The Color of Law_ A Novel - Mark Gimenez [69]
Scott turned away, wishing this gut check could be answered by simply running into five frothing-at-the-mouth testosterone-charged linebackers.
Scott got into the Ferrari, but he couldn’t go back to the office. Downtown suddenly felt claustrophobic. So he drove onto the Dallas North Tollway and hit the accelerator hard. He felt the power of the machine beneath him as he took the engine through the gears. The 360 Modena topped out at 180 miles per hour, but Scott eased off the accelerator at eighty, the customary highway speed in Dallas. No one drove the speed limit in Texas, not even women putting on their makeup. Northbound traffic was light at this time of the morning, so he drove unimpeded in the left lane. He often drove aimlessly about the 4,000 miles of roads in Dallas when he needed to think. For some reason, he thought better in a Ferrari.
Without thinking, Scott suddenly veered across three lanes of traffic and exited at Mockingbird Lane, cut over to Hillcrest, and drove north. He turned left, stopped three doors down on the right, and stared at the new two-story monster house, arched entry, dormers, vaulted roof. But in its place he saw the small one-story cottage that had once occupied this lot, the home he and his mother had rented from the good doctor. Living room, kitchen, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, less than one thousand square feet including the porch where they often sat after dinner and waved at neighbors taking their evening walks. He remembered crawling into bed, lying back on the pillow, and waiting for his mother to come in, sit down, open the book, and read a chapter. And when she finished, she’d close the book and say, “Scotty, be like Atticus. Be a lawyer. Do good.”
It’s hard to do good when your clients are bad.
Lawyers never believe their clients because clients lie. They lie to the IRS and the SEC and the FBI. They lie about their taxes, they lie about their financial statements, and they lie about their lies. Most of the time, they don’t get caught. When they do get caught, usually for lying about their lies to the FBI—a felony called obstruction of justice—their lawyers stand outside the courthouse and proclaim their client’s innocence right up to the moment the client plea-bargains, pays a fine, and lives to lie again.
A lawyer always assumes his client is lying.
So Scott naturally assumed his heroin-addicted hooker-client was lying. But maybe he would believe a nice white sorority girl. He had gotten Hannah Steele’s unlisted phone number in Galveston from Bobby. Now he sat in the Ferrari and listened to the call ring through. A soft voice answered.
“Hello.”
“Hannah Steele?”
“Who’s calling?”
“Scott Fenney. I’m Shawanda Jones’s lawyer. My cocounsel, Bobby Herrin, spoke with you.”
“Yes, Mr. Fenney.”
“Hannah, I need to hear your story. I need to hear you tell me what Clark McCall did to you.”
A long sigh. “I’ve told Carl and Bobby, I don’t—”
“I know this isn’t easy, Hannah, but Senator McCall is pressuring me not to bring up Clark’s past at the trial, not to call you as a witness. For me to make a decision, I need to hear for myself what happened.”
“All right.”
Hannah Steele told Scott of her encounter with Clark McCall. She had met him on the SMU campus after a football game. He asked her out for the next night. He picked her up at her sorority house. They had dinner at a Mexican restaurant in the Uptown section of Dallas, the nightlife area between downtown and Highland Park. They had a few drinks and they went to the McCall mansion, where Clark attacked her, beat her, and raped her. Afterward, he acted as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. He gave her a ride back to the sorority house and even smiled at her when she got out of his car. She got in her car and drove straight to the police station and filed a complaint. She was taken to Parkland Hospital for a rape analysis and then returned to the sorority house. The next morning, a man came calling for her, saying he was Senator McCall’s lawyer. He handed her a document