Pleading Guilty Read Online Free PDF

said. "Me." Brushy was my attorney in my wars with Nora. An absolutely ruthless trial lawyer, Emilia Bruccia is one of G &G's great stars. On deposition, I've seen her reform the recollections of witnesses more dramatically than if they had ingested psychoactive drugs, and she's also gifted with that wonderful, devious, clever cast of mind by which she can always explain away the opposition's most damaging documents as something not worth using to wrap fish. She's become a mainstay of our relationship with TN, while developing a dozen great clients of her own, including a big insurance company in California.
    Not only does she bill a million bucks a year, but this is a terrific person. I mean it. I would no sooner try to get a jump on Brushy than I would a hungry panther. But she is not dim to feelings. She has plenty of her own, which she exhausts in work and sexual plunder, having a terminal case of hot pants that makes her personal life, behind her back, the object of local sport. She is loyal; she is smart; she has a long memory for kindnesses done. And she is a great partner. If I had to find someone on an hour's notice to go take a dep for me a hundred miles from Tulsa in the middle of the night, I'd call Brushy first. It was her dependability, in fact, which inspired my visit. When I told her I needed a favor, she didn't even flinch.
    "I'd love it if you could grab the wheel on Toots's disciplinary hearing at BAD," I said. "I'll be there for the first session on Wednesday, but after that I may be on the loose.' BAD--the Bar Admissions and Disciplinary Commission--is a sagging bureaucracy ministering over entrances, exits, and timeouts from the practice of law. I spent my first four years as a lawyer there , struggling to remain afloat in the tidal crest of complaints regarding lawyerly feasance, mis, mal, and non.
    Brushy objected that she'd never handled a hearing at BAD and it took a second to persuade her she was up to it. Like many great successes, Brushy has her moments of doubt. She flashes the world a winning smile, then wrings her hands when she is alone, not sure she sees what everybody else does. I promised to have Lucinda, the secretary whose services we shared, copy the file, to let Brushy look it over.
    "Where will you be?" she asked.
    "Looking for Bert.-
    "Yeah, where in the world is he?"
    "That's what the Committee wants to know."
    "The Committee?"
    Brushy warmed to my account. The Big Three tend to be tight-vested and most of my partners relish any chance to peek behind the curtains. Brushy savored each detail until she suddenly grasped the problem.
    "Just like that? Five million, six?" Her small mouth hanging open, Brushy looked dimly toward the future--the lawsuits, the recriminations. Her investment in the law firm was in jeopardy. "How could he do that to us?"
    "There are no victims," I told her. She didn't get it. "Cop talk," I said, "it's a thing we'd say. Guy walks down a dark street alone in the wrong neighborhood and gets mugged. Some shmo cries a river cause he lost a hundred-thousand-bucks hoping some con artist could make a car run on potato chips. People get what they're asking for. There are no victims."
    She looked at me with concern. Brushy sat here tonight in a trim suit and a blouse with a big orange bow. Her short hair was cut close, a little butch, and showed off two or three prominent acne scars that pitted her left cheek, like the dimples of the moon. Her teenaged years had to have been tough.
    "It's a saying," I said.
    "Meaning what? Here?"
    Shrugging, I went to the pencil drawer in the gunmetal credenza behind her to find a cigarette. We both sneak butts. Gage & Griswell is now a smoke-free environment, but we sit in Brushy's office or mine with the door closed. From the drawer I also removed a little makeup mirror, which I asked to borrow. Brushy couldn't have cared less. She was chewing on her thumb, still wrought up with the prospect of disaster.
    "Should you be telling one