No Way to Treat a First Lady (26 page)

"It's incidents such as these," Alan Crudman wrote in an op-ed article for
The Boston Globe,
"that weaken Americans' faith in their legal system."

"I thought I'd already hit bottom," Boyce said to Beth, "but being looked down on by Alan Crudman gives new definition to bottom."

"He called me this morning," Beth said. "He wants to take the case. He wants to file a motion."

"Pass the hemlock. I'm listening."

"Mistrial for reasons of ineffective assistance of counsel. He thinks Dutch would go for it. Even if you don't get a mistrial, it's very solid grounds for a reversal after conviction."

Boyce chuckled darkly. "I'd sooner swallow leeches than spend ten minutes with Alan Crudman. But he's a helluva lawyer. You should consider it. Look at the scumbags he's gotten off."

Beth looked at him.

"Sorry. Didn't mean it that way. I meant, go for it."

"I told him to go screw himself."

"Beth, it's hard enough paying Alan Crudman a compliment. Don't make me work at it."

"I'm not going to ruin your life three times."

"I wouldn't feel it. You develop a callus after the second time. Look, it's not a bad idea he's got there. You can file an affidavit along with the motion saying that I
forced
you to take the stand against all your better instincts. You had no idea I was conspiring to tamper with the jury. And my getting thrown off the case has completely compromised your defense. You should be given the opportunity to start over. These are all perfectly good arguments for a mistrial. Dutch will have to go for it. He's painted himself into a corner. The Supreme Court would back him up in a second. You've got to do it. You have to do it for—"

"I don't want to hear that I have to do it for the Tummybug."

"Well, you do, Beth. Even if you don't want to hear it."

"I'm not going to. So forget it. We'll find some other way."

"At what point in your life did you decide that stubbornness was one of the cardinal virtues?"

"When at age eleven I saw that the world was ruled by men."

"Fine. Condemn our child to life in the prison playground."

"Maybe it would be better not to
have
the child."

They were silent.

"That's a terrible thing to say," Boyce said.

"I know. I didn't mean it. I was just trying to hurt you. I'm sorry." Beth considered her belly. "I'm going to start showing soon."

"What a media feast that's going to be. They ought to be paying us an entertainment fee. Think of the content we're providing."

Beth put her hands to her stomach.
"This
is content." She smiled.

"We go now to our legal correspondent."

"Peter,
another
tumultuous day in the MacMann case. We have just learned that Beth MacMann will take over her
own
defense. Mrs. MacMann is a lawyer, after all—it was at law school that she
met
Boyce Baylor and the late President—though she has never
practiced.
This is a highly unusual development. It's hard, if not impossible, to think of someone taking over their own defense in a murder trial at this late stage, but then just about everything about this case has been unusual."

"What will Boyce Baylor's role be? Will he have one?"

"His
role,
Peter, will consist of defending
himself on
the very serious charge of jury tampering. At the moment, we understand, he is occupied with moving
out
of the Jefferson Hotel, where he maintained his so-called war room. We've learned further that he is
suing
the Jefferson for wrongful eviction...."

The government had seized his bank accounts, so Boyce found what are politely called alternate arrangements across the river in Rosslyn, Washington's unbohemian left bank, a suburban sprawl of glassy highrises where most of the pedestrians work for various defense agencies and the cabdrivers come from countries badly disappointed by U.S. foreign policy.

It wasn't so bad, though living without the room service took some getting used to. The papers ran photographs of the outside of the motel juxtaposed with photos of the previous one, under the caption "How the mighty have fallen." The relative modesty of his new surroundings even gave him a bit of
nostalgie de la boue,
reminding him of his early days of defending corrupt union officials, mobsters, and—lowest of the low—providers of illegal soft money. He became a local celebrity at the Szechuan Sizzle Chinese restaurant around from his motel. The owner paid him the highest compliment a Chinese restaurateur can bestow: he didn't charge for the soup.

Boyce listened with one ear to the machinations of his legal team, who were busy filing motions and preparing a defense in the face of dismal and overwhelming evidence. But try as he might, Boyce had no interest in his own case. He did not relish the idea of spending five years in prison, surrounded by victims of inferior lawyering. All he could think about was Beth and Tummybug.

