Without a Doubt - [7]

“Marcia,” he told me wearily, “it’s time to cut my losses. I’m going to end after the break.”

“But Harvey,” I replied, “you can’t just leave out the rest. It’s important.”

“You can cover it in your argument,” he told me. “Barry won’t want to bully you in front of the jury. This is best for the case. You can do it.”

It’s possible Judge Revel caught the look of panic on my face, because-in an uncharacteristic gesture of thoughtfulness-she recessed court for the weekend immediately after Harvey concluded.

If anyone was going to finish our opening arguments, it would have to be me. Yet, I found myself paralyzed. Over the months, I had been ground into the dirt by the same stresses that had gotten to Harvey. My spirits were at an all-time low. I didn’t have much fight left. Above all, I was inexperienced. I’d never delivered a summation where this much was on the line.

That weekend I went to a cousin’s wedding in a suburb of L.A. I shouldn’t have even attempted a social ordeal like this. I knew perfectly well that I was physically and mentally exhausted, that I should have spent my two days preparing, or better yet, getting some sleep. Instead, I tried to put on a happy face in front of friends and family. I was doing all right until I caught sight of my mother standing off to one side. You remember how it was when you were a kid? You’d fall and scrape your elbow and you could hold in the tears-until you caught sight of your mom? Then the dam would burst.

“What’s wrong?” she asked me. That’s all it took.

I threw my arms around her, sobbing. “I can’t do it, Mom. It’s just too much. I’ll never be able to pull it together.”

This was not the kind of scene that is welcome at a wedding. And, anyway, these outbursts were not my mother’s style.

She patted me on the shoulder.

“You’ll pull it off, Marcia. You always do.”

Her words hit me like a splash of cold water. But she was right. I wasn’t a child anymore. I was an adult. A professional. I couldn’t count on my mother-or anyone else-coming to my rescue. I realized, as I stood sniffling in the reception line, that if I were to be saved, I’d have to save myself. Life’s hardest lesson.

The following week, I marched back into court and delivered the rest of the damned summation. I don’t know that I did such a brilliant job of it. Probably not. The point is, I finished. I didn’t give in to despair. The memory of that experience gave me a world of confidence during the years, and trials, to come. As Lillian Hellman once said, “Half the battle is being able to take the punishment.”

We got our conviction. Harvey transferred out to a quieter post in Santa Monica. I moved into his office and became one of five deputies at Special Trials, the unit that handles L.A. County’s high-profile cases. Over the next five years, I caught some of the cases that might ordinarily have come to Harvey. One of these was the case of People v. Robert Bardo.

The Bardo case was known more popularly as the Rebecca Schaeffer case, after its victim, a pretty twenty-one-year-old actress who played Pam Dawber’s sister on the sitcom My Sister Sam. An obsessed fan named Robert Bardo wrote Rebecca a series of letters. Unfortunately, she wrote one back. It was just a generic thank-you-for-your-interest, but it was enough to make the twisted son of a bitch think they had made some kind of connection. He hired a private investigator, who turned up Rebecca’s address. Then he showed up at her apartment with a bag containing copies of his letters to her, a paperback of The Catcher in the Rye, her publicity photo, and a gun.

When he rang the bell, Rebecca answered it herself. That caught him off guard. I guess he was expecting she had servants to sweat the small stuff. She was gracious enough to shake his hand, but then eased the door shut on him. Bardo, apparently offended by the rebuff, retreated to a nearby restaurant to collect his wits. He went into a men’s rest room to load the last chamber in his handgun. Then he went back to Rebecca’s apartment. This time, when she came down to answer the buzzer, he gestured that he wanted to give her something. For whatever reason, she opened the door. And he shot her point-blank through the heart.

Bardo was my first “celebrity” case. I didn’t ask for it; it simply landed on my desk. The deputies at Special Trials do not as a rule clamor for big assignments like hounds after hush puppies. Our office has learned from hard experience that every celebrity case carries with it the potential for disaster. Though it can be a career-maker, as the Manson case was for Vincent Bugliosi, it is just as likely to be a sinkhole. And the more titanic the celebrity, the deeper the potential drop.

When Bardo landed on my desk, I’d never really had any experience with the press. To me, the attention this case attracted only created annoying complications. The trial was covered, gavel-to-gavel, by a new cable network called Court TV. In the Bardo case, the fact that hearings were broadcast seemed to have little impact on the proceedings. The real problems began when TV and print reporters “interviewed” witnesses, causing several to drop out of sight before