No Way to Treat a First Lady (7 page)

"I tried to be a good First Lady. I pushed through initiatives on child care, prescription drugs for the elderly, the environment, a lot of things."

"I know," Boyce said. "The bastards ought to be grateful, instead of getting all bent out of shape just because you killed their president."

Beth gave him a horrified look.

"So shall we dispense with the self-pity and get to work?"

She nodded. "Fair enough."

"We heard some bad news today. But we also heard some good news. Many of them, at least the males in our group"—Boyce looked at the screen of his laptop computer—"think that the President and the entire government hate you. I'm
very
pleased with that."

"You are?"

"Yes. We can accomplish wonderful things with that."

"Was there any other wonderful news?"

"Two-thirds thought Babette Van Anka's last movie stank. The one where she played the Israeli female tank commander. That's excellent news.
And
you did very, very well among certain demographic groups. Males twenty-five to forty-nine want to have oral sex with you."

"Why would you
ask
such a thing? It's mortifying."

"It would be mortifying if they didn't."

"Why"—Beth blushed—"that particular category?"

"Our research indicates that ninety-seven percent of heterosexual men want to have sex with attractive women. So this tells us nothing useful. But men only want to have oral sex—to perform oral sex—on women to whom they are especially attracted. This is great news for our side."

"I don't even know how to process that information."

Boyce scrolled. "We didn't score well with pet owners. They didn't like the fact that you didn't have a dog in the White House."

"You want me to go out and buy a sheepdog?"

"We could get you a puppy, but it's kind of late. Gays liked you, especially the hard-core lesbians."

"I score well among hard-core lesbians?"

"They love you. Probably because you crushed your husband's skull with a spittoon."

"I
didn't."

"Whatever. We'll be getting some deeper analysis on those numbers. Among the former military, we did not do well. Not at all. No surprise there, since you—since they think that you killed one of the nation's great military heroes. By the way, everyone—even the hardcore lesbians—thought you were a little dry-eyed at Arlington Cemetery during the burial."

"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."

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.

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.