The Color of Law sf-1

by Mark Gimenez

  “Yes, sir, it’s a crying shame, Judge.”

  “You know, Scott, seeing you up there, everyone applauding you, made me recall that game of yours against Texas-damn, son, that was the best running I’ve ever seen. What did you get that day, a hundred fifty yards?”

  “One hundred ninety-three, Judge. Three touchdowns. We still lost.”

  “Hell of a game.”

  “I didn’t know you were a big football fan, Judge.”

  “I’m a Texan, born and raised, Scott, that makes me a football fan. Did you know I went to SMU?”

  Scott chuckled. “Of course, I know, Judge. Every student at the law school knows about Samuel Buford-top grade point average in the history of the school, law review editor, clerk to Supreme Court Justice Douglas, Assistant Solicitor General under LBJ…”

  “Whoa, son, you’re making me feel old.”

  “Oh, sorry, sir.”

  “You did pretty well yourself, Scott, top of your class.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “So, Scott, you up for helping out an old judge?”

  “Always happy to help in any way, sir.”

  Just then his mind’s peripheral vision caught a movement, like a linebacker moving in to nail him from his blind side.

  “Tough job, Scott, requires a tough lawyer, a lawyer who doesn’t quit, who can handle pressure, who can take a hard hit and still get up-you proved all that on the football field. You know, Scott, pound for pound, I always figured you were the toughest player I’d ever seen, except maybe for Meredith.”

  Before he was the star quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys, Don Meredith had been the star quarterback at SMU from 1957 through 1959, a country boy out of Mount Vernon, one of the greatest athletes ever produced by the State of Texas, and generally regarded as the toughest quarterback ever to play the position. Meredith was still a living legend in Dallas, although he lived in Santa Fe.

  “But, Scott, this job also requires a lawyer who believes like you do, that lawyers are supposed to protect the poor and defend the innocent and fight for justice.”

  “Absolutely, sir.”

  Back in his playing days, when the game was on the line, Scott Fenney, number 22, always pulled out all the stops to take home a victory. Even though he wasn’t sure what he was playing for today-perhaps Buford wanted to appoint him independent counsel to investigate a high-profile political scandal, which could make Scott Fenney a very famous lawyer-his natural desire to win took over. He pulled out all the stops.

  “Protecting the poor, defending the innocent, fighting for justice-that’s not just our professional duty, Judge, that’s our sacred honor.”

  Shit, that sounded good! That’s a winner for sure! Scott made a mental note to add that line to his campaign speech.

  “Good to hear that, Scott. You’ve read about the McCall case, the senator’s son murdered Saturday night?”

  “Yes, sir, by the hooker.”

  “Yeah, black girl, twenty-four, a dozen priors for prostitution, drug possession…says she’s innocent.”

  Scott chuckled. “Don’t they all?”

  “This case is going to be a media circus-black prostitute accused of murdering a senator’s son, and not just any senator, mind you, but likely the next president.”

  “Yeah, I wouldn’t want to be her lawyer.”

  “Well, Scott, that’s why I called.”

  And what the judge wanted from Scott Fenney hit him with all the force of a linebacker on a blitz. Blindsided by a federal judge! Sweat beads erupted from the pores on his forehead. His pulse jumped. He reached up and loosened his silk tie.

  “She needs a good lawyer, Scott. She needs you.”

  That’s what he had won? That’s the victory he would take home? On the verge of panic, Scott’s sharp mind began devising ways to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

  “But, Judge, what about the public defender’s office?”

  “Scott, I can’t put a death penalty case in the hands of a wet-behind-the-ears PD lawyer who barely got through law school. This girl needs a real lawyer.”

  “But I’m a corporate lawyer. Why not appoint a criminal defense attorney?”

  “I was going to…until I heard your speech. Defense lawyers, they’re just hired guns. They don’t care about defending the innocent or fighting for justice. They just want to get paid. Not like you, Scott. And most of them only work state court; you’ve got federal court experience.”

  “Why’s a murder case in federal court?”

  “Clark McCall was the FERC chairman, courtesy of the senator. Murder of a federal official is a federal crime.”

  “But, Judge-”

  “And besides, Scott, you can make your mother proud.”

  “What?”

  “You can be another Atticus Finch.”

  “But-”

  “She has the right to counsel, and you’re it, Scott. You’re hereby appointed to represent the defendant in United States of America versus Shawanda Jones. Meet your client tomorrow morning. Detention hearing’s Wednesday, nine A.M.”

  Scott was walking quickly- hell, he was damn near running — down the carpeted corridors of the sixty-second floor to the marble-and-mahogany staircase leading to the sixty-third floor. He bounded up the stairs and hurried past tiny offices occupied by smart young lawyers churning out their monthly quota of billable hours like blue-collar workers punching a clock on a factory line. Tonight, as every night, the workers were pulling double shifts, much to the benefit of the partners. But that thought did not fill Scott’s heart with the usual cheer; tonight his heart was filled with fear as he rushed into his senior partner’s office.

