The Color of Law sf-1

by Mark Gimenez

  Scott had called Rudy Gutierrez, the immigration lawyer.

  “Her name is Consuela de la Rosa. Get her out today.”

  “No way, Scott. INS won’t let go of her.”

  “Why not? She’s just a maid.”

  “Scott, since 9/11 every Mexican here illegally is an international terrorist as far as INS is concerned. They play hardball. They were pricks before-now they’re goddamned pricks.”

  “I’ll pay whatever it takes, Rudy, just get her out.”

  “Scott, it’d be cheaper not to fight deportation. Let INS bus her across the border, then she can cross back over and work her way back up here.”

  “Consuela can’t handle that.”

  “Okay, but it ain’t gonna be cheap.”

  “How much?”

  “Twenty-five…thousand.”

  “I’ll send you a check today. You find her today, Rudy, tell her everything is gonna be okay, that we’re her family and she’ll be back with us…and Rudy, tell her I’m sorry.”

  Bobby had returned from the library shortly before noon. They were now taking the elevator upstairs to the Downtown Club. Scott was still aching to punch something. Or someone. He straightened his tie in the mirrored wall and said, “Bobby, we’re gonna show the world what kind of boy Clark McCall was.”

  “For Shawanda or because McCall got your maid arrested?”

  Scott stared at himself in the mirror a moment.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Let me know when you do.”

  The elevator doors opened and Scott led the way down the corridor to the maitre d’s station.

  “Two, Roberto.”

  Roberto stood frozen, his brown eyes wide, as if the Virgin Mary herself stood before him. Scott expected him to make the sign of the cross.

  “Roberto?”

  “Uh, Mr. Fenney, I, uh, I, uh…”

  “What, Roberto? We want lunch.”

  “Mr. Fenney, I no can do.”

  Roberto was suddenly no longer the suave maitre d’ of the Downtown Club; he was a no habla ingles immigrant just up from the border.

  “You no can do what?”

  “Give you seat.”

  “Why not?”

  Roberto’s forehead shone with a layer of sweat.

  “You no member.”

  “What the hell you mean I’m not a member?”

  “Mr. Fenney, is no more.”

  “You’re telling me I’m not a member anymore?”

  Roberto nodded. “Si.”

  “Get Stewart.”

  Roberto hurried off in search of the club’s manager. Scott turned and nodded at the three men waiting behind him to be seated. In less than a minute, Stewart appeared, trailed by Roberto-and the club’s security guard.

  “What the hell’s going on, Stewart?”

  Stewart regarded Scott with the same disdain he would a homeless person seeking a handout at the swanky Downtown Club.

  “Mr. Fenney, your membership has been revoked by action of the board of directors, effective immediately. I must ask you to leave the premises.” He gestured at the members in line behind Scott. “Roberto, seat these gentlemen.”

  The three men followed Roberto into the dining room, but not before giving Scott a curious glance and whispering among themselves, “That’s Scott Fenney, Tom Dibrell’s lawyer.”

  “You’re joking?”

  “No, Mr. Fenney.”

  Stewart held out an envelope. Scott snatched it, opened it, and removed a letter from the board of directors of the Downtown Club informing A. Scott Fenney, Esq., that his membership had been terminated. Scott’s blood pressure ratcheted up until the veins in his forehead felt like they would blow any second.

  “Please leave, Mr. Fenney. Or Darrell will escort you out.”

  Darrell, the security guard, took a step toward Scott. Darrell was young, early twenties, maybe two hundred pounds, wearing a clip-on tie and a brown polyester sports coat the sleeves of which were straining against his thick arms. Sporting a flattop, he had a square jaw and the protruding brow of a weight lifter fashioned from steroids. Scott had played football with what God gave him; he hadn’t bought it in a goddamned drugstore. But he had played against many such freaks. Problem with drugstore muscles, though, was they weren’t real, they weren’t strong, they weren’t powerful. They just looked good. At least that was his theory. Scott Fenney was still 185 pounds of natural muscle and he could still kick Darrell’s ass up and down the seventy floors of this skyscraper. He now took a step toward Darrell, so close he could smell Darrell’s foul breath. Scott said through clenched teeth: “I wouldn’t recommend trying.”

