“We go now to our legal correspondent.”
“Peter, another tumultuous day in the MacMann case. We have just learned that Beth MacMann will take over her own defense. Mrs. MacMann is a lawyer, after all—it was at law school that she met Boyce Baylor and the late President—though she has never practiced. This is a highly unusual development. It’s hard, if not impossible, to think of someone taking over their own defense in a murder trial at this late stage, but then just about everything about this case has been unusual.”
“What will Boyce Baylor’s role be? Will he have one?”
“His role, Peter, will consist of defending himself on the very serious charge of jury tampering. At the moment, we understand, he is occupied with moving out of the Jefferson Hotel, where he maintained his so-called war room. We’ve learned further that he is suing the Jefferson for wrongful eviction.…”
The government had seized his bank accounts, so Boyce found what are politely called alternate arrangements across the river in Rosslyn, Washington’s unbohemian left bank, a suburban sprawl of glassy high-rises where most of the pedestrians work for various defense agencies and the cabdrivers come from countries badly disappointed by U.S. foreign policy.
It wasn’t so bad, though living without the room service took some getting used to. The papers ran photographs of the outside of the motel juxtaposed with photos of the previous one, under the caption “How the mighty have fallen.” The relative modesty of his new surroundings even gave him a bit of nostalgie de la boue, reminding him of his early days of defending corrupt union officials, mobsters, and—lowest of the low—providers of illegal soft money. He became a local celebrity at the Szechuan Sizzle Chinese restaurant around from his motel. The owner paid him the highest compliment a Chinese restaurateur can bestow: he didn’t charge for the soup.
Boyce listened with one ear to the machinations of his legal team, who were busy filing motions and preparing a defense in the face of dismal and overwhelming evidence. But try as he might, Boyce had no interest in his own case. He did not relish the idea of spending five years in prison, surrounded by victims of inferior lawyering. All he could think about was Beth and Tummybug.
Judge Dutch had stopped short of placing Beth in custody, but just for good measure he had ordered that she be placed under a kind of house arrest. Marshals were ordered in to “protect” the house in Cleveland Park where she was staying. So she now had two rings of federal protection around her, her Secret Service detail on the inside and bulky men in windbreakers on the outside. At night, over a phone line that they were fairly sure was tapped, Beth and Boyce joked darkly about the tunnel the two of them were digging.
In the mornings, Boyce would show up in a taxicab, with at least two vans full of television camera crews following, and ride with her in her now even longer motorcade to the courtroom. She would get out at the front entrance. He sat in the car with the contemptuous Secret Service agents, watching the proceedings on a portable television set. During breaks, Beth would return to the car, parked in the courthouse basement, to get his comments and notes. As the TV correspondent would say, it was an unusual arrangement.
Beth had called to the stand the White House curator, F. Dickerson Twumb. The idea was to show that she so revered eighteenth-century American silverware that she never would have used it to crush the skull of her husband. It somewhat left open the suggestion that she’d have been happy to use some other less precious blunt object.
“Well,” Beth said, entering the car with her folders and legal pads, followed by the faithful Vlonko.
“I’m uneasy with this witness,” Boyce said. “He doesn’t seem to like you very much, frankly.”
“You have to understand about curators. They think it’s their White House, and they regard all First Ladies—with the exception of Jackie Kennedy—as menopausal busybodies whose idea of decor is an Ethan Allen showroom. When we got to the White House, I had the temerity to suggest to him that I found Albert Bierstadt’s landscapes boring, and he went into a snit from which he has apparently not yet recovered.”
“Great witness for the defense.” Boyce snorted.
“He did say I was particular about the silver.”
“Vlonko?”
Vlonko shook his head. “Jury’s not so fucking happy today. Not happy yesterday, either. Or the day before. Maybe they don’t like army food.”
“All right,” Boyce said. “You go back in there and you grab this guy by his bow tie and get him the hell off the stand. Who’s your next witness?”
“I want to recall Secret Service agent Birnam.”
“Why?”
