by Pete Dexter
“Keep trying him for me,” he said. “Meantime, get me Paris Trout. He’ll be at the store.”
“Yessir,” she said. A minute later she knocked and put her head inside. “There’s no answer at the store,” she said.
“Did you try the house?”
“Yessir, I got his wife, but she said Mr. Trout wasn’t there.” Harry Seagraves took his feet out of the drawer and slipped them into his shoes. “You want me to keep trying?” she said.
“No,” he said. “I’ll go over there myself. I need the exercise.”
She said, “What if Dr. Braver calls?”
He said, “Tell him I’ll be over to see him directly.”
SEAGRAVES FOUND PARIS TROUT in the back office of his store. The front entrance was still locked—it was after ten o’clock—so Seagraves had walked around the block to the alley and found the door there open.
Trout was holding his head in his hands when Seagraves caught him, gray hair spilling out between his fingers, his elbows resting on the table. He was focused on a bill of sale in front of him. There was a bottle of mineral water next to the paper and a strong body odor in the air.
Seagraves said, “Mr. Trout?”
Trout looked up slowly. His eyes were blood red, and the front of his shirt was wrinkled, as if he’d slept in it. “It’s here in black-and-white,” he said.
A light bulb hung from the ceiling, a little behind the table, and when Trout took his finger off the bill of sale, the shadow faded and grew until it covered most of the document.
“Right here,” Trout said. “Account payable, Henry Ray Boxer. One thousand and twenty-seven dollars for a 1949 Chevrolet. Neither God nor man can say that debt wasn’t legal. I have the proof.” He pushed the paper at Seagraves, Seagraves did not move. “Look for yourself.”
The bill of sale was written in a tiny, neat handwriting, the signatures were scrawled and unreadable. Seagraves did not try to read it. “Ward Townes called, like we thought,” he said quietly. “He wants to see us this afternoon at one o’clock.”
“Does he care to see the bill of sale?”
Seagraves said, “We can bring the bill of sale.”
“It’s black-and-white,” Trout said again. “That car was sold as legal as the seal of Georgia.” His eyes opened wider, a frightening color. Seagraves realized he had no idea whatsoever of the transformations going on in his head.
“It would be a good idea you went home and changed shirts,” he said. “Shaved, cleaned yourself up.”
Trout touched the bill of sale again. “He don’t need me,” he said. “He’s got everything he needs to settle this right here.”
“No,” Seagraves said, “we got to see him ourselves.”
Trout suddenly stood up and slammed his fist into the middle of the table. Dust stirred, it settled. “He don’t believe these are the real signatures?”
Seagraves was suddenly aware of the size of Paris Trout and the size of the room, and he wished he’d used the telephone. More than that, he wished Paris Trout was somebody else’s client. This had a feeling he didn’t like, that he was drawn into something further than he ought to be.
“Sit down, Paris,” he said, and was surprised when Trout sat down. He began to pace. Trout followed him with his eyes, back and forth. “We got a problem here between us and the prosecutor,” he said. “It isn’t black-and-white, at least you better hope not. It doesn’t matter what’s in any bill of sale, it concerns people that have been shot.”
Trout stole a quick look at the paper. “It isn’t in the goddamn bill of sale,” Seagraves said. He leaned across the desk, smelling dried sweat, a faint odor of vomit. “It’s in Cornell Clinic. There’s a child in Cornell Clinic named Sayers, and she’s been shot four times and is all but done living. That’s all Ward Townes wants to talk to you about now, and you would be smart to prepare yourself, not to make this worse than it is.”
Trout blinked his red eyes and waited. Seagraves found himself suddenly calm. “Listen, now,” he said. “I want you to take yourself home, bathe, and put on something it don’t look like you’ve been wrestling pigs. And then, at one o’clock on the dot, you be at the prosecutor’s office, looking like somebody, and talk to the man about that girl. Not that you shot her—don’t put yourself in as deep as you did with Hubert Nordland—but talk about the girl, acknowledge her.”
