Another City Not My Own

by Dominick Dunne

  “She didn’t. She said, ‘I think you’re being a little impertinent, Gus. I thought you were friendly to our side.’ I said, ‘Of course I’m friendly to your side, Juditha. You know that. I’m the only one who has the guts to tell you what I’m telling you, that you’re not going over with the jury, and you’re not going over with the media.’ ”

  “You might have gone too far, Gus,” said Pattijo.

  “I know it,” replied Gus. “I’m all for raising money for battered women, but that’s what Denise Brown should do after the trial, not during the trial. It makes it look like she’s trying to get famous on Nicole’s death.”

  “You didn’t say that to her, did you?”

  “No, but I did ask her about that picture of Denise in the National Enquirer, hugging some cheap gangster in Boston. Don’t you think the defense must be eating that up?”

  “And what did she say?”

  “She said it didn’t mean anything, that picture. She said, ‘My daughter is a very hugging sort of girl. She hugs everyone.’ ”

  “Oh God,” said Pattijo.

  “I’ve gone through what the Browns and Goldmans are going through, and I know what I’m talking about. The Goldmans are playing the scene correctly, but the Browns aren’t. Someone from their family must be in the courtroom at all times.”

  “Your call must have had some effect,” said Pattijo. “At least Tanya and Rico have started to come.”

  “True, they have. But I just wish Tanya and Rico would stop necking in the courtroom,” said Gus. “It’s not a good look in front of the jury. Chris Darden told them to cut it out. They’re all nice people in that family, but they don’t seem to have any judgment.”

  “My wife’s a big fan of this writer here,” said Captain Gartland during his remarks, pointing to Gus. “I don’t usually read the kind of fancy magazine he writes for, but Ann got me to start reading his accounts of the Simpson trial, after she told me he always sticks up for the police. I don’t have to tell anyone in this room that when the defense has no case, they turn things around and blame the police for arresting the wrong guy, as Mr. Johnnie Cochran and his team are doing to Detectives Phil Vannatter and Tom Lange, two of the finest detectives in this department.”

  The room broke into applause, and Gartland continued. “My new friend here wrote that, uh—wait a minute, I’ve got it here; I knew I wouldn’t be able to remember it. Here it is: ‘In court, Cochran acted as if it was an impertinence on the part of Detectives Vannatter and Lange to have had the temerity even to suspect that such an eminent person as Mr. O. J. Simpson might be the killer when they went to his house on Rockingham after the discovery of the mutilated bodies, even though Simpson had a record for beating up his wife in the past and smashing the windshield of her Mercedes-Benz with a baseball bat.’ ”

  * * *

  Before leaving New York for Los Angeles to cover the trial, Gus had had a drink with an English friend, Victoria Weymouth, in the bar of the Westbury Hotel on Madison Avenue and Sixty-ninth Street. As he was bringing her up to date on the latest news about the murders in Brentwood, a beautiful woman walked into the bar from the street entrance. Tall, dark-haired, purposeful in her stride, she walked past his table on her way to the lobby. Gus, astonished, recognized her. He turned and stared after her.

  “I’ve lost you, Gus. Whom are you staring at, for God sake?” asked Victoria, an interior decorator of note, who was then doing up a Fifth Avenue apartment in the English style for an Australian billionaire. “What movie star is that?”

  “That’s the sister of Nicole Brown Simpson, whom we’ve just been talking about. Her name’s Denise Brown. These things happen to me all the time. I’ll be talking about somebody, and the person appears.”

  “Serendipity, they call it,” said Victoria.

  “When the police called to tell the family Nicole had been murdered, Denise said straight off on the telephone, ‘O. J. did it.’ She knew, and O. J. wasn’t even a suspect at that time. Would you excuse me for a minute, Victoria. I can’t let this opportunity pass by.”

  He followed Denise Brown into the lobby. She was standing at the desk, asking for her messages.

  “Miss Brown, I’m Gus Bailey,” he said when he caught up with her. He could tell that she had never heard of him, as there was no recognition at the sound of his name. “I’m a writer for Vanity Fair magazine. I’ve recently covered the Menendez trial in Los Angeles, and I’m going back shortly to cover the O. J. Simpson trial.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m not giving any interviews,” replied Denise. He saw that she was wary of being approached in this manner.

