No Way To Treat a First Lady Read online

  Beth had promised herself that she was not going to watch the evening shows. But with her feelings toward Boyce now rekindled and glowing like fanned embers, she found herself turning on Hard Gavel, not for the commentating and second-guessing, but to see what her competition was wearing that night. She had developed a little paranoid theory that the closer she and Boyce got, the tighter Perri’s sweaters got.

  It was in the midst of checking out Perri’s attire that Beth couldn’t help but hear Alan Crudman going on about the free pass Boyce was giving Babette Van Anka.

  Beth reproached herself for her doubts. Had a lifetime in politics made her this cynical? Or was it just a lifetime with Ken MacMann?

  The first infidelity had been with one of her bridesmaids. At least he hadn’t dragged her upstairs during the reception, like Sonny Corleone, and thrown her up against the wainscoting. But finding out that your husband has been having it off with one of your bridesmaids, into the bargain, an old friend from boarding school, would put a dent in any new wife’s confidence. She even considered leaving Ken. And she was overwhelmed with guilt over how she’d treated Boyce. From what she heard, Boyce had taken it hard. Friends said he was going through some kind of personality change, from nice guy to quiet angry guy. One said, “I hope he doesn’t end up one of those people who send mail bombs.”

  Ken apologized for having an affair with one of her oldest friends. He blamed it on something called post-traumatic stress disorder, the name they were starting to give to Vietnam vets who were acting wiggy. He promised not to do it again. And he was as good as his word, for almost two months. Meanwhile, he appeared to have lost interest in his new wife physically, which is demoralizing six months into a lifetime partnership. And Beth liked sex. She liked sex a lot. She started to fantasize about Boyce. It was all so conflicting.

  Meanwhile, Ken had made it clear to her that he had a plan, and not just to screw all of her old school friends. He was going to be president, and he was going to do it quickly, whatever it took, so that he could enjoy the experience while he was still young. She wouldn’t be seeing much of him.

  Friends remarked how changed she was. Beth didn’t laugh much anymore.

  It was now after 10:30. She knew Boyce went to sleep early. She waited until 10:40. Couldn’t help herself.

  The voice that answered was already livid at being woken up.

  “What is it, Beth?”

  “I was just listening to”—God, how was this going to sound?—“I was just thinking. I think we need to rethink the Babette Van Anka thing.”

  “Do you realize,” Boyce growled, “how many federal agents are listening in on this conversation? Why don’t you just call up the Justice Department and tell them how you think I should defend you?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So you keep saying.”

  “Well, it’s true. Most men like it when you apologize to them.”

  “Apologize in the morning, when the G-men aren’t listening in. Good night. Good night, boys. Sleep tight, you incompetent bastards.”

  He hung up.

  Beth had to get up out of bed and pace and smoke. She’d started again, a fact that had somehow found its way into the press. To hell with it. Pacing at night without smoking was like a drum majorette parading without a baton.

  Was he trying to throw the case? She was attractive, this Perri Pettengill. Why not go after Babette Van Anka? What did Ken see in her? Never mind. And the husband. Nine miles of bad road. He gave millions to Ken’s campaigns—some of it probably in bags—and those Far East associates of his, real charmers. Turned out one of them, for whom Max had wheedled an invitation to a state dinner at the White House, was connected to the Burmese general who protected the poppy business. What interesting friends. To counter the unfavorable publicity, Ken had decided to make campaign finance reform a central theme of his reelection campaign. As the wise man said, You can fool some of the people some of the time, and those are the ones you need to concentrate on.

  “Why not go after Babette Van Anka?” Boyce asked rhetorically over breakfast. He was the temperature of his coffee. Hotter, probably. “You were watching her show again.”

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Well, watch something else. Something wholesome. Like wrestling. Or one of those reality shows where they chain people together for a week to see if they eat each other.”

  “They should chain lawyers together.”

  “That I might watch. Everyone hates lawyers—until you need one.”

  “Then you really hate them.”