“I want to put it to him, ‘If you think I was such a threat to the President, then why didn’t you rush into the bedroom and shoot me?’ ”
Boyce shrugged. “Why not.” He glanced furtively at Vlonko. Vlonko’s look said it all.
Boyce was having a morose, solitary dinner of Chairman Mao chicken and crispy shredded beef at the Szechuan Sizzle before going back to his room. His eyes strayed to the television monitor over the bar. The sound was off, with the closed captioning on. On the screen he saw the flashing lights. The captioning scrolled:
CAPT. CARY GRAYSON, WHO PERFORMED THE AUTOPSY ON PRESIDENT KENNETH MACMANN, IS IN CRITICAL CONDITION FOLLOWING AN ACCIDENT ON THE GEORGE WASHINGTON PARKWAY. HIS CAR WENT OFF THE ROAD AND HIT A TREE. HE WAS TAKEN TO NEARBY BETHESDA NAVAL HOSPITAL AND UNDERWENT SURGERY … POLICE SAY THERE MAY BE EVIDENCE THAT HE WAS INTOXICATED …
Intoxicated? Grayson? He called Beth on his cell phone. It didn’t matter if the feds listened in, though his attorney, Judd Best, had been assured by the U.S. District Attorney’s Office that there were no outstanding eavesdropping warrants on him.
“Were you planning on recalling Dr. Grayson?”
“No. Why?”
“He’s in surgery and may not come out of it. Car crash.”
“Poor man.”
“Well, the poor man may have been drunk at the wheel when he went off the road into the tree.”
“Grayson?”
“Turn on the news.”
On the other end, Boyce heard the sound of the channel he was watching silently at the bar.
“Jeez,” Beth said.
Boyce looked around to see if any reporters were listening in. He said into his cell phone, “Not to be morbid about it, but tomorrow morning I want you to go to Dutch and say, ‘Look, I was planning to call this guy again and now look.’ He’ll ask you what you wanted to hear from Grayson. I’ll think of something. Toxicology, whatever. But you’ll say it’s crucial, and without his testimony we—you—are being deprived of vital evidence. Wait.”
“What?”
“I just thought of something. Pure genius!”
“Well?”
Boyce looked around again. “No, not on the phone. Tomorrow, on the way to court.”
“Well?” she said next day as they were riding to court.
Boyce lowered his voice. “Wouldn’t they love to hear this in the front seat up there.” He whispered, “We—you—tell Dutch that you were going to recall Grayson to testify in greater detail about that suspicious postdeath imprinting of the Revere mark on Ken’s forehead. But they got to him before you could.”
“Who got to him?”
“They—the Secret Service. They ran him off the road.”
Beth looked at him. “Boyce, honey, I know this has been an awful strain on you.”
“Dutch’ll hit the ceiling. But it doesn’t matter. You bring it up in the closing arguments. Look—seventy-five percent of the American people still think that JFK was killed by his own people. Trust me, at least one juror will think, Hmmmm. And all you need is one juror.”
“It’s nuts.”
“Of course it’s nuts.”
“I don’t know if I have it in me.” Beth sighed and sat back in the seat. “What I’d really like to do is go into that courtroom today and say, ‘Here, here’s what happened. Here’s the truth of it.’ ”
“Beth, how many times do I have to tell you. The truth has no place in a court of law.”
“I know, I know. But my belly is swelling, my tits won’t fit in the bra anymore, they want to put me away. I’m tired.”
Boyce spent a busy morning calling his shrinking group of media friendlies, trying to convince them that Dr. Grayson’s mishap on the George Washington Parkway was no accident.
“Who,” he said darkly, “had the motive? Who had the means?”
“You’re saying the Secret Service tried to kill him?”
“I know. Hard to believe, isn’t it? But that’s what they said about Vince Foster.”
“Boyce, Grayson was drunk. He was tanked.”
“Exactly. And who had the means to plant the booze on him?”
“Oh, come on.”
“If you don’t want it, fine. I gotta go, that’s Newsweek on the other line.”
