Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [410]
When Ritter heard it was $500, he said, "That will be the fine." To the client, he said, "You have already paid your fine. Don't give your counsel another penny." The poor lawyer wanted to crawl under the desk. Another advocate kept speaking in so low a voice that Ritter asked him, "Why are you whispering?" The fellow answered, "Because I'm scared." A veteran trial lawyer would go into Judge Ritter's courtroom the way common mortals went to the dentist, but then Ritter had a mind that could see where arguments were leading faster than a dentist could locate decay. He gave hell to people who wasted his time. You not only had to do a good job, but do it quickly.
That impatience, even Ritter's defenders would say, got the old Judge in a lot of trouble. Once a legal matter became clear, he was going to make his judgment. Just would not plod through the production of a long careful opinion with fifty or one hundred citations. Then the Tenth Circuit would complain that the record was not complete, and reverse him. Later, the Supreme Court would affirm him. His affirmance rate with the U.S. Supreme Court was exactly the opposite of his reversal rate with the Circuit Court. "They're just too stupid to see I'm right," he would say of the Tenth Circuit.
Of course, this contempt for Judges he considered unintelligent closed Ritter off from recognizing that the party for whom he had found was the one hurt the most by the reversal. By the time the Supreme Court affirmed Ritter two or three years later, it was often too late to do the original fellow any good.
Some of these stories were legend in Salt Lake law courts. But Dabney also had talked to people who knew Ritter well enough to tell you about the Judge's personal life, where the legends were not true. Ritter, actually, led a lonely life. Most days, he only crossed the street from his rooms at the Newhouse Hotel to his chambers at the Court. He had the reputation of being a drinker and a womanizer, and maybe he had been some of that in the old days when he taught at the law school, but nobody had seen him in recent years with a woman, and he rarely drank. It had been said for years that the best bar in town was Judge Ritter's chambers, and it was true that Willis Ritter had some nice things located under his desk, and there were times when he might invite a lawyer to have a glass with him, but he was hardly an alcoholic. It had been years since the doctors had told him he couldn't drink much, and he didn't. In fact, nobody, when you got down to it, had seen him drunk in years. Once on a trip to San Francisco, Craig Smay, his law clerk, had gone to some pains to find a bottle of Ritter's favorite Scotch, Glen Livet, but the bottle sat under the desk for six months, and Ritter finally gave it back to Smay unopened.
Couldn't drink it. His health forbade. He would get heart attacks, or have to go into surgery every three or four months, yet for all that he'd be back on the bench two weeks later looking like an old Olympic athlete, white hair, ruddy face. You couldn't believe the man's capacity to recuperate.
Yet always a lonely man. He had for friends only a few lawyers he'd known for years, and a few old reporters. Ever since the Mormons had raised those accusations against him back in Harry Truman's administration, Ritter had stayed away from everyone. The only time anyone had ever seen him with a number of people was one year on Christmas Eve when Ritter insisted Craig Smay and his wife come to dinner. When they got to the hotel, a room had been rented, and inside were twenty-five people around a big table, older people with their sons and daughters and grandchildren. Everybody was calling him Bill. They were friends from the time he'd been a boy. Up to that moment, Craig Smay never thought of the Judge as one of those human beings who naturally have a first name.
Given the length of this wait, it was better to remember only those tales about