No Way to Treat a First Lady (2 page)

The nickname had been given to him by a federal judge early in Boyce's controversial career, after he had persuaded a jury that his client, the Cap'n Bob Fast Fish Restaurant chain, was unaware that its popular Neptune Burgers were made from black market Japanese whale meat. Since that stunning victory, Boyce had successfully defended traitors, terrorists, inside traders, politicians, mobsters, blackmailers, polluters, toxic-waste dumpers, cheats, insurance frauds, drug dealers, horse dopers, televangelists, hucksters, society wife batterers, cybermonopolists, and even fellow lawyers. An eminent legal scholar who wore bow ties commented on public television that if Shameless Baylor had defended Adolf Eichmann after he had been kidnapped and brought to Israel and tried for crimes against humanity, Eichmann would have been not only acquitted, but awarded damages. It was not said admiringly. But if Boyce's fame had long since reached the point where shoeshine men in airports asked for his autograph, the public was largely unaware of the actual motivation for his remarkable career.

And now—a quarter century after his career began—his phone rang.

He reached for the button, then paused. He thought of telling the secretary to tell her to call back. Sometimes he put new clients through a ten- or fifteen-minute wait before picking up. Softened them up. Made them all the more eager.

Should he, to her? No. He had waited twenty-five years. He was too impatient to begin this beguine.

He felt the kettledrum in his chest. Good Lord. Was his pulse actually quickening? He, who never broke a sweat, even while arguing before the Supreme Court?

He picked up.

"Hello, Beth. What've you been up to?" This was nonchalance carried to operatic heights.

"I need to see you, Boyce."

Her voice was all business. Cool as a martini, no more emotion than a flight attendant telling the passengers to put their seats in the upright position. He'd have preferred a little more raw emotion, frankly, even a stifled gasp or sob. Some clients, even burly men who could break your jaw with one lazy swipe of their paws, broke down the first time they spoke to him. Boyce kept a box of tissues in his office, like a shrink. One new client, the head of a plumbers union who had been taped by the FBI on the phone ordering the car bombing of a rival, had blubbered like an eight-year-old. He later blamed it on medication.

But even now, placing a call that must have humiliated her, Beth was in her own upright position, not a trace of begging or desperation in her voice. Boyce stiffened. His pulse returned to normal.
Okay, babe, you want to play it cool? I'll see your thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit and lower you five.

"I could see you tomorrow at ten-thirty," he said. "For half an hour."

It had been a long time since anyone had said something like that to Beth MacMann.

The two of them began the mental countdown to see who would blink first.

...seven... eight... nine...

"Fine," she said.

"Will you be taking the shuttle?" He'd be damned if he'd send his own jet to pick her up.

"No, Boyce. I'll be driving. I don't relish the thought of being stared at for an hour on the shuttle."

As a former First Lady, she retained Secret Service protection, another of the ironies in which she and the nation found themselves: prosecuted by the government, protected by the government. A
Times
columnist had mischievously posed the question: If in the end Beth MacMann was executed, would there be a shoot-out between the Secret Service and the lethal injectionist?
So
many delicious questions were being posed these days.

"Ten-thirty, then."

Boyce leaned back in his leather throne and imagined the spectacle in all its many-pixeled splendor: hundreds of TV cameras and reporters outside his Manhattan office, clamoring, aiming their microphones like fetish sticks as the Secret Service phalanxed her through to the door. And there he would be standing, gorgeously, Englishly tailored, to greet her. His face would be on every television set in the world tomorrow. Peasants in Uzbekistan, ozone researchers in Antarctica, Amish farmers in Pennsylvania would recognize him.

He would issue a brief, dignified, noncommittal statement to the effect that this was only a preliminary meeting. He would smile, thank the media for its interest—Boyce was the Siegfried and Roy of media handlers—and usher her in. How satisfying it would be, after all these years. They were already calling it "the Trial of the Millennium," and there he would be, at the red hot center of it. And maybe—just maybe—to make his revenge perfect, he would deliberately lose this one. But so subtly that even the Harvard Law bow tie brigade would hem and haw and say that no one, really, could have won this one, not even Shameless Baylor.

