A World of Thieves

by James Carlos Blake

  “Got to go, boys, I got to…” He was so “rattled” he dropped some bills and affected not to notice—a perfect touch—and the guy next to him fetched the money up for him.

  Buck was the very picture of a shaken man. “Sorry, boys, sorry,” he said. “Gotta go.”

  “Hey now, what the hell…?” the goatee said.

  “Christ’s sake, Parham, it’s the man’s wife,” another guy said.

  “I’m really sorry, fellas,” Buck said. He tossed a twenty on the table. “You all have a few on me. Jesus, guys, I wish…ah, hell. Tommy, get me to that damn hospital. Let’s go!”

  Then we were out of there and quickstepping down the hall. I could feel the door guy watching us. There was a muffled shriek from one of the rooms along the hall. I heard the door close behind us and let out my breath. We cut our eyes at each other and Buck’s grin looked as big as mine felt. He glanced behind us and said, “Dickson was right. Nothing but rubes.”

  We were passing by 307 when its door flew open and banged the wall and a naked girl came running out.

  I had an instant’s glimpse of a wide green bloodshot eye and a blackened swollen one, a raised purple cheekbone, a bloody nose—then her arms were tight around my neck and her blond bob was in my mouth and I heard Buck say, “Holy shit!”

  I didn’t see the burly mustached guy until his fist closed in her hair and yanked her head back, trying to pull her away. But she kept her hold on me and tugged me off balance and I fell on top of her, her breath heaving up in my face with a smell like rotted fruit.

  Then Buck and the man were on the floor and grappling beside us. I pried loose of the girl and scrambled to my feet as the guy got his hands on Buck’s throat. I gave him a kick in the ear that knocked him against the wall. Then one in the mustache that spattered the wall with blood. He curled up with his arms around his head and said “Okay, okay!” like he had a mouthful of marbles. But now Buck was on his feet and kicking him in the head and the guy cried out sharply a couple of times and then slumped still.

  A middle-aged guy in shirtsleeves was standing in the doorway of 307 with his mouth open. Behind him was a slackfaced girl in a robe. He banged the door shut and turned the lock—but not before I got a look at the bright photography lamps set up around a red sofa and a camera on a tripod.

  I expected rubberneckers out of every room, but the only door to open was down at 312. The door guy stepped out and looked at us. Buck brought out the .45 and the guy ducked inside and slammed the door. We backed up along the hallway, watching the doors, Buck repeatedly clearing his throat hard and rubbing his neck.

  The girl was half-crouched next to the elevator shaft, her knees together and her arms over her breasts. Her eyes were on us but she seemed to be having trouble focusing. Buck gave her the once-over as he stuck the .45 in his pants. The face was a battered fright but the body was something to see. And she was a real blonde. I was still feeling the way she’d flung herself on me. The way she’d held on when the guy tried pulling her back.

  “Drunk as a skunk, ain’t you, darling?” Buck said.

  I didn’t think she was. She was looped, all right, but what I’d smelled on her breath wasn’t booze.

  “They might’ve called downstairs,” Buck said. “Let’s skip any surprises.”

  He raised the fire escape window with a rusty screech. By the hallway’s weak light we could make out the bricked wall of a neighboring building not ten feet away.

  “Come on,” he said, and ducked out under the sash and started clunking down the iron stairs into the greater darkness.

  I thought of the camera and told myself she had it coming. For a bare moment her eyes fixed on mine, then slipped out of focus again. I almost said “Good luck” before the stupidity of it struck me. I had one foot out the window when she grabbed me from behind, hugging to me and crying, trembling like a mistreated dog.

  I didn’t think about it, I just did it. I took off my coat and helped her get her arms in the sleeves and she drew it close around her. The sleeves hung past her fingertips. I went out on the landing and helped her through the window. She hit her head on the sash but hardly seemed aware of it. The alley below us was dark as a grave. Unsteady as she was, I had to hold her close to me as we descended the creaky stairway into a deepening stink. At the second landing the stairs reversed direction and we went down the last flight.

  “What the hell’s this?” Buck’s harsh whisper came up from the blackness.

