No Way To Treat a First Lady Read online

  Boyce smiled. “I am at the mercy of Your Honor’s wise and learned judgment.”

  Chapter 10

  There are few spectacles more pathetic than a roomful of otherwise responsible people trying to squirm out of a civic duty enshrined in Magna Carta as one of the signal boons of democracy. On the other hand, who in his right mind wants to serve on a jury?

  Impaneling a jury for United States v. Elizabeth MacMann was more daunting. When the prospective jurors entered Judge Umin’s courtroom with the downcast shuffle of the damned, most of them took one look at the judge, Boyce, and the deputy attorney general and uttered the same silent cry: Oh God, no—not that case!

  Boyce and his jury consultant studied their faces intently. It was easy enough to spot the ones who were horrified at the thought of spending the next year in some ghastly motel with seventeen of their “peers.”

  Others positively radiated delight, either at the thought of becoming part of history, or at the prospect of all those lucrative book deals. Juror Number Five: My Story. Film rights to Warner Brothers for seven figures. A top New York publisher had been quoted in the Times saying that a book by the first juror to be dismissed would fetch at least $1 million. But a juror who held out against the other jurors, either for or against conviction—that juror, the publisher said, could go start pouring the concrete for that dream house.

  “This is a capital murder case,” the judge began on the first day of jury selection. “Capital means that conviction carries a potential penalty of death. Normally a case like this could take months to try.” Groans came from men and women in expensive suits who looked as if they measured their time in minutes. “But this is not a normal case, so it is difficult to predict. It could take up to one year. It could take more. Especially”—he glanced sideways at Boyce—“since an extensive witness list has been submitted by the defense.” Gasps, groans, chests were clutched, bottles of nitroglycerin tablets rattled.

  Boyce and his jury consultant watched the faces of the jury pool. Boyce’s jury consultant was a man named Pinkut Vlonko. Before going into the lucrative business of advising trial lawyers on jury selection, “Pinky” Vlonko had been for over twenty years the CIA’s top psychological profiler. His job was to figure out which of the CIA’s top people were most likely to be selling secrets to the Russians or Chinese; also, to determine whether Saddam Hussein was technically a malignant narcissist or simply a fruitcake. Pinky had worked with Boyce on many cases. Between them, they had the best juror “radar” in the business. Boyce was fascinated by psychology. After being dumped by Beth, he had taken a master’s degree in applied psychology.

  The two of them had prepared a juror’s questionnaire extensive even by their standards. It consisted of eight hundred questions. Number 11: Did you vote for President MacMann? Number 636: Are you regular at bowel movements? During his years at the CIA, Pinky had discovered that defectors and moles—switchers of allegiance—tended to be constipated.

  The questionnaire had occasioned another heated session in Judge Dutch’s chambers. Ms. Clintick, the DAG, had pronounced it an abomination. Boyce had thereupon produced a questionnaire used by the attorney general’s own pollster when he had run unsuccessfully for governor years ago. It was 120 questions long. He’d waved it in the DAG’s face. A compromise was struck. Boyce’s questionnaire was trimmed to 650 questions. This was more or less the number of questions he and Pinky wanted to begin with. Boyce’s rule since childhood had always been, Ask for a lot more than you need so that you end up with what you want.

  Boyce’s amiable but relentless grilling of the jurors, carried live on TV—Judge Dutch had decided it would be more complicated not to allow cameras in the court—led one pundit to venture that the only jury Boyce would be satisfied with would be one consisting of blind deaf-mutes with an IQ of 75. Not at all, Boyce countered cheerfully. All he wanted was “a level playing field.” Was it unreasonable to seek out jurors whose minds had not been “hopelessly polluted by the daily diet of deplorable lies, innuendos, and vilification manufactured by the government’s agents of smear and malediction”? If finding an unbiased jury required a little patience, who could object?

  A “little patience” ended up taking four months.

  Chapter 11

  You should have been there,” Boyce said. “I thought he was going to stab me with a Dutch letter opener. This is going to be fun.”

