Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

by John Berendt

  In addition to the gunshot-residue problem, Seiler was becoming concerned about Williams’s testimony. It had been nearly four years since he had last testified, and Seiler worried that he might become confused about minor details and contradict what he had said before. Two weeks before the trial was to begin, he insisted that Williams sit down and review his prior testimony. Any deviation in his story, even the slightest detail, would give Lawton a chance to pounce on his credibility. Seiler told Williams he would bring the transcripts to Mercer House on Saturday afternoon, and they would go over them together. Saturday morning, Williams called and invited me to sit in on the review.

  “Come half an hour early,” Williams said. “I have something I want to tell you.”

  The moment he opened the door, I could tell Williams knew the odds were against him. He had shaved his mustache. Seiler had tried to make him shave it for the second trial, saying it would make him look less forbidding, but Williams had refused. Now Williams was apparently willing to do anything to ingratiate himself with the jury.

  He came right to the point. “Sonny doesn’t know this yet, but I’m going to change my story. I’m going to tell what really happened that night. It’s my only chance to win this case.”

  I made no comment. Williams drew a deep breath and then began:

  “The evening started out just as I’ve always said it did. Danny and I went to a drive-in movie. He was drinking bourbon and smoking grass. We came back to the house. He started an argument, kicked in the Atari set, grabbed me by the neck, pushed me up against the doorjamb. All that’s true. Then he followed me into the study, just as I’ve always said. We called Joe Goodman. Right after that, Danny took the tankard in his hand and said, ‘This tankard has about made up its mind to go through that painting over there.’ I told him to get out. He went into the hall, I heard crashing sounds, he came back with the Luger in his hand and said, ‘I’m leaving tomorrow, but you’re leaving tonight.’ Then he raised his arm and pulled the trigger. All that’s true. It’s what I’ve been saying all along. But here’s the difference: The gun was on safety! When Danny pulled the trigger, nothing happened! No bullets came out. No bullets whizzed by my arm. Danny lowered the gun, took the safety off, and ejected a live round. That gave me time to reach into the drawer and get my own gun and shoot him. I fired three times. Bam, bam, bam. He fell dead. But he hadn’t fired a shot. Then I thought: Goddamn, what have I done! I went around the desk, picked up his gun, fired two shots back across the desk, and dropped the gun on the floor. In the panic of the moment I didn’t know what else to do.”

  Having said all that, Williams seemed strangely elated. “You see, it explains why there was no gunpowder on Danny’s hand!” He studied me carefully, looking to see my reaction to his new story.

  I wondered if my expression betrayed my astonishment.

  “The police and my lawyer, Bob Duffy, arrived at the house at the same time,” he went on. “I took them into the study and told them Danny had fired at me and missed, and that I’d shot him. I had a feeling I was making a bad situation worse by sticking to that story, but I didn’t see that I had any choice. Well, I’ve been convicted twice now, so I’ve finally decided to tell it the way it really happened. And when I do, Spencer Lawton’s case will crumble. I’ll be acquitted.”

  “I’m not sure how you figure that,” I said.

  “Because it explains everything! The lack of gunpowder on Danny’s hand. The live round on the floor. The pieces of paper on the gun. It all ties together!”

  My guess was that Williams was using me to float a trial balloon. His new story fit the evidence well enough, and it preserved his claim of self-defense. But it was too convenient, too neat, and too late to do him much good.

  “If you tell that story,” I said, trying not to sound too argumentative, “you’ll be admitting you’ve committed perjury all these years.”

  “Yes, of course,” he said, “but so what?”

  Evidently, Williams did not want to be dissuaded. So I did not tell him that I thought his new story would be music to Spencer Lawton’s ears, or that if he admitted having fired all the shots, any jury—even a friendly one—would conclude that Hansford had never held a gun in his hand at all that night.

  “You haven’t told Sonny Seiler any of this?” I asked.

  “I intend to tell him as soon as he gets here.”

  Good, let Sonny Seiler deal with it. It was not my business to counsel Williams anyway. I shifted the conversation to innocuous topics while we waited. I told Williams that without his mustache, he had a benign look. A jury might like that. I glanced out the window, watching for Seiler, and noticed Minerva sitting on a bench in the square.

