Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

by John Berendt

  Knowledgeable Savannahians were taken aback by the sign, because they knew that the outside of the Hamilton-Turner House was the only part worth looking at. The interior had been gutted and cut up into apartments long ago. Joe had taken the parlor floor for himself, and it was only this portion of the house that was open for viewing. The space did have tall windows with dramatic views of the square, but the once-stately progression of beautifully proportioned rooms had been sacrificed to make bathrooms, bedrooms, closets, and a kitchen. Walls had been moved and open archways filled in. And yet, because of its vastness, the parlor floor still did retain the aura of a grand piano nobile. It had old chandeliers and mantels and pier mirrors (though none were original to the house), and Joe did manage to fill the place appealingly with what was left of his own furniture plus antiques borrowed from friends or taken on consignment from local antique shops.

  Joe had, in fact, created something new in Savannah: the only private house that was operating as a full-time tourist attraction. Seven other houses were also open to the public, but they were all museum houses, all important architectural specimens authentically restored and staffed by professional curators and operated on a nonprofit basis. Joe’s made-over parlor floor had, in effect, gone into competition with the museums. And he did get his share of tourists. At least fifty people would walk in off the street every day, and half a dozen or more tour buses would stop by. One busload usually stayed for lunch, and in the evenings Joe made the dining room available for private dinners by candlelight.

  To help handle all this traffic, Joe hired a short, indomitably cheerful black housekeeper and stationed her at the top of the front steps in a crisp black-and-white maid’s uniform. Her name was Gloria, and she had big eyes and little corkscrew curls hanging down over her forehead. Knowing that half the money she collected at the door was hers to keep, Gloria flagged down virtually everybody who came near the house. On slow days, she was not above offering a cut-rate deal—one dollar per person instead of the usual three. (“It may only be but a dollar,” she would say later, “but it sure looks like a lot sittin’ next to nothin’.”) Gloria gave her customers a glass of lemonade and led them through the parlor floor, blinking her eyes in wonderment as she recounted the historical highlights of the house. She explained that it was the first house in Savannah to be electrified (the mayor who built it had also been head of the power company) and that it had served as the center of the city’s social and cultural life in the latter part of the nineteenth century. “This house is the center of a lot of things now too,” she would add with a big smile. If “Mr. Joe” happened to be home, he would play a few old standards for the guests, and then Gloria would sing the few lines she knew from “Stormy Weather” while doing a dance that resembled the hula.

  Joe netted an average of $500 a week from the house, most of it in cash, which suited his needs perfectly since there was not a single bank left in Savannah that would give him a checking account. Even the bank account at Sweet Georgia Brown’s had been taken out of his hands. It was now in Mandy’s name, and it was her signature, not his, that appeared on all the checks made out to employees and suppliers of the bar.

  Joe and Mandy were no closer to marrying. In fact, his attentions toward other women had become more frequent and more open. On several occasions Gloria found the door to Joe’s bedroom locked while she was leading tours through the house. She was never at a loss for words. “Beyond this door lies the mansion’s master bedroom,” she would say, “and today the editors of Southern Accents magazine are photographing it for publication, and we cannot disturb them. So I am very sorry, but we will not be able to see this room today.” Her explanation might or might not be thrown into question by the sounds of laughter and giggling on the other side of the door.

  Mandy was aware of Joe’s flirtations. “I swear Joe Odom is going to drive me into being a feminist,” she said. “Two years ago if anybody had told me that, I’d a died.” But Mandy began to display a new assertiveness. She snatched up the checkbook at Sweet Georgia Brown’s and stationed herself at the cash register, thereby shutting off Joe’s supply of easy money. So the cash flowing into Joe’s pocket from the tour business provided a much-needed lifeline. But there was a hitch: It was illegal.

  The Hamilton-Turner House was zoned for residential use. Private tour houses were not permitted.

