Another City Not My Own

by Dominick Dunne

  The leading players in the story are beginning to find the camera intoxicating. They have learned to know exactly when the camera is on them without having to look into the lens, and they assume their attitudes as it pans past them. They are aware when the lens zooms in for a close-up and act accordingly. Simpson is particularly good at it. So is Shapiro. No one loves it more than Judge Ito, although he pretends to despise it. He is said to be delighted with the success of the Dancing Itos on the Jay Leno show, and people claim that he shows videos of the Dancing Itos to some celebrity visitors in his chambers.

  “You know why Ito got the job, don’t you?” asked Mavis Jordache, a reporter friend of Gus’s from several previous trials, with whom he was having lunch in the cafeteria of the Criminal Courts Building in Los Angeles, where the trial was taking place. Between trials, they kept in touch by telephone.

  “I don’t, no,” replied Gus. “I’d never heard of Judge Ito before.”

  Mavis looked in both directions to make sure no one was watching her and then pulled the skin by the side of each of her eyes sideways, turning herself into an Oriental.

  “May I quote you?” asked Gus.

  “But it’s true,” insisted Mavis. “If they had a white judge, it would be said that he was favoring the prosecution, and if they had a black judge, it would be said that he was favoring O. J., and neither side wanted a Hispanic, because Hispanics don’t like blacks, and blacks don’t like Hispanics. So who’s left? No one’s going to admit that’s true, Gus, but I happen to know.”

  “What’s Ito like?” asked Gus.

  “Hates the media. Calls us ‘jackals.’ Secretly, he loves getting famous, though. I know one of the law clerks. He tells me stuff. Writes fan letters, I hear. And Ito’s wife, you know about his wife, don’t you?”

  “I know she’s the highest-ranking woman in the Los Angeles Police Department. Is there more than that?”

  “Captain Peggy York by name. She’s involved in this story, too, far more than she wants anyone to know,” said Mavis.

  “Tell me everything,” said Gus.

  “She has a past history with Detective Mark Fuhrman, which ought to disqualify Ito from sitting on this case. They had some serious problems together, and a big dislike exists. What I hear is, Peggy Policewoman is going to deny she knew Fuhrman, or say she can’t remember him. She doesn’t want her Lance to lose the biggest gig of his career at the trial of the century.”

  “A novelist couldn’t make up a cast list like this,” said Gus.

  “And Cochran knows the facts, but he doesn’t want to lose Ito. This way, he’s got a hold over him. Cochran’s going to run that courtroom, not Ito,” said Mavis.

  “Other than looking Oriental, hating the media, and being married to a cop with a secret, what are his qualifications for the job? What kind of a judge is Ito supposed to be?” asked Gus.

  “His only other big case was the Charles Keating trial,” replied Mavis.

  “That’s a good sign,” said Gus. “How many years did Keating get?”

  On the day Jerrianne Hayslett, who was in charge of media relations for Judge Lance Ito, posted the seating arrangement for the media in the courtroom, there were screams of disappointment from those who had to share seats, or did not get seated at all in the courtroom. To Gus’s astonishment, he received a permanent seat in the front row that he did not have to share for alternate periods with other reporters. Gus could feel that there was a great deal of resentment toward him because of his privileged appointment.

  An article appeared on the front page of the Los Angeles Times in which he was sneeringly referred to as a “celebrity author,” who had been given preferential treatment by the judge, and, more mockingly, as “Judith Krantz in pants,” which an unpleasant fellow from the Copley News Service was quoted as saying. No one enjoyed the Judith Krantz appellation more than Leslie Abramson, with whom Gus had crossed swords in print in the past, who found it hilarious to refer to Gus thereafter as Judy and to his books as “jumped-up romance” novels.

  Abramson’s husband, less celebrated than she, was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, assigned to cover the Simpson trial as part of their team, and Abramson herself had become a legal commentator on the Simpson trial for the ABC network.

