by John Berendt
“Well, I do see your point,” the woman said dryly.
The man then looked over at Cynthia Collins, but at that moment Mrs. Collins was stealing a glance at her watch. A flicker of concern crossed her brow. She caught the eye of the maid by the door. “Pass napkins,” she whispered.
Chapter 11
NEWS FLASH
At this point in my experiment in bi-urban living, I found myself spending more time in Savannah than New York. The weather alone would have been reason enough for the tilt. By late April, New York was still struggling to free itself from the clutches of winter, and Savannah was well into the unfolding pageantry of a warm and leisurely spring. Camellias, jonquils, and paper-whites had bloomed in December and January. Wisteria and red-buds had followed, and then in mid-March the azaleas burst forth in gigantic pillows of white, red, and vermilion. White dogwood blossoms floated like clouds of confectioner’s sugar above the azaleas. The scent of honeysuckle, Confederate jasmine, and the first magnolia blossoms were already beginning to perfume the air. Who needed the chill of New York?
So I lingered in Savannah. Its hushed and somnolent streets became my streets of choice. I stayed put, just as Savannahians did. Savannahians often talked about other places, as if they traveled a lot, but usually it was just talk. Savannahians liked to talk about Charleston most of all, especially in the presence of a newcomer. They would compare the two cities endlessly. Savannah was the Hostess City; Charleston was the Holy City (because it had a lot of churches). Savannah’s streetscape was superior to Charleston’s, but Charleston had finer interiors. Savannah was thoroughly English in style and temperament; Charleston had French and Spanish influences as well as English. Savannah preferred hunting, fishing, and going to parties over intellectual pursuits; in Charleston it was the other way around. Savannah was attractive to tourists; Charleston was overrun by them. On and on. In the minds of most Americans, Savannah and Charleston were sister cities. If so, the sisters were barely on speaking terms. Savannahians rarely went to Charleston, even though it was less than two hours away by car. But then Savannahians rarely went anywhere at all. They could not be bothered. They were content to remain in their isolated city under self-imposed house arrest. There were exceptions, of course, and Chablis was one of them.
Chablis took her act on the road via Trailways, just as she said she would—to Augusta, Columbia, Atlanta, and Jacksonville. She came back to Savannah between swings, long enough to freshen her wardrobe and avail herself of Dr. Myra Bishop’s female hormone shots. When she was finished at Dr. Bishop’s, she invariably called me up or threw pebbles at my window, and I would come down and drive her home. She came to look upon these rides as a ceremonial aspect of her sexual journey. The estrogen would be working its magic inside her, transforming the tomboy into a graceful empress even as we drove through the streets of Savannah.
One Saturday morning in early May, I was preparing to drive out to Fort Jackson to watch one of Savannah’s traditional annual sporting events, the Scottish games, when the telephone rang. It was Chablis.
“It’s the bitch, honey,” she said. “It’s The Lady. I ain’t lookin’ for a ride this time, though. I’m just checkin’ to see if you’ve had a look at your morning paper yet.”
“No, I haven’t,” I said. “Why?”
“Remember that antique dealer you told me you met? The one with the big house on Monterey Square?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Didn’t you tell me his name was Jim Williams?”
“Yes, I did. What about him?”
“James A. Williams?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Age fifty-two?”
“Sounds right,” I said.
“Of 429 Bull Street?”
“Come on, Chablis. What happened?”
“She shot somebody last night.”
“What? Chablis, are you serious?”
“I wouldn’t joke about a thing like that. That’s what it says right here in the paper. It says James A. Williams shot Danny Lewis Hansford, twenty-one. It happened inside Mercer House. They got a big ol’ picture of your friend James A. Williams on the front page, but they ain’t got one of the twenty-one-year-old, dammit, and that’s the one I wanna see.”
“Did Danny Hansford die?” I asked.
“He musta did, honey, ’Cause they’re chargin’ Miss Williams with murder.”