  As we came off the stairway she lost her footing and gasped but I caught her before she fell.

  “What’re you doing, Sonny?”

  “We can’t leave her up there,” I said.

  “Goddammit, kid, are you…shit. Come on.”

  I followed his vague form in the dark, pulling the girl along by the coat, catching her up each time she stumbled. We went past two alleyway intersections and around the corner of the next one, where Buck drew up so short I bumped into him. We stood still, listening hard, but didn’t hear anything except our own heavy breath and the scurrying of rats in the garbage. Nobody coming behind us. No police sirens on the air.

  “What’s the big idea?” he whispered.

  “No big idea,” I said. “It’s just…we don’t have to leave her to those guys to beat up some more.”

  I couldn’t see his face in the gloom but I could feel his eyes. “Hey kid, the world’s full of punching bags and for all we know that’s her husband we kicked the shit out of.”

  “If he is, I hope we busted his skull,” I said.

  Like Daddy, I never could abide a womanbeater, and like him I thought guys who hit their wives were the worst of the bunch. The neighbor across the courtyard used to smack his wife around, but one night when he had her crying really loud Daddy went over there and thumped on the door and when the guy opened up Daddy knocked him on his ass. Told him if he hit her again he’d break his neck. They didn’t have any children and I figured this time the woman would finally leave him. But when Daddy came back out I saw her sitting on the sofa with the bastard and tending to his busted mouth. I thought she was a fool for staying with him, but my mother said we shouldn’t be to hard on her. “‘Love thieves the will to be free,’” she said, quoting some line I’d never heard. That was my mother, always the poetic soul, fond of Byron and Poe and Yeats, all those versifying fools of the heart. “Well, her love for that sonofabitch,” Daddy said, “is gonna thieve her of her dumb-ass life one of these nights.”

  Buck struck up a match to illuminate the girl’s beatup face. She turned away. “What’s your name, Toots?”

  She gripped my arm more tightly.

  “Rat got your tongue?” Buck said. The match burned out and the dark swallowed us again. “Some breath on her. It ain’t hooch, either. She’s doped.”

  “More reason to get her away from those bastards,” I said.

  “She’ll just fall in with some other bastards. It’s how these bimbos are.”

  “Well, we can’t leave her here.” She pulled away from me and we heard her being sick.

  “Listen to that,” Buck said in disgust. “Christ’s sake, Sonny, this business ain’t got a lot of room in it for taking pity. It’s you and your partners and fuck the rest. Or go sell shoes for a living.”

  “I know that, dammit.” And I did. She drew up against me again. I could smell the sick on her breath. “But this isn’t business right now and she’s already here and we can at least take her someplace else. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “That’s all you’re saying, my ass. She’s built like a brick shithouse and you’d like the chance to climb all over her. Hell, kid, I don’t blame you—me too. But goddammit…”

  That wasn’t the whole reason—I didn’t know the whole reason—but I couldn’t deny it was part of it.

  He blew out a long breath. Then said, “Goddammit, Sonny, the minute…the minute she’s in the way…or even just a pain in the ass—”

  “She’s gone,” I said.

  “
You goddam right she is.”

  And that was it. He turned and headed off. I held the girl close to me and followed him to the end of the alley, where it abutted a street that wasn’t brightly lighted or heavily trafficked.

  “Wait here out of the light,” he said. Then left. The girl kept her hold on me and pressed her face into my chest.

  Fifteen minutes later the car pulled up in front of the alley. Russell stuck his head out the window and said, “Where you at? What’s this surprise you got?”

  I steered the girl out of the shadows and over to the car and Russell said, “What the hell…?”—smiling kind of crooked, like he thought it might be a joke.

  The rear door swung open and Charlie reached out and beckoned impatiently. “Get her in here, Sonny.”

  I helped her duck into the door and Charlie drew her in. “Good Lord, girl,” she said, “what happened to you?”

  I started to get in the back too but Charlie wouldn’t have it. She made me sit up front with Buck and Russell so the girl could lie on the seat with her head on Charlie’s lap.

  “Smells like somebody been using her for a…hey now,” Russell said. I don’t think he’d noticed till then that all she had on was the coat.

