No Way to Treat a First Lady (3 page)

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."

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 the 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."

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 first-rate 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."

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."