It didn’t matter. There were almost no cameras.

“There is nobody here,” said Mr. Dunne, the chronicler of celebrity crime, still disappointed on Friday as the first week of testimony wrapped up.

Well, not nobody; Mr. Dunne, after all, is present. At 82 and battling bladder cancer, he traveled here against doctor’s orders and his family’s wishes, to sit again in a courtroom, where a different set of lawyers grill a different set of troubling witnesses, but where the same defendant, Orenthal James Simpson, awaits his fate.

Mr. Dunne says he wouldn’t think of missing it. Given his declining health and his desire to write his memoirs, this may be the last high-profile trial for Mr. Dunne, whose lengthy first-person columns in Vanity Fair portray celebrity defendants and his own personal celebrity. He has covered the courtroom dramas of Claus von Bulow, William Kennedy Smith, Michael C. Skakel and Phil Spector.

“An O. J. case is the perfect capper because he’s been such a part of my life for 13 years,” said Mr. Dunne, whose virulent criticism of Mr. Simpson, 61, in his writing and on Court TV, caused defense lawyers to ask prospective jurors if they were familiar with his work.

“I had a literary following before, but because of O. J. I became a name and a public person, which I love,” Mr. Dunne said. “I think it would be a fitting way to end.”

Mr. Dunne and the defendant are almost the only holdovers here from the 1995 double-homicide trial at which Mr. Simpson was acquitted. (The former prosecutor Marcia Clark, who failed to convict Mr. Simpson on charges that he murdered his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman requested a press badge to report for “Entertainment Tonight,” but she has not yet appeared.)

“There’s no excitement, no buzz outside,” Mr. Dunne said wistfully. “It’s because there’s no body.”

Indeed, thi s trial is a vastly different business. Mr. Simpson is charged with armed robbery and kidnapping stemming from a confrontation in September 2007 in which he attempted to retrieve sports memorabilia that he said had been taken from him.

The scene of the alleged crime was a $35-a-night hotel room here. There is no bloody glove entered as evidence, only a series of headache-inducing audio recordings by an ex-convict who set up the confrontation and sold his tapes to a gossip Web site before sharing them with the police.

Instead of two attractive young people stabbed in cold blood, the victims are a pair of middle-aged men, collectibles dealers.

MR. DUNNE understands all that, now that he has sat through five tedious days of testimony that included arcana about the corruptibility of digital audio recordings. But to him it isn’t just a mundane robbery case; it’s a mundane robbery case involving one of the world’s most famous murder defendants.

“If O. J. was not at the center of this, there’s no way I could even sit through this,” he said. “I just don’t care about stolen footballs.”

Nor, it seems, do most Americans; they just want to find out whether it ends any differently than the first trial, and whether, if convicted on the most serious counts, Mr. Simpson will be sentenced to the 15 years to life in prison he faces.

Mr. Simpson’s initial court appearances last year provoked a minor frenzy, but his arrivals in recent days elicited little reaction. A street outside the courthouse was shut down for an expected deluge of reporters, but it has been largely empty. The Las Vegas Sun is offering updates via the microblog site Twitter, but as of Friday just 33 people had signed up.

The event is also playing out to a country preoccupied by a crisis on Wall Street and the drama of a presidential race. The quiet around the trial has made Mr. Dunne, a small, white-haired figure with thick horn-rimmed glasses, one of the more intriguing sidelights of the saga.

When a Simpson fan burst into the courtroom during a break to get the defendant’s autograph, the sight of Mr. Dunne caused her to let out a gasp. “It’s Dominick Dunne!” she exclaimed, planting a kiss on him before bailiffs expelled her. There was laughter, and Mr. Simpson quipped, “Hey, she’s after Dominick, she’s not after me!”

Declining to work in a nearby press room where it is easier to see and hear, Mr. Dunne prefers to soak up the atmosphere, such as it is, in the back row of the Clark County courtroom. He sits next to the door, the only person permitted by Judge Jackie Glass to enter and exit while court is in session, a concession to his health.

The notebooks in which h e scribbles have a sketch of his own likeness on every page, pads made for him for his occasional TruTV series, “Dominick Dunne’s Power, Privilege and Justice.”

Even Mr. Simpson, whose guilt in the double murder Mr. Dunne has vehemently argued, is deferential. Mr. Dunne said he was nervous when Mr. Simpson, a former professional football player, approached him on the trial’s first day, but the defendant just smiled and complimented him on his TV show.

Could Mr. Dunne and his arch-nemesis be enjoying a détente?

“I suppose I have felt a bit of empathy, but he killed two people,” Mr. Dunne said. “I don’t give a damn about the armed robbery. The other was a criminal act of the worst kind. I have seen the severed head of Nicole and what your throat looks like after it’s been cut open.”

But there’s “a loneliness, a sadness about O. J. that I never saw before,” he said. “I think he understands how wrecked his life is.”

The columnist plans to stay through the end of the second week of what is expected to be a five-week trial because he must return to New York for a medical procedure related to his cancer. He will return to Las Vegas, he says, for the conclusion.

He also suspects — and hopes — that the case could get good by then.20Mr. Simpson’s lawyers began laying the groundwork on Thursday for a defense that will resonate with anyone familiar with the 1995 case: He is being persecuted by police officers willing to manipulate evidence.