Classy Sleaze

By Peter Stoler

KENNEDY FOR THE DEFENSE

by George V. Higgins

Knopf; 225 pages; $9.95

He does not wring confessions out of witnesses or win acquittals for innocent clients. He never affects tailored suits or dour expressions. There is no need for him to impress his clients. The people who come for help are usually guilty as charged. What they need is not style, but help. And that is exactly what they get from Jeremiah Francis Kennedy, whose wife refers to him as "the classiest sleazy criminal lawyer in Boston."

Fiction is full of lawyers, from Louis Auchincloss's glossy barristers to the spoonbread counselors of William Faulkner and Harper Lee. But none of them seems as recognizable--or amiable--as the hero of George V. Higgins' latest novel. Moreover, if Kennedy's clients are criminals, they are also Higgins' liveliest creations. Take Cadillac Teddy, a professional car thief who specializes in Cadillacs. "Your Porsche, your Corvette, your Jaguar, your Mercedes, I can get you them, but I'm not used to them, you know?" His current complaint: a state trooper has eaten his driver's license. Or an aristocratic homosexual cruiser who solicits a cop. Or a kid so simple that he sets himself up for a drug rap. Kennedy's friends and co-workers are equally indelible: a colleague with whom he shares an addiction to the Red Sox, a gabby investigator named Bad Eye Mulvey, and a weary cop who specializes in the genealogy of sin.

Kennedy for the Defense is an account of the events that take place while the lawyer attempts a holiday with his wife and teen-age daughter, dubbed Saigon because it was her timely birth that kept the attorney from being sent there. Kennedy is a variegated yarn of third-rate perpetrators, second-class citizens and first-person encounters. But it works. Under the author's increasingly deft touch, events blend like coffee and Irish whisky, and conversations ring as true as coins on a mahogany bar.

Let the record show that the book does not provide the neatest of plots. But its tangled cast is instantly credible and permanently delightful. From the opening wisecrack, Kennedy and his world seem so real that when, at novel's end, the lawyer finally relaxes on the "Irish Riviera," readers may feel a slight sense of resentment. The fault is Higgins' for providing so much merriment in so brief a space. His readers should demand the same treatment as Kennedy's crooked clients: after all, one good term deserves another.

-- Peter Stoler

"I suppose there is quite a lot of me in Kennedy," concedes George Vincent Higgins, 40. "Particularly in his commitment to his family and his general attitude toward the law."

That attitude is pure, unblinking realism. Higgins' exposure to justice began with a stint as a court reporter for the Associated Press, developed through law school and appointments as a Massachusetts assistant attorney general and an Assistant U.S. Attorney, and continues in the criminal-law practice he has maintained in Boston since 1973. "The hardest thing in this business is to explain just what you can and can't do for a client," he says. "There is a good reason why 85% to 90% of all criminal cases brought by a competent prosecutor end up in defense pleas; nobody can win them."

Higgins, like Kennedy, does not even try. Acknowledging that more than one of his clients has had "a record that RCA Victor would have envied," he measures success by the ability to keep clients on the right side of the bars. "It's frustrating," he admits, "and I don't handle frustration very well. If I have my IBM Selectric and a box of white paper I can accomplish something between sunrise and nightfall."

Higgins has accomplished quite a lot. Since the classic Friends of Eddie Coyle (1972), he has written seven books, most with the same Boston Irish locale and personae. Recognition has enabled Higgins to indulge a recently acquired love of the sea: he plans to spend this summer living aboard his 37-ft. ketch Litigator with his wife of eight months, Loretta, and two children by his first marriage.

But like Kennedy, he is unlikely to escape frustration: Higgins is hopelessly hooked on the local baseball team. "The Red Sox are a religion," he concludes. "Every year we re-enact the agony and the temptation in the Garden. Baseball child's play? Hell, up here in Boston it's a passion play."

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