“People in Chicago don’t like the way you’re writing about the case, Gus,” said George.
“Is that so?”
“People think you’re biased, Gus,” said George.
“Not all people think that. I get an awful lot of fan mail, George,” said Gus.
“Not good to be biased, Gus.”
“You’re not threatening me, are you, George? Only last week you asked me to autograph one of my books for your daughter, and now you’re giving me ominous feelings. If I thought that, I’d have to go right to Judge Ito,” said Gus, speaking in a teasing voice, as if he were not taking seriously what George was saying to him.
“I’m not threatening you. I’m just telling you what people in Chicago were saying about you over the weekend,” said George.
Sometimes during breaks, Gus chatted with Denice Halicki, the rich and beautiful young widow who was the live-in fiancée of Robert Kardashian at the time of the murders. Her husband of three months had been killed in a stunt accident on an action film he was producing, and he left her an estate of $14 million, which siblings of her late husband were contesting. She was often in the courtroom. She discussed with Gus the Bible group that she had formed, which was attended by O. J.’s sisters, by Dale, Johnnie Cochran’s wife, and by several of the female lawyers on the case. Sometimes Roosevelt Grier, who was Simpson’s spiritual adviser, came to talk to the group. Then one day Halicki stopped coming to court. Gus first became aware that the engagement between her and Kardashian was in trouble when a tabloid reporter named Craig Lewis, who was at the time with the National Enquirer, sidled up to him in the courtroom one day and asked him if he knew that Kardashian was “making out” with a beautiful young lawyer from Johnnie Cochran’s office. Gus had not been aware of that information, but he knew the young lawyer in question and liked her. He became arch at the time and said to the reporter, “I don’t know anything about it, and I wouldn’t tell you if I did.”
When Gus asked Larry Schiller if it was true about the broken engagement, he replied that Denice had moved out and taken all the furniture with her, including the television sets. The story became the hot courtroom gossip of the day. Even Simpson’s sisters, Shirley and Carmelita, were whispering about it. Later, after Gus discovered that Dr. Henry Lee, the famous forensic scientist, who was an expert witness for the defense, had also been in Kardashian’s house when Simpson and Cowlings had taken off on the freeway chase, he asked Schiller how many people in all had been there. Schiller reeled off the names, but he specifically said that Denice Halicki had been out shopping and was not present at the time.
“I’m not sure if you’ll remember me or not, Gus,” said the woman on the telephone. “I met you in London several years ago when you were writing the story on the breakup of Prince Andrew and Fergie. I was a friend of Steve Wyatt—you know, from Houston, Lynn Wyatt’s son—and everyone was saying at the time that Steve, who was living in London, was having an affair with the Duchess of York, which he wasn’t.”
“Yes, I remember, sort of,” said Gus. “Tell me your name.”
“Schaffner. Eloise Schaffner.”
“Didn’t we have a drink together at Claridges?”
“We did.”
“And it was Steve’s friend Johnny Bryan, who was later photographed sucking Fergie’s toes in the south of France, who was actually having the affair, as I remember,” said Gus.
“You remember very well. I have another story to tell you.”
“I’m off the duke-and-duchess circuit these days,” said Gus. “I’m all mixed up with race and murder now.”
“Which is what my tale is about,” said Eloise. “I happen to be a good friend of Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall and Keith Richards and Ron Wood, and the bunch of them.”
“You’ve piqued my curiosity,” said Gus.
“Do you remember when the Rolling Stones were on their tour and played at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena last year?” she asked.
“I do. Robert Shapiro got a standing ovation from the crowd when they flashed his picture on the screen,” said Gus. “I almost puked at the time.”
“Same concert. Different cast of characters. My story’s about A. C. Cowlings, O. J.’s friend,” said Eloise.
“You’ve piqued my curiosity further,” said Gus.
“It turns out A. C Cowlings is a great fan of the Stones, particularly Keith Richards. He called the public-relations people handling the concert, told them who he was, like he’s a great celebrity, asked for complimentary tickets, which they sometimes give to famous people, and also a backstage pass that gave him access to the dressing rooms of the Stones themselves.”
