Paris Trout

by Pete Dexter

  One of the agents considered Fixx in a Yankee sort of way and said, “Let him finish laughing, and we’ll find out. It’s a professional courtesy.”

  When Ralph Guthrie had finished laughing, he spoke directly to the sheriff. “Edward,” he said, “you got yourself a problem. These here safes are Belgian.”

  The sheriff also did not appreciate being called Edward by somebody in handcuffs.

  Ralph Guthrie looked around at the walls and said, “You wonder, don’t you, how safes like that end up someplace like this.”

  “Can you do it?” one of the agents said.

  Ralph Guthrie shrugged. “I can get in. There ain’t no safe you can’t get inside, but I got to blow it.”

  “Here?” Edward Fixx said. “Downtown Cotton Point?”

  The safecracker shrugged. “You can move these somewhere else, I’ll be glad to wait. They might weigh a thousand pounds.…”

  Edward Fixx did not like the idea of a safecracker setting off an explosion in Cotton Point, but the federal agents assured him that Mr. Guthrie was as careful as a surgeon, and if it were not for his weakness to brag and spend money, he could never have been caught.

  The sheriff had one of the agents write that down and then agreed to the plan, and the safe blowing was set for Sunday afternoon. The police blocked off Main Street for two blocks on either side of the store and pushed the crowd back that gathered along the edge of Georgia Officers’ Academy’s campus to watch until none of them could see anything.

  Ralph Guthrie and the federal agents were in the store most of the afternoon, setting the charges. Edward Fixx sat in his cruiser on a side street a block and a half from the store. The cruiser was fresh out of the body shop—he’d smashed it one way or another four times in the last year—and had that new-car feeling again, and Edward Fixx wasn’t about to expose it to a brick shower because some Leavenworth safecracker used too much nitroglycerin.

  A few minutes after six o’clock Ralph Guthrie and the federal agents walked out of the front of the store, in no hurry at all, crossed the empty street, and sat down on the curb. A minute or two later there was a muffled explosion, followed by a cloud of smoke that rose from behind the store.

  The explosion shook the ground but did not as much as crack the front windows of the store.

  The men waited a few minutes more and walked back inside.

  Edward Fixx drove his cruiser to the corner and got out, leaving the door open. He did not like a professional safecracker inside with no one local to watch him. He found them in the back, coughing in the dust and smoke. The five safes sat exactly where they had been, but the doors were ajar, a few inches each.

  “Sheriff Fixx,” one of the agents said, “if you would get a pencil and paper, we can itemize the contents as we take them out.”

  It took them half an hour, but Edward Fixx stopped writing a long time before that. There were more than ninety bottles, each one filled approximately a third of the way to the top with urine. Each bottle was labeled, date and time. “Urine passed from the body of Paris Trout, eleven o’clock A.M., this eleventh day of March 1954. To be used in the event of my death for evidence I have been poisoned.”

  Edward Fixx was not about to write them down one at a time.

  There was also a sealed white envelope which held several hundred pieces of clipped fingernails and another envelope—this one light brown and containing a single sheet of paper full of columns of numbers that seemed to be a code or a map.

  After several months in the hands of U.S. Army decoding experts, however, the numbers were discovered to be the combinations to the five safes themselves.

  THAT WAS AS CLOSE as anyone came to Paris Trout’s money, it was as much of an explanation as he ever gave.

  Hanna Trout sold the house and moved to Savannah, where she taught school as long as she lived. Sometimes, looking out over the playground from her office window, a child would catch her eye, someone awkward and dark with legs as thin as bones, and she would think of Rosie Sayers.

  The child was never in her dreams, though. She had no claim on Hanna Trout.

  In her dreams everything was dark. She could never see the walls or the floor or her own hands. She would stumble, catching herself a moment before she fell, and then stumble again. Always moving toward a voice that called for help.

  The tripping frightened her—she remembered there was glass on the floor—but in the dark, at the bottom of things, she always kept on. In her dreams she knew the voice.

  And when she woke from that other place, grabbing at the roll of the mattress for some purchase to break her fall, she would hold herself still for as long as the dream was fresh, trying to hear the voice again, but the fear would pass before she could bring it back.

  And then it was gone.

  And she would lie in the dark until morning sometimes, wondering which one of them it was.

  August 16, 1987

  Sacramento, California

  This book is for

  James Maurice Quinlan

  and Mickey Rosati,

  two of a kind.

  BY PETE DEXTER

  God’s Pocket

  Deadwood

  Paris Trout

  Brotherly Love

  The Paperboy

  Train

  Paper Trails

  Spooner

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PETE DEXTER is the author of the National Book Award–winning novel Paris Trout as well as The Paperboy, Spooner, Paper Trails, God’s Pocket, Deadwood, Brotherly Love, and Train. He has been a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News and the Sacramento Bee, and has contributed to many magazines, including Esquire, Sports Illustrated, and Playboy. His screenplays include Rush and Mulholland Falls. Dexter was born in Michigan and raised in Georgia, Illinois, and eastern South Dakota. He lives on an island off the coast of Washington.