Judge Dutch had stopped short of placing Beth in custody, but just for good measure he had ordered that she be placed under a kind of house arrest. Marshals were ordered in to "protect" the house in Cleveland Park where she was staying. So she now had two rings of federal protection around her, her Secret Service detail on the inside and bulky men in windbreakers on the outside. At night, over a phone line that they were fairly sure was tapped, Beth and Boyce joked darkly about the tunnel the two of them were digging.

In the mornings, Boyce would show up in a taxicab, with at least two vans full of television camera crews following, and ride with her in her now even longer motorcade to the courtroom. She would get out at the front entrance. He sat in the car with the contemptuous Secret Service agents, watching the proceedings on a portable television set. During breaks, Beth would return to the car, parked in the courthouse basement, to get his comments and notes. As the TV correspondent would say, it was an unusual arrangement.

Beth had called to the stand the White House curator, F. Dickerson Twumb. The idea was to show that she so revered eighteenth-century American silverware that she never would have used it to crush the skull of her husband. It somewhat left open the suggestion that she'd have been happy to use some other less precious blunt object.

"Well," Beth said, entering the car with her folders and legal pads, followed by the faithful Vlonko.

"I'm uneasy with this witness," Boyce said. "He doesn't seem to like you very much, frankly."

"You have to understand about curators. They think it's
their
White House, and they regard all First Ladies—with the exception of Jackie Kennedy—as menopausal busybodies whose idea of decor is an Ethan Allen showroom. When we got to the White House, I had the temerity to suggest to him that I found Albert Bierstadt's landscapes boring, and he went into a snit from which he has apparently not yet recovered."

"Great witness for the defense." Boyce snorted.

"He did say I was particular about the silver."

"Vlonko?"

Vlonko shook his head. "Jury's not so fucking happy today. Not happy yesterday, either. Or the day before. Maybe they don't like army food."

"All right," Boyce said. "You go back in there and you grab this guy by his bow tie and get him the hell off the stand. Who's your next witness?"

"I want to recall Secret Service agent Birnam."

"Why?"

"I want to put it to him, 'If you think I was such a threat to the President, then why didn't you rush into the bedroom and shoot me?' "

Boyce shrugged. "Why not." He glanced furtively at Vlonko. Vlonko's look said it all.

Boyce was having a morose, solitary dinner of Chairman Mao chicken and crispy shredded beef at the Szechuan Sizzle before going back to his room. His eyes strayed to the television monitor over the bar. The sound was off, with the closed captioning on. On the screen he saw the flashing lights. The captioning scrolled:

CAPT. CARY GRAYSON, WHO PERFORMED THE AUTOPSY ON PRESIDENT KENNETH MACMANN, IS IN CRITICAL CONDITION FOLLOWING AN ACCIDENT ON THE GEORGE WASHINGTON PARKWAY HIS CAR WENT OFF THE ROAD AND HIT A TREE. HE WAS TAKEN TO NEARBY BETHESDA NAVAL HOSPITAL AND UNDERWENT SURGERY... POLICE SAY THERE MAY BE EVIDENCE THAT HE WAS INTOXICATED...

Intoxicated? Grayson? He called Beth on his cell phone. It didn't matter if the feds listened in, though his attorney, Judd Best, had been assured by the U.S. District Attorney's Office that there were no outstanding eavesdropping warrants on him.

"Were you planning on recalling Dr. Grayson?"

"No. Why?"

"He's in surgery and may not come out of it. Car crash."

"Poor man."

"Well, the poor man may have been drunk at the wheel when he went off the road into the tree."

"Grayson?"

"Turn on the news."

On the other end, Boyce heard the sound of the channel he was watching silently at the bar.

"Jeez," Beth said.

Boyce looked around to see if any reporters were listening in. He said into his cell phone, "Not to be morbid about it, but tomorrow morning I want you to go to Dutch and say, 'Look, I was planning to call this guy again and
now
look.' He'll ask you what you wanted to hear from Grayson. I'll think of something. Toxicology, whatever. But you'll say it's
crucial,
and without his testimony we—you—are being deprived
of vital
evidence. Wait."

"What?"

"I just thought of something. Pure genius!"

"Well?"