“Poor dead Nicole and Ron have foisted a whole new circle of celebrities on us,” said Gus. “My friend Joe McGinniss, the writer, was on an American Airlines plane the other day, in first class, and Cowlings was on board. Joe said he had a man with him to keep people from going over to talk to him about the case, like a bodyguard. All of a sudden, he’s become Denzel Washington. When the plane landed, a public-relations person came on board and escorted him off the plane before anyone else. All this attention for the man who was driving the getaway car for his killer friend during the freeway chase. Don’t get me started on these people. I get too worked up at some of the things I hear. Go on.”
“The PR people gave him the tickets and the pass. It was good publicity to have him there. After the concert, he was in Keith Richards’s dressing room. He wanted to party with Keith. He wanted to go back to the Four Seasons, where they were all staying. The more Keith resisted him, the more he told him about the night of the murder.”
“I can just see him, sucking up, dispensing tidbits of murder gossip, making himself irresistible to his idol.”
“From what I gather, he told Keith everything,” said Eloise.
“What do you mean, ‘everything’?” asked Gus. “Did he say O. J. killed Nicole and Ron?”
“I don’t know the specifics. I was only told that he told everything.”
“Will Keith Richards talk?”
“No, of course not. But I thought maybe you could do something with the story.”
“Good story. I don’t know how I can use it in Vanity Fair, though. It’s what they call hearsay. I have to get the story directly from Keith, which you say he won’t do. Al Cowlings is an interesting character in this story. I believe he probably knows more than anyone else about these murders. I’ve never understood why the police and the lawyers keep treating him with kid gloves. I don’t understand why they didn’t arrest him for aiding and abetting. When this trial’s over, I’m going to write a novel about it. What you just told me would be a great scene in the book. The Rolling Stones concert at the Rose Bowl. It’s got everything. It’ll be an even greater scene in the miniseries. It’ll show Shapiro on the giant screen, waving to the crowd, experiencing the ecstasy of fame as if it were an orgasm. It’ll show the fans cheering him because he’s representing O. J. Simpson, the football star. In the novel, I’ll change everybody’s name, so I can get away with a lot of stuff I couldn’t get away with in nonfiction. I’ll have the character based on Cowlings, the arriviste celebrity, made famous by his proximity to a murderous event, arriving backstage with a bag of the white stuff—which I’ll have him call ‘toot’—as a gift, to ingratiate himself. The more blow he takes, the more he’ll talk. I remember reading in the National Enquirer at the time that a porn-star friend of Al’s said she asked him where the murder weapon was, and she said he answered, ‘With the fishies.’ I’ll use that line in the scene with the character based on Keith Richards, and I’ll have the Keith character keep him going until he finds out the body of water the knife was dropped in. Are you still there, Eloise? I’m sorry. I get carried away when I start thinking of the novel. I hope you’re not calling from London.”
The trial was in its afternoon break. Reporters on deadline rushed to the telephones, while others waited for their turn. Larry Schiller, who wrote Simpson’s best-seller jailhouse book, I Want to Tel
l You, had become an inner-sanctum member of the defense team, with a regular courtroom seat next to Shirley and Benny Baker and Carmelita Durio.
“Do you know how Schiller got his seat in the courtroom, sitting with O. J.’s family?” asked David Margolick, the New York Times reporter.
“No,” said Gus. “I just know that Judge Ito was really pissed that he was sitting there and had Jerrianne Hayslett kick him out for a few days.”
“Johnnie Cochran went to Judge Ito and begged him to rescind his ruling on Schiller’s seat,” said Margolick. “He told Ito that Schiller was paying the defense team their salaries, because the only money they were getting from O. J. was from the book Schiller wrote with O. J., declaring his innocence.”
“That should be a clue to the outcome,” said Gus.
