Paris Trout (22 page)

"No," he said, "no need. I must have
cut out just as I was leaving."

He looked at his watch then, but in the poor light he
couldn't make out the hands.

"
Have I been here long?"

"
Yes."

"
It's still Sunday, isn't it?" he said. He
smiled, and then felt the weight of her stare, and stopped.

It was quiet.

"Are you going to get him off?"

"
I can't say what will happen." He put his
hand on the doorknob, telling himself to turn it, walk through and
then out the front door ....

"
If you turn my husband loose, you open the door
for everything that follows."

Seagraves opened the door
and paused in the threshold. "I wish you'd reconsider," he
said. "Come to the trial."

* * *

SEAGRAVES CLOSED THE GATE outside the house and
looked at his watch. It was nearly four o'clock. He began to walk
south, into town. He straightened himself as he went, lining up the
buttons of his shirt with his belt buckle, smoothing the wrinkles out
of the sleeves of his coat.

A block from the house he turned east, in the
direction of the college. It was one place in Cotton Point he was not
likely to be recognized, and there were professors walking around the
school who looked as wrinkled as he did now every day of their lives.

He crossed the street, stepped over a parking chain,
and was on the campus. Feeling safer, he began to reconstruct his
defense of Paris Trout. It was not as pure now as it had been in the
morning; Hanna Trout was still with him, staring across the dark
room, using his own words to warn him. It felt like a curse.

He wondered if she were part Gypsy.

He walked the length of the campus and came out
behind the courthouse. The street beyond that was Browne, and then
Main, where he turned left. The Ether Hotel stood in the middle of
the block, a shade of green, it seemed to him, that nobody drunk or
hung over or anywhere in between ought to have to confront.

He walked inside. The lobby was empty except for a
clerk sitting behind the desk, playing solitaire. Seagraves noticed
the coat hanging on the rack near the emergency exit, the side pocket
heavy with a jar of liquor, and he thought for a moment he was going
to be sick.

"
Is Mr. Trout i11?" he said.

The clerk looked up, saw who it was, and hurried to
his feet. He turned and checked the mailbox. "Yessir," he
said, "He must be, on account his key's gone."

"What room is that?" Seagraves said.

The boy hesitated.

"
I am Mr. Trout's attorney, and I am here on a
matter of business."

The boy said, "Mr. Trout don't take visitors.
It's in his instructions."

"
Instructions . . ."

"
Yessir, he wrote them down when he first moved
in. Like, he takes the paper in his mailbox just so, and if it ain't
there, he won't pick one up off the counter. He'll go to his room and
call down to have somebody bring it."

Seagraves saw the boy was as afraid of him as he was
of Trout.

"What room?" he said.

"
Three-ten. The honeymoon suite."

Seagraves looked up and down and could not imagine
it. "Paris Trout's got the honeymoon suite?"

"
Yessir," the boy said, and Seagraves
thought he sounded sad. "He flat took it over."

Seagraves climbed the stairs, holding on to the rail.
When he got to the third floor he stopped, right on the edge again,
and waited until his stomach settled.

He walked up the hallway to the end and found the
door. It was dark wood, the numbers 310 nailed in gold right at eye
level. He knocked and heard the bedsprings. "Who is it?"
Right on the other side of the door.

"
Harry Seagraves," he said.

The door cracked open, a few inches. He saw one of
Trout's eyes.

"We got to talk."

Trout offered no sign that he recognized Seagraves or
even heard him. He kept his eye in the crack of the door, waiting for
something else.

"
Are you dressed?"

Trout looked him up and down then, as if he were
comparing their clothes. Then the door opened another half foot, and
Seagraves saw the gun. Trout was wearing a long-sleeve white shirt,
buttoned at the neck and wrists, and in the hand Seagraves could see
was a heavy foreign-looking automatic.

"Who are you fixing to shoot?" Seagraves
said.

Trout still didn't answer, and the thought settled
for just a moment in Seagraves's head that this man knew where he —
Seagraves — had spent the day. Trout walked away from the door,
leaving it open, and came back a moment later wearing his coat. He
put as much of the gun as would fit into the side pocket and came out
of his room.

As he opened the door, Seagraves caught a quick,
blinding reflection of the sun of the floor. "We could talk
here," Seagraves said, but Trout had already started toward the
stairs.

At the front desk Seagraves stopped him. "Leave
your gun with the boy," he said.

Trout took a step back. "It's legal. I got a
right."

"
You don't need a damn gun to walk up the street
Sunday afternoon."

"
How far?"

"
As close as you want," Seagraves said.
"The college, officers' academy, it doesn't matter as long as
it's private. It won't help things to be seen walking the streets
with a weapon two weeks before they call a jury .... "

Trout looked at his pocket. The mouth of the pistol
peeked out of the corner like some pet snake. He took it out, the
barrel moving quickly from Seagraves to himself to the door, and then
handed it to the boy behind the desk. "Don't allow nobody to
monkey with this," he said.

The boy took the gun, holding it with two hands, and
set it behind the counter. "No sir," he said.

"
Even yourself."

"No sir."

Trout stared at the boy a moment longer. "I'll
know if you do," he said.

"Yessir, I know you would."

They walked down Main Street, passing Trout's store,
and came to the academy. Seagraves was sick again and went through
some bushes to a bench underneath an elm tree. He sat down heavily,
Trout stood in front of him.

"
Well?" Trout said. "It's private."

Seagraves wiped at the sweat on his neck. "I
went and talked to your wife today," he said.

"
It's no one's concern what's between her and
me."

