No Way To Treat a First Lady Page 3

  So on the morning that the country awoke to the news that its leader had suddenly expired in his bedroom, in the company of the First Lady, it connected the dots before noon. Even the First Lady’s supporters were at pains to exculpate her. It did not help Beth when one of her staunchest allies, the head of the National Organization for Women, went on TV that afternoon to defend her and said, “If something violent occurred, I’m sure she was provoked.” Thanks a lot!

  When the first public opinion poll was taken, three days later, the TV screen flashed the news that nearly 70 percent of the American people thought that Beth was “implicated” in the death.

  This was the thin consolation available to Harold Farkley. He was determined, in his own quiet, number two–ish sort of way, to do whatever he could to ensure that he would go down in history as the collateral beneficiary of a murder, not merely a wet bathroom floor. He lay awake at night tormented by the vision of elementary school teachers a hundred years hence asking their children, “Now what vice president became president because of a bar of soap?”

  And there was this: Harold Farkley detested Beth MacMann. She had managed to inspire in a second-rate temperament a genuinely firstrate passion. He loathed her.

  During the primary campaign between himself and Governor MacMann, there had come a moment when it looked as though Harold Farkley might just break through the membrane of mediocrity that had bound him for so long to the earth and become—number one. He was ahead, though by the weensiest margin. His advisers counseled, Go for it, sir! Be bold! Pull out all the stops! Do what must be done, and greatness will finally be yours!

  Harold Farkley, the taste of victory meltingly on his tongue like a chocolate caramel, gave in to the zealous urgings of his handlers. Here, they said, is MacMann’s Achilles’ heel: his pushy wife. Their polling showed that just enough MacMann male voters were wary of her to provide Farkley with a winning margin if they came over to his side. So Harold Farkley, daring greatly if not judiciously, crossed the invisible line and—criticized his opponent’s wife.

  “It is not him who worries me,” he said memorably and ungrammatically in his fateful speech to the Michigan autoworkers. “It’s her. I think the American people have a right to know whom will be wearing the presidency’s pants.”

  Within two hours, feminists, soccer moms, and even happily unliberated housewives were clamoring for Harold Farkley to withdraw. You just don’t go after a man’s wife. It’s un-American!

  And so Harold Farkley’s karmic parabola, having temptingly arced toward the stratosphere of greatness, curved steeply back toward the dismal earth. Only by furious backpedaling and a massive eleventh-hour media buy did he manage to hold on to his number two status. At the party convention, Beth assented to Farkley’s being named to the ticket only after her husband’s advisers convinced her of the inexorable electoral math warranting his inclusion. If they were to win in November, they would need Harold Farkley’s fifty-four electoral votes. Anyway, the advisers said, it would look magnanimous. American voters love magnanimity, however you spell it. Beth was the very picture of magnanimity, right up through election day. Then she took a sharp knife and quietly removed Harold Farkley’s testicles.

  She froze him out. And when she couldn’t freeze him out, she put him next to the kitchen. At state dinners, Harold found himself seated next to the non-English-speaking wife of the finance minister of the visiting head of state. “How are you enjoying your visit to Washington?” After interminable translation, the answer came back, “She say Washington very hot in summer.” Harold found himself dispatched to represent the United States at their funerals before the foreign dignitaries had even died. He was appointed to commissions on “uninventing government.” Around Washington he became known as Vice President Whatsisname. Indeed, his name recognition dropped below 23 percent. More Americans knew the name of Canada’s Prime Minister than their own Vice President’s. Editorials once again surfaced in the nation’s newspapers asking if the vice presidency was really necessary. A year and a half before reelection time, it was all but certain that Harold would be unceremoniously dumped in favor of a new running mate. And it was Beth who had her hand on the lever of the trapdoor.

  Then—this.

  The gods who had for so long laughed in Harold’s face had suddenly intervened on his behalf. Here, on a silver platter, was his chance to achieve what any politician most cherishes in his heart of hearts: payback.

