No Way To Treat a First Lady Page 2

  “Hello, Beth. What’ve you been up to?” This was nonchalance carried to operatic heights.

  “I need to see you, Boyce.”

  Her voice was all business. Cool as a martini, no more emotion than a flight attendant telling the passengers to put their seats in the upright position. He’d have preferred a little more raw emotion, frankly, even a stifled gasp or sob. Some clients, even burly men who could break your jaw with one lazy swipe of their paws, broke down the first time they spoke to him. Boyce kept a box of tissues in his office, like a shrink. One new client, the head of a plumbers union who had been taped by the FBI on the phone ordering the car bombing of a rival, had blubbered like an eight-year-old. He later blamed it on medication.

  But even now, placing a call that must have humiliated her, Beth was in her own upright position, not a trace of begging or desperation in her voice. Boyce stiffened. His pulse returned to normal. Okay, babe, you want to play it cool? I’ll see your thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit and lower you five.

  “I could see you tomorrow at ten-thirty,” he said. “For half an hour.”

  It had been a long time since anyone had said something like that to Beth MacMann.

  The two of them began the mental countdown to see who would blink first.

  … seven … eight … nine …

  “Fine,” she said.

  “Will you be taking the shuttle?” He’d be damned if he’d send his own jet to pick her up.

  “No, Boyce. I’ll be driving. I don’t relish the thought of being stared at for an hour on the shuttle.”

  As a former First Lady, she retained Secret Service protection, another of the ironies in which she and the nation found themselves: prosecuted by the government, protected by the government. A Times columnist had mischievously posed the question: If in the end Beth MacMann was executed, would there be a shoot-out between the Secret Service and the lethal injectionist? So many delicious questions were being posed these days.

  “Ten-thirty, then.”

  Boyce leaned back in his leather throne and imagined the spectacle in all its many-pixeled splendor: hundreds of TV cameras and reporters outside his Manhattan office, clamoring, aiming their microphones like fetish sticks as the Secret Service phalanxed her through to the door. And there he would be standing, gorgeously, Englishly tailored, to greet her. His face would be on every television set in the world tomorrow. Peasants in Uzbekistan, ozone researchers in Antarctica, Amish farmers in Pennsylvania would recognize him.

  He would issue a brief, dignified, noncommittal statement to the effect that this was only a preliminary meeting. He would smile, thank the media for its interest—Boyce was the Siegfried and Roy of media handlers—and usher her in. How satisfying it would be, after all these years. They were already calling it “the Trial of the Millennium,” and there he would be, at the red hot center of it. And maybe—just maybe—to make his revenge perfect, he would deliberately lose this one. But so subtly that even the Harvard Law bow tie brigade would hem and haw and say that no one, really, could have won this one, not even Shameless Baylor.

  Chapter 2

  It was a bigger zoo than he’d expected. Outside Boyce’s Manhattan office were sixteen satellite trucks with seventy-foot telescope microwave dishes to supply the live feeds, as well as over three hundred reporters and camera people and twice that many onlookers. Even he was impressed.

  The police had to block off one lane of westbound traffic on Fifty-seventh Street. It was the Client-Attorney Meeting of the Millennium. By the time this was over, one pixel pundit said, the word millennium would be so overworked that it would have to be mothballed until the year 2999.

  Beth quietly fumed in the elevator until she and her Secret Service retinue had reached Boyce’s office on the northwest corner of the fiftieth floor looking toward Central Park. He called it his “thousand-dollar-an-hour view.”

  “That was truly humiliating,” she said. “Thank you.”

  He knew right away that there was no use pretending it hadn’t been he who had leaked the news of their meeting. But he found himself hoping that she hadn’t figured out to whom. Perri Pettengill, Boyce’s current girlfriend, was the host of the Law Channel late night talk show Hard Gavel. She was blond, smart, and ambitious, talked fast, and wore bifocals and tight sweaters. She had the best ratings on the Law Channel, which tended not to attract many viewers in the periods between spectacular murder trials, though a highly classified in-house research report showed that roughly one-third of her viewers watched her with the sound off. Tom Wolfe had mentioned her in an essay, calling her “the Lemon Tort.”

