The Color of Law (10 page)

Frank grinned and said, “I always show up to collect funds.”

“Ah, the personal touch.” Scott gestured over at Bobby on the sofa. “Frank, Bobby Herrin. Bobby, Frank Turner, famous plaintiffs’ lawyer.”

They shook hands, then Frank gestured at the big blowup of Scott Fenney, number 22, on the far wall above the sofa.

“That the day you got a hundred and ninety-three yards against Texas?”

“Yep, that was the day.”

Frank’s eyes lingered on the blowup, and in Frank’s eyes Scott saw the envy of a tuba player. But Frank Turner was now a plaintiffs’ lawyer and he was here for money, so he finally turned to Scott and said, “You got the check?”

“You got the release?” Scott asked.

Frank held out a document, which Scott took and scanned to make sure the bastard hadn’t changed anything. Satisfied, he turned to the signature page and saw that sweet Nadine and sleazy Frank had both signed in triplicate. He then handed a cashier’s check to Frank Turner.

“One million dollars, Frank.”

Frank stared at the check a moment and then broke into a birthday-boy smile.

Scott said, “So is this what you do every day, Frank, walk from office to office picking up big settlement checks?”

Frank’s face took on an expression of thoughtfulness, then he smiled again. “Yeah, Scott, now that you mention it, that is pretty much what I do.”

The smile still on his face and a million-dollar check in his hand, he headed to the door, but stopped abruptly and turned back. He held the check up to Scott.

“Oh, just so you know, Scott, Nadine would’ve taken half a million.”

Frank was turning away again when Scott said, “Well, since we’re confessing, Frank, just so you know, Tom would’ve paid two million.”

Frank’s smile evaporated like a raindrop on the sidewalk outside and his shoulders slumped: the only thing that makes a plaintiffs’ lawyer lose sleep is leaving money on the table. He turned and slithered away, not thinking that he had just
made
$333,333.33, but that he had just
lost
the same amount. Which left Scott with something of a moral victory, at least.

“Asshole,” Scott said.

“Who, me?”

Sid Greenberg’s head was in the door. Scott motioned him in.

“Sid, meet Bobby Herrin.”

Sid stepped over and shook hands with Bobby. “How’d it go this morning? You taking over the hooker?”

“Not exactly,” Scott said.

“The judge wouldn’t let you out?”

“No. Looks like I’m stuck with her. Bobby’s going to carry the heavy end of the log, write the briefs and motions, make all pretrial appearances—”

Sid smiled at Bobby. “Do all the work, like I do for Scott on Dibrell matters.”

Sid’s smile disappeared when he turned to Scott and saw that Scott wasn’t smiling.

“Yeah, Sid, only difference is, I need Bobby. You can be replaced.”

Sid squirmed and forced a sheepish grin. Scott never let on with associates whether he was serious when he made remarks like that, which kept them on their toes and billing hours.

“Why are you standing on my Persian rug, Sid?”

“Oh, we signed up the environmental consultant on Dibrell’s land deal. He now works for Ford Stevens. That was a brilliant idea, Scott.”

Sid was in damage control mode.

“That it?”

“Well, no. One more thing, Scott.” He glanced at Bobby, then back at Scott. “Confidential.”

Scott said, “Close your ears, Bobby.”

He nodded to Sid to go on.

“Our discovery, production of documents, is due on that Dibrell lawsuit, the one where all the residents in his apartment complex are claiming they were harmed by mold in their apartments and he didn’t do anything about it?”

“Yeah, so?”

“So in going through Dibrell’s records, we found one letter that might prove troublesome. It mentions some of the symptoms of mold poisoning. But we’ve taken the position that Dibrell didn’t have any knowledge of the dangers of mold.”

Scott, to Bobby: “A goddamn lawsuit over mold. One jury in Austin comes back with a thirty-two-million-dollar verdict, next thing you know everyone’s dying of mold poisoning.”

Back to Sid: “How many pages of production are we giving the plaintiffs’ lawyer?”

“Twenty-seven thousand.”

“Okay, here’s what you do. Double copy everything, so we give them fifty-four thousand pages. And put everything out of order, a real mess. Then make one really bad copy of that letter, you know, like our secretaries do without meaning to, where you can hardly read it. And stick it right in the middle of those fifty-four thousand pages, see if they can find it.”

