Paris Trout (29 page)

CARL BONNER
PART
FIVE

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 eastem 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 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.

"
During that time Mr. Trout treated me as an
employee, without warmth or consideration, and would fly into fits of
temper at the least divergence from his instructions. He would not
allow me to visit my sisters in Savannah or my friends in Atlanta. He
would not allow me to visit with neighbors. So I will take the house
in payment for those two years, although given the choice, I would
certainly have the two years back."

"
You are forty-five years old now?" He
would have thought she was younger, but it was hard to say. With
Bonner there was a single stage women passed into when they were no
longer young. He could not attach an age to it, but after women had
crossed the line, he lost interest in their appearance and could not
differentiate the stages beyond it.

"
Forty-six," she said.

"
And your husband?"

"
Fifty-nine."

"
Have you thought of how you will maintain
yourself?"

"
I have my savings," she said, "and I
am not incapable of working."

She thought for a minute. "I may return to
teaching, I want to do something now to clean myself of this."

Bonner picked up the pencil and made a few quick
notes. She didn't try to stop him. "There won't be any problem,"
he said, looking at what he had written. "My advice would be to
ask for alimony, but if this is what you want, there should be no
problem at all."

"You may want to interview my husband before you
say that."

"
There is one law for everyone," he said.
That remark seemed to brighten her spirits, he could not guess why.

"
You'll handle it then?"

"It will be my pleasure," he said, and
smiled at her the way he had smiled to please adults all his life.
And once again it cut her own smile in half. He wondered about Hanna
Trout and what she saw in him that she did not like.

She stood up, offering him her hand. He took it,
noticing the feel of the skin. She was old, but she wasn't. "How
long does something like this take?" she said.

"
It depends to a large extent on your husband,"
he said. "I'll file the papers this week, and it could be over
in six months."

"
Is that what you expect?"

Bonner was still holding her hand, looking right into
her eyes. "I don't know. It could last a longer time if he
wanted it to," he said. He watched that register and then tried
to soften it.

"It shouldn't be long," he said. "This
is a favorable settlement for him, his lawyer will tell him. If he
knows what's good for him, this will be over in no time at all."

She said, "I do not
think you can count on Mr. Trout's knowing what is in his own
interest."

* * *

AT THE TIME OF this meeting with Hanna Trout, Carl
Bonner had been back in Cotton Point two months. She was his first
real client.

Bonner had been away eight years. He had left the
town when he was sixteen to attend Tufts University in Massachusetts
on a scholarship. At eighteen he interrupted his education to enlist
in the U.S. Army and spent two years in Korea, operating field
artillery and reaching the rank of captain. He was shot in the hand
and returned to Tufts University, decorated and honored, and finished
his degree in zoology.

It took two more years to complete law school.

But if he was absent in that way eight years, in
another way he was never gone at all. He had been one of those
children who imprint themselves on an adult society; he was a part of
the way people thought about themselves and the place they lived.

Carl Bonner had been the youngest Eagle Scout in the
history of the state. He was the youngest person ever known to preach
a sermon in Ether County.

From the age of six on, he had played football with
murderous intentions, unconcerned for his own safety. In high school
he ran three distances at the state track meet. Under the supervision
of his father, the Reverend P. P. Bonner of the First Presbyterian
Church, he had studied three and four hours every night but Saturday,
completing both his elementary and secondary education with the
highest marks in his class. He won state contests in mathematics and
science. His picture was in the
Ether County
Plain Talk
ten times a year, often with
accounts of his study habits.

His father made the
Plain Talk
too, although it was usually with people he'd just
married or a story about vandalism at the church. Religion was
removed somehow from the real business of the county, and the boy
came to understand that his father was insulted to be left out and
drove him for that reason.