  But it must be done subtly. Harold Farkley had learned from his disastrous attack on her. This time he would be artful.

  His feud with Beth MacMann was no secret. The media were ready to pounce on President Harold Farkley at the first sign he was using the incident as an excuse to prosecute his grudge against the First Lady. Hypocrisy is a prerogative of the press but must under no circumstances be tolerated in politicians.

  So when the FBI director reported directly to newly sworn-in President Farkley that there were inconsistencies in Beth’s statements, when the director of the Secret Service reported to him that an argument had been heard that night by one of the agents, Harold Farkley knew that he must dare to be cautious. He was out of the country on the day she was formally indicted.

  Upon his return, he went on TV to address the nation. It was all he could do to keep from tap dancing. Before his address, he practiced his expression in the bathroom mirror prior to going on television, arranging his second-rate features into a look of overdone gravity, a vaudevillian attempting Shakespeare.

  He told the nation that this was, indeed, a dark hour, “not only for the country as a nation, but for me personally, as a human being.” He said he had “every confidence that justice will prevail and that Mrs. MacMann will be cleared of the awful—indeed, horrible—charge against her.” Thanks, Harold.

  Since her indictment, Harold Farkley had been in a covert state of bliss. He happily attended to the affairs of state—the affairs of state that were now all his. In his quiet moments, he tantalized himself with daydreams of Beth weeping, begging for a presidential pardon. Of Beth sizzling in an electric chair, hooded with a noose around her neck, dropping through the trapdoor, tied to the stake, the flames reaching higher and higher and higher—

  “Mr. President?”

  Dammit, the way they just walked in.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s on the news. Mrs. MacMann has hired Boyce Baylor.”

  Suddenly the pleasant images shattered like glass struck by a sledgehammer. Harold Farkley heard a voice pronouncing the awful words: “We find the defendant not guilty.”

  Chapter 4

  Normally Boyce would have flown down to Washington on his private jet, a sporty Falconetta 55 with enough range to get him to Paris for dinner. But since he would soon be impaneling a Washington, D.C., jury whose primary source of news came from television, he not only took the commercial shuttle flight, but also carried his own garment bag and briefcase. His office had called the media ahead to let them know what flight he’d be on. They were waiting for him as he stepped off the ramp, with enough light to illuminate twenty Hollywood premieres.

  “Boyce!”

  “Mr. Baylor!”

  “Are you—”

  “Will you seek—”

  “Possible to—”

  “Yo, Shameless, over here!”

  Boyce stood in the basting glare, trying not to blink—or melt—with an appropriately grave look and waited for the insect whir and hammer click of cameras to subside. He was used to media, God knows, but this was a turnout. There must be over a hundred.

  He gave a curt nod to indicate that the orchestra should stop tuning their instruments. The conductor was ready. The symphony was about to begin. And he had brought them a little something. He always kept them well fed.

  “I’m here,” he said, “to help an old friend. With respect to the charges, I have this to say. I personally admire and respect the attorney general. So I regret all the more that he decided, in the face of massive evidence
to the contrary, to sacrifice an innocent widow on the altar of his own burning ambition.”

  The attorney general of the United States, watching in his office at the Justice Department, said to his deputy, “That asshole. That goddamn asshole.”

  “Looks like war,” his deputy said.

  “Finally,” Boyce said, “I would ask all Americans to remember something in the days ahead. Yes, the country has lost a president. But a beloved First Lady has lost her husband.”

  Beth, watching from her new temporary headquarters in Cleveland Park, a few miles from the airport, muttered aloud to her TV screen, “ ‘Beloved’?”

  “That’s really all I have to say at this time. Thank you.” He always said this before proceeding to take questions.

  “Boyce! Were you and Beth MacMann lovers?”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Perri Pettengill’s senior producer, “those two? Used to do it?”

  “Um-hum.” Perri nodded, continuing to watch.

  “That’s perfect.”

  “They were in law school together. She screwed him over.”

  “So why’s he helping her?”

