Another City Not My Own Page 11

  Although Gus had once lived in Los Angeles for many years, he had never been so aware of what a small town the Hollywood community really was until his return for the trial. Everyone knew everything about everyone else. Like Robert Shapiro, whom everyone seemed to know in the houses where Gus went to dinner, Robert Kardashian, the great friend of O. J. Simpson, also began to come up more and more as a figure in the story who, outside of the courtroom, interacted in the social world in which Gus moved. Gus had written that Kardashian would always be remembered as the man caught an videotape walking off Simpson’s estate on Rockingham the day after the murders, carrying a Louis Vuitton bag, which many people believed contained Simpson’s bloody clothes. Gus knew before he met Kardashian that his former wife, the mother of his four children, was now married to the Olympic Gold Medal winner Bruce Jenner. He knew that Kardashian was engaged to a rich and beautiful widow named Denice Halicki, who was in litigation with her late husband’s brothers over his $14 million estate. He knew that Kardashian had sold his Beverly Hills house to Don Ohlmeyer, the president of NBC West Coast, three weeks before the murders of Nicole and Ron. Ohlmeyer, a close friend and outspoken advocate for Simpson, was a frequent visitor at the county jail where Simpson was incarcerated.

  One Friday, Gus ran into Kardashian at the Grill in Beverly Hills. In court, they had never spoken. As Gus passed his table, Kardashian said, out of the side of his mouth gangster-style, “Why aren’t you home writing?” Gus laughed. He stopped and introduced himself.

  “I know who you are,” replied Kardashian. “O. J. knows who you are, too. He turned around and said, ‘Who’s that guy?’ I told him, and he said, ‘He’s the guy who wrote about the Menendez brothers.’ O. J. had the cell next to Erik Menendez when he was first in jail.”

  “I know. After they moved O. J. to another cell, I heard Erik the parent killer told everybody he thought O. J. was guilty of murdering Nicole and Ron,” said Gus. “If that’s not the pot calling the kettle beige, I don’t know what is.”

  They both laughed.

  “Just to tie things up in a ribbon, did you know that Jose Menendez was one of the top executives at Hertz Rent-a-Car when O. J. was doing all those commercials?”

  Kardashian nodded as if he knew.

  “But I bet you didn’t know this: Jose’s kids, Lyle and Erik, who were then young teenagers, worshiped O. J., and one time Jose and Kitty had O. J. to dinner as a treat for the kids. They never saw one another again until they met up in the county jail, where all three are charged with double murder.”

  “The minute I heard that Nicole was murdered, I knew that O. J. had killed her,” said Cici Shahian. Cici had been one of Nicole Brown Simpson’s best friends. She had stopped Gus in the hallway as he was leaving the office of Michael Viner, the president of Dove Books, where she worked.

  “I used to see her almost every day. We jogged on San Vicente the day before she was murdered. We saw Kato. She wouldn’t speak to him. She thought he was spying on her for O. J. She said, ‘Nothing’s free in life.’ That’s how Kato pays for his room at O. J.’s. She used to say, ‘He’s going to kill me and get away with it, and charm the world, because he’s O. J. Simpson.’ She knew. She foresaw what was going to happen. She just didn’t know what day it was going to happen.”

  “We should get together and have dinner, Cici,” said Gus. “I’d like to talk about Nicole. I can only think of her lying in a couple of gallons of blood in a short black dress with her throat slit. I can’t get a feeling about her.”

  “I’ll tell you what, Gus. I know you like to go to all the fancy restaurants, but I’m not in the mood for that. Why don’t you come over to my apartment on Spalding Drive in Beverly Hills Tuesday night? I’ll cook some lasagna, and I’ll tell you about her, and I think I’ll ask Faye Resnick and Robin Greer. The three of us, we were her best friends.”

  “Spalding Drive? What number Spalding Drive?” asked Gus.

