by John Berendt
Williams continued to maintain his innocence. He was convinced that the jury in the second trial had simply rubber-stamped the first conviction. They had all been familiar with the case beforehand because of its great notoriety, and they were under the impression that the first conviction had been reversed on a technicality. Williams was contemptuous of the jury, the witnesses, the district attorney, Judge Oliver, and the local newspaper. But he saved his sharpest scorn for his own lawyers.
“I loathe them,” he said. “They have meetings and conferences, supposedly to discuss my appeal, but they accomplish nothing and then send me bills for the time they’ve wasted. They are five- and ten-thousand dollaring me to death. The last thing they want to do is settle my case. It would cut off their supply of money. They’ve cost me four hundred thousand dollars so far, and I’ve had to sell truckloads of valuable antiques out of my house to pay them. Alistair Stair came down from Stair and Company in New York and bought a lacquered Queen Anne desk and a rare Charles II cabinet made in Charleston. He also bought the grandfather clock in the hall that Danny Hansford knocked over. I mean fine things. The most beautiful silver coffee urn I had ever seen. A pair of marble Fu lions that came out of the Imperial Palace in Peking during the Boxer Rebellion. They were my treasures. I sold the Early American four-poster bed out of my bedroom, the finest bed of its type I’d ever seen. I sold an Irish linen press that’s featured in a book on Irish furniture by Desmond Guinness. Carpets. Portraits. I sold a pair of Irish Chippendale chairs—one of them was the chair that I supposedly placed on Danny’s trouser leg. Every penny from the sales goes into the bank and then straight out again to lawyers, investigators, and expert witnesses. I have no choice. I have to do it. Money is ammunition, and as long as I have some I’ll use it. Spencer Lawton has an unlimited budget, full-time investigators, free use of state laboratories. But I’m forced to pay for every move my lawyers make to counter them.
“People think I’m rolling in money. They think I’ve lived a luxurious life with lots of servants and breakfast in bed. But that’s all an illusion. I have a maid three times a week, but no cook. I make my own breakfast. I eat a sandwich for lunch and go out for supper, usually to the Days Inn coffee shop. But most people don’t want to believe that. In Savannah, all you have to do is pay your bills and people will say you’re rich.”
And how were the lawyers progressing with his appeal?
“Mmmmm,” he said. “Whenever I call to talk to Sonny Seiler, he’s either in Athens at a football game, or on vacation, or just nowhere. I finally got him on the phone the other day, and I said, ‘Hey, Sonny. How’s it going?’ Sonny said, ‘Not well, Jim. Not well at all.’ He sounded very down, so of course I assumed the worst. I said, ‘Why? What happened?’ And Sonny said, ‘Jesus, Jim, don’t you read the newspapers? The Dogs lost last Saturday!’
“I told him, ‘Sonny, let’s get one thing straight. The only game I’m interested in is the one I’m playing.’”
In fact, no progress could be made with Williams’s appeal until the trial transcript had been typed by the court stenographer. The trial had been long and involved, and the transcript would run fifteen hundred pages. It would take months to complete. Meanwhile, Williams remained optimistic. “I will get out of here,” he said. “The Georgia Supreme Court will reverse my conviction, and when I get out I will see that Spencer Lawton is charged with prosecutorial misconduct, suborning perjury, and denying me my civil rights.”
“How do you propose to do all that?” I asked.
“The same way I restore houses,” said Williams. “Step by step. Inch by inch. I learned an invaluable lesson from my old mentor, Dr. L. C. Lindsley. Did I ever tell you about him? Dr. Lindsley was a college professor who restored and lived in one of Georgia’s great houses, Westover. It was built in Milledgeville in 1822 in the grand style. It had spiral stairs and a pair of white double-height columns on each side of the front entrance.
