The Color of Law (24 page)

They were standing outside Shawanda’s cell. Inside, she was lying on her bed facing the far wall, curled up in a ball, her entire body shivering uncontrollably. She was groaning as if she were dying, her skin glistened with sweat, and her legs kicked involuntarily.

“That’s why they call it kicking the habit,” Bobby said. “Right now, she’d give everything she has in life for one fix.”

Bobby was rubbing his right fist. “Hitting someone hurts.”

“I’m proud of you, Bobby.” Scott pointed the Jetta toward Highland Park and said, “You know what pisses me off the most?”

“The Ferrari?”

“No, about Burns.”

“What?”

“The prick’s right. About me.”

Bobby worked his hand and said, “What did Buford want?”

“He wanted to take me off the case. Said he was going to appoint you.”

“You still want out?”

“No. I told Buford that, but he told me to think about it, come back at noon, tell him if I’m ready to be her lawyer.”

They were silent until they exited downtown. Then Bobby said softly: “I can’t try this case, Scotty. I’m not good enough. She needs you.”

An hour later, Scott left the house by the back door and ran west on Beverly Drive. It was exactly eleven
A.M.
; he had sixty minutes to make the biggest decision of his life.

Scott turned south on Lakeside Drive and ran past the stately old mansions that had stood for almost as long as Highland Park had existed. The homes sat higher than the street and looked down on a little park and Turtle Creek, where Scott often took Boo to skip rocks across the water.

Scott headed west on Armstrong Parkway a short distance, then turned north on Preston Road and ran up the sidewalk, the road to his left and to his right the massive wall that shielded the grand estates of Trammell Crow and Jerry Jones and Mack McCall and—

Tom Dibrell.

Scott had damn near run right into the long silver Mercedes as Tom exited his estate and stopped to check for traffic, blocking the sidewalk. They stared at each other across a distance of just a few feet, Tom wearing a suit and tie but cool in the air-conditioned luxury of a German sedan, Scott wearing only shorts and running shoes and sweating profusely in the hundred-degree heat. For eleven years they had talked daily; they had traveled the country, negotiating deals, making deals, and closing deals; they had celebrated victories and lamented defeats; they had eaten together and gotten drunk together; but they had never been friends. Successful lawyers, Scott now knew, have rich clients, not loyal friends.

Now, seeing this man who had given him his identity and had taken it away, Scott saw a sad man. This man had had four wives, but none of them had made him happy. He had six children by three of those wives, children who chose not to live in this fabulous estate with their father, because their father loved his skyscraper more than he loved them. He was a man who had lawyers, but not friends. Who had money and everything that money could buy, but little happiness. Three weeks ago, after Tom had fired him, if they had crossed paths like this, Scott Fenney might have shot him the finger.

Today Scott only nodded and smiled at the sad man in his Mercedes-Benz.

Tom opened his mouth as if to say something, then abruptly broke eye contact and hit the accelerator hard, sending the silver sedan roaring out onto Preston Road. Scott watched Tom drive away in a cloud of exhaust fumes, then started running again. He ran north past the Village and across Mockingbird Lane. A mile later, he turned east on Lovers Lane. He knew now where this run would end.

His journey took him along the boundary of the Highland Park Country Club, its tall brick wall discouraging gawkers. But there was one break in the wall where wrought iron spanned a few feet, and Scott stopped and looked in. A foursome of old white men was putting out on the seventh green, getting a round of golf in before the summer sun sapped their strength.

Growing up in Highland Park, Scott had often looked in through this opening at the old white men playing golf; it was like window-shopping with his mother at Highland Park Village, where she couldn’t afford to shop. He’d always said that one day he would be rich enough to own a mansion in Highland Park, play golf at the country club, and buy his mother anything her heart desired at the Village. She had died before he could buy her anything at the Village, but four years ago, when Scott Fenney was admitted to the membership of the country club, he thought how proud his mother would have been of her son. For the last four years, he had played golf with pride inside these walls and looked out at others looking in.

Today the view was different.

