I put my bags on the conveyor belt and stroll through the metal detector.

"Stop her!" hollers one guard. I am told to leave my tape recorder at the main desk and given a receipt to retrieve it at the end of the day.

"I didn't know," I meekly mutter to the large, no-nonsense fellow behind the circular desk who takes my name down in big block letters and seals my recorder in a Zip-Loc bag as if it's evidence. He ponders my meekness and decides to smile.

After a half-hour wait outside the 7th floor courtroom, which I spend making conversation with a guy from "Entertainment Tonight," the doors swing open. Family and official press get ushered in first. Then the rest of us are allowed to file in. I slide into a pewlike bench toward the back, directly behind four stiff-backed "members of the family," though whose family is not clear, since there are three men on trial here: Sean "Puffy" Combs, Jamal "Shyne" Barrow and Anthony "Wolf" Jones.

I spot Johnnie Cochran's bald spot -- about 20 feet in front of me -- right away. Even under the fluorescent lighting, he looks smooth. My first impression of Puffy, seated immediately to his left, between Cochran and his other lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, is more complicated.

It's hard to reconcile my sense of Puffy the celebrity with this slender, ashen-faced fellow in the dark suit. Deprived of his entourage and out of his glitzy context, he just looks like a defendant. It's unnerving.

Then he gets up, tall and slender in his oversize suit, and walks out into the audience, greeting and kissing a group of people -- mostly women -- directly opposite me. After some quick banter, he swaggers back through the low swinging panel that separates the audience from the action and takes his seat up front.

Before the jury comes out, one of the lawyers moves for a mistrial. A heated discussion about impeaching the credibility of a witness ensues. The D.A., Matthew Bogdanos, a trim fellow with a perky nose, barks a line about a trial being a search for truth, not gamesmanship. And Brafman snaps back, "I thought we would wait till 3 or 4 o'clock before Mr. Bogdanos got all wound up."

Somehow the matter is settled, and the judge denies the motion for a mistrial. It is also agreed that Puffy's bodyguard Anthony Jones, who, like his famous boss, stands accused of gun and bribery charges, should be referred as Mr. Jones and not "Wolf," "unless the witness knows him by no other name." And, after a brief discussion of ballistics and scientific proof, the jury files in and we move on.

Or try to move on.

The witness, Leonard Curtis Howard, a former corrections officer who moonlights as Puffy's bodyguard, is nowhere to be found. He's not outside the courtroom, where he was supposed to be at 9:30 a.m. (it is now past 10), nor is he answering his cellphone. Confusion ensues, but then, just as another witness is about to be called, Howard shows up.

He takes the stand and we learn A) that he's "here to tell the truth," B) that he saw Puffy looking "nervous and shocked" as well as "stunned and shocked" after the shots were fired in the crowded Club New York the night of Dec. 26, 1999, and C) that he once was accused and cleared of charges of possession of a stolen vehicle because "I had no knowledge of a stolen vehicle." (He was, however, suspended by the department of corrections for six months.)

Before getting off the stand he gives his big sound bite, um, I mean, testimony. "For so long as I have known [Puffy], I have not known him to carry a firearm. If I had known, I would not have worked for him, because I would not put my job on the line."

Then we take our midmorning break.

Brilliant Careers: Sound and Vision Audio and video highlights of our Brilliant Careers profiles