Jimmie had no choice but to say his safeword: “E. L. James.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Hello Kitty
Cat released Jimmie. While the press corps had pretty much cleared out except for a few stragglers, prying eyes and ears could be anywhere. In the potted plants. In the luxury umbrella stand. In Cat’s phone.
“Can we talk?” he said. “Somewhere private.”
“You cost me my job, you idiot,” she said. “And just how drunk were you last night at the State Dinner?”
Her job? Following the Ted Cruz sex tape lawsuit, she’d been the one who’d fired him. He eyed the logo on her badge. “You’re still with the Daily Blabber, though.”
“I was demoted to the presidential beat,” she said. “You think I enjoy being penned up in here with these losers?”
Michael Strahan gave her a little wave, and Cat fake-smiled back. When he passed, the warmth once again drained from Cat’s face.
She said, “You want to talk, Jimmie? I’ve got about five minutes until I have to be on the South Lawn golf course for Trump’s big foreign policy speech.”
“I’m headed there too,” Jimmie said, although this was the first he’d heard about it. He really needed to start reading the daily e-mail with the president’s schedule.
He followed her through the winding maze of hallways that he assumed would become second nature to him. If he stayed at the White House long enough.
“What are you doing tonight?” Jimmie said, opening the door for her to the back lawn. Two dozen rows of chairs were quickly filling for the soon-to-be-historic speech. “Let me take you out to dinner. As an apology for all the trouble I caused you.”
“There’s not a restaurant in this city expensive enough to make up for all the trouble you’ve caused me,” she said.
Likewise, he thought.
“Do you have your phone on you?” he asked.
“What’s this really about?”
“Just answer the question.”
“It’s at my desk.”
“Good,” he said, lowering his voice. “Because I need to talk to you about Lester.”
“Are you still angry about that? If I remember correctly, you were the one who proposed that we ‘take a break.’”
“So that means you go sleeping around on me?”
“That’s exactly what that means.”
Okay, so maybe she had a point. Things had been moving kind of fast between them at the time. They’d gone from sleeping together to living together in under a month. That, coupled with working together, had spooked Jimmie. So, yeah, he’d suggested they take a break from each other. He thought he’d move back into his own apartment. Maybe go to a movie on a Friday night by himself. He hadn’t expected to be replaced by Lester fucking Dorset.
Jimmie asked, “When’s the last time you spoke to Lester?”
She ignored him and picked up her pace.
“He was working as Trump’s ghostwriter,” Jimmie said, jogging after her. “A job that I’ve been hired for, as of Monday.”
“You’re both idiots for working with that guy. He’s a racist, a sexist-”
“That’s just a bunch of talk. He seems okay in person.”
Except for when he asked his Secret Service detail to shoot me, Jimmie thought. But he could see why Cat wouldn’t like him: Her father was Mexican (one of the good ones, but still). That, plus the fact that she was a woman, meant she wasn’t exactly Trump’s target market.
“Well, have fun while it lasts,” Cat said. “I hear Trump likes to fire people.”
“Lester wasn’t fired.”
“So he quit,” she said. “So what? We split up a while back. I don’t keep tabs on him.”
“You don’t know, do you?”
“Know what?”
Jimmie lowered his voice: “He’s dead.”
Cat stopped abruptly, and Jimmie slammed into her.
“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you,” he said.
Her bottom lip quivered. He shouldn’t have sprung this on her here. There was a time and a place to tell your ex-girlfriend that her dickhead boyfriend was dead, and this wasn’t it.
“I haven’t spoken to him in months,” Cat said. “June? Earlier, maybe. I don’t know. We didn’t see each other around the West Wing too often-Corey keeps the press corps on a pretty tight leash to prevent anyone from leaking real news to us. I just… I can’t believe it. I would have heard if something happened to him. Are you sure?”
Jimmie nodded.
“How did he die?” she asked.
He shook his head. “He last signed in to the White House on Independence Day. I have reason to believe that was also the day he died. I can’t say more now… but could you just meet me tonight? Or even after this event. Maybe we could grab a drink.”
She was quiet for a long time.
Finally, she said, “Did they give you his old office? He didn’t… leave anything behind, did he?”
“Like…”
“Like, duh, nudes,” she said.
“You let him take nude pictures of you?”
“We got one of those instant cameras and took some glamour shots in the vice president’s office. Biden left behind his beanbag chair, where we-” She paused. “You know what, let’s just meet Friday. I need a few days to process this. It’s just… I can’t believe it.”
“Of course,” he said.
“Oh, and another thing, before you even ask,” she said. “I’m not going to sleep with you.”
“That’s good, because I wasn’t going to ask,” he said.
Cat disappeared into a row toward the back, and Jimmie took a seat up front.
She suspected he wanted to sleep with her. Ha! Part of him did-that part-but he had another, more pressing motive, one that he would spring on her over dinner. He needed her help.
Jimmie had three solid suspects for Lester’s murder. If he could establish a prior relationship between Lester and one of them, he would save some time. That would help narrow his investigation-and possibly keep him alive, if he could sort out friends from foes inside La Casa Blanca.
Figuring out the whodunit was only step one. For step two, he needed a platform. With the FCC’s ruling on net neutrality limiting the reach of small blogs, he couldn’t just publish this story-no matter how big-by himself online and expect traction. The Cigar Aficionado editor had stopped returning his e-mails. With his name still blackballed across the industry, selling an exclusive to the Daily Blabber was his only hope. And this time, he wouldn’t get slapped with a lawsuit. He’d get slapped with a Pulitzer. Then, and only then, would he ask to sleep with her. If she said yes, he might actually do it, too.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Prince of Whales
“Pee-wee Paul Ryan says the lawmaking process in this country is broken, and for once I agree with him,” Trump said. “Maybe we should do things a little more like our good friend Russia. What is it you do over there, Vlad? You write it down and hand it to a bird, right?”
Putin, seated beside the president, nodded. “Is owl.”
“That’s right,” Trump continued. “You write the law down-say, no more abortions after the fourth trimester-hand it to the owl, and send the owl out into a snowstorm. If it stops snowing within twenty-four hours, the bill becomes law. If not, you just try again, I guess?”
“We have many owl,” Putin said with a tight-lipped smile.
The president was just over ten minutes into his remarks, but already Jimmie’s mind was wandering. He looked down at his open notebook. He hadn’t taken a single note so far during the event, unless you counted the sketch of the first family’s wiener dog. It had shown up, humped the leg of a Secret Service agent for three minutes, and then chased off after a squirrel into the Rose Garden. Opulence was probably humping the poor squirrel right now.