A World of Thieves Page 2

  I held him against the bars with one hand and hammered him with the other, feeling his front teeth go, his nose. Somebody clubbed me from behind and I spun around and drilled him with a straight right and saw it was a cop as he went backpedaling into the wall and down on his ass.

  Now the other cops were all over me and I knew better than try to make a fight of it. I hunkered down and covered up with my arms the best I could but still took a lot of thumps before the one in charge yelled, “All right, enough!”

  I felt like I was wearing a ten-pound headache hat. The Indian was up on hands and knees now, dry heaving, his face gray. Horton was curled up on the floor with his hands over his broken mouth and nose. The sergeant gave him a kick in the ribs and said, “You never been nothing but trouble in this jailhouse, you shitbird.”

  “Shooo,” a cop said, “lookit old C.J. That boy is out!”

  He nodded at the cop I’d hit. He was sitting against the wall with his chin on his chest. One of them went over and shook his shoulder and said, “Come on, old son, get up and piss—the world’s on fire!”

  The C.J. guy slumped over, eyes half open. The other cop’s mouth fell open and he knelt and put an ear to the C.J. guy’s chest.

  Then looked up and said, “Lordy, this boy’s dead.”

  Dead and the sole son of John Isley Bonham, a longtime deputy sheriff down in Terrebonne Parish and something of a legend all over the delta. I didn’t know who he was until one of the cops referred to him as John Bones and I remembered having heard Buck and Russell mention the name one time in discussing the roughest cops they knew of. I heard plenty more about him, from jailers and jailbirds both, while I was waiting to go to trial.

  They said he’d killed more men than any other cop in Louisiana. He’d claimed self-defense in every case but rumors persisted that some of the shootings had been point-blank executions. He’d been investigated a dozen times and suspended from duty a time or two but never found guilty of malfeasance or anything else. The local newspapers had long celebrated him as a lone wolf of justice whose fearsome reputation kept bootleggers and other criminals out of Terrebonne Parish. One robber he shot lived long enough to pull the trigger on a shotgun and remove most of Bonham’s left hand, a maiming in the line of duty that made him even more of a public hero. For ten years now he’d worn a set of chrome pincers in place of the hand and they said just the sight of that thing put suspects in a sweat when he entered an interrogation room.

  He had outlasted a string of high sheriffs and for a long time now he could’ve had the job for the asking but didn’t want it. He wasn’t one for politics or smiling for the cameras. It was common knowledge he wasn’t well liked by his fellow cops—he was too stand-offish, too given to working without a partner. But they all said he was the most respected man among them, which I took to mean he was the most feared.

  “He is that,” Sharp Eddie said. “And he’s got a lot of admirers that don’t know the first thing about him except that he scares the merde out of crooks and that he’s had some sad luck in his life. Lost his first wife nearly forty years ago when she drowned off Grand Isle on their honeymoon. Their honeymoon, son. That’s the kind of thing that gets a man a lifetime of sympathy. He married again sixteen years later and they had a baby boy, but then twelve years ago wife number two hanged herself. Didn’t leave a note, but everybody knew she had a nervous condition and it most likely got the best of her. The man did not marry again. And now, with that sixty-year-old stalwart of the law so near the end of a long and illustrious service to the state, his only begotten son is killed in a fight with a jailbird.”

  He paused to give me a cigarette, then lit it and one for himself. “It’s hardly surprising,” he said, “what with John Isley Bonham being such a tragic hero and all, that the state is charging his son’s killer with murder in the first degree and the newspapers are cheering that decision.”

  Given the circumstances, I didn’t see how in purple hell they thought they could nail me on murder in any degree. But Eddie said he knew of weaker cases that had sent men to the gallows.

  “In most courtrooms across our grand republic, the facts of this case wouldn’t support even second-degree charges,” Eddie said. “But we’re in Loosiana, my boy, and if the jury wants your ass it’ll have it. I got my work cut out, son, believe me.”