“Dr. Lindsley told me that an old house will defeat you if you try to restore it all at once—from roof to windows, weather-boarding, jacking it up, central heating, wiring. You must think of doing one thing at a time. First you say to yourself: Today I am going to think about leveling off the sills. And you get all the sills leveled. Then you turn your mind to the weatherboarding, and gradually you do all the weatherboarding. Then you consider the windows. Just one window at a time. That window right there. You ask yourself, ‘What’s wrong with that part of that window?’ You must do it in sections, because that’s the way it was built. And then suddenly you find the whole thing completed. Otherwise, it will defeat you.
“That’s how I will get out of here. Step by step. First I will work on Sonny Seiler. Get him moving on the appeal. Then I’ll concentrate on the seven justices of the state supreme court. Send them mental messages, just as I did after my first trial. Get them to see things my way.”
I heard Williams draw on his cigarillo. I pictured him tilting his head back and sending a stream of smoke ceilingward.
“One way or another,” he said, “I will get out. You can rely on that. And I’m not talking about suicide, although I’ve contemplated that option. My conviction will be reversed. You’ll see. It may seem impossible to you, but let me point out something else—something else I learned from Dr. Lindsley. One day he said, ‘You know, robins move houses. Little birds with orange tummies can move a house. In fact, they tried to move Westover.’ I said, ‘All right, I give up. How do they do it?’ And he said, ‘They eat chinaberries, and then they drop the china-berry seeds near the foundation of a house. A chinaberry tree grows there and uproots the house.’ And he was right. I’ve seen it happen. Chinaberry trees grow very rapidly, and they will tear up the foundations of a house. That’s how I intend to undo all the work Spencer Lawton has done to put me here. I will shake him to his foundations. It just might take a little time.”
Chapter 23
LUNCH
Rather than arrive early for Blanche Williams’s luncheon party, Millicent Mooreland drove around Monterey Square several times. Then she moved on, two blocks north, and drove around Madison Square. She went back and forth, circling one square and then the other, taking her time, driving very slowly.
Mrs. Mooreland hardly knew Blanche Williams. She had met her briefly at Jim Williams’s Christmas parties, and in the eight months since Williams went to jail she had made a point of calling Mrs. Williams every few weeks to see how she was getting on. After all, Mrs. Williams was nearly eighty and had moved into Mercer House all alone without any family or friends nearby.
Mrs. Williams appreciated the gesture and told her son she wished she could thank Mrs. Mooreland and many of his other friends for being so thoughtful. “Why not have them all to lunch?” he had suggested. The idea terrified Mrs. Williams, but her son reassured her. “You won’t have to do anything at all,” he said. “I’ll take care of everything.”
From his jail cell, Jim Williams organized every detail of his mother’s luncheon party. He drew up the guest list. He ordered stationery for the invitations and wrote out a sample for his mother to copy. He telephoned Lucille Wright, the cateress, and asked her to prepare a buffet of low-country food. He selected the menu—shrimp, smoked ham, roast lamb, okra, squash, sweet potatoes, rice, cornbread, cookies, and cakes—and told Mrs. Wright to plan for twenty guests (he later expanded the list to forty-five) and to serve the meal on the Duchess of Richmond’s porcelain with Queen Alexandra’s silverware, both of which she would find in the breakfront cabinet in the dining room. Williams hired his usual bartender and urged his mother, who did not drink, to allow her guests at least half an hour for cocktails before serving lunch. “That will give them a chance to loosen up,” he said. “We don’t want them to be too glum and serious.” Finally, he told Barry Thomas to fill the house with fresh flowers on the morning of the party and to be sure to go into the garden before the guests arrived and turn the fountain on.
Mrs. Mooreland was doing more than simply whi
ling away the time as she drove around the squares. She was peering into the parks in a way she had never done before—scrutinizing the people sitting on the benches, particularly the young men. She was surprised at herself for doing it, but she could not resist. Conflicting emotions were battling inside her today. It had all started with the headline in the morning paper: NEW WITNESSES IN WILLIAMS CASE. Two new witnesses had come forward, both of them favorable to Jim Williams. Such good news! And on the very day of Mrs. Williams’s luncheon party! It was the first glimmer of hope for Jim Williams in nearly a year. Before she had even read the story, Mrs. Mooreland rushed to the foot of the stairs and called up to her husband to tell him about it. Then she went back to the kitchen and sat down to read.
