No Way to Treat a First Lady (33 page)

Boyce's cell phone rang.

"Hello, Counselor."

It was Sandy Clintick.

"I won't bother asking you how you got this number," he said. "But it's extremely unlisted. To what do I owe this pleasure? Are you ready to move to dismiss the indictment of my client?"

"Your former client. You're no longer representing Mrs. MacMann."

"So you're calling to apologize on behalf of the federal government, for entrapping me in the jury-tampering case?"

Sandy Clintick laughed. "No, that wasn't on my agenda. I don't have any involvement in that case. But," she added, "it's one I'd frankly
love
to try."

"I'll bet you would. For what it's worth, I'm glad you're not. You're not as good as me, but you're up there."

"When the biggest narcissist in the law tells me I'm almost in his league, I feel lavishly complimented."

"No, Alan Crudman is the biggest narcissist in the law. I'm second."

"Shall I get to the point, or shall we continue to sniff each other?"

"By all means. Fire away."

"I'm weighing whether to move to dismiss."

"Oh, come on, Sandy. I can hear the mob outside your window with torches and pitchforks, chanting, 'Justice!' "

"I have insulated windows."

"I also read that you now have a U.S. marshals bodyguard. Don't worry, after the first coupla dozen death threats, you get used to them. I get Christmas card death threats."

"I'm thrilled to be in your league, Boyce. The reason I'm weighing whether to dismiss is there's something still bothering me."

"What would that be?"

"The Grayson deposition."

"The Crogenos autopsy supports everything that he said."

"There was something else in it that bothered me. At the end, when he asks Beth to forgive him."

"Yes?" Boyce said cautiously.

"She did. Just like that."

"She's a forgiving type."

"I don't buy that. Her life became hell because of what he did. No one is that forgiving. Even Jesus Christ would have needed to think about it for five seconds before saying, Okay, let bygones be bygones."

"She's a mensch. It's why I fell in love with her back in law school."

"Some mensch. She dumped you for that asshole."

"Please, you're speaking of the dead."

"I think I know what happened the night of September twenty-eight. And I'm pretty sure you do, too."

"So move to dismiss."

"I'll weigh it."

"Look, if it's my ass you still want, don't sweat it. I'm going down. Even Alan Crudman couldn't get me off."

"It's some consolation, I admit."

"Look on the bright side. After I spend five years in prison being made love to by passionate weight lifters with AIDS, they'll disbar me. You'll never have to face me again in a courtroom."

"I'm feeling better and better."

"Let it go," Boyce said.

"I'll weigh it." She hung up.

Boyce considered whether to tell Beth about the call. He decided against it.

The next morning, shortly after 10:00 A.M., the deputy attorney general of the United States rose and went to the podium in Judge Umin's courtroom. The mood was, as Dan Rather put it, "more electric than a drenched cat with its tail stuck in a socket."

"If it please the court," she began, "the United States respectfully moves that the court dismiss the indictment in
United States
versus
Elizabeth MacMann,
by reason of new developments that show that justice requires that."

The courtroom exploded.

Beth sat gravely in her seat, expressionless. Boyce, watching from his hotel room, was similarly calm. His eyes bored in on Beth.

Judge Dutch said, "In view of the prosecutor's motion to dismiss, I—"

Beth rose. "If it please the court, Your Honor, may the defendant in this case make a statement at this time?"

Oh shit,
Boyce thought.

"I was about to make a ruling on the prosecution's motion," said Judge Dutch, as if to say,
"If you will just remain seated and quiet, Mrs. MacMann, I'll have you out of here in three minutes."

Sandy Clintick looked at her. The entire world—some billion-plus viewers, at any rate—was looking at Beth.

"I am aware of that, Your Honor. But the defendant would like to make a statement
before
you rule on the motion." She added, "So that the court may be fully informed."

Judge Dutch sat back wearily with the air of a reasonable man surrendering to an unreasonable world, glasses beginning to fog. "Very well, Mrs. MacMann. Proceed."