  Gus walked through the entrance of Cici Shahian’s apartment building on Spalding Drive. He stopped in the middle of the redbrick courtyard and stood there, looking about, remembering. The scent of jasmine was in the air. Built in the Georgian style in the forties, the building retained a sense of elegance, although skyscraper apartment buildings on Wilshire Boulevard now dwarfed it.

  He climbed the outdoor staircase to Cici’s apartment. She answered the door.

  “Michael Viner was supposed to come, but at the last minute he went to a screening of a picture at Bob Evans’s house with Jack Nicholson,” said Cici. “So it’s just you and us girls.”

  “I think we can make do without Michael,” said Gus. “What’s Evans running?”

  “Muriel’s Wedding.”

  “I haven’t seen a movie since the trial started,” said Gus.

  “You know Faye, Gus,” said Cici.

  “Hi, Faye.”

  “And this is Robin Greer.”

  “Hi, Robin.”

  “My aunt said to say hello to you,” said Robin.

  “Who’s your aunt?”

  “Jane Greer.”

  “God, I haven’t seen Jane Greer in years. She was a beautiful woman,” said Gus.

  “Still is.”

  “Used to be married to Eddie Lasker when I knew her.”

  “Over and out long ago.”

  “Your aunt was great in Out of the Past with Robert Mitchum when she was at RKO,” said Gus. “Give her my love.”

  Inside Cici’s apartment, Gus kept walking over to the window and looking out on the courtyard of the building. Cici was in the kitchen, fixing the dinner. Faye Resnick and Robin Greer sat on the sofa, talking about Nicole.

  “There was a viewing of Nicole’s body in an open casket on the day before the funeral,” said Robin. “Nicole didn’t look anything like herself. She looked old and unhappy. It wasn’t like looking at Nicole.”

  “We walked in to pay our respects to the family,” said Cici, coming in from the kitchen. “O. J. was right there. We all knew in our hearts that he had done it, but we all hugged him. He gave each of us a different message. He said to Faye, ‘You know, I loved her too much.’ He said to me, ‘Please help Amelle to take care of the children.’ At the funeral, I sat down, and Cora Fishman sat next to me, then Faye and Kris Jenner, who used to be married to Robert Kardashian. Who sits next to me on the other side but Kato Kaelin. He never looked at me. I said, ‘Kato, what happened?’ He never looked me in the eye. I turned and said to Cora, ‘This guy knows something. He won’t look at me.’ ”

  “Robert Shapiro showed up at the wake with O. J.,” said Faye. “Right there, with Nicole’s dead body on view, he said to her mother, Juditha Brown, ‘Are you sure your phone call to Nicole was at a quarter to eleven?’ Juditha had initially made a mistake remembering the time of her call to Nicole to tell her she had left her glasses at Mezzaluna restaurant, where the family had had dinner after Sydney’s dance recital. If it had been at ten-forty-five, that would mean that O. J. wouldn’t have had time to commit the murders and still make his plane. Juditha wanted to believe that O. J. didn’t do it.”

  “Nicole was secretive,” said Robin. “I had begged her not to return to O. J. She told me about his abuse, but she didn’t tell me she was seeing O. J. again.”

  “What I can’t understand is why she didn’t leave him earlier,” said Gus.

  “Her family,” said Faye. “They wanted her to stay in the marriage.”

  “Why?”

  “The money. Her father stopped speaking to her when she said she was going to leave him,” said Faye.

  “Dear God.”

  “Nicole felt that O. J.’s abusiveness to women had something to do with his father being gay,” said Robin. “You did know the old man was gay, didn’t you? Left the family, became a drag queen. Most people don’t know that. You never hear about it. Nicole called O. J.’s mother, Eunice, after one of the beatings to ask her if she’d been beaten by her husband. She wanted to know if it ran in the family.”


  “Nicole never wanted the kids to know she was fighting with O. J. on the phone. She would say to them, ‘It’s my friend,’ so they wouldn’t know it was him. Nicole used to say, ‘You don’t get it. He doesn’t love me. He’s obsessed with me,’ ” said Cici.

