Spy in a Little Black Dress - By Maxine Kenneth Page 0,9
head and brought her hands toward each other in a shortening motion. “Hen,” another team member shouted. Jackie nodded encouragingly, then made a stretching motion. “Henna… henpeck… Henry,” someone else called out.
Jackie nodded an emphatic “yes.”
Then she depicted a big box with a line down the middle and a knob on each side. “Door,” someone shouted. Jackie shook her head. “Closet,” someone else called out. Again Jackie shook her head. “Armoire,” said another, and they all laughed as Jackie rolled her eyes. Then Charlie Bartlett, who was on her team, shouted, “Cabinet.” Jackie nodded and brought her hands together as if squeezing something. And Charlie said, “Cab… cabin…” Jackie nodded hard, and Charlie finally shouted, “Cabot! Henry Cabot Lodge!”
“Oh, yes, thank you!” Jackie said. She wanted to kiss Charlie when she caught the admiring look that Jack gave her. But then she glanced at her watch and gasped. It was nine thirty, almost time for her to be meeting John Husted for a nightcap at the Georgetown Inn. She desperately wanted to break up with John and was hoping that she’d have the courage to do it tonight.
“You’re leaving so soon?” Jack asked with disappointment in his voice as Jackie made her round of good-byes.
“I’m sorry, but I have to,” she said, softening her insistence with a smile.
As she started walking toward the door, Jackie saw Loretta Sumers come bounding toward Jack, eager to move in and take her place.
Not on your life, Jackie thought. She turned back to Jack and gave him an inviting look. “If you’d like to walk me to my car, that would be wonderful.”
“Of course,” Jack said, leaping up from his chair and linking his arm in hers, while a sullen-looking Loretta Sumers was stranded in her tracks.
When they reached Jackie’s black Mercury convertible parked in the middle of Q Street, Jack asked, “Would you like to go someplace for a drink, Jackie?”
He was smiling at her, but he had a predatory look in his silver-blue eyes. It was the same look that Jackie had seen her father give a woman when he was sizing her up to see how fast he could get her into bed.
The womanizer once-over, Jackie thought and looked away. “Uh… I don’t know…,” she stammered. Do I have a headache? Do I have to get up early? As she frantically searched for an excuse, she absentmindedly yanked the car door open.
And to her shock, a body fell half out of the car, like a corpse making its entrance in a mystery melodrama.
It was John Husted!
“Hey, Jacks,” he said, to her complete and utter humiliation, “who’s your friend?”
Allen Dulles sat behind his desk, puffing on his Kaywoodie, his face expressionless as he listened to Jackie’s account of her meeting with Jack Kennedy the night before.
“Everything was going along swimmingly, just as we had planned, when out of the blue, there was my boyfriend,” she said, “and I can tell you, Jack Kennedy didn’t take it any too kindly.” Slumped in a chair across from Dulles, she sounded like a dazed accident victim describing the catastrophe to the police.
Jackie shuddered as she recalled how badly the evening had ended. A rudely awakened Husted explained to her that he was walking along Q Street, saw her car parked there, decided to wait for her in it, and fell asleep. As for Jack, he hadn’t bothered to hang around for an explanation. He merely gave Jackie a withering look and slunk off into the night in a mist of bruised ego.
Jackie was beside herself. Leave it to good old dependable John Husted to show up at the most inopportune time and turn such auspicious beginnings into a fiasco. She sighed and looked at Dulles with a pained expression. “If only I had locked the car, that never would have happened.”
Dulles nodded. “That’s a good lesson learned,” he said evenly.
Jackie stiffened, expecting him to reprimand her, but instead, Dulles smiled at her in an avuncular way and said, “Cheer up, Jacqueline. This may turn out to be a bit of serendipity.”
“What do you mean?” Jackie asked.
“For a man like Jack Kennedy, nothing is a bigger aphrodisiac than competition,” Dulles said with a chuckle. “You’ll hear from him again. I guarantee it.”
III
Jackie’s heart skipped a beat when she picked up the phone and heard a vibrant man’s voice with an unmistakable Boston accent say, “Hello, Jacqueline, this is Jack Kennedy. I hope I’m not calling too early, but I wanted to reach you before I got