Without a Doubt - [53]

Except for Phillips, none of these guys knew Mark well. They would hardly risk their jobs, not to mention an indictment, to protect him. If their testimony was to be believed, it was a physical impossibility for Mark Fuhrman to have planted evidence.

From where I was sitting, Fuhrman was in the clear. I did my best to reassure him of that. But he was very anxious. Very paranoid. He complained about being treated like a “goddamned suspect.” He complained that the defense was targeting him, trying to destroy him. Things took a turn for the worse when the FBI found a single Caucasian hair on the glove from Rockingham. It most likely belonged to Ron Goldman, but no one could establish this conclusively. The defense asked for hair samples not only from Fuhrman, but from Phil, Tom, and Ron as well.

When I passed this request along to the cops, they went absolutely ballistic.

“We’re not going to be treated like goddamned suspects. Next they’ll want to take our blood,” they huffed.

I warned them that their refusal would look bad, but I said, “Fine. I’ll fight it.” I got myself charged up to oppose a court order for the hair samples. But before I could strap on my armor, the cops had a change of heart. Their attorneys had told them that in refusing, they’d appear to be hiding something. So they agreed to give the hair samples.

I got on the horn to Shapiro. “You won’t need a court order for the hair, Bob,” I told him. Fine, fine. Everything’s cool. I had barely gotten off the line when the cops did another flip-flop. “We’re not giving samples,” they insisted. “We’re not goddamned suspects.” Finally, they complied. And, thank God, when the results came back a few weeks down the line, nobody matched the mystery hair.

The thing that annoyed me was that I’d really gone to bat for those guys, and still they went around grousing that I was disloyal. I could already see the police distancing themselves from this case. By late September, Tom and Phil were “too busy” to do anything I asked. Finally, I just quit calling them and used our D.A. investigators instead.

Annoyed as I was with Tom and Phil, I felt very sorry for them. They’d been beaten down by a barrage of idiotic requests and make-work motions coming their way from the defense team. Shapiro had started his own “investigation” to find the real killer or killers. He’d set up an 800 number that during its first two weeks of operation drew over 250,000 calls. Most of them seemed to come from psychics, psychos, and general cranks who’d had dreams about where the knife was hidden. “Look in the sandbox.” “Look in the tree by the playhouse.” Like we hadn’t thought of that? We got our share of crank callers as well. My favorite was the one who theorized that Simpson, Nicole, and Ron had all sat around in a circle stabbing one another. Crazy stuff. But Tom and Phil had to follow up every lunatic lead or risk being harangued by the defense. After a couple of weeks of this, their expressions were hangdog, their eyes tired. I could just about tell what they were thinking: “We’re too close to retirement to take this bullshit.”

Naturally, Shapiro’s make-work motions ended up on my desk. He wanted murder logs. He wanted dispatching logs. He wanted records of all the people treated for dog bites at emergency wards. The message of this last request, I guess, was that any resident of West L.A. who’d been bitten by a dog during the late hours of Sunday, June 12, 1994, was a potential suspect in the murder of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman. That one gave me a laugh. The perpetrator of a grisly double homicide is going to walk into an emergency room to get treated for a dog bite?

As primary litigator, I shouldn’t have been saddled with these day-to-day distractions. I should have been concentrating on building what is called the case-in-chief-the essence of a presentation that proves the defendant committed the crime. But there was absolutely no time for overall planning or, indeed, any creative thought about this case.

After the prelims were over, I’d expected to have a little breathing room to sit down and organize the mountains of evidence gathering around my desk. A case like this one usually takes a year or more to come to trial. Generally, the defense wants to delay things as long as possible to give themselves time to prepare. They are also hoping that key witnesses will die or disappear in the meantime, so they’ll ask for postponement after postponement until either we or the judge says, “Enough, already. Let’s go.”

Shortly after the prelims, however, Shapiro announced that his client intended to invoke his right to a speedy trial.

When the news reached me, I just put my head on my arms and moaned. “Speedy trial,” by law, means no more than sixty days after an arraignment. It was a good strategy. In fact, I’m surprised that more defense attorneys don’t use it. What it meant was that we had to be ready in eight weeks. It was an absolutely impossible deadline.

I knew that Shapiro was no more ready than we were, but he didn’t have to prepare a case to prove his client’s innocence. All he had to do was stand by and be ready to kick us in the shins. He wouldn’t have to present any evidence until we finished our case. We were at a bigger disadvantage than he was.