THE GHOSTWRITER.(The Talk of the Town)

In 1994, Pablo Fenjves lived in a house about sixty yards away from Nicole Brown Simpson's residence, at 875 South Bundy Drive, in Brentwood. Fenjves was a screenwriter, and on the night of June 12th of that year he was working on a script called "The Last Bachelor," about an amorous baseball player. Shortly before eleven o'clock, he went from his office to his bedroom, where his wife, Jai, was watching "Dynasty: The Reunion." As the credits for the program were rolling, Fenjves heard a dog barking. The sound of the dog, Fenjves later testified, was like "a plaintive wail--sounded like a, you know, a very unhappy animal." Seven months before the murders of Simpson and Ron Goldman, Fenjves had written a script called "Frame-Up," which became a cable-television movie. In the opening scene, Fenjves wrote, "We hear the plaintive wail of a police siren."

The son of Holocaust survivors from Hungary, Fenjves had followed a circuitous route to "the Bundy location," as it was known in the O. J. Simpson trial. He grew up in Venezuela, went to college in Illinois, and ventured to Canada for a first job in journalism. In the late nineteen-seventies, he moved to Florida to write what he called "human-interest stories" for the National Enquirer. There he covered such curiosities as the world's oldest Siamese twins (they were in their twenties and worked in a travelling freak show), but he soon decided to devote himself to screenwriting full time.

While at the Enquirer, he became close friends with a colleague at the paper, Judith Regan. They kept in touch over the years, and when Regan became a success in the publishing world, as the custodian of her own imprint at Harper-Collins, she sometimes hired Fenjves. He ghostwrote the 2003 autobiography, "Maybe You Never Cry Again," of the comedian Bernie Mac (sample passage: "Got-damn right muh'fucka, I got a level of crazy in me you ain't begun to see"). Last year, Regan published Fenjves's parody of James Frey's work, called "A Million Little Lies," which he wrote under the ...