  “You hush up, Russell LaSalle,” Charlie said. “And turn around—all of you. It’s not a coochie show back here.” She unfurled her motor court blanket and spread it over the girl.

  Russell got the Ford rolling. Buck drained the last drops of the flask, then got the bottle from under the seat. He uncorked it and took a slug and then handed it to me. I turned it up and swallowed deep and felt the heat of it in my eyes and nose, the flooding warmth in my belly.

  Buck said it might be wise to make a beeline out of San Antonio and look for a motor court somewhere down the road. Nobody argued the point.

  “You poor thing,” Charlie crooned. She was stroking the girl’s hair. “You poor…Sonny, what’s her name?”

  “Beats me,” I said.

  “Belle.” Faintly spoken but clear enough.

  And then she was asleep.

  T he Vieux Carré. Three o’clock of a Tuesday morning. Rivermist wafting through the streets and shaping hazy aureoles around the lamplights. Some of the jazz clubs still at it, some of the speaks and sporting houses, others of them calling it a night. Edward Longstreet Charponne emerges from Miss Daniella’s front door and makes a final adjustment to his cravat as the proprietress herself smoothes the shoulders of his coat. She kisses his cheek, bids him goodnight and a good long sleep, steps inside and closes the door. He lights a thin cigar, exhales smoke and self-satisfaction, feels vestigial but pleasurable ache in his loins from the evening’s ruttish indulgences. He crosses the street to the maroon Packard parked in the shadow of an overhanging balcony, unlocks the door and slides in behind the wheel.

  He flinches at the touch of something small and hard against the back of his head as a voice says, Easy does it, counselor. Sharp Eddie is certain that the object at his head is a pistol and he feels a moment’s keen urge to urinate. He peers into the rearview but the man’s face is obscured by shadows and a white widebrimmed hat.

  Have a smoke, the man says. Good for the nerves.

  Eddie lights a cigarette and the man leans forward so the glow of the match will clarify his face in the mirror. The gray mustache spreads slightly in what might be a smile as Eddie recognizes him. He shakes out the match, certain that no amount of lawyerly outrage at being confronted in such felonious manner will be of effect with this man. Still, he is quick to recoup his self-confidence and invoke a bravado learned from his years of professional association with the rougher trades.

  Wouldn’t it be more polite, he says, not to say more productive and less warranting of assault charges, if you’d simply made an appointment to see me in my office?

  Who killed Charlton?

  Pardon me? His tone affecting a nettled bemusement. Look, deputy, the police have already interrogated me at length about Lionel Buckman’s escape, so—

  His left ear abruptly afire. His hand flies up to find there the pincers which snap onto the forefinger as well and he hears a small crack of bone. Before he can scream, the pistol barrel is deep in his mouth, scraping palate, grinding tongue on molars, inciting a surge of vomit to burn the nasal passages and cut off breath and spill over his goatee. He thinks he will drown. Then the barrel withdraws sufficiently to permit him to cough and suck a hard breath. The pincers unloose the torn ear and broken finger. Blood cascades hotly on his neck. Tears blur his vision and stream down his face, mucus floods his mustache. He snorts, chokes, gasps around the gun barrel. Tastes oil and steel and his own ferrous blood.

  The beslimed muzzle leaves his mouth and presses into his good ear. The man embracing him from behind like a perverse lover, sliding the open pincers down his chest like a caress. Touching them lightly to his crotch.

  I won’t ask again.

  Sharp Eddie gives up the names of Sonny LaSalle and his outlaw uncles—and with hardly a pause offers all he knows of last summer’s Verte Rivage bank robbery, volunteers that he recognized the newspaper drawing of the unidentified Bogalusa robber and murder suspect as one of the LaSalle brothers. But he has little else to reveal. The LaSalles have kept him on retainer for nearly two years and occasionally joined him for a drink, but they’ve always been closemouthed about their business and their associates and never yet required his services in court for themselves.

  The man jabs the gun hard into Eddie’s ear. I don’t give a rat’s ass about them. Where’s the kid?