Sid was grinning. “That’s brilliant!”

“Aggressive and creative lawyering, Sid.”

Among lawyers, employing clever litigation tactics like hiding one damaging document in fifty-four thousand pages of discovery—not to mention just shredding the damn thing—is known as “aggressive and creative lawyering,” and it is a skill highly praised by members of the bar. Aggressive and creative lawyering is how successful lawyers become successful, that and not getting caught. A big part of being successful, Scott had learned, was not getting caught.

Sid scurried away, and Scott gestured after him.

“First in his class at Harvard. Might make a lawyer out of him yet.”

Bobby was giving him a look.

Scott held his hands up.
“What?”

“That’s what you high-rent lawyers do, play hide the ball?”

“It’s just like football, Bobby—if you don’t get caught holding, you didn’t hold. When you’re playing this game against sleazy plaintiffs’ lawyers like Frank Turner, you play by the same rules they play by. You do whatever it takes to win—because rich clients don’t want ethical lawyers who lose, Bobby. They want lawyers who win.”

Bobby seemed unconvinced, so Scott pointed his finger at the open door.

“Bobby, that bastard Frank’s got a jet!”

Scott’s thoughts returned to Shawanda Jones, like one’s thoughts did to a recurring nightmare.

“Oh, and no interviews, Bobby. We want to keep the firm’s name out of the press.”

Bobby nodded. “I’ll get the police report, see what evidence Burns has got, hire a PI. He’ll interview witnesses, track down leads, do background checks on Clark and anyone connected to Clark. Name is Carl, he’s an ex-cop.”

“Dan’s gonna crap, paying for a private investigator.”

“Scotty, we gotta have a PI. It’s a death penalty case.”

Scott sighed. “Okay, but hide his fees in your bills to the firm. So Dan doesn’t see them.”

“Yeah, okay. Uh, Scotty, this case is gonna eat up a lot of my time. I’ll have to incur some expenses and…well…you think I could get an advance on my fees?”

“Sure.” To his secretary: “Sue!” She popped in within seconds. “Sue, get Bobby a firm check for twenty-five hundred.”

When she left, Bobby said, “Thanks.”

Scott waved him off. Twenty-five hundred was pocket change at Ford Stevens.

“Kind of funny, ain’t it, Scotty?”

“What?”

“Back in school, we used to talk about working together. After all this time, we are.” He shrugged. “Kind of funny.”

Scott stared at his former best friend.

“Yeah, Bobby, this is fucking hilarious.”

Boo screamed with delight. “A. Scott, you’re on TV!”

Her father and mother walked over to the kitchen TV and saw what she saw: on the evening news, A. Scott looking like a reluctant movie star, pushing through a crowd of TV cameras and microphones as reporters shouted questions.

“Did your client murder Clark McCall?”

“How will she plead?”

“What’s your defense?”

“This morning,” her father said. “The mob at the courthouse.”

“You couldn’t get out of the case?” Boo asked.

“No.”

“You’re going to trial?”

“Yeah.”

“When?”

“August.”

“Well, there goes Vail,” her mother said with an exasperated sigh. “We’ll be the only family in Highland Park suffering here in August. That’ll be embarrassing.”

“Can I go?” Boo asked.

“Yeah, you and Mom can still go to Vail,” her father said.

“No. To the trial.”

“You want to come to the trial?”

“I’ll still be out of school.”

“No, you may not, young lady,” her mother said. “A murder trial is no place for a nine-year-old girl.”

“But it’ll be like, history in the making.”

Her mother gave her another exasperated sigh. “Murder trials happen every day.”

“No, I mean A. Scott representing a human being.”

Her father looked at her and she at him; they both laughed.

Rebecca was not laughing.

“This won’t affect your position in the firm?”

Upon retiring to the master suite, that was Rebecca’s first and only question, her way of asking,
Will this affect your income?

“No, of course not. I’m still Tom Dibrell’s lawyer.”

Her expression said she wasn’t buying it.

“Rebecca, look, I’ve got Bobby working the case. He’ll get me through it, she’ll get convicted, and things will go back to normal. Don’t worry.”