  Scott wadded up the letter and tossed it in Stewart’s face, then he turned and walked away. They were ten paces down the corridor when he heard Bobby’s voice: “Scotty.”

  Scott stopped and turned back. Bobby was pointing to a portrait on the wall, one of the club’s founders: Mack McCall.

  If Mack McCall had appeared before him at that moment, Scott Fenney might well have found himself sleeping in a cell like Shawanda Jones that night. He had never before been this mad at another human being, not even on a football field. He knew he couldn’t return to the office in that state, so he and Bobby took the skywalk across to the athletic club.

  “They got a juice bar,” Scott said.

  They were met at the front desk not by the trim little blonde Scott normally saw after work but by Han, a hulking bodybuilder who made Darrell look like a runt. Han greeted Scott like a stranger.

  “Please wait here, Mr. Fenney.”

  “Oh, shit,” Bobby said. “Deja vu all over again.”

  Han returned with a cheap little gym bag the club gave to guests. He held it out to Scott.

  “What’s this?”

  “The contents of your locker.”

  “Why?”

  “Your membership is terminated.”

  “As of when?”

  “This morning.”

  “Why?”

  “Orders.”

  “From whom?”

  “The club manager.”

  “And who gave him orders?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Han crossed his arms over his chest, creating a mass of muscle, bulging biceps and triceps and forearms and pectorals. Scott wasn’t sure he wanted to test his theory about steroid-induced muscle on Han. Scott had been in his share of bar fights in college, but never in a juice bar and never sober and never with anyone as big as Han. And he had always been backed up by one or two offensive linemen; those guys were crazy enough to fight a grizzly bear hand to hand. So when Bobby grabbed his arm and said, “Let’s get out of here,” Scott did not resist.

  For the first time since he made partner at Ford Stevens, A. Scott Fenney, Esq., ate a hot dog for lunch, purchased from a street vendor, in the company of people whose collective net worth was less than the price of his suit.

  After choking down two dogs, which he was beginning to regret, he and Bobby walked down Main Street, something else Scott hadn’t done in years. Or ever. And for a good reason.

  Five minutes in the July heat and Scott was soaked from head to toe in sweat. His hair and face were wet, and his crisply starched shirt now clung to him like wet tissue. The sweat from his chest and back was rolling down and collecting in his underwear; the sweat from his legs was collecting in his socks. Hoping to at least save the coat of his $2,000 suit, he removed it and draped it over his shoulder. Bobby was saying something, but to Scott it was just background noise. Scott’s mind was on Mack McCall.

  Bobby said, “Can you believe those civic boosters, actually thinking the Summer Olympics might come to Dallas? Half the athletes wouldn’t make it out of this blast furnace alive.”

  A block later, Bobby said, “Used to be whorehouses and saloons all up and down Main Street. Doc Holliday practiced dentistry and killed his first man right here.”

  And later: “You know Bonnie and Clyde grew up here? They’re both buried here. Cly
de’s grave is over in West Dallas. I don’t know where Bonnie’s is at.”

  They walked like that, Bobby giving Scott a brief history of Dallas and Scott responding with only nods and grunts the same as if he were listening to Rebecca telling him about her day. They arrived at Dealey Plaza on the western edge of downtown, a tiny triangle of green grass wedged between Houston, Commerce, and Elm streets, the Triple Underpass to the west and the School Book Depository and the grassy knoll to the north. The place remained exactly as it had been on November 22, 1963.

  Bobby said, “You ever been up to the Sixth Floor, looked out the window?”

  Scott shook his head.

  “No way Oswald did it alone,” Bobby said. “Had to be a shooter on the grassy knoll. You want to go over?”

  Scott shook his head again.

  Bobby pointed down the street. “Right over there, that’s where Ruby shot Oswald, down in the basement of the old jail.”

  Scott grunted. Oswald shot Kennedy, Ruby shot Oswald, Shawanda shot Clark, Scott shot Mack. It was a thought.

