Chris finally prevailed personally upon her publisher, Michael Viner, to bring Resnick in out of the cold. Viner’s motives, I suspected, were not solely to advance the interests of justice. Every time a witness marched out of the Criminal Courts Building, it was a big news day. That meant publicity for the book, the author, and the publisher. But I was willing to play this game if it would advance our cause.
They made quite a pair, Resnick and Viner. He was a pale, almost rabbinical-looking man. Faye, to my surprise, had metamorphosed from the trembling, fetal creature who’d visited my office three months earlier into a burnished vamp whose months in New England seemed actually to have enhanced her tan. She bore right down on me, all hugs and kisses, far more expansive and relaxed than during our first meeting. Maybe it was because she felt having her book out there before the public was, as I had suggested, a sort of insurance policy. If Faye got knocked off, I guess we’d pretty much know where to start looking.
The first time we’d met, we’d both been relatively anonymous. Now, for the moment at least, we were two of the most visible women in America. Maybe in Faye’s peculiar worldview, this created some kind of bond between us. Whatever the reason, this time around, she was full of stories. She told how she and Nicole had met in 1990 but did not hit it off until one day at a sunbathing party where they discovered that they had both banged the same guy, Joseph Perulli. Joseph had apparently broken off his relationship with Nicole, and Faye was trying to give her tips on how to win him back.
“I liked her immediately once… once she wasn’t seeing him anymore,” Faye whispered, in her sultry contralto. “But now I want to help her, right?”
“Go figure,” I interjected dryly.
Faye claimed she did not know about O.J.‘s New Year’s Eve attack until she and Nicole went into group therapy in February 1993. The therapist asked Nicole to tell the story, and she ran from the room crying. Afterward, Faye engaged in a little Tough Love; she told Nicole, “If you can’t confront any questions at all, you’re never going to make headway.” “Nicole wanted to get rid of all that bad stuff but she was afraid to,” Faye told us. “O.J. would get so mad at her that she would be frightened to do it.”
Nicole made so much “progress” in her therapy that she decided to beg O.J. to come back so that they could mend their marriage. In retrospect, a terrible mistake. In early May 1994, Nicole was supposedly still talking about reconciliation with O.J., but she also told Faye that she was having an affair with Marcus Allen (which Allen later denied).
Faye looked at me solemnly and said, “I believe that Nicole thought she was going to die, and I think she was doing some really wild things. I think she was out of control. Nicole had done some strange things in the last month of her life.”
“Like?”
“Telling our friend Cora Fischman about her and I being together. I thought that was strange, which she promised me she wouldn’t tell anybody. Because I’m not bisexual, neither is she. And it was something that just happened one night and she promised me she would never tell anybody about it. And for her to tell, I couldn’t imagine Nicole doing that. For her to see Marcus, I couldn’t imagine Nicole doing that. Those two things, I-I can’t-I can only see that they’re desperate, they’re an act of a desperate woman thinking she’s going to die.”
Faye also confirmed one of my earlier hunches: that the IRS letter had made Nicole furious enough to walk out for good. “She realized that he didn’t care about the kids,” Faye told me. “The children meant nothing to him. [Nicole] said, ‘If he’s going to kill me, let him get it over with.’ “
Faye herself had apparently fallen upon hard times and was living at Nicole’s condo. She told me how she’d gotten increasingly freaked by O.J.‘s behavior. He’d called Faye one day in April demanding to know why Nicole wasn’t returning his calls. “If you don’t tell me why she’s not calling,” he said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do.” She believed his words were a death threat to Nicole.
It turns out that Faye was doing a lot of coke and Valium about then. Nicole organized an intervention to get her into a rehab clinic in Marina del Rey. Faye checked in on June 9. Three days later, at nine o’clock on June 12, she called Nicole from a pay phone at the clinic, asking her how the recital had gone.
“That was the best mood I have ever heard her in. She sounded so resolved and so clear and so strong, felt so good about what she had done. She felt good about the fact that her family was behind her at this time.”
Her parents’ support meant a lot to Nicole, Faye said. Nicole confided in her that “the only reason she stayed with O.J. after that [the New Year’s Eve incident] was because of her family. They needed his support financially. And when she told them that she wanted to leave him, they made her feel so-so bad about it, and they basically did not accept her leaving him. And to me that was one of the biggest secrets of all. I mean, I was devastated by that. It’s like their daughter is a throwaway daughter.”
Chris and I both believed that Faye was telling the truth about Simpson’s abuse of Nicole. He hit the trail and checked out various sources, all of whom ended up confirming her accounts. A nurse at the rehab clinic confirmed that Faye really had called Nicole the night of the murders. Various members of the Brentwood crowd-Candace Garvey, Bruce and Kris Jenner-also verified Faye’s account of O. J. Simpson’s obsessive, abusive relationship with his wife.
Chris had several follow-up interviews with Faye. She flirted outrageously with him. Her pet name for him was “D’Artagnan.” A Musketeer? Go figure. She would leave throaty messages on his answering machine: “D’Artagnan, I need to speak with you.” He’d play them for me when he got to work.
Anyway, Chris liked her. He was all for putting her on the witness stand. But I held back. As I’ve said before, Faye had a very serious downside. There was her drug problem, for starters. On top of that we’d heard that Robert Shapiro professed to have witnesses to an ongoing lesbian relationship between Faye and Nicole. These “witnesses” could supposedly describe the lovemaking positions both women had assumed during these encounters. Moreover, while on her book tour, Faye had drawn fire from black women in the audience of a national talk show. To them, she was just one more white bitch trying to bring down O. J. Simpson. If the jury had it in for me, you can imagine how’d they’d respond to her.
In the end, I prevailed. We didn’t call Faye, and I’m sure that it didn’t break her heart. Faye’s information supplied the connective material to turn our collection of isolated police reports about Nicole’s deeply troubled marriage into a coherent history. It gave us a badly needed boost.
And now, I thought, if we could just reach the Browns.
This is the part that gets weird for me. It wasn’t for lack of desire, but I was never able to get as close to the victims’ families in this case as I would have liked. I felt enormous sympathy for the Browns and the Goldmans. And I felt a special rapport with Kim Goldman. Her grief, never far from the surface, simply broke my heart. A brother murdered! I thought of my own brother, Jon, the person closest in the world to me. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to lose him.
Whenever I called the Goldmans’ home, whoever answered the phone, usually Fred or Patti, would tell the other to pick up the extension and we’d all talk. I’d fill them in on the latest news and check to see how they were holding up. Patti never failed to ask about my health and my children. Same for Fred. I found that remarkable, especially in light of the loss of their own child. Such incredibly wonderful people.