Trout patted the paper on the desk. “This is the proof,” he said.
“Don’t use that word this afternoon,” Seagraves said. “Don’t try to tell Ward Townes what proof is.” He thought for a moment and put it a different way. “I’ll be with you,” he said. “I can stop you from saying the wrong thing, but I can’t make up the right words and whisper them in your ear. I believe this thing is … an affront to Ward Townes. Something in it is personal, like you had insulted him. Treat it like that, like he was offended.”
Trout sat still. “How much is this gone cost me?” he said finally.
“I don’t know,” Seagraves said. “Some of it’s up to Ward Townes, some of it’s up to you.”
Trout took a mechanical pencil out of his shirt pocket and handed it to Seagraves. “I want you to write it down,” he said.
“Christ Almighty, Paris …”
The pencil was green and translucent, he could see little specks floating around inside. The eraser was worn smooth at the corners, and the word SCRIPTO was worn half off the side. It was a nineteen-cent pencil, and Trout had kept it probably five years.
“The price to represent my legal case. I want you to put it right here on a piece of paper, so we both know where it is.”
Seagraves put the pencil on the table, beside the mineral water. He noticed spit floating on top. “The price depends on the time,” he said, “you know that as well as anybody.” It was part of the enigma of Paris Trout that he had graduated from law school himself, someplace up in North Carolina, but never practiced law.
Trout shook his head. “I want one price,” he said.
“I don’t discuss price,” Seagraves said. “I got a girl that prepares the billings, but she can’t tell you a thing until we determine what that child in Cornell Clinic’s going to do and what Ward Townes intends to do about it.”
“I want a number wrote down, right now at the start,” Trout said. “That’s how I do business.” He was smiling now, as if he had Seagraves trapped. Trout’s teeth were yellow and gapped, and against his will, Seagraves imagined the way it would have looked when he shot the girl.
“All right,” he said, “you tell me what you did, and I’ll tell you how much it costs.”
Seagraves took the chair in the corner and moved it to the table. He did not want to be in the room with Trout and what he had done—he had wanted it softened first, to read it, have one of his clerks take the statement—but there was something in Trout that pushed things farther than they were intended to go.
Trout sat still. His face was changed, but it held the smile. “What did you want to know?” he said.
“Everything you did in that girl’s house.”
Trout rubbed his ears and pushed the hair back off his face. “The family owed me a debt,” he said. “A legal debt …”
Seagraves did not try to guide him now. He waited to see where the story would go on its own.
“It was eight hundret dollars, I sold him that Chevrolet, and I told him I get my money. It was eight hundret for the car, another two hundret and twenty-seven for the insurance. I always tell them I get my money. You can ask any coloreds in Cotton Point, they’ll tell you the same thing.”
Seagraves stared at Trout and waited.
“I warned that boy when he brought the car back,” he said. “He busted it up, wanted me to forgive the debt.” Trout shook his head. “I don’t forgive debts,” he said. “I pay my obligations, and I am paid in return.”
Seagraves sat still.
“And I went out there, to Indian Heights where this family is, to collect my money.”
Sea
graves stopped him. “You thought they had eight hundred dollars in the cookie jar?”
“I never said so. I went out to get them to sign me a note to have it took from their pay. That’s all that was intended, to get my note signed.”
“You brought Buster Devonne,” Seagraves said.
“That debt was legal. That’s all anybody’s got to do, lookit the bill of sale. I am a businessman, I don’t make nothing up.” Trout moved in his chair, looking uncomfortable. “I don’t have a cruel heart,” he said.
Seagraves smiled at the phrase.
“We drove out to the house,” Trout said. “This boy Thomas Boxer was on the porch. Buster Devonne had the note, and Thomas Boxer wouldn’t sign it. He had his feet on the rail. I shook him by the collar. There was people behind their curtains now, and you forgive one debt, ain’t none of them going to pay you ever.
