Chapter Thirty
Biebs
Dorset: You’ve had some issues with women in the past.
Trump: No one’s a greater supporter of women than me. I love women. My mother was a woman-a great woman.
Dorset: I’m thinking, specifically, of your Twitter war with Helen Mirren. You retweeted somebody calling her a “bimbo.”
Trump: I never called her that. I would never call a woman a “bimbo.” Never. Who calls women names like that? It’s juvenile.
Dorset: Okay. You have called her “crazy,” though.
Trump: Well, yeah. If she’s acting like some kind of crazy bimbo, I’m going to call her crazy.
Dorset: Did… you just call her a bimbo?
Trump: Don’t twist my words. Do not twist my words. I never said she was a crazy bimbo. I said she was acting like a crazy bimbo. Take your dick out of your ear and listen to what I’m saying.
Jimmie reached the end of the recordings. He’d spent the past five hours holed up in his office listening to Lester’s interviews… all for nothing.
Jimmie could see why Lester Dorset thought there were some “game-changing” admissions on the hard drive. Trump spoke candidly with Lester Dorset about buying favor in the media. He called the Mighty Mississippi a “river of slime” running through the United States. At one point, he even referred to the Second Amendment as one of the Ten Commandments. Lester, the golden boy for the country’s most liberal rag, had to have shit himself at that one!
The problem was that Lester Dorset had always been an idealist. A fool who believed in the essential goodness of the American people. Lester probably thought that if he could expose the man behind the orange mask, the people would come to their senses and storm the gates.
Unfortunately, Jimmie knew better. Trump was what those on the celebrity-gossip beat called a “Biebs.” No matter what you wrote about Justin Bieber in the dirt sheets, he still managed to top the iTunes charts. Trump was the same way. He could do wheelies on a motorbike over Ronald Reagan’s grave, and half the country would still vote for him in 2020.
While many of Trump’s admissions were indeed eye raising, none of them were “game changing.”
Still, whoever had killed Lester had thought they were. The killer also had to have known Lester was attempting to smuggle the recorder out of the White House. The motive couldn’t be clearer. They just hadn’t counted on Lester hiding the recorder so well. If the killer ever learned that Jimmie had the recordings in his possession now, they would come after him.
This was a most unwelcome realization.
The dots that had seemed rather random were beginning to connect. A web was forming, with Jimmie smack-dab in the middle of it. Regardless of the fact that Lester didn’t have anything on Trump, he’d told people he had-and someone had killed him for it.
Jimmie thought back to the list of people who had had access to the White House roof: Christie, Lewandowski, Putin. Each had a motive to protect Trump. It had to be one of them. A political scandal was brewing, the likes of which nobody had seen since Watergate. He knew next to nothing about that scandal, of course, and hoped to keep it that way. In his high school civics class, they’d watched All the President’s Men. He’d fallen asleep fifteen minutes into it and woke up during the end credits and was assured by a classmate he hadn’t missed a damn thing.
But he wasn’t going to fall asleep now. At least not before three o’clock (one of his three naptimes, back when he was a freelancer). He could smell something fishy, and it wasn’t the tuna sandwich he’d forgotten about in his desk drawer.
He hid the recorder back in the ceiling; he’d figure out how to get rid of it later, if necessary.
This wasn’t Jimmie Bernwood being paranoid.
This was Jimmie Bernwood being smart.
In order to investigate this thing, though, he was going to have to do something stupid: He was going to have to enlist the help of his ex-lover.
One of them, that was. He had many, just so you know.
More than he could count.
(Seven.)
Only one, however, worked in the White House.
Chapter Thirty-One
The Birds and the Bees
Jimmie watched from the sidelines as the president fielded questions from the pool of reporters.
“So what if England was our friend? Think how boring it would be if the Yankees and Red Sox were friends. Snoozefest. People like a healthy rivalry. Though I wouldn’t call England the Red Sox. Maybe more like the Twins.”
That got a surprisingly large laugh from the press corps. Jimmie surveyed the journalists, all of whom were fenced inside a wire pen. He recognized a couple. Keith Olbermann, who was on his sixth time around with ESPN. Joe Buck, from Fox Sports. Vin Scully, the former Dodgers play-by-play announcer. In fact, more than half of the journalists appeared to be from the world of sports. This was, apparently, standard practice for days when the Donald took the podium. They didn’t want questions from anyone who’d done too much research.
Jimmie smiled as a feeling of superiority swelled in his chest. Not because he was better than them, but because he was probably making twice what they were making. Maybe that was the same thing-it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that amongst the fifty or so reporters of varying degrees of triviality was Cat Diaz, whose hand was held high.
Trump called on her.
“Mr. President, do you plan to respond to Prince Charles’s latest comments?” Cat asked. She had her clear thick-rimmed glasses on today, the ones that did funny things to Jimmie.
“I assume you mean that clown’s speech before Parliament, where he called me an embarrassment to swine,” Trump said. “We’re meeting to determine a really primo insult to send back across the pond.”
“Could you give us a preview of some of the names being discussed?” Cat asked.
“That’s classified, sorry,” Trump said. “You gotta keep an eye on my Twitter feed. I will say this, though. He’s a very ugly man-I mean, I’ve seen elephants with smaller ears. He’s an ugly man who married way, way above his station in the looks department, married a total fox, and then he cheated on her. So the man’s clearly an idiot. I would never have cheated on Lady Di. Never. And I cheat on everybody.”
There was more laughter from the sports reporters as Trump ended the session and left the room.
Jimmie hopped into the press corps pen and waded through the sea of journalists, who were packing their notebooks away. He made a beeline for Cat. Come to think of it, though, he’d never seen a bee fly in a straight line. Usually they zigzagged around, looking for the right flower to bang.
Cat took one look at Jimmie and turned the other way.
She had no interest in being his flower.
Or maybe-just maybe-she was playing hard to get.
“Wait up,” he said, reaching out for her. His hand landed on her shoulder. Immediately, he realized this was a poor decision on his part. She dropped her notebook and gripped his wrist with both hands. She gave his arm a twist, which he felt all the way up to his shoulder. He spun down to the ground and found himself pinned to the floor with his arm bent unnaturally back in a kimura lock.
“You’ve been working out,” he said through the pain.
“You haven’t been,” she said.
That much was true. He wasn’t going to turn the tables on her. None of the other journalists seemed to even take notice that she had him writhing in pain on the carpet. Working in the Trump White House, they’d probably seen violent outbursts before. Rumor was, on Wednesday nights, the Bush Room transformed into a fight club.