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 administration; 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.
