by John Berendt
“We closed the bar at two-thirty, and I got in my car and went straight home. I was going up the stairs, when I heard a gunshot. I looked over my shoulder towards Mr. Williams’s house. It sounded as if it had come from that direction. There was a young man in blue jeans and a T-shirt, holding a gun, pointing it towards the trees. He fired another shot.”
“What did you do after that?” Seiler asks.
“I opened the front door to go into my apartment, and when I looked back I noticed the young man was going back up the front steps to Mr. Williams’s house. Then I collected my thoughts for a minute and I thought about calling the police, but when I looked out the window again, a police car was pulling up to the house.”
Spencer Lawton sees Miss Blanton as a serious blow to his April 3 scenario. He challenges her ability to see the figure in front of Mercer House clearly at that distance and in the dark of night. But she sticks to her story.
Seiler’s second surprise witness is Dina Smith, a blond woman in her mid-thirties. On the night Danny Hansford was shot, she was visiting Savannah from Atlanta and staying with her cousin just off Monterey Square. Sometime after two o’clock, she went out to sit on a bench in Monterey Square and enjoy the night air. “After I’d been in the square for some minutes, there were several loud gunshots fired all at once. It was very loud. It seemed to be coming from all around. I kind of just sat there frozen. I looked around and remained in the square for twenty to thirty minutes and then walked back across to the apartment.”
“Were there any police cars in front of Mr. Williams’s house at that time?” Seiler asks.
“No, sir. The front door was standing open. The lights were on.”
“All right,” says Seiler. “Did you see anyone?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you call the police then?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Why not?”
“I wouldn’t have known what to tell them. I didn’t know what I had heard.”
The next morning, Mrs. Smith left her cousin’s house to go to the beach and saw a TV news van in front of Mercer House. She read about the shooting later and only then realized what had happened. Mrs. Smith says she was introduced to Williams by her cousin on a subsequent visit to Savannah, while Williams was appealing his conviction. She told Williams what she had heard, and he asked her to speak to his lawyers.
The import of what Dina Smith has to say is that all of the shots, as she heard them, were fired in rapid succession, just as Williams said. There were no pauses—no time, if she is to be believed, for Williams to get a second gun and fake the shots from Hansford’s side of the desk.
The final day in court, a Saturday. On tap for today: closing arguments, the judge’s instructions to the jury, the Georgia–Mississippi game.
In his summation, Sonny Seiler puts heavy emphasis on the clumsiness of the police at Mercer House, comparing them to the Keystone Kops. “They had so many people in Jim Williams’s study while they were investigating the scene they can’t count them,” he says. “First Corporal Anderson comes, and he brings a rookie cop along. Following them is Officer Traub, as I recall, and then they started coming out of the woodwork. In they come, one after another—I don’t know how many, something like fourteen in all—and it wasn’t a matter of just coming. It was ‘Come and join the party!’ because you don’t have many things like this happening in Savannah, in a historical mansion with an environment of antiques and fine things and an air of mystery and intrigue. And they all go into the study at one time or another. Anderson, White, Chessler, Burns, Traub, Gibbons, Donna Stevens. All of them, back and forth, in and out, all around the room. Everybody’s curious, you see. They’re picking things up and they’re putting them down. And every expert on the stand, including their own, says that is not good investigative procedure. Yet they want you to believe they had some sacred veil over all the stuff while they took photographs. They tell you they secured the scene. Baloney! You’ve seen the pictures.”
Lawton, in his closing statement, will not give up on the idea that Jim Williams staged the April 3 incident, in spite of what Vanessa Blanton says she saw. Lawton tells the jury, “If you believe Vanessa Blanton really saw Danny Hansford out there shooting in Monterey Square, then okay. But I will suggest to you that it may be very difficult to tell, down there in those shadows, whether what you’re looking at is Danny Hansford … or Jim Williams. We have to entertain the possibility that it was practice, a dry run that sets up Danny Hansford’s violent nature within a month of when he gets killed.”
