Private eye's work ranges from famous cases to unknown faces

      WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- He grabs the just-delivered stack of newspapers and rustles through them, scanning each page from top to bottom before flipping onward.
      Suddenly, his eyebrows dart up and he raps the paper with his index finger: "Look at that!"
      On the page in question sits a photo of a massive traffic jam caused by a boat sliding off a trailer. On that day, thousands of commuters were annoyed; on this day, some four months later, Patrick McKenna, private investigator, is jubilant.
      His job, as he sees it, for $100 an hour, is "to help people get out of jams." And his client -- a young professional man, charged with lewd-and-lascivious conduct -- is in a much worse jam than the one that delayed those commuters.
      Up front, McKenna gets the official story -- what his client has been charged with, all the details authorities have collected. Then he looks for contradictions.
      "Usually, when you start out, it looks really bad," he explains. "Then the more you find out, the picture starts changing."
      And the best way to change the picture is to find an alibi.
      Take the newspaper traffic photo. It will prove that his client could not have driven from his downtown office to a suburban neighborhood in time to have exposed himself to his accuser.
      Only one problem.
      As he gives one more look to the paper, ordered from the public library, he realizes it's dated the same day as the offense -- meaning the traffic tieup occurred the day before.
      "I thought I was going to look like a genius there," McKenna said ruefully, quickly folding up the papers and pushing them to the side.
      He's looked like a genius before. Once, McKenna was working on behalf of a man charged with an especially brutal rape. The man had a record, the evidence seemed stacked high against him, and he had little money to spend for a defense.
      McKenna came up with pivotal evidence by driving down busy U.S. Highway 1 and balancing a video camera aimed to show both the speedometer and the highway as the time flashed on the tape.
      At the end of the trip, McKenna had proof that his man did not have the time to make the trip from a place where witnesses saw him to the place where the rape occurred. An iron-clad alibi.
      The verdict: Not guilty.
      So when the traffic tieup photo didn't work out, McKenna wasn't worried: "I've got plenty of tricks left."
      "Patience and persistence," he said, repeating softly, "patience and persistence."
      In 13 years as a private eye, Pat McKenna has helped plenty of people in trouble, including some you may have heard of.
      William Kennedy Smith, for one. O.J. Simpson, for another.
      Those cases helped establish the garrulous, salty-tongued ex-Marine as a top real-life practitioner of the usually secretive, often romanticized, trade. McKenna, wrote Joseph Bosco in his Simpson trial book, "looks, talks and lives a life ... close to rivaling the great P.I.s of fiction."
      "A lot of what I do is mundane," McKenna said. He searches records, reads files, sits through stakeouts.
      Nevertheless, his job has taken him to jungle airstrips in South America, banks in Switzerland, beaches in the Caribbean and deep into the underside of Palm Beach society while working with such attorneys as F. Lee Bailey, Johnnie Cochran and Roy Black.
      For nearly two years, often 18 hours a day, he lived the Simpson case -- as Bailey says, "checking out every roach under every stone."
      "A good lawyer will always have a good investigator," said Bailey, who called on McKenna soon after the 1994 slayings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman.
      Sure, investigators are still called upon to serve as gumshoes for criminal cases, or spies for jealous spouses. But these days, they also are hired in white-collar cases. They can sniff out information faster and cheaper than lawyers who pursue documents and depositions.
      Bailey, who started out as a private investigator four decades ago, says there's no substitute for going out and knocking on doors, finding "and eyeballing" the witnesses and evidence.
      McKenna, say attorneys he's worked with, combines the best of old and new -- he's well-educated, with a master's degree in corrections from Chicago State University, and conversant enough with computers to at least know what information is available.
      Attorneys say the 48-year-old former probation officer and presentencing investigator also has crucial intangibles: He's fearless and relentless. He usually shuns electronic surveillance devices used by colleagues -- "Inspector Gadgets," he's dubbed them -- and doesn't carry a weapon.
      He spends much of his time on the phone, working sources, kibitzing, trading notes with law-enforcement acquaintances, chasing tips.
      Earthy, witty and animated, but with a soothing politeness and friendliness, McKenna "just has a way of putting people at ease," Miami attorney Stephen Bronis said. He blends in.
      "And," Bailey adds with a chuckle, "he's got a lot of Irish charm."
      It was McKenna who unearthed a key break in the Simpson murder trial -- discovery of tapes in which detective Mark Fuhrman used racist language and bragged of rogue activities.
      Luck, he says -- "but it was hard-working luck."
      When he worked for Black at the William Kennedy Smith rape trial, McKenna immersed himself in the Palm Beach bar scene, probing deep into the background of Smith's accuser, finding contradictions in her story.
      Simpson was different. A native of Chicago, McKenna initially was dispatched there to retrace Simpson's steps -- literally timing and counting the number of paces from his hotel room to the ice machine, for example -- after his flight from Los Angeles the night of the killings.
      Over the next two weeks, McKenna, sometimes posing as a reporter and thrusting a tape recorder into a detective's face, monitored the police investigation while lining up "demeanor witnesses" who would testify that Simpson's behavior didn't seem unusual.
      Then, he joined two other veteran P.I.s in Los Angeles working for the defense. His role included more than 50 visits to the crime scene, literally giving his blood for a defense forensic test of how quickly blood would dry on the glove found there.
      And, mainly, chasing leads.
      There were leads from kooks. There were leads from witness wannabes. There were false leads, he suspects, from allies of the police and prosecution.
      But many leads initially seemed legitimate and, as McKenna reflects, "in this business, you never know."
      He shot pool with a Stephen Seagal lookalike whose inside information turned out to be idle gossip about prosecutor Marcia Clark, drank beer in a biker bar with a former girlfriend of Fuhrman, and flew to Wichita, Kan., to grab cigarette butts out of the garbage can of a woman who claimed to have been smoking a cigarette at the scene the night of the murders.
      Then, among the stack of phone messages he waded through in July 1995 was one from a man who told him of a woman named Laura who had interviews with Fuhrman -- on tape.
      Rumors of such tapes had been circulating, but McKenna's tip was greeted skeptically by Simpson's lawyers, who'd seen so many leads collapse. He doggedly pursued it, leading to aspiring screenwriter Laura Hart McKinney in North Carolina.
      The result: The tapes that blasted Fuhrman's credibility.
      McKenna, who did consulting work for Simpson's new defense team in the civil trial, still insists Simpson is innocent. But the bottom line to his job, McKenna says, is that "I ain't the one to do the judging."