  “I don’t want an interview,” he replied. “I just wanted to introduce myself to you before the trial starts. May I give you a card? If you tell Gil Garcetti that we met, or Pattijo Fairbanks in the D.A.’s office out there, they’ll give you a rundown on me. I’m prosecution-friendly.”

  “How did you find out that I’m staying here at the Westbury?” she asked.

  “I didn’t find out. I didn’t follow you here. I just happened to be having a drink in the bar with an English friend, talking about your sister’s murder, as a matter of fact, and you walked by my table. Of course, I recognized you right away. You look so much like Nicole. I look forward to seeing you in California.”

  With that, he turned and went back into the bar.

  When he saw her again some weeks later, in the corridor of the courthouse, Denise Brown greeted him as if they were old friends. “Hi, Gus. I want you to meet my mother and father, Juditha and Lou Brown. This is Augustus Bailey, the writer. He’s the one I told you about. We met in New York at the Westbury. He’s covering the case for Vanity Fair.” She turned to Gus. “You see, I checked you out. I hope I wasn’t rude that day.”

  “You weren’t. Just wary,” replied Gus. “Which is probably a good thing to be, with all the publicity this case is getting.”

  “Tell me. Privacy has gone right out the window in our lives,” said Denise. “There are reporters outside our house. They follow me in my car. It’s awful.”

  As the weeks went on, Gus and Denise often talked together and sometimes even laughed together. Gus liked her. One day in court, she cupped her hand over her mouth and said to Gus, “The trial of the century is turning into the joke of the century, and you can quote me on that.” He said to his editor about her, trying to describe her, “Her emotions are right out there. She cries, she laughs, she snorts with derision, she smiles with approval. She likes or she doesn’t like you. There’re no blurs with her.”

  “I was haunted by what Officer Riske said on the stand about waking up Sydney and Justin in the middle of the night, when he went to the condo to investigate the murders,” said Gus. “What terror those kids must have felt, being told to get dressed by a cop in uniform.”

  “Oh God,” said Denise, shaking her head at the memory.

  “How old are the kids?”

  “Sydney’s nine and Justin’s seven.”

  “It must have been frightening for them, sitting in the back of a police car all that time, in the alley behind the condo, not knowing anything, not being told anything,” said Gus.

  “Sydney said she knew something had happened to her mother. She said that to Justin in the police car on the way to the station,” said Denise.

  “The poor little things,” said Gus.

  “The other night, Sydney said, ‘Mommy’s here. I can smell her perfume.’ It’s so sad.”

  “I’m sure you’ve thought of this, or Marcia and Chris have, but if the kids’ dog, the Akita, hadn’t gone out and looked for someone to bring back to discover the bodies, the children might have discovered their mother when they woke up,” said Gus.

  Carl Douglas walked by. Gus and he looked at each other but didn’t speak. Gus said to Denise, “There goes the seeker of truth.” Gus had written in his “Letters” that hardly a day went by when either Douglas or Johnnie Cochran didn’t make a pronouncement to the court in sanctimonious
tones that the trial was a search for truth.

  “I don’t know how those guys can look at one another without laughing when they’re talking about searching for truth one minute and the next they’re selling the jury a bill of goods that O. J. was chipping golf balls at Rockingham at the time that a Colombian drug cartel was killing Nicole over on Bundy because they mistook her for Faye Resnick, when they all know perfectly well that O. J. did it,” said Gus.

  “Write about it,” said Denise.

  “In my novel, I’ve already planned this scene where the Dream Team sits around a conference table in Johnnie’s office and makes up this stuff. In the scene, I have them screaming with laughter, wiping the tears off their cheeks, as they come up with the idea of having O. J. chipping golf balls.”

  Denise nodded her head in Douglas’s direction and said, with derision in her voice, “They want to put her on the stand.”

  “Who?”

  “Sydney.”

  “Why? She’s only a kid, and her mother’s dead.”

  “She told them at the police station that her mother was crying on the telephone with a friend that night,” said Denise.

  “Surely O. J. wouldn’t allow his team to put his daughter on the stand, as if she hadn’t been through enough already,” said Gus.

  “Get real, Gus,” said Denise.