"Thank you, Your Honor. I..." She paused. "Am not sure where to begin, so I will begin with an apology. To the people of the United States. To this court. Even to my attorney, Mr. Baylor. For not telling the truth about what happened that night."

The nosebleed that had been building for decades finally burst from Dan Rather. Mercifully, it was kept from his viewers.

Judge Dutch's eyes disappeared for the last time behind the pea-soup fog of his glasses.

"Not last," Beth continued, "I apologize to the United States Secret Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Terrible accusations were laid at their doorsteps, on my behalf. I—not Mr. Baylor—bear the full moral responsibility for those accusations, and I hereby retract them."

Beth looked down, swallowed, and continued. "I threw the historical... object at the President that night. The spittoon."

The courtroom stirred.

"In fact, I threw it at him hard. This happened at a moment of emotional... Oh, to hell with it... excuse me, Your Honor. I was furious with him. I knew what he'd been doing. And if I had killed him, I cannot say to you here and now that I would have regretted it at the time."

She continued, "But I was certain, somehow, that I had
not
killed him. And it was to that certainty that I clung throughout the investigation and"—she sighed—"subsequent events. I cannot justify that certainty. I cannot excuse the accusations that were made in my defense."

Beth's hand moved abruptly to her stomach. She winced.

"Mr. Baylor, genuinely believing in my innocence, defended me to the utmost of his ability. Which, in the case of Boyce Baylor, is pretty utmost. He now faces the possibility of prison and professional ruin. If my debt to the American people is exceeded by any other, it is by my debt to him. For without Mr. Baylor's interventions, however zealous, the result of these proceedings might very well have been otherwise. Perhaps, on balance, that would have been for the best, at least for the country's sake. At any rate, now this court knows the full truth of what happened in the White House that night. And can make such disposition," Beth concluded, sitting down, "as it deems fitting."

She sat down and folded her hands on her lap.

There was no murmuring. Even normally garrulous television commentators said nothing.

At length, Judge Dutch removed his glasses and cleared his throat He looked toward the clerk of the court, then at Beth. He hesitated for several long seconds, then spoke.

"Motion is granted."

He turned to the jury. "The jury is discharged. On behalf of the people of the United States, I would like to extend gratitude for your service in what I know have been trying circumstances."

With that he said, "Court is adjourned," and brought down his gavel on the Trial of the Millennium.

Five days before
United States
v.
Boyce Baylor et al
was scheduled to go to trial, a trial that in the opinion of most legal observers would be a "slam dunk" for the prosecution, Boyce's co-defendants, Felicio Andaluz and Ramon Martinez, escaped from the U.S. Detention Center in Fairfax, Virginia, during a game of basketball with other inmates. This was highly embarrassing to the government and forced a delay in the start of Boyce's trial.

From Boyce's point of view, it was a welcome delay, allowing him time to be with Beth when she gave birth. Her pregnancy had been the most media-covered gestation since an actress had appeared nude and immensely gibbous on the cover of
Vanity Fair
magazine. Their daughter, Ilsa Tyler Baylor, weighed six pounds ten ounces, exactly—a fact
The Washington Post
pointed out—the weight of the infamous Paul Revere silver spittoon. Chatting with reporters outside the hospital, Boyce was good-humored enough to remark that he hoped his new daughter would soon be too heavy for her mother to throw at him.

The investigation into the disappearance of Felicio and his colleague proved inconclusive. They had, simply, vanished.

One night, rocking his newborn daughter to sleep, Boyce received a telephone call. After listening to what Felicio had to say, he in turn called a reporter friend. The friend had already won two Pulitzer Prizes for his investigative reporting but was by no means averse to having a third. With the information that Boyce vouchsafed him, he went to work and in six weeks, on the eve of the start of Boyce's rescheduled trial for conspiracy to commit jury tampering, brought out the first in a series of articles, thoroughly if somewhat anonymously sourced, stating that Felicio Andaluz was a longtime agent of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Furthermore, it had been the CIA that had so deftly arranged his and Mr. Martinez's escape from the detention facility. The CIA had been most eager not to have one of its prize agents, one fairly teeming with sensitive information about its operations in Latin America, take the stand in a federal court case.

