Prosecutor Marcia Clark was steaming, too angry even to listen to her favorite blues tapes as she drove home that night. After 20 murder trials--almost all of which she's won--she thought she had seen it all. Of course she had expected a little razzle-dazzle from Johnnie Cochran Jr. during his opening arguments, but, she says, the surprise unveiling of 14 new witnesses by O.J. Simpson's defense lawyers stunned even her. ``This was plain sleazy,'' Clark said in an interview with Time. ``I was floored. They disregarded the judge's orders.''
But Clark, a steely prosecutor who says she must be ``convinced 200% that a defendant is guilty before I'll try a case,'' is hardly incapacitated. Every night last week, after going home for an hour to tuck her two children into bed, and all through the weekend, she was back in her small 18th-floor office at the Los Angeles County courthouse, munching on celery (she does not eat dinner), smoking Dunhills and scribbling furiously on a white legal pad. Clark, deputy district attorney Christopher Darden and the six other lawyers working on the case--along with a bunch of cops who constantly drop by to visit Clark and offer help and moral support--ordered in pizza or Chinese food as the team scrambled to right the prosecutorial ship. ``I don't believe the defense can produce everything they say they can,'' says Darden. ``I can tell you that you will not see the prosecution be as complacent as we have been for the rest of this trial.''
The plan, says Clark, is to research and impeach the new witnesses--witnesses the prosecution believes Cochran mentioned merely to create a fog of reasonable doubt in the minds of the jurors at the outset of the trial, even though he knows their testimony will not survive cross-examination. ``Let me tell you this,'' says a bemused Clark. ``This was not the typical first week of a murder trial.''
Firecrackers, hand grenades, bombshells: the defense team is ready to toss an arsenal of hints, suggestions and arguments into this already explosive case. While Clark was cooling off and plotting her comeback, halfway across Los Angeles County, defense lawyer Robert Shapiro was watching his 14-year- old son Brent play a hard-fought, body-checking ice hockey game--and chatting strategy. Consider the bloody socks, he says, talking fast while cheering on Brent. Investigators ``find a pair of socks'' at O.J.'s house the day after Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman are found murdered, Shapiro explains. ``Nobody notices any blood. Two weeks later the socks are looked at by two of our experts, along with the head of the L.A.P.D. lab. Nobody notices any blood.'' Not until August, claims Shapiro, is blood discovered on the socks-- lots of it, plenty to run a DNA check. And where did this blood come from? Shapiro hints that when some of Simpson's blood was drawn on the day of his arrest, a bit seems to have disappeared. The implication: it found its way onto the socks.