The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (56 page)

“You’re going crazy, Alan,” Shapiro said.

Shapiro brought his petulance into the courtroom the following week. He made only his second appearance of the case (questioning Denise Brown was the first) when he cross-examined Philip Vannatter. Under direct examination by Darden, Lange’s partner and the co–lead detective on the case did little more than corroborate what Phillips, Lange, and Fuhrman had told the jury earlier. Shapiro did a competent job of cross-examining Vannatter, focusing on his false statements in the search-warrant affidavit for Simpson’s home and the detective’s decision to carry O.J.’s blood sample all the way from Parker Center to Simpson’s house in Brentwood. (Rather than reflecting conspiratorial behavior, Vannatter’s delivery of the blood merely illustrated his own laziness; by giving the blood to Dennis Fung at O.J.’s house, Vannatter spared
himself the headache of stopping at another location and doing the paperwork on the evidence.)

What was striking about Shapiro that day was his appearance. The lawyer conducted the questioning while wearing a blue ribbon on his lapel. The chief of the LAPD, Willie Williams, had started a campaign for citizens to wear these lapel pins in support of the police. Williams had very explicitly stated that the pins stood for defending police officers against the accusations leveled at them by O.J. Simpson’s lawyers. Shapiro never made clear just why—other than perhaps sheer perversity—he had decided to wear one. (To mock Shapiro around Cochran’s office, investigator Pat McKenna also took to wearing a blue pin—on the fly of his pants.)

Shapiro’s blue-pin gesture nearly drove his client over the top. Coming right after Shapiro attacked Bailey’s cross-examination of Fuhrman, the lapel pin was too much. Simpson gave Shapiro an ultimatum: One more stunt and you’re off the team.

This would have been Shapiro’s opportunity to flee—that is, if he had really wanted off. But in his heart Shapiro loved the attention that came to him as a result of the Simpson case—the knowing winks from celebrities, the autograph seekers. Shapiro also knew even before the trial had started that he wanted to write a book about it. He couldn’t give it all up now. Better, he decided, to spend the remainder of the trial as a guest at the Thanksgiving from hell: stuck at a table with people you can neither abide nor escape.

Marcia Clark was suffering, too. Bad enough that she was beset by the tabloids and a vengeful ex-husband; worse yet, she was watching the Simpson case become more racial morality play than murder trial. Clark had a gift for surviving on very little sleep, but so, alas, did her two sons, and they did not always choose the same five hours as each other or as their mother. Red-eyed, she would complain in the morning, “I got double-teamed again last night.” All of that, plus her incessant smoking, gave her a cold marked by a persistent, hacking cough and watery, bulging eyes. She was sick for weeks.

And then she had to deal with Kato Kaelin. His life was the antithesis of Clark’s—carefree, aimless, without plan or responsibility.
In fact, Kaelin’s cuddly image obscured a darker personal history. He may have looked and acted like a teenage slacker, but he was a lot closer to forty than twenty, and his perpetual freeloading was viewed with scorn by his ex-wife, the mother of their daughter, whom Kaelin intermittently supported. For that and any number of other reasons, Marcia Clark loathed him. But she needed him. Whatever else he did, Kaelin circumscribed O.J.’s alibi; the two men had arrived home from their famous trip to McDonald’s at about 9:40
P.M.
on June 12. Kaelin had also heard the thumps near the air conditioner, which had prompted Fuhrman’s expedition to the pathway behind the house. Clark needed Kaelin to place those facts in front of the jury.

When Kaelin took the stand—twitching, tieless, in black jeans and, of course, his unruly mop of greasy blond hair—everyone, including the usually deadpan jury, had to smile at his bravura goofiness. On the night of the murders, the jury learned, Kaelin spent from 7:45 to 8:30
P.M.
in O.J.’s Jacuzzi—a marination of almost superhuman duration. At one point, Clark asked him about the clock in Simpson’s Bentley, the vehicle they drove to McDonald’s.

“Was this a digital clock?”

“No,” Kaelin said, and he then began waving his arms in a sort of cretinous attempt to act out the hands of a watch. “It was a numbered clock. Well, I mean numerals.” He stumbled along. “A digit would be that, too, but you know what I’m saying.”

Ito finally ended the agony. “Analog,” he said.

Clark did get an interesting new fact out of the witness. It was always the prosecution’s theory that Simpson, while planning the murder, had tried to use Kaelin to set up his alibi. After Simpson returned from Sydney’s dance recital, he did something he had never done before—knocked on Kaelin’s door and said he only had hundred-dollar bills on him and needed a five to tip the skycap at the airport later that night. Kaelin didn’t have a five either, but he did give Simpson a twenty-dollar bill. Also during that visit, Simpson told Kaelin he was going to get something to eat. Had all gone according to Simpson’s plan, Kaelin would have reported this conversation to the police later. However, to Simpson’s surprise, Kaelin invited himself along. They had never gone to dinner together previously. Simpson agreed to take Kaelin, and the two men
made a quick trip together to McDonald’s—a time when, according to Kaelin, Simpson was brooding about Nicole’s inappropriately sexy attire at the recital.

The key new testimony concerned payment at the drive-through window. Kaelin had handed Simpson a twenty-dollar bill with which to pay, and after paying, Simpson had handed
all
of the change back to Kaelin. So, even though Simpson went to Kaelin’s room with the stated purpose of getting a five-dollar bill from him, he never took it even when he had the chance at McDonald’s—interesting circumstantial evidence that Simpson had tried to use Kaelin to set up an alibi for a premeditated murder.

