The Color of Law (13 page)

But she would not sell her beauty by the hour or by the night or even by the job. Rebecca Garrett would sell her beauty for community property, for half of everything her husband would acquire over the course of their marriage. As every Texas girl knows by the time she graduates high school, in Texas wives don’t have to beg for alimony; in Texas wives are entitled to half of everything—by law.

So she needed a husband. As she saw it, her beauty afforded her three matrimonial options: an older man who had already made his fortune (but such a man always comes with baggage, usually a couple of ex-wives and twice as many kids on the dole); the son of such an older rich man (but an inherited fortune is not community property); or a man with the ambition to make his own fortune, a fortune made during marriage, a fortune of community property. Scott Fenney, a Highland Park and SMU football legend, was just that kind of man. There is no better place in the world to be a football legend than Dallas, Texas. It’s as close to an ironclad guarantee of success as life offers.

So Rebecca Garrett bet her beauty on Scott Fenney.

She loved him back then, but she would not have married him if he had wanted to coach high school football and live in a small house in the suburbs. She could not separate her love from his ambition. She loved him because he wanted what she wanted, because his desire to have all this equaled her own. They were two of a kind. So they married and settled in a small $500,000 home in Highland Park; Scott became Tom Dibrell’s lawyer and she became the most beautiful woman in Highland Park.

The early years of the Scott Fenney ride were exactly what she had expected: they bought, they acquired, they went out, they moved up. Scott fought for the family fortune at Ford Stevens; she joined the society clubs and paid her social dues. Success followed success, his and hers. They soon made the Highland Park A-list, the up-and-coming couple, young and beautiful, smart and successful, the SMU legend and Miss SMU. They were the envy of all: men wanted her and women wanted him. But they expended their sexual energies only with each other—success excited her and she excited him. Her husband wanted her with a passion that always burned hot; he needed her more than life itself, a need that never waned or wandered. Success and sex: Rebecca Fenney’s life was perfect and getting better by the day.

Until the day she became pregnant.

Which came as a complete shock—motherhood had never been part of her plans—and a recurring one as she watched helplessly as her belly expanded and her body bloated up until she looked like a beached whale. She had always loved to look at herself when she passed a mirror; now she averted her eyes. Rebecca Fenney was not a squat soccer mom in a minivan! She was a sleek white woman in a black Mercedes coupe! Which she drove over to Harry Hines on more than one occasion trying to work up the courage to enter one of the clinics and have an abortion. Of course, she would have blamed the loss of the child on a miscarriage; there are no abortions in politically conservative Highland Park.

But Scott wanted the child.

He alerted all the world that a Fenney child was on the way. Men looked ahead fifteen years to when Scotty Junior would make his football debut at Highland Park High; women showered Rebecca with baby gifts to ease her descent into motherhood. With such attention focused on her pregnancy, a “miscarriage” would have been viewed as a personal failure on the part of Rebecca Fenney, and failure is not socially acceptable in Highland Park. So she resigned herself to the inevitable and became the perfect mother-to-be, eating only organic, no caffeine, no alcohol, exercising daily in the pool, acting oh so happy to be oh so fat.

But Scotty Junior was a girl named Boo. A collective sigh of disappointment went up in Highland Park, from everyone except Scott. He didn’t care. When he gazed on his new daughter in the hospital nursery, it was love at first sight. And Rebecca saw that her place in his heart had been stolen.

Sex was never the same.

Rebecca Fenney needed a man who needed her more than life itself; Scott Fenney was no longer that man. But she also needed a man who could give her the life she needed; that man was still Scott Fenney. He had given her this Highland Park mansion, the home she had dreamed about since she was a little girl, the home that told the world Rebecca Fenney belonged in Highland Park. A woman living in a $500,000 house can join the society clubs; a woman living in a $3.5 million mansion can chair the society balls. This home made Rebecca Fenney’s life. Her life was perfect and could get no better.

It could only get worse.

Which had become a constant worry for her over the last few weeks: Was her life about to take a turn for the worse? Was the ride slowing down…or coming to an end? She had thought and hoped and prayed that the Scott Fenney ride would last a lifetime. But you never know with men. Men can always find a way to fuck up a good thing.

