Paris Trout

by Pete Dexter

  “The law,” he said, “is reasonable doubt. And even if you did not know who Paris Trout was, or that he had been doing honest business in Cotton Point for as long as most of us can remember, even then, you could not look at this case and make more than a guess at what happened. There is no weight of evidence here, it is one story against another. And what we are left with is a tragic death and doubts over how it occurred. Reasonable doubts.”

  ∗

  WARD TOWNES WAS EVEN shorter in his remarks.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I am not as eloquent as Mr. Seagraves, but then I am not as expensive.” There was some polite laughter from around the room, and Seagraves smiled.

  “So I think what I will do now is borrow something from Mr. Seagraves’s own argument and remind you of his words that the proof was right in the courtroom yesterday, in the person of Mary McNutt.

  “I believe that too,” he said, and pointed at the empty witness chair. “She was sitting in that seat, and I think you can weigh what she said. I think you heard Mr. Trout too, and everyone else who was there when Rosie Sayers was killed. People who were in their own house when Paris Trout and Buster Devonne came to visit.

  “You have seen the pictures of the girl after Mr. Trout and Mr. Devonne left. You have seen the scars on Mary McNutt’s body.

  “There is no reasonable doubt. You all understand what happened out there, and all I am asking you to do now is acknowledge it. To say that it matters.”

  THE JURY WENT TO its deliberations at three-thirty. Seagraves took Trout out of the courthouse. They crossed the street and walked half a block to the Dixie Theater, and climbed the stairs. Seagraves’s office overlooked the street, and he stood in the window, watching good Cotton Point people taking care of their business, people he knew by name. He had not spoken to Trout since they left the courtroom.

  “Am I loose?” Trout said.

  Seagraves did not turn around. “Not yet,” he said.

  “How long does it take?”

  “It depends on what they’re going to do.”

  “They ain’t going to do nothing,” Trout said.

  Seagraves did not answer.

  “What can they do?” Trout said, a little later.

  “Isn’t anybody safe, Paris,” Seagraves said. “Not all the way. You might keep that in mind next time.”

  “What can they do?” Trout said again.

  Seagraves shrugged. “It’s a jury, they can do what they want.”

  Trout laughed, that barking sound. “I think you forgot where you are,” he said.

  Seagraves turned away from the window. “Maybe,” he said.

  Trout slammed his hand against the desk. “I paid you to look after this,” he said. “I want more back than maybe.”

  “You should of come hired me sooner,” Seagraves said, feeling the anger returning. “You should of called me up before you and Buster Devonne went over there to shoot that child and Mary McNutt. You should of called and asked my advice then, and I would of given you advice that it was murder.”

  “That boy owed me money,” Trout said. “You ought to explained that better.” He had moved halfway across the desk, and his face was so close Seagraves could see the thin red lines in his eyes.

  “There’s some things,” Seagraves said, thinking of himself, “that business isn’t an excuse.”

  Trout stayed where he was, leaning across the desk. “You think I don’t know what a lawyer is?” he said.

  It was quiet a long time, and Trout slowly sat back into his chair. His mood seemed to change, and he turned thoughtful. “Say they come back and find me guilty,” he said. “What’s left then?”

  Seagraves shrugged. “Depends on you,” he said. “File motions for a new trial. Allowing the pictures was a judicial error …”

  “What then?”

  “Then we go through appeals until we get a new trial or run out of courts.”

  “How long is something like that take?”

  “Depends. A year or two … sometimes longer.” He turned in his seat and looked back out the window. “It’s expensive,” he said.

  “It’s already expensive,” Trout said.

  “Yes, it is.”

  THE JURY WAS OUT a little over three hours. Seagraves had left Trout in his office, looking at a National Geographic, and was down the hall with a young lawyer named Walter Huff when his secretary knocked on the door and said they’d called from court.

  Walter Huff’s family owned the Ether Hotel, where Trout was living, and he had just told Seagraves that the maids were afraid to clean the room. “He’s supposed to said he’s got poison up there,” the young lawyer was saying, “and there’s guns everywhere.”

  “You allow him up there like that?”

  The young lawyer smiled. “He pays his rent.”

  Seagraves thought of that on the way back to court. It seemed to him that the young man had good judgment for an attorney fresh out of school. And then his thoughts turned to the Bonner boy, who had graduated Tufts Law School that spring and would be opening his own law practice in the fall, and Seagraves wondered what the schooling had done to him.

  Most of them came out thinking they knew something.

  Seagraves and Trout walked through the courtroom’s main entrance. Ward Townes was already sitting at the prosecution table, the spectator seats were close to empty. People had gone home.

  The room had a hollow sound without spectators. Whispers carried, words spoken out loud seemed to hang in the air.

  Judge Taylor came in buttoning his robe. There was grease on his chin, and he was sweating. When he settled, he checked the papers on the desk in front of him and then instructed the court officer to bring in the jury. Trout stared at them as they filed into their seats. Seagraves could see a pulse in his forehead. Only two of them glanced back, the foreman and a woman from Homewood.

  The judge asked the foreman if the jury had reached a verdict. The air in the room smelled a hundred years old. “Yessir,” he said.