  “Is she casting a spell on somebody?”

  “Probably,” said Williams. “I give her twenty-five dollars a day, and I’ve learned not to ask questions.”

  Seiler arrived shortly, accompanied by his secretary and two lawyers who were assisting on the case, Don Samuel and David Botts. Seiler was out of breath. “We got a lot to cover this afternoon,” he said, “so let’s get going.”

  We assembled in the study. Williams sat at his desk, and Seiler stood in the center of the room. He was wearing a blue blazer and a red-white-and-black Georgia bulldog tie. I felt a twinge of pity for him. His case was about to fall apart. He was full of energy, impatient to begin.

  “Now, Jim,” he said, “we’re coming into this trial with some serious problems, and I don’t want to give Lawton a chance to tangle you up on cross-examination. If you get up there and say you blinked twice before you shot Hansford, he’ll say, ‘But, Mr. Williams, didn’t you testify on an earlier occasion that you blinked three times?’”

  “Sonny,” said Williams, “before we get into all of that, there’s something I want to tell you about my testimony.”

  “Okay,” said Seiler, “but just wait a minute. I want to review where we stand. Number one: We have not been able to get a change of venue. Number two: Our motion to suppress the evidence has been denied. Number three: We’ve had a hell of a time trying to deal with that damned gunshot-residue test.”

  “I know all about that, Sonny,” said Williams. “What I have to say has a direct bearing on it.”

  “Just hear me out. Then you can go ahead.”

  Exasperated, Williams sat back in his chair, arms crossed. Seiler continued.

  “A couple of weeks ago, Dr. Stone told me he could not explain how Danny could have fired a gun and still had zero gunpowder on his hand. He made a suggestion, though. He said, ‘Why don’t you go back out to Candler Hospital and see if you can find out what they did with Hansford’s body before they swabbed his hands for gunpowder. Maybe you’ll come up with something.’ He said the more a body is moved or touched, the more likely it is that gunpowder will be wiped off.

  “I went out to the hospital yesterday and asked for the file on Hansford. They gave me the autopsy report. Nothing new about that. We’ve had a copy of it all along. But this copy had a top sheet I hadn’t seen before. It was a green hospital admitting form filled out by the nurse in charge of the emergency room—Marilyn Case. She had written a note on it: ‘Hands bagged bilaterally in Emergency Department.’ This piqued my curiosity, so I called her up and asked her to explain it. She said it meant she had put bags over both of Danny’s hands so the gunpowder wouldn’t rub off; the coroner had called and told her to do it. I said, ‘Wait a minute! The police said they put bags on Hansford’s hands back at Mercer House! You mean to tell me that there were no bags on Hansford’s hands when he arrived at the emergency room?’ ‘I’m sure of it,’ she said. ‘I bagged the hands myself.’”

  Seiler was glowing. “Do you know what this means?” he said. “It means the police didn’t bag the hands at all! They’ve been lying all along. They forgot to bag the hands! They wrapped Hansford in a blanket, lifted him onto a gurney, wheeled him into an ambulance, drove him out to the hospital, wheeled him into the emergency room, lifted him off the gurne
y, unwrapped him, and all that time his bare hands were flopping around and rubbing against his shirt, his jeans, the blanket—and rubbing off all that gunshot residue! I called Dr. Stone and told him what I’d found. ‘Sonny,’ he said, ‘you struck gold!’”

  Seiler pulled a copy of the admissions sheet out of his briefcase. “Here it is, Coach!” he said. “The death knell of Spencer Lawton’s precious gunshot-residue test. They based their whole case on it, dammit, and we’re gonna kick it right between the goal posts. What’s worse, Lawton was obligated to give us a copy of this sheet along with the autopsy report, and he didn’t. So, we’ve caught him hiding the evidence again. He’s gonna have fits when we hit him with it.”

  Seiler put the paper back in his briefcase and snapped it shut. “Okay, Jim,” he said. “Your turn.”

  Williams sat with his chin cupped in his hand. He glanced at me, flickered his eyebrows, and then looked back at Seiler.

  “Never mind, Sonny,” he said. “It’s not important.”

