No Way To Treat a First Lady Read online

  “What was I supposed to do, start wailing and tearing my hair? Leap in with the coffin?”

  “If you had called me when you should have, instead of playing Mrs. Why Do I Need a Lawyer?—”

  “We’ve been through this.”

  “—I would have rubbed onion juice on your sunglasses before the funeral.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “I had a client once, she blew her husband’s head off with his twelve-gauge Purdey shotgun—a forty-thousand-dollar gun—in the living room, in front of guests, on the white carpet—”

  “I don’t want to hear this.”

  “Ooh, this was one tough cookie. Hard like a rock. Sigourney Weaver played her in the movie. She blew two holes in him the size of grapefruits, then reloaded and kept blasting. At the funeral, mascara—down to her cleavage.”

  “I’m not listening.”

  “White onion is best. Not red. We went for temporary insanity. The jury was out in under two hours. She was out of the mental hospital in less than three years. She’s a tennis pro in Boca Raton. By the way, I want you in black for the trial.”

  “Isn’t that a bit obvious?”

  Boyce shrugged. “I’m not saying wear a burqa. Look, most women in New York wear black, and they only dream about killing their husbands.”

  He scrolled down.

  “Now, these numbers about the late President’s policies. There’s stuff in here we can work with. African Americans were not happy with his last Supreme Court appointment, plus he criticized the Reverend Bones for having that love child with the head of his choir and deducting her on his income taxes.”

  “Bones called again yesterday,” Beth said. “He wants to come pray with me.”

  “I’ll bet he does. And they call me Shameless.”

  Boyce scrolled.

  “They thought your late husband was squishy on affirmative action. You gave a speech about that, didn’t you? You disagreed with him. Was that a good-cop, bad-cop routine you two worked out to keep the black vote mollified, or did you actually mean it?”

  “Screw you, Boyce.”

  “Pardon my cynicism. I thought you and he might have other arrangements, in addition to the one about his not banging actresses when you were in residence.”

  “You didn’t used to be like this.”

  “No, I didn’t. I was quite trusting, actually. Then I got screwed by someone I trusted. So now I have no illusions about people. I not only expect the worst from them, I demand it. Is any White House staffer likely, on the stand—under oath—to derogate or otherwise cast doubt on the integrity of your coming out publicly against your husband on the issue of racial quotas?”

  “Is that what you think of me?”

  “The witness is directed to answer the question.”

  “No. Amazing as it may seem, I was speaking from the heart.”

  “It’s not that often I get such principled clients.”

  Chapter 8

  Three days before the start of jury selection, Boyce was filing his seventy-fourth pretrial motion—a personal record—this one to suppress the evidence of Beth’s fingerprints on the Paul Revere spittoon on the grounds that her voluntary submission to fingerprinting by the FBI had constituted a “flagrant and unconscionable” violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable search. It was a long shot, but Boyce was already in his mind mapping out pretrial motion number seventy-five, on the even more daring premise that the traces of French-made hand moisturizing cream in the fingerprints would unfairly bias jurors who felt that an American First Lady should use only American-made beauty products.

  The TV was on. He watched with one eye.

  “Good evening,” said Perri Pettengill, wearing a clingy sweater and trademark eyeglasses, “and welcome to Hard Gavel. My guest tonight, one of America’s great trial attorneys, Alan Crudman. Welcome.”

  Alan Crudman was in fact a fine attorney, one of the best, yet even in his late forties he still carried on like a twelve-year-old clamoring to be acknowledged as the smartest boy in class. In law school it was said of him that he had come out of his mother’s womb with his hand raised. He had gotten acquitted some of the most loathsome human beings on the planet and yet, not content to shrug and say that he had simply been upholding the purity of law and rights guaranteed by the Constitution, insisted on going an unnecessary further step and proclaiming in front of cameras that his smirking client, shoes still sticky with his victims’ blood, was “totally innocent.” Even colleagues who hadn’t lost a minute’s sleep after a lifetime career of defending the dregs of humanity shook their heads in wonder at Alan Crudman’s amazing protestations on behalf of his clients. Could he really have convinced himself of their innocence? Impossible. Too smart. It had to be more complicated: he had graduated to telling the big, big lies, daring God to challenge. This fooled no one, but the media ate it up. The television talk shows loved it. It got them callers galore. And Alan Crudman was never too busy to go on television, on any show, to comment about anything at all. If the Weather Channel invited him to go on to talk about the legal implications of a low-pressure system over Nebraska, he’d be there as long as they sent a limousine for him. A short man, he demanded big vehicles.