  Judge Burton Katz, who had presided at the trial of the man who had killed Gus’s daughter fifteen years earlier, showed up in the media pool one day at the Simpson trial as a legal correspondent for a tabloid television show, with press credentials from the Malibu Times. Katz was no longer a judge. An article that Gus had written years before, about the mockery of justice that the trial had been, had always been rumored as having had something to do with that, but the fact was that Katz had retired from the bench with a disability pension and was in the process of developing a new career as a television commentator. He looked familiar to Gus on the morning of his first day, while the reporters were waiting in line for their daily press badges, but he did not immediately recognize him after so many years.

  “Yeah, I’m the guy you keep taking potshots at,” said Katz, a hint of self-pity in his voice. He was sitting on a bench in the corridor outside the courtroom. Several reporters turned to watch.

  Then Gus remembered who he was. Vile feelings erupted within him as memories of their bitter exchange on the final day of the trial returned to him. The cockiness and the swagger that Gus remembered so vividly were no longer apparent, but his eyes had not lost their hardness as they locked for an instant with Gus’s eyes.

  In that instant, Gus sensed again the rage he had felt on the day of the verdict, when Judge Katz thanked the jury on behalf of the families for the verdict that would release Lefty Flynn from prison in two and a half years. Outraged at the affront by a judge he had grown to disrespect and then dislike during the trial, Gus stood up in the courtroom and yelled out, “Don’t thank the jury on behalf of my family, Judge Katz.” As he continued his harangue, two deputies carried him out of the courtroom.

  Seeing Katz again, Gus relived that moment. He made a sound of disgust and turned away. Their unpleasant encounter was reported in USA Today.

  “Judge Ito would like to see you in chambers,” said Deputy Jex to Gus a few days later, in the snarling tone of voice he used when speaking to members of the media. From the beginning, Gus had not been able to abide Deputy Jex, whose face was perpetually scowling. Gus might not have minded Jex’s unpleasantness quite so much if he had been equally unpleasant to the defendant on trial for double murder. Instead, he addressed him in the fawning manner of a fan at a Buffalo Bills game.

  It was the first time that Gus had met Judge Ito, who had sprung to national prominence since his appointment as judge in the Simpson trial. There were those in the media who had taken an early dislike to him because of the contemptuous manner with which he treated them.

  Judge Ito, who was smaller than Gus expected him to be, was in his shirtsleeves, sitting at his desk when Gus entered.

  “Sit down, sit down, Mr. Bailey,” he said, motioning Gus to a sofa opposite his desk. Behind the sofa, at the end of the room, several law clerks were busily at work. Gus wondered which one was Mavis’s friend.

  “I’ve read some of your coverage from the Menendez trial,” said the judge. “You certainly take a very definite stand. There’s no mistaking how you feel about those young men.”

  “I’m lucky to write for a magazine that lets me take a stand, Your Honor,” replied Gus.

  “It’s come to my attention that there are some people who are giving you a hard time because of your seat in the courtroom,” he said.

  “I can handle that, Your Honor,” said Gus.

  “You must understand, they’re giving me a hard time as well, because of your seat in the courtroom,” said Judge Ito.

  “Oh?” For a minute Gus thought that the judge was going to take the seat away from him.

  “I would like you to know that I assigned you that seat. That seat is yours for the length of this trial,” he sa
id.

  “Thank you, Your Honor,” said Gus. “I am very grateful.”

  Ito stood up, indicating that the meeting was over. He walked with Gus to the door of the chambers. As they stood by the door, he asked, “Have you ever seen anything like this, Mr. Bailey?”

  Gus didn’t have to be told that the judge was referring to the media event that the trial was becoming.

  “I haven’t, Your Honor,” he replied, “and I’ve covered a lot of high-profile cases. Sometimes it’s scary outside the building, with all those people yelling. I often have the feeling that the slightest spark could ignite something very ugly.”

  Ito looked Gus squarely in the eye. “You see, I felt very safe in giving you a seat next to either the Brown or the Goldman family,” he said. “I knew that you would know how to deal with the families, that you wouldn’t intrude on them or ask questions.”

