The Color of Law (5 page)

FIVE

S
COTT STEERED
the red Ferrari out of the parking garage, gave Osvaldo, the attendant, his customary salute, and turned north. While most downtown workers commuted to their homes in the distant suburbs via the Dallas North Tollway or the North Central Expressway, hopelessly stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic for hours and suppressing the road rage that left a number of drivers dead each year on Dallas highways, Scott Fenney drove leisurely up Cedar Springs Road and Turtle Creek Boulevard and Lakeside Drive and then past Robert E. Lee Park, homeward bound over the same route important men of Dallas had traveled for a hundred years. Ten minutes later, he crossed a two-lane swath of asphalt and, as if his fairy godmother had waved her magic wand, his world abruptly changed: land values quintupled, home values quadrupled, per capita income tripled, students’ achievement test scores doubled, and the population turned all white.

He had entered the Town of Highland Park.

Developed in 1906 on thirteen hundred acres of high land above downtown Dallas, Highland Park today is a sanctuary of elegant homes, landscaped lawns, and broad avenues canopied by towering oak trees. On its wide sidewalks European nannies and Mexican maids can be seen pushing the heirs of the great Texas fortunes in strollers while their fathers—billionaires and millionaires and the lawyers who tend to them—work in the downtown skyscrapers and their mothers play tennis at the country club and shop at Anne Fontaine, Luca Luca, and Bottega Veneta in the Highland Park Village shopping center, its Spanish Mediterranean architecture and quaint stucco buildings with terra-cotta roofs and decorative wrought iron harking back to a distant time and place when great wealth was reserved for people of a certain class, not just anyone who could dunk a basketball. Visitors from California say the town reminds them of Beverly Hills, and with good reason: the same architect who designed Beverly Hills designed Highland Park. Only difference is, the founders of Beverly Hills did not file deed restrictions that legally limited home ownership in their new town to white people only; the founders of Highland Park did.

Almost a hundred years later, the Town of Highland Park is a two-square-mile island entirely surrounded by the 384-square-mile City of Dallas. It’s an island of white in an ocean of color: Dallas, a city of 1.2 million residents, is now only 39 percent white; while Highland Park, a town of 8,850 residents, remains 98 percent white, with not a single home owned by a black person. It’s an island of wealth—on any given day over a hundred homes in Highland Park will be listed for sale at prices exceeding $1 million. It’s an island immune from the crime and social ills that afflict Dallas—Highland Park kids call their hometown “the Bubble,” happy to be insulated from the outside world that beckons at the town boundary—albeit an island without a river or stream or even a moat to keep the outside world out, only the highest home prices in Texas, a well-armed police force, and a long-standing reputation that if you’re black or brown and don’t live there, you’d damn well better be passing through.

The Highland Park police did not stop the Ferrari: Scott Fenney was white and he lived there. Like other white men of means, he made his money in Dallas but came home to Highland Park, raised his family in Highland Park, and sent his child to Highland Park schools. He turned right onto Beverly Drive and into the driveway of his two-and-a-half-story, 7,500-square-foot, six-bedroom, six-bath, $3.5 million residence. He had bought the home three years ago for $2.8 million when the previous owner had filed bankruptcy and the bank had foreclosed. Dan Ford had called in a personal favor and persuaded the bank to sell the house to Scott with one-hundred-percent financing at prime plus five. Sitting on one acre in the heart of Highland Park, the place had been a steal at that price. Scott had jumped in with both feet, into debt up to his neck. In many towns in Texas, men who owe large sums of money are looked on with suspicion; in Dallas, such men are looked on with awe.

Scott drove up the brick-paved driveway and into the rear motor court. He cut the engine, but he didn’t get out. Usually when he arrived home each evening and again admired his residence, he was filled with a sense of pride, that through brains and hard lawyering, he had achieved the perfect home for a perfect life.

But this evening was different.

For only the second time in his life, a distinct feeling of impending doom darkened his mind, just as it had when he was ten and his mother had picked him up early from school and said his father had been hurt. He knew his father was dead.