  Crudman loathed Boyce Baylor for four deeply held philosophical reasons. One, Boyce had gotten more guilty people off than he had. Two, Boyce was richer. Three, Boyce was taller and better looking. Four, Beth MacMann had chosen him over her.

  He had placed a call to Beth within an hour of hearing the news that she was a suspect in her husband’s death—and she had not returned his call. This hadn’t happened to Alan Crudman in two decades. Who did she think she was? So now he despised her as well. He lay awake at night pleasuring himself with visions of the jury foreman pronouncing, “Guilty!” He saw her stunned expression, saw them drag her off. Saw her in bright orange death prison garb, struggling as they inserted the needle, shouting, “Get me Alan Crudman!”

  “Thank you, Perri. Always good to be here.”

  Perri disliked Alan Crudman for one deeply held philosophical reason. She had invited him on one of the early episodes of Hard Gavel and he had treated her like a dumb blonde instead of a former assistant district attorney. At one point he’d airily informed her that she had “totally misconstrued the deeper meaning” of Plessy v. Ferguson. After the show, he had invited her to his hotel room—a lavish suite at the St. Regis Hotel, charged to Hard Gavel along with the limo—for a drink. She had gone with one purpose in mind. Over drinks, she’d sat opposite him while he’d talked about his greatness, her miniskirted thighs parted just enough to provide a glimpse of the heaven within. Having brought him to a state of painful arousal, she had looked at her watch, announced she was running late, and left him to quench his ardor with any means at hand.

  As Hard Gavel’s ratings increased, Alan Crudman’s attitude toward her became less and less condescending. He now addressed her as he would a Supreme Court justice.

  Perri had asked him on the show tonight because she was mad at Boyce. Boyce was refusing to feed her details about the case.

  “So how do you think the defense is shaping up so far?”

  “I wouldn’t want to second-guess Boyce Baylor,” Alan Crudman lied, “but I’m frankly surprised that he hasn’t put together a top-level team. All he’s got is associates from his own firm, most of them younger people. This is, as I don’t need to tell you, going to be a very tough case. Even I would find it a tough case. And I certainly wouldn’t try to do it all myself. So it’s either remarkable, or daring, or both, that he seems intent on trying this case all by himself.”

  “You’re acknowledged as being the best in the business”—she knew this would infuriate Boyce—“when you take a case of this profile—”

  “Perri”—Alan Crudman smiled, not one of nature’s prettier sights—“with all due respect, there has never in history been a case of this profile.”

  “—you usually partner up
with other distinguished attorneys. It’s not like you’re saying, I can’t handle this all by myself. Right?”

  “Absolutely. In the J. J. Bronco case, as you’ll recall, there were—what?—six of us. I, of course, was lead counsel, but I had Barry Strutt to handle the bloodstains, Lee Vermann for hair samples, Kyle Coots, who as you know is the authority on slash wounds—he wrote the book—so we had a good, solid team. And of course justice prevailed.”

  “On that, any progress in the search for the real killers?”

  “I—there’s—I understand he’s pursuing it. But as far as the MacMann case goes, yes, I am surprised that Boyce Baylor seems determined to do it all by himself. I’m sure he has his reasons.”

  Beth too was watching. She had developed a curiosity about Perri Pettengill.