The CIA naturally had "no comment" on the articles. But in the aftermath of the trial, public opinion was sensitive to any suggestion that the government had been up to yet more covert mischief.

The Justice Department found itself assailed by the media, demanding to know why, if one branch of the government was secretly springing from jail a set of defendants in the same trial, another branch of the government should so assiduously pursue the remaining defendant.

High-level meetings were held.

At length it was announced that the government would nolle prosequi in the case of
U.S. v. Baylor et al.
In plain English, this means:
I am not going to touch this with a ten-foot pole.

The stated justification given was that Messrs. Andaluz and Martinez had agreed to cooperate with the government and testify against Boyce Baylor. (Untrue.) In their absence, the government now felt that it had insufficient grounds to continue against him. But what about the videotape of him plotting away happily to pollute the jury? The spokesman bravely cleared his throat and said that the tape was "open to subjective interpretation."

The nolle was greeted with approval by the over 85 percent of the American people who said they were suffering from Trial of the Millennium-related exhaustion.

The Ethics Panel of the District of Columbia Bar Association convened to determine whether there had been ethical violations sufficiently grievous to warrant disbarring Boyce from continuing to practice law. The hearings were closed but were reported in the press to be "heated." There was a certain amount of harrumphing on the nation's editorial pages about the "ridiculous" spectacle of lawyers declaring each other morally unfit.

On the eve of what was said to be a "close" vote, Boyce himself, in a brief statement given on his front steps while holding his infant daughter, announced that he was retiring from the law, as he put it, "to improve humanity by reducing the number of lawyers by one."

"Won't you miss it?" asked one reporter.

"You mean, honestly?"

The United States
v.
Van Anka
lasted less than two weeks. Nick Naylor, Babette's publicist, held press conferences every afternoon after the day's proceedings, to say how enormously satisfied the Van Anka camp was with how it was all going. A number of famous actors testified on Babette's behalf, as well as the Israeli defense minister and two former prime ministers. It took the jury five hours to find her guilty of perjury. The judge (not Judge Dutch) sentenced her to one and a half years in a minimum-security facility near Los Angeles, so that she could be near her agent. She'd be out in four months, pounds thinner and looking fabulous.

Her divorce from Max was complicated by the fact that Max was now a fugitive from U.S. justice living in Indonesia and Switzerland. Though not a divorce attorney per se, Alan Crudman represented her in the matter and, after ingeniously—as even Boyce admitted—managing to attach the assets of his offshore holding companies in the Netherlands, brought him to a bargaining table in Taiwan and to a settlement that was described by the
Financial Times
as "a lulu."

Wiley P. Sinclair disappeared once again and then several years later was given Chinese citizenship. His behind-the-scenes maneuvering to help China win sponsorship of the Olympics came to public light when he was decorated by the Prime Minister and awarded the title "Hero of the Revolution." He is said to live comfortably in Beijing and to maintain a summer residence in Hangchow. Occasionally, dressed as an elderly Chinese woman, he travels to Las Vegas.

Some thirty-eight books have been written so far about the trial, sixteen of them by the jurors.
Juror Number Eighteen
is generally considered to be the least tedious.

Judge Dutch Umin received plaudits for his handling of the Trial of the Millennium. He declined President Harold Farkley's nomination to the Supreme Court, saying that when he reached retirement age, he planned to accept an outstanding offer to be curator of the Institute for Dutch Still Life.

Harold Farkley was overwhelmingly defeated in his bid to be reelected president, confirming in everyone's mind that he was fundamentally second-rate and that he never would have achieved the number one job in government had it not been for the fact that his predecessor had died in, as one columnist put it, "pathetic" circumstances.

His opponent ran on a platform of restoring dignity to the White House. He announced that his first piece of legislation would be the Lincoln Bedroom Protection Act, barring presidents from turning the once sacred second-floor room overlooking the South Lawn into, as he put it, "a by-the-hour motel for political donors."