  Bobby said, “Right here, this is where Dallas got started, a hundred and sixty years ago, at the exact spot Kennedy got shot. Kind of creepy, ain’t it? Anyway, guy named John Neely Bryan set up a trading post right on the banks of the Trinity River-you know it used to run right here? Every spring it flooded downtown, so eighty years ago the city leaders moved the whole damn river a mile west, built big levees so it wouldn’t flood downtown. Course, ever since it’s flooded black people’s homes in South Dallas. They didn’t build levees down there.”

  They started back toward Dibrell Tower.

  Bobby said, “People that started Dallas, they were running from their creditors back East. ‘Gone to Texas,’ they said, which is like saying ‘chapter seven bankruptcy’ today. They figured their creditors might be brave enough to chase them into Indian territory, but they sure as hell weren’t stupid enough to follow them into this hellhole.”

  When they arrived at the six-story Neiman Marcus flagship store at Main and Ervay, Scott stopped and watched an old homeless woman pull her shopping cart full of junk over and admire the window display, designer clothes on skinny white mannequins, while inside the fine ladies of Highland Park were attending the Estee Lauder Focus Week, or so the sign in the window said. The old lady looked up at Scott and gave him a big toothless smile.

  They walked on and Scott began to notice the other strange people populating downtown, the people who walked the streets amid the heat and the noise and the nauseating exhaust fumes of buses and cars, so thick in the air he could taste it, the vagrants and the panhandlers, the old women without teeth and the old men with beards, Hispanic girls with little children in tow, black boys looking tough, and the cops walking the beat. There was another world down here on the streets. Driving by in his Ferrari, Scott had noticed these people no more than he did the inanimate objects of downtown, the light poles and parking meters and trash cans. His life was lived 620 feet up, in air-conditioned comfort. Scott was terribly uncomfortable down here on the street. Bobby was passing out business cards.

  “What the hell are you doing, Bobby?”

  “Trolling for clients, man. Scotty, I’m a street lawyer and this is the street. You look at them and see homeless people, vagrants, dime players, bottom-feeders-I see clients! This is my Downtown Club.”

  Bobby quickly realized his error.

  “Shit, I’ve been trying my best for an hour to get your mind off that, now I bring it up. Sorry.”

  But Scott’s thoughts had already returned to his perfect life sixty-two stories above them. He now knew that Mack McCall was not going to beat Scott Fenney senseless with brass knuckles. He was going to do something much worse. He was going to take Scott’s perfect life away.

  That feeling of impending doom enveloped Scott Fenney.

  If she made this putt, Rebecca Fenney would finish with a 74, her lowest score ever. She stood behind the ball and took two practice strokes, then walked over and assumed her putting stance, carefully placing the putter behind the ball and adjusting her weight until she was comfortably balanced. She knew Trey, the young golf pro whom she was paying $500 for today’s playing lesson, was watching her closely, but he wasn’t eyeing her putting stroke. He was eyeing her butt. He always managed to stand directly behind her when she putted.

  Trey had already holed out for a 62. He was twenty-six, gorgeous, and a former All-American golfer. He had just received notice from the PGA that he was eligible to play in the remaining tournaments that year. This was his last week at the club.

  She made a smooth stroke, sending the ball on a true line six inches outside the cup, and watched as the ball broke left and rolled into the hole.

  “Yes!”

  Trey walked over to her. They high-fived on the eighteenth green of the country club. He looked at her like he always did, and she saw the need in his eyes: he needed her more than life itself. They had been having sex for the last seven months.

  They turned and walked up the grassy slope to their cart and climbed in for the short drive to the clubhouse. Trey parked the cart, and the black bag boy appeared.

  “Your car be the black Mercedes coupe, Miz Fenney?”

  “What?”

  “Your car, it the black coupe?”

  “Yes, what about it?”

  “Make sure I take your clubs to the right car.”

  “Don’t take my clubs to my car. Put them in the clubhouse, like always.”

  “Mr. Porter, he tell me take them to your car.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t know, ma’am.”

