obsession. It was like Desert Storm with a docket number. Why is the American public such a sucker for any drama unfolding live? Will Baby Jessica make it out of that well? Will the baby killer whale make it to open sea? Will O. J. Simpson blow his brains out? The lure, I suppose, is the honesty of an uncertain outcome.

But even now, in the cold gray light of hindsight, I still don’t fully understand the appeal of this case. I know that the Bronco chase offered a powerful rush. The first hit is free… Liking the jolt it got during those two hours of unprogrammed airtime, the public came looking for another. And another. The media fed the addiction, covering every twitch in the case as a “stunning new development.” By the time we got through those preliminary hearings, nothing was ordinary. Nothing was allowed to be ordinary. It was all reported at the same hysterical, accelerating pitch.

God forbid there should be a slow news day, or the press would settle its frenetic, predatory attentions on me. No one ever came right out and asked the question on everyone’s mind: “Why’d Gil Garcetti pick a girl for this job?” The subtext, however, was clear: Criminal prosecution is guy’s work. You gotta be tough. And for a case this big you gotta be real tough. You gotta put your best man in there. Is your best man really a woman?

I’ve never been one to cry sexism. But I know the score. I know that I have to be tougher and better than the guys I work with. My attitude has always been, So what? Having to be tougher and better makes me just that, tougher and better. And I tried looking at this particular situation philosophically. I knew that anybody Gil picked for this job was going to come in for a lot of scrutiny and a whole lot of grief. But the kind of grief I got was the sort I thought had gone out of fashion with foot binding.

After that blast of exposure during the prelims, my appearance became the subject of seemingly endless speculation. (You remember, don’t you?) The circles under my eyes. When I’m tired, I tend to get circles under my eyes. People I scarcely knew would come up and say, “When are you going to do something about those circles?” And I’d tell them, “I’ll do something after the trial. I’ll get some sleep.” During the prelims, my facial features became one of the leading indicators of the prosecution’s fortunes. As in, “Marcia’s looking hagged out; the prosecution must be having a bad day.”

Once I wore a short-sleeved white dress. There was no significance to it except that it was clean, comfortable, and not something I usually wore in front of a jury because it was just a little too casual. Since we were in pretrial motions and didn’t even have a jury at that point, I could choose comfort over formality. And so, as I got off the elevator, reporters started hectoring me: “Marcia, what is the significance of the dress? What does it mean?”