Chapter 12
GUNPLAY
Under the banner headline WILLIAMS CHARGED IN SLAYING, the story was very brief. It said that at 3:00 A.M., police had been summoned to Mercer House, where they found Danny Hansford, twenty-one, lying dead on the floor in the study, his blood pouring out onto an oriental carpet. He had been shot in the head and chest. There were two pistols at the scene. Several objects in the house had been broken. Williams had been taken into custody, charged with murder, and held on $25,000 bond. Fifteen minutes later, a friend of Williams had arrived at police headquarters with a paper bag containing 250 one-hundred-dollar bills, and Williams was released. That was all the newspaper said about the shooting. Williams was identified as an antiques dealer, a restorer of historic houses, and a giver of elegant parties at his “showplace” home, which Jacqueline Onassis had visited and offered to buy for $2 million. About Danny Hansford, the paper gave no information other than his age.
The next day’s newspaper carried a more detailed account of the shooting. According to Williams, he had shot Danny Hansford in self-defense. He and Danny had attended a drive-in movie, he said, and returned to Mercer House after midnight. Back at the house, Hansford suddenly went wild, just as Williams said he had done a month earlier. He stomped a video game, broke a chair, smashed an eighteenth-century English grandfather clock. Then—just as he had done before—he grabbed one of Williams’s German Lugers. But this time he did not fire it into the floor or out into Monterey Square. This time he aimed it directly at Williams, who was sitting behind his desk. He fired three shots. All three missed. When he pulled the trigger to fire again, the gun jammed. That was when Williams reached into his desk drawer and took out another Luger. Danny was struggling to unjam his gun when Williams shot him.
Later in the week, Williams elaborated further in an interview in the weekly newspaper the Georgia Gazette. His tone was confident, even a little defiant. “If I had not shot Danny,” he said, “it would have been my obituary that was published.” Williams said the movie at the drive-in had been a violent horror film. “Lots of throats being slashed and that sort of thing. I told Danny we should leave and go play backgammon or chess or something, and we did.”
By the time Williams and Hansford arrived back at Mercer House, Danny had smoked nine joints and consumed a half-pint of whiskey. They played a video game for a while and then a board game. At that point, Hansford launched into an irrational tirade against his mother, his girlfriend Bonnie, and his buddy George Hill. Suddenly, in a flash of anger, he stomped the video control panel. “Games!” he screamed. “It’s all games. That’s what it’s all about!” Williams stood up to leave the room. Hansford grabbed him by the throat and threw him up against a doorjamb. “You’ve been sick,” he screamed. “Why don’t you just go off someplace and die?” Williams wrenched himself out of Hansford’s grip and went into his study, where he sat down at his desk. He heard loud crashing noises—the grandfather clock falling to the floor, glass breaking, and other sounds of destruction. Danny came into the room carrying a German Luger. “I’m leaving tomorrow,” he said, “but you’re leaving tonight!” With that, he took aim at Williams and fired. Williams said he felt a breeze as one of the bullets passed his left arm. Then Danny’s gun jammed. Williams grabbed his own gun and fired.
After Danny fell, Williams put his gun down on the desk, walked around the desk, saw that Danny was dead, then went back behind the desk and called a former employee, Joe Goodman. Williams told Goodman he had just shot Hansford and to come to Mercer House right away. After that, Williams called his lawyer. Then he called th
e police.
Williams’s lawyer, the police, Joe Goodman, and Joe Goodman’s girlfriend all arrived at Mercer House at the same time. Williams was standing at the open door. “I just shot him,” he said. “He’s in the other room.”
The first policeman to arrive on the scene, Corporal Michael Anderson, recognized Danny immediately. Corporal Anderson was the same policeman who had come to Mercer House a month earlier to take Danny into custody after his previous rampage. On that occasion, he had found Danny upstairs stretched across the bed, fully clothed. This time he found him lying on a Persian carpet in Williams’s study with his face in a pool of blood. His right arm was outstretched above his head, his hand cupped lightly over a gun.
