In a trial which some had forecast as sensational--in the tabloid sense of the word--but which has often been lacking in red meat, Wednesday's wrap-up of the government's case at least provided a couple of other food groups. There was toast, as in the general assessment of Anthony Pellicano's pro se defense as things stand after a month in the federal courthouse. And of course there was a dead fish, as in the wet, slimy symbol that a person or persons unknown slapped onto reporter Anita Busch's Audi convertible under an overturned pan and alongside a rose, a hole in the windshield, and a hand-lettered sign reading, "STOP".

If you ask Busch, it was the doing of the day's other star witness in concert with the trial's key defendant: "I know that he hired Anthony Pellicano and the evidence points to Mike Ovitz." That testimony was evoked during a robust but gentlemanly cross-examination by lawyer Chad Hummel, representing Pellicano co-defendant Mark Arneson, and he'd been asking if the fish was possibly planted as a result of another investigative series, about actor Steven Seagal and his mobbed-up sometime partner Julius Nasso.

Less gentlemanly was the interrogation by Pellicano himself. The former p.i is broke and broken, and in his Velcro-cinched sneakers and tent like prison garb, nobody wants to meet the former dandy's tailor anymore. But when he stands at the podium with one foot crossed over an ankle and his hand held disconcertingly behind is back, dipping his beak in his accusers' miseries, he's somehow threatening. She managed a few ripostes, at one stage saying, "it was relentless attack, Mr. Pellicano-as you know."

Busch had already been subjected to a necessary round of questions from Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Saunders. He took her through the history of some stories she free-lanced for in the New York Times, most but not all co-bylined with Bernard Weinraub, with headlines like, "Actor Defects From Ovitz--Another Setback For Troubled Agency". (The actor was Robin Williams, and the agency was his Artists' Management Group, which at the time of the Times stories was heavily leaking clients, prestige and money--or, as Ovitz put it, "doing just fine". But as the television/telephony producing side of his tripartite enterprise tanked (AT&T pulled out of financing it) and his former CAA brethren (like earlier witnesses Bryan Lourd and Kevin Huvane) froze him out, "We were reeling...all I wanted was a graceful exit."

(Or as another Times headline would term it, "A Faded Power Broker Relinquishes His Talent Business". Feeling the press reports were "wildly personal and wildly embarrassing", Ovitz, who seemed to quite enjoy his comparison of the Hollywood mogul scrum to high school and was hardly the picture of remorse on the witness stand, freely confessed to hiring Pellicano because he worked with "the highest levels of the community...the same people who were sourcing the press".

Notable on Ovitz's enemies list today were a man he has accused of bringing him down via Hollywod's "gay mafia", David Geffen, as well as his sometime partner in founding Creative Artists Agency, Ron Meyer. Ovitz said Pellicano "knew a substantial number of people in the West Los Angeles business community. He was working with people I was having problems with -- Ron Meyer, David Geffen" .In fact, in "embarrassing" Busch and the other detractors, Pellicano would prove "extremely helpful". The $75,000 he spent for such information was hardly the biggest tab paid to the private investigator during his thriving years.

Ovitz has not been charged in the case, and with the statute of limitations on any wiretapping charges reportedly now expiring, only if he's perjured himself will he face prosecution over the whole adventure. "I never instructed him to do anything illegally," he said of Pellicano. (The private detective gave him the code name Gaspar, which Ovitz acknowledged with some befuddlement. It just might be a reference to the Spanish pirate who wrapped an anchor chain around his waist and plunged to his death in the brine rather than surrender.)

The government's twin prosecutors, Saunders and Kevin Lally, would seem, from the attention they paid to cross-references during their direct examinations of Ovitz and Busch in quick succession, to believe otherwise. Saunders introduced the evils visited on Bush by degrees--her home (and home office) phones were hooked up to "half-taps", which were traced to Pellicano's office, and her computer and its files, included e-mail were preyed upon. And the infamous fish incident clearly traumatized her. But her tormentors' piece de resistance, which she related tearfully and with long pauses to regain composure, came on the morning of August 16, 2002, when she left her apartment to walk to her rental car and was accosted by two men who roared up her street off San Vicente Boulevard in what she saw as a "dirt-colored" Mercedes, stopping to confront her after she scurried into her car. "I remember thinking, 'I'm going to die!' " she sobbingly told the courtroom, "I thought, 'This is how it ends.'" The car's passenger gave her "a sickening smile" held a finger to his lips, and then gave a two-fingered ta-ta wave.

It's quite evident that Busch, whose courtroom support included her First Amendment lawyer, as well as the attorney representing her in civil suits against Pellicano and Ovitz, a journalist friend, and her sister, has not emotionally recovered from her ordeal. She has abandoned--as Pellicano and attorney Hummel were at pains to make her reiterate- a book project whose draft was titled A Woman At Risk, and she's done more editing than reporting of late.

If Pellicano has garnered any good will from the jury with his unctuous, daily "Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the jury," he pretty much wrapped it in an anchor chain and threw it away with his cross-examination of Busch. Having grilled her a t the street layout that day (of which he seemed highly knowledgeable), he raked at her over details. Early on, Saunders objected with "asked and answered", and though he habitually shoots down entire skeins of Pellicano cross-examination with objections the judge sustains, he then seemed to strategically desist and let Pellicano dig and dig until the entire courtroom's unease (and dislike for the p.i.) became palpable.

Busch described a post-threat meeting with the editor of the Los Angles Times, who by then had hired her, and said the paper's general counsel Karlene Goller proposed hiring Pellicano to find the source of thereat--"She wanted you to come aboard" - to which Busch, as she said even as the courtroom tittered, remembered replying that he "didn't have a very good reputation."

After the prosecution finishes with some dense business regarding wiretapping technique tomorrow, they'll close the case in chief, and Pellicano will be the first among the four defendants present his case. (Of course, he's got an entire second trial alongside Century City lawyer Terry Christensen, also indicted due to their shared work for Kirk Kerkorian, to face after this one.)

Thus far, Pellicano's sandbagged himself with those clumsy or alienating cross-examinations, which the quietly droll but definitely serious Judge Dale Fischer steers back on track with pained good grace, and observers are wondering just how much bigger a hole he can dig for himself.

As was pointed out early on, through his assiduously collected but ill-advisedly stashed tapes of his own conversations ("Always an open ear," as Ovitz warmly said) he's been the trial's best witness for the prosecution. The courtroom would hear Ovitz, in another one of Pellicano's taped conversations with the clients he steadily milked for large payments, saying to him, "I need to see you--I have a situation, I think it could be beneficial to you and probably to me--this is the single most complex situation imaginable."

And yet, Ovitz promised, relating it all would take only 30 minutes that evening. That was April 11, 2002--six years to the day this Friday, as Pellicano prepares to defend himself. He apparently still hasn't decided if he will take the stand in his own defense, which may tempt his outsize o but leave him open to a righteous prosecutorial pummeling. And that, to borrow Ovitz's agently exaggeration, is almost certainly the single most complex situation imaginable.

(Ron Meyer, left, and Mike Ovitz in happier days circa 1998; photo by Time-Life Pictures/DMI//Getty Images)