  I said if he was trying to boost my spirits he was falling a little shy. He said he just didn’t want me looking cocky in front of the jurymen.

  The only word from Buck and Russell came with a packet of cash which arrived at Eddie’s office. The envelope was postmarked Houma, and a note attached to the money said, “Buy it.”

  They were obviously keeping up with the news.

  But Eddie said they ought to know there’d be no buying me out of it, not with the victim being son to a policeman—especially this policeman. He did buy me a nice suit to wear in the courtroom.

  The state presented Charlton John Bonham—“C.J.” to all who knew him—as a large-hearted young man cut down in the bloom of his life, as a prime candidate for such law enforcement greatness as his father had achieved. Witness after witness told of C.J.’s genial nature, of his deep devotion to a mother whose tragic loss came when he was but ten years old, of his avid desire since boyhood to be a policeman like his daddy, of his dedication to duty.

  At our table Sharp Eddie gave me a look. More than one person in a position to know had admitted to him in private that C. J. Bonham was one of the worst bullies in the Baton Rouge Police Department. He’d been assigned to jail duty while the department investigated him for beating to death a fifteen-year-old boy he’d caught breaking into a warehouse. Even so, the only reason the killing was being investigated was that the boy was white and his father had died heroically in the war—and because his grieving mother had raised a stink in public. Some of the jail cops had told Sharp Eddie in detail how C.J. loved to use his club on prisoners, but of course none of them would testify to it. They said if he tried to make them repeat their stories on the stand they’d deny every word to John Bones personally and call Eddie a liar in court.

  John Bones—the daddy wolf himself, the two-time widower and famous crook killer—sat in the front row of spectators. Tall and lean in a black suit and black string tie, his gray hair close-cropped, his gray mustache thick and drooping, his face stone-stiff and void of all expression. He held his planter’s hat on his lap and covering the contraption on the end of his arm. I didn’t catch him looking at me until midway through the first day’s proceedings. His eyes were brightly black and fixed on me like a hawk’s.

  I gave him a look right back: Up yours, mister.

  On the night it had happened, after they took the body away and charged me with the killing and transferred me to a regular cell, I’d lain in my bunk and waited to feel whatever I was going to feel about it. My pulse was still jumping and I was still trembling a little, but that wasn’t unusual after a fight, in or out of the ring. I was sorry I’d killed him, which of course wasn’t the same thing as being sorry he was dead, but how could I be sorry about that when I didn’t know a thing about him except he was a jailhouse cop? Later on, when I found out the kind of cop he’d been, the fact that he was dead didn’t bother me at all. On that night, however, all I had in mind was that I’d killed him, and I waited for guilt or regret or fear or whatever mix of feelings might descend on me. Over the next few hours I felt a twist of them all, but they passed fairly quickly. Except for anger. That’s the one that stuck.

  The look John Bones gave me in court brought that anger back in a rush. What did he expect—I’d take a knock on the head and not do anything about it because his son was a cop? Buck once said the main reason he hated cops was they were naturalborn bullies. They loved the action when the odds were all on their side, but let them get the worst of it and then listen to them cry.

  The old man and I held stares for a long moment—and then he showed a trace of a smile and brought that chrome thing up from under the h
at and gently stroked his mustache with it, letting me see it in all its wicked gleam like some kind of surgeon’s tool. Then he slipped it back under the hat and turned away and didn’t look at me again.

  To hell with you too, I thought.

  The prosecutor reminded the jurymen that C.J.’s life had been taken by a man already in jail on charges of bank robbery and car theft. And now that man had committed murder, the most horrid sort of theft there was—the theft of a human life. And, the prosecutor added, this awful theft didn’t stop with C.J. The murder of that fine boy also robbed the father, John Isley Bonham—robbed him of his only son, robbed him of his lineage.

  “And there he sits, gentlemen,” the prosecutor said, pointing at me. “The man who committed all of this unspeakable thievery.”