Toward 7:00 A.M., the police escorted Williams to headquarters. They fingerprinted him, booked him for murder, and set bond at $25,000. Williams went to a telephone and called Joe Goodman, who was still waiting back at Mercer House. “Joe, now listen carefully,” he said. “Go upstairs to the tall cabinet outside the organ room. Stand on the chair next to it, reach up, and take down a paper sack that’s sitting on top.” Fifteen minutes later, Goodman arrived at police headquarters with a brown paper bag containing 250 one-hundred-dollar bills, and Williams went home.
A few days later, the police announced that certain lab tests would show whether or not Danny Hansford had actually fired a pistol as Williams claimed. A crucial test would be the presence, or absence, of gunshot powder on Hansford’s hands. If gunshot residue could be detected, it would mean Hansford had fired his gun before Williams killed him; the absence of residue would mean he had not fired. Police said the results would be ready in a week or so and could make or break the case against Williams.
Despite the heavy charges hanging over him, Williams went calmly about his affairs. On Wednesday, four days after he shot Hansford, he asked the court for permission to fly to Europe on an antiques-buying trip. The judge raised his bond to $100,000 and let him go. In London, Williams stayed in his favorite suite at the Ritz and played roulette at Crockford’s Club. Then he flew on to Geneva to attend a sale of Fabergé. He returned to Savannah a week later.
Soon afterward, the police announced that the lab tests would be delayed because of a backlog of work at the Georgia Crime Lab in Atlanta. A month later, the police were still awaiting results.
In the meantime, people in Savannah were coming to conclusions on their own without benefit of lab results. Facts about Danny Hansford were beginning to circulate, and they lent credence to Williams’s claim of self-defense. Hansford had been in and out of juvenile homes and mental hospitals. He had dropped out of school in the eighth grade and had a history of violence and getting into trouble with the police. Williams himself had bailed him out of jail nine times in the past ten months. Skipper Dunn, a horticulturist, who had once lived in the same rooming house as Hansford, described him as a dangerous psychotic. “He was a berserker,” Dunn said. “I saw him run amok twice, breaking things, reaching for knives. It took two people to pin him down. You could look into his eyes and see there was no person left, only rage and violence. It was easy to see that he might try to kill someone some day.” Hansford had once torn a door off its hinges in an effort to get at his sister and beat her up. His own mother had sworn out a police warrant against him, declaring that she was afraid he would do bodily harm to her and her family.
In his interview with the Georgia Gazette, Williams described Hansford as severely disturbed. He said Hansford had once told him, “I’m alone in this world. No one cares about me. I don’t have anything to live for.” With a strange sort of detachment, Williams saw himself as Danny Hansford’s savior rather than his nemesis, much less his murderer: “I was determined to save him from himself,” he said. “He had given up on being alive.” Though Williams’s view was unabashedly self-serving, it was compelling in its detail. Hansford had developed a fascination with death, he said. He would frequently go to Bonaventure Cemetery with friends and point to the grave markers and say that the small ones were for poor people, and the big ones were for rich people, and that if he died in Mercer House he would get a big one. Hansford had twice tried to commit suicide at Mercer House by taking drug overdoses. The second time, he had written a note: “If this stuff does the job, at least I’ll get a decent tombstone.” Williams had rushed him to the hospital both times. All of that was a matter of record.
Beyond saying Danny Hansford was an employee, Williams never fully explained their relationship. But it soon became known that Hansford had been a part-time male hustler who loitered in the squares along Bull Street. Most people did not need to have the rest of the story spelled out for them. A few of Williams’s friends, however—society ladies for the most part—discovered they had been completely in the dark. Millicent Mooreland, an Ardsley Park hostess and a blue blood, had known Williams for thirty years. Yet when a friend called her to say, “Jim Williams has just shot and killed his lover,” she was dumbstruck for two reasons, not just one. “That statement left me absolutely gasping,” Mrs. Mooreland said. “My friendship with Jim had been based on antiques and parties and social things. I simply wasn’t aware of his other interests in life.”
