Chapter Thirty-Five

Thursday, Don’t Even Start

Thursday was declared a day of national mourning for President Putin. Trump excused all White House employees for the day so everyone could honor the late Russian president’s memory in their own way.

As Putin’s body was flown home to Russia, Jimmie hit up the Leonardo DiCaprio triple feature at the nearby megaplex. Putin had once described the actor as a muzhik. A “real man.” It was only fitting that both Putin and DiCaprio had gone out fighting bears—Putin at the White House and DiCaprio while filming The Revenant 2’s impressive live-grizzly attack scene (shot in one take, for which DiCaprio picked up a much-deserved posthumous Oscar).

It was while watching DiCaprio get torn apart by the pack of thirty-two hungry grizzlies that Jimmie finally concluded there was no way Putin could have had anything to do with Lester Dorset’s death. The Russian president had gone down fighting a two-ton panda. Putin was a real man. It was utterly inconceivable that he would murder a reporter by pushing him from a roof in the middle of the night. That wasn’t the way of the muzhik. Lester Dorset’s killer was still out there. One suspect down . . . two to go.