  Rebecca turned to Trey. He shrugged. She walked inside the clubhouse, into the golf shop, and directly to the head pro’s office, where Ernie Porter was sitting. Ernie couldn’t make it on the pro tour, so he had spent the last twenty years giving golf lessons, running tournaments, and pocketing a percentage of every club, golf ball, and pair of shoes sold in the pro shop.

  “Ernie?”

  He looked up. “Yes, Mrs. Fenney?”

  “The bag boy, you told him to take my clubs to my car?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Why?”

  “If that’s inconvenient, Mrs. Fenney, I’ll have them delivered to your house.”

  “I don’t want my clubs at my house. I play here every day.”

  Ernie suddenly appeared sick. “Mrs. Fenney, you don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  Ernie shuffled some papers, squirmed in his chair, then said, “Your husband, Mr. Fenney…Well, he’s…He’s, uh…He’s no longer a member here.”

  “ What? We’ve been members for four years.”

  “Well, technically, Mrs. Fenney, your husband is the member. You have playing privileges as his spouse. Since he’s no longer a member, you no longer have privileges. It’s in the bylaws.”

  “Since when isn’t Scott a member?”

  “Since today.”

  She found her husband sitting at the kitchen table, their daughter cradled in his lap and sobbing into his shoulder as he stroked her braids. Pajamae was sitting across the table, her face glum, her chin resting on her hands on the table.

  “Mother, Consuela’s gone and she’s never coming back!”

  Rebecca put her hands on her hips and tried not to scream.

  “Didn’t Sue pay our club dues this month?”

  Scott raised his eyes to her. He nodded blankly.

  “Ernie said you’re no longer a member.”

  His hand slowly came up and fell on a piece of paper on the table. She recognized the club’s letterhead. He pushed it her way. She picked it up and read:

  Dear Mr. Fenney:

  The Membership Committee believes that your continued presence at the club will detract from the collegial social atmosphere of the membership. Therefore your membership has been revoked effective this date. Please do not return to the premises. Your personal belongings will be delivered to your residence, along with y
our final bill.

  “It’s McCall,” he said. “He got me kicked out of the Downtown Club and the athletic club, too. He’s trying to pressure me to drop our defense.”

  “Goddamnit, Scott, I told you!” Her arm dropped and the letter floated to the floor. The Scott Fenney ride was coming to an end. The only question now was whether the end would be a soft landing or a fiery crash.

  The girls were sitting up in Boo’s bed when Scott picked up the book and sat down in the chair next to the bed. All the strength had drained out of his body. In one day, he had lost his maid and his memberships at the dining club, the athletic club, and the country club. Just the idea of it, that Mack McCall possessed that kind of power, that he could sit in Washington and pull strings in Dallas, make a few phone calls and affect Scott’s perfect life, made Scott realize his relative place in the world. Maybe 193 yards against Texas didn’t make Scott Fenney so special after all.

  “You broke your promise,” Boo said, her voice stern, “and now Consuela’s gone.”

  Scott had suffered all manner of physical pain, but none compared to the pain he felt now for letting his daughter down.

  Scott removed his glasses. “I’m sorry, Boo.”

  “Get her back.”

  “I’m trying to.” Scott replaced his glasses and opened the book. “Where were we, the Thirteenth Amendment?”

  Boo said, “We want to talk about something else.”

  Scott shut the book. “Okay. What?”

  “What’s a will?”

  “A will is a legal declaration evidencing a testamentary intent to dispose of one’s property upon one’s death.”

  Boo had a blank expression. “In English,” she said. Pajamae was nodding.

  “A will says who gets your stuff when you die.”

  The girls glanced at each other and nodded. Boo said, “So who gets your stuff if you die?”

  “Your mother.”

  “Who gets her stuff if she dies?”

  “Me.”

  “Who gets your and Mother’s stuff if you both die?”

  “You.”

  “Who gets me?”

  “Oh.”

  “My grandparents are dead, I don’t have any uncles or aunts or older brothers or sisters…and now I don’t even have Consuela.”