Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (29 page)

Colonel Atwood’s revolver caught the attention of Dr. Tod Fulton. “Twenty-two Magnum, huh? Not bad. I carry this little number.” Dr. Fulton reached in his pocket and took out a black leather wallet. The wallet had a hole through the middle. The crescent curve of a trigger could be seen along one edge of the hole. “It’s a twenty-two Derringer in disguise,” he said. “If a mugger holds me up and demands my money, all I have to do is pull out this wallet and … payday!”

“My word!” said Mrs. Carter.

Dr. Fulton pocketed his wallet. “My wife carries a thirty-eight,” he said.

“So do I,” said Anna brightly.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Mrs. Carter said. “If I’d so much as touched that gun in Lyman’s hand, they’d have charged me with murder as surely as I’m standing here!” Mrs. Carter was so frail one might have doubted she had the strength to lift a gun.

“Someday I
will
shoot a man!” said Serena. “God knows I’ve already tried!” She lifted a pearl-handled revolver out of her purse and held it daintily by its chrome-plated muzzle. “Just ask my former sweetheart, Shelby Grey. I wanted like hell to shoot him! I begged him to let me do it! I didn’t want to kill him, of course. I only wanted to shoot him in the toe, just to give him something to remember me by. But the coward wouldn’t hold still! I blew a hole in the air conditioner.”

“You … shot him?” Mrs. Carter said, wide-eyed.

“I missed.”

“How fortunate.”

Serena sighed. “Not for dear Shelby. Now he has nothing of any permanence to remind him of my love. Still, I am very much afraid I will have to shoot a man one day, and it won’t be in the toe. My husband left me priceless jewels, as everybody knows, and certain individuals would love to get their hands on them. I live in fear of burglars day and night. That’s why I always have this little beauty close at hand. When I’m home I keep it by my bed.” Serena glanced at Colonel Atwood. “And when I leave the house I put it in my purse. But anytime I feel the bastards are about to spring, I just stash it between my boobs.” Serena tucked the revolver into her bosom and lifted a fresh martini from a passing tray.

Feeling in need of a drink myself at this point, I intercepted the waiter as he came in my direction. Two other guests, a man and a woman, stepped up and helped themselves too.

“It was a
crime passionnel,”
the woman was saying, “so I don’t think it counts. You know, a lovers’ quarrel. These things happen. It isn’t the same as murder.”

“My dear,” said the man, “it may have been a crime of passion, but I know three people who served on that grand jury. They’ve seen the evidence, and I gather it’s going to be sticky for Jim.”

I turned my back and looked in the other direction, but at the same time I moved closer to the couple in order to hear them better. The man lowered his voice.

“First of all,” he said, “I’m told the Crime Laboratory came up with some troubling results. There was no gunpowder residue on Danny Hansford’s hands. That means he couldn’t have fired the gun at Jim, as Jim claims he did.”

“Good Lord!” the woman gasped.

“The location of the bullet wounds also appears to be at odds with Jim’s scenario of self-defense,” the man said. “One bullet entered the chest, which sounds all right, but another hit Hansford in the back. A third one hit him behind the ear. So the way it looks, Jim shot him once in the chest and then stepped around the desk and shot him twice more as he lay facedown on the floor, in a sort of coup de grâce.”

“How dreadful,” the woman said. “You mean it wasn’t self-defense?”

“I’m afraid it doesn’t look that way. The fingerprint analysis is even more damaging. The gun found under Hansford’s hand had no fingerprints on it at all, even though it had been fired. This means somebody wiped them off. So it begins to look as though Jim shot Danny and then got a second gun and fired a few shots from where Danny had been standing, to make it look as if Hansford had fired at him. Then it seems he must have wiped his fingerprints off the gun and put it under Danny’s hand.”

“I’m feeling faint,” the woman said. “What do you think will happen to Jim?”

“Just what I told him when I arrived here tonight. He’ll get off.”

“But how is that possible?” the woman asked.

