No Way to Treat a First Lady Read Free

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.
     

Chapter 2
    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