  And so forth.

  Sharp Eddie had wanted the fairy I’d defended to testify, and the kid agreed to it, but as soon as he’d served his ten days for solicitation of an unnatural sex act and was turned loose, he took off. Horton and the Indian disappeared too. So Eddie went to work without witnesses.

  He looked the jurymen in the eye as he explained the woefully mistaken arrest in Verte Rivage that placed me, an innocent man, in the Baton Rouge jail on that fateful night. He described the frail and helpless boy who’d been there too and would have fallen victim to the sexual depravities of a pair of brutal inmates but for my intervention—an act of selfless bravery that almost cost me my own life. The blow young Bonham took was inadvertent, a random, instinctive punch in the midst of a melee. And while the mortal skull fracture he received on striking the wall was certainly tragic, it was no act of murder, but an act of God, a death by misadventure.

  And so on.

  A few of the jurors seemed receptive to Eddie’s argument but most of them looked unmoved. They talked it over behind closed doors for about three hours before settling on one of the alternatives the judge gave them and convicting me of manslaughter.

  Better than murder in any degree, yeah…but still. When I heard the verdict I felt like the world abruptly tilted way the hell over.

  And when the judge sentenced me to thirty years at Angola, I felt like I was falling off.

  The newspapers thought both jury and judge had gone too easy on me. John Bonham refused to comment on the verdict or any other aspect of the trial. Sharp Eddie said he’d appeal, of course—first the conviction, and if that went nowhere, the sentence. But I’d learned to read him fairly well by then, and I had a feeling he knew the thing was settled and done. Which meant the most I could hope for was parole in ten years.

  Ten.

  L ionel Loomis LaSalle—that’s my name on the dotted line. I was still a child when Daddy apologized for it. Lionel Loomis was my mother’s father, and Daddy’d had to agree to both names for their firstborn son before she would marry him. But he never did use it. He called me Sonny and that’s what I went by. My mother called me Lionel until I refused to answer to it and she finally gave in and called me Sonny too. Except when she was vexed with me—then it was always Lionel.

  I wouldn’t have been too happy with Daddy’s name, either—Marlon—though the name didn’t seem to bother him any, maybe because he went by Lonnie. He was Buck’s and Russell’s elder brother by ten years. He’d grown up the same sort of wildhair kid they would become—always in trouble at school and getting in fights and doing petty thieving and such. At sixteen he was caught breaking into a warehouse by a night watchman who whaled on him with a club until Daddy took it away from him and whipped him bloody before the cops showed up. The judge gave him the choice of a year in jail or lying about his age and enlisting in the military. Three days later he was on his way to a naval training camp. He learned to box in the navy and made it to the semifinals of the fleet championships. He liked the sailor’s life but not the navy with all its saluting and regulations and petty punishments. At the end of his hitch he returned to New Orleans and signed on as a merchant seaman.

  He met my mother one chilly autumn morning in a French Market café. She was a librarian, a pretty but shy girl who’d grown up with stern warnings about sailors. But she was a romantic at heart and couldn’t help being amused by this handsome mariner just returned from distant ports and so happily drunk at such a saintly hour. She gave him the chance he needed to impress her and four months later they got married and moved into an apartment on St. Philip. I was born on the next New Year’s night.

  Although Daddy was often gone to sea I never heard my mother complain of it. She’d known the life she was making when she married a sailorman. They were always happy when they were together. Some nights I’d lie awake listening to their husky whispers and low laughter from the bedroom down the hall. But she was a solitary woman of few friends, and when Daddy was away what she mostly did was read. She read to me too, every night from the time I was a baby until I was almost five and was reading for myself. All through my grammar school years she made sure I did my homework and would test me on it every night. She was forever correcting my grammar and pronunciations, and she’d despair to hear me lapse into the regional drawl and locutions. It was something I did now and then to fit in with the people I found myself among—though sometimes I did it for no reason except I liked how the accent felt in my mouth. When I pointed out that Daddy and Buck and Russell all spoke that way, she said that was all right because they couldn’t help it, but I could.