“A good lawyer can challenge the evidence, maybe even turn it around to the defendant’s advantage. And Jim has good lawyers.
That’s why I think he’ll get off. That, and because of his standing in the community.”

Having delivered his private assessment of the case, the man changed the subject, and I drifted into the hallway, where Williams and his mother were standing with a small circle of guests.

Blanche Williams had driven in from Gordon, Georgia, where she had lived all her life. Now in her late seventies, she was a tall woman, thin as a stork. Not a hair was out of place in the arrangement of tight white curls that covered her head like a snowy cap. She stood shyly with her hands clasped in front of her. One of the other women was admiring her evening gown.

“Why, thank you,” Mrs. Williams said politely. “James gave it to me. Whenever he has a big party, he likes to make sure I have a pretty new dress and that there’s a flower waiting for me when I get to Savannah.” She glanced at her son, as if to reassure herself that she had said the right thing.

“Mother is always the belle of the ball!” Williams said heartily.

Mrs. Williams took this as a sign of approval and was emboldened to continue. “James has given me so many pieces of jewelry until finally I got to where I told him one day, I said, ‘James, I don’t know how I’ll ever wear them all!’ And he said, ‘Well, Mother, I’ll just have to give more parties so you can come to Savannah more often and wear all the things you’ve got.’ James is real good about taking me places too. He’s taken me to Europe five times, and
oh!
, one time he called and said, ‘Mother, we’re going to leave in three days for London on the Concorde,’ and I said, ‘Now, James, don’t tell me that. We’re not going to fly anywhere on the Concorde!’ And he said, ‘Oh yes, we are. I’ve already got the tickets,’ and I thought, ‘My Lord, what did they cost!’ But then pretty quick I knew James was serious, and I had to stop fussin’ and get busy. I had to get ready in three days, and I did, and sure enough we went to London on the Concorde.”

Mrs. Williams spoke in a quiet rush of words, as if wanting to finish quickly and not trespass on the conversational terrain any longer than necessary. Her erect posture and the alert look in her
eye suggested that despite her apologetic manner, she was a lady of considerable fiber and determination. In a few moments, Williams was drawn into a conversation with new arrivals, and Mrs. Williams and I found ourselves facing each other. I uttered a pleasantry about the festive party, and Mrs. Williams nodded in agreement.

“James has always had a crowd around him,” she said, “even when he was little. One time, he got him a little picture machine—the kind that flashes pictures on a wall—and he’d give little picture shows, and the other children would come over and have the best time, and he’d charge them a penny apiece. Course I had to have a little something for them to eat or drink, you know, just to munch. That was when he was eleven or twelve. When he was thirteen, he used to ride around the countryside on his bicycle, buying antiques to sell. That’s how he started out. At first he went to the nigger houses, and he’d buy little oil lamps and things they didn’t want. He’d pay a quarter for them and then fix them up and sell them for fifty cents. Then he bought better things, like mirrors and furniture and whatnot, and he’d fix them in his woodworking shop. He put a little ad in the paper, ‘Antiques for Sale,’ and you’d be surprised. The ladies from Macon would come to Gordon and get him out of high school! The superintendent was so impressed. They were high-class ladies—doctors’ wives and so forth—and James would bring them to the house, and they’d buy things right out of his bedroom! He worked his way up. Bit by bit, all by himself.

“It got to where a few years ago I thought, Isn’t life grand! My children have turned out fine. My daughter teaches at the university, and James is doing so well in Savannah. My work is done. The Lord can take me now. But He didn’t. And when James got in this awful mess, I thought this must be what God has been saving me for.”

The din of the party surged in volume, but Mrs. Williams did not raise her voice. She kept speaking in her quiet way, looking straight into my eyes—in fact, she seemed to be looking through me.

“James called me on a Saturday, right after lunch I believe it
was, and he told me, ‘Mother, I’ve got bad news. I had to shoot Danny.’ Well, I just froze. I said, ‘Sugar, you come right straight home,’ and he did, and when he got there I didn’t question him. I just let him talk when he felt like it, because he was so keyed up and hurt and everything else, and before long people found out he was there, and I tell you people started calling. Goodness, there were so many calls I just put them on a slip.”