“No no no. Hold on. Do you know this, or are you guessing?”
“Did Woodward know?” Boyce said. “Did Bernstein know?”
It’s an axiom of journalism that if you can get one paper to print a rumor, all the others will rush in to print it on the grounds that someone else did. It was for the best that poor Dr. Grayson was still in a postoperative coma after undergoing seven hours of brain surgery. By noon the next day, it was being speculated, mostly on the Internet, that his accident was no accident.
The Secret Service was being besieged by calls wanting to know if they had run him off the road—to keep him from testifying that the Revere mark had been planted by them. The day after that, the Times, Post, and half a dozen other pillars of journalistic reputability were running items headlined:
SINISTER MOTIVES ALLEGED IN GRAYSON CRASH
The Secret Service directed inquiries to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where an embarrassed doctor stood before the podium at a press conference to say that Dr. Grayson’s blood alcohol level upon arrival at the emergency room was—clearing of throat—“slightly elevated above the legal limit.”
How elevated?
Clearing of the throat. “Point one nine.”
God in heaven, the man was stinking! Plastered! Navy drunk! Oh, what do you do with a drunken sailor, so ear-lie in the mor-ning?
Another navy doctor, this one with more ribbons than Christmas morning on his white chest, was trotted out to say that Captain Grayson was a man of impeccable reputation who was not only the navy’s top pathologist, but had served his country valorously in war. Naturally, the President’s death and his involvement, his testimony, had been a strain. There was no excuse for what had happened, but no one had been harmed but Dr. Grayson, and so while we all pray for his recovery, let us bear in mind that he surely is as human as the rest of us.
The media, sensing that moral outrage and opprobrium might be out of place, ceased baying for the time being and set up a death watch outside Bethesda Naval.
Chapter 30
But why was he drunk? Why was this white-gowned, medal-wearing paragon of military and medical virtue driving blotto into trees?
Boyce hid from his media pursuivants in the Szechuan Sizzle, poring over the transcript of Grayson’s testimony, over the toxicology reports from the President’s autopsy, over everything pertaining to the doctor. No clues to this seemingly out-of-character behavior presented themselves. At the trial, the doctor himself had been an exemplar of professional calm in every way. Reviewing the tapes, Boyce saw that his expression had been serene and unruffled. Following his testimony, the women’s magazines had been full of his pictures. People magazine had declared him one of its “50 Most Reassuring Men in America,” an event that according to reports had given everyone at Bethesda Naval a good chuckle, no one more so than Dr. Grayson.
Meanwhile, Judge Dutch had reacted volcanically to the media reports about the Secret Service allegedly pouring whiskey into Dr. Grayson and then driving him off the road into the maple tree. He knew exactly where this canard had begun to quack. In retaliation, he gave orders that no vehicle carrying Boyce Baylor could enter even the basement garage of the courthouse. It turned out that this was, in fact, beyond even his august sovereignty. Judge Dutch’s glasses now fogged at the merest mention of Boyce Baylor. The joke began to circulate around the courthouse clerks that the next car to veer drunkenly off the George Washington Parkway would be Judge Dutch’s Volvo.
But at least the Trial of the Millennium was coming to a close.
For Beth, however, there was little light at the end of this long tunnel. Las Vegas bookmakers were laying thirty-to-one odds on conviction. And ominously, some commentators were remarking that her physique seemed to be changing, almost as if she were, well, pregnant.
One evening a few minutes past ten o’clock after returning from working at Rosedale with Beth on her concluding argument, Boyce sat in his usual booth at the Sizzle, nursing a glass of inferior brandy and staring halfheartedly at a motion he was filing in his own case. As he worked, a fortune cookie was placed in front of him.
He looked up to tell the waiter that he did not want a fortune cookie, only to see the back of someone disappearing briskly toward the restaurant’s front door. Odd.
He looked at the fortune cookie. Its fortune protruded from the sugar clam lips.
He extracted the piece of paper cautiously, as if it might be the fuse to a bomb. In the kingdom of the tricky, the paranoid man still has all his fingers.