  Listening to Alan Crudman, whom she had loathed since he had pronounced on television that J. J. Bronco was “one hundred thousand percent not guilty” of the grisly murders, confirmed her decision not to return his call during the first days of her nightmare. Yet the lawyer in Beth was wrestling with the fact that he was Alan Crudman, a lawyer of great ability. Even if she discounted his palpable jealousy of Boyce, his comments did make her wonder why Boyce was so intent on going into court solo. She’d asked him why he hadn’t assembled the mother of all defense teams. He’d said he didn’t want to overwhelm the jury with too many expensive suits. The fourth time she’d asked, he’d gotten huffy and reminded her that he was in charge. Two possibilities lurked in her mind: one, he was playing single-combat warrior to beat the odds and win back her heart; two, he wanted to lose this case to punish her for what she’d done to him. She didn’t like either scenario, though the first was preferable.

  Chapter 9

  If it wasn’t going to be easy to impanel a jury in United States v. Elizabeth MacMann, finding a judge was presenting its own challenges. There were thirteen full-time judges on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Four had to recuse themselves because they had been appointed to the bench by the late President MacMann. Two more had to drop out because they had been appointed by the previous president, whom Ken MacMann had defeated. Another had been overheard by a caddie telling his golf partner on the seventh hole of Burning Bush Golf Club that the President “got what he had coming.” The caddie sold the quote to the National Perspirer tabloid for $10,000. Scratch judge. Another judge had been on a panel with Boyce at the Trial Lawyers Association convention years ago and had called Boyce “the worst human being on the planet” while discussing the topic “Getting Hitler Off: Rethinking Nuremberg Defense Strategies.”

  The media combed through the court transcripts and biographical profiles of the remaining judges to see what nuggety chunks of mischief might be embedded in their pasts. One judge, fresh out of college, had spent a summer working for a congressman who had insisted that Beth’s husband had been brainwashed in captivity and referred to him publicly as “the MacManchurian Candidate.” He was out. Another had protested against the Vietnam War in which President MacMann had so valiantly fought. Out. The gavel of yet another had to be pried from his fingers after it was reported that he had gone on a blind date twenty-five years ago with Babette Van Anka, whose name then was still Gertrude Himmelfarb. By now one dyspeptic columnist at The Washington Post suggested it would be simpler just to take Beth out back of the courthouse and shoot her.

  In the end, it came down to the one remaining judge on the bench. His name was Sylvester Umin, known to his colleagues as “Dutch.” He had been appointed to the bench two months before by President Harold Farkley. Up to then, he had been a senior partner in the distinguished Washington firm of Williams Kendall, specialists in impeachment and negligence law.

  Dutch Umin was in his early sixties. He had drowsy but watchful eyes and the Cheshire cat physique of a gourmet and oenophile. His vertical collection of Château Petrus made dinners at Mandamus, his Virginia mansion, memorable occasions. He collected Dutch master artwork, the source of his nickname.

  He was a man of formidable intellect who had clerked for the great Potter Stewart on the Supreme Court and over the course of a distinguished career had won impressive victories for clients ranging from left-wing firebombers to cocaine-snorting major-league baseball players to international grain corporations accused of using powdered insect dung to give a popular children’s breakfast cereal its distinctive crunch. But he had yet to try a single case as judge, and now by process of elimination he was—it. Overnight, he became the most famous jurist in the world. Within weeks, he would have name recognition among aborigines and Seychelles islands fishermen. He was not altogether delighted by this abrupt propulsion to celebrity. His glasses had developed a tendency to fog.

  Judge Dutch Umin’s first official duty in United States v. Elizabeth MacMann was to convey his dismay over the witness list that Boyce had submitted. It included 281 names, including the directors of the Secret Service and the FBI, the President of the United States, and most saucily of all, the deputy attorney general, who was prosecuting Beth. One columnist remarked that it was a wonder he had not subpoenaed Paul Revere to attest to the authenticity of the spittoon.

  The atmosphere in chambers was tense. Sandra Clintick, the deputy attorney general—who had not at all hungered to have this prosecution handed to her—had taken exception to Boyce’s demand that she herself testify. She was so mad that she avoided eye contact with Boyce. Never, she told the judge, had she heard of more appalling—make that atrocious—ethics. It was beyond insulting. The gloves were off, and they weren’t even in court yet.

