MR. NICE GUY RETURNS

By ELAINE LAFFERTY/SANTA MONICA

O J. Simpson had been on the witness stand for most of two hours last Friday afternoon when the judge took a brief recess. Two elderly women who had occupied coveted seats available to the public decided they had heard enough. Leaving the Santa Monica, California, courthouse, one of them said, "Well, you either believe the whole thing or you don't."

No legal pundit, or Hamlet invoking "words, words, words" could have explained the wrongful-death lawsuit against Simpson more succinctly. As the defense prepares to rest this week, jurors will ponder what has been presented to them. Under gentle questioning from his attorney, Robert Baker, Simpson constructed the architecture of his life, recounting his impoverished childhood in San Francisco and detailing his development as an athlete throughout high school and college. Baker spent a good deal of time prompting Simpson to list his athletic achievements and awards, from the Heisman trophy in 1967 to his status as perhaps the game's reigning star when he finally resigned from football in 1979.

Finally, Simpson gave his version of life with Nicole Brown Simpson, whom he married in 1986 after a seven-year courtship. Most of their relationship, to hear Simpson tell it, was idyllic, filled with the luxuries that only a combination of financial wealth and true love can bestow. Said Simpson: "We traveled all over the world. Our house was always packed with people and full of friends."

Theirs was not a violent relationship, Simpson maintained, with the exception of a single incident on New Year's Eve in 1989. Of the other encounters introduced by the plaintiffs, such as when Nicole called 911 in 1993 after Simpson kicked down an exterior door in her home, Simpson was dismissive: "It was a reflex action."

Although it was not by any measure riveting testimony, it may have been effective. While praising Nicole's skills as a mother, Simpson managed in his narrative of the last two years of Nicole's life to make passing reference to her alleged drug use, to her acquaintance with a known prostitute and to an abortion. Said Laurie Levenson, dean of Loyola Law School: "The whole contention is 'I'm a wonderful person, and I wouldn't have done this.'" Even the plaintiffs noted privately that there was little they would challenge. "It's his script, and we all know the words," said a source close to the plaintiffs. "Deny, deny."

Nonetheless, Simpson's easy, relaxed demeanor capped the kind of week that has thus far seemed to elude the Simpson defense. After several sessions of pummeling by the plaintiffs, attorney Baker offered up a kind of Greatest Hits of the O.J. Defense. Forensic wizard Dr. Henry Lee reprised his "something's wrong here" analysis of crime-scene blooddrops that was so effective in the criminal trial. This time, however, Lee said, in videotaped testimony, that he observed a second set of blooddrops in crime-scene photos that he had missed the first time. That, and Lee's contention that Ronald Goldman's struggle with his killer was a prolonged one, would seem to support the defense theory of a second killer. l.a.p.d. criminalist Dennis Fung, whose nine days of prosecution testimony in the criminal case did so much damage that the defense chose to present him as a witness this time, also managed to inject a bizarre new twist when Fung suggested that a discrepancy in a photograph of the glove found near the bodies of Nicole and Goldman indicated it may not be the same one booked into evidence at the l.a.p.d. lab. The strategy of raising questions rather than eliciting answers is one that Baker has perfected. Earlier, for example, Baker asked l.a.p.d. Detective Tom Lange whether Detective Mark Fuhrman had been out of sight long enough to plant a glove, even though no evidence to that effect had been introduced. All Lange could offer was that Fuhrman was not always in his view.

For their part, the plaintiffs have relied on pictures almost as much as words, from some 30-plus photos of Simpson wearing the Bruno Magli shoes he has denied owning to photos of a bruised Nicole. When Simpson retakes the stand this week, plaintiffs' attorney Daniel Petrocelli must decide how much to prolong the cross-examination. Despite the tantalizing prospect of tripping up O.J., it is likely Petrocelli will resist the temptation to confront Simpson with every inconsistency in his tale and opt instead to get the case to a jury that has already begun to look weary. Judge Hiroshi Fujisaki has said he expects the case to end in the next two weeks.