During the O.J. Simpson trial he would appear on the CBS Evening News every Friday, and Dan Rather would always ask him how he thought the trial would end. With a hung jury, Dunne finally decided. After all, who would have thought that Simpson would go free?

So here is Dunne more than six years later, with the memory of what he calls a miscarriage of justice still rankling. He has tried to put it behind him, but he cannot. To exorcise its ghost, he even wrote Another City, Not My Own, a hybrid novel. It was part memoir and part reportage, with the real names of real people--O.J., the Dream Team, Judge Lance Ito and Marcia Clark among them, along with all the bit players and hangers-on--and its narrator is one Gus Bailey, who writes for Vanity Fair and is, of course, Dunne himself. "Thoroughly absorbing," Time said of the novel; "Compulsively readable," according to Vogue. Meanwhile in the novel's last few pages, Dunne, a.k.a. Gus Bailey, has his face shot off and is dead.

"I thought if I killed Gus, it might help to rid me of my obsession with O.J., but it didn't work," Dunne says. He is in his nicely cluttered apartment in the East 40s in Manhattan--many books and pictures, dinner invitations, memos and notes stuck under the rim of a mirror, and a sofa with a pillow on it that says, "Where is Chandra Levy?" where he spends three days each week. The rest of the time he is at his yellow frame house with a gambrel roof in Connecticut. He describes it in the section of the book where Gus Bailey is shot dead.

"I can't think of any trial that caught up as many people in America as the Simpson trial did," Dunne continues. "It was a great trashy novel come to life: the celebrity status of everyone involved, the beautiful blonde wife, the two darling kids upstairs in the condominium while their father murdered their mother and Ron Goldman. I had spies everywhere, even in the defense--I won't tell you who--and I was at dead center of the biggest story in America." Indeed he was. Mindful of Dunne's own celebrity status, Judge Ito had assigned him a permanent front-row courtroom seat. When the jury announced its verdict, after only eight minutes of deliberation, you could see Dunne on television. His jaw had dropped and he looked stunned.

"It made me aware for the first time of the deep chasm between blacks and whites," Dunne goes on. "I was friends with O.J.'s sisters--lovely, lovely people--and I understood how they felt. But there were African-American reporters, as well educated as I was, who had sat through the trial and weren't upset. There was this need, the need that O.J. be acquitted."So Dunne was saddened by that, and at the same time he was appalled by what the trial did to the people involved in it. In the great media circus that the Simpson trial became, he says, "event fame," as opposed to accomplishment fame," transformed the participants. Some flashed across our consciousness while they were interviewed by Larry King and signed contracts to write quickie books and even do lounge acts in Las Vegas. When the trial was over, they disappeared without leaving any traces behind them. Whatever happened, for example, to Kato Kaelin?

But there were also the major players at the trial, who, enamored by their instant fame, Dunne insists, trivialized the judicial process. When celebrities showed up in the courtroom, he recalls, Judge Ito would stop the trial to chat with them. On the great day that Barbara Walters appeared, he invited her to visit him in chambers. There was also prosecutor Marcia Clark. When Dunne first met her, characteristically, for him, at a dinner party in Hollywood, he thought she was brilliant. But then, he says, she succumbed to her growing celebrity status. She changed her hair and she changed her make up, and then she began wearing mini-skirts. "The church-going ladies on the jury were shocked," Dunne says. "I don't know why the district attorney didn't stop her."

But Dunne reserves his deepest scorn for the highly paid lawyers who swore to Simpson's innocence while they preened for the press outside the courthouse by day, and then joined in the trek to Larry King, Greta van Susteren and Geraldo at night. For the members of the Dream Team, Dunne says, the trial was never about the slit throats of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman; it was always about winning at all costs.