Mrs. Williams paused as two guests stopped to say good-bye. “Y’all be sure and come back again next year,” she told them. Then she turned back to me.

“I never did trust that boy. He was kind of vague, the way he looked at you. I wouldn’t tell James this, but to me that Danny Hansford was just b-a-a-ad news. James brought him to the house one time. In a little bit, James went out in the back to wash his car, and I didn’t see the boy, and I said, ‘James, I don’t see him,’ and James said, ‘Oh, that’s all right, Mother. He told me he was just going to walk around out front.’ Well, when it came time to eat, the boy was still not there, and James said, ‘Mother, I’ll tell you what: If Danny takes a notion to go somewhere, he won’t tell anybody about it, he’ll just go. He’s done it before.’ Well, right then I understood what the boy had done. Don’t ask me how I knew. Something just told me. I had an idea he was downtown huntin’ dope. Gordon’s only a small town, but I figured he saw something down at the filling station on the way to the house, and he wanted to go back there and buy some dope. James found out the next day that the boy had hitch-hiked all the way back to Savannah.”

Mrs. Williams looked down briefly as she rearranged the wadded handkerchief she’d been clutching in her hands.

“Now, I’ll just be frank with you,” she said. “Sometimes James is too good to people. I don’t know, maybe he got it from me. I can get feeling sorry for people too quick, and that’s not good, because a lot of people know how to play you and get your sympathy. I know some people do James that way, and he’ll get to where he feels sorry for them. He’ll try to help ’em, like he tried to help that boy. There were times I felt like maybe I
should talk to James, but being a mother I was afraid I might be interfering. You don’t want to overstep the line, so I never did talk to him like I wish I had.

“James would help anybody, and that’s the reason I just hate to see him in this mess. Why, when James sold Cabbage Island and made a bunch of money, the first thing he did was he fixed up my house, and then he gave my church a check for ten thousand dollars to buy an electric organ. I just don’t know. Maybe this mess is going to be a lesson. I believe it’s going to make James realize that he’s got to think of himself sometimes ….”

Mrs. Williams smiled as her son reappeared at her side.

“Well, I’ll hush now,” she said.

“What have you two been talking about?” he asked.

“I was saying how everything is going to work out just fine, James.” Mrs. Williams’s answer was drowned out by the convivial hubbub around her.

“I’m sorry, Mother, I didn’t hear.”

Mrs. Williams took a deep breath, and for the first time all evening she raised her voice a little. “I said, ‘Everything is going to work out … just … fine!’”

“Of course it is, Mother,” he said. “It always has, and it always will.”

“Hell, I’d have shot Danny Hansford too,” said Dr. James C. Metts, the coroner of Chatham County. “This guy was just a badass. He scared Williams to death. You know, hell, it’s three o’clock in the morning, and here he is having a temper fit because Williams won’t play an Atari game.” Dr. Metts, a generally soft-spoken man, had spent several hours investigating the scene at Mercer House the night of the shooting. It was he who had signed the death certificate and ordered the autopsy. A week before Jim Williams’s trial was to begin, one of Williams’s lawyers, John Wright Jones, paid a call on Dr. Metts in his office to discuss the case.

John Wright Jones was one of Savannah’s better-known criminal lawyers. A burly bear of a man, he was assisting in Williams’s defense. He had seen the autopsy report and the police photographs taken in Mercer House after the shooting. He was concerned about the bullet hole in Danny Hansford’s back and the one behind his ear. He asked Dr. Metts if it was possible to reconstruct the shooting in such a way that Danny Hansford was
not
lying facedown when those two shots hit him.

“Yes,” said Dr. Metts, “you could do that. The first shot hit him in the front left side of the chest. When you get shot in the
chest, it’s like a punch; you rotate, you spin around. So the next shot hits you in the right side of the back, and you keep rotating, and the next one hits you behind the ear. It’s possible, if the ballistics work out, that Danny Hansford was not shot lying down. He could have been standing up.”