  Trout slowly stood up, his eyes still fixed on the jury box.

  The foreman did not see him rise, he stared at the paper in his hands. “ ‘We find the defendant guilty of second-degree murder,’ ” he read. Then he looked up and found Paris Trout staring at him. A look passed over the foreman’s face, and when it was gone, so was his color.

  Seagraves stood up too. “We request a poll of the jury,” he said.

  One by one the jurors stood and pronounced the same verdict. Only one—the woman he recognized from Homewood—dared to look Trout in the eye. Seagraves wondered if she cared anymore who it was that had got her city water.

  “Mr. Trout,” the judge said when the last juror had spoken, “you have been found guilty of second-degree murder in the death of Rosie Sayers. Do you have anything further to say at this time?”

  Trout turned his look on the judge but did not answer.

  “We have no further remarks,” Seagraves said.

  “In that case, gentlemen, it is the finding of this court that you are guilty of the crime prescribed in the true bill filed by the people July twenty-first of this year—namely, second-degree murder. Further, it is the decision of this court that you be incarcerated in the state work camp in Petersboro County for a period of not less than one nor more than three years.”

  He leaned forward then, folding his hands, and spoke informally. “It is this court’s fervent hope that you will return to the community at the soonest possible time,” he said, “and resume your place among its business leaders.”

  Judge Taylor looked at Seagraves then in an apologetic way.

  “Your Honor,” Seagraves said, “in light of Mr. Trout’s established business, civic, and family ties to the community, we ask that he be allowed to remain free on his own recognizance until new trial motions are settled.”

  “Mr. Townes?”

  “The people have no objection to that, Your Honor,” Townes said.

  Judge Taylor thanked
the jury and excused them. Trout stared until the last juror was out the door. Then he stared at their empty chairs.

  “Mr. Trout,” the judge said, “you are free pending your appeal. You may not leave the county or change residences without notifying this court of your intention to do so. You are not to have contact with any of the witnesses or jurors involved in this trial. Do you understand the conditions of your release?”

  “We understand, Your Honor,” Seagraves said. But there was no sign that Trout understood at all.

  They walked out of the courthouse together and then stood for a moment in front of the town monument where, if you believed the monument, the state seal of Georgia had been hidden in a privy when General Sherman came through at the end of the war.

  Cotton Point had been a rich place then, the center of the state’s agriculture and law. At that time “Gone to Cotton Point” did not refer to the asylum.

  Trout took a pack of cigarettes out of his pants pocket and looked back at the courthouse as he smoked.

  “I’ll let you know where we stand,” Seagraves said.

  “You said the judge made an error.”

  “I believe he did.”

  Trout turned quiet, and Seagraves started to leave. He wanted to walk. “I’ll be by the hotel later, when I got some idea where we are.”

  “Leave word,” Trout said. “Don’t come up on me unexpected.”

  A farmer passed them in his pickup, the back end loaded with coon dogs, baying at the sky. There was nothing to chase and tree, so the noise itself had become the purpose.

  “How long does it take to figure this out?” Trout said.

  Seagraves shook his head. “You work it out,” he said. “You get an accommodation. There’s no figuring, not the way you mean it.”

  “Is it more money?”

  Seagraves blew all the air out of his chest. He wanted to move to a different place, to walk. He could still hear the dogs, fainter now, like a memory. “You missed the point, Paris.”

  “If a man stole from me tomorrow,” Trout said, “I’d do the same thing again.”

  On an afternoon early in December, five months beyond the trial, a woman arrived at the office of a young attorney named Carl Bonner without an appointment, knocking so tentatively on the smoked-glass window that he thought at first it was the maid.

  Carl Bonner walked from his desk through the outer office and opened the door. He did not have a secretary yet and could not persuade his wife to work for him until the practice was making enough money to afford one.

  The woman stood in the doorway, looking at him in a direct way. “Mr. Bonner,” she said, “I am Hanna Trout. Mr. Seagraves suggested your name to me this morning, and I was just passing your office and thought I might take a chance on catching you in.”

  He stepped back, making room for her to come inside. “Mr. Seagraves has been very good to me,” he said.

  Paris Trout’s wife was old, of course, but there was something in the way she carried herself that did not fit her age. He watched her a moment from behind and then shut the door. She stopped halfway across the floor and turned, waiting for him to indicate where she should go.

  He led her to the smaller inner office, and when they were sitting down, he smiled in an uncomfortable way and said, “What may I do for you today, Mrs. Trout?”

  “I called Mr. Seagraves this morning to initiate divorce papers against my husband,” she said, “but because he continues to represent Mr. Trout in his appeals, he was unable to handle this for me and suggested your name instead.”

  Bonner opened his drawer and found a pencil to take notes. “Will Mr. Seagraves be representing your husband in the divorce?”

  She shook her head. “He said not. Perhaps someone from his firm, but not Mr. Seagraves himself.” She looked around the room then. His degrees hung on one wall, commendations from the war on another. There was a canary in a small cage in the corner.

  “Have you handled divorces before, Mr. Bonner?”

