“Yeah, Scott, a prick with a career. A death penalty gets me an office in D.C.”
“How do you sleep with yourself?”
Ray laughed. “Uh-oh, a born-again lawyer. Eleven years you spend every waking minute billing hours, making boatloads of money, living in a mansion, driving a Ferrari-how much did that cost your clients? Then you get fired and suddenly you see the light like a dying man: I wanna do good, Lord! Bullshit, Scott. You don’t give a flying fuck about her. She’s just a nigger, right? Two months ago, you were trying to bail on her faster than you can spit, now you’re gonna be her hero? Tell it to Oprah. Oh, and I don’t sleep by myself, Scott, I sleep with a gorgeous redhead from accounting. Who you sleeping with? Not your wife; she’s sleeping with her golf pro.”
Scott lunged for Ray, but Bobby jumped in between them.
“Hell, Scott,” Ray said with a little laugh, “don’t worry. The bitch probably won’t live through withdrawal.”
In one quick movement, Bobby released Scott and punched Ray in the mouth. Ray fell back against the wall.
Bobby said, “I told you, Ray.”
“I’m real worried about her, Mr. Fenney,” Ron the guard said. “I’m thinking maybe I made a mistake, taking her H.”
They were standing outside Shawanda’s cell. Inside, she was lying on her bed facing the far wall, curled up in a ball, her entire body shivering uncontrollably. She was groaning as if she were dying, her skin glistened with sweat, and her legs kicked involuntarily.
“That’s why they call it kicking the habit,” Bobby said. “Right now, she’d give everything she has in life for one fix.”
Bobby was rubbing his right fist. “Hitting someone hurts.”
“I’m proud of you, Bobby.” Scott pointed the Jetta toward Highland Park and said, “You know what pisses me off the most?”
“The Ferrari?”
“No, about Burns.”
“What?”
“The prick’s right. About me.”
Bobby worked his hand and said, “What did Buford want?”
“He wanted to take me off the case. Said he was going to appoint you.”
“You still want out?”
“No. I told Buford that, but he told me to think about it, come back at noon, tell him if I’m ready to be her lawyer.”
They were silent until they exited downtown. Then Bobby said softly: “I can’t try this case, Scotty. I’m not good enough. She needs you.”
An hour later, Scott left the house by the back door and ran west on Beverly Drive. It was exactly eleven A.M.; he had sixty minutes to make the biggest decision of his life.
Scott turned south on Lakeside Drive and ran past the stately old mansions that had stood for almost as long as Highland Park had existed. The homes sat higher than the street and looked down on a little park and Turtle Creek, where Scott often took Boo to skip rocks across the water.
Scott headed west on Armstrong Parkway a short distance, then turned north on Preston Road and ran up the sidewalk, the road to his left and to his right the massive wall that shielded the grand estates of Trammell Crow and Jerry Jones and Mack McCall and-
Tom Dibrell.
Scott had damn near run right into the long silver Mercedes as Tom exited his estate and stopped to check for traffic, blocking the sidewalk. They stared at each other across a distance of just a few feet, Tom wearing a suit and tie but cool in the air-conditioned luxury of a German sedan, Scott wearing only shorts and running shoes and sweating profusely in the hundred-degree heat. For eleven years they had talked daily; they had traveled the country, negotiating deals, making deals, and closing deals; they had celebrated victories and lamented defeats; they had eaten together and gotten drunk together; but they had never been friends. Successful lawyers, Scott now knew, have rich clients, not loyal friends.
Now, seeing this man who had given him his identity and had taken it away, Scott saw a sad man. This man had had four wives, but none of them had made him happy. He had six children by three of those wives, children who chose not to live in this fabulous estate with their father, because their father loved his skyscraper more than he loved them. He was a man who had lawyers, but not friends. Who had money and everything that money could buy, but little happiness. Three weeks ago, after Tom had fired him, if they had crossed paths like this, Scott Fenney might have shot him the finger.
Today Scott only nodded and smiled at the sad man in his Mercedes-Benz.
Tom opened his mouth as if to say something, then abruptly broke eye contact and hit the accelerator hard, sending the silver sedan roaring out onto Preston Road. Scott watched Tom drive away in a cloud of exhaust fumes, then started running again. He ran north past the Village and across Mockingbird Lane. A mile later, he turned east on Lovers Lane. He knew now where this run would end.
His journey took him along the boundary of the Highland Park Country Club, its tall brick wall discouraging gawkers. But there was one break in the wall where wrought iron spanned a few feet, and Scott stopped and looked in. A foursome of old white men was putting out on the seventh green, getting a round of golf in before the summer sun sapped their strength.
Growing up in Highland Park, Scott had often looked in through this opening at the old white men playing golf; it was like window-shopping with his mother at Highland Park Village, where she couldn’t afford to shop. He’d always said that one day he would be rich enough to own a mansion in Highland Park, play golf at the country club, and buy his mother anything her heart desired at the Village. She had died before he could buy her anything at the Village, but four years ago, when Scott Fenney was admitted to the membership of the country club, he thought how proud his mother would have been of her son. For the last four years, he had played golf with pride inside these walls and looked out at others looking in.
Today the view was different.
From inside the walls, these old white men had seemed so special because they were so rich. But from outside, they just seemed old. And Scott realized that just as he was looking in at them, they were looking out at him. And in their eyes he saw their envy: they would gladly give every dollar they had to be young again, to have a head full of hair and sharp eyes and a clear mind with a memory that did not play tricks on them several times a day; to again live in a strong muscular body instead of the broken-down body they were left with; to run down the street instead of barely making it back to the golf cart; to again have a prostate gland instead of having to wear a diaper because the surgery had left them permanently impotent and incontinent; to again feel the pleasure of sex. They were looking out at a young man with his life in front of him; he was looking in at old men with nothing in front of them except the end of their lives.
The old men were tended to by their caddies, middle-aged black men wearing white canvas overalls, black men who caught the bus each morning before dawn in South Dallas and rode north to Highland Park to work at a club where they could never be a member because they had been born black. They were good men, like Louis, but they weren’t good enough for the club, these black men who fixed old white men’s divots, found their lost balls, and carried their clubs, all the while performing like actors in Gone With the Wind — “Yassuh, Mistuh Smith, that there swing sure ’nough make you look like Arnold Palmer hisself”-because making these old white men feel like Southern plantation owners meant a bigger tip. Scott had always been uncomfortable with the whole black caddie thing, but he had always employed a caddie for every round because it was club policy.
After each round, he would retire to the men’s grill for drinks and cards with these old white men, and he had felt so proud to be accepted by them, to be seen in their company, to share their special space and breathe their rarefied air. He would hang on their every word-usually jokes and commentary about “niggers” and “wetbacks” and “kikes” made without regard to the presence of the black waiters hovering about. But Scott’s eyes would always meet those of his waiter, and he would feel the heat rise within him. Yet Scott Fenney, who had played football with black guys, showered with black guys, roomed with black guys, and partied with black guys, had never stood up and told those old white men that he would no longer be available for a game of golf with a bunch of racist anti-Semitic sons of bitches in shorts. No, A. Scott Fenney, Esq., had smiled politely at their jokes and nodded approvingly at
