Paris Trout

by Pete Dexter

  For a moment she seemed to rock, as if a breeze had suddenly blown through the room. “Lord,” she said, “I wouldn’t say nobody shot me if they didn’t.”

  “You know a good bit about the courthouse, don’t you?”

  “No sir.”

  “You and your family know something about how to try a case?”

  “Ain’t none of us lawyers,” she said, and suddenly everyone in the court except Mary McNutt herself was laughing.

  Seagraves smiled, and the judge wiped tears out of his eyes. “I didn’t mean to accuse you being lawyers,” Seagraves said. “I meant you folks have been through this procedure before.”

  “No sir, I never been in court.”

  “What about those boys of yours?”

  “No sir, they never in nothing like a big court. Henry Ray been in little troubles, but never in nothing with a gun.”

  “Our contention, Mrs. McNutt,” Seagraves said, “is going to be that Thomas came up off that chair and cursed Mr. Trout for everything in the catalog and then came in after the shooting and removed the gun. Is that the truth?”

  She and Paris Trout stared at each other then, until Seagraves walked between them.

  “No sir,” she said. “I told the truth about it. You can make it look any which way now, but I told how it happened.”

  Seagraves said, “That’s what we called the jury for, to decide.”

  She turned then, looking directly at them. “They don’t decide what happened,” she said. “It’s already done. All they decide is if they gone do something about it.”

  ∗

  HARRY SEAGRAVES ATE A late supper alone with Lucy. The maid had gone home ill, and the liver Lucy cooked had a metallic taste. He had no appetite anyway.

  He played with his food until she had finished and then stood up, not waiting for dessert, and headed out the front door. “Harry?” she said.

  “I’ve got some things to do,” he said, without turning around.

  “Are you going to be long?”

  “I’m in a trial,” he said.

  He drove the car to Sleepy Heights, a gritty housing development that overlooked the sawmill on the edge of town. Two-bedroom houses, most of them cheap brick. Brand-new, they were forty-two hundred dollars each. Police lived there, workers from the sawmill, teachers.

  The development was built on two hills, and Buster Devonne’s place sat in between, at the bottom. Seagraves stopped the car in the road and turned off the lights. He checked to see the envelope was still in his coat pocket. He got out. The air was full of the smell of sawmill chemicals.

  The driveway sloped downhill, and ridges of baked clay left by car tires broke under Seagraves’s feet and made him unsteady as he walked toward the porch. It was screened in and ran the length of the front of the house. Seagraves knocked and then realized Buster Devonne was sitting six feet away, watching him.

  Buster Devonne stood up slowly and unhooked the screen door. Behind him, inside the house, there were lights on. Somebody was playing a piano. Buster Devonne didn’t wait for Seagraves to come in but turned his back as soon as the door was unlocked and sat back down and lit a cigarette. “Help yourself,” he said, and nodded to the other chairs.

  “I didn’t come to sit with you,” Seagraves said.

  “This ain’t personal against Paris,” he said. “I got to protect my own interests. You explained that to Paris the way I intended it.…”

  “I brought you the money,” Seagraves said. “I don’t run your errands.”

  Buster Devonne was bare-chested, thick in the neck and shoulders, turning fat. The porch smelled of tobacco and sweat.

  “Help yourself,” he said again.

  Seagraves stayed where he was. The heel of his shoe held the door open, perhaps an inch. He took the envelope out of his coat pocket, feeling the weight. “This is from Paris Trout,” he said. “It isn’t connected to me.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  Buster Devonne accepted the envelope without looking inside, folded it in half, and pushed it into his pants pocket. “Mr. Trout don’t have nothing to worry about,” he said. “All those people looking for is a way to let him go.”

  Seagraves did not answer.

  “I know people, and I lived in this county all my life,” he said.

  Seagraves walked back to his car, feeling the man on the porch watching. He got in slowly, feeling as if he’d left something behind. He stared at the porch a moment, and then, before he started the car, he saw the point of Buster Devonne’s cigarette glow red and then disappear. In the moment of illumination, though, he saw him. Buster Devonne was counting his money.

  HE DROVE THROUGH SLEEPY Heights and came out on the highway. He turned left, in the direction of town, and a few minutes later he passed his own house and then the college and then the courthouse. He turned right at the river, and the sound of his tires changed as he dropped off the pavement onto the dirt road that led into Indian Heights.

  He stopped up the road from the house where it had happened and turned off his lights, thinking of what he had just done.

  He watched the windows for most of an hour, trying somehow to weigh the place now without the girl, until a shadow moved and the lights inside went off.

  He had no idea why he was there.

  SEAGRAVES ARRIVED AT COURT at five minutes to eight, red-eyed and spent. He had fallen into bed exhausted and then been unable to sleep until after five. Trout was already there, staring in a murderous way across the aisle at Ward Townes. Townes ignored him, and with the jury out of the room, Seagraves ignored him too.

  The first witness was Agent J. E. Smythe of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, who referred repeatedly to a small leather notebook he took from his coat pocket.