  “I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself,” Beth said.

  Boyce put his hand on hers. “I’m just trying to get you to relax.”

  Beth looked anything but relaxed. She’d lost the weight Boyce had ordered her to shed. Her cheekbones were more prominent now, and the eyes had the darty intensity of someone dreaming of deep-crumb coffee cake. Looking at her, Boyce suddenly felt guilty. He wanted to pull the motorcade over and rush in and get her a chocolate milkshake.

  “You okay, kiddo?”

  “Fine.”

  “You look great, for someone who hasn’t eaten in six months.” The beauty magazines had tracked Beth’s change in physical appearance. Vogue had done an article entitled “Diet of the Millennium.” It quoted a leading Hollywood “aesthetic consultant”—formerly “makeup man”—saying, “If this is what killing your husband can do for you, then more women ought to considering clubbing their husbands to death.”

  Vanity Fair magazine pined, “If only Natalie Wood were still alive to play her in the movie. That limpid sexuality, the steel hidden beneath the puddly dark eyes, the tragic glamour.”

  Variety reported that Catherine Zeta-Jones was “desperate” to play Beth in the movie. Further, that Joe Eszterhas, the dramatically hirsute and extravagantly compensated screenwriter, was holed up in a bungalow on Maui pounding out draft number seven of his script, entitled Spittoon.

  All this Boyce had tried to keep from Beth. He needed her focused. She rolled down the window.

  “Ma’am,” said Hickok, the Secret Service agent in the front passenger seat. Hickok was jumpy these days. The death threats had been increasing.

  Beth ignored him. The air was June—humid and sweet with moldering blossoms. She’d been a virtual prisoner since last fall in the house in Cleveland Park, under permanent surveillance by a press camp that never dropped below fifty people, even during the Christmas holidays. The house, built by a friend of George Washington, had the happy name of Rosedale but had been renamed Glamis by a pundit, after the castle in Macbeth.

  Beth left the window down. She’d be damned if they’d deprive her of a few gulps of fresh air on her way to be tried.

  They drove along Pennsylvania Avenue to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia at Third and Constitution. She thought of the January day three years before when she and her husband, freshly sworn in as President, had walked past the spot, waving to cheering crowds. Normally this would be enough to make a couple happy. Not the MacManns. The night before, at Blair House, Beth picked up the phone to make a call and heard her husband on the line talking to a well-known society woman in New York, the trophy wife of a billionaire. They were making plans for an afternoon hump at his New York hotel while Beth was across town at the United Nations, addressing a conference on the role of women in the new millennium. She reflected that the role of women in the new millennium seemed to resemble the role of women in the last millennium: on the wrong end of the screwing.

  She put down the phone, went into the next room, picked up a lamp, and was about to conk him with it when a vision made her stop—the vision of herself twelve hours later holding the Bible as Ken took the oath of office, looking at him adoringly, his head wrapped in a bandage. She put the lamp down. And Ken smirked. If she was dry-eyed at his funeral, she was drier still at his swearing-in.

  Now the motorcade pulled up in front of the courthouse. This was Boyce’s idea.

  “Okay,” he said, “remember, we’re going to walk in there like we own the place. By the time we’re through with these jerks, they’ll be the ones on tria
l.”

  Boyce didn’t quite believe this, but going into court was like taking the field in a game. You had to pump up your players. You had to pump yourself up.

  There were so many satellite trucks, it looked like a NASA tracking station. It was a scene. Media, cops, and demonstrators with signs—ASSASSIN!, FRY THE BITCH!, FREE BETH!

  She was wearing a black pantsuit copied from one of the leading designers, with enough changes so that the media wouldn’t be able to say that she had looked “stunning in Armani.” Half a dozen designers had called Boyce offering to dress her for the trial. Boyce had turned them all down. What’s more, he’d informed the media that he had. On the first day of her trial, Beth looked stylish but sober: a smart-looking woman in her early forties on her way to a business meeting. The white blouse, Boyce joked to her, symbolized her innocence. It was open enough to draw the eyes of the male jurors without offending the women. The string of pearls had been a gift from Ken, bought by his secretary when he forgot her birthday.

