I just couldn’t imagine Mark having said things this awful. I couldn’t believe that was how he felt. I asked the producer for the date of the report. It went back to the early eighties. That was a long time ago. Had he really believed all that, or was he just saying something outrageous to support a disability claim?
After Mark had made his urgent but vague references to this file in the hallway after his testimony, I’d made a note to follow up. A week later, it was still on my “To Do” list.
I’ve thought about that a lot in retrospect. And when I find myself beating myself up over it, I stop myself and ask, “Would history have been changed so radically if I’d run right down and filed a request for that disability file right after Mark told me about it?” Probably not. After all, it was too late to keep Mark off the stand. He’d already testified. About the only advantage I would have had was not being blindsided by this call from Channel Seven.
“Let me talk to Mark,” I said to the producer firmly. My tone must have scared her; she put him back on immediately.
“Do you believe that shit, Marcia?” he asked me.
“About planting the glove? That’s ridiculous. But it may not matter what I think once people get a load of those shrinks’ reports.”
“I never said that stuff! That’s what I was trying to tell you before. I just told him I hated gang bangers. I couldn’t stand the way they screwed over innocent people. I don’t know how he got all that shit in there.”
“Is that how you feel now?”
“Hell, no. I’m no racist, Marcia. You can ask anyone. Some of my good friends are black. Shit, ask Danette Meyers if you don’t believe me.”
I knew Danette Meyers, a striking African-American woman who was a D.A. in Santa Monica. She was smart, feisty, and nobody’s fool. She certainly wouldn’t tolerate racist crap from anyone. I needed to talk to her. But for the moment, I had to take a very, very deep breath and think this through.
What were the actual chances of Fuhrman’s shrink report coming into evidence? Pretty slim. I felt I could successfully argue that a shrink’s report from a decade before the crime in question was too ancient to be admissible. But in practical terms, what would it matter? The article, with all the attendant publicity, would ensure that anyone out there with a pulse would know about Mark’s statements to his psychiatrists. Which is exactly what Shapiro wanted when he planted his poison with a stooge holding a press card.
So the nightmare began. It was, however, not unprecedented. In countless cases involving a black defendant, the defense makes some effort to play the race card. But in this case, one would have thought that this particular odious card just wasn’t in the deck. It just seemed so patently inappropriate: O. J. Simpson lived a rich man’s life among friends who were, by and large, white. His ex-wife and current girlfriend were white. His entire legal team was white. How, I wondered, could Shapiro or Uelmen sell a racial defense?
As for the planting theory, it was more bizarre than anything I’d heard of so far. How would Shapiro account for the fact that other cops had been at the Bundy crime scene and viewed the evidence before Mark arrived?
“So what do you think about my talking to Channel Seven?” Mark asked me again.
“I want to talk to Gil about this,” I told him. “Tell them to sit tight for now.”
I don’t think I’d ever paged Gil Garcetti before. “Sorry to bother you on a weekend,” I told him when he called me back, “but there’s something you should know about.” I laid out the damage.
He had no instant panacea, and who would have expected one? This isn’t one of the situations they teach you about in law school. “Just when you think you’ve heard them all…” he finally said, his voice trailing off. “Let me think about this. I’ll call you back.”
Gil phoned me again about a half an hour later and told me to deny Mark permission to do the interview. “I think we have to keep playing by our usual rules,” he said. Mark wasn’t happy when I told him, but he agreed to go along with us. I promised him we’d talk on Monday.
Outside in the sunlit yard, the children were giggling uncontrollably. I shut out everything for the moment except the sweetness of that scene. Fortunately, they hadn’t a clue about the misery that could befall adults. I needed to regain my perspective. In the months to come I would find myself grasping at the strangest diversions to restore that precious clarity. But at the moment it was enough to join the kids on the swing set and let them push me until I could see my feet against the sky.
Strange Days
On most days Jim Morrison hovers on the periphery of my consciousness. During my last few years as a deputy, I kept a four-foot-high poster of him mounted on the wall behind my desk. Jim is onstage, wearing tight leather pants and that signature pout. As a teen, I was a big fan of the Doors, and Morrison’s expression just hooked me. Here was a guy who looked Strangeness in the eye without blinking. Well, ultimately he did blink. But it was my guess that throughout the preliminary hearings, Morrison was parked on a couch in the Valhalla of dead icons, watching CNN and grinning.
This is the strangest life I’ve ever known. It was Morrison’s line, but I found myself saying it over and over. In the days following the prelims I could not believe what was happening. What a freaking spectacle. In the space of three weeks this case had grown from a straightforward double homicide-which incidentally concerned a celebrity-into a national obsession. It was like Desert Storm with a docket number. Why is the American public such a sucker for any drama unfolding live? Will Baby Jessica make it out of that well? Will the baby killer whale make it to open sea? Will O. J. Simpson blow his brains out? The lure, I suppose, is the honesty of an uncertain outcome.
But even now, in the cold gray light of hindsight, I still don’t fully understand the appeal of this case. I know that the Bronco chase offered a powerful rush. The first hit is free… Liking the jolt it got during those two hours of unprogrammed airtime, the public came looking for another. And another. The media fed the addiction, covering every twitch in the case as a “stunning new development.” By the time we got through those preliminary hearings, nothing was ordinary. Nothing was allowed to be ordinary. It was all reported at the same hysterical, accelerating pitch.
God forbid there should be a slow news day, or the press would settle its frenetic, predatory attentions on me. No one ever came right out and asked the question on everyone’s mind: “Why’d Gil Garcetti pick a girl for this job?” The subtext, however, was clear: Criminal prosecution is guy’s work. You gotta be tough. And for a case this big you gotta be real tough. You gotta put your best man in there. Is your best man really a woman?
I’ve never been one to cry sexism. But I know the score. I know that I have to be tougher and better than the guys I work with. My attitude has always been, So what? Having to be tougher and better makes me just that, tougher and better. And I tried looking at this particular situation philosophically. I knew that anybody Gil picked for this job was going to come in for a lot of scrutiny and a whole lot of grief. But the kind of grief I got was the sort I thought had gone out of fashion with foot binding.
After that blast of exposure during the prelims, my appearance became the subject of seemingly endless speculation. (You remember, don’t you?) The circles under my eyes. When I’m tired, I tend to get circles under my eyes. People I scarcely knew would come up and say, “When are you going to do something about those circles?” And I’d tell them, “I’ll do something after the trial. I’ll get some sleep.” During the prelims, my facial features became one of the leading indicators of the prosecution’s fortunes. As in, “Marcia’s looking hagged out; the prosecution must be having a bad day.”