A World of Thieves

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 hat 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.

Lionel 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 cafe. 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