  “Okay, here we go,” he said. “Got your mantra ready?”

  She gave him a tight smile. The mantra, devised by Boyce, was “When we walk in, there’ll be one single thought in your head: I have come to accept their apology.”

  That night, after the first day of the Trial of the Millennium, her entrance into the court was shown on an estimated 72 percent of the world’s television sets. Her swanlike serenity, amid a clamor that would have rattled a professional wrestler, was widely commented upon.

  Boyce was cheered by DAG Clintick’s opening statement. She delivered it in an earnest more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone. He was so delighted that he decided to break his rule and depart—slightly—from his own memorized fifteen-thousand-word opening statement.

  The essence of the United States’s case against Elizabeth Tyler MacMann, Ms. Clintick averred, was straightforward: The President was found dead in his own bedroom. The autopsy established time of death between 3:15 and 5:00 A.M., and that death had resulted from an epidural hematoma caused by blunt-force trauma to the skull five centimeters above the right eyebrow. Photographic enlargement of the bruise revealed the distinctive imprint of the hallmark of an antique Paul Revere silver spittoon. The spittoon, used as a wastebasket, was found not in its usual place in the bedroom, by the First Lady’s side of the king-size bed, but by the door, on its side. The jury would hear testimony from a Secret Service agent who would testify that he had heard a violent argument coming from the presidential bedroom between 2:10 and 2:20 A.M. They would hear from numerous people who had attended the state dinner that night that the President had been in fine spirits and health, no bruise or Paul Revere hallmark on his forehead. An overnight guest in the White House would testify that she said good night to an unbruised President at 12:30 A.M. They would hear testimony from numerous friends and associates of the First Couple as to the turbulence of their marital relations.

  When all this evidence was presented, the jury would have no choice but to conclude, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Beth MacMann had callously and cold-bloodedly murdered her husband as he slept, in their own bed. A husband who, as it happened, was President of the United States of America. They would therefore have no choice but to find her guilty not only of murder in the first degree, but of assassination, the gravest crime in the land. This litany of villainy took slightly under two hours to deliver.

  Boyce rose, buttoned his jacket, and walked toward the jury box. He rested his hand on the edge of it as he walked from one end of it to the far end, as if it were a banister. He had learned this from Edward Bennett Williams, the great trial attorney: Show them you’re not afraid of them, show them you’re comfortable everywhere in the courtroom, show them it’s your courtroom.

  He turned, faced them, and said in a quiet but commanding voice, “Good morning.” His jury consultant, Vlonko, noted that eight out of eighteen returned his greeting. Resting one elbow on the jury box, he began. No podium, no notes—unlike the DAG. He then launched into his imitation of a lawyer speaking from the heart, one of the great dramatic roles.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, that was a pretty good speech you just heard by the deputy attorney general. She was, as you know, appointed to her office, a sacred trust, by her boss, the attorney general, who got his job from Mrs. MacMann’s late husband. She and her superior, the attorney general of the United States, seem to have held on to their jobs, despite the change in administration.” Pause. “That is unusual. But not irrelevant to this case. It is also highly unusual for a deputy attorney general of the United States to personally prosecute a case. Extremely so. One might ask, Why is she prosecuting this case, when she could be doing what a deputy attorney general does? Namely, keeping the nation safe. Working on behalf of those whose civil liberties have been violated? On behalf of those whose livelihoods are threatened by giant monopolies? On behalf of those who are persecuted for the color of their skin, for their sexual orientation—”

  “Objection.”

  “Proceed, Counsel.”

  “Now, ambition in itself is not a bad thing. All of us, all of you, have ambitions. To move up in the world. To earn the respect of your fellow citizens, to save money to send your children to college—”

  In the press section, heads turned. Someone said, “Oy.” There’s no more suspicious sound than that of a lawyer proclaiming the decency of his fellow man.