  Boyce grinned. “Two points.”

  “Look, I’m not trying to interfere.”

  “Yes, you are. No wonder you were an unpopular First Lady.”

  “I wasn’t unpopular. I was a transitional First Lady. I was plowing the ground for the ones who’ll follow.”

  “I’d be careful with the ground metaphors. Your husband’s fertilizing the lawn at Arlington.”

  “Charming. Really charming.” Beth sipped her coffee. “I didn’t sleep.”

  “I didn’t either. My client kept calling me.”

  “You won’t even discuss it with me?”

  “All right.” Boyce dabbed his mouth with the napkin. “This once I’ll discuss it with you. If I go after Babette Van Anka, which I very easily could, it would be shooting fish in a barrel. I could make her look like the whore of Babylon in sixty seconds. And what would that accomplish? One thing. It would give you a motive for killing War God. The jury would reasonably conclude, Sure, she was pissed at him for humping the girlfriend right down the hall. But killing is killing. She coulda waited till morning and divorced him. Only a scheming little putz like Alan Crudman would do something so obvious as go after Babette Van Anka. No. I take that back. He’s not dumb. He’s a putz, but he’s a smart little shit. He knows perfectly well that’s not the key here. He’s just saying it on Perri’s show because the majority of the people who watch know fuck-all about trial strategies, and he can get away with saying things like that and look smart on my time. You know something else? For all I know, he may be saying that precisely to make you think I’m blowing this case. Did that enter your mind? So any more questions?”

  “No further questions.”

  “All right. I’m glad we had this talk. Let’s go kick some ass.”

  Chapter 16

  Sophie Williams, the upstairs maid who had pointed out to Beth that her husband was unlikely to be wanting breakfast that morning or indeed any future mornings, had been the subject of furious pretrial motions.

  Two months after the fateful day, she sold her story to the National Perspirer. It filled four pages inside. The headline on the cover was HE LOOKED PRETTY DEAD TO ME! The subhead promised “Gripping Details of the Stormy MacMann Marriage!”

  And delivered them. The Perspirer paid $250,000, roughly six times her annual salary. In return, they got a heaping plateful of red meat. Sophie’s account was so entertaining that movie producers all over Hollywood and Europe rushed to snap up the rights. It was full of delicious details about Babette’s numerous overnight stays in the Lincoln Bedroom. “I sometimes wondered what Mr. Lincoln would have made of all that bouncing and moaning.” One night while Babette and the commander in chief were enjoying a soiree of headboard-banging bliss, “Mrs. MacMann was off giving a speech to some family organization about how important marriages are. I felt kind of sorry for her.” The First Guest was not, apparently, a favorite of the White House staff. “And I never did care much for Ms. Van Anka’s singing or acting.”

  The so-called mainstream media who publicly affected to disdain the Perspirer as a scandal sheet for overweight proles found it all so riveting that they recycled it on their own more respectable front pages, along with the usual grudging attribution and qualifiers.

  Babette had to be talked out of suing the Perspirer by Nick Naylor and her trio of lawyers. Don’t go there, they said. It will only make it worse. Instead she demanded that Max buy the
movie rights through one of his dummy Hong Kong companies, in order to ensure that no movie would ever be made. Sophie’s new best friend, her agent, had gotten the bidding up to a price that was giving Max indigestion. When it passed $5 million, Max announced that he would not go one dollar, pound sterling, Swiss franc, euro, or yen higher. “Who’s gonna want to see this movie, anyway?” This highly insensitive comment triggered a domestic scene of exquisite fury.

  The movie rights ended up going for $7.4 million, to a French company and English director, who, according to Variety, was planning to ask Babette to play herself. “I see it,” he was quoted, “as the television show West Wing meets Murder on the Orient Express. Washington camp, lots of big stars having tremendous fun. Babette would be marvelous as herself. Who better? I’ve always wanted to work with her.”

