Elmore Leonard - Up in Honey's Room

Carl turned left onto Seven, not many cars on the road, held it at thirty and pretty soon the Model A was behind him, hanging back. He remembered the police precinct on the right, came to it and turned into the parking lot. The Model A stopped on Seven Mile. Carl came out of the precinct lot and turned left. Now he was heading toward the Model A, staying in his lane, wanting to see who was in the car, still a couple of hundred feet away when the Model A took off and flew past him going the other way.

One guy in the car.

Carl tried to concentrate on how much of the guy he saw, the way the guy was hunched behind the wheel. He wanted the guy to have slick black hair like the kid gangster Vito Tessa had and he’d know, okay, the guy’s here, the Avenger with the big nickel-plate automatic, and he’d know who to look for. But the guy in the Model A didn’t have slick black hair, it was a lot lighter.

He turned left on Pontchartrain Drive, the way through Palmer Park, fairways of the public golf course on the left, grass and picnic tables and trees on the right. He saw the Model A way back-but coming, gaining on him. Carl pulled his .38 and laid it on the seat close to his thigh. Looked up at the mirror and the Model A was coming fast, closing on him and, Christ, shooting at him. The only thing to do-Carl braked hard, covering the sound of gunfire with screaming tires. The .38 flew off the seat. It didn’t matter, Carl was going down anyway, flat against the seat cushion, down there getting his hand on the .38 as the Model A came around to pass him and hammered away at the Pontiac, rounds shattering the side windows above him, through one and out the other, making frosted-looking circles on the windshield, with a machine gun. It was . It was a goddamn machine gun, but didn’t sound like a Thompson. He thought of Louly saying she’d have to fire a Browning for him, “rip off a few rounds.”

The Model A was making a U-turn a hundred yards ahead, getting in behind an Olds that went past, staying close, using the Olds for cover. Carl opened his door, stood up and laid the .38 on the top part of the doorframe, aimed at the front end of the Olds coming toward him, let it pass and opened up on the Model A, fired five rounds double-action at the hood and the car windows, certain he either hit the driver or changed his mind from shooting it out.

Carl got his car turned around and went after the Model A, got close when it had to slow down before turning onto Seven Mile. Now it was flying toward Woodward. Carl made the turn and gunned it, gained on the Model A going past the police precinct, coming to the golf clubhouse now, the first tee, and the Pontiac engine blew with the sound of gears grinding, steam pouring from the hood vents, Carl watching the Model A approaching a red light at Woodward. Carl, his dead car rolling to a stop, had to watch through spiderweb gunshots in the windshield and steam rising to see the speed demon run the light, weaving past cars braking and swerving to miss the nut in the Model A and somehow he made it. The Avenger gone, out of sight on a gloomy April afternoon.

The Tulsa Police lieutenant said, “I’m surprised, Carl, there must be somebody else don’t like you.”

“Vito Tessa from Kansas City,” Carl said, using the phone on the table behind the staircase that came down in a curve toward the murder-scene living room. “Vito told Virgil he was coming up to see me.”

“I love Virgil,” the Tulsa lieutenant said. “The first thing he ever said to me-we’re in that bar in the basement of the Mayo. He says, ‘You ever been in a pissing contest?’ I said no, what do you go for, height or distance? He says, ‘No, we piss on the ice in urinals and bet on whose pile of cubes gets melted down the most.’ But the thing about your dad, he didn’t piss on any kind of regular basis. He could hold it.”

“That’s why he’s still one of the great pissers,” Carl said, “he can hold it as long as he wants, which you don’t find at all in men his age. I’ve been in that bar with my dad, but I can’t say I ever pissed next to him. Go in the woods with him hunting, I don’t think I ever saw him piss, not wanting to leave his sign.”

“That’s your dad,” the Tulsa lieutenant said. “Who’d you say, Tessa? He’s out on bond. No, wait a minute, I got the latest here. He was out on a five-hundred-dollar bond till his hearing. He was out. Tessa and some other punk held up the wrong poker game. Both of ’em got shot in the ass going out the door, with the pot they scooped into a hat. So I was right, it’s somebody else wants to shoot you.”

“Was he packing that big nickel-plate?”

“Yeah, but didn’t get off a shot. Had a full magazine.”

“It didn’t seem to me he was gonna make it in his trade,” Carl said and thanked the lieutenant.

Now Kevin Dean was coming across the living room.

“You back already?”

“I haven’t gone yet where I’m going. I just spoke to Tulsa Police asking about Vito the Avenger. Remember the kid gangster I told you about, with a brother? It wasn’t him shooting a machine gun at me in Palmer Park, he’s laid up, handcuffed to a hospital bed. So the one shooting at me was a local guy. He knew who I was, driving away from here. He had light-colored hair, like Bohdan’s.”

“As long as his?”

“I couldn’t tell. The guy fired at me with a machine gun that wasn’t a Thompson. I can hear a Thompson in my head. This one had a different sound.”

“Upstairs in the doctor’s bedroom,” Kevin said, “a cabinet was pried open. Nothing in it but a box of nines. But now Nadia the maid says with her accent the guns are missing. A Walther, two Luger pistols and a Maschinenpistole 40, like the ones she saw at the War Souvenir Show at Hudson’s. You recall we missed that show?”

“Having lunch with Honey.” He could see her working on her salad, then wiping a roll over the empty plate, picking up any dressing that was left.

“You know what Walter calls her, Honig, the German word for honey, Honig Schoen.” Kevin said, “Tell me what happened in the park.”

Carl took him through it to where the Pontiac engine blew and he watched the Model A make it through the Woodward intersection.

“And you left your car?”

Carl said he stopped at the Palmer Park Precinct, the Twelfth , and sent them after a shot-up Model A, a black one, and told them where Bo lived. “They towed my car out of the street and said they’d have their mechanic look under the hood.” Carl said, “I hate to lose that car,” and said, “You wouldn’t happen to have one I can borrow, do you? Or maybe the Bureau’ll let me have one?”

Maybe. But what Kevin wanted to know, “If Bo’s shooting people who can testify against him and Vera, why’s he want to shoot you?”

“I don’t know, I only met him this morning,” Carl said. “I did speak loud to him. I might’ve hurt his feelings.”

“You going to Honey’s?”

“I’m thinking about it.”

“You don’t have wheels, I can take you, tag along.”

Carl didn’t need Kevin with him. He said, “You’re on this case-don’t you want to get hold of Bohdan quick as you can?”

“You sent the cops after him.”

“When your superior asks you what you were doing, you tell him you were visiting a young lady?”

“Don’t you want Bo?”

“I’d rather have Jurgen,” Carl said. “Homicide wants Bo. You could drive down to Vera’s with one of those boys and let me have your car. How’s that sound?”

What Bo did, he ditched the Model A on a street of workingmen’s homes, walked a block to Woodward Avenue and around the corner to the 4-Mile Bar, a block and a half from the cathedral. He had a shot of whiskey before he called Vera.