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. Clyde’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.