But Scott was worried. That feeling of impending doom had grown stronger. He plopped down in his chair in the sitting area off the master bedroom and used the remote to turn on the TV. The late news. A story about Clark McCall’s funeral this afternoon, video of people in dark suits and dark dresses entering Highland Park First United Methodist Church, wealthy people, white people, important people, the vice president, members of Congress, the governor, the mayor, and Scott’s senior partner.

TEN

T
HE REST OF
J
UNE
passed quietly. The temperature climbed steadily as summer set in so that by the end of the month the mercury was pushing one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Rain became an infrequent occurrence and the sun beat down on the landscape with a vengeance. Native oak trees burrowed their roots deeper into the earth to suck the last drop of moisture from the parched Texas soil, and all God’s creatures hunkered down for another merciless summer, except those wealthy Dallas families who could afford to flee to the cool air of Colorado or California. The less fortunate remained behind and relied on air-conditioning and backyard pools to survive the heat.

Rebecca Fenney continued her relentless climb up the Highland Park social ladder; Boo Fenney occupied herself at home with her computer and her books; Consuela de la Rosa was reunited with Esteban Garcia, just back from the border; Scott Fenney billed two hundred hours at $350 an hour for Ford Stevens’s paying clients; Bobby Herrin billed one hundred hours at $50 an hour for the firm’s only nonpaying client; and the federal grand jury formally indicted Shawanda Jones for the murder of Clark McCall. The federal magistrate set her bail at $1 million, which meant she would remain in custody until the verdict was read, at which time she would be either set free or shipped off to a federal prison to serve her sentence or await execution. She called her lawyer daily, sometimes several times a day, always crying hysterically from the combined effect of craving both her daughter and heroin. Having no idea where he might acquire heroin for her, her lawyer did the only thing he knew to get her to shut the fuck up: he agreed to bring her daughter down to the detention center to see her. Or at least to have Bobby bring her daughter to her.

But Bobby copped a plea: fear. “Shit, Scotty, East Dallas is scary enough for me,” he said. “Fat white dude like myself, I wouldn’t last five minutes in South Dallas. Sorry, man, but no way I’m risking my life for fifty bucks an hour!”

So it was that on the second day of July and the first hundred-degree day of the summer, A. Scott Fenney, Esq., $750,000-a-year corporate partner at Ford Stevens LLP, found himself driving a shiny red Ferrari 360 Modena slowly through a grim public housing project in South Dallas, past the rhythmic pounding of loud rap music and the glares of tough-looking young black men, and feeling as if he were driving a flashing neon sign that screamed
CARJACK ME
!
Scott had played football with black teammates at SMU fourteen years ago, but he didn’t figure that would count for much with these guys. Without conscious thought, Scott slid down the leather seat until he could barely see over the steering wheel.

Thirty-six years Scott Fenney had lived in Dallas and not once had he driven into South Dallas. White people drove south of downtown three times each year and only for events held within the gated Fair Park grounds—the State Fair, the Oklahoma-Texas football game, and the Cotton Bowl game—being careful to stay on the interstate, to take the Fair Park exit, and to drive directly through the park gates without detour or delay. White people never drove
into
South Dallas, into the neighborhoods and mean streets of South Dallas, into the other Dallas of crime and crack cocaine, prostitution and poverty, drive-by shootings and gangbangers, into black Dallas, where a white boy from Highland Park driving a $200,000 Italian sports car was considered neither welcome nor very smart.

But here Scott was, parking in front of a concrete block building euphemistically called a “garden apartment” by the housing authority, although not a blade of grass much less a garden was evident to Scott’s eye. He cut the engine and was working up the courage to get out—the Ferrari had attracted a crowd—when the sun was suddenly blocked out by a Dallas Cowboys jersey on the biggest black man he’d ever seen on or off a football field. Black knuckles rapped against the blacked-out window. Scott lowered the window an inch.

The jersey moved down until Scott saw wide shoulders, a thick neck, and finally a broad black face. The man lowered his sunglasses and peered in.

“You the lawyer?”

“What?”

“You Shawanda’s lawyer?”

“Yeah.”

“You here for Pajamae?”

“Yeah, how—”

“Shawanda call me. She figured you might need a, uh…chaperone, if you know what I mean.”

