control the staccato that jams his tongue. The stigma kept him out of the courtroom as a trial attorney, but sharpened his abilities to research and absorb through every other method of communication. And it hadn’t seemed to slow him down when it came to beautiful women.
What Billy may have lacked in loquaciousness, Diane McIntyre made up for. The woman could talk. But I was always impressed by the intelligence and lack of bullshit that accompanied her discourse. She eschewed the typical small talk. Rarely gave opinions on something she wasn’t knowledgeable about. And knowing that, you crossed her at your own peril.
Once, while working a stock fraud case for Billy, I’d been in the county courthouse when she was trying an elderly-abuse case. I’d ducked into the gallery seats just as she was ripping the skin off a state administrator in cross-examination. With a controlled passion she laid out damning statistics, entered photos of bedsores on her client, documented the phone logs from the seventy-eight-year-old woman’s daughter showing calls to the administrator and the abuse hotline and recited, without notes, the state’s own rules on oversight of their licensed nursing homes and how they’d broken them. Within minutes everyone in the courtroom, including the judge, was looking at the administrator, who could do little but hang his head. I still remembered her final line: “Would you put your own mother in such a place, Mr. Silas?”
She and Billy had been engaged since last spring. He had fallen hard, and it wasn’t just because she was gorgeous.
Diane took us all the way through dinner and coffee with descriptions of the Basilica of Saint Mark and the Correr Museum and 2:00 A.M. wine tasting at L’Incontro. When the dishes were cleared, I thought she might continue but she gracefully excused herself with: “I’ll leave you both to business while I go make some phone calls.” Billy and I exchanged looks and took our coffee to the patio.
The dominating feature of Billy’s apartment were the floor-to- ceiling glass doors that made up the entire eastern wall and opened onto the ocean. I stood at the railing and looked to the horizon where there was still a hint of blue.
“Anything n-new on Harris?”
“I’ve been watching him, but the press coverage must have pushed him under his rock for a while,” I said.
Harris was a physician who’d been writing tons of prescriptions for pain pills to Medicare patients in return for kickbacks. Billy had been working the guy for a class action suit by a group of cancer victims. I was logging his movements and interviewing poor patients who had been or still were seeing him. We were doing well until a high-profile conservative radio talk-show personality got busted for feeding his pain pill addiction with illegal prescriptions. In the media frenzy Harris had significantly cut back his operation. But Billy had done his work and we probably had the guy nailed already. One of the radio host’s lawyers had called Billy through the attorney grapevine, but Billy had refused to share any information.
“I’m more worried about the cruise ship guys,” I said. “Rodrigo has been real twitchy the last couple of times I went up to talk with him. He’s worried about his job and I think the others in his crew are telling him to back off getting any kind of legal representation because they’ll all get blackballed from working.”
Billy had me working a line on a dozen cruise ship workers who had been injured in a boiler explosion as their ship was coming in to the port of Palm Beach. The cruise ship business was huge in South Florida with tens of thousands of tourists packing the floating cities for luxury trips to the Caribbean. But the unknown population was the thousands of workers, almost every one a foreigner, who cleaned and catered and served and smiled for those vacationers for wages that those same Americans wouldn’t let their teenagers work for. But the
What Billy may have lacked in loquaciousness, Diane McIntyre made up for. The woman could talk. But I was always impressed by the intelligence and lack of bullshit that accompanied her discourse. She eschewed the typical small talk. Rarely gave opinions on something she wasn’t knowledgeable about. And knowing that, you crossed her at your own peril.
Once, while working a stock fraud case for Billy, I’d been in the county courthouse when she was trying an elderly-abuse case. I’d ducked into the gallery seats just as she was ripping the skin off a state administrator in cross-examination. With a controlled passion she laid out damning statistics, entered photos of bedsores on her client, documented the phone logs from the seventy-eight-year-old woman’s daughter showing calls to the administrator and the abuse hotline and recited, without notes, the state’s own rules on oversight of their licensed nursing homes and how they’d broken them. Within minutes everyone in the courtroom, including the judge, was looking at the administrator, who could do little but hang his head. I still remembered her final line: “Would you put your own mother in such a place, Mr. Silas?”
She and Billy had been engaged since last spring. He had fallen hard, and it wasn’t just because she was gorgeous.
Diane took us all the way through dinner and coffee with descriptions of the Basilica of Saint Mark and the Correr Museum and 2:00 A.M. wine tasting at L’Incontro. When the dishes were cleared, I thought she might continue but she gracefully excused herself with: “I’ll leave you both to business while I go make some phone calls.” Billy and I exchanged looks and took our coffee to the patio.
The dominating feature of Billy’s apartment were the floor-to- ceiling glass doors that made up the entire eastern wall and opened onto the ocean. I stood at the railing and looked to the horizon where there was still a hint of blue.
“Anything n-new on Harris?”
“I’ve been watching him, but the press coverage must have pushed him under his rock for a while,” I said.
Harris was a physician who’d been writing tons of prescriptions for pain pills to Medicare patients in return for kickbacks. Billy had been working the guy for a class action suit by a group of cancer victims. I was logging his movements and interviewing poor patients who had been or still were seeing him. We were doing well until a high-profile conservative radio talk-show personality got busted for feeding his pain pill addiction with illegal prescriptions. In the media frenzy Harris had significantly cut back his operation. But Billy had done his work and we probably had the guy nailed already. One of the radio host’s lawyers had called Billy through the attorney grapevine, but Billy had refused to share any information.
“I’m more worried about the cruise ship guys,” I said. “Rodrigo has been real twitchy the last couple of times I went up to talk with him. He’s worried about his job and I think the others in his crew are telling him to back off getting any kind of legal representation because they’ll all get blackballed from working.”
Billy had me working a line on a dozen cruise ship workers who had been injured in a boiler explosion as their ship was coming in to the port of Palm Beach. The cruise ship business was huge in South Florida with tens of thousands of tourists packing the floating cities for luxury trips to the Caribbean. But the unknown population was the thousands of workers, almost every one a foreigner, who cleaned and catered and served and smiled for those vacationers for wages that those same Americans wouldn’t let their teenagers work for. But the
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