  Gus, understanding, met the judge’s look. He knew that Judge Ito, without saying the words, was referring to the murder of his daughter, Becky. He knew that the judge realized that he, like Louis Brown, the father of Nicole, and Fred Goldman, the father of Ron, was the father of a murdered child.

  “Thank you, Your Honor,” he said again as he went out the door.

  “I don’t know Faye Resnick. I’ve never met her. She came into Nicole’s life in the last couple of years,” said a lady who was also named Nicole. She called Gus at the Chateau Marmont from the car phone in her Ferrari. She didn’t want to give her last name. “I work at Van Cleef and Arpels in Beverly Hills, and I just can’t get involved in this thing, but I loved Nicole. She was my friend. We went to high school together. We were both blond. We were both named Nicole. We both had daughters the same age. We both drove Ferraris. We were both in abusive marriages. Only I got out of mine. Nicole’s mother always wanted those girls to connect with rich men. Nicole was with O. J. from the time she was about seventeen. Faye Resnick covered it all in her book. She got it right. The Browns may not like the book, but the way Faye wrote it is the way it was. What she wrote is heartbreakingly true. I could have done without the blow-job story—some day the kids are going to read that—but it was her life. Nicole was a woman with her own life.”

  “I want to meet Faye Resnick,” said Gus to Michael Viner. Viner was the publisher of Faye’s best-selling book, Nicole Brown Simpson: The Private Diary of a Life Interrupted. “I had her all wrong. I thought she was some bimbo who was capitalizing on her friend’s murder, but I saw her interview with Connie Chung last night, and I changed my mind. She’s a gutsy lady, and she makes no bones about how she feels about O. J.’s guilt. Can you set it up for me, Michael?”

  On the night of the murders, Faye Resnick, Nicole’s close friend, was in a drug rehab center, for problems with cocaine. As far as was known, she had been the last person to speak on the telephone to Nicole before she was murdered. Their conversations were intimate. She told Faye private things—it was only afterward, when it was too late, that all her friends began to compare notes.

  Faye was an unknown at the time of the murders, except in her own immediate circle, which in no way overlapped with any of the Los Angeles circles in which Gus Bailey moved. But, with the publication of her book, which documented her friendship with Nicole, the spotlight of fame began to shine on her, and the name Faye Resnick became known to everyone who followed the trial. No publicist or rave review could have done a better job of making her book known throughout the land than Judge Ito, who, miscalculating his newfound importance, asked the networks not to interview her on the debut of the book. His ill-advised interference caused people to rush to their bookstores and guaranteed weeks and then months on the New York Times best-seller list.

  From the minute they met, Gus and Faye were an unlikely duo, but they got on well and became friends.

  “O. J. couldn’t look me in the eye at the funeral,” said Faye to Gus one night at Drai’s, when Viner arranged for them to meet. “He knows how much I know. He wants me dead, Gus. I know too much about this guy. It wasn’t just what Nicole told me; I saw it with my own eyes. I know all about his drug use. I’ve done cocaine with him. And he’s saying now that he didn’t do drugs. Bullshit!”

  “Does it worry you that so many people think he didn’t do it?” asked Gus.

  “Get real, Gus. The kind of people who think O. J. didn’t do it are not the kind of people he’s interested in,” said Faye. “If they release him, they’re releasing a dangerous man. He’s not sorry for what he did. He’s sorry he got caught.”

  “Hear, hear,” said Gus. “You’re getting famous, Faye. Every time you sound off on Larry King the way you do, you sell another ten thousand books.”

  “I’m so tired of people going on television and talking about me,” said Faye. “I’m getting attacked by people I don’t even know, who say they know me. Some guy said on TV he had nude pictures of me. There are no nude pictures of me. They’re talking about a different person. It’s not me. People I don’t know say they did drugs with me.”

