No Way to Treat a First Lady (19 page)

"Okay. We'll talk about it after court today. Jesus, look at the time. We're going to be late. Have the un-Secret Service drive you in through the basement garage. I'll meet you inside."

"I'm going in the front door, as I have every day."

"Don't say anything to anyone about testifying. Beth?"

She'd hung up.

Confronted with this fresh hell—as Dorothy Parker put it—Perri had only one way to proceed: full steam ahead. Somewhat nervously, she rehearsed her indignation and dialed Boyce's cell phone, his super-secret cell phone, the one whose number he gave out only to death row wardens entrusted with the temporary care and feeding of his less successful clients.

"Is this
true?"
Perri demanded, dispensing with the usual, "Hi, honey!"

"I'm on my way to court," Boyce said. "Can we talk about this later?"

So it
was
true. As it happened, Perri had been the source of the leak to
The Washington Post.
She had called up Grove and told him that she had walked in on Beth and Boyce in the act. Call it an educated gambit.

"You bastard." Perri faked a stifled sob.

"Look, baby, I'm"—what a morning—"it's got nothing to do with you."

"Obviously not."

"I'll come up this weekend. We'll go to La Grenouille. Champagne, foie gras, that Dover sole with that sauce you like. Grand Marnier soufflé." Just what he needed in the middle of the Trial of the Millennium—a hysterical betrayed girlfriend, with her own television show, costarring Alan Crudman as the Greek chorus.

"You think I can be bought off with a
soufflé?
What do you think I am, some
flight attendant?"

"Those happen to be the best soufflés in the world."

"Screw the soufflés!"

"Perri honey, I've been under intense pressure here. You have no idea."

My God,
he thought,
I sound like Babette Van Anka.

"You could be disbarred for screwing your client, you know."

"Honey, lawyers screw their clients all the time. And make a good living."

"I'm calling the D.C. Bar Ethics Committee."

"Okay, okay. Listen, I'm pulling up at the courthouse right now. You can probably see me on your TV. Do you see me? That's me. I'm waving. That's for you." He made a kissing sound. "I'll call you the second I'm free. Okay?... Okay?... Perri?"

She'd hung up. Not yet ten o'clock and already two for two.

After court that day, they were waiting for him as his car exited the courthouse basement garage. The driver had to stop or he would have crushed a dozen photographers and cameramen. They swarmed around the car, encircling it, scanning the inside with their lenses. Boyce was no stranger to paparazzi, but this was an entirely new level of interest. Now he had insight into what it was to be a Princess Diana. Not wishing to have film footage of his car speeding away from a clamoring, shrieking press become a permanent part of the Boyce Baylor videotape archive, he rolled down the window, smiled, and said, "She's in the trunk." They liked that. They let him go after a few pointless, shouted questions.

Beth had made it abundantly clear, over a strained atmosphere and tuna-fish sandwiches in the soundproof defense room, that she now more than ever planned to take the stand. This led to their most candid discussion about the night of September 28-29.

"If you're committed to going through with this," Boyce said, "then you'd better tell me everything I need to know about what happened. Tell me everything. Including what I really
didn't
want to know."

"All right," Beth said. "He came to bed after screwing that over-the-hill hooker—"

"Stop. Stop right there." Boyce sighed. "You'll recall I spent days doing one of the best cross-examinations of my career—and I don't say that to boast—rehabilitating that 'over-the-hill hooker,'
precisely
so that the jury would conclude that she had
not
been screwing the late President. Which conveniently removed your motive for killing him. And now the first thing you tell me is he was in there doing push-ups with her. Beth, do you understand why this is suicidal?"

"Okay. Ask the question again."

"Would you tell the court what happened on that night?"

"My husband came to bed about two-thirty A.M.—"

"Why so late?"

"I didn't ask."

"Oh,
that's
convincing."

"He's the President of the United States. They get up all the time in the middle of the night to save the world."

"Weren't you curious as to what crisis had him up in the middle of the night?"

"The crisis in his crotch."

"Very good," Boyce said. "We got two questions into a cross-examination before you admitted to killing him. Here are a few more. Did you ever assault your husband? Did he require medical treatment afterwards? Was it your habit to throw heavy objects at him? Did you kill your husband? Did you assassinate the President of the United States?"

