A World of Thieves

thought he was spooking me, pushed me over.

I stood up and the Horton one got that look they get when the thing doesn’t go how they expect. He hustled his dick back in his pants and said, “Hey boy,” and raised a finger at me in warning. I feinted left and clipped him with the right. It wasn’t flush but it sent him sprawling.

The Indian tried to get me in a headlock but I wrenched free and hooked him hard in the kidney and he hollered and dropped to his knees. I gave him one in the neck and he fell on his side, gagging loud, and then puked on the concrete floor.

“What the hell’s going on?” A cop was at the hallway door but couldn’t see into the tank from there.

The kid was over by the wall, gawking at me. I felt like smacking him too, for being such a rabbit. I should’ve been watching the Horton guy—he came up from behind and locked a forearm around my throat. I heard the cops clamoring at the cell door as I got the footing I needed and lunged back hard and banged Horton against the bars, knocking him breathless and breaking his hold on me.

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