  Perri and Boyce had met six months earlier when she moderated a panel at the Trial Lawyers Association in New Orleans on jury selection entitled “Peremptory This!” Boyce had been on it. She had introduced him as “not only the best but the most exciting trial attorney in the country” and that night after dinner had given him the most memorable evening he had ever spent in New Orleans, which was saying a lot. She had moved in later that week. Their relationship had been cemented in boldface type by the New York gossip columnists. She was smart enough not to have brought up the subject of marriage just yet, but the question was there every morning, fluttering over the breakfast trays like the Dove of Damocles. Boyce did have an excuse: four previous wives. It did give Perri pause. No romantic woman dreams, in her heart of hearts, of becoming Mrs. Number Five.

  Boyce had called Perri after getting off the phone with Beth. She’d nearly hyperventilated. What a scoop. Her ambition sometimes made Boyce wary, as, to be honest, did her extraordinary ability in bed. Confronted with a truly skilled partner, a man had to wonder, even as he gasped and whinnied in ecstasy: Where did she learn to do that?

  But now his thoughts were of Beth, upon whom he had last laid eyes a quarter century ago.

  “You gave it to that woman, didn’t you?” she said. “Sweater Girl.”

  “That’s right. I wanted a big crowd down there today. I wanted to send a message to the U.S. government—”

  “You did. It read, ‘Boyce Baylor is a flaming egomaniac.’ ”

  He was—stunned! It wasn’t the sort of romancing Boyce expected from supplicant clients.

  “I got up at five o’clock this morning,” Beth said, “and spent four hours on I-95 feeling like O. J. Simpson in the Bronco, being chased by a half dozen Eyewitness News teams. Then I arrived to your welcome wagon from hell. So if you’ll excuse me, I’m in no mood to kiss your ass.”

  With that she sat down and began pulling off her gloves. Beth had always worn them, for the uncomplicated reason that they kept her hands soft. When she became the wife of a presidential candidate, and no shrinking violet, the media seized on the gloves for a convenient iron-hand-in-the-velvet-glove metaphor.

  Boyce couldn’t help himself watching her take them off finger by finger in an incredibly sexy Barbara Stanwyck let’s-get-down-to-business way. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. Men are men and fools to a man, but it amazed Boyce, seeing her this close, that Ken MacMann had needed to screw all those other women when he had this waiting for him at home, warm in his own bed at night. She was a few years younger than he, and looked perhaps a few years younger than that. She had aristocratic cheekbones and black hair with streaks of gray that made the black richer and more lustrous. Her eyes looked straight at you in an evaluating but not unfriendly way. Her figure, unmarred by childbearing, was full and handsome. If she’d been an actress, she would have gotten the part of the take-charge businesswoman who turns out to be an absolute panther in the sack. He remembered how every time he walked behind her and saw the lovely sexy sway of her bottom, his mouth went dry and his heart soared with possession.

  And so here she was, twenty-five years later, in his office, a client.

  “Coffee, skim milk, one sugar.” She crossed a black-stockinged leg. He heard the siren song of nylon on nylon. “So how are you, Boyce?”

  It now dawned on Boyce Baylor, lion of the American Bar, t
hat in less than thirty seconds he had been reduced to the status of coffee boy—in his own lair, with a view that God would envy, amid walls hung so thickly with honorifics and photographic testimonials to his greatness, his hugeness, that the very Sheetrock cried out under the strain. No no no no. This would not do. Not do at all. He must assert control, quickly.

  He buzzed for the coffee and, sitting down opposite, said, “Not so bad. Haven’t been indicted for murder.”

  She gave him the hint of a smile.

  “Why,” he said, “didn’t you call me sooner?”

  “I was waiting to see how bad it was going to get. I thought it might not get to this point. And I didn’t want to make it appear worse by hiring a lawyer.”

  Boyce shook his head silently, wisely. How often he had heard this.

  “Anyway,” she said, “here I am. On bended knee.”