  Perri looked at him. “Harry, it’s the Trial of the Millennium. Of course he’s going to represent her.”

  “You gotta get him on the show tonight. We gotta have him.”

  Boyce had told Perri he wouldn’t do her show, at least for a while. “It wouldn’t look right.” In retaliation she told him fine, no sex. They compromised: sex and monster leaks.

  “Let’s save him for something big,” Perri parried.

  “It’s all big,” Harry said. “You’ve got a mass of hot air over Washington, a cold legal front coming down from New York, and media from all over the world converging. It’s The Perfect Storm all over again. ‘Perfect Storm’! We could use that.”

  “Yes, Harry. That’s good. Use it.”

  “I’ll Chyron it.”

  Boyce had been ready for the question. He paused to give the impression that it had taken him by surprise. “The First Lady and I were at law school together. It was a long time ago.” He added with nice faux self-deprecation, “You’d know it was a long time ago to look at me, maybe. Not the First Lady.”

  Through the plate-glass window in the airport terminal where Boyce was standing, he could see in the distance the towers of Georgetown University. A quarter century ago, he and his fellow third-year law student Beth Tyler had one night found themselves in the auditorium for their first moot court. They were so nervous they shook, and this was in the days before beta-blockers.

  A rumor had been going around for days that the presiding judge would be a Bigfoot. When that day the door opened and out walked Chief Justice Henry Adolfus Wiggins of the Supreme Court of the United States, a gasp went through the standing-room-only auditorium. A month before, Wiggins had ordered the President of the United States to turn over his secret Oval Office tape recordings. That led swiftly to his historic resignation. The Georgetown Law School dean—he had clerked for Wiggins years ago—had pulled off a coup getting him to come.

  Beth groaned to Boyce, sitting beside her, “We’re dead.”

  She was to play the part of the U.S. solicitor general and argue the government’s side before the Supreme Court. Boyce was her deputy. He whispered back, “He doesn’t look happy.”

  Indeed, Chief Justice Wiggins wasn’t happy, not at all happy. He’d been sandbagged by the dean, his former clerk, who had not told him until the last minute that the mock case tonight he would be presiding over would be the very same one he had so historically decided a few months ago. It bordered on impudence.

  Beth and Boyce had pulled two consecutive all-nighters to prepare. They looked like extras from the movie Night of the Living Dead. Her argument for letting the President keep his tapes was that the Supreme Court justices lacked the proper security clearances to hear what was on them. They were armed with precedents, but now, looking at the imperious, pinched-looking Wiggins taking his seat before them, they felt a presentiment of doom. In effect, their job tonight was to persuade him that he had been wrong. And chief justices, generally, did not like to be told that they were wrong.

  “Oyez, oyez, oyez,” the dean intoned, grinning at his triumph. The Washington Post and The New York Times had sent reporters. “All persons having business before the honorable, the Supreme Court of the United States, present themselves.”

  Boyce began humming Chopin’s “Marche Funèbre.” Dum dum de dum dum de dum de dum de dum.

  “Shut up,” she hissed.

  Beth stood. Justice Wiggins did not return her smile. In his robes, spectacles, and blue, bloodless lips, Justice Wiggins looked as though he were yearning to sentence everyone present to death by hanging, or preferably by some more prolonged, medieval form of execution.

  Beth stood mute at the lectern. Five seconds went by, ten. Fifteen. Wiggins, accustomed to brisk kowtows and beginnings, frowned, a formidable sight.

  People exchanged glances. The dean’s smile vanished. The silence that descended on the auditorium had an Old Testament quality, the kind that preceded the Voice in the Whirlwind announcing, I am the Lord God Almighty, and I am very, very wroth.

  “Your Supreme Honor—”

  Off to a good start.

  “With all due respect, I—we, that is, the government of the United States—do not believe that you—that the Court—has jurisdiction in this matter.”

