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Another City Not My Own

Page 25

by Dominick Dunne


  “And don’t forget, we put the kids and the nanny in the Beverly Crest Hotel,” said Peach. They both began to laugh at the memory they were sharing.

  “But it sure was pretty,” said Gus.

  “Gus, Gus, pick up the telephone,” called in Sigrid. “It’s Chief Lopez on the second line. Zander’s alive. They found him. The rain saved him. He lay there where he fell and held his mouth open. You better talk to him.”

  “Oh, my God, Peach. He’s alive. He’s alive.” Gus started to cry. He knelt down by her bed and dropped his head on her mattress. “I couldn’t have gone through that a second time. I couldn’t have gone through it again. I wouldn’t have made it, Peach.”

  “Listen, Peach, I’m off. Grafton and I are driving up to Tucson to see Zander in the hospital. He’s dehydrated, bruised all over, sprained ankle, but otherwise well. We’re going to have to have a press conference, according to the hospital, because there are so many reporters there. I just said to Grafton, I wish he’d at least have broken his leg. It would have made the press conference easier. After that I’m going to head back to L.A. and the trial. Judge Ito’s been very patient about my seat. Apparently I didn’t miss much in the trial while I was here, except Gretchen Stockdale, the model O. J. Simpson left a cheap romantic message for a few hours before the murders. I just asked my friend Dan Abrams of Court TV if she was pretty, and he said, ‘When Gretchen Stockdale walked off the stand, the defense table rose by six inches.’ Well, I thought it was funny. I don’t know when I’ll be back, other than Thanksgiving and Christmas. This is a first for us in a long time, Peach. This is a story with a happy ending. Zander’s safe. Thanks for letting me cry on your shoulder. You always were the class act, you know. I was the mongrel.”

  22

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

  From hanging out at murder trials, as I do, I have grown despondent about the goodness of people. Whatever happened to truth? Truth has taken an ignominious decline in importance in the courtrooms of our land. Truth has become what you get the jury to believe. I’m sure there are several jurors on this panel—I could tell you which ones, but I won’t—who actually believe that O. J. Simpson was chipping golf balls at his estate on Rockingham while a Colombian drug gang was murdering Nicole Brown Simpson over at her condo on Bundy, because that’s what they’ve been told by some of the fanciest lawyers in the workplace. I remember saying to F. Lee Bailey, early on, before the trial started, when we were still speaking, words to this effect: “You can’t really think anyone’s going to buy that Colombian-drug-gang story, do you?” Lee was right: There are those who do buy into it, which is a form of untruth in itself, the way I look at it. Truth doesn’t matter. Freeing O. J. Simpson is what matters.

  But I saw and felt goodness again in Nogales, Arizona, during the five-day search in the Santa Rita Mountains for my missing son. There were volunteers from two counties, K-9 patrols, police, a sheriff, helicopters, and a plane from Entertainment Tonight. The telephones never stopped ringing. People from everywhere called to say they were praying. All those prayers were heard. My son reappeared, having fallen down a ravine and having survived. We experienced joy.

  Gus returned to Los Angeles from Arizona on Saturday. Everyone at the front desk at the Chateau Marmont told him how happy they were that his son had been found. Everyone said they had prayed for Zander. There were hugs all around. Phalaenopsis plants with gift cards filled his rooms. The entire sofa was covered with letters and cards. His desk was overflowing with faxes. Maria, the maid, whose son worked in the garage, gave him a Mass card.

  “You must be exhausted,” said his friend Judy Spreckels, whom he referred to as a “trial historian” when he wrote about her during the Menendez trial. When Gus talked to his friends about her, he always said, “Judy Spreckels knows more about murder trials than anyone I know, except possibly Theo Wilson, the great crime reporter.” While he was gone, she had organized all his letters and cards and faxes. She had clipped every newspaper account of Zander’s disappearance. She had made lists of all the people who had telephoned and had recorded the messages of each caller who said that he or she was praying.

  “I’m overwhelmed at what you’ve done, Judy,” said Gus, looking around the room. “You even have the letters alphabetized. I never could have pulled this together in such order.”

  “The least I could do,” said Judy. “Mario and Frederica at the front desk were great. This hotel sure loves you.”

  “Business tripled here after I wrote in Vanity Fair that the night maids leave a gold-wrapped condom rather than a gold-wrapped chocolate mint on the pillow each night,” said Gus.

  Judy had once married into the very rich Spreckels family, of the sugar fortune, in San Francisco, but a variety of life circumstances had altered that way of being. She lived modestly in a little book-filled house in the San Fernando Valley. Like Gus, she had never believed for a second that the Menendez brothers were sexually abused by their father. Their certainty that the defense’s claim was bogus was the beginning of their friendship.

