Digging for the News : A fictional investigative team gets the goods : THE PAPERBOY, <i> By Pete Dexter (Random House: $23; 307 pp.)</i>

Paris Trout, the violently bigoted Southerner who, in Pete Dexter’s novel of the same name, stood monstrously for the darkest human and social instincts, has spawned several baleful fingerlings.

There is, at the start of Dexter’s new novel, “The Paperboy,” Sheriff Thurmond Call of Moat County, Florida. He had, “even by the standards of Moat County, killed an inappropriate number of Negroes in the line of duty.” Sixteen, in fact; which his fellow whites saw as a sign not of depravity but of a pardonable nervous imbalance. It was the mid-1960s and the era’s mixed signals were too much for an old-time lawman. Dexter’s wicked silken line is at its finest: “Hippies, federal judges, Negroes--he couldn’t keep track of what he was allowed to do to them and what he wasn’t.”

When Call kicked a white man to death on a public street it was a trifle graver. This was so even though the dead man, a member of the murderous van Wetter swamp clan, was noted for his drunken and degenerate stare, which, the young narrator’s words, “fell on you, expecting something, waiting, a tiny interest finally stirring, like a small smile, as he found the little places inside you where he did not belong.” Truly, another Troutling.

Soon Sheriff Call is found not only killed but disemboweled. This gets two monsters out of the way, all in the first six pages, and leaves a third to stay around and chill the rest of the book. He is Hillary van Wetter, who lives, like his cousins, in the marshy Moat County backlands, and who is arrested, tried and convicted for Call’s disemboweling and sent to Death Row.

All this is the setting, recounted with the whipcrack irony and edge of the grotesque that Dexter can manage so well. Through it, several different stories are threaded. The principal one is the investigation of van Wetter’s trial and conviction by a two-man team sent up by Florida’s biggest newspaper, which Dexter calls The Miami Times. They are an ill-matched pair. Ward James, son of the publisher of the local Moat County paper, is a driven, meticulous investigator. Yardley Acheman is the team’s writer: flamboyant, lazy and dishonest.

Dexter uses their partnership, which gradually falls apart and turns into enmity, for several purposes. One is to portray the personages and the weakening traditional institutions of a rural Southern district in the ‘60s. With perfect pitch and a mix of ferocity and sympathy he gives us surly sheriff’s deputies, a revered and incompetent small-town lawyer, a safely liberal editor--Ward’s and the narrator’s father--who knows just how far he can irritate the local establishment, and the feral swamp domain of the van Wetters.

The author tells this story consummately well, often reaching the level of “Paris Trout,” his masterpiece, even if no figure quite achieves Paris’ awful stature. There are wonderful scenes; for example, the dismay of an old lawyer when he realizes that the journalists are not there to do one more folksy feature about his career--he has his clippings album ready--but to question his outrageously feeble defense of Hillary. There is the tense and comic standoff when Ward goes to the sheriff’s office for information, is treated patronizingly, then curtly and finally ignored altogether--and remains stubbornly standing before the duty officer’s desk for two days on end.

There are forays into the swamp to question Hillary’s uncle, Tyree. The old man fends off their questions while consuming quarts of ice cream which he passes, when he’s had his fill, to a vacant-eyed younger man and a pregnant companion. Tyree, seemingly simple, occasionally menacing and suddenly shrewd, is at the heart of the story the reporters are pursuing; by the end it becomes clear that he has outsmarted them.

There is the odd and finally endearing figure of a murderer-groupie. Charlotte Bless, a 40-year-old postal worker, corresponds with a dozen convicted killers. Hillary obsesses her; she feels there is something pure about the sexually obsessed letters he writes in reply to her own. She arrives in Moat County with 40 cartons of clippings, photos and journals that she has kept on the case; it is she whose questioning of the trial has convinced the Times to send Ward and Yardley.

She gets herself engaged to Hillary; she goes with the reporters to visit him. He ignores their questions and concentrates on rousing himself to orgasm by staring at her through the visitor’s window. He is brutal, gross and single-minded; eventually he will cooperate to the extent of letting Ward and Yardley write a story that gets the case reopened, and then dismissed for lack of evidence.

It is something less than a journalistic triumph, though. In fact, it is the tautly assembled machinery on which Dexter, rather less tautly, dismantles present-day journalism and a few other things as well.

There is, first of all, the irony of the effort. Ward’s father, the local editor who will be temporarily boycotted because of his son’s part in the Times’ expose, makes a cautious observation when Ward and Yardley tell him of the incompetent defense mounted by Weldon Pine, Hillary’s old lawyer. Perhaps Weldon knows what he is doing, the father remarks with what seems like cowardly old-fogyism. By the end, Hillary is free, even though--rotten trial or not--he has quite certainly killed the sheriff. Furthermore, he goes on killing.

Thus far an irony, and not a bad one. But Dexter uses much of the book to break things down further, and here the fine stitching of voice and incident often comes undone. The investigative journalism of Ward and Yardley does not merely have unintended bad effects; it is corrupt in itself.

The corruption is not with Ward, who is quixotically devoted to painstaking, infinitely careful reporting. He becomes the victim of Yardley and of what Dexter singles out as journalism’s mortal sin: “not the need to know but the need to tell.” Journalism, in other words, for the sake not of truth but of power and prestige.

The distinction is interesting and to some extent valid. Anyone who has worked as a journalist knows of stories whose impact comes, not in direct contraposition but at an oblique angle to a full array of the facts. Dexter, a former journalist, is unsparing. At one point, when Yardley is ready to write his expose and Ward insists on clearing up some doubtful points, the editor backs Yardley with the old injunction to stop reporting and start writing. “You have to let go of it to get it done,” he says.

It is a necessary process. It is also a borderline process, and it can become, consciously or not, a corrupt one. But Dexter makes the corruption so garish and blatant as to put great strain on his finely wrought story. The expose of Hillary’s trial rests on evidence that Yardley may or may not have known to be faked. Yardley goes from a not unappealing ambition to sheer villainy; at one point he threatens to blackmail Ward, who is gay.

There are other things that loosen Dexter’s tension by adding unnecessary melodrama. Ward’s savage beating by two sailors from whom he has solicited sex is powerfully described but doesn’t seem necessary. Even less necessary--and, for once, obviously and coarsely written--is the portrait of a scheming woman reporter who seduces Ward’s father, marries him and tries to take over his newspaper.

If “Paperboy” is marred by excessive side-plotting, and by overmaneuvering its theme, much of it is still first-rate Pete Dexter. That is as good as things get, and not quite like what anything else gets.