  Wiggins, who had just earned himself his own chapter in the legal history of the United States for a written opinion that was being hailed as the most consequential legal ruling since Maimonides, glowered at Beth like a malevolent owl contemplating a mouse. The Wiggins Supreme Court felt that it had jurisdiction over everything, including what time the sun was allowed to rise.

  Boyce felt his insides loosen, along with the cold scalp prickle that augurs calamity.

  Wiggins let her continue another two and a half sentences, whereupon he assumed his accustomed role of grand inquisitor. It was merciless. It was scathing. It was so bad that no one could bear to watch. Four hundred pairs of eyes looked down. Never had the auditorium floor been so closely examined. It was so awful that finally Boyce decided there was nothing left to lose. He scribbled on an index card and slid it in front of Beth as the judge continued to blowtorch her for her abominable—no, worse, abysmal!—understanding of the Eleventh Amendment. It read:

  He’s wearing panty hose underneath

  To keep from laughing, Beth sucked in her upper lip and bit down on it so hard that it stayed swollen for two days.

  Boyce’s note saved her from annihilation. Chief Justice Wiggins, who deep down was really more angry at the dean than at an intellectually frisky third-year student, saw this young woman in front of him apparently about to burst out crying and ceased his attack. He became even moderately magnanimous. He concluded by telling her that her argument was “without merit,” but was without merit “in an original way.” For Wiggins, this was tantamount to a compliment.

  At the reception afterward, another third-year student named Kenneth Kemble MacMann, six feet four, lean, with Kennedyesque hair and soulful, hooded eyes, approached Beth to say how impressed he had been by her performance. Boyce knew him slightly. He was older than the other students. Word was he’d been to Vietnam. If you were a vet in the 1970s on an eastern college campus, it was not something you broadcast to your fellow students or teachers, who would be only too glad to accuse you of crimes against humanity.

  A few days later, Beth showed up in Boyce’s dorm room with microfiche copies from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, and an official U.S. Navy publication, page after page of news stories about a navy ship called the Santiago.

  “What’s this?” he said.

  “That guy, the third-year the other night we talked to—read this.” Boyce read.

  The Santiago was a fast navy electronic surveillance vessel assigned to monitor Russian shipping in and out of Haiphong Harbor. Its captain had taken
it inside the twelve-mile limit, probably on orders. A North Vietnam MiG attacked. Everyone on the bridge was killed except for Lieutenant (jg) MacMann. Wounded, he had assumed command and—as the citation that she for whatever reason had dug out of the archives put it—at great personal risk attempted to drive the Santiago into undisputed waters while simultaneously directing aid to the wounded and the destruction of classified materials. The Santiago was overtaken by North Vietnamese gunboats. Lieutenant MacMann ordered abandon ship and evacuation of the wounded but remained on board himself. While continuing to receive enemy fire, he successfully scuttled the Santiago, which sank to the bottom of the Gulf of Tonkin.

  He was picked up by the gunboats and endured three and a half years of torture, starvation, inadequate medical care, and solitary confinement at the Hanoi Hilton. Upon his release, Lieutenant K. MacMann was awarded the Purple Heart, Distinguished Service Medal, Navy Cross, and Congressional Medal of Honor. He’d been personally decorated, in the Oval Office, by President Richard Nixon, otherwise known among the eastern academic elite as the Antichrist. (Not that the eastern academic elite believed much in Christ.)

  “He’s a hero, Boyce.”

  “Boy,” Boyce said. “I’ll say.”

  “Listen to this.” She read: “ ‘Following Lieutenant MacMann’s release by North Vietnam, he was returned to the United States and spent two months at the Naval Hospital in San Diego. Subseqently he received an honorable medical discharge from the Navy with the rank of Lieutenant Commander.’

  “I wonder what the reason was,” Beth said.

  The first indication that something was wrong came a few days later when from a distance Boyce saw Beth heading into Habeus Sandwich, the Georgetown Law student hangout, with Kenneth Kemble MacMann. Boyce followed them and, finding them both sitting cozily in a booth, announced himself with a “Hi.” Beth appeared clearly disappointed.