“Now there’s a candidate for contempt,” I muttered under my breath.
Lance found himself in a game of chicken, and I think he knew he’d blink before I would. He began to ease his foot off the accelerator. “Miss Clark,” he said, “all levity aside, I’ve offered you now three times an opportunity to end this right now. This is very simple. And perhaps if Mr. Darden had the opportunity to review the transcript that I have before me, he would see the wisdom of that.”
Seeing the transcript would not only help us assess our chances if we challenged the contempt order, but, much more important, it might give us a half-respectable way out of this mess.
“Why don’t we review the transcript, Your Honor?” I agreed.
We went to sidebar. Bailey joined us there. “Apologize, Chris,” he advised him sincerely. “It’s not worth your bar ticket.”
I had to agree. I was looking over the transcript and I didn’t like our chances. We had taken this far enough.
“It ain’t worth it, G,” I told him.
I think by this time Chris’s anger had cooled. He seemed grateful for a way out.
“It appears that the court is correct, that perhaps my comments may have been or are somewhat inappropriate,” he told Ito. “I apologize to the court. I meant no disrespect…”
When Ito returned the apology, I was relieved, but also a little disgusted. After all, it was Johnnie who’d behaved outrageously. But it was Chris who’d had to fall on his sword.
On my way home that night, I paged Chris from my car phone. A few minutes later he called me back.
“Clark, what do you want?” he yelled. I could hear the noise of the freeway behind him. He was on his car phone, too.
“Hey, is that any way to talk to your attorney?” I joked.
“Well, my attorney sold me down the river, remember? Have I told you you’re fired?”
“Well, you can’t fire me-I quit! Besides, you haven’t paid me. That’s the last time I take on a criminal defendant without a retainer.”
“Pay you? Pay you? I’ll pay you, Clark. You’ll find a bag of ‘Snack Ems’ on your chair in the morning. Consider yourself overpaid.”
By now we were both convulsed with laughter. Then Chris sobered up and in a sweet, almost childlike way asked, “Did you really mean that?”
“Mean what?”
“Taking off your jewelry and all that?”
“Of course I did,” I told him. “You know I got your back, G.”
Johnnie was still hammering away at Tom Lange when the defense team dropped another bombshell on us. Rosa Lopez, the mystery alibi witness to whom Johnnie had alluded several times in his opening statement, was about to flee the country. He had to get her into court. Now!
The first we’d heard of this shadowy figure was a two-page statement the defense had given us only minutes before Johnnie’s opening. Lopez’s statement was, to be sure, short on details. She was a Salvadoran maid who worked for Simpson’s neighbors. Rosa claimed to have been out walking her employers’ dog at around ten, and reported seeing Simpson’s Bronco parked by the curb at 10:15. Since that was about the time the dog started barking at Bundy, her story, if true, would blow a big hole in our case.
But was her story true? We strongly suspected that it was not. First tip-off: Lopez had not offered this information to police, who canvassed the neighborhood immediately after the murders. Then we did a little digging into Lopez and discovered that she had been friendly with Simpson’s Israeli housekeeper, Michelle.
Michelle was, by all accounts, fanatically loyal to the defendant. And she’d had a rocky history with Nicole. When the cops were called to the Simpson house the night of the New Year’s Eve argument, it was Michelle who’d tried at first to persuade them to go away. Then she’d actually come out to the police cruiser, where Nicole had taken refuge, and tried to pull her back into the house.
Later on, Michelle had locked horns with Nicole in an incident involving the kids. Sydney and Justin had tracked dirt into the house. Michelle scolded them, and that provoked an argument with Nicole-who slapped her. So there was no question as to where Michelle’s loyalties lay.
According to the story the defense was handing out, Rosa had told Michelle about seeing the Bronco at the curb, and Michelle insisted that she get in touch with Simpson’s attorneys. Think about this for a moment. Lopez’s statement comes in suspiciously late. It includes exactly one firm detail-which just happens to be a key exoneration point for the defendant. The witness is friendly with the defendant’s devoted maid. This had all the earmarks of a defense plant.
Lopez’s testimony wasn’t scheduled to come up until the defense put on its case; we thought we’d have several months to do some more checking on her. Now, her supposed threat to leave the country spiked that plan: Johnnie wanted to call her in to preserve her testimony.
We saw the timing as one more low trick. The defense suspected that Rosa was a serious flake and they were afraid of how she would play as a witness. Rather than take a chance with her during their casein-chief-and giving us the opportunity to investigate her and prepare our cross-they wanted to do a dress rehearsal in what is called a conditional exam, which is done outside the presence of the jury. If Lopez didn’t come across well here, she’d be buried in the middle of our case. If she was persuasive, however, they could bring her back later. And if she fled in the meantime, they could enter her earlier testimony into the record. For the defense it was a no-lose proposition.
For us, it was lose all around. Interjecting Rosa into the middle of the People’s case would not only break our momentum, but get the jury thinking about alibis. We had to stop it.
Lance ruled that we would examine Lopez out of the jury’s presence, so he could decide whether she truly posed a flight risk. That Friday, she took the stand. She was a sunken, peculiar little woman, wearing what appeared to be a purple velour jogging suit. She didn’t look particularly happy to be there. She’d come with an attorney. Where, I thought, does a down-at-the-heels character like this one get the bucks to hire a lawyer?
Under Johnnie’s questioning, Lopez contended that because of her involvement in the case, she had lost her job and had to move out-and was about to return to her homeland. “The reporters wouldn’t leave me alone,” Lopez told the court in Spanish, through an interpreter. “I’m tired of looking at them. They have been harassing me.”
Harassing? Even allowing for the translation, this smacked of coaching.
She began to weep. Someone gave her a Kleenex.
“Do you have any present plans to return to El Salvador?” Johnnie asked her.
“I would like to go tomorrow.”
Since I was on witness fifteen and counting, Chris had agreed to question Rosa. “You made [a reservation] today?” he asked her. “… Prior to coming to court this morning?”
“Sí,” she assured him.
He asked her whether anyone had told her to do so. No, she said, she had decided to do it. She would stay away for a long time.
I passed a note to Chris:
“Ask her what airline and under what name.”
He did. She replied that her reservation was booked under her own name. And then he asked her the airline.
“Taca. Taca International. T-A-C-A.”
Cheri ran out to check. What a surprise: Rosa had no reservation.
Chris bored into her: “Miss Lopez, we just called the airline. They don’t have a reservation for you. Can you explain to the court why it is that you just told us you have a reservation?”
“Because I am going to reserve it, sir. As soon as I reserve it, I will buy my ticket and I will leave. If you want to, the cameras can follow me.”
Rosa was not as dull-witted as she seemed.