  “Counselor?” Judge Dutch leaned back in his armchair, which gave off the creak of expensive leather. Knowing that the ordeal ahead would tax all his reserves, he had resolved to be as laconic as possible, even to the point of Zen.

  “Your Honor,” Boyce said, smiling, as if he were presenting the most reasonable proposition since Newton’s last law, “one of the foundations of our defense will be that this prosecution, ab initio”—he turned to the deputy AG—“sorry, ‘from the beginning’—”

  “I know what it means.”

  “It’s Latin.”

  “I know that.”

  “I wasn’t sure they still taught Latin when you—”

  “Your honor.”

  “Counsel.”

  “A significant part of our defense, Your Honor, will be that Madame Deputy Attorney General here—”

  “The name is Clintick. I don’t work in a whorehouse.”

  Boyce snorted. “I’d say that’s a matter of opinion.”

  “Your Honor.”

  “Counsel.”

  “We will establish that Mad—that the deputy attorney general is merely the smallest cog in a larger government conspiracy machine to bring murder charges against the former First Lady to further their own political agendas. Their evidence is disgraceful. Worse than disgraceful. I will annihilate it. Having done that, I will show by direct and cross-examination that Ms. Clintick conspired, along with other officers of government, to crucify Elizabeth MacMann on the altar of their own ambition. I understand, Your Honor, that this is a foul charge. I use it reluctantly, having no other recourse.” When Boyce got going, his language became florid in a nineteenth-century sort of way.

  Judge Umin tried not to smile. He concentrated on thinking about the crippling price he had just paid for his latest acquisition, a still life of a pear and eel by Govingus Koekkoek (1606–1647).

  “I won’t sit here and listen to this,” said the deputy AG. “I will certainly not sit in court and listen to it.”

  Judge Dutch creaked in his chair. “Why don’t I decide what we’ll do in court?”

  “Of course, Your Honor. I meant …”

  Bingo. Boyce always tried to rattle them before going into court, to see where their stress points were. This one’s stood out like rivets.

  “I’m hard-pressed to think of a precedent,” Judge Dutch said.

  “I can’t think of a precedent, either
,” Boyce interjected. “The executive branch conspiring with directors of the nation’s top security and law enforcement agencies to frame the widowed wife of a president in order to conceal their own rank animosities and evil designs—”

  “Steady, Counselor.”

  “I apologize, Judge. I forgot myself. But I feel myself stirred.”

  “Give me something concrete, not a Patrick Henry speech.”

  Boyce handed him a loose-leaf binder full of press clippings highlighted in bright colors, neatly tabbed.

  “As you know, Mrs. MacMann was no passive First Lady. She did not confine herself to serving tea to other wives and organizing Easter egg rolls on the White House lawn for the children of … cabinet officers.”

  The attorney general, father of five, had been conspicuous with his brood at the recent White House Easter egg roll.

  Boyce continued. “Beth MacMann was the most substantive First Lady in our history. This did not sit well with some. On occasion, as the documents in that binder will show, Mrs. MacMann was vocally, if always cautiously, critical of the FBI and the Secret Service. The former for what she viewed as incompetence for hiring a man with the middle name of Vladimir to head up its counterintelligence operations. The latter for its hiring practices, which she viewed as discriminatory. We will contend that these two agencies, which played so critical a role in her being dragged by the hair to the dock, were predisposed to exact revenge on her by concocting the evidence against her.”

  “Evidence, Counsel, evidence. These are press clippings.”

  “With all respect, you’re putting my client in a classic Catch-22 position. She cannot produce evidence without putting her accusers on the stand, yet you will not permit her to put them on the stand without first presenting evidence.”

  “I’ll consider it. But for your client’s sake, I wouldn’t put all your eggs in that basket. As for calling the President to testify, visualize a snowball. Now visualize the same snowball in hell.”