So when Dunne, who is ordinarily very proper and sometimes almost prim, talks about the lawyers he uses obscenities. Probably he cannot help it. Memories of their lawyerly tactics still linger. F. Lee Bailey promoted the theory that the murders were committed by members of a Colombian drug ring. Johnnie Cochran turned up in court with guards from the Nation of Islam."That was totally unnecessary," Dunne says. "No one was going to do anything to Johnnie. It was to let the jury know how to vote." At the civil trial the Goldmans brought against Simpson, Robert Baker ridiculed Ron Goldman's dream of one day owning a restaurant. "Let's examine reality," he said, while the bereaved Goldman family listened. "Ron Goldman wouldn't have a restaurant now. He would be lucky to have a credit card."And so it went, while America and much of the rest of the world followed it all on television. In a way, it was entertainment. Dunne, who had believed from the start that Simpson was guilty, recalls a day early on in the trial when Robert Shapiro, then the lead lawyer on the Dream Team, was cheered by the crowd at a football game. It is another dreary memory that won't go away. "I thought to myself," Dunne says, "what is wrong with our country?"But if you are to understand why Dunne feels as passionately as he does about the Simpson trial you should know about his life. Dunne was born into an upper-middle-class family in Hartford, Connecticut. At age nine he visited Hollywood with his aunt and thought it so glamorous that he promised himself he would one day return there. Eventually he did, although first he saw combat as a teenage private in Europe in the war. Then he went to Williams College and, after graduation, decided to pursue a career in television in New York. That led him in turn to 24 years in Hollywood, where he became a producer and studio executive. The promise he had made to himself as a boy was fulfilled.

And indeed for a long while Dunne's life went well. He was happily married with two sons and a beautiful daughter. He was also a Hollywood insider. "Nick was always fun to have around," says a woman who was on the A-list too. But then things went wrong. The marriage broke up. Dunne began drinking. In 1978 he produced the movie Ash Wednesday with Elizabeth Taylor, and it flopped. "My life," Dunne says, "was in a downward spiral." Consequently he retreated to a one-room cabin in Oregon to lick his wounds and write a novel. He discovered, in fact, that he enjoyed writing. So he left the cabin after six months and returned to Beverly Hills, where he sold all of his possessions and then moved to New York, where he found an apartment in Greenwich Village and finished his novel. When it was published, the Times's review said it was lousy, but no matter. Dunne wrote another novel. It was The Two Mrs. Grenvilles and it was hugely successful. Dunne had found a new career.

But in 1982 Dunne's life changed again. His adored daughter, Dominique, was murdered by a man named John Sweeney. The woman from the A-list who had known Dunne in Hollywood saw him in New York just after it happened. "Nick's face was so full of pain that you couldn't bear to look at him," she says. "You had to keep turning away."

Dunne could not make the pain go away, although, as he would say later, he did find a way to keep his sanity. Two days before he was to leave New York for Los Angeles to attend Sweeney's trial, he met Tina Brown, who was about to become the editor of Vanity Fair. "Keep a journal every day," she told him. "Write it all down. Come and see me when you get back."Dunne did as she suggested. Meanwhile the trial was a travesty. His daughter's killer, a former boyfriend who had stalked and strangled her, read a Bible each day in court. His lawyer depicted him as working-class man who had fallen in love with, and then been spurned by, a Beverly Hills playgirl. In effect, Dunne's daughter was put on trial, and not Sweeney. At the same time, the judge ruled as inadmissible any testimony from a woman he once had beaten so badly she had to be hospitalized. The real horror, though, came when Sweeney was sentenced to only three years in prison. Indeed he was released after serving only two and a half years.On his return to New York, Dunne wrote about the trial for Vanity Fair. His story was titled Justice, and you may find in it themes that have echoed in his writing ever since: contempt for courtroom theatrics and defense lawyers who want to win at any cost, disdain for incompetent judges and sympathy for the families of victims. Remember what he said about the trial of O.J. Simpson.

Dunnne's feelings are always apparent, and he is not interested in journalistic balance. He has a mission to indict the guilty. Meanwhile he moves, as always, among the rich and famous, and is perfectly at home when he does. Other than Tom Wolfe, say, it hard to think of any other writer with his eye for the exquisite detail. It is almost a trademark of his stories. Dunne walks through a room and then describes it down to the last elegant bibelot, sconce and ormolu table. He will also tell you what the women in the room were wearing.

But return now to Dunne's nicely cluttered apartment in the East 40s. You would not call it elegant, although certainly it is comfortable, and it suits Dunne very well. He arises there every morning at 6 and picks up the Times, Post ("I love the Post," he says), News and Wall Street Journal at his door, makes his coffee, and turns on Don Imus. He may write in his journal after that, recording whatever it was he did the night before. Dunne is 76, but he says he feels like 40. The chance that he had stayed home the night before rather than going out somewhere is virtually nonexistent."I love my writer's life more than I ever did my Hollywood life," he says. But he will not talk about his new novel except to say that in it he will bring Gus Bailey back from the dead.