Simpson had dictated a memo from jail advising Shapiro how to cross-examine Kaelin, urging the lawyer to establish that on the night of the murders his attitude was “just kicking back, was tired, and that was his frame of mind.” Shapiro followed his client’s advice, and Kaelin did portray Simpson’s demeanor as more matter-of-fact than tense. In the prelim, Kaelin had suggested Simpson was in a dark mood that evening, and the shift in his testimony enraged Clark. She displayed great impatience with Kaelin during his redirect testimony and even had Ito declare him a “hostile witness,” which entitled her to ask him leading questions. Ultimately, Clark did get the bare minimum she needed out of him, but her hostility, combined with Kaelin’s vapidity, made this witness ultimately a lost opportunity for the prosecution.

Not so Allan Park, who represented one of the rare occasions when fortune smiled on the prosecutors. Poised, intelligent, with a record of cellular telephone calls to corroborate his story about the night in question, the man who drove Simpson to the airport in a limousine proved a devastatingly incriminating witness.

Nervous about picking up a celebrity for the first time, Park had arrived for his 10:45
P.M.
pickup about twenty minutes early. He drove up Rockingham at about 10:25
P.M
, and—this was crucial—
Simpson’s Bronco was not there
. He made a right turn onto Ashford and waited. He rang Simpson’s bell at about 10:40
P.M.
No answer. He went around the corner to the Rockingham gate. No signs of life—and still no Bronco parked there. Park began to panic. He didn’t want Simpson to miss his 11:45
P.M.
flight to Chicago. Using the limo’s cell phone, Park called his boss. He even called
his mother. He kept ringing the bell to the house. Peering through the gate, he saw that the house was dark, except for a single light upstairs. At 10:52
P.M.
, Park’s boss called him in the limo. A minute or two later, two sights caught the driver’s eye. First, a man (Kaelin) emerged briefly from the shadows near the back of the house. Second, in front of the house, a 6-foot, 200-pound black person walked into the front door of the house from outside. Park buzzed again. For the first time, the lights went on downstairs, and O.J. Simpson answered the intercom, then opened the gate by remote control.

“I overslept,” Simpson said. “I just got out of the shower, and I’ll be down in a minute.”

Clark knew how to milk a moment in the courtroom, so she asked Simpson to rise from his seat at the defense table. “Can you tell us,” she asked Park, “if that appears to be the size of the person that you saw enter the front entrance of the house at Rockingham?”

Cochran objected. Ito overruled him. Simpson winced as if in physical pain.

“Yes, around the size,” said Park.

Simpson spent about five minutes rooting around in the now fully lit house and rushed downstairs with a few bags, Park said. Kaelin and Park helped him load them into the car, although Simpson insisted that only he touch a small black duffel bag. (Prosecutors argued that this bag held the clothes Simpson wore during the murders.) When Park drove his limo down the driveway and made a left onto Rockingham, he noticed something that was different from when he had arrived. The Rockingham curb had been empty at 10:25, but at this point, shortly after 11:00, “something was obstructing my view” on the right—apparently, the Bronco. In other words, O.J. Simpson’s Bronco was
not
parked by his house at the time of the murders, but it
was
there after Simpson materialized back at his house. It was startling evidence of Simpson’s guilt. Cochran made scarcely a whit of progress on cross-examination.

James Williams was the skycap who had checked Simpson’s bags through to Chicago at Los Angeles International Airport. In brief testimony after Park’s, Clark had Williams explain that there was a big trash can on the sidewalk in the area where Simpson got out of Park’s limousine. The implication, which Clark never stated directly
before the jury, was that Simpson might have discarded, in that trash can, the small black duffel bag he had insisted on handling back at his house.

Carl Douglas rose to cross-examine, full of bluster. Clark’s insinuations about the trash can were so vague that a more confident lawyer might simply have ignored them. But Douglas would not be deterred.

“Mr. Williams,” Douglas barked out, “you don’t recall ever seeing Mr. Simpson anywhere near that trash on June the twelfth, do you, sir?”

Williams didn’t hesitate. “Yes, he was standing near the trash can.”

Douglas looked like he had been clubbed with a two-by-four. Clark stifled a smile.

Williams stepped down on the afternoon of March 29, and on that rare happy note for her in Department 103, Marcia Clark effectively disappeared from the case. She did not examine another witness for nearly three full months, until June 21. Preoccupied with her divorce case, she rarely even made it to court on time. Over the following weeks, it was often 9:30
A.M.
or later when Clark burst through the courtroom double doors and, juggling purse, files, and food, settled noisily into her seat. The jurors, who as near prisoners had to rise daily at 5:30
A.M.
and thus had no choice about being on time, regarded Clark’s entrances with long, cold stares.

18. THE BEST TRIAL LAWYER

B
arry Scheck looked different and sounded different. His entire wardrobe of ill-fitting double-breasted suits probably cost less than just one of Cochran’s or Shapiro’s buttery ensembles. In more ways than one, Scheck spoke in a language that few in the courtroom understood. There was his accent for starters—a New York honk that never blended into the beige California soundscape—but there was also his vocabulary: the language of forensic DNA technology, with its “alleles,” “autorads” and “daughter ions.” When Scheck first turned up in the case at a handful of hearings during the summer of 1994, he and his partner, Peter Neufeld, seemed rarely even to talk to their colleagues at the defense table.

But the courtroom camera never caught the most important difference between Scheck and the other defense lawyers.