  A feeling of sadness went through Gus. Once Becky had said to Peach about Lefty Flynn, “He doesn’t love me. He’s obsessed with me.”

  “Why did Nicole go back to him, then?” asked Gus.

  “I’ll give you a straight answer, Gus. Nicole could not be happy being alone,” said Cici. “She had to have a man. She had to have someone else with her. Every guy she went out with let her down, so she always went back to O. J.”

  “Do you think O. J. knew about Ron Goldman?” asked Gus.

  “I know he did,” said Faye. “I heard him mention Ron. He’d seen him in Brentwood, driving Nicole’s Ferrari. It made him crazy.”

  “But they were divorced. She could see anyone she wanted,” said Gus.

  “She liked young guys, late twenties, early thirties, and that made O. J. crazy, too, because he was beginning to get on in years. All her boyfriends after O. J. were in that age group. Keith Zlomsowitch, Grant Cramer.”

  “Were Nicole and Ron having an affair?” asked Gus.

  “Not yet,” said Faye. “She liked him. It was going to happen, but it hadn’t happened yet. I know that. That’s the kind of thing she and I talked about.”

  “Maybe it was going to happen that night,” said Gus. “I never could understand why Nicole lit the candles around the bathtub, unless she was expecting a night visitor and was setting the scene. Candlelight, soft music on the stereo, the scent of Rigaud in the air, and the handsome young waiter with the good pecs she’d already let drive her Ferrari. Come to think of it, Ron went back to his apartment and took a shower first and changed his clothes. If he was just going to Nicole’s condo to return her mother’s glasses, which she’d left behind at the restaurant, he wouldn’t have needed to take a shower first, nor would he have had any way of knowing that Nicole had drawn a tub for him and lit the candles to get things started.”

  “What are you talking about, Gus?” asked Faye.

  “That’s the way I’m going to describe it in my novel,” replied Gus.

  They sat by the fireplace and continued to talk.

  “How does O. J. react when they flash those pictures of Nicole’s dead body on the screen?” asked Robin.

  “He doesn’t look,” replied Gus. “He keeps his eyes averted from the screen. Either Carl Douglas or Robert Kardashian moves in and sits next to him and keeps him involved in conversation while the pictures are on the screen. Kardashian’s gotten pretty expert in positioning himself so as to block O. J.’s face from the camera when the bloody pictures of Ron and Nicole are on the screen.”

  “Perfect,” said Faye.

  “How’d you like to do that for a living?” asked Gus. “Offer comfort and distraction to the killer when they show pictures to the jury of the people he killed?”

  “I’ll tell you something I bet you didn’t know, Gus,” said Cici, coming into the room, carrying her lasagna. “Everybody sit.”

  “What’s that?” asked Gus, who was seated at the head of the table.

  “Robert Kardashian’s my cousin.”

  “He’s your cousin? Good God. I didn’t know that,” said Gus.

  “Yes. We’re both Armenians. The Kardashians are a prominent Armenian family out here,” said Cici.

  “I didn’t know that, either.”

  “Of course, Robert and I don’t speak now, ever since the murder. We’re on different sides. He went with O. J., and Nicole was my best friend. I know O. J. is guilty. At Nicole’s funeral, he couldn’t look me in the eye. He knows that I know.”

  “There sure is a lot of overlapping among the players in this case,” said Gus.

  “Do you know, Gus, the strangest thing happened to me the Tuesday after the murders,” said Cici. “The murders were on Sunday. O. J. came back on Monday from the golf tournament he went to in Chicago, and this—what I’m about to tell you—happened on Tuesday. I was driving my car, and I came to a stoplight. I was thinking, thinking, thinking the whole time about the murders, and all the signs that I hadn’t picked up on, and I happened to turn and look out the window at the car in the next lane to me, and I swear to God, Gus, there were O. J. and my cousin Robert waiting for the light to turn green. I couldn’t believe it. O. J. was on the passenger side. They were in Robert’s car. They were talking so intensely to each other, they didn’t notice me. All that I could think of was, Where have they been? What are they talking about? I felt like I was watching a strategy of lies being planned. When this thing is all over, I’ll never speak to Kardashian again. Never!”