It was a bigger zoo than he'd expected. Outside Boyce's Manhattan office were sixteen satellite trucks with seventy-foot telescope microwave dishes to supply the live feeds, as well as over three hundred reporters and camera people and twice that many onlookers. Even he was impressed.

The police had to block off one lane of westbound traffic on Fifty-seventh Street. It was the Client-Attorney Meeting of the Millennium. By the time this was over, one pixel pundit said, the word
millennium
would be so overworked that it would have to be mothballed until the year 2999.

Beth quietly fumed in the elevator until she and her Secret Service retinue had reached Boyce's office on the northwest corner of the fiftieth floor looking toward Central Park. He called it his "thousand-dollar-an-hour view."

"That was truly humiliating," she said. "Thank you."

He knew right away that there was no use pretending it hadn't been he who had leaked the news of their meeting. But he found himself hoping that she hadn't figured out to whom. Perri Pettengill, Boyce's current girlfriend, was the host of the Law Channel late night talk show
Hard Gavel.
She was blond, smart, and ambitious, talked fast, and wore bifocals and tight sweaters. She had the best ratings on the Law Channel, which tended not to attract many viewers in the periods between spectacular murder trials, though a highly classified in-house research report showed that roughly one-third of her viewers watched her with the sound off. Tom Wolfe had mentioned her in an essay, calling her "the Lemon Tort."

Perri and Boyce had met six months earlier when she moderated a panel at the Trial Lawyers Association in New Orleans on jury selection entitled "Peremptory This!" Boyce had been on it. She had introduced him as "not only the best but the most exciting trial attorney in the country" and that night after dinner had given him the most memorable evening he had ever spent in New Orleans, which was saying a lot. She had moved in later that week. Their relationship had been cemented in
boldface
type by the New York gossip columnists. She was smart enough not to have brought up the subject of marriage just yet, but the question was there every morning, fluttering over the breakfast trays like the Dove of Damocles. Boyce did have an excuse: four previous wives. It did give Perri pause. No romantic woman dreams, in her heart of hearts, of becoming Mrs. Number Five.

Boyce had called Perri after getting off the phone with Beth. She'd nearly hyperventilated.
What
a scoop. Her ambition sometimes made Boyce wary, as, to be honest, did her extraordinary ability in bed. Confronted with a truly skilled partner, a man had to wonder, even as he gasped and whinnied in ecstasy:
Where did she learn to do that?

But now his thoughts were of Beth, upon whom he had last laid eyes a quarter century ago.

"You gave it to that woman, didn't you?" she said. "Sweater Girl."

"That's right. I wanted a big crowd down there today. I wanted to send a message to the U.S. government—"

"You did. It read, 'Boyce Baylor is a flaming egomaniac.' "

He was—stunned! It wasn't the sort of romancing Boyce expected from supplicant clients.

"I got up at five o'clock this morning," Beth said, "and spent four hours on I-95 feeling like O. J. Simpson in the Bronco, being chased by a half dozen Eyewitness News teams. Then I arrived to your welcome wagon from hell. So if you'll excuse me, I'm in no mood to kiss your ass."

With that she sat down and began pulling off her gloves. Beth had always worn them, for the uncomplicated reason that they kept her hands soft. When she became the wife of a presidential candidate, and no shrinking violet, the media seized on the gloves for a convenient iron-hand-in-the-velvet-glove metaphor.

Boyce couldn't help himself watching her take them off finger by finger in an incredibly sexy Barbara Stanwyck let's-get-down-to-business way. He couldn't take his eyes off her. Men are men and fools to a man, but it amazed Boyce, seeing her this close, that Ken MacMann had needed to screw all those other women when he had this waiting for him at home, warm in his own bed at night. She was a few years younger than he, and looked perhaps a few years younger than that. She had aristocratic cheekbones and black hair with streaks of gray that made the black richer and more lustrous. Her eyes looked straight at you in an evaluating but not unfriendly way. Her figure, un-marred by childbearing, was full and handsome. If she'd been an actress, she would have gotten the part of the take-charge businesswoman who turns out to be an absolute panther in the sack. He remembered how every time he walked behind her and saw the lovely sexy sway of her bottom, his mouth went dry and his heart soared with possession.