  Babette menaced Max with the salad tongs, accusing him of, among other failings, insufficient loyalty for not having outbid the French. Nick Naylor, presented with yet another Grab–Van Anka public relations catastrophe, said that at this point Babette might consider accepting the part, to “defuse things.” Though certainly not until after the trial. “Naturally, we’d want to see a script first.”

  At any rate, Sophie Williams was now rich and retired from service in the White House. Sometimes the American dream, like God, works in mysterious ways.

  The prosecution wanted Sophie to testify, especially since her account of Babette’s previous visits to the White House opened up the can of night crawlers that was the MacMann marriage and established a clear motive for Beth’s jealous fatal spittooning of the President.

  Boyce fought against having her testify, arguing that she had discredited herself by selling her story to a “lurid, sensation-mongering tabloid” (that, as it happened, he had once defended in a libel case, but never mind). He thus found himself in the position of defending a wronged wife by attempting to suppress evidence of her husband’s offenses. If Sophie testified, he’d have to retaliate by making her out as a scheming mercenary who had embellished the truth in order to increase its market value. As Sophie was black, he was not eager to perform a credibilotomy on her in front of a jury consisting of seven African Americans.

  So the atmosphere in court this morning was especially charged.

  “The United States calls Sophronia Williams.”

  “Why,” Beth asked in a tight voice, in the car at the end of what had been a very long day in court, “did you keep asking her why I was so unpopular among the staff?”

  “I’m trying to establish a conspiracy. Conspiracies need motives.”

  “You were trying to make me out to be Leona Helmsley. Is this some new cutting-edge defense strategy? Make the jury hate the defendant?”

  “We’ve established that the FBI hated you. When I finish with Agent Birnam, it’ll look like he and the entire Secret Service hated you. With Sophie, I was trying to suggest that the staff might have had it in for you, too.”

  “Suggest? You asked her if I knew the birthdays of her four kids. Do you know the names and birthdays of your cleaning lady’s kids? And what was all that how much did I spend on Christmas presents for them? And the fifteen minutes you spent on her brother-in-law who’s in jail for stabbing someone? I take it you were trying to suggest that I was cold and unfeeling because I didn’t try to get him a presidential pardon for stabbing a convenience store clerk. I didn’t even know that she had a brother-in-law in jail. It wasn’t something she advertised.”

  “I think we made good progress today.”

  “You know, Sophie liked me. She all but said so in the Perspirer piece. The part about how she felt sorry for me that he was screwing that cow while I was giving a speech to the Promise Keepers about the sanctity of marriage. Why didn’t you ask her about that?”

  “Gee, why didn’t I think of that? Then we could have gone on to your motive for killing your husband.” Boyce sighed, a deep, lawyerly sigh. “Let me explain this one last time. I want it to look like the entire White House was in league against you. That they went to bed at night dreaming of ways to get even with you.”

  “What if I’m acquitted, and everyone in the country hates me because I’m supposedly a bitch?”

  “You’ll get an eight-million-dollar book advance from Tina Brown. Then you can tell everyone how wonderful you really are. Americans love comebacks. It’ll be a best-seller. Then you can pay my fee, which is going to be at least eight million.”

  “Alan Crudman would have been cheaper.”

  That night Beth smoked half a pack of cigarettes and watched not only Hard Gavel but all the shows. The topic on all of them was “How Awful Is Beth MacMann?” The Vanity Fair correspondent was funny on Charlie Rose. “It’s a wonder,” he said, “we’re not all covering a trial for her murder.” The other guests laughed. Beth’s dreams of someday having a political career of her own, running for the Senate or state house back home—so much for all that. Boyce might be winning the case, but he was ruining her reputation in the process.

  The phone rang.

  “I don’t think you’re that bad.” It was Boyce.

  “Fuck you.” She hung up.

  He called back. “Was that your idea of phone sex?”

  “Tell me you have a strategy,” she said. “Tell me this is going the way you planned it.”

