Patience is not my strong suit. Wherever I go, I bring a file or book with me in case, God forbid, I’m stuck waiting for someone. By now, I was beginning to feel edgy. Nearly five hours had passed since I’d last spoken with Phil Vannatter. I supposed that he and Tom Lange were finished interrogating Simpson and had him in lockup somewhere. Best not to bug them, I told myself.
So I held off calling. As I was looking back over my notes from the morning’s conversation with Phil, I suddenly realized I hadn’t called my friend Lynn. I’d completely missed the lunch in her honor. I rang her up and apologized.
“No big deal,” she assured me. Considerate, given that her upcoming wedding was a very big deal to her.
“So,” she said, “what do you think?”
“Of what?”
“Of this guy Simpson.”
It was the first of an infinite number of queries about this case that will likely continue until I am lowered into my grave.
“The evidence is looking pretty strong so far,” I said. “I can’t wait to find out what he’s saying to the cops.”
As I was signing off with Lynn, David poked his head into my doorway. “Why don’t you give them a call?” he said, sitting down across from me.
He was right. Why sit here like some deb waiting for a prom date?
I rang Parker Center.
“Lange, here.”
“Tom, it’s Marcia. Just called to find out what our man had to say.”
“We talked to him for a while. Took his blood. Got some photos.” Typical Tom, wasting no words. He did tell me that Simpson’s attorney, a local heavy hitter named Howard Weitzman, had gone to get coffee or something, leaving his client to go into the interview alone. That was odd. What could Weitzman have been thinking?
“Did you tape?” I asked him. This was really important. If they got the thing on tape, we wouldn’t have to cope with challenges to their note-taking or memories.
“You bet,” he assured me.
“So where’re you holding him?” I asked.
“We let him go.”
Let… him… go??
I couldn’t fucking believe it!
“You let him… go?” I was looking at David, whose jaw had dropped.
“He’s not going anywhere,” Tom told me, sounding a little defensive. “He’s too famous.”
Give me a break. Sure, he was famous. Sure, it seemed unlikely that he might bolt. But we had a lot more to worry about than whether O. J. Simpson could find a place to hide. “What if he decides to destroy evidence?” I wanted to ask Tom. “What if he starts to intimidate witnesses?” But I kept it buttoned. The last thing you want to do is get into a pissing match with your investigating officers. I told myself, unconvincingly, that Phil and Tom were doing the best they could, considering that they’d been up since at least two or three A.M. Lange handed me off to Vannatter, and I could hear the fatigue in Phil’s voice as he summarized, rather disjointedly, the interview with O. J. Simpson.
“Suspect has a golfing date… Suspect attends his daughter’s dance recital… Suspect drives aimlessly in his Bronco making calls from a cell phone.” From there it was back to Rockingham, a limo to the airport, and then a flight to Chicago.
“I don’t know whether you heard about it,” Phil paused to say, “but when we met him at Rockingham, he had a big old bandage on the middle finger of his left hand.”
Of course. The blood drops running parallel to the footprints on the drive.
“No shit!” I said. “Where’d he say he got it?”
First, Simpson told them he’d gotten the cut in Chicago, which left him having to explain the blood in his driveway and foyer. But then he seemed to cover himself, saying he’d noticed the bleeding before he left, as he was rushing to get to the airport for the outbound flight. The way Phil told it, it was difficult for me to figure out whether we had an incriminating slip or just a confused explanation. I needed to hear that tape.
“What’s doing with the search?” I asked him, hoping earnestly that the search team was not rooting around Rockingham unsupervised.
“We’re on our way out there now,” he assured me.
“Keep me posted.”
“Sure thing.” Phil hung up.
I looked at David. For a minute, the two of us said nothing, both silently assessing the magnitude of the cops’ blunder. Why had they let Simpson walk? It was true that once the police formally arrest someone, they must be prepared to charge him within forty-eight hours. If they’re not sure of their evidence, they can cut him loose, then pick him up later when they have something more solid. But why in this case, where the evidence seemed so strong?
I had never seen the cops this jittery. It was not so much what they said as the reticence in their voices. Something in Phil Vannatter’s tone reminded me of Mark Fuhrman’s as, earlier in the afternoon, he’d gone out of his way to tell me about Simpson’s record on the playing field. At one level, I was hearing the perfectly ordinary sound of people talking. And beneath it, the cackle of It’s the Juice, man. Can you believe it? It’s the fucking Juice!
I didn’t work late that night. The cops had made it clear that they weren’t going to let me into the loop until they were good and ready.
I caught sight of my baby’s head bobbing behind the crocheted curtains of the picture window. The sight of him always gave me a rush of joy.
No sooner had I gotten into the house than a tiny hand grabbed mine and dragged me down the small flight of stairs to the crudely appended addition that was my bedroom. I called it the Swamp. Whenever it rained, water cascaded down the wall behind my four-poster bed, causing mold to grow. I was allergic to it. During the rainy seasons, spring and fall, I was sick all the time with respiratory infections. There seemed to be nothing I could do to get rid of either the dampness or the mold.
There on a patch of well-discolored wall behind the bureau was an evil-looking arachnid the size of a pinball. She was starting a web, apparently at home in the squalor.
Oh, swell.
For the millionth time, I told myself, “We gotta get outta this place.” What invariably followed was the dismal realization that we had nowhere to go. I was struggling just to make the mortgage payment on this dump.
Thoughts like these usually triggered an orgy of self-reproach. But not tonight. I found, to my surprise, that I was in an indestructibly good mood. True, the cops had cut loose the suspect in a double homicide when they had a mountain of evidence to hold him. True, they were holding me at arm’s length. But you work with what you’ve got.
The fact of the matter was, I loved having a new case. A new case is like a secret lover. You think about it. Plan for it. It infuses unrelated events with a sense of purpose. We ordered in Chinese food that night, and as we struggled with chopsticks, I found myself mentally composing witness lists. That’s how it’s supposed to feel. Mind and heart engaged, neither tripping over the other. I hadn’t been that happy in a long time.
God, Do We Look Like Morons
“Marcia, it’s crazy here!”
It was the delicate, nervous voice of Suzanne Childs on my car phone. I’m weaving in and out of lanes, trying to balance the handset against my cigarette. The damned window on the driver’s side won’t roll up. I’m struggling to hear her over the traffic.
“You won’t believe what’s going on!”
“Calm down, Suzanne. Just calm down.”
Suzanne is our conscientious and permanently agitated media relations director. This is her third call to me that morning, and every one has been urgent. The press was hounding Gil for details about the Simpson case, she said. Please-did I have any more info I could pass along?
“Geez, Suzanne,” I told her. “You probably know more than I do.”