  Boyce used this as an excuse to look at her knees.

  “The reason they’re bent,” she said, “is from four hours in the back of a Secret Service SUV. But I could say they’re bent for your sake, if you’d like.”

  Toying with him! Intolerable.

  “You must be in a world of hurt,” he said, “to come to me.”

  “I’ve been indicted for murder. That’s one definition of ‘world of hurt,’ I suppose.”

  “Why me? There are lots of good lawyers who’d love to have this case.”

  “Boyce,” she said, “if you want me to say, ‘Because you’re the best,’ I will.”

  “Beth”—he smiled—“I know I’m the best. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m past the point where I need your approval.”

  “Oh, you’ve done well. No question. It’s why I’m here, isn’t it?”

  He was thinking, You waltz in here after screwing me over and sit there with those incredible legs crossed, putting out—attitude?

  Boyce decided right there and then to take the case.

  “On the way up here,” she said, looking down at her lap, “somewhere between Baltimore and Wilmington, I promised myself that I was not going to apologize. Then when we got to the New Jersey Turnpike, I decided I was going to apologize. Then in Newark I went back to my nonapology posture.”

  “How’d you feel going through the Holland Tunnel?”

  “Like turning around. Only that’s tricky in a tunnel. Annoys the oncoming traffic.”

  “Well, we can talk about all that some other time.”

  “Maybe we should talk about it now. I think I’d rather know your state of mind going in. I don’t want to find out during closing arguments that your heart wasn’t really in this.”

  She was a canny one.

  “This isn’t Casablanca. And this”—he waved at his Wall of Ego, which still, Beth noticed, held an official framed photograph of his former father-in-law Prince Lupold of Bad Saxony-Wurtburg—“is not Rick’s Café. I moved on. And I’ve done just fine. The truth is I got over it pretty quickly.”

  “I don’t flatter myself that I ruined your life.”

  Flatter herself? That she ruined my life? Dammit …

  “I have a very good life.” He nodded in the direction of the Wall of Ego. “As you can see.”

  She looked at the wall. “I see. I …”

  “What?”

  “I did reach out to you. After we got to the White House. You didn’t answer four invitations. To state dinners.”

  “Must have gotten lost.”

  Beth smiled. “Boyce, dinner invitations from the White House don’t get lost.”

  “I may have been in the middle of a trial. When I’m trying a case, to be honest, an earthquake wouldn’t register.”

  “Then you must have been in the middle of four trials, because we invited you four times. I was going to put you next to Princess Caroline. Knowing how you like princesses.”

  “She was related to my wife. Somehow. All goes back to Queen Victoria.” He was mumbling.

  “The protocol office said they’d never heard of anyone not answering four White House state dinner invitations. You’re in the Guinness Book of World Records.”

  “One of my fathers-in-law died in the middle of the MicroDot trial, and I was so wrapped up in it that I didn’t even attend the funeral.”

  He heard the little computer voice in the cockpit saying, Pull up, pull up!

  “So,” he said crisply, “shall we talk about my bad manners, or the case?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Beth, “that I’ve satisfied myself as to your state of mind. If you’re going to handle this, I need to know that you’re on board, emotionally.”

  Boyce snorted. “I don’t deal in emotions, only motions.”

  “I don’t believe that for a second.”

  “What makes you think I’ve decided to take this case?”

  “Boyce”—Beth laughed—“whatever the situation is between us, I really can’t believe that you wouldn’t take this case.”

  She was smiling. My God, the woman was smiling in triumph.

  “I mean,” she continued, “the very idea of you not being involved in this case—they’re calling it ‘the Trial of the Millennium.’ It doesn’t make sense.”

  She had him, had him by the short ones. All he could do was pretend that he was the absolute lord and master of the corner that she had artfully backed him into.

  He gave her his best gaze-blank-and-pitiless-as-the-sun, the one he reserved for his most withering cross-examinations. And she just stared back at him until all he could do was try not to laugh at his own helplessness.

