Smith - Dallas Noir

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

Published by Akashic Books
2013 by Akashic Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-190-5
eISBN: 9781617752025
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013938543

All Rights Reserved.

Akashic Books
PO Box 1456
New York, NY 10009
info@akashicbooks.com
www.akashicbooks.com

INTRODUCTION

A PERMANENT BLACK SCAR

My favorite line in my favorite song about Dallas goes like this: Dallas is a rich man with a death wish in his eyes / A steel and concrete soul in a warm-hearted love disguise...

The narrator of Jimmie Dale Gilmores perfect tune Dallas is coming to town as a broke dreamer with the bright lights of the big city on his mind. Hes just seen the Dallas cityscape through the window of his seat on a DC-9 at night. Is he just beginning his quest? Or is he on his way home, flying out of Love Field, reminiscing after seeing the woman who stepped on him when he was down?

Dallas itself is like a marvelous piece of fiction. It is a city created out of nothing. Nobody even seems to be certain why its called Dallas. Founded because it sat on a navigable spot in the Trinity River, the city was originally envisioned as a port from which ships could travel to and from the larger gulf port at Galveston. However, only a few boats ever successfully made the journey, and none without encountering major trouble along the way. The river is too shallow. It barely exists anymore, except when one of our terrifying Texas thunderstorms turns it into a dangerous flood. Despite this apparently doomed beginning, Dallas seemed to will itself into existence and flourish against all odds. Two major railroad lines eventually crossed paths here, the town became a major cotton exchange, and it has been pulsing with life and growing ever since.

In a country with so many interesting cities, Dallas is often overlookedexcept on November 22 every year. The heartbreaking anniversary keeps coming back around in a nightmare loop, for all of us. On that day in 1963, Dallas became American noir. A permanent black scar on its history that will never be erased, no matter how many happy business stories and hit television shows arise from here.

In a stark ongoing counterweight to the JFK tragedy are those two iterations of the TV show. Dallas is not a TV show. Its a real city with a booming downtown, a flourishing arts district, generous philanthropists, and ever-sprawling suburbs that boast some of the most beautiful neighborhoods, best schools, and lowest cost of living in the US. My parents moved to Dallas when I was in elementary school. We were welcomed into a diverse neighborhood with hills and trees in the 1970s that included Jews and Gentiles living next to each other, academics sharing ideas with entrepreneurs over backyard beers, and artists howling at the moon alongside frog-giggin cowboys and avid deer hunters. All of my early memories were made here. I love this town. And for the past forty years, my capacity to be surprised by it has not diminished one bit. I hope the stories in this collection will surprise you too.

In the February 2013 issue of Texas Monthly magazine, Pulitzer Prize winner Larry McMurtry wrote: Dallas is a second-rate city that wishes it were first-rate. Perhaps Dallas has a certain image that makes it easy to underestimate, or to dismiss with blanket assumptions and odd assertions such as McMurtrys. Like a beautiful woman with poison under her fingernails, this is a town of dangerous paradoxes. Art and commerce in constant battle. Immense wealth and crushing poverty. An obsession with private schools and competitive youth sports. Country club kids with good drugs and guns in the glove boxes of their cars. Professional athletes, interior decorators, gangbangers, and narco-traffickers jammed into a nightclub, dancing the night away during an ice storm. Texans with more money than taste, gilding the wide streets with latter-day chteaus. The eighty-thousand-dollar millionaires driving rented Aston Martins and Range Rovers up to the valet lines.

Business is combat in Dallas. And everybodyeven the old-money richis leveraged in mountains and mountains of debt because they are always rolling the dice on another deal. In this atmosphere, nasty surprises lurk around every turn. There are winners and losers. And in good noir stories, they are often one and the same.

Forget the typical bad-news headline stories every city has about murders, rapes, and other nasty violent crimes (the kind used on the screen crawl and daily front page to sell newscasts and newspapers). Dallas has those too. But the other true crime of the century may have been the savings-and-loan crisis that bubbled up and then ran unchecked for nearly a decade in Texas, with the Wild West of Dallas as the epicenter in the 1980s. Before Enron and Bernie Madoff and even the subprime meltdown, there was Danny Faulkner, who was caught perpetrating a real estate fraud that bankrupted five savings and loans and cost the US government (meaning you and me) one billion dollars. Faulkner and a group of buddies turned Dallas into their own personal cash machine. Through a scheme of insanely friendly loans from their thrift-banker pals, they figured out how to buy large chunks of land for pennies along Interstate 30 in East Dallas County. Then they flipped their new properties like Bisquick pancakes, often many times over in the same day, jacking up the land value on paper by several hundred percent in a few blinks of an eye. They promised beautiful condos and bountiful returns.

Their astounding fraud happened in plain sight, with dozens if not hundreds of people involved in the deals. Everybody had their hand in someone elses pocket, like a dirty daisy chain. Everybody got paid. Until the last guy in the chain ended up holding property that was worthless. Then there were no buyers for the cheap condos. When the final property owners couldnt pay their debts, the lenders went under in a huge collapse.

At the height of Faulkners success in the mid-1980s, he was worth millions. An illiterate house painter from Mississippi, he drove around Dallas in a fleet of Rolls-Royces and flew in his own helicopter. The FBI started an investigation. It wasnt pretty. More than a hundred people were eventually convicted in the scheme. Those collapsing Texas S&Ls were the early-falling bones in a domino effect that crippled the nationwide independent banking system and eventually resulted in a lovely US government bailout to the tune of an estimated $500 billion.

Dallas very own Danny Faulkner was the poster boy for the entire debacle. For decades afterward, the interstate highway along which he and his pals did their finest land development deals was lined with acres upon acres of partially constructed, unsold condos with no roofs and vacant concrete foundation slabs. A man named Faulkner, from Mississippi, creatively developing a small parcel of land... but its not fiction. Its Dallas history.

This kind of real-life brave citizenry and lendy-spendy atmosphere make terrific fodder for noir fiction. Thats what Ive tried to gather together in this collection. To paraphrase Frank Underwood, current leading man of great hamartia on the original Netflix show