No Way to Treat a First Lady (32 page)

"Objection. Witness is not in a position to make a medical evaluation as to the reliability of the deposition."

Heads turned in surprise. It was Sandy Clintick. Whose side was she on, anyway? The consensus among the pixel punditariat was that with Boyce Baylor removed, the deputy AG now lacked an opponent "really worth hating."

"Sustained," said the judge. "You will confine yourself to answering the question put to you directly, Ms. Van Anka."

Beth continued, "You heard what Captain Grayson said in his deposition?"

"I
heard."

"You told the court that you applied Viagra, mixed with moisturizer, to your... to the... to the relevant area. Is that correct?"

"Yes."

"How much Viagra did you use?"

"What do I look like, Lee Harvey Oswald? I wanted the man to be happy. Not dead."

Boyce typed,
NOT FOR YOU TO DETERMINE. PS YOUR LAST MOVIE SUCKED.

"That's not for you to determine, Ms. Van Anka. That's a question that can only be resolved by a medical authority."

"A medical authority who falsifies autopsy reports and gives deposition when's he doped to the gills? Please. I wouldn't entrust an ingrown toenail to the man. May he rest in peace."

"Objection."

"Sustained. Ms. Van Anka, you are to answer the questions."

"This
is why my people left Europe."

"One more comment and I will find you in contempt."

Boyce typed,
JUMP IN—NOW!! IT'S THEIR STRATEGY, TO FORCE A MISTRIAL. CONTEMPT → HOSTILE JURY → DISMISSAL. LET'S WIN
THIS
ONE NOT WAIT FOR THE NEXT.

"Babette," Beth said.

Babette started at Beth's use of her first name.

"Sorry. Ms. Van Anka. We—I—only want to find out how much Viagra you used that night. That's all. Under oath, please, just tell the court how many pills you crushed up and mixed in with the cream."

"You mean, honestly?"

The courtroom exploded with laughter. Alas, the irony was lost on Babette, who had lived for too long in a community where insincerity was the norm.

"Honestly." Beth smiled.

"Three. The fifty-milligram ones. I just wanted the man to be able to perform, not hold up the tent."

"Three pills? The blue ones?"

"Like this." Babette formed a diamond shape with her thumbs and forefingers. "You know, you can split them in two, but I figure, why?"

"I see your point."

Suddenly the two women were like old friends, chatting away knowledgeably about how much Viagra their partners required.

"They're not fatal," Babette said. "I mean, a ham sandwich can be fatal if you choke on it. I read the directions. One night I gave Max three. He was a bit flushed in the face. But he didn't die. Right now I could give him
ten
Viagras."

"Did you administer it to your husband the same way you administered it to mine?"

"No. I—well, you know how men don't like to admit?"

"Oh, I know."

"I crushed them up and put them in his borscht."

"I see. Just one or two final questions, Ms. Van Anka. How did it occur to you to administer the Viagra to my—to the President in this way?"

"I couldn't get to his soup. The Secret Service sees you putting powder in the President's soup and they open fire. I have a friend who does it this way, with the moisturizer. She said it worked. It worked. Well, up to a point."

"Thank you, Ms. Van Anka. No further questions at this time. Reserve the right to recall the witness."

Beth looked down at her laptop.

PUT IT IN MY SOUP AND I'LL SHOOT YOU.

"Do we believe her that she ground up only three pills?" Beth said. "I wouldn't put it past her to feed the whole bottle into a blender."

"Yes," Boyce said. "I think for once she was actually telling the truth. But Grayson said he had three hundred milligrams' worth in him. That leaves three more pills unaccounted for. Did he have a prescription?"

"Are you kidding? Every time the White House doctors give a president a Tylenol, it's front-page news. He would never have gotten a prescription."

"Did you ever see any in his toilet kit?"

"I never went into his toilet kit."

"You didn't?"

"Not after I found a twelve-pack of rubbers in it."

"Twelve-pack? When did he have time to run the country? But assuming he had the pills—who gave them to him?"

Beth thought. "It would have to be someone he trusted. Trusted absolutely."