Most of the social set were more worldly than Mrs. Mooreland. “Oh, we knew,” said John Myers. “Of course we knew. We weren’t aware of the details, naturally, because Jim exercised discretion, which was the right thing to do. But all along we’d congratulated ourselves about Jim’s social success because of what it seemed to say about us. We thought it proved Savannah was cosmopolitan, that we were sophisticated enough to accept a gay man socially.”
Mrs. Mooreland remained loyal to Williams, but there were certain things that did trouble her, apart from the shooting itself. She was perplexed by a seemingly small detail in the rush of events that happened that night. “Joe Goodman,” she said. “Who is he? I don’t know him. I’ve never seen him in Jim’s house, and yet he was the first person Jim called.”
Mrs. Mooreland’s consternation about Joe Goodman arose from the fact that she had lived her entire life within the reassuring confines of what was known as Old Savannah. Old Savannah was a sharply circumscribed, self-contained world. The supporting roles for all of its dramas had been cast long ago. In times of crisis, one turned to the relevant figures in the community—the legal authority, the moral pillar, the social arbiter, the financial titan, the elder statesman. Old Savannah was well structured for dealing with crises. Having spent a lifetime in this comforting environment, Mrs. Mooreland was surprised that in his moment of need Jim Williams had reached out to someone completely unknown—rather than to Walter Hartridge, for instance, or to Dick Richardson. It was a signal to her that something was terribly off kilter.
With so much talk centering on Jim Williams—his origins, his career, his exploits, his everything—the incident of the Nazi flag came in for a good bit of rehashing. And now a shooting with a German Luger, no less.
Some people, even a few Jews like Bob Minis, dismissed the Nazi flag episode as insignificant—“It was stupid,” said Minis. “Jim acted quickly, without thinking.” But others were not inclined to let Williams off so easily. “I’m sure he doesn’t actually think of himself as a Nazi,” said Joseph Killorin, an English professor at Armstrong State College. “But come on, Nazi symbols are not totally bereft of meaning. They still carry a very clear message, even if they’re displayed under the guise of ‘historic relics.’ The message is superiority, and don’t think for a minute Jim Williams isn’t aware of it. He’s too smart not to be. In the South, among extreme chauvinists, you sometimes find a strange affinity for Nazi regalia. It has to do with a sense of once having been treated for what one was worth and now being treated merely as an equal. There is a terribly social gentleman here in Savannah who sometimes wears Nazi uniforms to costume parties—anyone can tell you who I’m talking about; he’s known for it—and he says he does it for shock value, but the deeper meaning is still there. In Jim’s case, it may not be anything more than apol
itical arrogance. If a man lives in the grandest house in town and gives the most extravagant parties, he could easily come to believe he was superior. He might also think the rules for ordinary people no longer applied to him. Displaying a Nazi flag would be one way of demonstrating that.”
All in all, if a straw poll had been taken in Savannah in the first few weeks after the shooting, it would most likely have shown that the public expected the case to be dropped. By all appearances, the shooting had been self-defense or, at worst, a spur-of-the-moment crime of passion. Matters like these were traditionally settled quietly, especially when the accused was a highly respected, affluent individual with no criminal record. Sa-vannahians were well aware of past killings in which well-connected suspects were never charged, no matter how obvious their guilt. One of the more colorful stories involved a society spinster who claimed that her gentleman lover had shot himself with a rifle while sitting in a wing chair in her living room. The woman “found” her lover’s body, cleaned the rifle, put it back in the rifle case, and then had the body embalmed. Only after having done all that did she call the police.
“Oh, Jim Williams will probably get off,” said Prentiss Crowe, a Savannah aristocrat, “but he’ll still face a few problems. There is bound to be a certain resentment about his having killed that boy—that boy in particular, I mean. Danny Hansford was a very accomplished hustler, from all accounts, very good at his trade, and very much appreciated by both men and women. The trouble is he hadn’t quite finished making the rounds. A fair number of men and women were looking forward to having their turn with him. Of course, now that Jim’s shot him they never will. Naturally, they’ll hold this against Jim, and that’s what I mean when I say ‘resentment.’ Danny Hansford was known to be a good time … but a good time not yet had by all.”