  “All right. I’ll handle the case.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But I want it understood, understood without ambiguity, that I’m in charge.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Oh no. Raise your right hand and say, ‘I, Beth Tyler MacMann, do solemnly swear that Boyce Baylor shall be completely, wholly, totally, and one hundred percent comprehensively in charge of my defense. So help me God, Jehovah, Allah, Buddha, Vishnu, and all and any other gods not herein specified.”

  “Swear.”

  Boyce rose, his pride assuaged. “There’s a basement garage so you can avoid your fans in the media.”

  “Don’t you want to know if I did it?”

  “Obviously, you never practiced law. The last thing I want to know from my clients is did they do it.”

  Beth had the disconcerted look of the bright girl in class who had just been singled out for saying something foolish.

  “I’ll fly down to D.C. tomorrow morning and we start.”

  Chapter 3

  Harold Farkley had long dreamed of becoming president of the United States, but thrilled as he was finally to get the job, he wished the circumstances had been different. It was one thing for a vice president to assume the mantle of greatness because of a dramatic assassination, a sniper’s bullet at high noon with all the world watching. But to be the beneficiary of a marital spat gone tragically awry … Harold Farkley could almost hear the gods sniggering. He could certainly hear the media tittering. Tittering—hell, they were howling. Openly. Hysterically. Wetting themselves with laughter.

  He looked at the newspaper on his Oval Office desk, open to the editorial pages. Harold Farkley fumed. John O. Banion—that insufferable, bow-tied prig—had written in his widely syndicated column, “ ‘President Farkley.’ Try, if you can, to wrap your mind around that stunning oxymoron.” Boiling, he read on. “Harold Farkley was the second-born in his family, went to a second-rate college, where he graduated second in his class. Thus equipped with a second-rate intellect, he went into a second-rate profession. Eventually, he clawed his way to becoming the second choice of the voters in his party. This in turn got him the number two spot on the presidential ticket. Now fate has intervened in a most bizarre fashion, for only a bizarre chain of events could have propelled a Harold Farkley to the number one position. The universe is temporarily unbalanced. Some cosmic intervention may be necessary to realign the heavens.”

  Oh, for th
e days of real executive power, when a ruler could have his opponents thrown into a dungeon.

  Harold Farkley forced himself to read the rest of the column, for even a second-rate mind knew that it was prudent to know how the enemy was thinking.

  Banion, a contrarian, refused to accept the charges against Beth MacMann. President MacMann, he wrote, had been the victim of “bathetic happenstance”—a pun on bathroom. The President, Banion stoutly maintained, had gone in to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, slipped, crawled back into bed, and died. The strange markings on his forehead could be explained as a “dermatological anomaly.” The First Lady had been unfairly accused. That weekend, Banion had announced with customary pomposity on his new television program, Capitol Bang, that the government was conducting a “witch-hunt even more unseemly than the kind conducted in Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1690s.”

  President Harold Farkley read Banion’s opinion with the impotent fury of a second-rate mind and the fervent hope that it would remain in the minority. So far, so good. His own pollster confirmed what the media were saying: Most Americans thought she had done it.

  The First Lady had been controversial from the start. From the moment she set foot in the White House, she made it abundantly clear that she did not plan to “spend my days going over menus.” It was a far cry from Hillary Clinton, who contented herself with taking care of her husband and giving the occasional tea for congressional wives.

  Beth’s declaration that she would be a substantive First Lady was met with grumbling and mutterings of “Who elected her?” She attended cabinet meetings, where she not only spoke up but sometimes corrected the secretary of defense or commerce on a point.

  A few months into the new MacMann administration, a report appeared in The Washington Post about an alleged “shoving incident” involving the First Couple. The White House spokesman dismissed it as “rubbish.” A few weeks after that, the President appeared at a Rose Garden event wearing a bandage on his nose. The spokesman averred that the President’s wound had been the result of “walking into a door.” Washington murmured that it was more likely that the door had walked into the President. In the two and a half years of the MacMann presidency, the White House spokesman had dismissed a total of seven incidents, with indignation ranging from “totally untrue” to “I have nothing further for you on that.”