Jimmie slipped through the door. He descended the maintenance staircase on the other side, down into the bowels of the White House. Past the basement… and to the subbasement.
There were only two ways to get to the subbasement: via the Reagan Library and via a service elevator in the family quarters. A men’s room attendant had advised him to avoid the elevator. It was primarily used by the kitchen staff, who were known to lick. Jimmie didn’t ask any other questions. He’d tipped the attendant a twenty for his troubles. Emma thought Jimmie had been in the practice of trading gossip for gossip. He’d been all too happy to not correct her. Cash was frowned upon in the news business, but cash was also king-Trump clearly knew that.
Jimmie pushed open the heavy fire door at the base of the stairs. He was in a walkway lit by what looked like backup lighting. It had that wonderful mid-twentieth-century bomb-shelter aesthetic. All bare concrete walls and exposed metal piping, like a hip coffee shop.
Jimmie was alone in the subbasement.
Uncomfortably alone.
Was the chief janitor’s closet down here somewhere? Jimmie had looked at the staff directory, which didn’t list a “chief janitor.” Whatever Christie was doing at the White House was off the books.
The subbasement seemed like the perfect out-of-the-way place from which to do dirty work. The kind of work that would normally be frowned upon in DC but was commonplace in Jersey. Jimmie hadn’t dared ask the men’s room attendant any questions about Christie, though. He didn’t want the guy to get in any kind of trouble over twenty bucks. God knew people had been killed for less, but still.
Jimmie passed a handful of metal doors, none of which were equipped with electronics for reading badges. He tried one. Locked. Maybe the subbasement was a dead end-his badge wasn’t going to do any good down here.
He turned the corner and paused. There was a door that stood out from the rest, with a Far Side cartoon taped to it: A nerd carrying a stack of books was pushing on a door marked “PULL.” A sign beside the door read “SCHOOL FOR THE GIFTED.”
It smacked of the smarter-than-thou humor a smarmy New York Times journalist would find funny.
Jimmie looked both ways and, still finding that he was alone, pressed the handle down. Amazingly, it wasn’t locked. He pushed the door open.
Or he tried to. Its hinges were rusted. He tried again, this time throwing his shoulder into it. The door didn’t budge, but his spinal column folded like an accordion. Needless to say, the pain was excruciating.
Jimmie stretched his back out. He was about ready to ram the door again when something hit him: The cartoon’s subject and placement weren’t incidental.
He pressed down on the handle and pulled.
The door opened without difficulty, and he was inside.
Chapter Twenty
Close Enough for Government Work
With the flip of a switch, a long, single-bulb fluorescent light hanging from the ceiling flickered on. The room was set up as an office-the world’s smallest office, but an office nonetheless. There was barely enough room for two people to stand side by side in front of the metal desk, which stretched from bare wall to bare wall. There was a filing cabinet on the other side of the desk, but there didn’t appear to be any way to get to it. A chair back poked up from behind the desk. It wasn’t ergonomic; it was a torture device.
“I see you’ve found your new office.”
Jimmie spun around. Emma was standing in the doorway, arms folded.
“Thought I’d do a little snooping around,” he stammered.
“You’re free to go wherever you please,” she said. “Sorry that the office is a little on the small side, but it’s all we have left.”
“I used to live in Manhattan,” Jimmie said. “This looks like a penthouse suite compared to some of my old apartments.”
“Fascinating,” she said.
“You think I’m exaggerating?”
“No,” she said. “It’s fascinating that you think I care.”
It was taking her a while to warm up to him. The president had probably chewed her ear off regarding the elevator incident yesterday, so Jimmie couldn’t exactly blame her for being so chilly. At least he still had a job. That was really all that mattered. He was beyond caring what beautiful women thought of him.
Emma asked, “Do you have your tux for the State Dinner this evening?”
“The steak dinner?”
“State Dinner,” she said, obviously annoyed he hadn’t read the e-mail with the president’s schedule. Hey, at least he hadn’t deleted it. “The president and Putin are out hunting together right now. Festivities start at six.”
“Tux. Already rented. Gotta pick it up after lunch.”
She stared at him for a beat, seeing through his lie but not calling him on it. He appreciated that in a boss. He figured he could trust her. He was going to have to trust somebody around here, and she hadn’t batted an eye when she’d found him snooping downstairs.
“The first biographer,” he blurted out. “The man who had this office before me… Lester Dorset. He’s not backpacking the Pacific Crest Trail, is he?”
She shook her head. “He’s never even read Wild. This isn’t public knowledge, but… he took his own life. It was a great shock to everyone,” she said, her voice no more than a hushed whisper. “Climbed onto the roof and jumped… right into the Rose Garden.”
“Jesus.” Jimmie couldn’t say much else. Because what do you say when you hear something like that? A coworker kills themselves on the job? In the springtime, when you saw the fake flowers blooming, how could you not think about a body lying there?
And yet… Jimmie had to press further.
“You sure he jumped? He wasn’t… pushed?”
“I was right about you,” Emma said.
“That I’ve got a nose for a story?”
“That you’re still living in your dirt-sheet fantasy world,” she said. “It’s just your second day on the job, and you’re already snooping around for scandals. This is one story you can forget about, though. Not many people have roof access. Who was going to push him off? Surely not the president or the first lady, who were in Mar-a-Lago for the Fourth of July. There’s no story here.”
Except there is a body, Jimmie thought. And where there’s a body, there’s a story. If somebody kills themselves, you don’t just dig a hole in the backyard and throw them in. That’s what you do if somebody is murdered.
He remembered from that boring Watergate movie how upset people got when Nixon lied about the break-in at the Democratic National headquarters. The Washington Post had won a Pulitzer for that dull bit of reporting!
Imagine, now, if there’d been a dead body involved.
Whoever reported that story wouldn’t just win a Pulitzer-they’d win an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America. They’d win their girl back. If that was something they were theoretically hoping to do, which he wasn’t.
Lester was dead, but somebody was lying. Too bad the dog had made off with the evidence, but he guessed there was more where that came from. Jimmie Bernwood was going to find out the killer’s identity… if he lived long enough.
If anyone lived long enough, he thought, remembering what Connor had said about the war with the United Kingdom-and the potentially looming threat of World War III.