The Color of Law_ A Novel - Mark Gimenez [16]
After a moment, Dan removed his hand. He was smiling.
“Get her to plead out.”
“She says she’s innocent, wants a trial.”
“So? Look, Scotty, go see her, explain the real likelihood the case will be lost and that she’ll be sentenced to death or best case, spend the rest of her life in prison. That by pleading out she’ll be released by the time she’s fifty and she can still have a life…You know, turn on that famous charm, pretend you care.”
“And if she doesn’t go for it?”
“She goddamn well better go for it! I’m not going to have this firm’s revenues damaged by some two-bit hooker!”
Dan’s face was now a bright red, and he was pointing a finger at Scott, a sure sign it was time to leave. Scott stood and eased toward the door.
“You tell her she’s pleading out whether she likes it or not!”
Scotty nodded and slid out. He was ten paces down the hall when he heard Dan’s voice again: “Cop a plea, Scotty!”
FIVE
SCOTT STEERED the red Ferrari out of the parking garage, gave Osvaldo, the attendant, his customary salute, and turned north. While most downtown workers commuted to their homes in the distant suburbs via the Dallas North Tollway or the North Central Expressway, hopelessly stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic for hours and suppressing the road rage that left a number of drivers dead each year on Dallas highways, Scott Fenney drove leisurely up Cedar Springs Road and Turtle Creek Boulevard and Lakeside Drive and then past Robert E. Lee Park, homeward bound over the same route important men of Dallas had traveled for a hundred years. Ten minutes later, he crossed a two-lane swath of asphalt and, as if his fairy godmother had waved her magic wand, his world abruptly changed: land values quintupled, home values quadrupled, per capita income tripled, students’ achievement test scores doubled, and the population turned all white.
He had entered the Town of Highland Park.
Developed in 1906 on thirteen hundred acres of high land above downtown Dallas, Highland Park today is a sanctuary of elegant homes, landscaped lawns, and broad avenues canopied by towering oak trees. On its wide sidewalks European nannies and Mexican maids can be seen pushing the heirs of the great Texas fortunes in strollers while their fathers—billionaires and millionaires and the lawyers who tend to them—work in the downtown skyscrapers and their mothers play tennis at the country club and shop at Anne Fontaine, Luca Luca, and Bottega Veneta in the Highland Park Village shopping center, its Spanish Mediterranean architecture and quaint stucco buildings with terra-cotta roofs and decorative wrought iron harking back to a distant time and place when great wealth was reserved for people of a certain class, not just anyone who could dunk a basketball. Visitors from California say the town reminds them of Beverly Hills, and with good reason: the same architect who designed Beverly Hills designed Highland Park. Only difference is, the founders of Beverly Hills did not file deed restrictions that legally limited home ownership in their new town to white people only; the founders of Highland Park did.
Almost a hundred years later, the Town of Highland Park is a two-square-mile island entirely surrounded by the 384-square-mile City of Dallas. It’s an island of white in an ocean of color: Dallas, a city of 1.2 million residents, is now only 39 percent white; while Highland Park, a town of 8,850 residents, remains 98 percent white, with not a single home owned by a black person. It’s an island of wealth—on any given day over a hundred homes in Highland Park will be listed for sale at prices exceeding $1 million. It’s an island immune from the crime and social ills that afflict Dallas—Highland Park kids call their hometown “the Bubble,” happy to be insulated from the outside world that beckons at the town boundary—albeit an island without a river or stream or even a moat to keep the outside world out, only the highest home prices in Texas, a well-armed police force, and a long-standing reputation