by Mark Gimenez
She turned to the white man to her left, Mr. Fenney. Tall and blond and handsome, wearing a dark pin-striped suit that hung like a silk dress over his broad shoulders, a crisp white shirt with French cuffs, a maroon silk tie, and the overall appearance of a white-boy version of the baddest pimp in the projects, he had a look that said, I’m a stud.
A stud or a dud?
Shawanda was twenty-four years old. She had dropped out of school at age fifteen when she got pregnant. She had only nine years of formal education. But she wasn’t stupid. And her prior experiences with the American legal system had taught her an important lesson, one she wasn’t ever going to forget: rich lawyer means good lawyer; poor lawyer means bad lawyer. She looked up at the judge and said, “It ain’t okay!”
Scott’s heart froze as the words from the black woman standing next to him hit his brain. The judge’s head shot up. His eyes locked on Shawanda Jones. Scott turned and stared down at her, stifling the urge to strangle this client who refused to go away quietly.
“What?” the judge asked.
“It ain’t okay with me,” Shawanda said. She pointed a trembling black finger at Scott. “Judge, I’m innocent and I want Mr. Fenney be my lawyer.”
The judge yanked his reading glasses off his face and cocked his head at Scott.
“Mr. Fenney, did you not discuss this with your client prior to asking this court to substitute counsel?”
Scott cleared his throat. “Uh, no, sir.”
“Well, maybe you should have.” The judge returned to Shawanda. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you want Mr. Fenney as your lawyer?”
“Judge, I believe in him. I feel confidence in him. I know he can prove me innocent.”
The judge again turned to Scott.
“Mr. Fenney, it’s the defendant’s right to counsel, so it’s her decision.”
“Your Honor, may I have a moment with Ms. Jones?”
The judge gave him a brief wave of the hand.
Scott stepped between Shawanda and the judge, leaned down to her, and whispered through clenched teeth: “Look, goddamnit, my firm is hiring a lawyer for you. I’ve got better things to do than take you to trial. I’m not gonna be your lawyer. Now you tell the judge it’s okay for Bobby to represent you.”
Scott straightened up and faced the judge. The judge held his hands up.
“Well, Ms. Jones?”
Shawanda again turned to Robert Herrin- Dud! — then to A. Scott Fenney- Stud! She pointed at Mr. Fenney and said, “I want him.”
“Jesus H. Christ!” Dan Ford was upset now. “A goddamn hooker holding this firm hostage!”
Scott had just come from the courthouse with the bad news. “Can we appeal the appointment?” Scott asked.
“Hell, no! Even if we could, we wouldn’t. That’d piss off Buford big-time. We would never be able to set foot in his court again.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
Dan stared at his protege, the finest young lawyer he’d come across in thirty-five years. The boy was a natural: smart, shrewd, articulate, and possessed of the intestinal fortitude to bill a client until he cried uncle. He looked upon Scott as his son.
“Keep Herrin on the case, let him do all the heavy lifting, write all briefs and motions, make all pretrial appearances-that’ll keep the firm’s name out of the papers and off TV. And no goddamn interviews, make sure Herrin knows that! You”-a finger pointed at Scott-“you work for our paying clients.”
Dan checked his watch and walked over to the coatrack. “Keep me posted. I don’t want any surprises, Scott.”
Scott departed, and Dan slipped into his coat; he was wearing a black suit today. He had to go to a funeral.
NINE
Most residents of Highland Park who knew Clark McCall always assumed he would die young. He was wild and reckless, to the degree only a child of enormous wealth could afford to be. A son of the middle class could not afford to squander his chances at admission to a top college and then law or medical school. But for Clark McCall, those considerations were of no concern: his father possessed a net worth in excess of $800 million.
Dan Ford was sitting in the sanctuary of the Highland Park United Methodist Church situated at the southern end of the SMU campus, waiting for Clark McCall’s funeral service to begin. He had known Clark all the boy’s life because he had known Clark’s father for forty-two years. Dan had met Mack their freshman year at SMU when they had pledged the same fraternity.
With America at war in Vietnam and Uncle Sam drafting more young men to die, Dan Ford had decided to fight the war at a private college and then a private law school. He did not pursue a legal career out of any particular love of the law, only because of a particular fear of dying in some rice paddy ten thousand miles away. He wasn’t alone in that fear: enrollment at America’s law schools doubled during the war.
But once his future career was fixed, Dan Ford plotted a path to success. He knew lawyers got rich by representing rich clients. So, while most freshmen busied themselves with drinking and screwing, free of mommy and daddy for the first time, young Dan Ford began cultivating future clients.
Mack McCall was at the top of his list. As soon as you met him, you knew Mack was going places. He had that look about him. Born in Odessa, son of a roughneck and one himself, Mack was engaged to his high school sweetheart, the only daughter of an oil company vice president. His future father-in-law paid Mack’s way through SMU.