  “I don’t know how I’m ever going to be able to answer all these letters,” said Gus. “There must be a thousand there.”

  “One thousand two hundred and fourteen as of this morning’s mail, and that doesn’t include the faxes and the telephone messages,” said Judy.

  “Efficient, as always. I knew you’d know it right down to the last one,” said Gus. “How am I ever going to answer all these, Judy?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that while you were gone,” she replied. “Why don’t you write up a thank-you note that would apply to everybody, talk about it being a story with a happy ending, like I heard you say on television, et cetera, et cetera. I’ll have a couple of thousand xeroxed, and all you have to do is write ‘Dear Mario and Phil,’ or ‘Dear Howard and Lou,’ or ‘Dear Carolina and Reinaldo,’ or ‘Dear Freddie and Isabel,’ or whoever and whoever, and sign it ‘Gus Bailey,’ and I’ll do the envelopes and stamps.”

  “That’s a lot of work for you, Judy,” said Gus. “What did Mario and Phil send?”

  “Those white orchids in the basket. They came just before you got back. Card said, ‘Dear Gus, We are overjoyed for you. Our prayers were answered. Love, Mario and Phil.’ ”

  “They’re called phalaenopsis,” said Gus. “Everyone’s been so nice. There must be a dozen or more.”

  “Fourteen,” said Judy.

  “Take one home. Take two,” said Gus. “I missed my deadline for my ‘Letter from Los Angeles’ when I was over in Nogales, so I have to write a double-length one for next month.”

  “Here’s a loose-leaf notebook with all the newspaper accounts about Zander,” said Judy.

  “God, I didn’t see some of these,” said Gus, as he leafed through the clippings. “Look at this headline in the New York Post: NEW AGONY FOR AUGUSTUS BAILEY. IS that cheap enough for you? Did I tell you they sent a plane from Entertainment Tonight to aid in the search?”

  “Yes, I saw you in the plane on Entertainment Tonight,” said Judy.

  “They had a guy with a video camera aimed right at my face, for a reaction shot in case something happened, like Zander was dead, for instance, which was on a lot of people’s minds, myself included. There I’d be in close-up,” said Gus, shaking his head at the memory. “I hope the time will come when this will strike me funny, but I’m not there yet. I’m still shaken by it. I’m still close to tears all the time. Before the O. J. trial, none of this would have happened. It might have been a story, but it would have been about this little on page forty-two of the Metro section and probably wouldn’t have made the evening news on television.”

  “How’s Peach?”

  “I think she’s had more than her share of being put to the test in life,” replied Gus. “I think all the years of being as ill as she has been have put her in a different sphere of reasoning than those of us who are still involved in the day-to-day drama of life, like this damn trial that has ta
ken over my life, that has even become my life.”

  “Where is Zander?”

  “He’s still in the hospital in Tucson, but he’s okay. He’s dumbfounded by all the publicity. Zander’s the shy one in the family. He’s the only one who never sought the limelight, and then he became the center of it. I’m sure in time he’ll write about it. Grafton’s gone back to his movie. He wrote it with a friend and he’s directing it. I think it’s about Peach, but I’m not sure. And Monday morning, I’m going back to the Criminal Courts Building and the O. J. Simpson trial.”

  “Are you exhausted?”

  “I am,” said Gus. “I held it together until after he was found, and then I fell apart. The only night I slept was when I took a Tylenol PM, but I felt groggy the next day.”

  “You’re supposed to go to dinner at Charlie Wick’s house in Malibu. I called earlier and said that you probably wouldn’t be able to make it. I’m sure you’ll have dinner on a tray in your room, watch television, and go to bed early,” said Judy.

  “Get real, Judy. I’m going to the Wicks’ in Malibu,” said Gus.

  “Why don’t you take a night off?” asked Judy.

  “I might miss something.”

  The dinner at Charlie and Mary Jane Wick’s beach house in Malibu was for Walter Annenberg, former ambassador to the Court of St. James. Annenberg and his wife, Lee, were spending August at their bungalow with its own swimming pool at the recently reopened Beverly Hills Hotel. Everyone at the party told Gus how happy they were that his son had been found. Everyone said they had prayed for Zander. There were hugs and kisses.

  “Here’s a note I wrote you,” said Betsy Bioomingdale. “I hadn’t had a chance to mail it yet, and then Mary Jane said on the telephone that you were coming. How’s Peach?”

  Charlie said the ambassador had a few questions he wanted to ask about the trial. Later, during dessert, when the champagne was being poured, Charlie asked if Gus would mind saying a few words. Charlie said that people were becoming concerned with the way the trial was going.