  “Baby, this is going so well, I’m sitting here doing a crossword puzzle. By the way, what’s a four-letter word for woman ending in u-n-t?”

  “Aunt.”

  “Hm. Can I borrow your eraser?”

  Chapter 17

  Boyce did have a plan, and it centered on a single line from Babette’s statement to the FBI. He had been careful not to file any pretrial motions having to do with it and not to put on his witness list anyone who might alert the prosecution to this little buried truffle.

  Meanwhile, the United States called Captain Cary Grayson. Grayson was the U.S. Navy’s top pathologist at Bethesda Naval Hospital, just outside Washington. It was he who had performed the autopsy on President MacMann and who had concluded that the President had died of an epidural hematoma caused by, in the dry, precise language of forensic medicine, blunt-force trauma to the skull. The blow to his forehead had ruptured the middle meningeal artery. Blood had collected between the skull and the dura, the membrane between the skull and the brain, forcing the dura inward. This in turn compressed the cerebral cortex, killing the President.

  Captain Grayson was in his late fifties, a trim, graying, bespectacled navy bones of pleasant, professional demeanor, the sort of man you would be thrilled to find at the foot of your hospital bed, checking your chart and issuing crisp commands to the nurses. Into the bargain, he had an impressive chestful of ribbons, including the bright yellow-and-red rectangle denoting service in Vietnam (pharmacist’s mate on the aircraft carrier Independence). This was, of course, irrelevant to his testimony, but the deputy attorney general, keenly aware that the jury contained two veterans of the Vietnam War, slyly managed to insert a glancing mention of it in her direct examination of Captain Grayson. There was no point in objecting. Boyce could see that all the jurors, not just the vets, were already in love with him. They wanted him at the foot of their hospital beds when the time came. Boyce knew from experience that juries tended to love doctors, except for plastic surgeons with practices in Beverly Hills and the 10021 zip code area of Manhattan. Doctors with military decorations—two credibilities in one uniform—they deemed godlike.

  Deputy AG Clintick gently walked him through his testimony, reinforcing the fact that the time of death had occurred in the hour and a half following the overheard shouting match. She got him to comment that the President was in fine physical condition, extraordinary, considering his grueling ordeal during the war. Grayson had observed some evidence of coronary heart disease, but nothing serious. Perhaps in a few years, during his second term—objection, sustained—perhaps in four or five years he would have required angioplasty, or the insertion of a stent, but these were now routine pr
ocedures. He would have lived to a ripe age. A great loss. A great loss for the nation. Boyce was bursting to object, but you could have heard a pin drop, so he held back.

  And then Clintick ambushed Boyce. According to her witness list, the enlarged photographs of the Paul Revere mark on the President’s skull were to have been presented by a leading civilian forensic dermatologist. But seeing how mesmerized the jury was by Captain Grayson, the navy’s answer to Marcus Welby, M.D., she pulled a fast one and asked that the photographs be introduced so that Grayson could explain them.

  During the ensuing sidebar, Boyce protested that Captain Grayson, for all his wonderfulness, was not qualified to discuss epidermal markings that were, as he put it, “more mysterious in origin than the designs supposedly left on the Andes mountains by ancient flying saucers.”

  A seething Boyce and a placid deputy AG returned to their places. A clerk mounted the three-by-two-foot photographs on an easel. It was the first time they had been shown to the public.

  A gasp went through the courtroom. Boyce winced. There was nothing worse for your client than the sound of an entire courtroom having its breath taken away by graphic evidence of your client’s alleged handiwork.

  The photograph was an enlargement of a five-by-two-centimeter rectangle of presidential forehead.

  The letters were so clear that they could have been used as an eye chart. The New Yorker observed, “They could have been read by Stevie Wonder.”

  When Boyce had first seen the depressing photographs, he had briefly contemplated an Exorcist explanation: that the conspiracy against Beth included even Satan, who had malevolently stamped Paul Revere’s mark on the President’s skull.

  He took a deep breath. Some days you earned that thousand bucks an hour.