Defending Billy Ryan by George V. Higgins

Author:George V. Higgins [Higgins, George V.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780307947352
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-03-05T16:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

Billy’s arrival at my office the following Monday was punctual, but it was not happy. It was clear there’d been another family meeting over the weekend, this one about my refusal to appear before the tribunal at the Ryan castle. Had it not been for what Frolio had told me the preceding Friday, I would have assumed that the remarks passed about me had been even more scornful than those of the previous gathering. As it was, I didn’t see how they could’ve been, or how that gang of amateur saboteurs could possibly have dreamed up any scheme more dangerous than the one they’d proposed to Mark.

The consensus had obviously been that Billy should appear as I had directed him, but once seated in my office, chair the meeting himself: Ryan’s Rules of Order.

He crossed his legs. “Colin’s worried about Keats,” he said.

“So’m I,” I said. “I always worry about judges.”

“Even ones you know?” Billy said. “You went to law school with this guy, you and Colin.”

“Billy,” I said, “when I’m in front of Colin, I worry about him. A judge on the bench on a case you’re trying is not a friend of yours, no matter how long you’ve known him or how many beers you’ve had with him, or whether you used to be sidekicks when you both tried cases. Doesn’t matter in the slightest. Once he gets that dress on, he’s not your pal anymore until the case’s over. It always worries me, in fact, if he’s one of my buddies outside the court, maybe he’ll throw his back out doing favors for the other guy to show he’s not favoring me.”

“Is Keats going to do that, you think?” he said.

“If I knew what a judge was going to do in a given case before the thing went to trial,” I said, “very few of my cases would go to trial. I’d blow out the ones I was going to lose, and I’d tell the prosecutor ‘No deal’ when I knew I was going to win. If you find a lawyer who tells you he knows what the judge will do when the case comes to trial, you’ve either got a liar or a fool on your hands, and if I were you I’d be worried.”

“So Colin’s right, then,” Billy said. “He says he’s never trusted Keats, not even in law school. Says Keats’d wait until you got up and left the library to go the bathroom, and then steal the book you were studying so you’d flunk the test and make him look good.”

“He would,” I said. “But so would everybody else, including me and Colin. But not to make you flunk: to survive, ourselves. If there was a case assigned that wasn’t in the textbook for the course, anywhere from ten to sixty people in that course would be competing for the volume of decisions that contained it. Generally there were two or three of them in the library. Sometimes only one. You got that

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