  I left Mercer House that afternoon with the uncomfortable feeling that I knew more than I wanted to know. Around midnight, I stopped in at Sweet Georgia Brown’s and sat down on the piano bench next to Joe.

  “I need to ask you about a point of law,” I said.

  “I knew you’d get into trouble writing that book of yours,” Joe said. “But like I told you, that’s what I’m here for.”

  “This is a purely hypothetical question,” I said. “Suppose an unnamed person—an upstanding citizen minding his own business—happened to become privy to inside information about a criminal case. Something secret, something that contradicts sworn testimony. Would this person become an accessory after the fact if he just kept quiet about it?”

  Joe looked at me and smiled broadly, while continuing to play the piano. “You wouldn’t be trying to tell me Jim Williams has finally told you one of his many alternate versions of how he shot Danny Hansford, would you?”

  “Who said anything about Jim Williams?”

  “Oh, that’s right,” said Joe, “we were speaking hypothetically, weren’t we? Well, according to the law, this ‘unnamed person’ is under no obligation to divulge his secret information, which—if it’s what I think it is—is not all that secret anyway. Heh-heh. In fact, I was beginning to wonder how long it was going to take a certain writer from New York to find out something half of Savannah already knows.”

  As Joe spoke, a policeman and a policewoman approached and stood awkwardly by the side of the piano.

  “Mr. Joe Odom?” the policeman said.

  “That’s me,” said Joe.

  “We have orders to place you under arrest.”

  “You do? What’s the charge?” Joe went on playing the piano.

  “Scofflaw,” said the policewoman. “We’re from Thunderbolt. You got six unpaid speedin’ tickets and a U-turn violation.”

  “Any bad-check charges?” Joe asked.

  “No, just the speedin’ tickets and the U-turn,” the woman said.

  “Well, that’s a relief.”

  “We’ll have to take you to Thunderbolt in the squad car,” the policeman said. “Once we book you and relieve you of two hundred dollars for bond, why, you can be on your way.”

  “Fair enough,” said Joe, “but I’d be much obliged if you’d bear with me while I finish up a couple of things. I was just giving my friend here some legal advice. And …” He leaned closer to the two officers and lowered his voice. “See that old couple sitting by the ice machine? They’ve driven in from Swainsboro to celebrate their sixtieth wedding anniversary, and they’ve asked me to play a medley of their favorite songs. I’m about halfway through. I’ll be done with both of these chores in about four or five minutes, if it’s okay with you.” The policewoman murmured it would be fine, and the two of them took seats near the door. Joe sent the waiter over with Cokes and turned back to me.

  “Now, about this not-so-secret secret information,” he said. “I would tell this ‘unnamed person,’ in case he’s interested, that in all of Jim Williams’s versions of how he shot Danny Hansford, there are certain consistent points. The shooting happened in the course of an argument and on the spur of the moment. It was not a premeditated killing. The victim was an out-of-control, drunk, drug-addicted kid with a history of violence, and the defendant was a frightened, angry, nonviolent older man with no criminal record. That’s a scenario for manslaughter maybe, but not first-degree murder. And in Georgia, a conviction for manslaughter usually carries a sentence of five to ten years with two years to serve. Jim’s already served two years.”

  “I suppose you could look at it that way,” I said, “if you wanted to.”

  “Anyhow, that’s my answer to your question about the ‘point of law.’”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “And now, there is the small matter of my consultation fee—heh-heh. I’m thinking I’ll waive it in exchange for a small favor. All you have to do is to follow a certain squad car out to Thunderbolt in a few minutes, then turn around and drive a certain attorney-scofflaw back to town.”

  “It’s a deal,” I said.

  Joe finished his medley with a flourish. He went over to the bar and, while Mandy’s head was turned, took $200 out of the cash register. On his way out the door, he stopped to pay his respects to the couple from Swainsboro. The woman wore a large pink corsage pinned above her heart.

  “Oh, Joe,” she said, “that was lovely. Thank you so much!”

  Her husband stood and shook Joe’s hand. “It ain’t but midnight, Joe. Why’re you leavin’ so early?”