  “The ‘fallout from fame,’ it’s called,” said Gus. “I never saw anything like it. Everyone wants to be in on the act in the Simpson saga. Strangers are always cornering me in public places to tell me their connection to the drama, no matter how tenuous the connection is. The other day a woman came up to me at Thrifty Drug in Beverly Hills and told me she went to the same dentist O. J. did, as if it might be a significant factor in solving the crime. She even offered to put me in touch with the dentist. I didn’t know what to say to her, so I said, Thank you very much’ and moved on to the disposable razors. Do you think Johnnie Cochran will put you on the stand?”

  “I doubt it. I’m too full of ammunition on O. J. I know too much, and I’m one of the very few people who isn’t intimidated by him,” said Faye. “Chris Darden thinks they’ll rip me apart without calling me. He thinks they’re afraid of what I might say up there.”

  9

  In his “Letter from Los Angeles,” Gus wrote:

  The loyalty of the Simpson family toward the defendant on trial is extraordinarily touching. His mother, daughter, son, nieces, a brother no one knew about, his brother-in-law, his first wife and her current husband, and others have attended the trial, but none have been as stalwart in their attendance and devotion as his two sisters, Shirley Baker and Carmelita Durio. Both San Franciscans, they and Shirley’s husband, Benny, are staying at Simpson’s heavily guarded house on Rockingham Avenue. Most nights, they visit him in jail. Carmelita attends the trial Monday through Thursday and then goes to San Francisco on a three-day weekend. Shirley attends Tuesday through Friday and then goes to San Francisco to be with her daughters and grandchildren, so one or the other or both are always in the courtroom as supportive presences for their brother. “I go back up to San Francisco to make sure my job is still there, and my husband is still there, and my child is still there,” Carmelita told me.

  For reasons he had not yet discovered, Gus’s fascination with the case exceeded by far the normal fascination that a journalist or novelist feels for a good story in the making. One of the many curiosities of Gus’s life during that period was that he became friends with O. J. Simpson’s sisters and brother-in-law, even though he firmly believed that Simpson was guilty of the murders with which he was charged. Benny Baker, who was married to Simpson’s sister Shirley, said to him in the corridor outside the courtroom, “Did it ever occur to you, Gus, how similar this case is to your own?”

  It was a thought that was waiting to happen for Gus, and Benny, without knowing it, brought it to fruition. He had just read Gus’s article, called “Justice,” from fourteen years before, about the trial of the man who had killed Gus’s daughter. Gus thought that what Benny was referring to were the beatings, the bruises, the stalking, the abject fear that characterized both Nicole Brown Simpson and Becky Bailey in the days before their deaths.

  The two men looked at each other for an instant and then quickly looked away. They had never discussed the heart of the matter
, the crux of what had brought them together on a daily basis: the dreadful bloody murders of Nicole and Ron. Nor had they discussed the defendant on trial, about whom they had very different opinions as to his guilt or innocence.

  “What happened to that guy, Gus?” asked Benny.

  “He did two and a half and got out,” replied Gus.

  “Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t know? Really?”

  “We let go after a while, my sons and I. I hired a private detective to follow him right after he got out, a guy by the name of Pellicano, Anthony Pellicano—you probably read about him during the Michael Jackson case with the little boy—but I didn’t want that to become what my life was about, trailing a killer. You can’t let your life be about revenge, Benny. I don’t know where he is. I don’t want to know where he is. He’s out of my life, never to be heard from again, I hope,” said Gus.

  Gus had not set out to make friends with the family of O. J. Simpson with the ulterior motive of gleaning information out of them about life at Rockingham, where they were living in Simpson’s house during the trial. The friendship between them developed over a period of time and a succession of minor events. In every courtroom in which he had sat since the death of Becky, watching rich-people justice, which was his specialty, he was more interested in the people in the case than in the legalities. He was particularly interested in the defendant’s family, individuals who had had nothing to do with the murders but whose lives were changed forever because of them. In the first weeks of the trial, he had stared at the Simpson family and was struck by both their loyalty and their dignity. Back then, they spoke to almost no one, except one another. They were there every day, always on time, always smiling warmly at their brother each time he entered the courtroom from the holding room in the company of his lawyers.