Of Dina Smith and the shots she heard on the park bench a month later, Lawton makes it clear he does not believe her. “I will suggest to you that she was a friend trying her best to help out in a pinch.”
Toward the end of his summation, Lawton engages in a bit of stage business concerning the twenty-pound trigger pull on Danny’s gun: “The defense tells us that when Danny Hansford fired at Williams and missed, it was because the trigger pull on his gun was so strong. So strong, indeed, that Dr. Stone—an ex-FBI agent and obviously no weakling—had to use two hands to fire it. I’d like to show you something if I may.” Lawton hands Danny’s gun to his petite female assistant and asks her to point it toward the wall and pull the trigger. She does so with no effort at all and without jiggling the barrel a millimeter. Seiler objects to the demonstration, but Oliver overrules him.
After the closing arguments, Judge Oliver reads the jury its instructions. He offers three choices: guilty of murder, guilty of voluntary manslaughter, and not guilty. It is 5:30 P.M. when the jury retires to consider its verdict. Williams and his family head back to Mercer House. Seiler goes to his office in Armstrong House; on the way out, he gets good news from his man in the corridor: Georgia has beaten Ole Miss, 36–11.
I ask Minerva if she wants to go have something to eat while we wait. She shakes her head and rummages in her shopping bag. “I got work to do here.”
Three hours later, the jury sends word that it has reached a decision. Seiler returns to the courtroom, clearly worried. “It’s too soon,” he says. “The case has too many issues. They can’t have reached a well-thought-out verdict yet. Maybe they just wanted to get it over with and go home.” Blanche Williams, too, has a sense of foreboding. “We hadn’t sat down to dinner when they called us,” she says. “I made a caramel cake, that’s James’s favorite, and I was just getting it ready. Before we left the house, I saw James slip something into his sock. Maybe it was cigarettes. It makes me think James must feel he’s not coming back home.”
I sit down next to Minerva and notice almost at once that there is a thin trail of white powder on the floor in front of the jury box. There are also twigs and pieces of root in front of the judge’s bench. Minerva is chewing slowly. The jury files into the jury box. She glares at them through her purple glasses.
Upon the judge’s order, Williams rises. The foreman hands a piece of paper to the clerk, who reads the verdict aloud:
“We find the defendant guilty of murder.”
Judge Oliver bangs his gavel. “The sentence is life imprisonment. That’s mandatory.”
The courtroom is silent. Williams calmly takes a sip of water from a paper cup. Then he walks across the floor and is escorted by the bailiffs through the door that leads to the tunnel that will take him to jail.
I feel Minerva’s hand on my arm. She is gazing straight ahead at a group of people milling around Spencer Lawton, and she is smiling.
“What is it?” I ask, wondering what she could be smiling about.
She points a forefinger at the district attorney, whose back is turned to us. He is gathering up papers and accepting the murmured congratulations of his staff, unaware of the footprint-size smudge of chalky white powder on the tail of his suit jacket and the seat of his trousers.
“Did you put that white stuff on the D.A.’s chair, Minerva?” I ask.
“You know I did,” she says.
“What is it?”
&nb
sp; “High John the Conqueror. A powerful root.”
“But what good can it do now?”
“By gettin’ where it got, that powder means Delia still be workin’ on the D.A.,” she says. Delia was one of the names Minerva had called out in the graveyard. “And she got him by the seat a his pants too! She ain’ done settlin’ with him.”
“What do you think will happen?” I ask.
“You mean if Delia don’t leave go?”
“Yes. If she hangs in there.”
“Why, the D.A.’s gonna have to turn Mr. Jim loose. It’s just that simple. If I was the D.A., I wouldn’t be thinkin’ about no celebration. Not with Delia Hangin’ on he ass like she be. When she was livin’, she was bad. Dead she’s worse! And now she ‘bout to raise all kinda hell!”
“What happened to the other eight dead women you called in the graveyard?”
“Didn’t git no reply from the first three. Delia was the fourth.”
“And Dr. Buzzard? Is he involved?”
“He gave Delia the okay.”
“Has he given you a number yet?”