Would Scott Fenney?

Other Highland Park men certainly had, leaving their wives—older women Rebecca knew—for younger women. But those discarded wives were in their fifties and sixties, the family fortunes made and their community halves secure. Rebecca was thirty-three, and the family fortune was still in the making, still owed to the bank that held the mortgage on their home and her life. If Scott left her now, she would have nothing, just as her mother had nothing when her father left them. The Scott Fenney ride had to last until the mortgage was paid off.

She had bet her beauty on Scott Fenney. What if she lost that bet?

When she first became Mrs. A. Scott Fenney and went to the homes of the older lawyers’ wives, she would admire their possessions, and she wanted what they had, all the things money could buy. Only recently had she realized that while she was coveting what they possessed, they were coveting what she possessed: youth and beauty—what they needed to compete for their lawyers. But their money could not buy youth and beauty, try though they did with liposuction, tummy tucks, breast implants, and face-lifts; the good doctor could help, but he could not make a fifty-year-old woman look twenty-five again. So they lost their lawyers to younger women.

And now Rebecca, thirty-three, old by Highland Park standards, understood their fear as she observed the blonde by the pool—
what was she, twenty-two, twenty-three?
—giving her husband a come-hither look, competing for her lawyer, more than willing to use her beauty to claim what Rebecca possessed. There was always a younger, prettier, skinnier woman ready to take your place in the mansion. Rebecca Fenney was still remarkably beautiful, still the most beautiful woman in Highland Park, still able to compete with a twenty-two-year-old for her lawyer. But the day would come for her, she knew; and with each passing day, Rebecca Fenney was a day older and a day less beautiful.

If she lost Scott to the girl by the pool—and every Fourth of July there would be a girl by the pool—before the family fortune was made and her community half secure, she would have only one option for a new husband: a man fifty, fifty-five, maybe sixty years old. The thought of a sixty-year-old man climbing on top of her made her shudder. With enough money, a man could always drop down two decades, even three, for a new wife. But a woman? She would have no chance at a man her own age. Men in their thirties or forties were looking at twenty-somethings like the blonde.

Yes, in every woman’s life, there’s always another woman. But it was different for Rebecca Fenney: the other woman in her life, the woman competing for her lawyer, the woman who was threatening to take everything she had in life—her home, her position, her possessions—was not a twenty-two-year-old blonde with big tits and a tight ass, but a black prostitute accused of murdering a senator’s son.

“I’m gonna be a hooker when I grow up.”

Consuela let out a shriek from the kitchen, Scott almost choked on a mouthful of barbecued brisket left over from the party, and Rebecca glared at him from across the dining table. He turned to Boo, who had just announced her career plan to her family at the dinner table.

“Excuse me?”

“Yeah,” she said, chewing on a barbecued rib, “men pay Pajamae’s mother two hundred dollars an hour just to be with her, and if the trick wants her all night, then it’s a thousand.”

Scott looked at Pajamae, who was nodding matter-of-factly.

“Well, Scott,” Rebecca said, “your little social experiment is already making our daughter a more worldly person.”

“Rebecca, she doesn’t understand what she’s saying.” To Boo: “And what does Pajamae’s mom do with her tricks?”

Boo shoveled potato salad into her mouth and said, “Well, mostly they watch TV and eat popcorn, but sometimes the trick wants to fornicate.”

Rebecca dropped her silverware. “Oh, this is just great!”

Calmly: “And what about that?”

Boo said, “Well, that’s okay as long as he wears his rubbers, although if it’s not raining, why the heck would he need rubbers?”

She turned to Pajamae for an answer, but Pajamae only shrugged, shook her head, and bit into a rib.

“Unh-huh. So that’s what your mother told you, Pajamae?”

Pajamae was busy with her food, but she said, “Yeah, that’s what she said. And she said if a president can make ten million dollars for writing a book about getting blow jobs in the White House, she ought to be able to make a hundred dollars for giving one on Harry Hines.” She now looked up from her plate. “Mama talks a lot when she’s sick and takes her medicine…until she falls asleep.”

Boo turned to Pajamae: “What’s a blow job?”

