Without a Doubt - [52]

It usually takes weeks to get a permit, but Schram and his buddies had one laminated and in my hands before I left the range. On the way out, Schram fixed me with his steady blue eyes. “I want this in your, purse at all times,” he told me. “It won’t do you any good in your desk drawer.”

I kept forgetting it. It was a form of denial on my part, I suppose. If I wasn’t in danger, I wouldn’t need a weapon. Right? Schram didn’t buy this pretzel logic. If I happened to pass the lieutenant on the way out of the office, he’d hold me up for a random inspection. If he didn’t find the Smith & Wesson in my purse, he’d send me back to my office to get it. I finally got used to carrying that gun as a matter of habit.

I’d gotten word through the rumor mill that one of the networks was having me tailed, that the National Enquirer was having me tailed, that O. J. Simpson’s private investigators were having me tailed. All of them were presumably competing for lane space with my own security detail. Every time I climbed into my car I felt like Goldie Hawn in The Sugarland Express.

It was no longer possible for me to walk down the hall to the D.A.‘s office and take a meeting with Gil Garcetti. Now, the sight of me opening those glass doors excited too much speculation. So Gil showed me a back way. There’s an entrance on the north side of the building that lets you circumvent the reception area and enter the D.A.‘s office unobserved. I’d spent ten years in this place and nobody had ever bothered to tell me about it.

Used to be that Bill and I could jump in a car and go visit a witness. No fuss. No armed escort. Now, we couldn’t leave the CCB together without staging a major military operation. One day, Bill and I had to interview a witness named Danielle Rose. She was a friend of Kato’s girlfriend, Rachel Ferrara. Danielle had called us about a conversation she’d had with Rachel a day or two after the murders. According to Rachel, Kato had seen Simpson outside the house within moments of hearing the thumps on his wall. It was hearsay on hearsay, but we still had to check it out.

Danielle was nervous about coming to our office. She’d seen how reporters pounced on anyone they suspected had been speaking to the prosecution, and she wanted no part of it. This distinguished her from any number of wannabe starlets who’d had even fleeting contact with any of the main players in the case and now were coming out of the woodwork and selling their stories to evening newsmagazines. This one wanted anonymity. Cool. We came up with a plan to meet her in an alley a short distance from the apartment of one of her friends.

Bill and I got into Phil Vannatter’s car, D.A. investigators flanking us before and behind. As we drove, Phil kept in radio contact with our escort. So far, so good. No tail spotted. I was beginning to think that we could all use a few weeks in therapy to lose the paranoia. No sooner had we pulled into the alley, however, than Phil pointed off to the left. Two men in sunglasses sat in a parked nuthin’-special car. One of the investigators checked them out-sure enough, they were reporters from a local TV station. He shooed them off like cowbirds.

We didn’t mention this little episode to Danielle. Poor kid was freaked out enough as it was. And all for nothing. As she stammered through her story it became clear to me that she might have simply misunderstood Rachel, whose main concern was not what Kato had done when, but that he had dragged her into this mess at all.

On the drive home, I was still boiling about the leak. What had alerted the station? A phone tap? A comment overheard in the hall? We never did find out. But after that we doubled our precautions. No more talking on cell phones. We had our cars and offices swept for bugs. From that point on, there was no more talking about the case in public. Not in the halls, not in the elevators, not even in the johns.

Meanwhile, the Fuhrman controversy showed no signs of slackening. It irritated the hell out of me to be drawn off the preparation of the case by diversionary tactics of the defense. But I also knew we’d never get back on track until we faced the problem head-on.

It did not seem logical to me that Fuhrman would try to frame O. J. Simpson with as little information as he’d had at the time he’d found the glove. How, for instance, could he have known that Simpson didn’t have an airtight alibi for the time the murders occurred? How could he know whether an eyewitness, or even an ear witness, might come forward to identify someone else? What if someone stepped forward to confess? How could he know whether Kato had already gone far enough down the south pathway to see the area where the glove was found? Did Fuhrman even have the opportunity to move evidence?

I’d asked the LAPD for a list of all of the officers who’d arrived at Bundy before Mark. There were sixteen of them. Only four had gotten beyond the perimeter to see the evidence near the bodies: Officer Robert Riske, first officer on the scene. Lieutenant Frank Spangler, one of the highest-ranking officers supervising the scene. Sergeant David Rossi, in charge of the patrol officers. And Detective Ron Phillips, Fuhrman’s supervisor, who arrived at precisely the same time Mark did. I interviewed those four men personally, and each was very clear about one thing: there had been one glove, and one glove only, lying between the bodies.