Minerva laughs. “Shit, no. He likes me po’. That way I gotta keep workin’ and goin’ to the flower garden to see him. That way he keep a hold on me.” Minerva picks up her shopping bag and gets ready to leave. The bag opens momentarily, and I catch a glimpse of what looks like a chicken foot. Minerva waves good-bye and slips into the crowded corridor.
I make my way out of the courthouse, past Sonny Seiler, who is standing in front of the television lights, talking about an appeal. The courthouse flack sidles up, looking slyly amused as usual. “With good behavior,” he says, “Williams will be out in seven years.”
“I’m told he might be out even sooner,” I reply, “if a certain lady named Delia has anything to say about it.”
“Who?” The flack cups his ear.
“Delia.”
“Who is Delia?”
“You mean who was Delia,” I say. “That’s all I know about her. She’s dead.”
Chapter 22
THE POD
The posthumous powers of the late Delia, if she had any, were apparently not the sort that took effect immediately. This became clear the day after Jim Williams’s conviction, when his lawyers went before Judge Oliver to ask for his release on bond and were curtly turned down. The judge did relent on one point, however: Williams would not be transferred right away to the much-feared state penitentiary at Reidsville. He could remain in Savannah at the Chatham County Jail so that his lawyers could consult with him while they worked on his appeal—and that could take a year or more. This concession displeased the county commissioners, who voted to sue Williams for room and board while he remained at the county facility—$900 a month. (The suit was dropped when the county attorney advised the commissioners it would not stand up in court.)
In the absence of its master, Mercer House assumed a ghostly air. The interior shutters of its great windows remained closed against the outside world. The gala parties were over. The elegant guests coming up the walk in evening clothes were only a memory now. But the hedges remained neatly clipped, the front lawn was mowed, and in the evenings slits of lamplight shone though the louvered windows. In fact, Blanche Williams had moved into the house from her home in Gordon. She lived alone in the house, biding her time. She polished the silver and dusted the furniture, and every week she baked a fresh caramel cake in expectation of her son’s return.
The shop in the carriage house stayed open for business and was tended by Williams’s shopkeeper, Barry Thomas. From time to time, Thomas could be seen standing in the street outside the shop taking Polaroid pictures of a plantation desk or a chest of drawers being off-loaded from a truck. Thomas would then deliver the photographs, together with catalogs of upcoming sales and auctions, to the jail a few blocks away so that Williams could see his new purchases and make selections of what to buy or bid on next. It was common knowledge that Williams was running his antiques business from jail.
He was aided in this effort by the lucky chance that there was a telephone in his cell. Ordinarily, an inmate serving a life sentence would not have ready access to a telephone; however, Williams’s cell housed not only convicted criminals but men who were still awaiting trial and therefore had a need—and also the right—to talk to lawyers and family. The phone was set up to make outgoing calls only, and all the calls had to be collect. It would have been unthinkable, of course, for Williams to make business calls that began with an operator announcing bluntly, “I have a collect call from Jim Williams at the Chatham County Jail”—but he got around that easily enough. He would make a collect call to Mercer House, and then his mother or Barry Thomas would accept the charges and use three-way calling to put his call through. By routing his calls through Mercer House, Williams stayed in touch with major figures in the world of antiques without ever having to reveal that he was calling from jail. He chatted with Geza von Habsburg at Christie’s auction house in Geneva and placed a bid for a pair of imperial-presentation Fabergé cuff links made for a Russian grand duke. He spoke with the editor of Antiques magazine about an article he had promised to write on the eighteenth-century portrait artist Henrietta Johnston. Williams followed up each call with a short note, dictated over the phone to Mercer House and typed on his engraved personal stationery—“It was good talking to you today. Hope to see you soon ….”
The pretense that he was calling from the dignified confines of Mercer House was a difficult ruse for Williams to carry off, as I discovered the first time I spoke with him. A television set blared in the background, and I could hear raucous shouts and an occasional high-pitched scream. Williams had been placed in a cell for homosexuals and the mentally unstable. He and his cell mates were segregated from the general jailhouse population for their own safety. The cell was known as the “pod.” It was twenty feet by twenty feet and held eight inmates. The mix of personalities confined in it created an unpredictable atmosphere.
