Seven Days in May by Fletcher Knebel & Charles W Bailey II

Author:Fletcher Knebel & Charles W Bailey II [Knebel, Fletcher & Bailey, Charles W II]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politics, Classics, Suspense, Historical, Thriller
ISBN: 9780060124359
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 1153485
Publisher: Harper & Row (NY)
Published: 1962-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Wednesday Night

Jiggs Casey woke up hot and sticky in his room at the Sherwood Hotel in New York. The light filtering through the window curtains was fading. He looked at his watch. It was 6:30. He’d have to get moving, for he was due at Shoo’s apartment at seven.

He had called Eleanor Holbrook at her office as soon as he checked into the hotel. He hadn’t heard Shoo’s voice in two years, but it was just as he remembered it, the brittle quality of her tone offset by the haphazard pattern of little breathless rushes of speech.

“Hi, Shoo,” he said. “You remember a fellow named Casey?”

“Jiggs!”

“What time do you get through work?” he asked.

“Not so fast, Colonel.” He heard her quick intake of breath and remembered how she would swallow a cloud of smoke from her cigarette. “I don’t make plans for men who vanish from the earth and then come back suddenly, like in a parachute.”

“I want to take you to dinner,” he said.

“Oh, just like that? And suppose the lady has a date, Colonel, which she happens to have.”

“Gee, I wish you’d break it.” Casey lowered his voice and promptly felt like a heel for feigning romantic intentions. But he had to see her. There was no place else to begin. “I have to talk to you, Shoo, really.”

“Poor little misunderstood married man?” She was sarcastic now.

He could imagine her at her desk, her arms all but bare in a short-sleeved work dress, little golden hairs glinting on her forearm as she tapped ashes from the cigarette held with two fingers in a ridiculous angle. He could see the brown hair fluffed over her forehead; the nose, small and narrow; the full lips that never quite closed over her teeth. She’d be twenty-eight now, this tall, proud girl who hurried so to taste all of life. She was the woman who liked to speak wistfully of a cottage in the country, but who lived in perfect rhythm with the staccato tempo of New York-her world and her hypnosis. In the brief week that Casey had known her, Eleanor Holbrook’s lack of affinity for the simple things had irritated and finally (and fortunately) estranged him, but her appetite for the city swept him along. His blood had warmed with the excitement even as he cursed the fascination. She was, indeed, the original Cloud Nine girl.

Now he could feel certain nostalgic tremors and he found it hard to phrase the lighthearted answer that he knew she expected.

“Cat got your tongue, Jiggs?”

When in doubt, charge, he thought. “I’m no traveling salesman, Shoo. I’ve got two boys at home and a wife I love. What’s that got to do with us? I want to see you tonight.”

“Where are you?” she asked. He gave her his room number at the Sherwood.

“Wait right there,” she said, her words very clipped and businesslike. “I’ll call you back. My date tonight was half business anyway. I’ll see.”

Half business? thought Casey. Mine is all business, honey. Or it was when I called you.

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