"
It's your concern that she comes to your
trial," Seagraves said quietly.

Trout stared down at him, then looked around, as if
he were afraid someone were listening. "I pay you for that."
Then he looked at his watch.

"
Are you late somewhere? You need to get back to
your hotel room?"

"What is it you come by to say?"

"
The first thing," Seagraves said, "you
got to talk to your wife, patch up what you can. People know you left
the house, but if you could get her to the courtroom, it might help."

"
I mind my own business," Trout said, "let
everybody else mind theirs."

"
It isn't your business until it's over,"
Seagraves said. "After the trial you got all the privacy you
want, one way or the other."

Trout looked at him. Seagraves could see he was
angry, but he held it. "Now," Seagraves said, "you and
Buster Devonne been going over what happened in Indian Heights?"

Trout shrugged. "Ain't much to go over."
Trout began to pace.

Seagraves closed his eyes to keep himself from
following the movement. "Buster and myself was in it together,"
Trout said. "We decided what we said and took a pact to stick to
it."

"
A pact?"

Trout nodded. "On the way back to town. That
nothing happened in Indian Heights was gone turn two white men
against each other."

 
Seagraves opened his eyes and stared at him,
trying to imagine how it would have looked. He saw Trout stained with
the child's blood, he and Buster Devonne shaking hands on their pact.

"
Did Buster shoot the woman, or did you?"

Trout stopped pacing and studied his feet. "He
works for me," he said. "He'll say what I tell him."
Then, more quietly: "He thinks they'll invite us in the jury
room — my trial and then his — give out party hats to celebrate."

Seagraves took a deep breath.

"
Buster is a popular man in Ether County,"
Trout said. "They ain't going to do nothing to him. It could be
their own trouble."

It was quiet a long minute, and then Seagraves heard
his own voice.

"
If it was you who shot the woman and the girl,
and they had a gun of their own, it would explain things better."

Trout stood dead still.

"
If it happened that all the shots came from
your weapon . . ." The words came out of him easier than he
thought they would, easier than they should.

Trout still hadn't moved, but Seagraves began to
notice the rise and fall of his chest. "Which one of us you
think is paying you?" he said after a moment.

"It was your gun that fired the bullets into the
girl," Seagraves said. "Ward Townes has got the gun and the
bullets, that's the starting point. We all got to agree to it because
there it is. But if it happened that the bullets inside the woman
were yours too — there is no way to prove that because they're
still inside her — then we've got a situation that a jury might see
self-defense."

"
I ain't in this alone," Trout said a
little later.

Seagraves stood up, steadying himself with his hand
against the back of the bench. "Either that," he said, "or
you were in it together." The next time he looked at Trout, he
was glad he'd made him leave the gun back at the hotel.

"
There isn't going to
be any party in the jury room for either of you," Seagraves
said. "Buster Devonne doesn't know Cotton Point, he only knows
what fits his own way of thinking about it." He saw Trout didn't
believe that. "It's a mistake to take a place and say it's all
one way or another, just because that's the way it's comfortable,"
he said.

* * *

THE TRIAL BEGAN SEVENTEEN days later on a Wednesday,
at eight o'clock in the morning. Judge John Taylor was a little under
five and a half feet tall and weighed 220 pounds, even without his
robe, and started early because he was intolerant of late-afternoon
heat.

During the summer, in fact, he was sometimes disposed
to call a five-minute recess every hour, to retire to his chambers,
undress, and cover himself with baby powder. Attorneys who were taken
into his chambers for scolding or to argue sensitive issues were
accustomed to seeing the judge sitting in his shorts behind his desk,
the color of death itself.

He smiled now, at the beginning of the case, and
noted the spectators. They had filled every seat and were standing in
the back and sitting in the windowsills. "You-all welcome to
stay, of course," he said, "but in the afternoon you ain't
going to want to."

A few of the ladies looked uncomfortable at the
warning.

Seagraves was sitting with Trout. There was a notepad
between them on the table, for Trout to write down his thoughts or
objections. He was immobile today, staring straight ahead, as he had
been the day before during jury selection. He took it as an affront
to be judged.

He was dressed in a pale gray suit and a yellow tie.
He had been to the barber and shined his shoes.

Hanna Trout, however, was missing from the room.
Seagraves had saved a place for her in the seats just behind the
defense table, and it was the only empty seat in the room. He took it
as a setback and as an omen.

And he was disappointed in some way that was
unconnected to the trial.

Buster Devonne, whose own trial was scheduled to
follow Trout's, sat behind the gate, on the aisle of the third row.
Seagraves noticed he bore a certain resemblance to some of the
members of the jury, a resemblance of attitude and manner which
Trout, under any sort of scrutiny, did not share.

As the trial date closed in, Seagraves had spent long
afternoons with Trout and Devonne, together and then one at a time.
Devonne, who was an imbecile, understood immediately; Trout held some
unspoken resistance. Hours went into the preparation of the statement
Trout  would read at the trial, and more hours into trying to
coach him into some sort of ordinary civility. But each time they
met, Trout was more remote than the last. It was almost as if he had
removed himself from what was coming. On the last afternoon Seagraves
gave up and left the instructions at this: "If you need to say
something, write it down. Write slowly, so it looks thoughtful."

Trout had said, "I
don't need to write things down. That's what I paid you for."

* * *

THE FIRST WITNESS WAS Henry Ray Boxer. He wore a
long-sleeve shirt with cuff links at the wrists, Sunday pants, work
shoes. His hand on Bible was as narrow as a woman's. He slouched in
the witness chair, afraid to look left or right, and spoke so softly
he could barely be heard.