  Lafayette Square was a quiet, conservative corner of Savannah. It was surrounded by stately townhouses and free-standing mansions. The townhouse where the writer Flannery O’Connor had lived as a child stood catty-corner from Joe on Charlton Street. Directly across the square the magnificent Andrew Low House, a pink Italianate villa with a Greek Revival portico, sat in all its architectural and historic splendor; Juliette Gordon Low had founded the Girl Scouts of America there in 1912, and it was now the Georgia headquarters of the Colonial Dames. Of all Joe’s neighbors, however, none was more reproachful a presence than the Lafayette apartment house, that monument to Joe’s financial debacle of just a few years back. The Lafayette stood on the far side of the square in silent rebuke to Joe. Within its walls there were half a dozen people who had still not recovered from the shock of having their apartments foreclosed (and then having to sue to get them back) when Joe defaulted on his construction loan.

  The noise and the fumes of the buses irritated the residents of Lafayette Square, but the wedding parties nearly drove them to distraction. For these affairs, Joe literally annexed the square as his own front yard. He put a Dixieland band on the portico over his front door and pitched tents in the square without bothering to obtain a permit. The square reverberated with blaring music and the shrill chatter of a hundred wedding guests milling about. “Everybody loves a wedding,” said Joe, grievously miscalculating the tolerance of his neighbors. After enduring three such weddings, the neighbors formed a committee and sent a spy into the Hamilton-Turner House on a fact-finding mission.

  The spy was a dowdy middle-aged woman who lived on the southside. Posing as a walk-in tourist, she entered the Hamilton-Turner House at three in the afternoon for what was supposed to have been a twenty-minute tour. She emerged two hours later with her hair frosted and spiked and her face made up to look like Cleopatra. She declared that Joe Odom was a heartthrob, that the housekeeper, Gloria, was so cute she could just eat her up, and that she did not have time to discuss it any further because she needed to rush home, change clothes, and get to Sweet Georgia Brown’s in time for happy hour.

  Exasperated, the committee selected a second spy, also a middle-aged woman, but this one was a bit more savvy, having been a docent in one of the museum houses. This second spy came back to report that there was a lot more going on in the Hamilton-Turner House than tours. “Joe Odom, charming as he is, seems unable to distinguish between his private and his business lives. His many friends pop in and out and mingle with the paying guests in a most familiar way. They converse, they make drinks, they raid the refrigerator, they use the telephone. Four men were playing poker in the dining room, and I could swear I saw one of them on the evening news not long ago—he was very fat, that’s why I remember him—and he’d been arrested for embezzlement, or maybe it was drug-running. There was a woman curled up on a sofa sleeping off what Mr. Odom laughingly described as ‘a marathon binge.’ In the kitchen we came upon an extremely talkative young man giving an elderly woman a permanent wave. He had the cheek to suggest that I should be next, that I could use a comb-out, I think it was. When you add to these activities the constant comings and goings of the tenants who live in the upstairs apartments—they must all walk through Mr. Odom’s entrance hall to reach the stairway—you have an idea of the chaotic atmosphere that prevails.

  “Mr. Odom’s tours are an out-and-out con job,” the spy went on. “Three dollars is a lot to pay for a glimpse of a thrown-together apartment with no historic interest. Most of Mr. Odom’s artifacts are bogus—General Oglethorpe’s snuffbox and that sort of thing. Often Mr. Odom simply lapses into a parody of a r
eal house tour. He referred to a pair of oil portraits as his ‘ancestors-by-purchase,’ because he said he’d found them in a flea market and they seemed to want to come home with him. The furniture is an ungainly combination of styles—some reproductions, some period pieces—almost all of it in deplorable condition. One loveseat had an overturned slop bucket in place of a missing leg. Knowing of Mr. Odom’s precarious financial situation, I was not surprised that he made several allusions to the fact that everything in the house was for sale—carpets, paintings, furniture, bric-a-brac. He sang a few songs, which was pleasant enough, but he then made a blatant pitch for Sweet Georgia Brown’s, fliers for which lie in stacks on every table. It seems clear that this whole tawdry enterprise is nothing but a promotional come-on for Mr. Odom’s nightclub. By contrast, the museum houses give far greater educational value, and the fees they collect are used for the worthwhile purpose of maintaining important remnants of Savannah’s heritage. Mr. Odom’s tours merely cheapen the concept.”

