Elmore Leonard - Up in Honey's Room

“Before she married Carl Webster.”

“That’s right, and now she’s in the Women Marines, teaching recruits how to fire a machine gun from the backseat of a dive-bomber.” Kevin said, “All the guys Carl Webster shot, he used the same Colt .38 revolver, the front sight filed off. No, one he shot with a Winchester at four hundred yards. At night.” Kevin said, “Something I don’t understand, you see his name in the paper or in the book, it’s Carl Webster. But when he calls me he says, ‘This is Carlos Webster.’”

“That’s his real name?”

“Carlos Huntington Webster. His dad was in Cuba with Huntington’s Marines at Guantánamo in ’98, during the Spanish-American War. Carl’s mother was Cuban and his dad’s mother was part Northern Cheyenne. But does he go by Carl or Carlos?”

“How old is he?”

“All he’s done, you’d think he’d have some years on him, but he isn’t yet forty years old.”

“Have you met him?”

“Not yet. He was ready to come to Detroit on his own, help us look for Jurgen and the SS guy, Otto. But Carl’s boss, the Tulsa marshal, retired and they made Carl acting head of the office. He raised hell saying he’d never had a desk job and never would.

The marshals office in Washington said okay, they’d look around and find someone to take his place. He told me, if we don’t have Jurgen by the time his replacement arrives, he’s definitely coming.”

Kevin looked at Honey. He loved looking at her profile. She had a cute nose like the girls in the Jantzen swimming suit ads. She didn’t act like she knew she was a knockout, but he would bet she did and knew how to use her looks without letting on too much.

“You want to meet him if he comes?”

“I wouldn’t mind,” Honey said. “But why would he bother seeing me?”

“Walter,” Kevin said. “He wants you along when he talks to him.”

Every time Carl approached the Mayo he thought of the guy who tried to shoot him in the back as he entered the hotel. The Black Hand extortion guy ten years ago. With an Italian name Carl couldn’t think of. The doorman that day had been holding one of the doors open for Carl. He started in and the glass in the door next to him and in the door swinging closed behind him both shattered, blown apart with the sound of high-caliber gunfire and now tires screaming, the Ford coupe gone by the time Carl came around with his Colt revolver.

Today the same doorman was holding the door open, Marvin, a black guy, Marvin asking Carl as he approached the entrance how he was this spring morning. Now looking past Carl and saying, “Uh-oh,” under his breath. “Man has a gun.”

Carl stopped. He heard his name called and turned to see a young guy in black holding a big heavy show-off nickel-plate automatic against his leg, the shoulders of his suit wide, zooty, the pants pegged at his light-tan shoes. There he was, a full head of black hair shining in the hotel lights, a young gangster, Italian or Jewish, here to shoot Carl Webster. If the kid was Jewish he’d be a kin of the Tedesco brothers, Tutti and Frankie Bones from the Purple Gang. That time in Okmulgee they came around on him pulling their guns, Carl fired twice and the Tedescos went down.

This one, standing on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, said, “You Carl Webster?”

“Yes, I am. Tell me who you’re related to.”

“You killed my brother.”

The third one to come along with a dead brother. Carl said, “You mean the one use to beat the shit out of you when he felt like it? Which one was he?”

“Luigi Tessa.”

Jesus Christ, Lou Tessa the backshooter. Carl shook his head. “You know he ambushed me? Right here as I’m going in the hotel? You could’ve busted me from behind yourself, but you want to do it face-to-face, uh? There’s hope for you, boy. What’s your name?”

“Why you want to know?”

“So when I tell what happened here I can give your Christian name. Who you were.” Carl freed the button holding his suitcoat closed and said, “Wait a minute. I never killed your brother, he went to prison.”

“Where he got the chair,” the kid gangster said. “It’s the same as you killin’ him.”

“Listen,” Carl said, “you don’t want to shoot me.” He held his suitcoat open wide with both hands. “You see a gun on my person?” Carl dropped his arms, his right hand sweeping the coat aside to bring out the .38 revolver from his waist, hard against his spine, and put it on Lou Tessa’s brother, telling him, “Now you see it. Lay your left hand on that cannon you’re holding and eject the loads till the piece is empty. You pause,” Carl said, “I’ll take it to mean you want to kill me and I’ll shoot you through the heart.”

Virgil, Carl’s dad, said, “I thought you liked a shoulder holster.”

“I’m not gonna wear it driving. I get in the car,” Carl said, “my gun goes in the glove compartment. I checked out of the office and stopped by the Mayo for a drink. You ought to move to Tulsa. That bar in the basement keeps right up.”

“What’d you do with the kid gangster?”

“Turned him over to Tulsa police. They’ll look him up, see if his big nickel-plate is dirty or not. Vito Tessa, they can have him. I’m leaving from here in the morning, six-thirty.”

“How come you’re sure the two Huns are in Detroit?”

Carl and his dad were sitting in wicker chairs this evening-in shirtsleeves but wearing their felt hats-on the front porch of Virgil’s big California bungalow, the home situated in the midst of his thousand acres of pecan trees.

“What you want to ask,” Carl said, “is how I know they’re still in Detroit, five and a half months later.”

They were talking about Jurgen Schrenk mostly, a POW from the Afrika Korps, tank captain and one of Rommel’s recon officers. Finally, 165 days from the time Jurgen and the other one, Otto Penzler, the SS major, broke out of the Deep Fork prisoner-of-war camp-drove out in a panel truck, the two Krauts wearing suits of clothes made from German uniforms-Carl was free to get after them.

This day he drove the forty miles south, Tulsa to Okmulgee to visit his dad, was the seventh of April, 1945.

Carl and his dad were drinking Mexican beer supplied by the oil company-way better than the three-two local beer. It was part of the deal that let Texas Oil lease a half section of the property, the wells pumping most of forty years while Virgil tended his pecan trees and Carl, when he was still a boy, raised beef he’d take to market in Tulsa. Virgil’s home was a few miles from Okmulgee and across the Deep Fork stream from the POW camp.

“He’s still in Detroit,” Carl said, “ ’cause he hasn’t been caught, or we’d of heard. Jurgen’ll get by, he speaks American with barely an accent. You have to know what words to listen for. I told you he lived in Detroit when he was a kid? He can talk like a Yankee or sound like he’s from Oklahoma, either way.”

“I’d see him,” Virgil said, “the times he’d come with a work crew of prisoners. I swear they all looked like foreigners except Jurgen. I asked him one time was he thinking of setting fire to oil wells and storage tanks, see if he could perform acts of sabotage.”

“After you told him you were on the Maine .”

“Yes, I did, a marine aboard the battleship the night the dons blew her up in Havana harbor, 1898, and set us at war with Spain. I told him there wasn’t a destructive act he could think of that would compare to blowing up the battleship Maine .”

Carl said he got a kick out of Jurgen slipping out of camp every couple of months to get laid, spend some time with his girlfriend, Shemane.

“She was a hot number,” Virgil said, “worked in a Kansas City cathouse. The next time she’s seen she’s driving by here in a Lincoln Zephyr.”