Elmore Leonard - Up in Honey's Room

“If the doctor isn’t there, and his wife is found dead-”

“A suicide,” Bo said.

“Yes, but the police will suspect her husband killed her. Where is he? Has he fled? Bo, leave the doctor where he is. It’s much simpler if Rosemary killed him and killed herself.” Vera finished the slivovitz and lighted a cigarette. “Have you ever had a conversation with Rosemary?”

“I’ve asked her what she’d like to drink. She says, ‘Oh,’ and acts flustered. ‘Do you have white wine?’”

Vera said, “I doubt if anyone who knows Rosemary will believe she killed Michael. But, I suppose that can be said of most women who kill their husbands. She’s a timid soul. I can’t imagine her firing a P38 or even knowing how.”

“The doctor also has a couple of Lugers,” Bo said, “and that bullet hose, the MP40 machine pistol.”

There was a silence as Vera smoked her cigarette and imagined the scene in the doctor’s house. Finally she said, “Bo, listen. I want only the doctor and Rosemary there. Who knows why she killed him. It will be announced on the front pages of Detroit papers, Wife Murders Her Husband the Doctor. After that, stories will be about the doctor’s politics. What is he? An enemy alien born in Canada, a former member of the Bund and alleged member of a German spy ring. We won’t know if the police suspect murder. They’ll talk to neighbors, the doctor’s hospital associates, his nurses, perhaps some of his patients, and before long they’ll ask us how we happen to know Dr. Taylor.”

“Only socially,” Bo said, “he’s so much fun.”

“But if Aubrey’s body is found in the house,” Vera said, “it becomes a much bigger story because Aubrey’s an infamous celebrity. They’ll write entertaining features about his Klan activities, perhaps the only Nazi Grand Dragon in America. The investigation can go on forever, newspaper columnists offering theories. More light is cast on us as enemy aliens and the Justice Department is forced to take action. We’ll be indicted, charged with acts of sedition, if not plotting to overthrow the government. We’ll be offered a bond we can’t possibly afford, and sit in a federal prison for months awaiting trial.”

“But what do they have on us?” Bo said. “Nothing.”

Bo sounding confident for her benefit. Vera knew him, his poses, his attitudes he could turn on and off. By now she could anticipate his reactions. If the FBI came for Bo, he’d run.

She said, “What would you do if they came to arrest you?”

“Run,” Bo said. “Have it already worked out how we’d do it. I know they won’t be after me without you.”

She wanted him to mean it and murmured into the phone, “This is when I need to feel my lovely boy against my body and whisper things to him.”

“Dirty things?”

“What I want him to do to me.”

“You’re giving me what Americans call a boner,” Bo said. “Stay in bed. I’ll be home as soon as I dump Mr. Aubrey.”

“The way we planned it.”

“Yes, bury him.”

“He’s quite bloody, his clothes?”

“I suppose. I shot him and closed the door.”

“You have to put him in my car, don’t you?”

“I can wrap him in a blanket.”

“Bo, don’t take anything.”

“I won’t.”

“Perhaps the Lugers. But you understand it isn’t to look like a robbery.”

“Leave the Schmeisser?”

“The doctor called it that?”

“I did. So he’d think I’m an oaf.”

“Bring the Schmeisser if you want.”

“Anything else?”

“Be sure to clean the powder room.”

Vera had learned that if she screamed at Bohdan, sometimes only raised her voice, he’d sulk. He’d stop talking to her and she would have to wait for him to get over his funk or let him wear one of her cocktail dresses. She loved Bo; she did. When they were having fun in bed or on the floor or the stairway and Bo’s mind was set on giving her pleasure, she adored him. This lovely boy from Odessa who killed with ease having seen hundreds and hundreds of people gassed, shot against walls, shot with pistols against their heads, hung from streetlights, locked in rooms and burned alive, all of it a part of Bo’s coming-of-age. She would ask him, “Will you always love me, Bo?” And he would tell her she was his life, his reason for living.

She wished she’d had more time to spend with Jurgen, another lovely boy, at first thinking he might be a bore or a tragic figure after North Africa, instilled with war, and she would have told him to wake up, we’ve all been to war. But he was never tiresome. He let you know he was alive, happy to be in America, and he was inquisitive. He accepted her being a reluctant German agent and in another day or so they could have been in love. At least lovers.

But along came Honey, the cheeky Sieg Heil girl, not Honey Schoen, Walter’s ex, Honey Deal. She had taken Jurgen away and by this morning would have eaten him up. Vera liked Honey from the moment she walked in the house, she sounded so American. “I’d marry Carl in a minute, but he’s taken.” Or when she said, “I act a little like I’m on the make, but I’m not after him to leave home.” Honey just wanted to have fun. She thought Bo was cute.

Vera loved the way Americans spoke in their different accents and the expressions they used. One of her favorites was “on the make,” which meant flirting. She loved Honey saying, “You think he’s a shit-kicker till you look in his eyes.” Telling so much in a few words about the federal policeman, Carl, the one Honey had her eye on.

The day they arrived in Detroit she told Bo, “We are going to listen to people, the way they pronounce words and the slang they use. We are not from the South or New York City, we live in Detroit and speak the way they do here.”

At that time Bo said, “I have one. ‘So is your old man.’”

“So’s,” Vera said. “ So’s your old man. You hear the difference? It’s a rebuff.”

Bo was a natural. He liked to imitate people on the radio, Walter Winchell, Gabriel Heatter, Jack Benny. He could do Rochester. Vera laughed because he was funny and she loved him, this boy who told her she was his life.

But if the time came he had to make a choice, give her up or go to prison?

He’d give her up.

In the courtroom Bo would gaze at her with tears in his eyes- he could do that, cause his eyes to fill-and testify for the prosecution. Bo would create for her daring acts of espionage, and the newspapers would make her a star, World War II’s Mata Hari, without citing a single reference to what Mata Hari did for the Kaiser. Or did she spy for the French? Vera wasn’t certain, perhaps both, but knew she was better-looking than the Dutch woman- huge thighs but no tits-whose stage name was a Malay word for “eye of dawn.”

If offered the same choice, would she give up Bo? Regretfully. Though it would never come to that. Or Bo in a courtroom testifying against her. She would shoot him first. Love in a time of war had only moments. But awfully good ones. Even Aubrey wasn’t that bad.

Carl’s dad phoned at 6 a.m. waking him up.

“How you like Detroit?”

“All right. It’s big. They say it’s our third-biggest city, but I heard Philadelphia was.”

“It don’t mean a thing to me,” his dad said. “How’s the hotel?”

They’d go through this until his dad came to the reason he was talking to Carl long-distance.

“A guy called last night saying he was a buddy of yours and wondered where you were. Narcissa talked to him.”

“What’s his name?”

“Vito Tessa.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“No, I said Vito Tessa.” His dad being funny.