  Shortly after this visitation, the Department of Inspections notified Joe by certified letter that the tour business at the Hamilton-Turner House violated the zoning code and must cease immediately.

  Joe ignored the order. “The best response is always no response,” he said. “It buys you two or three months’ breathing time, six if you’re lucky.” In the meantime, he quietly persuaded friends on the Metropolitan Planning Commission to propose a zoning amendment allowing private tour houses. When the Downtown Neighborhood Association got wind of it, they voted to oppose it, and the amendment went down to defeat. A few weeks later—the day before the St. Patrick’s Day parade—the Department of Inspections again ordered Joe to stop the tours at once or face legal action. This time the Savannah Morning News picked up the story. Joe’s breathing time, it seemed, was over.

  The wagon carrying the dead Union soldier turned the corner and continued up Abercorn Street.

  “I don’t know, Joe,” I said. “I get the feeling you might end up in that wagon before I do.”

  “Now, don’t you start frettin’ about your friend Joe,” he said.

  “You’re going to obey the court order, aren’t you?”

  “Me? The Host of Savannah? Close my doors? It’s not my nature to be antisocial. Goes against my grain. Besides, I’m getting filthy rich being so hospitable. I’d have to be crazy to become unfriendly all of a sudden.” Joe looked out over the square, scanning the buildings ranged around him as if they were enemy fortifications. “I have a plan.”

  “What is it?”

  “I thought I’d enlist the help of some of your new friends. That Minerva woman, for instance. I thought we might drive over to Beaufort around midnight and have a little chat with her. See if she’ll cast a spell on some of the folks who want to shut me down. Or maybe we could get your buddy Luther Driggers to poison ’em. Or your pal Jim Williams to shoot ’em … in self-defense, of course.”

  “Poor taste,” I said.

  “No good, huh? Well, I have another idea. I really do, and this one is serious. Come on downstairs. I’ll show you what I mean.”

  Joe worked his way down the stairs shaking hands and calling out greetings. Parade-watching parties were in full swing on every floor of the house. Friends shouted expressions of support. “Keep up the fight, Joe!” “Don’t let ’em close you down.” “Hell with ’em, Joe, they ain’t got no right.” And Joe told them again and again, “Don’t worry. We’re staying open. We’re staying open.”

  The crush of people on the parlor floor was so dense it was difficult to make our way through it. This was the first time Joe had lived in a house on the actual parade route, and as a result his St. Patrick’s Day party was an even bigger draw than usual. In the midst of it, Gloria, the housekeeper, was gamely showing tourists through the house at three dollars a head, perhaps for the last time. Three middle-aged couples stood clustered around her, cupping their ears in order to hear her over the din of the jostling crowd. “In the olden days,” Gloria was saying, “the ladies used to sit by this fireplace shielding their faces behind these beaded heat screens. You see, in those days, ladies’ makeup was made out of wax, and if it got too hot it would run down their pretty faces ….”

  Joe led me into a small, cluttered room at the rear of the house. He took a sheaf of papers out of a desk drawer. “Now, here’s my plan,” he said. “I’ve had to come out of retirement to draft it—had to put on my lawyer’s hat. Anyhow, tomorrow morning I will go over to the courthouse and dump this legal rigmarole in their lap.” He handed me the papers. They were the incorporation documents for “The Hamilton-Turner Museum Foundation,” which was described as “a nonprofit corporation whose purpose will be to restore the interior of the Hamilton-Turner House through proceeds generated by a private, not-forprofit tour business on the premises—Joseph A. Odom, president.”

  “So that’s it, plain and simple,” he said. “After we deduct salaries and expenses, I can’t say there will be any proceeds. But at least we won’t be in violation of any zoning code. As of tomorrow morning, the Hamilton-Turner House will not be a private house; it will be a museum. So, if they still want to close me down, they’ll have to close the others too.”

  “Do you think it will work?” I asked.