Scott knew what he meant. He looked out both sides of the car at the crowd looking in, black women—girls really—with babies on their hips and toddlers clutching their thick legs and muscular black males, and he thought of Fight Night, the last time he had been in such close proximity to strong young black males. Started during the depths of the great Texas real-estate bust when the Dallas real-estate community desperately needed a distraction, Fight Night had become an annual tuxedo tradition: a boxing ring was set up in the swanky Anatole Hotel and black boxers were brought in to beat themselves senseless for the entertainment of rich white men smoking big cigars, eating thick steaks, drinking hard liquor, and playing patty-cake with beautiful young models hired for the night. Scott remembered thinking that the black boxers might be has-beens in the professional ranks, but they could KO every white guy in the joint with one punch—and probably wanted to.

Scott put on his glasses, not to appear smart, but in the hope that these black guys wouldn’t beat up a white guy wearing glasses. He took a deep breath, opened the door, climbed out, and stood pressed against the Ferrari. He felt his face flush and heard the big man’s voice boom out:

“Y’all back off, give the man some room! He’s the lawyer!”

The crowd eased back several steps. Scott exhaled with relief, then inhaled the air, which felt even hotter down here, not a whiff of breeze or a tree in sight to offer shade from the sun, its full force seemingly directed down on him. Beads of sweat popped out of the pores on his forehead like popcorn and his starched shirt stuck to his skin. He glanced around at the gray bunkerlike buildings, the gray dirt yards, the gray concrete landscape, and the black residents, a strange world in the shadows of the downtown skyscrapers. If Scott’s office faced south, his view would be of these projects, hence, the preferred northerly view, toward white Highland Park. Only five miles of pavement separated these projects from Highland Park, but the black kids plastering their faces against the Ferrari’s windows to catch a glimpse of the plush leather interior might as well have been living in China.

“That a fine ride, mister,” one black boy said with a wide grin.

The big man said, “I’m Louis.” He gestured at the crowd. “Don’t mind all them. We don’t get many lawyers down here.”

Louis stood maybe six six and weighed well over three hundred pounds. His huge hands dwarfed Scott’s. So Scott didn’t offer to shake hands; instead he said, “Scott Fenney,” and handed his card to Louis, who examined it intently.

“What the
A
stand for?”

“Nothing.” Scott pointed a thumb at the Ferrari. “Maybe I should wait in the car.”

Louis said sternly to the boys: “Touch that car, you answering to me.” Then he smiled at Scott and said, “Car be okay, Mr. Fenney.” Louis turned and the crowd parted. Scott followed Louis a few paces up the sidewalk, but Louis abruptly stopped and turned back. “Still, you might wanna lock it.”

“Oh, yeah.”

Scott dug the keys out of his pocket and beeped the Ferrari locked and one of the boys said, “Aw, man!” Scott turned and followed Louis through a gauntlet of shirtless young black men bouncing basketballs so hard against the concrete it sounded like high-powered weapons discharging—
boom boom boom
. Their torsos were knotty with muscles and glistening with sweat, their sinewy arms etched with barbed-wire tattoos, their expressions sullen. They were wearing long shorts hung low on their hips and those $100 Nikes Scott couldn’t afford as a boy and looking on Scott Fenney as prey, which no doubt he would have been but for the presence of Louis. Scott avoided direct eye contact with them like they say to do with wild animals for fear of inciting them. He wanted to cut and run back to the car and drive full throttle out of here. But he’d never make it to the Ferrari: the image of a pack of wolves pouncing on a fat little rabbit flashed through his mind. So he closed the gap with Louis and followed in the black man’s shadow. And he had to admit to himself, he who had never felt fear on a football field felt it now. Scott Fenney was terrified. By the time they arrived at apartment 110, Scott’s heart was beating against his chest wall like a jackhammer and he had broken a full-body sweat. Louis knocked on the door.

“Pajamae, it’s Louis.”

No answer. Louis knocked again. Still no answer. The front window was covered with thick drapes inside and black burglar bars outside. No light was visible from within the apartment.

“Maybe she’s not home,” Scott said.

Louis’s body shook with a chuckle. “She home all right. She afraid to come outside. Don’t even open the windows even though ain’t no air-condition in there. She ain’t come outside since Shawanda arrested.” He leaned down and lowered his voice and said, “It’s a good thing you doing, Mr. Fenney, taking Pajamae to see her mama.”