“Then the boy rose up like nobody’s business, made to grab me, and I went to sit him back down. The girl got in the midst of it—she put herself in the midst—and then the woman. The ruckus moved into the house, where the girl and the woman was shot. The boy run off, and I wouldn’t want his conscience to live with.”
Seagraves said, “Who shot the girl and the woman? Was it Buster Devonne or was it you?”
“Don’t know,” Trout said. “It was cloudy in the house, and it’s still cloudy when I think about it.”
“Cloudy?”
“Smoky,” he said.
“You told Hurbert Norland they had guns?”
Trout thought for a moment and then said, “Yessir.”
Seagraves heard the lie in that. “You got your gun?”
Trout opened the drawer to the table and came out with an ivory-handled Colt automatic. He laid it on the table between them, with the barrel pointed at the bottle of mineral water. “That’s the one I carry,” he said. “You can take it if you need, I got spares here in the store.”
With the gun on the desk, Seagraves imagined the scene again, how it might have looked to the girl. “Did you clean it when you got back?” He was going slower now, thinking better.
Trout nodded and said, “That gun cost two hundret and forty dollars, you damn right I cleaned it.”
“Did you look at the clip, see how many rounds you’d fired?” Seagraves studied the gun, there was something out of the ordinary. “What is that, a thirty-eight?”
Trout smiled. “No sir,” he said, and he picked it up in his open hand, as if he were weighing it. “This is a forty-five. A lot of people make the same mistake; it don’t look like what it is.”
“How many times was it fired?”
Trout shrugged. “Didn’t count,” he said.
“You removed the clip when you cleaned it.”
“I loaded it back up,” he said. “I didn’t count the rounds.”
“What did Buster have?” Seagraves said. “Did he have a forty-five too?”
Trout shook his head. “He got a thirty-eight. The same one from when he was on the police. Buster gets a gun he likes and sticks with it.”
Trout put the automatic back on the table and Seagraves picked it up. He thought of the girl in Cornell Clinic and the accidental nature of her associations. What would she make of a rich white man, holding the gun that shot her? He wondered suddenly if she could read. If somebody had somehow shown her the story in the newspaper beforehand—the story that she’d been shot—would she have known what it was?
“And there were guns in the house,” Seagraves said.
Trout did not answer, did not seem to understand what Seagraves meant.
“Did you see guns? You said they had guns too.”
“I might,” he said.
“Did anybody touch them?”
It went slow, with Trout taking his time to consider the answers. “I would say so, yes, sir.”
“This girl might of touched a gun?”
“Might of.”
“And the woman might of touched a gun?”
Trout shrugged. “It got smoky,” he said. “You couldn’t tell who was shooting.…”
Seagraves heard the false sound in that, and Ward Townes would hear it too. What he would do about it Seagraves didn’t know. On the whole, Townes was sweet-dispositioned—some days you couldn’t tell he was even a prosecutor—but there was something in him that wasn’t sweet too, and Seagraves saw no reason to bring it out.
He stood up, and Trout stood up with him, making the room crowded. “If a man were to come in here today,” Seagraves said, in an offhanded way, “and told you this or that was the way to run your business, would you listen?”
“What man?” Trout said.
“I don’t care, President Eisenhower. Would you listen?”
“Not to that sonofabitch.”
“Then Marvin Griffin. Would you listen to Governor Griffin?”
“To run my business?”
“That’s right.”
“Marvin Griffin ain’t been in a business like this.”
“What if he was? What if Mr. Griffin had a business like yours up in Atlanta, and he came in here tomorrow and said this or that was the way things ought to be done.”
Trout took it to heart. “I would tell him to get the hell out,” he said.
“Hold that thought,” Seagraves said. “Hold that one thought when you see Ward Townes this afternoon. That you’re coming into his store.”
Trout started to answer, but then he stopped. Seagraves said, “Leave your bill of sale here. Let him ask for what he wants to see.” Seagraves looked at the paper on the table. The gun was there too. “All except that,” he said. “Let me have the weapon, he’ll need that, and I’d just as soon as it wasn’t on your person when it changed hands.”