  Gus could visualize the courtroom appearance of the beautiful nine-year-old Sydney Simpson. “My God, it would be like a scene from my novel,” he said. “Sydney would be seeing her father for the first time since he held her hand at her mother’s funeral. Can you imagine how that would play in front of this jury? Ito may as well hand him his acquittal right now if he allows that to happen.”

  Denise put a stop to that line of thought. “Over my dead body is that child going to appear in this courtroom,” she said, rising from the bench and walking away.

  “I went to the reopening of the Beverly Hills Hotel the other night,” said Gus, when he was visiting Elizabeth Taylor on Sunday afternoon. The famous hotel had been closed for renovations and redecoration for several years, after it had been purchased by the Sultan of Brunei.

  “How was that?” asked Elizabeth. Although she rarely went out to parties, she liked to hear what was going on.

  “A rat fuck,” said Gus. “Too many people. Too many photographers. You would have hated it. Anyone you would have known came early and left quickly.”

  “Richard and I once lived in a bungalow at the hotel,” said Elizabeth.

  “Peach and I used to use the hotel like it was a Beverly Hills country club,” said Gus.

  “How does it look? I hear it’s all done over.”

  “They didn’t ruin the Polo Lounge, and they didn’t ruin the coffee shop. They kept the Don Loper banana-leaf wallpaper, but the chandeliers and the gilded chairs in the lobby look like imports from the Sultan of Brunei’s palace, which is not high on my list of good looks in interior decorating.”

  “I figured.”

  “There was a woman there I used to know when I was in the picture business whose daughter is getting married in a big fancy wedding next Saturday. The matron of honor is supposed to be Marcus Allen’s wife, Kathryn, who’s her daughter’s best friend. Are you up on Marcus Allen?”

  “The football star,” said Elizabeth.

  “Marcus was a protégé of O. J.’s. He was a younger version of O. J., a great player, and they became great friends. The fans loved him. Handsome. Rich. Moved in Hollywood circles. Loved the ladies. The ladies loved him. The story goes that after O. J. and Nicole split, Marcus started having an affair with Nicole, which freaked O. J. out. Faye Resnick told me this. In typical macho style, O. J. took out his fury on Nicole, not Marcus. When Marcus married Kathryn—young, beautiful, blond—O. J. gave them their wedding reception at his house on Rockingham.”

  “I think I saw the video of the wedding on Hard Copy, or one of those shows,” said Elizabeth.

  “I saw it, too,” said Gus. “They even look alike, kind of. Now, this part of the story I can’t verify, but several people have told me that the affair with Nicole started up again. They believe he may even have been in Nicole’s condo on Bundy on the day of the night of the murders. He flew to the Cayman Islands later that day. There’s a record of that. Both the prosecution and the defense want to talk to him. Your friend Johnnie Cochran thinks it will show that O. J. was not the insanely jealous man the prosecution says he was, because he gave Marcus his wedding reception. This lady I used to know in the picture business, the mother of the bride, told me that she had just talked to Marcus before she came to the party, and he said that neither he nor Kathryn was going to come to L.A. for the wedding. If he came to L.A., they could subpoena him, so they’re not going to leave Kansas City. He doesn’t want to get involved in this trial. If he stands up for O. J., he’ll lose all his endorsements, and it could rock the marriage. Besides, he probably knows O. J. did it, and he doesn’t want to lie.”

  “It’s like O. J.’s everywhere,” said Elizabeth.

  “I saw Bernard Lafferty there,” said Gus. “He came over and spoke to me. Is he still in A.A.?”

  “Last I heard. Why?”

  “I just wondered. He was in black tie, looking very smart,” said Gus. “And he had on the biggest diamond studs I ever saw on a man in my life.”

  “I told him not to wear those,” said Elizabeth, shaking her head. “It doesn’t look right when he’s having all this bad publicity.”

  “They looked like they could have been Doris Duke’s earrings,” said Gus.

  “They probably were,” said Elizabeth.

  “Bernard introduced me to this young guy he was with, Andy Cunanan, a Latino type, who was all done up in a Gianni Versace dinner jacket. Very eager to please, instant first names, like we were old friends, that sort of thing. ‘Hi, Gus, I met you at Ray Stark’s one night. At the dinner for Marcia Clark.’ ”

  “Is that true?” asked Elizabeth.

