Without a Doubt - [51]

What does it mean? The dress means nothing, but the fact that you have to ask means a lot. It means there sure as hell is such a thing as pink coverage versus blue coverage. It means “She may be the CEO of General Motors, boys, but she’s still a woman.”

The debate inevitably descended to the length of my skirts. Drive-time radio jocks wore themselves out complaining that my hems were “too short.” Let me explain something here. When I’m on my own time I wear my skirts any damned length I please. And that is usually about three inches above the knee. It’s not an attempt at seduction. It’s not the Dance of the Seven Veils. But when it comes to what I wear in front of a jury, I have always been conservative. I wear what I consider to be smart, lawyerly suits with hems slightly above the knee. Now, if you check the hems of the other female D.A.s, I suspect you’ll find a number of them at precisely the same length. (But, of course, while the controversy over my skirts was at full boil, none of them came forward to say “Check out my hems.”)

The real problem was that I was overexposed. During a single week, my image had been beamed for some seventy hours into the living rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms, and kitchens of strangers. That’s about five years’ worth of Seinfeld episodes in seven days! No wonder strangers felt a false sense of intimacy with me.

One day after work I swung by the grocery store to pick up some ground turkey and green peppers for dinner. By the time I got to the checkout counter, my cart was loaded with stuff, including the obligatory Popsicles and Cheerios. The girl at the counter looked up at me and said, “What are you doing here?”

Meaning, “Big shot like you must certainly have people to do this kind of stuff for you.”

I felt like telling her, “Look, honey. I live in a rat hole with a leaky bedroom. My car window is busted. I can’t pay the mortgage. My nanny doesn’t drive. Who do you suppose runs my errands?”

But I didn’t. Some kid who makes $4.25 an hour bagging groceries probably doesn’t care about the distinction between Princess Diana and a public servant who stumbled into the spotlight.

Like it or not, I was a celebrity. I guess I was getting a taste of what drove my man Morrison nuts. Everywhere I turned, people seemed to be grabbing at me. They felt that they were entitled to interrupt me, no matter what I was doing. When I went out to dinner, they’d come over to my table. Or worse, they’d make that cute gesture of sending a waiter over with a glass of o.j. I’d try to be gracious, but I’m not an extrovert by nature. And I found dealing with these flat-footed overtures very depleting.

Everywhere I looked, there were hands. Hands wanting to shake mine. Hands wanting autographs. Hands wanting to touch me. It was getting to me. I had a recurrent waking nightmare that one of those hands reaching out to me, slow motion, held a gun pointed at my heart.

This was not some irrational, free-floating anxiety. During the Rebecca Schaeffer case, I’d learned about the pathology of obsession from Gavin de Becker, a security consultant and perhaps the world’s wisest authority on the psychology of stalking. Gavin helped me develop a psychological profile of Rebecca’s killer. When the Simpson case broke, I didn’t even have to call him. He phoned me to see if I was okay.

“Marcia”-Gavin’s mellifluous voice is unmistakable-“have you been receiving mail?”

I had, in fact-by the box load. I hadn’t read it. I didn’t have the time. Gavin offered to sort through it for me to see if there was anyone to watch out for. He also told me how to mitigate the risk factor in signing autographs: “Never sign more than your name,” he warned. Even a meaningless expression like “sincerely” could give encouragement to an unbalanced fan. If a situation seemed the least bit weird-a guy looking twitchy, avoiding eye contact-I should get the hell outta there.

“Kind of ironic, huh, Gavin,” I told him. “Whoever thought I’d be on the receiving end of this bullshit?”

There were others looking after me, too-like Lieutenant Gary Schram, a big, barrel-chested ex-marine who was in charge of the D.A.‘s investigators. Schram was this sweet, wonderful guy who worried over me constantly. He assigned his men to follow me around. If I was out on the freeway, I’d look up and see one of them in my rearview mirror. If I changed lanes without thinking and lost my escort, my car phone would scream almost instantly. It would be Schram, chewing me out for my carelessness.

At Gary’s insistence, I began carrying a handgun, a.38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. I wasn’t opposed to the idea in principle; a lot of criminal prosecutors carry guns. And I was certainly no greenhorn when it came to firearms. My ex-husband had been a gun enthusiast, and we’d gone out to the range together now and then for some target practice. Since I’d been living alone, in fact, I’d kept a handgun on the upper shelf of my kitchen cabinet.

Having one in your purse, though, is a whole different trip. It requires a CCW, a permit to carry. Schram took me down to the police firing range in the hills behind Glendale. The old cop who ran the range gave me a quick refresher on cleaning and loading procedures. We reviewed safety tips that I already knew. I fired a few shots at a silhouette to demonstrate I could aim at Van Nuys without taking out Long Beach.