PERSPECTIVES ON THE SIMPSON VERDICTS : If There’s Too Much Pain Rewrite the Ending : Crime novelists, unlike reporters, get to prescribe whatever justice they desire, in or out of court.

Justice still triumphs, but not in real life.

Had the O.J. Simpson case been fiction, when he was holding himself hostage with a gun to his head during the slow-speed freeway chase, he would have been trying to escape in order to find the real killer and exonerate himself.

But this is real life in America, where justice is rare and the jury system does not work. In America, where People magazine is the Bible and celebrities can do no wrong.

After 18 years as a reporter covering a criminal justice system that most often fails, I still clung to the hope that most people trusted with important decisions will rise to the occasion and find the courage to do the right thing. I was wrong.

Taking no time to consider the mountain of evidence or volumes of testimony, the Simpson jury ignored it, to send a message on behalf of a man who transcended race long ago. The jury wasted our time, wasted our money and helped pull the plug on our system of justice.

Reporting for a big-city newspaper was a joy. There is something noble and exciting about venturing out each day to seek the truth. Every day was an adventure. But writers want to be tidy, to wrap up the loose ends, solve the mysteries and provide closure. In real life, in journalism, murders go unsolved, some missing people stay lost forever and killers often beat the system. Unresolved murders are unfinished stories. They tend to haunt you.

The beautiful 17-year-old girl who vanished like footprints on a sea-washed beach 21 years ago and the parents who never stopped searching for her. The dismembered corpses of a young couple whose body parts surfaced in the bay and who have never been identified. The working mother cut in half by a shotgun blast even though she did not resist the seventh robbery of the convenience store where she clerked.

I think of them all every day of my life, tragic victims and survivors without closure or resolution. Now Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman join the restless souls of those whose killers walk free. Somebody owes them.

As for me, I have found an alternative, a world where justice and happy endings are still possible. I can make them happen.

One can often tell more truth in fiction than in journalism. A novelist can address society’s problems, expose wrongs and injustice and endow the characters with common sense.

I can solve the mysteries, make the good guys win and the bad guys get what they deserve; best of all I can bring closure to victims and their families--so unlike real life.