  “—to make better lives for ourselves. That is ambition, and there’s nothing wrong with it.” Pause. “But … but when ambition consists of exploiting a tragedy and the misery of a widow”—this would be the first of 1,723 mentions by Boyce of the word widow during the trial—“in the service of a conspiracy by the same government whose sworn duty it is to protect us, then, ladies and gentlemen, decency shudders, honor flees, and darkness has surely descended upon the land.”

  The deputy AG rose. “Your Honor, this is intolerable.”

  “This is a court, Mr. Baylor, not a church.”

  “Well, there I agree with the deputy attorney general. I agree that it is intolerable that a woman who has dedicated her life to public service, to feeding the poor and underprivileged, caring for the elderly, seeing to it that working men and women have jobs and portable health care—while also making sure that business and entrepreneurs are not overtaxed and over-regulated by government”—a little something for the Republicans on the jury—“I agree that it is intolerable that such a woman be vilified and unjustly charged with a heinous act.” Pause. “Simply because she dared to speak out against injustice and wrongdoing. Yes, I would say that the deputy attorney general has it exactly right. It is intolerable. And after the facts have been presented, you too will find it so. This case is designated United States versus Elizabeth MacMann. Well, that’s about the size of it. The government, the entire United States government … versus one single woman.”

  Boyce walked slowly over to the defense table and stood near Beth. She hadn’t quite anticipated a J’accuse! of this amperage. She tried to conceal her embarrassment by staring blankly at the table.

  Having placed himself next to the Widow MacMann, Boyce continued.

  “There is a philosophical principle called Occam’s razor. It goes like this: Never accept a complicated explanation where a simple one will do. Smart man, Mr. Occam. The prosecution—the government—would have you believe that the explanation for President MacMann’s demise is more complicated than landing a person on the moon. They will bring in charts, timelines, computer-enhanced photographs, to convince you of a scenario so wild, so convoluted, so unbelievable, that to process it, to take it all in, would require the intellectual capacity of an Albert Einstein or Martin Luther King. You recall that the judge here explained to you during voir dire that this case might take some time to try?” Boyce chuckled. “Well, brace yourself, ladies and gentlemen, because it might just take years for the deputy attorney general to convince you of the preposterous scenario upon which her case depends.”

  Boyce sighed deepl
y at the monstrous injustice of it all. He aimed his next burst of rhetorical flatulence at the heavens beyond the ceiling, where surely God and His archangels were listening, sharpening their swords of righteousness.

  “Be prepared for arguments that would make Jesus weep and Einstein’s head spin. Be prepared to hear that a mark on the late President’s forehead was put there … by Paul Revere.”

  The correspondent for The New Yorker magazine leaned over and whispered to the Vanity Fair reporter, “I love this guy.”

  “That’s right,” Boyce continued. “Paul Revere’s silversmith mark. Supposedly from a spittoon Mr. Revere made about the time of the American Revolution. Well, sit back and get comfortable. They’re going to bring in photographic blowups of a tiny spot on the President’s forehead. Experts—that is, they call themselves experts—with expensive, government-supplied laser pointers, will point at these photographs like they were aerial reconnaissance maps of Afghanistan. They’ll say, ‘See this teeny-tiny part here? We know it’s hard to see, but that’s Paul Revere’s initials on the President’s skull. Can’t you see that? Are you blind? Why, any fool could see it!’ Well, ladies and gentlemen, that’s exactly what the government thinks of you—fools. To be manipulated! Um-hum.”

  Jurors seven and nine were nodding along as if it were a Baptist sermon. Say it, brother!

  Boyce shook his head bitterly in wonder. The next words exploded from his mouth with such force that the front row of jurors recoiled.

  “A spittoon!”

  The stenographer started.

  “The so-called murder weapon. An antiquated device going back to the days when men chewed tobacco. How fitting, ladies and gentlemen, that the government’s chief piece of evidence should be a receptacle … for spit.”

  The New York Post headline the next day was:

  SHAMELESS: I SPIT ON YOUR EVIDENCE!