  “Whether we like it or not, people judge us by the way we speak,” she said. “Why give the impression of being uneducated if you don’t have to?”

  “I ain’t got no good answer to that, I don’t reckon,” I said.

  “Lionel…”

  When I finished the sixth grade, she persuaded Daddy that it was worth the cost to enroll me in a private school where I could get an education befitting my intelligence. He always deferred to her in matters of my education, and so the following year I found myself attending Gulliver Academy, overlooking Lake Ponchartrain.

  Daddy had been teaching me to fight since I was old enough to make a fist, and I’d applied his lessons to the jerks in grammar school who’d made fun of my name before the teachers took to calling me Sonny. But it was at Gulliver that his tutoring served me best. The school’s motto was Mens sana in corpore sano and varsity athletes were much admired, especially the boxers. My mother had been opposed to my joining the team but I told her I wasn’t really boxing, I was engaged in the pugilistic arts—which got the smile from her I’d hoped it would. We made a bargain that I’d quit the squad if my grades slipped. They never did. The only promise she ever asked of me was to do well in my studies, a simple pledge to keep because schoolwork came so easily to me.

  When I won the interscholastic welterweight championship at the end of my sophomore year, I was the youngest champ in the history of the school. Daddy’s ship had come into port two days earlier, and Buck and Russell were with him in the arena that night.

  My uncles were fraternal twins, only twelve years older than I. It was never any secret to me that they’d been breaking the law since boyhood. I’d heard all about the card and dice games they’d operated behind the school gym, knew all about the burglaries they’d been doing since the age of thirteen.

  I was ten when they came back from the war. Buck brought me a bayonet he took off a Hun he’d killed. “Fourteen of the bastards for sure,” he said. “No telling how many I potted in the dark.”

  He pulled up his shirt to show me the pinkly puckered scars where the bullet passed through that cost him a kidney. Russell was still using a cane then. He’d been an ace sniper until a machine gun knocked him out of a tree with one leg so shot up he almost hadn’t been able to talk the surgeon out of amputation.

  After hearing the first few of their war stories my mother excused herself from the room. They later begged her pardon and promised not to talk of such things in her company again, and they didn’t. They usually kept to their best behavior around her, rarely using profanity in her presence and quickly apologizing when th
ey slipped up. But I’d heard her talking to Daddy and knew she was as much bothered by their cavalier attitude toward the violence they’d seen as by the horror of their stories. She’d known them since they were wild boys in constant trouble with the law, and she was afraid they would revert to their old ways. Daddy didn’t think so. He believed the war had changed them for the better, had made them realize it was time they became responsible men.

  “They’ll find themselves a right trade, you’ll see,” he said.

  They’d come out of the army with enough money to see them through for a while and they told Daddy they wanted to take their time deciding what to do for a living. When they still didn’t have jobs after two months and he offered to help them get seaman’s papers or at least some kind of job on the docks, they said they didn’t want to lie to him anymore and confessed that they were back at their old trades. Daddy couldn’t understand why, after nearly being killed in France, they’d want to risk jail or even worse by going back to thieving and the gambling dens.

  “Hell, Lonnie,” Buck said, lowering his voice and glancing toward the bedroom to make sure my mother wasn’t in earshot, “it’s because we didn’t get killed in France, man. I promised myself if I ever made it back to the world I’d never take another order or live another minute by somebody else’s rules.”

  Russell nodded and said, “Amen, brother.”

  They made a joke of his concern over their gambling, saying it wasn’t really gambling, not the way they did it. That made me laugh out loud, and Buck and Russell grinned at me. Daddy gave me a look like I’d said something he never heard before, then told them that the way they did it was even riskier than real gambling. Buck smiled wide and said, “You reckon?”