From inside the walls, these old white men had seemed so special because they were so rich. But from outside, they just seemed old. And Scott realized that just as he was looking in at them, they were looking out at him. And in their eyes he saw their envy: they would gladly give every dollar they had to be young again, to have a head full of hair and sharp eyes and a clear mind with a memory that did not play tricks on them several times a day; to again live in a strong muscular body instead of the broken-down body they were left with; to run down the street instead of barely making it back to the golf cart; to again have a prostate gland instead of having to wear a diaper because the surgery had left them permanently impotent and incontinent; to again feel the pleasure of sex. They were looking out at a young man with his life in front of him; he was looking in at old men with nothing in front of them except the end of their lives.

The old men were tended to by their caddies, middle-aged black men wearing white canvas overalls, black men who caught the bus each morning before dawn in South Dallas and rode north to Highland Park to work at a club where they could never be a member because they had been born black. They were good men, like Louis, but they weren’t good enough for the club, these black men who fixed old white men’s divots, found their lost balls, and carried their clubs, all the while performing like actors in
Gone With the Wind
—“Yassuh, Mistuh Smith, that there swing sure ’nough make you look like Arnold Palmer hisself”—because making these old white men feel like Southern plantation owners meant a bigger tip. Scott had always been uncomfortable with the whole black caddie thing, but he had always employed a caddie for every round because it was club policy.

After each round, he would retire to the men’s grill for drinks and cards with these old white men, and he had felt so proud to be accepted by them, to be seen in their company, to share their special space and breathe their rarefied air. He would hang on their every word—usually jokes and commentary about “niggers” and “wetbacks” and “kikes” made without regard to the presence of the black waiters hovering about. But Scott’s eyes would always meet those of his waiter, and he would feel the heat rise within him. Yet Scott Fenney, who had played football with black guys, showered with black guys, roomed with black guys, and partied with black guys, had never stood up and told those old white men that he would no longer be available for a game of golf with a bunch of racist anti-Semitic sons of bitches in shorts. No, A. Scott Fenney, Esq., had smiled politely at their jokes and nodded approvingly at their commentary so as not to offend them. Because to offend these old white men would have been bad for business.

One day a year or so ago, Scott had asked Dan Ford whether these old white men just hated blacks, Mexicans, and Jews. Dan had laughed and said, “Oh, no, they hate lots of people, not just blacks, Mexicans, and Jews. They hate Democrats, Yankees, Californians, Asians, feminists, Muslims—anyone who’s different from them. See, Scotty, the glory days for these old farts were the fifties, back when they were young and white men ruled Dallas and the only black in their world was their oil, and the Texas Railroad Commission controlled the price of oil in the whole goddamn world. Now the best golfer in the world is black, the mayor of Dallas is a woman, and the price of oil is controlled by a bunch of Arab sheikhs. The only part of their world that’s still run by white men is this club. Drive through those gates and it’s 1950 again. And they aim to keep it that way until the day they die. Like it or not, these bastards own most of Dallas, so if you want to be a rich lawyer in this town you’ve got to join their club. Scotty, my boy, it’s just business.”

Dan Ford was wrong: it wasn’t just business; it was just bigotry. And A. Scott Fenney was wrong: his mother would not have been proud of her son.

Scott gave the members and their caddies one last glance—and noticed one of the caddies staring at him. The caddie’s face changed; he recognized Scott. He smiled and gave Scott a discrete thumbs-up. Scott thought he recognized the caddie but he couldn’t remember his name—he had never asked his caddies their names—but he returned the gesture, then ran on.

A few blocks later his thoughts were still on the club and the caddies and his good mother when he heard a high-pitched voice: “Scott! Scott!” He slowed, turned, and saw an arm waving out the window of a red Beemer:
Shit, Penny Birnbaum!

“Scott! Wait!”

Penny was heading in the opposite direction down Lovers, so Scott cut through Curtis Park, two backyards, hit an alley, ran a few more blocks, and came out on Hillcrest Avenue. He turned south and ran along the western boundary of the SMU campus. He entered the campus at University Boulevard right in front of the law school.

He stopped.