It was in handwriting.
Confucius say public phone Colonial and Nash soon ring with interesting tiding. 10:15 pm. WPS.
Boyce threw a twenty on the table and walked out of the Sizzle. There are no emptier streets at night than those of Rosslyn, Virginia. He walked the two blocks to the intersection of Colonial and Nash. It was dark and out of the way, just the place to kill someone. Not that anything that exciting ever happened in Rosslyn.
Calm down, he told himself. But he was nervous.
He answered on the first ring.
The voice on the other end was cheerful, like that of someone who wanted you to try their long-distance service, at significant savings.
“I always said, if I’d stuck around for my trial, you’re the man I’da hired, Counselor.”
Boyce had never heard Wiley P. Sinclair’s voice, so he had no way of knowing if this was really Wiley P. Sinclair, former FBI counterintelligence officer, betrayer of his country, agent of Chinese intelligence, code name Confucius. All of this he knew from the public record.
“Tell me something,” Boyce replied, “that would convince me that I’m really talking to Confucius.”
Chuckle. “You mean, like a PIN?”
Wiley P. Sinclair was the FBI’s Most Wanted fugitive. He had made a jackass of them (not an especially daunting task). It was said that he was still working for the Chinese. His double agenting had, among other things, helped them get the Olympics and a nifty new U.S.-designed nuclear-tipped torpedo for their submarine fleet.
On visits to Beijing, U.S. presidents and secretaries of state would demand that China turn Wiley over to them. The Chinese would blink through the cigarette smoke and say that they had no knowledge of this Wiley P. Sincrair and then suggest that if there were such a person, he must be working for the imperialist lackeys in Taiwan. And that would be the end of the Wiley P. Sinclair portion of the agenda for that visit.
And now Boyce was—or might be—speaking to him from a pay phone in Dullsville.
“I figured,” Wiley said, “that you might want some bona fides. They’re in your room waiting for you. Bit of a step down from the Jefferson, isn’t it?”
“Why are we speaking?”
“It’s complicated, Counselor.”
“Trust me. I can handle it.”
“Combination of reasons. You’ve given the bastards one hell of a run for their money. I like your style. Okay, I could tell you I’m doing this just to help, but you’d figure out that’s bullcrap. So I’ll level with you. My current employers would be very pleased if this
information came out. And you’re perfectly placed to be the one to bring it out. So here’s the 411.”
“The what?”
“The information.” Wiley P. Sinclair laughed. “Counselor, I’m surprised. I keep up better with the English slang living in Pandaland than you do.”
Boyce didn’t dare say it out loud to Beth in the car the next morning, just in case it was bugged. He wrote down the substance of what Wiley had told him.
Beth read, looked up sharply at Boyce. He took the paper back, tore it up, and put the pieces in his pocket.
“How can you be sure it was he?” Beth asked.
“When I got back to my hotel room, there was an envelope under the door. It was the PIN to his old ATM machine. I had someone in my office check his FBI file. It was in there. No one else would know that.”
“Except for the FBI. They could be setting you up.”
“I considered that,” Boyce said. “But why would they bother at this point? I’m going down in flames as it is. Why pour gasoline on me now?”
“To make you burn brighter.”
“Maybe. But what if it was him?”
“He.”
“This is a gift, Beth.”
“He’s a traitor to his country.”
Boyce was reminded that Beth had been First Lady of the United States. “Is this the time to be splitting ethical hairs?”
“It’s not a hair, Boyce. The man is evil.”
“Precisely. He and I are on the same bandwidth.”
“It’s wrong.”
“So the Chinese got the Olympics. So they got a torpedo. Is this the end of the world?”
“He protected all their agents in California who were stealing secrets from Silicon Valley.”
“No one’s saying the man’s a saint.”
“This is like trying to explain vegetarianism to a shark.”
“So why bother? This is not the time for ethical hand-wringing. Save it for your book.”
No Way To Treat a First Lady Page 21