"Finished?"

"Not nearly."

"I woke up. It was after two-thirty by the clock. I heard a sound. It was the President, getting into bed. He was frequently up at night, phone calls, emergencies. I didn't think anything of it. I... no, that doesn't really work, does it? Okay, you want to know what
really
happened that night?"

"Yes, Mrs. MacMann. Would you tell the jury what
really
happened that night."

"Do you want to hear this?"

"Personally, I'm dying to. But if I were you, I'd stop right there."

"If I tell them what happened, they'll believe me."

"I think you spent too long in politics."

"They'll believe the truth."

"You did whack him with the Revere ware, or didn't you?"

"Not
that
hard."

Boyce buried his face in his hands. "Oh, great."

"I didn't throw it that hard. He barely flinched. Usually he goes down when I throw something at him."

"Be sure to mention that."

"I've hit him much harder before. The time I threw the lamp at him? Four stitches. He had the press secretary say he swallowed a pretzel wrong and passed out and hit his chin on the way down."

"Well, it lets you off the hook. We'll just explain to the jury that he didn't actually die because you bashed him in the skull with a heavy metal object. He died—of something else. His war wounds..."

"But that's just it. He did. He had to. Look, he was alive and breathing when he put his head on the pillow. He was smirking."

"You didn't... get up in the middle of the night and finish him off? Beth?"

"What do you take me for?"

"I know what killed him."

"What?"

"Gamma rays from outer space."

"I don't know what happened. Maybe she screwed him to death. I don't know, except that I'm not guilty. And I won't have people thinking I am and that you got me off. If you won't help me, I'll find someone who will."

When Boyce got back to the hotel at the end of the day, the police had erected barriers outside. In addition to the mob, he counted six satellite trucks. They were all hoping for a glimpse of at least half of the Fun Couple of the Millennium.

Above he heard a helicopter.

He motioned the driver to go around. His era of basement garages had begun.

Back in his suite, he slumped into a chair and fought the temptation to pour himself a double bourbon.

He went into the bedroom.

The phone rang. Perri.

"I'm putting together tonight's show," she said in a businesslike voice. "Have you got anything for me?"

"There's a rumor." Boyce sighed. "She might be testifying."

"Really? How good a rumor?"

"That's the rumor."

"See you Friday at La Grenouille."

Boyce thrashed in his bed until around 2:30 A.M. He got up, dressed, and exited the Jefferson in an unaccustomed way—by the outside fire escape.

The ladder deposited him in a back alley that led to the street. As he turned away from the hotel, he saw that a skeleton crew was manning the cameras.

He caught a cab on Connecticut Avenue and gave the driver the cross streets a few blocks away from his ultimate destination.

"Lady Bethmac's stayin' just up the block from here," the driver ventured.

"You think she did it?"

"Oh
yeah. She killed him with that
bowl.
But that lawyer she got, he'll get her off. Uh-huh. Do you know what he charges?"

"No idea."

"Ten thousand dollars. For one
hour."

"He must be good."

"Oh, he
good.
He get the devil off. He and the devil, they get along
just
fine. Got a lot in common. Lot of lawyers in this town just like that." He chuckled. "Don't know if the devil going to have
room
for them all."

He pulled over at the corner of Wisconsin and Newark. Boyce gave him a twenty, along with his business card. The driver inspected it in the light.

"Damn! You him! Can I get your autograph?"

The last time Boyce had snuck into somewhere had been a girl's dorm back in college days.
Plus ça change.
But that dorm had not been under the protection of the Secret Service, and as Boyce contemplated how to breach the perimeter, it crossed his mind that the director of the Secret Service would gladly pin its highest medal on any agent who shot Boyce Baylor, preferably in the balls.

At the entrance to Rosedale, the estate where Beth was encamped, was a duplication of the vigil back at his hotel. Satellite trucks, vans full of slumbering TV crews. The Secret Service had pulled a car athwart the driveway.

Boyce walked down a darkish street that bordered the six-acre property. There were houses whose backyards abutted the estate. Feeling distinctly criminal, he looked both ways and plunged into one of the backyards. He scaled a low redbrick wall, ruining some meticulously trained clematis vines in the process, and pulled himself over into the forbidden zone.

