A World of Thieves

some way. The car?—stolen? Sweet Baby Jesus, don’t tell me. No wonder that fella gave me such a fine deal on it. Just yesterday in Baton Rouge. My rattletrap Model T and forty dollars. Said he was in bad need of the cash. It about broke me but was too good a bargain to pass up. Wrote me a bill of sale on a cafe napkin and promised to mail me the proper papers care of general delivery in Baton Rouge. Seemed a right enough fella so I trusted him. Lord only knows what I did with that napkin. Damn me for a careless fool.

Damn me for a lowdown liar, the cops said. Then tried smacking my partners’ names out of me. But I kept my mouth shut and didn’t cave.

The Southeast Louisiana Sheriffs’ Convention is what it was. There were more than sixty lawmen in Verte Rivage that day, and we hit the bank just as they’d set out to the fairgrounds for a barbecue and decided to make a loud parade of it. Ten minutes later there wouldn’t have been a cop in town. You’d think Buck’s informant would’ve known about it and passed the word. It might’ve been of some benefit to our planning.

I was three days in the Verte Rivage jail while they searched for Buck and Russell. They’d stolen a truck outside of town but abandoned it with a ruined wheel ten miles away, near the edge of the swamp. The cops sent in trackers and dogs, but finally gave up the hunt.

“Most like your buddies drowned or the gators got them,” a cop told me.

Maybe, I thought, and maybe not. Buck and Russell had grown up prowling the swamps and they weren’t about to be killed by one. But the talk in the jailhouse was that they’d made off with ten thousand dollars, and everybody knew how some cops would shoot robbers they caught with holdup money and out of sight of witnesses. They’d dump the body in the swamp and report that the man got away. Easy loot and hardly any paperwork.

The embarrassment of having the town’s only bank robbed right under their noses had put a lot of the conventioning cops in a vile temper. Lucky for me some of the older sheriffs thought the whole business was fairly amusing and they restrained the hotter ones from busting me up too bad. All the same I took a drubbing. But I used every trick I knew to protect my teeth and I didn’t lose any. No bones broken. It could’ve been worse.

They booked me into the Baton Rouge jail a little before dark. While I was waiting for permission to telephone my lawyer, he showed up. He asked to see Lionel Buckman, and so I knew Buck and Russell were all right, since the only way he could’ve known the alias I’d be using was if they’d been in touch with him.

I was taken to the visiting room and got my first look at Edward Longstreet Charponne. Sharp Eddie. Buck and Russell had told me all about this criminal attorney they kept on retainer. He came from old Louisiana money but had always been a black sheep. After graduating from Tulane he set up offices in New Orleans and Baton Rouge and became immensely and notoriously successful at defending criminals of every stripe. His embarrassed family disowned him. The newspapers regularly reproached him for his choice of clientele and had called him as much a menace to decent society as the rogues he represented. Eddie in turn routinely accused the papers of an un- American disdain for every man’s constitutional right to a fair day in court.

The simple truth of the matter, Buck told me, was that Sharp Eddie got a kick out of dealing with crooks.

“It’s true,” Russell said. “He’s another one of them educated types who like to rub elbows with what is commonly called the underworld.” They’d both given me a look and I couldn’t help but grin back at them.

We sat on opposite sides of a long table partitioned lengthwise by a heavy wire screen. A guard stood over by the wall on my side of the partition. Sharp Eddie was short and heavyset but impeccably groomed and expensively tailored, his blond hair combed straight back and his goatee closely trimmed. A white Panama lay beside some papers laid neatly before him.

“I was alerted to your situation via long-distance telephone,” he said in a low soft lilt I suspected was his normal tone rather than a deference to the guard’s presence. He was of a class of men rarely obliged to raise their voice.

I asked in a whisper where they were. He said he hadn’t asked and they hadn’t volunteered the information. “Better for everyone that way,” he said.

He glanced down at the papers. “The Verte Rivage report states that you had multiple facial lacerations and various other bruises at the time of your arrest. It speculates that perhaps you’d been in a motorcar accident immediately prior to the holdup.”

His eyes roamed my battered and discolored face, my bloated ears, my dirty rumpled suit. I smiled and shrugged and both actions hurt.

“Yes, well,” he said. “Hazards of the profession.” This from a man I would’ve bet had never felt a punch.

He said I’d be arraigned in the morning and a trial date set, and five minutes after that he’d have me out on bond. The robbery charge was nothing but air, entirely and flimsily circumstantial. If the state didn’t drop it before trial, he’d move to dismiss and ten-to-one the judge would grant.

“If not,” he said, “I’ll dismantle it in court in a minute.”

The Packard might be more of a problem. I could have come by the car exactly as I’d said. Who could prove that I hadn’t? My stupid story might strain the court’s belief, yes, but most judges had heard stupidity in such quantity and size that few examples of it surprised them anymore. It could be argued—and he would so argue, he assured me—that however foolish I’d been, I was as much a victim of fraud as the Packard’s owner was of theft.

“The court might go for it,” Sharp Eddie said. “Even if it doesn’t, you have no record of previous arrest, so there’s a good chance of immediate probation. Worst possibility? Six months in the parish lockup and you’ll be out in two.”

He consulted a large gold wristwatch and stood up, gathering the papers and slipping them into a tooled leather briefcase.

“All things considered,” he said, setting the Panama at an angle over one eye, “things could be exceedingly worse, as so many residents of this institution could tell you. See you in the morning, lad.”

The tank was lit by a low-watt yellow bulb with a wire cover in the middle of the ceiling. The turnkey locked me in and went back down the hall to join the other cops in an adjacent room whose door stayed open and bright with light. There were eight bunks all in a row with stained smelly mattresses and I stretched out on the one against the rear wall.

Only two other guys were in there at first. The well-dressed drunk who’d smashed up his car got bailed out pretty soon after I arrived. The other one was a little fellow who didn’t look to be more than a kid, although he was probably about my age. You could see he was a nancy—he might as well’ve worn a sign. One of his eyes was swollen purple. Most likely he’d come on to the wrong guy. My own face should’ve made him feel better about his. He hadn’t said a word, but he kept staring at me like he wanted to talk, so I gave him a hard look and he quit the eyeballing and curled up on his bunk.

I’d been dozing when they brought in a pair of loud ones. They wore T-shirts that showed off their tattooed arms and I thought they might be merchant seamen. One of them was insisting they had only been playing a joke and hadn’t been serious about strong-arming anybody.

“Yeah, sure, Horton,” a cop said, “you’re always innocent.”

The jailer clanked the door shut and turned the lock. The Horton one stood at the bars and yelled down the hall after them about a man’s right to make a phone call.

“We want a lawyer!” the other one said. He looked like an Indian. They finally quieted down to muttering between themselves.

I didn’t know how long I’d been asleep when something woke me and I rolled over and saw the kid kneeling on the floor, the Indian behind him and twisting his arm up high on his back. The other guy had the kid by the hair and was trying to make him suck his dick.

The kid was whimpering like a dog and jerking his head away. The guy yanked harder on his hair and smacked him in the face and told him to shut up and do it.

The Indian looked out to the hallway, then said through his teeth, “Holler again I’ll break your arm.”

I told myself the fairy had it coming. Likely said something to them. Maybe they wanted some of his action and he suddenly got particular. Whatever it was, it wasn’t my concern.

And then the Indian saw me watching and said, “Mind your fucken business.”

That’s what I should’ve done. Never stick your neck out for anybody but yourself and kin—even Daddy had always said that. But the beating I’d taken in Verte Rivage had put me in a mood. I was aching to punch somebody, I was right at the edge. The glare the Indian gave me, like he