  Dan Ford was sixty years old. He and Gene Stevens had founded the firm thirty-five years ago, right out of SMU law school. Dan Ford had hired Scott eleven years ago when he had graduated from SMU, taken him under his wing, taught him the profitable practice of law, got him elected to the partnership, got him the mortgage on the house, got him into the dining, athletic, and country clubs, and got him a good deal on the Ferrari. He was Scott’s mentor and father figure, and he was at his desk, his station in life from seven A.M. to seven P.M., Monday through Friday, and from seven A.M. until noon on Saturdays, fifty weeks a year. Dan Ford had billed three thousand hours a year for thirty-five straight years, a feat he compared favorably to DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak. The firm was his life.

  Dan’s shiny head came up and a broad smile crossed his face.

  “Scotty, my boy!”

  Scott fell onto the sofa.

  “You don’t look so good, son. Problem?”

  Dan Ford had solved most of Scott’s problems over the last eleven years. Scott was hoping this one would be no different.

  “Judge Buford just appointed me to represent the hooker who killed Senator McCall’s son.”

  The news took the breath out of Dan. He fell back in his chair. “You’re joking.”

  “I wish.”

  “Why?”

  Scott threw up his hands. “Because I gave my goddamn Atticus Finch speech at the bar luncheon! The judge was there.”

  “He believed it?”

  “Apparently.”

  Dan ran his hands over his smooth skull.

  “This is not good. Not good at all. We can’t afford to piss off the next president, and we sure as hell can’t afford to piss off Buford. Goddamn murder case, why isn’t it in state court? We could work with that!”

  State court judges in Texas were always amenable to a call from a powerful partner in a big law firm because state court judges are elected on campaign contributions from big law firms. The threat of moving the firm’s contributions to the judge’s opponent in the next election has a way of keeping judges in line. Electing state court judges is a constitutional tradition in Texas dating back to 1850 and served to keep the Texas legal system orderly and predictable if not terribly fair. Thus lawyers in big law firms do not fear state court judges just as one does not fear one’s
own house pet.

  But federal judges were a different breed. They’re not elected. They’re appointed by the president under Article Three of the United States Constitution-for life. They can’t be voted off the bench. They don’t need campaign contributions from big law firms. They don’t fear powerful lawyers. Cross a federal judge and you live with it for thirty or forty years-you’ll never win another case in his court. A large law firm like Ford Stevens with an active federal court practice could not afford to offend Judge Sam Buford.

  “We’ve got a dozen pending cases on his docket. Big-dollar cases. We become personae non gratae in Buford’s court, we lose our federal practice until the bastard dies.”

  “Or retires.”

  “Buford will die on the bench, just like Gene.”

  Gene Stevens, the firm’s cofounder, had died at his desk last year, a pen in his hand, his hand on his daily time sheet, recording his last billable hour. Within twenty-four hours, his office had been cleaned out and Scott had moved in.

  “Buford said it’ll be a media circus,” Scott said.

  “Yeah, lots of publicity for the firm-all the wrong kind.” Dan’s pale face was pinking up like a newborn’s. “Goddamnit, this firm cannot defend that whore!”

  Dan closed his eyes, placed his hand over his face, and rubbed his temples. His thinking mode. And when Dan Ford thought hard, he always emerged with the correct answer. Scott’s senior partner possessed a mind engineered like the Mercedes-Benz he drove: powerful, efficient, dependable, and wholly without a moral component. So Scott sat quietly while Dan’s mind worked. He turned his eyes upward and checked out the walls for new trophy kills. Dan was a big-game hunter; mounted on the walls were stuffed heads of the wild animals he had bagged over the years, all looking down on Scott. It was kind of creepy.

  After a moment, Dan removed his hand. He was smiling.

  “Get her to plead out.”

  “She says she’s innocent, wants a trial.”

  “So? Look, Scotty, go see her, explain the real likelihood the case will be lost and that she’ll be sentenced to death or best case, spend the rest of her life in prison. That by pleading out she’ll be released by the time she’s fifty and she can still have a life…You know, turn on that famous charm, pretend you care.”

  “And if she doesn’t go for it?”

  “She goddamn well better go for it! I’m not going to have this firm’s revenues damaged by some two-bit hooker!”

  Dan’s face was now a bright red, and he was pointing a finger at Scott, a sure sign it was time to leave. Scott stood and eased toward the door.

  “You tell her she’s pleading out whether she likes it or not!”

  Scotty nodded and slid out. He was ten paces down the hall when he heard Dan’s voice again: “Cop a plea, Scotty!”

  FIVE

  Scott 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.