  Agent Smythe had visited Rosie Sayers at Thomas Cornell Clinic the day after she was shot and written down what she told him.

  Seagraves objected before he could read it. “No grounds have been laid for this,” he said. “A dying declaration is not admissible without proof that the declarer knew they were dying. There was no doctor present, no medical basis for this at all.”

  Ward Townes did not wait for the judge to rule. “Did Rosie Sayers know she was dying?” he said.

  “She said as much.”

  “I’ll allow it,” the judge said.

  “Thank you,” Townes said, and then to the agent: “What exactly did Rosie Sayers say that indicated to you that she realized her condition was mortal?”

  The agent went back to his notebook. “She complained of her stomach,” he said. “She believed she was too young to die, that God had made a mistake.”

  Seagraves stood up again. “That is the statement of a delusional child, Your Honor. I ask that it not be allowed to prejudice this case any further than it already has.”

  “I think we’ll listen to this,” Judge Taylor said.

  “Did she tell you what happened to her?” Townes asked the agent.

  “Yessir. She said Mr. Paris Trout had arrived on the porch with brass knucks and grabbed Thomas Boxer.” The agent looked at his notebook again and began to read.

  “ ‘I told Thomas the man had knucks, and he said, “Goddammit, what is it to you?” He chased me in the house and hit me on the head with his knucks. Mary come in and pulled him loose. He shot me in the arm, he shot at Mary too. I went on inside the house and sat on the trunk. He came to the door and shot me in the shoulder and stomach.’ ”

  The agent looked up.

  “Did you ask if she had a gun herself?” Townes said.

  “Yessir. She said she didn’t. She said she didn’t even have a stick.”

  “Was there anything else?”

  The agent shook his head. “She couldn’t talk much, except to swear under oath it was true.”

  Townes went back to his table and pulled a folder out of his briefcase. An edge of one of the photographs lay beyond the lower edge of the folder, and Seagraves knew what it was.

  “Objection.” />
  The judge looked up, surprised. “To what, Mr. Seagraves?”

  “The photographs Mr. Townes is about to offer as evidence are gruesome beyond the matter in front of this court. They show the marks of the surgery.”

  “Are those pictures, Mr. Townes?” the judge said.

  “Yes, Your Honor.” He closed the folder of pictures and delivered them to the judge. Seagraves was surprised that he had not taken the pictures out and given the jury at least a glimpse as he carried them up. The judge fit his glasses across his nose and looked them over.

  “Is this the girl?” he said.

  “Yessir,” Townes said.

  “Is she deceased here?”

  “Yessir.”

  The judge frowned. Seagraves moved next to Townes and folded his arms. “As Your Honor can see,” he said, “the wounds are enhanced by the surgical procedures necessary to remove the bullets. The woman in those pictures has not only been shot, she has been mutilated.”

  Townes did not reply, and it struck Seagraves that the prosecutor had reservations of his own about showing them to the jury.

  Judge Taylor, however, had changed sympathies. “I believe the jury is able to see for themselves which wounds were bullets and which were surgery.”

  He handed the pictures to Seagraves, who took them back to the defense table and studied them, one by one. Trout looked at the first three, and then he moved in his chair until he was facing a different direction.

  The pictures showed the girl on an examining table. She was naked, and even with her eyes closed, something in the flashbulbs made her appear surprised. The surgical cuts were closed with tangles of black thread. As Seagraves finished with each picture, he handed it back to Townes, who carried it to the first juror, who passed it on to the second.

  It took half an hour for all the jury to see all the pictures, and then Townes showed them to Agent J. E. Smythe. “Are all these wounds consistent with her description of the wounds she suffered inside the house?”

  “I would say so.”

  “In your experience with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, have you had occasion to visit other victims of gunshot wounds?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Do you have a knowledge of anatomy, Agent Smythe?”

  “Yessir, I do.”

  “And do you have an opinion which one of these shots killed the girl?”

  “I would say the one into the stomach.”

  “Objection,” Seagraves said.

  The judge said, “I’ll allow it,” and Seagraves stood where he was a long time, staring at him, until the judge met his eyes. “I believe the agent’s opinion would be considered reliably expert in shooting matters, Mr. Seagraves.” There was a conciliatory note in what he said, however. Seagraves saw he had remembered who got him elected.

  Seagraves sat down and stared at the table where Trout was drawing something across the top of his pad.

  When he looked again, he recognized it as a family tree.

  SEAGRAVES BEGAN HIS CROSS-EXAMINATION. “Agent Smythe, in your medical opinion, how successful was the surgery to remove the bullets from Rosie Sayers’s body?”

  “I do not know, sir.”

  “But what I want to know, do you feel Dr. Braver did a good job?”

  “I have no way to know that.”

  “You couldn’t say if he might of gone in there with his knife and scissors and cut too much off this or not enough off that?”

  “No sir.”

  “You couldn’t say if he might of made it worse.…”

  “From the direction of the shot,” the agent said, “I don’t believe there was a thing your doctor could do to make it worst.”

  “You have seen wounds like this before?”

  “Yessir.”

  “You have seen someone who was shot in the stomach?”