  Gus got up and walked to the window and looked out over the courtyard.

  “That must have been after O. J. and Kardashian went to LAX to pick up his golf bag, which he’d left in Chicago. That’s when you saw them. I’ll bet you money the bloody knife was in that golf bag. It could go right through the security in the golf bag, without being noticed. He could have sent Kato, or Ron Shipp, or Al Cowlings out to the airport, but, no, he went himself, in the midst of his so-called grief and mourning for his slain wife. Something fishy there. I always wonder if all the pieces of this story are ever going to come together.”

  “What’s keeping you so fascinated at that window, Gus?” asked Cici. “You’ve gone over there to look out about four times.”

  “My previous life,” said Gus.

  “What does that mean?” asked Cici.

  “I used to live in this building,” said Gus.

  “You’re kidding!”

  “No, I’m not. Do you know who lived in this apartment that you have? Sydney Guilaroff. You probably don’t even know who he is, or was. He was at MGM for years, the greatest of all the hairdressers. The big ladies of the screen wouldn’t do a picture without him. He did Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Garbo, Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, Cyd Chiarisse, all of them. They all loved Sydney. He did Marilyn Monroe’s hair in the casket before they buried her. He did Natalie Wood’s after she drowned, before they buried her. I remember Ava Gardner used to come here to the building to visit Sydney.”

  “I love hearing stories about Hollywood history, Gus,” said Robin.

  “Which apartment was yours, Gus?” asked Cici.

  “Across the courtyard, with the two terraces, and the wrought-iron banister going up the stairs. That was mine. I lived there for quite a few years.”

  “That’s the best apartment in the building,” said Cici.

  “One of the big record-company executives lives there now.”

  “I moved here after my marriage broke up. Peach and the kids stayed in the house on Walden Drive. It wasn’t a good time in my life when I was here. I was out of work, broke, too ashamed to see anyone. I began to go downhill, slowly at first, but it escalated. I used to sit over there nights and drink and smoke dope and snort cocaine to blot out what was happening in my life.”

  The three young women stared at him.

  Gus turned back and sat down. “I led a very dangerous existence when I was drinking and using. Sometimes I’m surprised I’m still here,” said Gus. “I almost got murdered in that apartment, but I only tell that story when I qualify at an A.A. meeting.”

  “I heard some of that from my aunt,” said Robin.

  “My drinking became public,” said Gus. “George Christy alluded to it in his column in The Hollywood Reporter. So did Marvene Jones in her column. So did Bob Colacello in Interview. He wrote that I was all washed-up. Which I was, but I hated reading it. Finally, I had to give up the apartment. I couldn’t pay the rent. I couldn’t afford to put my things into storage, so I sold every piece of furniture in that apartment, every book, every plate, every piece of silver, even my Turnbull and Asser shirts with the monograms on them, and the Porthault towels. What I got from that sale was what I lived on until I got back on my feet again so
me years later.”

  “Is it a bummer for you being here?” asked Cici.

  “No. I got through it finally,” replied Gus. “It just brings back a lot of memories I’d managed to suppress.”

  “Where did you go when you left here?” asked Cici.

  “Oregon. I lived for six months in a one-room cabin in the Cascade Mountains, in a place called Camp Sherman.”

  “What did you do there?”

  “Licked my wounds. Started to write.”

  When Gus and Kardashian met again in court the following week, Gus wrote in his notebook, “Will you give me your telephone number?” and handed the notebook to Kardashian.

  As Kardashian was writing down the number, Deputy Browning, who was known to the reporters as “Big Girl,” pounced on Gus, enraged. Like her counterpart, Deputy Jex, she was filled with contempt for the media, mean as a hornet, and carried away by the importance bestowed on herby Judge Ito.

  “I’ll have you removed from this court,” she screamed at him. Her face turned bright red and was twisted with anger.

  Gus was startled, embarrassed, and bewildered.