  “I handle everything,” he said, and then moved on, as if that had answered the question. “Is the divorce adversarial?”

  “I would think so, yes.”

  “Has your husband been notified of your intention to proceed against him?”

  She shook her head. “He stays at the Ether Hotel, and I do not see him except by chance.”

  Carl Bonner noted the address at the top of the paper. “How long has he resided out of your home?”

  “Since late spring.”

  “And did he leave of his own volition—were you abandoned—or did you ask him to leave?”

  “I asked him,” she said. “After the girl was shot, I did not want him in the house.”

  He looked at her then, studying her face. She looked directly back. There was something incongruous about her appearance, but he could not find its origin. “Is that the reason for the dissolution? Moral turpitude?”

  She did not answer at first, and he saw she was weighing the answer. “Is it adultery?” Bonner said. He waited to see if the word embarrassed her and saw that it had not. For a moment, in fact, he thought he saw her begin to smile at what he had said.

  “I don’t believe so,” she said. “In any case, Mr. Trout’s sexual interests are not my concern, except in that they have led to abuse.”

  He wrote the word “abuse” across the top of a piece of paper and underlined it twice. Beneath that he printed the Roman numeral I. “Physical abuse?” he said. She studied him a moment, trying to make up her mind. He wrote the word “physical” and then an A. beneath that, slightly indented.

  “Mr. Bonner,” she said, “you are a young man, and I know your time is valuable. This situation, however, is complicated in ways that will not fit into an outline form, and perhaps it would be beneficial if we spoke informally at first, to acquaint you with what has happened.”

  He put the pencil down and leaned away from his desk until the back of his head touched the wall. He felt as if he had been scolded. “I didn’t mean to rush you,” he said.

  He felt the embarrassment press into his face like the summer sun.

  “Do you know my husband?” she said.

  “I know who he is,” he said. “I have a passing knowledge of his business interests.…”

  “Were you in Cotton Point at the time of his trial?”

  “I’m afraid I wasn’t,” he said. “I certainly heard about it.”

  “Did you find it frightening?”

  “In what way?” he said.

  “The arbitrary nature of the act itself, did it frighten you?”

  “Shooting a woman and a girl?” He shook his head and answered without thinking. “Mrs. Trout, I spent two years not long ago in a place where they shoot back.”

  She thought for a moment, her teeth holding the edge of her lower lip. “It frightened me,” she said.

  “I can appreciate that.”

  “In the first month of our marriage,” she said, “I lent my husband a sum of money. He believed it was all I had—in fact, it was half. Mr. Trout, as you probably know, has substantial holdings, both in Ether County and eastern Georgia, and did not need the little money I could add to it. I have never been privy to the figures, but he is a wealthy man.”

  “That is my understanding,” he said.

  “At the time I made the loan,” she said, “his assets were tied up in his businesses, at least that was his explanation.”

  “You believed Paris Trout did not have cash on hand?”

  She smiled at him then, he did not understand why. “I came into marriage late, Mr. Bonner,” she said. “I was forty-four years old and left a career which I had devoted myself to with some success for many years. I did not marry for security, I gave it up. It was a wager I took which I cannot begin to explain, except to say that the reason may lie in the excitement of the wager itself.

  “And so, when, a few weeks after we were married, Mr. Trout asked me for the money I had in the bank, that in some way became part of
the wager too.” She leaned forward for the first time. “I do not do things halfway,” she said.

  “I see that,” he said. “If I may ask, what was the amount of money involved?”

  “Four thousand dollars.”

  “And you kept another four from him?”

  “There is another five thousand dollars in an account in Atlanta, which I have been living off since he left.”

  “I take it your husband did not return the money.”

  “No, he did not.”

  “And is this the primary source of the discord? Four thousand dollars?”

  “Not the money itself,” she said. “The possession. Paris aspired to render me helpless, Mr. Bonner. It is a pattern. That’s what taking the money was about. That is why the child was killed.”

  She paused, and he waited.

  “In the weeks following the murder,” she said, “Mr. Trout abused me repeatedly. All pretensions of normal behavior disappeared the moment he entered our house.”

  “There were no witnesses to this abuse?”

  She shook her head.

  “Beatings? What else?”

  “He is a profoundly disturbed man,” she said. “The abuse he inflicted reflected the state of his mind.”

  He nodded as if he understood her. Something cautioned him not to push her for the details. “Have you thought about what sort of settlement you want from the dissolution?”

  “I want my house,” she said, “and I want the money.”

  “How much of the money?” he said quietly.

  “The money he took,” she said. “I wouldn’t touch a cent of the rest. The rest is tainted.”

  Bonner looked at his notebook but did not try to pick it up. “You’ve got to live afterwards.…”

  “Alimony?” She relaxed against the back of her chair. “I would as soon stick up a bank.”

  He shrugged. “He must have assets close to half a million,” he said. “You’re entitled to some consideration by law.”

  “The house I claim,” she said, “for the two years of servitude which followed my marriage. Until shortly after the killing, I worked six days a week, twelve hours a day in my husband’s store. I was his bookkeeper and his secretary and his clerk. I did stockroom work and mopped the floors.