  Joe smoothed the lapels of his tuxedo and straightened his plaid bow tie. “I’ve just been informed there’s an official motorcade leaving for Thunderbolt, and I’ve been invited to ride in the lead car.”

  “My word!” said the woman. “That’s a great honor.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Joe. “You could look at it that way, if you wanted to.”

  Chapter 27

  LUCKY NUMBER

  Blanche Williams came into the dining room and took her seat at the dinner table for lunch. “

  The cat won’t eat,” she said.

  Jim Williams looked up from the Sotheby’s auction catalog he had brought with him to the table. He looked at the cat, who was sitting motionless in the doorway. Then he returned his attention to the catalog.

  Mrs. Williams unfolded her napkin and put it in her lap. “It’s the same as last time,” she said. “The cat wouldn’t eat then either. Or the time before that. It’s happened every time we’ve come back from the courthouse to wait for the jury to make up its mind. She’s refused to eat.”

  Williams’s sister, Dorothy Kingery, glanced at her watch. “It’s one-thirty,” she said. “They’ve been at it three hours now. I guess they’re having lunch. I wonder if they’ll take a break or go right on deliberating while they eat.”

  Williams looked up from his auction catalog. “Listen to this,” he said. “‘When Catherine of Braganza, the Infanta of Portugal, arrived in England in 1662 to marry Charles II, she brought with her the largest dowry ever. Part of the dowry was the Port of Bombay in India ….’” He laughed. “Now, that’s the kind of princess I like!”

  “This makes the third time she’s done it,” Mrs. Williams said, “—not touched her food.”

  Dorothy Kingery regarded the sandwich on her plate. “Sonny says he’ll call from the courthouse as soon as there’s word. I hope we can hear the telephone from in here.”

  “I don’t know how she knows,” Mrs. Williams mused softly. “But she always knows.”

  Jim Williams suddenly closed the auction catalog and stood up. “I’ve got an idea!” he said. “We’ll eat lunch on the dishes from the Nanking Cargo. Just for good luck.”

  He took several blue-and-white plates out of the breakfront cabinet and passed them around the table. His mother and his sister transferred their sandwiches from their plain white plates to the blue-and-white plates. The blue-and-white plate
s had been part of a huge shipment of Chinese export porcelain that had been lost in the South China Sea in 1752 and salvaged in 1983. Williams had bought several dozen plates, cups, and bowls at a highly publicized Christie’s auction, and they had arrived at Mercer House within the past few weeks.

  “These plates have been sitting on the bottom of the ocean for two hundred and thirty years,” he said, “but they’re still brand-new. When they were found they were in their original packing crates. They’re in mint condition. No one has ever eaten off them before. We’re the first. Funny way to preserve dishes, isn’t it?”

  Mrs. Williams lifted her sandwich and looked at her plate.

  “You can’t fool a cat,” she said.

  Two weeks earlier, on the first day of Williams’s third trial, the outcome had seemed a foregone conclusion—so much so that the Savannah Morning News had announced in a weary headline, WILLIAMS FACES YET ANOTHER CONVICTION FOR MURDER. The jury of nine women and three men seemed predisposed to hand down a third conviction; all of them, having been subjected to six years of relentless publicity, admitted that they knew about the case and were aware that two prior juries had already found Williams guilty. The tension and suspense of the first two trials had given way to a feeling of grim inevitability. Television cameras were stationed outside the courthouse once again, but this time the spectator benches in the courtroom were only half full. Prentiss Crowe declared he would not even bother to read the news reports, it was all becoming such a bore. “It’s the same old story over and over,” he said, “like reruns of I Love Lucy.”

  The courthouse flack was among those who did attend. He sat slumped in his seat with one arm hooked over the back as if to keep himself from sliding off onto the floor. As usual, he was an oracle of courthouse wisdom and rumor. “Jim Williams’s guilt or innocence is no longer the issue,” he said. “Spencer Lawton’s incompetence is the issue. The question on everybody’s mind is, How long will he keep screwing up? I mean, this case is getting to be like a bad bullfight. Lawton’s the matador who can’t finish off the bull. Twice now, he’s plunged the sword in, but the bull’s still on his feet, and the fans are getting restless. Lawton looks ridiculous.”