Trout picked up the gun and handed it to Seagraves. Seagraves put it in the pocket of his coat. “I’ll want that back,” Trout said. “You tell Mr. Townes I want my property returned.”
“It’s his store,” Seagraves said.
“It’s my property.”
“Not now,” Seagraves said. “There is nothing connected to you and that girl that’s yours, and there is nothing you want to claim.”
“I ain’t ashamed,” Trout said.
Seagraves was on the way out but those words stopped him, and for a moment he fought an urge to quit Trout on the spot. “I know you aren’t,” he said, “but I want you to try.”
“You ain’t told me what it’s going to cost,” Trout said.
“You haven’t told me what you did.”
SEAGRAVES LEFT THE STORE the way he had come in, walked up the alley to the street, and turned left. A dozen people spoke to him in the two blocks to Cornell Clinic, most of them he recognized from Homewood Community, where the state hospital was. During his tenure in the state legislature Seagraves had gotten city water for Homewood, and controlled every Democratic vote there since. And there weren’t any Republicans, not even in the asylum.
People in Homewood named their children after Harry Seagraves, some of them even believed he lived there.
He took his time, speaking to everyone who spoke to him, commenting on the weather a dozen times between Trout’s alley and the glass door to Thomas Cornell Clinic. There had been no winter that year, and people wanted him to reassure them the seasons weren’t gone forever.
He stepped through the doors of the clinic, smiled at the nurse sitting at the desk and then at the patients waiting in chairs around the room.
The nurse straightened herself and smiled. “Mr. Seagraves,” she said.
“Miss Thompson,” he said, reading the name off her blouse. She was a small-boned woman, somewhere between thirty and forty, and her hair hung in a ponytail over one shoulder. She put in time on her looks, and Seagraves imagined her ponytail matted against his own shoulder, wet from the bath. He put it out of his mind.
“I wonder if I might see Dr. Braver when he has a minute,” he said.
She went for the doctor, and he took a seat against the wall with the patients. He signe
d the cast on a boy’s foot and gave him a quarter to buy a Moon Pie and a Dr Pepper after he was finished with Dr. Braver.
The doctor came through the door a moment later, and Seagraves left his seat. Dr. Braver was wearing white shoes with pink soles, a white belt, rimless spectacles. He did not smile when he shook hands, but then, Seagraves had never seen him smile.
He noticed an intimate look pass between the doctor and his nurse as they came into the room, however, and surmised that she was doing what she could in that direction.
“What may I do for you today, Mr. Seagraves?”
There were specks of blood on one of the doctor’s sleeves and a spot of red on the gold watch he wore under it. He had snow-white hair and had been that way since he was twenty-five years old.
“I wonder if we could have a moment in private,” Seagraves said.
“We could,” Braver said. He looked quickly behind Seagraves at the waiting patients and then spoke to his nurse. “Ain’t nobody dying on us, is there?” he said.
“No sir,” she said.
“Good,” he said. He held the door to the back rooms open, and as Seagraves walked through, the doctor spoke again to his nurse. “Call Dr. Bonner for me,” he said. “Tell him I said to do something about the rocks out to front of the church.”
“Yessir,” she said.
P. P. Bonner was not a medical doctor, but the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church. Seagraves recalled his boy, Carl, the youngest Eagle Scout in the history of the state, had gone off to Tufts University in Massachusetts when he was only sixteen years old. Won medals in Korea and was getting ready to graduate law school himself.
Seagraves did not remember the boy well, only that he was famous in Cotton Point and had always seemed too polite. As if he wanted something from you.
Dr. Braver followed Seagraves through the door and then led him down a long hallway to his office. He did not sit down or offer him a seat.
He removed his glasses and cleaned them with a corner of his coat. “Yessir,” he said, “what can I do for you today?”
Seagraves was direct, anything else was wasted on Braver. “A prognosis on Miss Rosie Sayers,” he said.