Elmore Leonard - Up in Honey's Room

“I didn’t know he was, or I wasn’t sure of it till she said we do it on the sofa or we don’t do it.”

“So when you started out telling her of your passion, it was to get laid.”

“I guess it was,” Carl said. “But I didn’t get laid, did I?”

“Didn’t break your vow. You were lucky, uh?”

“I walked past the bedroom door and out of the apartment.”

“You didn’t say anything to the lovely naked girl?”

“I said, ‘It doesn’t look like it’s gonna work out, does it?’ She was smiling a little, her eyes were. She’s the type, she’s comfortable not having any clothes on. No, at this point she’s having a good time.”

“Did she say anything to you?”

“She said, ‘You give up too easily.’”

“Wait. How did she know you wouldn’t look in the bedroom?”

“She gave me a choice, one or the other.”

“But you didn’t jump on her.”

“I wanted to. I would’ve if Jurgen wasn’t there. I didn’t tell Honey but he saved me from breaking my word, something I’ve never done in my life, ’less I’m kidding when I give it and everybody, or most everybody knows I’m kidding. No, I took a vow when I got married and I haven’t broken it yet. So I feel I owe Jurgen one. He wants to run and hide, stay low till the war’s over, it’s okay with me. He saved me from breaking my word. I’ll tell my boss, W. R. Bill Hutchinson, I couldn’t find the two escapees and that’ll be that.”

Narcissa’s voice said, “Oh, is that right? But what if you run into Honey again and no one like Jurgen is around to save your pitiful ass?”

He tried to get hold of Kevin to return his car, phoning from his room. The FBI voice said he was out of the office, on assignment. Carl asked if Bohdan Kravchenko had been apprehended. The voice said that information was not available for release. Carl left word for Kevin to call him at the hotel.

He phoned Louly at the marine air station in North Carolina, proud of his semiclear conscience, ready to say “I’ve been too busy” when she asked if he was staying out of trouble. But Louly wasn’t available either. What he should do, get ready to take the train back to Tulsa.

The phone rang. He expected it to be Kevin or Louly.

It was Honey Deal.

“You want to see Jurgen?”

“Let me talk to him on the phone.”

“Carl, Vera called. She wants to stop by this evening and visit.”

“With Bohunk?”

“She doesn’t know where he is. He didn’t come back last night. She’s worried about him.”

“I can see her wringing her hands,” Carl said. “What time she coming?”

“About eight. Stop in and say good-bye to Jurgen.”

“Where’s he going?”

“He won’t tell me.”

“Show him your hooters.”

“They’re on ice for you, Carl. You know what happens when ice touches just the tips?”

Carl said, “You sneeze?” and said right away, “You know you’re hanging out with the wrong crowd.”

“I know it,” Honey said. “But I don’t feel the least bit subversive. Do you? Or you can get away with it but I can’t?”

“Something like that,” Carl said.

“Listen, stop by for a drink tonight. I promise I won’t show you my boobs.”

“But I’ll understand,” Carl said, “if you can’t help taking your clothes off.”

She said, “Wait a minute.”

He heard her lay the phone down on a hard surface and after that faint voices. Now she was back.

“Carl, turn on your radio. Roosevelt’s dead.”

It was the way she said it. Not, he died; he was dead.

Carl said, “You don’t think Walter . . .”

Walter heard the news in the Greyhound bus station in downtown Detroit over the public-address system. He missed the first part of the announcement, the bus-schedule voice saying, “It is our sad duty to inform you that at three thirty-five this afternoon”- Walter waiting to hear where the bus was going, thought, Three thirty-five? Knowing it was almost six, looked up at the clock and saw he was right. Now he listened and heard the public-address voice say:

“Death gave the sixty-three-year-old president of the United States short notice. At about one o’clock this afternoon, in the Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia, the president felt a sudden pain in the back of his head. At the time he was having his portrait sketched in preparation for a painting. At one-fifteen the president fainted, never to regain consciousness. At three thirty-five p.m. Franklin Roosevelt died without pain of what his doctor called a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Funeral service for the president will be held in the East Room of the White House . . .”

That was enough for Walter. He got up and walked over to the ticket window, the PA system sounding as though it was starting over again.

“Today, April twelfth in Warm Springs, Georgia, death took Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president of the United States, and left millions of Americans shocked and stunned.”

Walter turned in his ticket to Griffin by way of Atlanta and was given his refund. He began to wonder if any of the people at Vera’s the other night, when they heard of Roosevelt’s death would immediately say, “My God, was it Walter?” Or would they say, “My God, it was Walter.” Remembering his determination. Vera comes up to him. No, first Honig. She touches his face and asks in her soft voice, “Walter, how in the world did you do it?”

“My dear,” he would say, “you don’t believe his brain hemorrhaged?”

“Yes, but what caused it to do so?”

They’ll consider he used some type of poison and he’ll tell them, “Believe what you want.”

“He must have used poison.”

“But how was it administered?”

“He couldn’t have done it. Walter is still in Detroit.”

“Walter’s clever. He sent it.”

“What?”

“Let’s say a cake. Delivered to the Little White House bearing the name of the president’s lady friend, according to Joe Aubrey, Miss Lucy Mercer. Oh, that Walter is clever. Even if the president has a food taster like kings of old, a cake said to be from Miss Lucy Mercer would arouse no suspicion. The president has a piece while having his portrait sketched, takes several bites and slumps in his chair in a coma. The time, one-fifteen, as he finishes his lunch.”

It was the kind of cloak-and-dagger plot Vera would think of. Or something like it. He could hear Vera say, “By whatever means the president met his end, you can be sure our Walter made it happen. We are not surprised at the cover-up, the White House saying his death was of natural causes. I doubt that Walter will ever reveal how he brought it off. For as long as he lives people who know this cunning fellow will offer their own theories and each will ask, ‘Is that how you did it, Walter?’”

His reply would remain, “Believe what you want.”

Honey had an apron on over the bra and panties she wore straightening the living room, picking up newspapers, emptying ashtrays, dusting here and there with a feather duster, showing off in front of Jurgen on the sofa with Life, his favorite magazine. He could not believe she had saved every issue since Pearl Harbor, 163 copies of Life in the storage room, seven missing consecutively from the winter of 1942.

She astonished Jurgen. She was always her own person, a jewel, a diamond in the rough that was her own style of rough, listening to Sinatra’s “Ill Wind” and saying “Fucking effortless” in her quiet way. He wondered what happened to her in the winter of 1942, when he was in Libya. He loved her. He would be in wonder of her for as long as he lived, Honey dusting in her underwear, arching her back to aim her pert rear end at him. He had told Honey he would become a bull rider on the rodeo circuit. “You know from the radio how they announce the contestants? ‘Now here’s a young cowboy name of Flea Casanova from Big Spring, Texas.’ Soon you’re going to hear, ‘We have a young cowpoke now name of Jurgen Schrenk from Cologne, Germany. Jurgen’ll be atop a one-eyed bull full of meanness name of Killer-Diller. Ride him, Jurgen.’” He told Honey, “The first-place bull rider at the Dallas Rodeo-it’s in Life magazine-made seventy-five hundred dollars for staying on three bulls for eight seconds each. I rode a Tiger in North Africa. I can ride a bull.”