Scott’s mind was busy considering his chances of making it back through the gauntlet alive so the words, “Why didn’t you?” were out of his mouth before he realized what he was saying. But Louis didn’t react angrily. Instead, his big round face folded into a gold-toothed smile.

“Well, Mr. Fenney, me and the Feds, we got some, uh, outstanding issues, if you know what I mean.”

Scott knew what Louis meant. He noticed the peephole in the door turn dark. And he heard a tiny voice: “That the lawyer?”

“Yeah,” Louis said.

The peephole went light again and Scott heard the sound of a heavy object being pushed away from the door, then the releasing of five deadbolts. The door opened a crack and a small brown face with big brown eyes gazed up at Scott.

“You gonna save my mama?” she asked.

“Pajamae. That’s a, uh, different sort of name.”

Her face glued to the Ferrari’s air-conditioning vent, the little black girl said, “Mama says it’s French, but it’s really just black. We don’t do names like Susie and Patty and Mandy down here. We do names like Shantay and Beyoncé and Pajamae.”

“My daughter’s name is Boo.”

She smiled. “That’s different.”

Scott smiled back. “She’s different. You’d like her.”

Scott had relaxed considerably once they had left the projects and turned onto Martin Luther King Boulevard, the main thoroughfare through South Dallas. His heartbeat was near normal and his body wasn’t sweating like a sprinkler hose. He wasn’t even slouched in his seat. He was sitting upright, looking around at this strange environment like a Japanese tourist at a rodeo. On one side of the street was the tall black wrought-iron fence that guarded the Fair Park grounds; inside were the Cotton Bowl stadium where the Cowboys had played until they struck out for the suburbs, and the historic Art Deco buildings dating back to the Texas Centennial Exposition of 1936 that now sat abandoned and decaying like an old movie set. On the other side of the street were overgrown vacant lots that apparently served as the neighborhood’s unofficial dumps, and boarded-up structures with broken-out windows and black men loitering outside.

“Crack houses,” Pajamae said.

Run-down strip centers offered pawn shops and liquor stores. Ramshackle frame houses slanted at twenty-degree angles, their paint peeling like skin from a badly sunburned body. Sofas sat on droopy porches, old cars were jacked up on cement blocks in the yards, garbage was backed up at the streets, and black burglar bars guarded every door and window of every house and storefront as if each structure were its owner’s personal prison. The entire landscape was dull and colorless, except for the graffiti adorning every wall and fence and the thick-bodied black women strolling by in colorful skirts and shorts and heels.

“Working girls,” Pajamae said. “Mama says they work down here because they’re too fat to get white tricks on Harry Hines.”

Scott was imagining living in this neighborhood, walking these streets with Boo, or worse, Boo walking alone, when his peripheral vision caught a commotion at the side of the road, and he slowed…a little.

“What’s going on?”

On the sidewalk outside a dilapidated apartment complex was a massive pile of belongings, everything from a microwave to clothes, a basketball to dolls, as if someone had backed up a truck and dumped the stuff there. Sitting on the curb were two black kids, their elbows on their knees, their chins cradled in their palms, looking like their world had just come to an end. An obese black woman in red stretch shorts and a white T-shirt was yelling and gesturing wildly at a skinny black man wearing a short-sleeve shirt and a tie. Pajamae strained her neck to see, then slumped back down.

“Eviction day,” she said matter-of-factly.

“They got evicted from their apartment?”

“Yeah. Happens first of every month.”

As a young lawyer, Scott had appeared in J.P. court numerous times on behalf of landlords to evict deadbeat tenants. But he had never witnessed firsthand the law in action—a family’s personal property removed from their apartment and dumped on the sidewalk out front, exactly as the eviction statute mandated. He glanced back at the scene and then accelerated away. When the Ferrari’s expensive racing tires hit the interstate heading north to downtown Dallas, he breathed a sigh of relief.

“My daddy, he was white,” Pajamae said.

He glanced over at the girl in the passenger’s seat. She was a cute kid with facial features that were more white than black. Her hair was done in neat rows braided lengthwise and snug to her scalp with long braids hanging to her narrow shoulders; she was wearing a pink T-shirt, jean shorts, pink socks folded down, and white Nike sneakers. Other than her light brown skin, she was no different from all the little girls Scott had seen in Highland Park—except for the cornrows.

“Where is he?”

“Dead.”