She was staying in the old yellow farmhouse where George Washington had actually slept once or twice, the home having belonged to his friend and comrade in arms, General Uriah Forrest. Forrest, a wealthy Georgetown merchant, had built the house, three miles up from the river, for his young wife, as a port town was not considered congenial to a lady. Once again the old house was serving as the domicile for a lady for whom the city had proved too much.

As Boyce walked toward the house, he decided that since he had no face mask, grappling hook, or silencer-equipped pistol, there was little point in trying to play James Bond. He would go in like the lawyer he was—threatening to sue everyone in his path.

He got his chance soon enough. He heard the scrotum-tightening sound of a German shepherd saying, in German to his handler: "Please—
bitte!
—please let me just rip out his throat,
then
you can arrest him." This was followed by a commanding human voice saying,
"Freeze!
Put your hands where I can see them! Now!"

It took ten minutes of gradually escalating threats and calls to their superiors before they relented and led him to Beth's door. Three of them stood behind him, scowling, at the ready, in case he turned out to be an assassin wearing a rubber Boyce Baylor face mask.

She came to the door, wiping sleep from her eyes, amazed, clearly, to find him there, but perhaps, he thought, not altogether disappointed.

The Secret Service withdrew. He went in, closed the door.

"I have a solution to our basement garage problem," he said.

She was standing by the mantelpiece, one arm across her chest, smoking. "Oh?"

"I asked you this once before. I'm going to ask you one more time."

"Boyce, I told you—"

"Will you marry me?"

Beth's eyes widened. "At three-thirty A.M.?"

"We could wait until the morning. Judge Dutch could marry us during recess. That would give them something for tomorrow's evening news."

She sat on the couch next to him. "Remember the last time you proposed to me? In the rowboat at Fletcher's Boat House?"

"I remember you said yes. This time, if the answer is yes, I want it in writing."

"Shouldn't we get through this first?"

"We're almost there. As long as you drop this idea of testifying."

"Is that what's behind this?"

"No. I came here to ask you to marry me. I would have brought a ring, but the stores were closed. Look, we lost twenty-five years. I don't want to lose the next twenty-five. We won't have any teeth left. As for the rest of it, I'll give up practicing law, we'll go away. I'll build you a castle, in—wherever you want. I've got lots of money. It's embarrassing how much I've made. We'll be together and not give a shit what anyone thinks. We'll leave it all behind. We'll adopt Korean kids. With Russian kids, you never know what you're getting. Don't think about it. For once, go with your heart. Please. Say yes. Prove Nancy Reagan wrong.
Just say yes."

"Yes."

"Oh baby, that's great. That's just terrific."

"After I testify."

No one believed Perri when, wearing her tightest cashmere sweater on
Hard Gavel,
she hinted that Beth would take the stand
precisely
because it was going so well, in order to rehabilitate herself with the public.

Alan Crudman ridiculed the idea in his most condescending tone, saying that with all due respect, that was nuts, just nuts. No defense attorney worth his salt would allow it. Forget it.

Perri smiled. Let him play her for the dumb blonde. The freckled dweeb would eat his words. Indeed, she felt confident enough to challenge him, right there and then, to a $1,000 bet. Crudman fell for it.

Next morning, while watching the day's proceedings on TV, Perri felt a warm wave of satisfaction wash through her when she saw on the screen a distinctly weary-looking Boyce—had he cut himself shaving?—approach the bench, along with an amazed, eager Deputy Attorney General Clintick. Judge Dutch leaned forward, then seemed to recoil into his black leather throne like an astronaut pinned by the G-force of blastoff. He recovered, leaned forward again, in an attitude, Perri thought, of barely controlled amazement. His face said, "Counsel, are you
quite sure?"
Boyce nodded, as if accepting reluctantly the terms of a plea bargain he had just resoundingly lost. Judge Dutch stroked his chin, waved the lawyers away from his bench like so many flies, and instructed the clerk to remove the jury. Even on television you could hear the excitement rippling through the courtroom. Clerks who had not moved in so long that some viewers were surprised to find they were actually alive and not wax effigies were suddenly all attention, heads flicking this way and that like aroused cobras.