* * *
Although Gus made no bones at all about how he felt concerning Simpson’s guilt, he had developed a curious friendship with Larry Schiller during the trial. It was from Schiller that Gus got his information about the defense team that he published in his “Letter from Los Angeles” each month. They often had lunch together in the cafeteria and occasionally had dinner together, along with Schiller’s fiancée, Kathy Amerman, a photographer. Gus believed early on that Schiller also thought Simpson was guilty, despite being his collaborator on I Want to Tell You.
“If I tell you this, Gus, you have to promise me you won’t use it,” said Larry Schiller. “It could get back to me.”
“Okay.”
“The lawyers hate having to go down to the jail at night to visit O. J. It’s okay the first couple of times, but he drones on and on and on, telling the same stories night after night, how he didn’t do it, how no one’s looking for the real killer, how could they be doing this to him, keeping him in jail. I heard last night he talked for forty-five minutes without stopping. I heard all that stuff when I was doing the book with him. It gets real boring, let me tell you.”
“The lawyers all know he did it, don’t they?” asked Gus.
“That’s the one thing that they never talk about,” said Schiller.
“You play a dangerous game, if I read you right, Larry,” said Gus one day. “They think you’re one of them, and you get to hear all the backstage stuff. You get to talk to O. J. in jail. Believe me, I’m not being critical. I’m fascinated.”
Schiller just smiled and said nothing.
“Why do I sense that there’s a book churning inside you?” said Gus. “You’re going to have stuff none of the book authors are going to have, like McGinniss and Bosco and me. You get to listen to Cochran and Shapiro and Scheck when they don’t have to censor what they say.”
Schiller smiled and said nothing.
“I just hope you don’t get murdered when they find out what you’re doing,” said Gus.
In his novel, Gus decided to base a character on Schiller named Joel Zircon. At first, he thought of the character as a double agent, but later, as the trial went on, he changed it to a triple agent.
He and Gus were chatting in a corner.
“Don’t blame Johnnie Cochran for playing the race card, Gus. They’re all part of it, no one more than O. J., and O. J.’s giving the orders,” said Larry.
“You have to admit, Larry, it is a little hypocritical that a black man who turned his back on blacks, who liked only white women, white country clubs, and white neighborhoods, should now use the race card to help him beat a murder rap.”
“Don’t carry it too far, Gus,” said Larry.
“Does Cochran listen to him?”
“You’d be surprised at how much input O. J. has in the strategy of his defense. Just because he spelled his kid’s name wrong in the suicide note, don’t ever mistake this guy for a dummy. When there’s a strategy session at night in Cochran’s office, O. J. is on a speakerphone from jail.”
They were interrupted by Barry Scheck, who walked up to them.
“Gus, I wonder if I could talk to you for a minute,” said Scheck.
“Sure,” replied Gus.
“Up at the end of the hall,” said Scheck as he turned in that direction.
“He’s going to let me have it for what I wrote about him in the magazine,” said Gus to Schiller. “God, I hate these scenes. Chris Darden was pissed at me the other day for something I wrote about his brother.”
Scheck was standing by the water fountain. His face bore a troubled expression, not the anger that Gus had expected. He seemed uncomfortable, as if he had something to say but didn’t know how to say it.
“I, uh, I see you hanging around with the Goldman family,” he said finally.
“Yes, I’ve grown very fond of the Goldman family,” replied Gus. “Judge Ito assigned me the seat next to them.”
“Yes, I know.” He stood there awkwardly for several moments. “I am haunted by the Goldman family,” he blurted out, in what was like a low wail of pain. “I can’t look at them. That family could be my family.”
Gus, astonished, stared.
“I know they must hate me,” he said. “You know, in every job there are things to do that you don’t want to do.” He looked at Gus. “I’m working for this guy—” He stopped. The two men stood there, having shared a moment of such intimacy that they couldn’t look at each other.
“Barry, would you like me to tell the Goldmans what you said?” asked Gus.
“Yes,” said Barry quietly. Just then, Deputy Jex opened the doors of the courtroom to indicate that the break was over.