And so here she was, twenty-five years later, in his office, a client.

"Coffee, skim milk, one sugar." She crossed a black-stockinged leg. He heard the siren song of nylon on nylon. "So how are you, Boyce?"

It now dawned on Boyce Baylor, lion of the American Bar, that in less than thirty seconds he had been reduced to the status of coffee boy—in his own lair, with a view that God would envy, amid walls hung so thickly with honorifics and photographic testimonials to his greatness, his hugeness, that the very Sheetrock cried out under the strain. No no no no. This would not do. Not do at all. He must assert control, quickly.

He buzzed for the coffee and, sitting down opposite, said, "Not so bad. Haven't been indicted for murder."

She gave him the hint of a smile.

"Why," he said, "didn't you call me sooner?"

"I was waiting to see how bad it was going to get. I thought it might not get to this point. And I didn't want to make it appear worse by hiring a lawyer."

Boyce shook his head silently, wisely. How often he had heard this.

"Anyway," she said, "here I am. On bended knee."

Boyce used this as an excuse to look at her knees.

"The reason they're bent," she said, "is from four hours in the back of a Secret Service SUV. But I could say they're bent for your sake, if you'd like."

Toying with him! Intolerable.

"You must be in a world of hurt," he said, "to come to me."

"I've been indicted for murder. That's one definition of 'world of hurt,' I suppose."

"Why me? There are lots of good lawyers who'd love to have this case."

"Boyce," she said, "if you want me to say, 'Because you're the best,' I will."

"Beth"—he smiled—"I
know
I'm the best. Don't take this the wrong way, but I'm past the point where I need your approval."

"Oh, you've done well. No question. It's why I'm here, isn't it?"

He was thinking,
You waltz in here after screwing me over and sit there with those incredible legs crossed, putting out
—
attitude?

Boyce decided right there and then to take the case.

"On the way up here," she said, looking down at her lap, "somewhere between Baltimore and Wilmington, I promised myself that I was not going to apologize. Then when we got to the New Jersey Turnpike, I decided I
was
going to apologize. Then in Newark I went back to my nonapology posture."

"How'd you feel going through the Holland Tunnel?"

"Like turning around. Only that's tricky in a tunnel. Annoys the oncoming traffic."

"Well, we can talk about all that some other time."

"Maybe we should talk about it now. I think I'd rather know your state of mind going in. I don't want to find out during closing arguments that your heart wasn't really in this."

She was a canny one.

"This isn't
Casablanca.
And this"—he waved at his Wall of Ego, which still, Beth noticed, held an official framed photograph of his former father-in-law Prince Lupold of Bad Saxony-Wurtburg—"is not Rick's Cafe. I moved on. And I've done just fine. The truth is I got over it pretty quickly."

"I don't flatter myself that I ruined your life."

Flatter herself? That she
ruined
my life? Dammit...

"I have a very good life." He nodded in the direction of the Wall of Ego. "As you can see."

She looked at the wall. "I see. I..."

"What?"

"I did reach out to you. After we got to the White House. You didn't answer four invitations. To state dinners."

"Must have gotten lost."

Beth smiled. "Boyce, dinner invitations from the White House don't get lost."

"I may have been in the middle of a trial. When I'm trying a case, to be honest, an earthquake wouldn't register."

"Then you must have been in the middle of four trials, because we invited you four times. I was going to put you next to Princess Caroline. Knowing how you like princesses."

"She was related to my wife. Somehow. All goes back to Queen Victoria." He was mumbling.

"The protocol office said they'd never heard of anyone not answering four White House state dinner invitations. You're in the
Guinness Book of World Records."

"One of my fathers-in-law died in the middle of the MicroDot trial, and I was so wrapped up in it that I didn't even attend the funeral."

He heard the little computer voice in the cockpit saying,
Pull up, pull up!

"So," he said crisply, "shall we talk about my bad manners, or the case?"

"I'm not sure," said Beth, "that I've satisfied myself as to your state of mind. If you're going to handle this, I need to know that you're on board, emotionally."