Summers, Dan clerked in Dallas law firms, learning the ways of lawyers. Mack worked on West Texas oil rigs. Back then, oil was going for two bucks a barrel; Mack predicted ten dollars a barrel. Even he didn’t dream of oil at fifty dollars a barrel.
By graduation day, Mack knew how to drill wells and, more important, he knew where to drill. Over the four years of college, he had mapped every producing well and dry hole in the Permian Basin. He hit his first wildcat well the summer after graduation. By the time Dan had graduated law school, Mack McCall was worth $20 million. Like H. L. Hunt and other Texas wildcatters before him, Mack McCall soon bored of what he could buy in an oil town, so he moved to Dallas. And Dan Ford, Esq., had his first rich client.
Dan now watched as the senior senator from Texas worked the church crowd as if his son’s funeral was just another campaign stop, although he was wearing his version of a grief-stricken face. He was a handsome man, with a full head of starched gray hair, immaculately dressed as always, the kind of man teenagers go “yuk” at, but women of AARP find irresistibly attractive.
Organ music was playing softly in the background, voices were subdued, and Dan was sitting in a pew in the middle of the church, a good vantage point from which to see who came and who did not. Martha McCall, Mack’s first wife and Clark’s mother, arrived early and sat in the front pew with the other family members. She looked so old next to Jean McCall, but then, who wouldn’t? Martha was the family station wagon parked next to a sleek sports car.
Dan’s station wagon was parked next to him; she was almost his age and looked it. They had married right out of law school and immediately had a child, added insurance that Dan Ford would not be touring Indonesia courtesy of Uncle Sam. Over the years, Dan had had three brief affairs, if you called making it with a drunk secretary on the sofa in his office after the firm Christmas party an affair, but he had never considered divorcing his wife for another woman. First, there hadn’t been another woman who had expressed any interest in becoming his next wife; and second, his true love was and had always been his law firm.
Political animals of every breed were making an appearance at Clark McCall’s funeral. They came not out of grief for the deceased, but because it was good for business: CEOs who needed McCall’s vote to extend their special tax break or exemption from some onerous environmental regulation; members of Congress who dared not cross the most powerful man in the Senate; the vice president because network news cameras were present; cabinet members who hoped to be in a McCall administra
tion; and judges-district court judges who wanted to be appeals court judges and appeals court judges who wanted to be Supreme Court justices, promotions requiring Senate confirmation. Clark McCall’s funeral had brought together a collection of national figures from politics and business the likes of which Dallas had seldom seen. When you’re the leading bet to be the next president, people come to your son’s funeral.
And the stalwarts of funerals, the old ladies of Highland Park, had come, recalling how handsome Clark had been as a boy. The funeral guests were friends of the family, not friends of Clark. A few young men about Clark’s age had come, themselves sons of great wealth who would forever be burdens to their parents. But no young women had come. Clark did not seem to have any female friends who mourned his passing.
Just as Dan’s own son would have no female friends at his funeral; he had recently confessed to being gay. God knows, Clark’s heterosexuality had never been in question. How many times had the senator called Dan in the middle of the night to bail Clark out of the Highland Park jail? Once a month, it seemed, during Clark’s college career at SMU and a dozen times since. Drinking, snorting, screwing-Clark McCall had definitely enjoyed himself. Fortunately, the boy had the good sense to get himself arrested in Highland Park, where money mattered.
The reverend stepped to the lectern, the people took their seats, and the background music faded away. The reverend spoke of God and heaven and peace, that Clark was in a better place; the good preacher was selling eternity, but Dan Ford wasn’t buying. Right here, right now, that’s all we have. Don’t wait for the hereafter. Get what you want here and now.
After ten minutes of the reverend, Senator Mack McCall stood and walked to his son’s coffin by the altar, placed his palm on the top, and closed his eyes, as if in prayer. But Dan wasn’t buying that either; he knew Mack too well.
Mack went to the lectern and gazed out at the assemblage with a grim expression. He spoke slowly and with great emotion of his only son, of how it was against nature for a son to die before his father, of how he had experienced pain in his sixty years, but nothing like this. Clark had been a troubled boy and for this he blamed himself, which Dan Ford knew was an absolute lie. Mack blamed Martha for not letting him send Clark to a military boarding school when he was ten. But Mack McCall was very good at this sort of thing, and by the end of his eulogy, most of the funeral guests were crying or damn close to it.
His only son was dead and buried.
They had never bonded, Mack McCall and his son. Clark had bonded with his mother; Mack had bonded with money. He reached into his inside coat pocket and removed and opened his billfold: not a single photograph of his son or either of his wives, but thick with the faces of Benjamin Franklin and Ulysses S. Grant. Money and power had been Mack McCall’s lifelong companions, not a wife and son. Now he would use his money to buy the presidency of the United States of America.
