Mark Gimenez - The Color of Law

Clark McCall was thirty years old and the sole heir to his father’s $800 million fortune. He was also a major-league screwup. Or so his father often said, usually right before threatening to cut Clark out of his will. Usually because of nights like this-drinking, drugs, and girls.

It was Saturday night and Clark, drunk on whiskey and wired on cocaine, was trolling for a hooker in his father’s Mercedes-Benz. He had driven south on Harry Hines almost to downtown without luck. There were plenty of working girls; he just hadn’t found the right one. He was now stopped at a light and staring up at the Dallas skyline rising above him: shadowy structures outlined in white and blue and green lights visible for forty miles in the night sky. Looking up like that made him feel a little woozy, so he fumbled for the power switch and lowered his window. He leaned his head out and caught the summer breeze, warm on his face. He inhaled the night air, the sweet scent of sex for sale.

He closed his eyes and might have fallen asleep right there, except a cowboy in the pickup behind him hit his horn like a bugler sounding charge. Which startled Clark. His eyes snapped open-the light had changed. He punched the accelerator and yanked the wheel hard to make a U-turn, but he gave it too much gas and now he couldn’t find the fucking brake pedal so he swung across three lanes and one tire of the Mercedes climbed up onto the curb and he almost clipped a street sign. What the hell was it doing there? The vehicle bounced hard coming back down.

No sooner had Clark gotten the big German sedan traveling mostly in one lane when he spotted her-a nice girl from the black neighborhoods south of downtown out for a slow stroll on a warm night with her girlfriend. She was just the kind he liked-a slim black babe in a blonde wig, a hot pink miniskirt, matching high heels, and a white tube top, swinging her little pink purse back and forth in perfect tempo with the exaggerated side-to-side movement of her round ass. Her body was fit, her legs lean, her entire essence so sensual and seductive that he knew she was the one-a black hooker from South Dallas specializing in white men from North Dallas.

She would be his date this Saturday night.

Not that Clark couldn’t get a date with one of the many gorgeous single white girls seeking husbands in Dallas. He was handsome and his father was rich. In Dallas, rich was required; handsome was optional. Being both, Clark McCall had recently been named one of the city’s most eligible bachelors. But he preferred prostitutes for female companionship. Hookers did what they were told and did not file police complaints afterward, and he knew up front how much the relationship would cost his father.

Clark steered the Mercedes over to the curb and slowed alongside the two South Dallas debutantes. He lowered the passenger window and yelled, “Blondie!”

They stopped, so he stopped. The black girl in the blonde wig sauntered over to the car with the kind of sassy attitude he liked in a hooker. She leaned down and stuck half her body through the window. Her skin was smooth and light, more tan than black, and her face was angular with sharp features, more white than black. Her lips and fingernails were painted a shiny red; her pushed-up breasts were round and full and looked real; and her scent was more intoxicating than anything he had ingested that night. She was beautiful, she was sexy, and he wanted her.

“How much?”

“What you want?”

“All you got, honey.”

“Two hundred.”

“A thousand. All night.”

She smiled. “Show me the money.”

Clark pulled out a wad of hundreds and waved it at her like candy to a kid. She got in and slid down the slick leather seat and her pink leather skirt crawled up so high he could see her black panties tight in her crotch, and he felt the heat come over him. He hit the accelerator and turned the sedan toward home.

But his thoughts turned to his father, as they often did in times like this. Clark McCall was a political liability to his father and always had been-the drinking, the drugs, the girls. Oh, if the senior senator from Texas could see his only son now, drunk and high, buying a black hooker with his money and driving her in his Mercedes to his mansion in Highland Park! Of course, his father’s first thought would be political, not paternal: What damage would be done to his campaign if the press got wind of his son’s latest indiscretion?

Clark laughed loudly and the hooker looked at him like he was crazy. At least he came home to Dallas to be indiscreet. Still, if his father found out that he had flown back home again, there would be more angry threats of disinheritance; but Clark would be back in Washington before the honorable senator knew he was gone. He laughed again, but he felt the rage rising inside him, as it always did when he thought of his father, a man who wanted the White House more than he had ever wanted a son.

United States Senator Mack McCall looked over at his second wife and thought what a handsome first couple they would make.

They were sitting in the leather wing chairs, enjoying a quiet Sunday afternoon in their Georgetown town house. Across from them on the sofa sat the two men who would get them into the White House. Their political consultant and pollster were poring over the latest poll results and focus group studies and staking out McCall’s positions on the political issues of the day-positions carefully crafted to appease every identifiable voting bloc in America, whether based on race, religion, ethnicity, gender, geography, age, socioeconomic standing, or sexual orientation-anyone who could cast a vote for Senator Mack McCall. The senior senator from Texas held a commanding lead in the preprimary polls.

Mack McCall’s lifelong ambition was finally within his grasp. He glanced down at his hands, still strong and calloused from years of working the rigs. He still had the hands of a roughneck and the determination of a wildcatter. And he was determined, as always, that nothing and no one would stand in his way. He would officially announce his candidacy on Monday.

Then he would spend $100 million or $200 million or whatever it took of his own money to win the White House. He had learned long ago that with enough money a man can buy anything and anyone he wants, be it an election or a younger woman. Mack McCall had enough money to buy both. He turned his eyes to his wife again and admired her beauty as if for the first time. He was filled with a sense of proprietorship, the same as years ago when he had gone out into the oil fields and admired his wells, knowing that he owned what other men coveted.

McCall was sixty; Jean was forty. He had been a senator for two decades now, and she had been his aide since she graduated from law school fifteen years ago. She was a savvy, articulate, and photogenic asset to his political career. They had been married ten years now, long enough for the messy divorce not to be a negative in his polls.

She had no children and wanted none. He had a son, Clark, from his first marriage-the consummate ne’er-do-well offspring of wealth, a thirty-year-old adolescent. Six months ago, thinking a steady job might bring maturity to the boy’s life, and to get him out of Dallas, McCall had pulled some strings and got Clark appointed chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. But the boy kept sneaking back home to do God knows what with God knows whom in their Dallas mansion. His son was not a political asset.

“Senator?”

Bradford, the butler, appeared in the arched entry to the living room, holding a portable phone and wearing a dazed expression.

“It’s Clark, sir.”

McCall waved him off. “Tell him I’m busy.”