  Eddie swears he doesn’t know. He’s heard rumor the brothers fled New Orleans following the botched job in Bogalusa. Maybe the kid’s with them. He feels his tender parts constricted small between the ready pincers.

  Who else knows them? Other kin? A ladyfriend?

  A ladyfriend, yes—a girl!—there was a girl. Eddie tells of an amused reference the brothers once made to a girl their nephew was humping. Last summer. A rich arty girl. Her father was the oil guy who drowned off the coast of Europe a few years back. Matson.

  He nearly weeps with relief as the pincers come away from his genitals. Then hears as well as feels the horrifying crunch of them through his throat….

  Police investigators speculate that Sharp Eddie’s bloodsoaked demise most likely came at the hands of a client with a grievance.

  Kind of lowlifes he did business with, I always expected it, me, a detective tells reporters.

  The newspaper’s pious editorial on the checkered career of Edward Longstreet Charponne closes with the observation that every criminal he set at liberty through the immoral and unethical application of his considerable legal acumen was but one more thief turned loose among the honest, one more seed of peril cast into the law-abiding world. We can hardly be faulted, the editorial opines, for perceiving some small measure of divine retribution in Mr. Charponne’s having reaped of the pernicious fruit he sowed.

  W e pulled into the Guadalupe Motor Camp outside of Kerrville sometime after two in the morning. The hills cast deep shadows under the high oval moon. The air redolent of cedar. The manager wasn’t happy about being wakened at that hour but he shuffled to the office door in robe and slippers and let us in. There were two cabins available. Charlie claimed one of them for herself and the girl and told Russell he had another think coming if he thought he was going to share it with them. She helped the girl out of the car and into the cabin and closed the door.

  Russell hadn’t complained about my “rescue” of the girl, as Buck jokingly insisted on calling it, until he realized he’d have to bunk with the two of us, and he berated me for a meddling fool as we finished off the bottle.

  “Next time you get a notion to save some chippy from a fate worse than whatever,” he said, “don’t do it—not if it’s gonna get me kicked out of my fluff’s bed.”

  Even Buck’s announcement that the San Antonio take came to $290 did little to soothe Russell’s irritation. The cabin had two beds and I didn’t think t
o argue about which one of us was going to sleep on the floor.

  We slept till nearly midmorning but still were ready for breakfast before the girls, so we went to wait for them at the camp’s café. When they finally came in and headed for our booth, we saw that Charlie had made a heroic effort with her makeup kit, but there was only so much she could do for the girl. The swollen black eye was a squint. Her other cheek looked embedded with a small wedge of plum, and her nose was lightly blue across the bridge. But she’d had a bath and her hair had been washed and brushed and showed a shine. She wore one of Charlie’s dresses. It rode high on her legs and was tight across the breasts but otherwise seemed to fit okay. Until now I hadn’t realized just how young she was—she didn’t look more than sixteen. And I could tell that under the bruises the face was a pretty one.

  “Like the blind man said when he passed the shrimp docks,” Buck said, “hello, girls.”

  “For Pete’s sake, Buck, try to be nice.” Charlie said. She slid into the booth next to Russell and patted the seat beside her for the girl to sit there.

  “Belle honey,” Charlie said, “this here’s Buck and that’s Russell.”

  She looked up timidly from under her lashes and her eyes cut from Russell to Buck and her lips made a small twitch in what was probably the best she could do for a smile.

  “An ass-kicking hurts even worse the day after, don’t it, honeybunch?” Buck said. She lowered her eyes to the table.

  Charlie gave Buck a look of reprimand, then touched Belle’s arm and said, “And that’s Sonny.”

  She met my eyes across the table for a second and then dropped her gaze again, her ears bright pink.

  “My hero,” Buck said, grinning at me. I flicked him a two-finger “up yours.”

  “Wish she’d give somebody a chance to get a word in edgewise,” Russell said, smiling at the girl, and her ears got redder.

  “She talks plenty,” Charlie said, “when she’s in company worth talking to.”

  Russell looked around, checking to see if anybody was within earshot, then said low-voiced, “Ah, exactly how much talking you done with her about us?”