  “I haven’t been in the courtroom for the past week, but I’ve been watching the television coverage while I was in Arizona,” said Gus when he rose to speak. “I was talking with the ambassador before dinner, and I hope you won’t mind, sir, if I repeat myself. There is a feeling of despair in the town as to the way the trial is going. There is no question that the defense is superior to the prosecution. The prosecution is proving incompetent, and the defense is immoral. For them, there is only one thing that matters, and that is to win, and they are willing to do whatever it takes to win. Indeed, the Fuhrman tapes were devastating, but they really have nothing whatever to do with the murders. I don’t think we should feel as bleak as we are feeling about the outcome of this trial.”

  When Gus spoke at the dinners he went to, he knew that the audience he spoke to was in complete accord with his own feelings. The possibility of an acquittal for a man who had murdered two people was a matter of repugnance to them all.

  “I have great faith in juror number three,” said Gus, continuing. “She is a sixty-year-old white woman, extremely attentive to what’s going on in the courtroom. She watches. She listens. She takes notes. She seems to absorb. She never looks bored, the way some of them do. I don’t know this, but I was watching her when F. Lee Bailey cross-examined Fuhrman, and my feeling was that she couldn’t stand F. Lee. Her name is Anise Aschenbach,” said Gus. “My source on the defense team tells me Cochran refers to her as ‘the Demon.’ At another trial where she was a juror, she became the lone holdout, and during deliberation she managed to bring the minds of the other eleven jurors around to her way of thinking.”

  “How do you know her name?” asked Walter Annenberg. “I thought the jurors’ names were protected.”

  “They are, but I had dinner at Drai’s recently with one of the dismissed jurors, Michael Knox. He’s going to write a book for Michael Viner of Dove Books, who arranged for me to meet with him. He was the juror who was kicked off the panel because he peered too long at the pictures in O. J.’s house when the jury went through. He told me the names of all the jurors. So say your prayers at night for juror number three.”

  “Maybe she’ll save the day again,” said Charlie Wick.

  “She’ll never turn these jurors around, the way she did last time. There is no possibility in the world that there will ever be a conviction, but she could very easily hang the jury, which is the most that we can hope for.”

  “Why is there no possibility of a conviction, with all the evidence the prosecution has?” asked Charlie.

  “Because the African-American jurors won’t be welcome back in their neighborhoods if they send their hero to prison,” said Gus. “It’s as simple as that.”

  The next morning Gus attended the eleven o’clock A.A. meeting at Cedars-Sinai Hospital. Everyone told him how happy they were that his son had been found. Everyone told him they had prayed for Zander. There were hugs and kisses.

  “I was praying every minute,” said Faye Resnick when they met up at the coffee machine.

  “I’m so happy for you, Gus,” said Bernard Lafferty. “Elizabeth was very upset, too.”

  “She sent beautiful flowers to Peach,” replied Gus.

  “Would you like to come up to Falcon Lair for lunch after the meeting?” asked Bernard. “You’ve never seen the house. It’s just the way it was when Doris was alive.”

  “I can’t, Bernard. I’m going to a barbecue for some of the reporters at Larry Schiller’s house out in the valley,” replied Gus.

  “Too bad. Andy will be disappointed.”

  “Andy?” asked Gus. “Who’s Andy?”

  “Andy Cunanan. He said he met you at a dinner for Marcia Clark. I introduced you to him at the opening of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Andy’s been staying at Falcon Lair.”

  Then Gus went to the barbecue lunch that Larry Schiller and his fiancée, Kathy Amerman, gave for members of the media who were covering the trial. It was held at the house they were leasing from the German film star Maximilian Schell in the San Fernando Valley. Gus had been at Schiller’s house several times before. It was there that he had listened to hours and hours of the Fuhrman tapes that Johnnie Cochran got from Laura Hart McKinny when Schiller, who was astute in technical matters, was cleaning them for courtroom clarity.

  “I thought I was going to be listening to some monster of hate on these tapes,” Gus had said. “He doesn’t sound to me as bad as Cochran makes him out to be.”

  “If Cochran knew you had heard these …” said Larry.

  “I know, I know. I won’t tell anybody,” said Gus.

  Since the trial began, Gus had gone through a variety of feelings about Larry Schiller. In the beginning, even when he thought he didn’t like him, he found him interesting. “He plays every side against the middle,” he said to David Margolick. They liked to compare notes about him. Margolick called him “the Candyman,” because he was always eating Snickers bars or bags of M&M’s, even right after lunch, when he’d had a big piece of lemon meringue pie for dessert.

  “He plays a dangerous game,” Gus said another time to Margolick about Schiller. “He’s going to be a wonderful character in my novel when I get around to writing it. I’m thinking of calling him Joel Zircon. The character is a sort of triple agent of the Simpson trial. Hanging out with the defense as he does, giving the appearance of being part of it, he is privy to things that no other reporter or journalist or novelist covering this case has access to, and I know for a fact he believes O. J. is guilty.”

 

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