Butch Fenney had been a construction worker. A cable snapped and a load of lumber fell, crushing him. Scott’s mother did the best she could, but they had to sell their small house in East Dallas. She worked for an orthopedic surgeon who lived in Highland Park and owned a teardown over by SMU, a tiny sixty-year-old home that would fall over if given a good push. The house was worthless, but the 75- by 125-foot lot it sat on was worth at least $250,000. The doctor planned to hold the property until his retirement, when he would demolish the house and sell the lot for a substantial profit. The good doctor rented the home to the Fenney family, mother and son.

So Scott Fenney attended Highland Park schools with the sons and daughters of governors and senators and millionaires and billionaires, scions of the great Dallas families like the Hunts and Perots and Crows. He was the poor kid on the block, the kid who didn’t wear designer jeans and $100 Nike sneakers, who didn’t go to Europe for spring break, who didn’t get a $50,000 BMW for his sixteenth birthday. But Scott Fenney possessed something no snotty rich boy could ever buy with daddy’s money: athletic ability. Remarkable God-given physical talent revealed with a run the town would never forget. High school football. Friday night fever. Legitimate, structured violence, organized by men, inflicted by boys, cheered by all—and a tried-and-true method for pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps in Texas. Scott was strong and he was tough and he was fast. He became the star running back for Highland Park High, the best since Doak Walker.

After high school, he went to SMU. Most Highland Park kids are deathly afraid of leaving the safety and security of the Bubble, so going off to college for them means moving out of their parents’ home in Highland Park, driving the Beemer a few blocks, and moving into a sorority or fraternity house on the SMU campus in Highland Park. Scott Fenney went to SMU because the school offered him a football scholarship. He starred on the varsity for four years; his 193 yards against Texas made him a legend. He was also popular enough to be elected class president and smart enough to graduate first in his class. When the pros passed on the six foot two, 185-pound white running back with jagged scars down both knees, he enrolled in SMU law school.

Now, you don’t go to Southern Methodist University School of Law if you plan on pursuing a legal career in New York or D.C. or L.A. or even Houston for that matter: it’s not exactly the Harvard of the Southwest. In fact, they say it’s a hell of a lot easier to get into the law school at SMU than it is one of the sororities or fraternities at SMU. You go to SMU law school if and only if you want to practice law in Dallas, Texas, because SMU lawyers have begotten SMU lawyers for so many decades now that the Dallas legal community is more incestuous than the Alabama backwoods of the fifties.

Scott graduated number one in his law school class, which earned him job offers from every big firm in Dallas. He chose Ford Stevens because they offered him $5,000 more. Eleven years later, Scott Fenney was no longer the poor kid on the block.

Scott entered the house through the back door that led into a mudroom and then into the spacious kitchen, where he found Consuela cooking and the small TV tuned to a Mexican game show.

“
Buenas noches, señorita
. What’s for dinner?”

Her brown face turned up from the stainless-steel stove, and she smiled. “Enchiladas, Señor Fenney.
Especial
for you.”

He walked over, put an arm around her, and said, “Consuela, don’t worry. Esteban will be back soon.”

She fought back tears. “
Sí.
He will come.”

Consuela de la Rosa was twenty-eight, short, and chubby. She lived in the pool cabana out back, just like countless other illegal Mexican maids throughout the Town of Highland Park, which effectively granted them political asylum from the INS. Their presence was certainly no secret; strolling the aisles of the Highland Park gourmet grocery store on a weekday when the maids did the family shopping qualified as a conversational Spanish lesson these days. The real threat to his maid was not the INS but Esteban’s hormones. If her
hombre
got her pregnant, Consuela would have to leave town per the tacit agreement in Highland Park: Spanish spoken in the grocery store was acceptable; Spanish spoken in the schools was not.

“Mrs. Fenney home?”

“No. Señora, she gone all day. She hit the golf ball.”

“With all the golf lessons she’s taken, she ought to be on the women’s pro tour by now.”