  “Yessir.”

  “You have seen someone shot in the side?”

  “Yessir.”

  From the table Seagraves leaned toward the witness. “Have you ever heard of somebody died from an operation?”

  When Seagraves had finished with the agent, he glanced again at the notepad on the table. At the top of the family tree, where his mother’s name was, Trout had drawn a spider that was also a face.

  It wasn’t a face Seagraves recognized—he couldn’t say if it was male or female, young or old—but he thought it was somebody real.

  Judge Taylor recessed for lunch at ten-thirty again and did not reconvene until one, when Ward Townes called Linda Boxer.

  THE LITTLE GIRL CAME out of the back of the courtroom alone, wearing a new yellow dress, her hair tied in back with ribbons. She was afraid, and when the court officer offered her the Bible, she accepted it as if it were a present. Seagraves noticed the ladies in the jury box smiling.

  Judge Taylor leaned toward the child and said, “I’m afraid we need that Bible there for the court, honey, but I’ll get you your own if you want.”

  The girl straightened her dress. “I got my own,” she said, and handed it to the judge.

  “Would you put your hand on top of it for me?” he said.

  She put her hand on the Bible, and the court officer swore her in. When it was done, Townes leaned on the rail in front of the witness box and scratched his head.

  “Linda, can you tell us how old you are?”

  “Eleven.”

  “And you say you’ve got a Bible at home?”

  “All us got Bibles.”

  “You and your sister?”

  “Me and my sister and my brothers too. Everyone got us our own.”

  “And so, when you put your hand on top of the Bible and promise to tell the truth, you know what that means, don’t you?”

  The child nodded.

  “Could you tell us?”

  She nodded again.

  “Now? Could you tell us now?”

  “The devil get you if you don’t tell the truth,” she said. “Come and snatch you up for that.”

  “All right then, let me ask if you remember the day when the men shot Rosie?”

  Seagraves stood up. “Objection. I am understanding of the problems with witnesses of this age, but the prosecutor is leading her here.”

  Judge Taylor sustained.

  “Do you remember the day when the shooting happened?” Townes said. The child nodded, her braids were as stiff as wire and moved with her head.

  “You have to say it out loud, honey,” Townes said.

  “I remember.”

  “Where were you when the men came?”

  “Me and Jane Ray was in the house,” she said.

  “The boys’ side?”

  She nodded.

  “And what did you see?”

  “We seen the men come up on the porch, and then Momma come up there to argue with them.”

  “Did you go out on the porch too?”

  “No sir.”

  “And did you hear them arguing?”

  “They said something, and then they ran into the house and shot Rosie.”

  “The other side of the house?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Did you see them shoot Rosie?”

  “No sir.”

  “You heard them?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Did it take a long time or a short time?”

  “A long time,” she said.

  “And when did you see Rosie again?”

  “Me and Jane Ray stayed put.”

  “Did you see Rosie again?” The child did not answer. “Linda? Can you tell us?”

  “We seen the men,” she said.

  “When was that?”

  The child began to search the courtroom then, looking for someone. Her thumb went into her mouth, and Seagraves saw that she was about to cry.

  “Linda?”

  Her eyes filled, and tears the size of marbles rolled down her cheeks. There was no sound at all. “You don’t have to talk anymore,” Townes said. “You want to stop now?”

 
“We seen them running out from the back the house,” she said suddenly. “They was runnin’ and fannin’ their coats. When they got into the car, then we come out and saw Rosie.”

  “And where was she then?”

  “Out the back door, on the ground.”

  “Did Rosie say anything?”

  The child shook her head. “To Momma,” she said. “We never got that close to hear it.”

  “Where were you, and where was your momma?”

  “Me and Jane Ray come out and saw what they had did. Momma was shot on the ground too, holding Rosie.”

  The child’s eyes filled again. She dropped her head, and Seagraves could see tears dropping into her lap. Townes said, “Did you think your momma was going to die?”

  “We thought we was all going to die,” she said.

  “Thank you,” Townes said, and then he turned and looked at Seagraves as if something had been explained.

  SEAGRAVES APPROACHED THE CHILD carefully. He said, “Linda, did you know who Mr. Trout was before that day?”

  At the sound of the new voice she flattened herself against the back of the chair. The judge leaned toward the child again. “Just a few more questions, honey. Can you tell us a few more things?”

  She nodded.

  Seagraves said, “Did you hear of Mr. Trout before he came to your house? Did you know who he was?”

  She nodded.

  “How was that?”

  “When he lent the boys money.”

  “He lent Thomas and Henry Ray money?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Seagraves smiled at the child, trying to get her to smile back. “That was a nice thing to do, wasn’t it?”

  “No sir.”

  “It wasn’t nice to give your family money when you needed it?”

  “He didn’t give it,” she said.

  “You’re right. He lent it. Do you know what that means?”

  She looked beyond him now, into the seats behind the railing.

  “Linda,” he said, bringing her back, “did you wonder how come Mr. Trout would shoot your momma and Rosie?”

  She did not answer but slowly brought herself to look at Trout.