Eighteen Jimmy

EIGHTEEN

Jimmy

WHEN HE FINALLY CALLS Jane, Saturday of her first week at Meier, he doesn't tell her about getting ambushed and jacked up in his own house. He knows how pissed at him she's going to be when he finally does tell her, noted control freak that she is, somebody who always wants to know everything, and acts insulted when she doesn't, as if somehow you were cheating on her. Or like she failed some test.

But what's he going to do while she's over there going through what she's going through? Tell her the last thing his attacker, the guy Jimmy thinks of as Joe Too, said and that she might actually be safer where she is?

So, he lets her talk, lets her set the scene at Meier, gets him laughing when she describes Dr. Stone Face, tells him about this great English woman she met. That's before she gets to the good parts, what he's waited to hear from her today, about how they're cautiously optimistic about her treatments, at least so far.

Then she wants to know what's happening with the case. Jimmy knows he has to give her something; she'll get suspicious if he gives her nothing. So, he tells her about his meeting with Edmund McKenzie, and what McKenzie said before he left Bemelmans that night.

"You think McKenzie's the one who sent the texts?" Jane asks.

"I'll ask him next time I see him," Jimmy says. "Problem is he seems to have disappeared."

Then he tells Jane that he hopes he has more intel on McKenzie the next time they talk, and that he loves her, but that he has to go, he's got another call.

The call is from Craig Jackson, who proceeds to tell him he can't locate McKenzie. The gossip police can't either, tracking his phone doesn't help, according to Jackson's reporter friend, because it hasn't left his apartment on Central Park West. The girl from Bemelmans, Amber, hasn't heard from him. The doorman on CPW hasn't seen him. Neither has the caretaker at McKenzie's house in Southampton. What seems like an army of bartender friends all over Manhattan haven't seen him in a week, because Jackson has interviewed most of them.

"Guy's in the wind," Craig Jackson says.

"Tell me something," Jimmy says. "When did you start talking like a TV detective?"

McKenzie's first wife lives in Paris now. She hasn't spoken with him since one of the alimony checks was late around the first of the year. Jimmy gets the second Mrs. McKenzie on the phone. "I haven't heard from him," she says, "but if you do before I do, please give him a message: Die. "

Jimmy is sitting at his kitchen table after his calls with Jane and Jackson, laptop open in front of him, nothing to do except modern detective work, which means going from search engine to search engine the way he used to go walking up stairs and knocking on doors. Wanting to know as much about McKenzie as possible when they do meet again, and why somebody wanted him to back up, and quickly.

Jimmy reads the coverage on the rape accusation, what there is of it until his hedge-funder daddy, Thomas McKenzie, clearly had the stories vaporized. The hits just keep on coming after that. There's the night he crashed daddy's Jag out in Water Mill. He just left the Jag wrapped around a tree, called a girl to take him home, never got Breathalyzed.

There are the gory details on Eddie's two divorces, which read to Jimmy like all the other cringeworthy celebrity divorces he's ever known or heard about.

There's the time the Jets backup quarterback beat him up after finding out McKenzie's current girl on the side was the quarterback's wife.

On and on.

A timeline of classic, modern, celebrity bullshit.

One of the stories quotes McKenzie as telling a friend, "Who knew that some of these bitches would be such bad sports?" He later denied saying that.

The truth is, Jimmy thinks, Edmund McKenzie is the bitch.

Same as Edmund's high school buddy Rob.

A brotherhood of bitches, Jimmy thinks.

Maybe both of them are crazy.