  “He was there. Skip Hartley brought him that night. I remember him because he was so interested in the paintings, which everyone else just took for granted. He said, ‘I watch you on TV with Dan Rather, and I read you in the magazine.’ He was full of compliments, said all the right things, but he kind of gave me the creeps.”

  “Just what poor Bernard doesn’t need in his life right now,” said Elizabeth.

  “Then the kid got really pushy, and he said something like, ‘You ought to put me in one of your books, Gus. I’d be a great character, and Keanu Reeves could play me in the miniseries.’ So I said, ‘Well, you’ve got to do something in life before someone’s going to write a book about you.’ ”

  * * *

  When Gus got back to the Chateau Marmont after court, he called Frank Bowling, the manager of the Bel Air Hotel. Gus had known Bowling when he was the manager at the Connaught in London and at the Carlyle in New York. Their paths often crossed at parties in both New York and Los Angeles.

  “Frank, this is a rather odd request, which is why I’m not calling the maître d’,” said Gus. “There’s no court on Monday, and I want to come to the hotel for lunch in the garden, but I’m bringing Heidi Fleiss, the Hollywood madam. She’s about to be sentenced to three years in the slammer, and I happen to have great sympathy for her. There won’t be any problem, will there? Ex-clients in the lunch crowd, or wives of ex-clients, that sort of thing, who might make a fuss? Her black book’s like a name-drop of Hollywood, you know.”

  “Of course not, Gus,” said Bowling.

  “I was thinking of the booth at the far end, the one Anthony Hopkins was sitting at when I saw him there last Saturday,” said Gus.

  “No problem.”

  “One other thing while I have you on the phone,” said Gus. “Wendy Stark tells me that there’s a guy who lives on Bristol Circle, a block away from O. J.’s house on Rockingham, who goes to the bar of the Bel Air every afternoon and tells anyone who will listen that he found bloody sheets and towels in his trash barrels that ha
d been put out for pickup the next morning. Do you know anything about this guy?”

  “I’ll introduce you to him, if you’d like,” said Frank.

  “You’re a prince, as always, Frank,” said Gus. “Do you think he’d talk to me?”

  “He talks to everybody else,” said Frank.

  “That’s the trouble with these guys with information,” said Gus. “I see it happen over and over again. They’re big shots talking about what they know, but they won’t go to the police because they don’t want to get involved. Meanwhile, the Dream Team is running circles around the prosecution in the trial.”

  “Oh, speaking of the trial, Gus, I had the nicest letter from Judge Ito yesterday,” said Frank.

  “You did? What about?” asked Gus. “Not a fan letter, is it?”

  “Sort of, I suppose,” replied Frank. “He said that he and Mrs. Ito had had dinner here in the dining room at the Bel Air the night before, and he complimented me on the food and the service, and the courtesy of the staff.”

  “Perfect,” said Gus.

  “He said he had especially enjoyed the dessert tray,” said Frank. “And he ended the sentence with an exclamation point.”

  Later, Gus called his editor Wayne Lawson in New York.

  “Don’t you think it would be interesting if I could locate the law clerk who takes Ito’s dictation when he writes these fan letters? Don’t you think it would be interesting to know what’s going through the guy’s mind while he’s typing how good the raspberry tart was at the Bel Air Hotel when Ron Shipp’s on the stand saying, ‘Tell the truth, O. J.’? If you don’t think it’s right for the magazine, I’ll save it for the novel.”

  Early on, when the trial of Heidi Fleiss, the Hollywood madam, was the talk of the town, Gus had written in one of his “Letters” that Heidi Fleiss would probably do more jail time for her victimless crime than O. J. Simpson or the Menendez brothers for their double murders. He meant it cynically, but he meant it. Heidi had been touched by what Gus wrote, and a meeting between them had been arranged.

  When she arrived a few minutes late at his table in the garden of the Bel Air Hotel, he wanted to say to her, but he didn’t have the nerve, that he never would have taken her for a madam. Her predecessor in the role, Madam Alex, whom Gus had met through Wendy Stark—who knew everyone—had the madam look, both in dress and manner. Heidi was wearing an oversize T-shirt, dark glasses, and a baseball hat on backward, which she took off when she sat down, letting her hair fall to her shoulders. She looked like a California girl on her way to the beach for the afternoon.