Three years he had spent in that building, three years studying the law—torts, taxes, contracts, conflicts, procedure, property, and ethics, a subject he studied in school and quickly forgot in practice. The practice of law isn’t about ethics; it’s about money.

Scott began running again, past the sorority houses placed all in a row, conveniently, he had thought back then, so he wouldn’t have far to walk between girls. And he recalled all the pleasures he had experienced in those houses with those girls, and he found himself wondering, as he had never wondered before, if their lives had turned out well.

He ran along University Boulevard into the heart of the manicured campus, then turned south on Hilltop Lane, which became Ownby Drive and led him directly to the new Gerald Ford Stadium, named after the billionaire Dallas banker, not the former president. He found an unlocked gate, entered the stadium, walked to the nearest ramp, and emerged from the concrete underbelly onto the green grass.

He was alone on the field.

The best times of his life had played out in this small arena—120 yards long, 53
¹
₃
yards wide. And the worst times, too, he used to think. Glorious victories and crushing defeats. Moments of immeasurable joy and unspeakable sadness. He could still close his eyes and see the crowd. He could still hear them cheering and smell the freshly cut grass. He could still taste his blood. He could still feel football.

Scott climbed the steps to the spectator stands and abruptly did what he had done so often back then: he ran the stands. His arms pumping, his legs burning with pain, he ran all the way to the top. He turned and looked at the downtown skyline in the distance, the skyscrapers silhouetted against the blue sky. Dibrell Tower stood above them all, and on the sixty-second floor, Sid Greenberg was standing in Scott’s office. Sid couldn’t see Scott four miles away, but Scott shot him the finger anyway, just on principle.

Back in college, he had often run the stands at night just so he could sit at the top of the stadium and gaze at the lights of downtown, the Emerald City rising out of the endless Texas plains: Dibrell Tower outlined in blue argon lights; the lighted ball above Reunion Arena looking like a Christmas tree ornament; and Pegasus, the neon red flying horse above the old Magnolia Building. Like so many other young white men, Scott Fenney had been seduced by the lights, by dreams of getting rich in Big D. That’s what they call Dallas—“Big D”—because it’s a mecca for men with big dreams. Big dreamers come to Dallas like sinners to Jesus: you want to get saved, come to Jesus; you want to get rich, come to Dallas. Sitting right here, Scott Fenney had dreamed big.

“That ain’t bad for an old man!”

The booming voice startled Scott out of his thoughts. He searched the stadium until he saw a big black man standing on the sideline below. He looked familiar. Scott walked down the stands toward him. As he came closer, he recognized the man.

“Big Charlie, is that you?”

“Scotty Fenney, how you doing, man?”

Scott arrived and stuck out his hand, but Big Charlie wrapped his huge arms around Scott and bear-hugged him, as if Scotty Fenney had just scored the game-winning touchdown.

Charles Jackson stood six four and weighed 285 pounds—when he was an eighteen-year-old freshman. By the time he was a senior, he weighed 325. He played right guard, which required that he pull and lead running plays around either end, removing any obstacle from Scotty Fenney’s path. Scott scored the touchdowns, but Big Charlie led the way.

Big Charlie came from Tyler, an East Texas town known for its red roses and black football players. Earl Campbell was the best known, but Big Charlie was the biggest. He attended SMU instead of Texas because he didn’t want to be too far from his mama and his sisters. He drove the two hours home every Sunday morning for church and came back every Sunday night for curfew.

The last Scott had heard, Big Charlie had been drafted by the Rams. Charlie now told him that he had played two seasons and had been a knee injury away from fulfilling his dream. He had returned to SMU, where he had coached the offensive line for the last ten years. Scott had attended most of those games but he’d never noticed Big Charlie. It was a long way down to the sideline from Ford Stevens’s private skybox.

“We could always use a good running back coach,” Big Charlie said. He had read about Scott’s troubles.

“Thanks, but I’ve still got some lawyering left in me.”

“You gonna win?”

“I don’t know.”

“You think she’s innocent?”

“Of murder, but not of killing Clark.”