In keeping with his daily routine, Scott climbed the back stairs two steps at a time to the second floor. He walked down the hall and up another set of stairs to the top floor that was his nine-year-old daughter’s domain. Hers was not a kid’s room; there were no posters on the wall of Britney Spears or the Olsen twins. There were books, books on the bookshelves, books on her desk, books on her night table, books on the floor. Even at nine, she was a serious child, thoughtful, smart beyond her breeding. Scott found her at her desk tucked under the dormer, barefooted and wearing overall shorts and a green Dallas Mavericks T-shirt, notwithstanding her mother’s threats to disown her if she didn’t start dressing in designer outfits from Neiman Marcus like the other Highland Park girls her age. But she had steadfastly refused, saying she had her own identity, to which her mother would always retort, “As what, a boy?”

“Hey, Boo.”

Barbara Boo Fenney. She was named after his mother, who had died before Boo was born. Scott’s mother had not lived to see her son’s mansion or her granddaughter. Boo spun around in her swivel chair, her shoulder-length red hair whipping around, and she gave him a smile that shot straight to his heart. Scott loved his wife, but Boo was the love of his life.

“Hey, A. Scott.”

He cupped her face, leaned down, and kissed her forehead.

“Did you have a good day, baby?”

“Oh, I read and played computer games, watched TV, cooked with Consuela, you know, the usual…until Esteban called. Thanks for calming Consuela down—she’d still be crying.”

Scott nodded. “Your mother’s been gone all day?”

She gave him a look.
“Duh.”

“It’s summer, she ought to spend more time with you.”

“Well, I’m not on the Cattle Barons’ Ball committee.” She smiled. “How was your day?”

“Okay.”

“Did you do important lawyer stuff?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Like what?”

Scott recalled his day—billing twelve hours for the nine he was at the office; giving his Atticus Finch speech at the bar luncheon; flirting with Missy while reeling in a law student like a hooked fish; voting to fire John Walker; flirting with Dibrell’s receptionist; hiding lead contamination behind the attorney-client privilege; threatening to destroy a young woman by revealing her sexual history at trial in order to obtain a favorable settlement—and quickly decided, as he always decided, that a lawyer’s day was best left at the law office. So he said, “Oh, just the things lawyers do.”

“Unh-huh.” She gave him another look. “You just tell me what you want me to know, don’t you?”

He gave her a smile. “Yep.”

She frowned. “It’s not fair.”

“What’s not fair?”

“I’m stuck here all day while Mother meets her lady friends for lunch and plays golf and you go to your office and do your lawyer work. Mother comes home and wants to tell me all about her day, but I want to know about your day, and you won’t tell me. It’s not fair.”

Scott sat on the edge of Boo’s bed and looked at his daughter, her cute little face contorted into a frown. He knew she wasn’t really mad, but it still bothered him. So he thought through his day again and decided he could tell her one thing.

“Okay, I’ll tell you something about my day. I got appointed to represent a criminal defendant, the woman who murdered Senator McCall’s son.”

Her face brightened and all was well again.

“You’re not a criminal lawyer.”

“Some people say all lawyers are criminal.”

Boo smiled. “You know what I mean.”

“Well, I’m hoping there won’t be a trial, that she’ll cop a plea.”

“What’s cop a plea?”

“Say she’s guilty.”

“Is she?”

“Probably.”

“Are you gonna ask her?”

“Maybe…I mean, yeah, sure.”

“Why do you want her to cop a plea? I thought you make more money when a case goes to trial.”

“Not this trial. I’m doing it for free.”

“Why?”

“Judge Buford’s making me.”

“He can do that?”

“Yeah. I practice in federal court, so he can do that. It’s a rule.”

“Support his opponent in the next election.”

He had taught her well.

“Judge Buford’s a federal judge, appointed for life.”

“Shit.”

“Boo, don’t cuss.”

“Mother does.”

“Well, she shouldn’t. And you shouldn’t either. It makes you sound trashy.”

“They cuss in the movies, even the PGs. And all the other kids cuss.”

“That doesn’t make it right. Don’t be a follower, Boo. Don’t do the wrong thing just because everyone else does. Do the right thing.”

“I don’t say the F-word.”

Scott smiled. “Well, that’s good.”

“I don’t even know what it means.”

“I hope not.”

“Sally down the street, she says her dad says the F-word all the time when he thinks she’s not around. And sometimes even when she is. You don’t say the F-word when I’m not around, do you?”

“No, of course not.”

A small lie.