“It all depends who’s here at any given time,” Williams explained. “Right now, there’s one other white inmate and five garçons noirs. Three of the five noirs play cards all day, but whenever there’s any music on TV they get up and dance and sing at the top of their lungs. That happens a lot, because the TV’s on from eight in the morning till two or three at night, with the volume turned up to scorch. I wear earplugs, and over that I clamp earphones so I can listen to tapes. But the noise from the TV cuts right through, and when they get to singing and stomping, I can barely hear my own music. I dread it when Soul Train comes on.
“The other two noirs are a pair of long-lost lovers who were reunited in here last week. There was much wailing and carrying on when they recognized each other—accusations of betrayal, declarations of love and forgiveness, weeping, laughing, screeching. It went on for hours. As we speak, they’re braiding each other’s hair into corn rows. Pretty soon they’ll be into face-slapping, and then they’ll probably have sex. The white inmate is a little weak in the head. They put him in here this morning, and he’s been rubbing the walls and preaching out loud ever since. We can’t make him stop. It’s a zoo.
“Things usually quiet down at feeding time, though. The menu usually consists of stale peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches or a small slice of rancid meat. It’s completely inedible, of course, but my cell mates don’t know it, and it calms them down for a while. That’s when I make my phone calls. At other times, if I need to, I can usually bribe them into shutting up with cigarettes and candy bars I buy from the commissary cart.”
Williams discouraged his friends from coming to see him at the jail. “The visitors’ room is a long, narrow hall with a row of stools facing plate-glass windows,” he said. “Whole families come to see their criminal loved ones. Babies are crying, everybody is shouting to be heard, and nobody can hear anything. It’s bedlam.” Williams clearly preferred not to be seen in such humbling circumstances. The telephone suited his purposes far better. He generally made his social calls i
n the evenings. There were no ice cubes clinking in his glass, but he was allowed to smoke his cigarillos, and I could hear him puffing on them as he spoke.
“We’ve had a little excitement in here,” he told me one night in mid-November. “We have a new cell mate who crawls around on his hands and knees and barks like a dog all day long. Once in a while he lifts his leg and pees on the wall. We’ve complained, but nobody does anything about it. Yesterday afternoon while the man was asleep, I bribed the others into turning down the TV and being quiet so I could make a few quick business calls. I was in the middle of a conversation with an important art dealer in London about a painting I was offering for sale when the new inmate woke up and started barking. I kept right on talking. ‘Oh, that’s my Russian wolfhound,’ I said. But then the barking moved up an octave and turned into yapping. ‘What’s that one?’ the dealer asked. ‘A Shar-pei?’ ‘No, no,’ I said, ‘that’s a Yorkie,’ and then I cupped my hand half over the phone and shouted, ‘Won’t someone please put the dogs out in the garden?’ At that point I nodded at my other cell mates, and they tackled the madman and clapped their hands over his mouth. The dealer and I went on politely discussing the niceties of the English landscape tradition while my cell mates scuffled at my feet. There were grunts and muffled strangulation noises. I don’t know what the dealer thought, but in the end he bought the painting.”
Although Williams spoke with his customary self-assurance, he made no attempt in our conversations to conceal the grimness of his existence. He had no visual contact with the outside world. The cell’s six narrow windows were fitted with a muddy brown translucent glass, and the lights inside the cell stayed on twenty-four hours a day. Williams said he could not eat the food and lived mostly on peanuts and candy bought from the commissary. A hard bump had appeared on his forehead, and there was a ringing in his ears and a rash on his arms and back. When the rash worsened, he went to the doctor and found five other inmates in the waiting room with the same rash. “Neither the blankets nor the mattresses are cleaned between inmates,” he said, “and I have no confidence in the doctor here.” Several crowns had fallen off Williams’s molars, and there was no dentist at the jail. A trip to his own dentist could have been arranged, but he would have been forced to go in chains, shackled at the waist, so he dropped the matter.