Both of the new witnesses were young men, one eighteen, the other twenty-seven. They did not know each other. They had come forward independently to say that Danny Hansford had approached them in the weeks before he died and tried to enlist them in schemes to kill or injure Jim Williams and then steal cash out of his house. Both of the young men said they had met Danny Hansford while hanging out in the Bull street squares hustling gay men.
A flush of embarrassment came over Mrs. Mooreland as she read, but she kept reading.
One of the young witnesses had been enrolled in a drug-rehabilitation program. The other had a string of convictions and was currently being held at the Chatham County Jail on auto-theft charges. Both men said Hansford had wanted them to lure Williams into a “sex scene” as part of the plot. They had refused. Later, when Hansford himself was killed, one of the young men said he had thought to himself, The dumb ass tried to pull it off. The newspaper quoted sonny seiler saying he would use the affidavits of the two young men in his appeal.
Mrs. Mooreland was in turmoil. Happy as she was for her friend Jim Williams, she was nonetheless appalled. She had been unaware of the details of Williams’s private life until his trials had so rudely awakened her, and she had finally come to terms with all of that, mainly by putting it out of her mind. But now this sordid business about the squares. And these new witnesses! Who were they? Male prostitutes! Burglars! Thieves! Mrs. Mooreland unburdened herself to her husband over breakfast. He attempted to put the new developments in perspective for her. “You wouldn’t expect this Danny Hansford, this unsavory little punk, to discuss his murderous schemes with someone on the order of Mac Bell, would you? Or Reuben Clark?” The names Mr. Mooreland mentioned were two of savannah’s most esteemed gentlemen, bank presidents both.
Well, that did make some sense, Mrs. Mooreland had to admit. But she was still dazed by what she had learned about the nefarious goings-on in the squares, and as she drove around them this sunny noontime in May, she did a little timid sleuthing. Maybe that’s one of them, she thought, casting her eyes on a shaggy-haired boy lounging casually on a bench in Madison square. But then it crossed her mind that he could have been one of those art students from the savannah College of Art and Design. How could anybody tell anymore? Mrs. Mooreland shuddered and checked her watch. It was time to go to the party. But she had still not resolved her biggest dilemma: what to say to Mrs. Williams about the news. She could hardly exclaim, “Isn’t it wonderful!” because a plot involving sodomy, murder, and theft could in no way be described as wonderful. There was nothing in those horrid little stories that was even slightly discussable at a polite luncheon party. She told her husband she thought she might just feign ignorance and pretend she had not read the newspaper at all that day. But he pointed out that a tactic like that could backfire. “It might just force Mrs. Williams to tell you all about it herself,” he said. “Better to say something noncommittal like ‘We’re all keeping our fingers crossed.’” And that is what she finally did.
In fact, in one way or another, that was how all of the guests handled the matter. Mrs. Williams stood at the door of Mercer House in a light blue chiffon dress, accepting obliquely worded congratulations as her guests arrived.
“I feel the tide is turning,” said Mrs. Garrard Haines, giving Mrs. Williams a kiss on the cheek.
“Isn’t this a sunny day!” said Lib Richardson.
Alexander Yearly put it another way: “I expect it won’t be long before Jim will be among us again.”
Mrs. Williams beamed. “It’s just like James said. Everything is going to work out just fine.”
The double doors at the end of the center hall were open to the courtyard, giving a view all the way through the house to the opulent greenery of the courtyard garden. The rear of Mercer House was distinctly different from the Italianate façade in front. The back of the house had the look of an antebellum mansion. Tall columns supported a wide porch shaded by dense swags of overgrown wisteria. Several of Mrs. Williams’s guests came out to sit in the wicker chairs and look at the sunken garden, the grove of ten-foot-high banana plants, and the lily pond while they ate their lunch.
Betty Cole Ashcraft sat beside Lila Mayhew. Mrs. Mayhew poked absently at her tomatoes and okra. “I suppose we’ll have another Christmas without Jim’s lovely party,” she said in a wistful voice.