She said the name.

"We've got to be sure. If we get him up there on the stand and he says no, it'll look like we're just fishing. And we can't subpoena eighty of his best friends and ask them if they were slipping the President hard-on pills on the sly. They'd lie anyway, and who's to contradict them?"

"The advantage of this witness," Beth said, "is that he can't lie under oath."

"Defense calls Damon Blowwell."

Damon Blowwell seemed uncharacteristically subdued. Normally he looked like a pit bull who hadn't been fed in three days.

Beth asked that he be given the oath again, even though he was still technically bound by the first.

"Mr. Blowwell, you are a born-again Christian, are you not?"

"I am."

"And you have just taken an oath swearing, before God, that the evidence you give will be truthful, is that about correct?"

"I'm not a liar, if that's what you are implying."

BACK OFF,
Boyce typed.
GIVE HIM ROOM.

"I'm implying exactly the opposite, Mr. Blowwell. I have only one question to ask you today. Did my husband ask you to provide him with Viagra?"

Blowwell's lower lip disappeared into the upper. Every fiber in the man's mortal body wanted to say no, but the soul that he had rededicated to the Risen Lord was whispering,
The truth shall set ye free.

"He might have." It hung there for a second or two before he added, "Yes, he did. He did."

Murmurmurmur.

"And how much did you provide him with?"

"One bottle."

"Containing approximately how many pills?"

"One hundred, I believe."

"Did you do this on one occasion, or more?"

"Yes."

"How many occasions, approximately?"

"Half a dozen. More, maybe."

Murmurmurmurmur.

"So you provided him with as many as six hundred, or more, pills?"

"That would be correct."

"And approximately when did you last fill the President's prescription, as it were?"

"It would have been about the middle of September."

"A few weeks before he died?"

"That's correct."

Blowwell's expression, for the first time that anyone could recall in public, took on a look of terrible pain. No one could remember ever before seeing Damon Blowwell look vulnerable. The man was crumpling.

"It was an accident, Damon," Beth said tenderly. "There's no need to blame yourself"

"Objection," said Sandy Clintick, almost reluctantly.

"Sustained Mrs. MacMann," said Judge Dutch, "if you have a question for the witness, ask it."

"No further questions for the witness, Your Honor. Thank you, Mr. Blowwell."

"Yes, ma'am. I—want to add something."

Judge Dutch said, "Very well, Mr. Blowwell."

"I want to apologize to Mrs. MacMann."

For the sake of what remained of the national dignity, the exhumation of President Kenneth MacMann was carried out under wraps during the hours of two and five A.M. This did not deter the TV networks from providing live coverage of the event, consisting of telephoto nightvision lenses aimed at a dark tent with soldiers standing in front of it while commentators passed the time by speculating about what was going on inside.

"For an operation like this, Tom, they would use, probably, a backhoe, in conjunction with—there would be a backup backhoe, in the event the primary backhoe was for whatever reason unable to dig, or malfunctioned."

"How deep is the President buried?"

"My information is that the President is between six and eight vertical feet beneath the stone
plaza
that was erected, the one that was placed over him after the burial."

"So they have to go through that first, correct?"

"Yes, and that's tough Vermont granite, of course."

"Once they've gotten the casket to the surface, do they—what happens then?"

"We're told that the casket, which is within a bronze outer casket, to prevent—that everything, the inner and outer caskets, will be loaded onto a military transport and taken to the National Institutes of Health."

"No more Bethesda Naval autopsies."

"No. And of course it is ironic that the NIH, where this second autopsy will be performed, under the supervision of a special master of evidence appointed by the court and
six
independent pathologists and toxicologists, none of them connected with the armed services, is practically right across the
street
from Bethesda Naval Hospital."

"One thing I'm not clear on—why wasn't the President embalmed?"

"It's standard procedure in cases of murder or suspicious death, Tom,
not
to embalm. In case they have to exhume the body for further medical testing. If you embalm a body, that's it as far as further toxicology testing goes."

"Talk to us for a moment about formaldehyde...."

