No Way to Treat a First Lady Read Online Free PDF

Chief Justice Henry Adolfus Wiggins of the Supreme Court of the United States, a gasp went through the standing-room-only auditorium. A month before, Wiggins had ordered the President of the United States to turn over his secret Oval Office tape recordings. That led swiftly to his historic resignation. The Georgetown Law School dean—he had clerked for Wiggins years ago—had pulled off a coup getting him to come.
    Beth groaned to Boyce, sitting beside her, "We're dead."
    She was to play the part of the U.S. solicitor general and argue the government's side before the Supreme Court. Boyce was her deputy. He whispered back, "He doesn't look happy."
    Indeed, Chief Justice Wiggins wasn't happy, not at all happy. He'd been sandbagged by the dean, his former clerk, who had not told him until the last minute that the mock case tonight he would be presiding over would be the very same one he had so historically decided a few months ago. It bordered on impudence.
    Beth and Boyce had pulled two consecutive all-nighters to prepare. They looked like extras from the movie Night of the Living Dead. Her argument for letting the President keep his tapes was that the Supreme Court justices lacked the proper security clearances to hear what was on them. They were armed with precedents, but now, looking at the imperious, pinched-looking Wiggins taking his seat before them, they felt a presentiment of doom. In effect, their job tonight was to persuade him that he had been wrong. And chief justices, generally, did not like to be told that they were wrong.
    "Oyez, oyez, oyez," the dean intoned, grinning at his triumph. The Washington Post and The New York Times had sent reporters. "All persons having business before the honorable, the Supreme Court of the United States, present themselves."
    Boyce began humming Chopin's "Marche Funèbre." Dum dum de dum dum de dum de dum de dum.
    "Shut up," she hissed.
    Beth stood. Justice Wiggins did not return her smile. In his robes, spectacles, and blue, bloodless lips, Justice Wiggins looked as though he were yearning to sentence everyone present to death by hanging, or preferably by some more prolonged, medieval form of execution.
    Beth stood mute at the lectern. Five seconds went by, ten. Fifteen. Wiggins, accustomed to brisk kowtows and beginnings, frowned, a formidable sight.
    People exchanged glances. The dean's smile vanished. The silence that descended on the auditorium had an Old Testament quality, the kind that preceded the Voice in the Whirlwind announcing, I am the Lord God Almighty, and I am very, very wroth.
    "Your Supreme Honor—"
    Off to a good start.
    "With all due respect, I—we, that is, the government of the United States—do not believe that you—that the Court—has jurisdiction in this matter."
    Wiggins, who had just earned himself his own chapter in the legal history of the United States for a written opinion that was being hailed as the most consequential legal ruling since Maimonides, glowered at Beth like a malevolent owl contemplating a mouse. The Wiggins Supreme Court felt that it had jurisdiction over everything, including what time the sun was allowed to rise.
    Boyce felt his insides loosen, along with the cold scalp prickle that augurs calamity.
    Wiggins let her continue another two and a half sentences, whereupon he assumed his accustomed role of grand inquisitor. It was merciless. It was scathing. It was so bad that no one could bear to watch. Four hundred pairs of eyes looked down. Never had the auditorium floor been so closely examined. It was so awful that finally Boyce decided there was nothing left to lose. He scribbled on an index card and slid it in front of Beth as the judge continued to blowtorch her for her abominable—no, worse, abysmal!—understanding of the Eleventh Amendment. It read:
    He's wearing panty hose underneath
     
    To keep from laughing, Beth sucked in her upper lip and bit down on it so hard that it stayed swollen for two days.
    Boyce's note