“I had an extraordinary conversation with Barry Scheck today,” said Gus. He was sitting on a bench in the corridor outside the courtroom. Next to him were Kim Goldman and her stepmother, Patti.
“Lucky you,” said Kim Goldman.
“It was about you, about your family, all of you, so let me tell you. Hold the comments until I finish,” said Gus. “He told me he was haunted by your family. He said that he couldn’t look at you. He seemed to be in deep psychic pain when he was talking. He said that your family could be his family. He said he knew that you must hate him. He said that there’re things in every job you have to do that—”
Gus stopped. Patti had tears in her eyes. “I don’t know what to say,” she said.
“Bullshit,” said Kim. “He wants you to write him up well, Gus.”
“No, I didn’t feel that, Kim. I can always tell when I’m being used or conned. I have to tell you, I believed him,” said Gus. “I think he’s deeply anguished.”
“Then if he’s so anguished, he should quit the case,” said Kim. She stood up and walked away.
“You made a mistake about me in your ‘Letter from Los Angeles,’ Gus,” said Denice Halicki, who called on the telephone as he was getting dressed to go to dinner at the house of Sue Mengers, the retired Hollywood agent, who was hooked completely on the Simpson trial. “Jack’s coming,” said Sue when she invited Gus. When people in Sue’s sphere said Jack, they always meant Jack Nicholson.
“I did? I made a mistake about you? What?” asked Gus.
“You said I was shopping on the day of the freeway chase and wasn’t in the house at the time,” said Denice.
“I did, yes.”
“Who told you that?”
“I can’t tell you my source.”
“It was Larry Schiller, wasn’t it?”
“Can’t say.”
“Get real. Gus,” said Denice. “Do I look like the kind of stupid bimbo who would be shopping at Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills when the eyes of the whole country were focused on my house in the San Fernando Valley, where O. J. Simpson was living with Paula Barbieri from the night after the murders to the freeway chase? You can’t think I’d miss that, Gus.”
Gus laughed. He was fond of Denice and had missed seeing her in court. It had never seemed right to him that she was not present at the time of the freeway chase. He realized that she would not have missed a possible historic occasion in her own house. He wondered why Schiller had fed him incorrect information.
“Sometimes
I call Schiller ‘the Triple Agent,’ ” said Gus.
Denice laughed at the name and immediately began calling him that herself. “Let me ask you something: Did you also hear from the Triple Agent that I had taken all the furniture when I moved put on Robert?”
“And the TV sets, too,” Gus replied.
“They spread these stories about me. The furniture and the TV sets were all mine, from my previous house. Triple Agent didn’t tell you that, did he? Oh no. Don’t you see what he and Robert are trying to do? They’re passing around information like this about me in order to discredit me, in case I ever decide to tell what I know about those four days between the murders and the freeway chase, when O. J. was living in my house. That house belonged to Robert and me, not just Robert.”
“Hi, Gus, it’s Judy Hilsinger.”
“Hi, Judy,” said Gus. Judy had publicized all of Gus’s novels on the West Coast, and they had become friends.
“Whose party are you off to tonight?” asked Judy. “I like to live vicariously through your social life.”
“I’m having dinner at Drai’s with Michael Viner and three of the four hookers who wrote the book You’ll Never Make Love in This Town Again. At a center table. For all to see. Top that, please,” said Gus.
“What happened to the fourth hooker?” asked Judy.
“Gossip has it that the fourth hooker is suing Michael for sexual harassment, which never happened, so she’s not coming,” said Gus. “Michael thinks Bob Evans put her up to it as revenge because he’s so pissed off at what the girls said about him in the book.”
“Gus, what can I say? You lead a magic life,” said Judy. “Now listen. I know you’re busy, and I hate to bother you with this, only it could be important for you. In the first place, have you ever been to Marbella? Spain.”
“Yes, why?”
“Do you remember having lunch at the Marbella Club?”
“Yes.”
“There’s a guy who came to see me in my office who lives part of the time in Marbella, has a house there, I think. He said he had lunch with you at the Marbella Club with Peter Viertel and Deborah Kerr.”
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