Shawanda sucked the bone dry, then licked her lips. She turned her big brown eyes up to Bobby, smiled, and said, “This here some good cooking.”

Bobby handed her another barbecued rib from Scotty’s party. He had walked out with a dozen ribs, two pints of coleslaw, one pint of baked beans, and two cold beers. He knew he couldn’t get the beers into the federal detention center, so he drank them on the way over. Of course, before Shawanda would eat, he had to tell her all about the pool party and Pajamae, how pretty she looked.

She said, “Mr. Herrin, over last month you bring me food what, five, six time?”

“Seven, but who’s counting. And don’t tell Scotty, okay?”

“Why you come? You sweet on Shawanda?”

Bobby shrugged. “You’re my client…sort of.”

She looked at him like a psychic trying to read his future in his face, then nodded knowingly and said, “You ain’t got no one to eat with, do you?”

Bobby stared down at his paper plate. “No.”

“Well, you awful nice, bring good food for me…’cept that pizza with them little fishes—”

“Anchovies.”

“Yeah, them.” She swallowed some coleslaw, then said, “Mr. Herrin, I’m real sorry.”

“For what?”

“For thinking you ain’t nothin’ but a dud…lawyer.”

Bobby laughed. “That’s okay. I feel that way about myself most of the time.”

“You just poor ’cause you care. You all soft inside for people like me, workin’ for nothin’, that’s why you ain’t a rich lawyer. Can’t make no money givin’ everyone freebies—where I be, I do that? Nope, Mr. Herrin, that just bad business. Mr. Fenney, he rich ’cause he know to only work for rich people.”

“He used to care.”

“So you ain’t mad, me telling the judge I want Mr. Fenney be my lawyer?”

“No. You need him, Shawanda. He’s a lot better lawyer than me.”

“Maybe you make him care again…maybe about me.”

They looked at each other, and Bobby saw the hope in her eyes.

“Maybe.”

The clubhouse at the Highland Park Country Club wasn’t the most expensive building in Dallas or even in Highland Park for that matter, but it was the hardest to get into. To say it was an exclusive club is like saying Michael Jordan was a pretty good basketball player. You don’t buy your way into this club; you’re born into it, you marry into it, or you kiss so many important asses in town to get in that the American Medical Association could board certify you as a proctologist. Scott Fenney had taken the latter route to membership, a privilege available only because he was a local football legend and Tom Dibrell’s lawyer.

Scott stopped the Range Rover under the porte cochere. Before he had cut the engine, the valet had their doors open. Scott gave the boy a twenty, and then walked his family into the club. Boo and Pajamae skipped ahead, giggling like the little girls they were. Scott smiled at the sight. Rebecca did not.

Even when not in the best of moods, as now, Rebecca Fenney was still the most beautiful woman in Highland Park. And Scott felt proud to squire his spouse into the clubhouse at the country club, the tall handsome ex-SMU-football-star-turned-successful-lawyer escorting the gorgeous ex–SMU cheerleader wearing a pale green sundress that showed off her fabulous figure, and to see each man discretely glance at her, wishing that she and not their wrinkled dinosaur wife was going home with them tonight. Rebecca was a big part of Scott Fenney’s perfect life, albeit a severely pissed-off part tonight.

“This is a big fucking mistake,” she said through her teeth.

“Oh, you worry too much. We’re here for the fireworks. No one’s going to pay attention to a little black girl.”

“Yeah, right. The women here notice if your breasts are half an inch bigger or your butt’s half an inch smaller. How am I going to explain her to them? She’s sure as hell not a member’s kid!”

The country club opened its doors to the members’ children twice a year, for the annual Christmas Party featuring Santa Claus and for the fireworks on the Fourth of July. Otherwise, children were banned from the premises. Not that kids would find the place inviting. The average age of the members was seventy-four; Scott and Rebecca were two of the young members, “young” meaning under sixty. The decor was contemporary—for 1952; the members saw no reason to update the club, the only concession to the last fifty years being a big-screen TV in the men’s grill. There was simply no sense in trying to convince a seventy-four-year-old member that change could be good; to a man that age, change could only be bad. No change could make him young again.