"Did you watch?" Boyce said.
"Honestly?"

"I was working on my concluding argument."

"You won't have to give one if the tox report comes out the way it should."

"I..."

"What is it? Did he kick?"

"No. Nothing. Just a procedural point I was going to ask you about. I've forgotten. I'll ask you about it when I see you. When will they know?"

"Possibly this afternoon. Toxicologists are a pain in the ass. They love to take forever. They know everything's hanging on them, so they get to be the center of attention. Did you see the
Times?"

"I've given up newspapers."

"You might want to check out the front page of today's. There's a poll."

"Has the procedure"—the word Beth used for exhumation—"caused my remaining four percent of supporters to hate me?"

"Quite the opposite. Your numbers are up, as you'd put it. Seventy-five percent feel the government owes you an apology. That's quite a reversal. You should be pleased."

Beth sighed. "Yes, that's nice."

"You've gone from being Lady Bethmac to Wonged Woman. You're not happy?"

"My husband is on a metal table somewhere. You're facing five years for saving me from myself. Having created the mother of all scandals, I'm about to become a mother and haven't the slightest confidence that I won't screw that up, too. 'Happy' isn't quite the word for what I feel right now. I better get back to my concluding argument. Just in case Dr. Grayson really was gaga on morphine and hallucinating the whole thing."

"Whatever happens, you're going to be a brilliant mother. You're going to be the mother of all mothers. Do you know why?"

"No idea."

"To make up for screwing up everything else in your life. Including my life."

"That's pretty good motivation."

"Folks," CBS News anchorman Dan Rather told his viewers, looking as if he might, finally, have a fatal nosebleed on live television, "this case has got more evolutions than a species in the Galapagos. We are told that a Dr. Laftos Crogenos, chief pathologist of the team that has performed the second autopsy on the remains of President MacMann, will be making an announcement shortly. Bob, that name, Laftos Crogenos, has more vowels in it than a bowl of alphabet soup after buzzards have finished picking out all the consonants. What do we know about him?"

"Dan, Dr. Crogenos is Greek, originally. But he is a
naturalized
American citizen—"

"So his sympathies, naturally, would be above question?"

"There's apparently a
saying,
Dan, in the pathology community, that there
are
no nationalities around an autopsy table."

"Good. That's what Americans at this point need to hear."

"Dr. Crogenos has been for many years chairman of the Department of Forensic Medicine at Johns Hopkins medical school. He has performed over fifteen
thousand
autopsies and is considered to be one of the best pathologists in the
world.
In the words of one colleague, this man can open you up from stem to stern with his eyes closed."

"This is no roadkill armadillo on Route 77 north of Corpus Christi he's working on, but a former president of the United States of America."

"There he is now. Dr. Crogenos is approaching the podium, accompanied by the five other medical examiners...."

"How does he look to you, Bob? What can we say from his expression?"

"Dan, it can't be
easy
examining the corpse of a, well,
any
corpse. Especially one that's been in the ground for over a year. But this one in particular, with the whole world watching over your shoulder, as it were. It has to be
tremendous
pressure."

"I'd be jumpier than a coked-up Mexican who's just found half a
cucaracha
in his guacamole. Let's hear what he has to say."

Dr. Crogenos's statement took less than five minutes to read. As he spoke, his face was bathed in thousands of flashes. It was done with as much dignity as could be mustered. He announced that the President had been killed by a "probably accidental" overdose of sildenafil citrate. There was evidence of "moderately advanced" coronary heart disease. An estimated 300 milligrams of Viagra had put too great a strain on the heart, bringing about lethal cardiac arrhythmia. The penile epidermis showed traces of sildenafil citrate as well as ingredients commonly found in high-end brands of moisturizing cream. There was no evidence of an epidural hematoma. The bruise on his forehead, though pronounced, had not been fatal.

At this point, Dr. Crogenos looked at his colleagues and sighed. If the Republic lasted a thousand years, schoolchildren in ages hence would remember President Kenneth MacMann as vividly as, if not more vividly than, Presidents Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt. His place in history was assured.