  “It’ll work until they figure out how to get around it. But by the time they do, I reckon it won’t matter because I’ll be rich and famous as the hero of your book.”

  At that moment, appropriately enough, a flourish of trumpets and a crash of cymbals was heard from the passing parade.

  Chapter 20

  SONNY

  Two weeks before his second trial was to begin, Jim Williams stood in the street outside his antiques shop watching three men unload a heavy piece of furniture from a large van.

  “Easy now,” he said. They were lowering a carved sideboard. “Up a little on the right.”

  “How’s it going?” I asked.

  “Business as usual,” he said.

  “I mean that other bit of business.”

  “My trial? I haven’t the vaguest idea. I leave all that to my lawyers. To me it’s a giant bore. Now that interests me.” Williams nodded at the sideboard. “That’s a very rare example of Georgian furniture. Black walnut. Early nineteenth century. The Regency details are extremely unusual. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

  He spoke as if the furniture coming off the truck was his sole concern. In fact, the defense arrangements for his upcoming retrial had been in turmoil only a few weeks earlier, necessitating a change of lawyers. Bobby Lee Cook, for all his guile and resourcefulness, had not been able to free himself from a conflict in court dates. He was committed to represent another client in a federal case, and the federal calendar always took precedence over state-level cases. Williams, suddenly finding himself without a lawyer, turned to Frank “Sonny” Seiler, a prominent Savannah attorney and a partner in the law firm of Bouhan, Williams and Levy. Seiler was already involved in the case peripherally, having been retained by Williams in his defense against the $10 million civil suit brought by Hansford’s mother. That suit would come to trial once the criminal case was settled. Now, in Cook’s absence, Williams asked Seiler to take over the criminal case as well.

  At fifty, Sonny Seiler enjoyed a position of considerable stature within the Georgia legal community. He was past president of the State Bar of Georgia. He was listed in the book The Best Lawyers in America as one of the top civil litigators in the country. He was also a native Savannahian, and that was a major plus for Williams. Juries, especially Savannah juries, were instinctively suspicious of out-of-town lawyers. Bobby Lee Cook had been from Summerville, Georgia, a hundred miles north of Atlanta, far enough away to make him a foreigner in Savannah. Seiler was not only homegrown, he had earned a place in Savannah lore. Thirty years earlier, at the age of twenty-two, he had dived into the Savannah River at the foot of East Broad Street and swum eighteen miles out to Tybee in six hours against rough water and the threat of a hurricane
.

  “Sonny Seiler’s been busily at work on my case,” said Williams. “He calls to tell me about it, but I only half listen. He sends me letters, but I just scan them. If you think it would amuse you, go see him yourself and let him explain it to you. Then you can tell me, in a few well-chosen words, how you think my case is going. It’ll save me the trouble. His office is right around the corner in Armstrong House, that big gray mansion I used to own at Bull and Gaston. I’ll tell him to talk to you. Just make sure you see him after five o’clock. Any earlier would be during office hours, and he’d probably bill me at his hourly rate. I’ve come to know the ways of lawyers.” The corners of Williams’s mouth drew downward. “Tell him to give my best to ugh-uh.”

  “Ugh-uh?”

  “U-G-A. Uga. Uga’s a big white bulldog. He’s the University of Georgia mascot. Sonny Seiler is the proud owner.” Williams said this with a disdainful look. “Sonny is very gung-ho. He’s the university’s number-one football fan. He’s owned the school’s mascot since he was in law school in the nineteen-fifties. The current Uga is the fourth in the Uga dynasty. Twenty-five years of Ugas and football. Sonny drives Uga up to Athens for all the home games in a big Georgia-red station wagon. The license plate reads ‘UGA IV.’”

  The entrance hall of Armstrong House was a cavernous space with marble floors and a baronial fireplace. A full-length oil portrait of a British nobleman in a crimson cape dominated one wall. Beneath it, old Mr. Glover, the porter, sat sleeping in an armchair. A receptionist at the foot of a sweeping stairway whispered that I should go right on up.