“Good gracious, Lila,” said Mrs. Ashcraft, “it’s only May. So much can happen before Christmas, and anyway it does look as though it isn’t all over for Jim just yet.”
“Jim always had his party the night before the debutante ball,” Mrs. Mayhew went on. “That was his night. Friday. I can’t remember what on earth we used to do in the days before Jim started having his parties. I’ve tried, but I can’t recall. My memory is failing, you know.”
“Well, never mind, Lila,” said Mrs. Ashcraft. “Before you know it, Jim will be right back here giving his parties again. They’ll just have to let him out now. I feel sure of it, what with all these ruffians popping up at long last and saying how they were getting ready to kill him. It’s a wonder Jim didn’t shoot them all. He would have been within his rights, you know.”
Mrs. Mayhew put down her fork. “Every year, Beautene made a new dress for me to wear to Jim’s party. Beautene is my colored seamstress. I think sometimes she just redecorated an old dress so it looked new. I wouldn’t have known the difference anyway. But last Christmas when Jim was in jail, I said, ‘Beautene, let’s don’t bother this year. There won’t be anything to do in savannah the night before the Cotillion anyhow.’”
“Now, Lila,” Mrs. Ashcraft said gently.
“And do you know what Beautene told me? She said, ‘Miss Lila, there may not be anything for you folks to do that night. But that night—the night before Cotillion—that’s the night of our debutante ball.’”
“Lord in heaven!” said Mrs. Ashcraft. “You don’t mean it.”
“Yes. The colored girls. They have a debutante ball the night before Cotillion. When Beautene told me that, I thought, How lovely for them. And I knew right then and there that I would miss Jim Williams’s Christmas party more than ever.”
Mrs. Mayhew took a sip of her iced tea and gazed into the garden.
As the two ladies lapsed into silence, I became aware of a conversation taking place sotto voce between a man and two women seated on the divan across from me. They were speaking like ventriloquists, barely moving their lips so as not to be overheard. When I tuned in to what they were saying, I understood why.
“It won’t work?” one of the women asked the man. “Why not?”
“For several reasons, one of which is that those statements sound as if they were bought and paid for by Jim.”
“Would Jim do that?”
“Of course he would,” said the man, “and so would I in his position. Sonny Seiler’s had both of the boys checked out by a private detective—Sam Weatherly, an ex-cop, good man. Sam says one of the boys may be telling the truth. The other one is poison; he has a reputation for selling testimony to the highest bidder.”
“Why can’t Sonny just use the one who’s telling the truth?”
“Because no jury is going to believe a street hustler, and anyway what he has to say is irrelevant. Danny Hansford’s motive
s are not the issue. He may have wanted to kill Jim, but there’s no evidence he tried to do it. There’s no evidence he even had a gun in his hand that night. No fingerprints. No gunpowder residue. The physical evidence is the issue. Now, if Jim could pay someone to discredit the physical evidence, that would be money well spent.”
Mrs. Williams came out onto the porch with a Polaroid camera in her hand. “All right now,” she said, “everybody get ready to look pretty!” Her guests looked up from their plates, and Mrs. Williams snapped their picture. The camera made a whirring sound and churned out a black rectangle of film. Mrs. Williams went back inside and laid it on the sideboard with the others. “Later on,” she said, “I’m gone carry all these pictures over to James. I just know when he sees them he’ll feel like he’s been at the party too. I really do. Whenever something important happens, I take a picture to show him. I took him one of the wisteria when it blossomed over the front door, and he called and said, ‘Thank you, Mother. Now I can tell it’s spring.’”
Faces were beginning to emerge in the photographs on the sideboard. There was Emma Kelly sitting between Joe Odom and Mandy in the rear parlor. Upon arriving at the party, Emma had told Mrs. Williams that every day for the past eight months, she had played “Whispering” on the piano because she knew it was Jim’s favorite song. Joe Odom remarked with an ironic smile that the way things seemed to be going lately, he and Jim might be trading places before long.