Boyce looked around again. "No, not on the phone. Tomorrow, on the way to court."

"Well?" she said next day as they were riding to court.

Boyce lowered his voice. "Wouldn't they love to hear this in the front seat up there." He whispered, "We—you—tell Dutch that you were going to recall Grayson to testify in greater detail about that suspicious postdeath imprinting of the Revere mark on Ken's forehead.
But they got to him before you could."

"Who got to him?"

"They—the Secret Service.
They ran him off the road."

Beth looked at him. "Boyce, honey, I know this has been an awful strain on you."

"Dutch'll hit the ceiling. But it doesn't matter. You bring it up in the closing arguments. Look—seventy-five percent of the American people
still
think that JFK was killed by his own people. Trust me, at least one juror will think,
Hmmmm.
And all you need is one juror."

"It's nuts."

"Of course it's nuts."

"I don't know if I have it in me." Beth sighed and sat back in the seat. "What I'd really like to do is go into that courtroom today and say, 'Here, here's what happened. Here's the truth of it.' "

"Beth, how many times do I have to tell you. The truth has no
place
in a court of law."

"I know, I know. But my belly is swelling, my tits won't fit in the bra anymore, they want to put me away. I'm tired."

Boyce spent a busy morning calling his shrinking group of media friendlies, trying to convince them that Dr. Grayson's mishap on the George Washington Parkway was no accident.

"Who," he said darkly, "had the motive? Who had the means?"

"You're saying the Secret
Service
tried to kill him?"

"I know. Hard to believe, isn't it? But that's what they said about Vince Foster."

"Boyce, Grayson was drunk. He was tanked."

"Exactly. And who had the means to plant the booze on him?"

"Oh, come on."

"If you don't want it, fine. I gotta go, that's
Newsweek
on the other line."

"No no no. Hold on. Do you
know
this, or are you guessing?"

"Did Woodward know?" Boyce said. "Did Bernstein know?"

It's an axiom of journalism that if you can get one paper to print a rumor, all the others will rush in to print it on the grounds that someone else did. It was for the best that poor Dr. Grayson was still in a postoperative coma after undergoing seven hours of brain surgery. By noon the next day, it was being speculated, mostly on the Internet, that his accident was no accident.

The Secret Service was being besieged by calls wanting to know if they had run him off the road—to keep him from testifying that the Revere mark
had
been planted by them. The day after that, the
Times, Post,
and half a dozen other pillars of journalistic reputability were running items headlined:

The Secret Service directed inquiries to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where an embarrassed doctor stood before the podium at a press conference to say that Dr. Grayson's blood alcohol level upon arrival at the emergency room was—clearing of throat—"slightly elevated above the legal limit."

How elevated?

Clearing of the throat. "Point one nine."

God in heaven, the man was stinking! Plastered! Navy drunk! Oh, what do you do with a drunken sailor, so
ear-lie
in the
mor-ning?

Another navy doctor, this one with more ribbons than Christmas morning on his white chest, was trotted out to say that Captain Grayson was a man of impeccable reputation who was not only the navy's top pathologist, but had served his country valorously in war. Naturally, the President's death and his involvement, his testimony, had been a strain. There was no excuse for what had happened, but no one had been harmed but Dr. Grayson, and so while we all pray for his recovery, let us bear in mind that he surely is as human as the rest of us.

The media, sensing that moral outrage and opprobrium might be out of place, ceased baying for the time being and set up a death watch outside Bethesda Naval.

But
why
was he drunk? Why was this white-gowned, medal-wearing paragon of military and medical virtue driving blotto into trees?

Boyce hid from his media pursuivants in the Szechuan Sizzle, poring over the transcript of Grayson's testimony, over the toxicology reports from the President's autopsy, over everything pertaining to the doctor. No clues to this seemingly out-of-character behavior presented themselves. At the trial, the doctor himself had been an exemplar of professional calm in every way. Reviewing the tapes, Boyce saw that his expression had been serene and unruffled. Following his testimony, the women's magazines had been full of his pictures.
People
magazine had declared him one of its "50 Most Reassuring Men in America," an event that according to reports had given everyone at Bethesda Naval a good chuckle, no one more so than Dr. Grayson.