“I mean,” Dexter persisted, “they’re threatening the United States with nuclear weapons. You think in the Situation Room at the White House everyone’s going to stop and go, ‘Oh, gosh, oh, dear me,’ because the President, in a moment of-justifiable-stress, calls them a name? I don’t think so.”
Jerry glanced over at Buddy, who was perched in his producer’s chair, looking as though he were conducting an silent one-man Socratic dialogue on the ethics of racist epithets.
“Samsung is a sponsor,” Buddy said softy. “ Toyota is a sponsor. Will they be comfortable with ‘little yellow bastards’? I’m guessing not. I could be wrong.”
“Those are Korean and Japanese,” Dexter said. “They hate the Chinese. Are you kidding? They’ll lap it up.”
“It’s tempting, but let’s save it for season two.”
The makeup lady dabbed at Dexter’s forehead. He said poutingly, “I thought the whole idea was to be edgy.”
“Edgy? You’ve just ordered in the Nimitz. Three pages from now, you’re going to send a B-2 bomber over Shanghai, giving one point three billion little yellow bastards a case of the shits. I call that edgy. So, we good to go? I’d love to wrap the scene where you tell the Speaker of the House to fuck off before we break for lunch.”
“All right. Where do we-what’s the line?”
The script assistant said mechanically, “ ‘I told those bastards not to screw around. Now they are going to get a taste of their own cooking, and it will make hot and sour soup taste like Cream of Wheat.’ ”
“Okay, everyone. Places. Scene six, take four. Action…”
Dexter managed to get to the end of the scene without further denigrating one-seventh of the human race. He was doing better than credible work as President Mitchell Lovestorm, especially for a nonprofessional actor. Buddy’s casting instincts had not failed him: a senator who yearns to be president brings verisimilitude to the role.
Buddy had been screening the first three episodes of POTUS for the media, and indications were favorable. They were amused by its camp aspect. In the opening episode, Mitchell Lovestorm-at the time, vice president-is reluctantly thrust into history’s spotlight when the President is accidentally killed by a foul ball during opening day. His wife, Consuela “Connie” Lovestorm, played by the steamy Ramona Alvilar, is a panther in pantsuit who will stop at nothing to advance her husband’s fortunes, but who is unable to deny-much less control-her ardor for National Security adviser Milton Swan. Icy blue-eyed Gore Peckermann of the TV show St. Paul Trauma brought a cool ambivalence to his role as the former Navy SEAL turned National Security adviser, who must balance his loyalty to President Lovestorm and the country with his burning desire to throw the First Lady over his desk and brief her until dawn.
CHAPTER 18
Pepper was in a sweat. She had an opinion to write, and since it proclaimed the right of criminals to sue gun manufacturers when their holdup weapons misfire in the middle of a crime, it needed to be good. Really, really good.
Her clerk, Sandoval, had offered to do “a draft” of it for her. Some justices let their clerks do pretty much all the “drafting” of their written opinions. But Pepper was determined to do her own even if it meant pulling all-nighters. She’d had enough problems in the media already without reading a snippy item in the Washington Post about how Judge Lightweight was relying on her clerks to do her heavy lifting. She didn’t doubt Sandoval’s discretion or loyalty, but clerks were a gossipy bunch who these days talked to reporters and authors and sometimes even wrote their own clerk-and-tell books.
After ten p.m. on what was shaping up to be her second sleepless night, Pepper was at her desk trying to figure out how to make the Swayle opinion sound like something Moses left behind on Mount Sinai along with the commandments. There was a knock on the door and in walked Justice Ishiguro “Mike” Haro.
“Busy?” he said.
It was a curious statement to make to someone who was in her office after ten p.m., looking like hell while staring desperately at a computer screen.
“Kind of. I’m working on the Swayle opinion,” Pepper said. “It’s been a while since I…”
“That’s why I came by.”
“Oh? How’s that?”
“Thought you could use some help.”
This struck Pepper as falling somewhere between a breach of etiquette and an outright insult. Though new here, she was pretty certain justices didn’t go around offering to help each other write opinions.
“I think I’ve got it under control. But thanks for the offer.”
Justice Haro stood awkwardly. He was in his early forties but looked ten years younger and had about him a mild air of contemptuousness, as though the world did not measure up to his standards.
“I liked the way you gave it to Santamaria at the conference,” he said. “Pompous prick.”
Eager as Pepper was for peer approval, collegiality predicated on a shared dislike of a third colleague was off to a false start.
“I shouldn’t have run my mouth like that,” she said. “I wrote him an apology.” She made a mental note to do that after Haro left.
“You don’t owe him an apology,” Haro said. “Not after the things he’s said about you. And not just in print.”
Was this an invitation to say, What things?
“I better get back to this.”
“Do you like wine?”
“Generally. Not right now.” Something made her add, “I’m more of a beer girl.”
“I have eight thousand bottles in my cellar.”
“Sounds like quite some cellar.”
“Yes, it is. Maybe I’ll show it to you sometime.”
Haro turned to leave. As he did, he said, “By the way, Mortimer isn’t the key to this case. But I’ll take care of it when your draft circulates.”
Pepper wondered if the woman who’d poured out her ex-husband’s wine and replaced it with grape juice was available, and went back to her Augean stable.
She finished the opinion late the next day and sent it out for comments by the four other justices in the majority. She felt as though she were back in school, hoping to find an “A” in red ink at the top of the returned term paper.
One morning a few days later she logged on to SupremeNet, the Court’s secure Intranet, and found the opinion in her inbox. There was no grade on it, but it was full of comments by the justices. Next to one section she found a “Good-DH.” Chief Justice Hardwether was not known to be liberal with his compliments, so she purred to find this. The pleasure was short-lived. On the next page, he had struck out a line in which she had used the Texas phrase “more confused than a cow on Astroturf”-a sentiment she had felt condign enough in a case like Swayle-and written, “Let’s try to keep it dignified.” Ouch.
When she came to the centerpiece of her argument citing Mortimer v. Great Lakes Suction, she found that every line- indeed, the entire page-had been struck out. In the margin was a note: “Mortimer is a rotting branch-see attachment. IH.” [19] The attachment consisted of twelve pages in which Justice Haro essentially took over and rewrote her opinion from top to bottom. It hinged on a case called Kozinko v. Mixmaster, in which, as Justice Haro eloquently explained, “the South Dakota Supreme Court rightly held that liability was not in quem pro tanto automatically waived simply because the blender was being used to manufacture methamphetamine, a federally prohibited controlled substance. Indeed, the very absence of legality in that case, pari passu, argues convincingly on behalf of Swayle’s assertion of denial of equal protection.”
Pepper read it several times, each time getting madder, but in the end conceded that it was, alas, a better argument than hers. Nonetheless, she typed KISS MY ASS on the top of the attachment, closed the file, and went to the gym to cool down. When she got back from the gym, she reopened the file, deleted KISS MY ASS, and typed, yes, right-thank you, and closed the file and e-mailed it back to the Clerk of the Court and went home to have a good cry, only to find a court summons in her mailbox relating to Buddy’s breach of contract suit. It sure was great, being on the Supreme Court. But there was better yet to come.