He had spent $25 million to purchase a Senate seat, only to discover that the sole power senators wielded was the power to deliver pork to their home states, not unlike a mailman delivering Social Security checks. It was power that served only to ensure their incumbency.
But Mack McCall wanted to leave his footprints on this earth; he wanted history to know he had been here. Before the divorce, Martha had suggested he establish a private foundation, use his wealth to help the world’s poor: AIDS victims in Africa, uneducated children in Mexico, homeless people in America. But even $800 million was a drop in the bucket when it came to the world’s social problems. And besides, he had never concerned himself with the plight of poor people; it just wasn’t his thing. So he divorced Martha and married Jean, and now he would spend as much of his fortune as necessary to buy the power he so coveted, the power to dispatch the United States Army. Wipe out a few Middle Eastern dictators, and history damn sure knows you were here.
Mack was standing in the bedroom of his Highland Park mansion where his son had been murdered. His mind began playing out the last moments of Clark’s life according to the police report, moments filled with alcohol and cocaine and lust and rage and fear and a hooker-a nigger, for God’s sake! His son had screwed her and fought her and then died right there on the floor where the carpet had been cut out and removed by the FBI. He saw Clark lying dead and felt the emotions welling up inside him and he thought, as he always thought when Clark came to mind:
What a major-league fuckup his son had been.
Anyone else’s son and Mack would say the boy deserved it, living a reckless life, bringing a hooker home to Highland Park. But it was his son and that made it different: no one else in Highland Park was running for president. For the last twenty years, Mack McCall’s every act, speech, public appearance, Senate vote- every breath he took — had been judged against one overriding concern: How would it affect his presidential ambitions? So now no conscious effort was required for his mind to judge his son’s murder and all the publicity the hooker’s trial would bring against the same concern.
Mack didn’t like the conclusions his mind arrived at.
He had threatened to cut Clark out of his will on more than one occasion, an attempt to curb his son’s reckless ways by threatening his future. But now it was the son who was threatening his father’s future: the circumstances of Clark’s death and his many indiscretions posed an imminent threat to Mack’s White House dreams. And Mack McCall was not one to wait passively for a threat to become reality.
Two hours later, Mack was standing at the open double doors of the foyer, saying good-bye to those who had come to pay their respects. Dan Ford was the last to leave. Mack watched Dan walk down the long walkway to the circle drive where the valet held open the door to Dan’s waiting Mercedes-Benz. Dan Ford would cooperate: a lawyer’s loyalty could always be purchased for a reasonable fee.
“This Fenney boy,” Mack said, “he played ball at SMU, pretty damn good as I recall.”
Mack shut the front doors and turned to Delroy Lund, a big, bald, no-necked slab of beef. Delroy was not the brightest former DEA agent in the country, and he was plenty rough around the edges-subtlety wasn’t Delroy’s strong point-but he had proved himself a loyal bodyguard and capable private investigator, adept at uncovering dirty little secrets about senators who opposed Mack on various pork barrel bills and his ex-wife during their divorce proceedings.
“Find everything there is to find on Fenney, and I mean everything. I want his transcripts, bank records, debts, tax returns. I want to know his clients, his friends, his enemies, whether he’s fucking around on his wife or she’s fucking around on him.” A pointed finger at his trusted manservant. “Delroy, I want to know how much he craps each morning. Understood?”
Delroy nodded.
“And no rough stuff this time, Delroy. I just want to control him.”
Delroy shrugged and said, “You’re the boss.”
“Get me every newspaper article on the McCall murder case,” Scott said to Sue. He gestured at Bobby sitting on the sofa. “Sue, this is Bobby Herrin. He’s working with me on the case. Give her your card, Bobby, so she has your numbers.”
Bobby dug around in his pockets, pulled out a crumpled card, and handed it to Sue, who was holding out a stack of pink message slips to Scott.
“Reporters and TV producers. They want you to appear on the morning news shows, Dateline, 20/20, and-”
“Trash ’em. And call security: tell them to keep those reporters outside on the street.”
“Frank Turner’s still waiting.”
“Show him in.” To Bobby: “I always make plaintiffs’ lawyers wait.”
Scott slumped in his chair behind the mahogany desk. Last time he felt like this was after the knee injury his freshman season.
“Just when you think you got the world by the balls,” Scott said, “you find out the world’s got you by the balls.”
“Welcome to my world,” Bobby said.
Sue escorted Frank Turner into Scott’s office. Frank appeared every inch the rich plaintiffs’ l
awyer, expensively dressed, his hair perfect, looking tanned and rested from another jaunt to Cancun aboard his personal Lear jet, the bastard. Frank had lucked into one major toxic tort verdict a decade ago, and he had never had to take a case to a jury again. His reputation forced every corporate defendant to settle for a substantial sum, one-third of which went into Frank’s pocket. So while Scott Fenney had a Ferrari, Frank Turner had a Lear.
Scott did not stand. “Frank, I didn’t expect you to come over personally.”
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?”