Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (56 page)

Six months after his acquittal, Jim Williams sat down at his desk to make plans for his first Christmas party in eight years. He called Lucille Wright and asked her to prepare a low-country banquet for two hundred people. He hired a bartender, four waiters, and two musicians. Then he took out his stack of index cards and embarked on the most delicate and satisfying task of all: compiling his guest list.

Williams considered each card carefully before consigning it to the In stack or the Out stack. He put most of the regulars promptly on the In stack—the Yearleys, the Richardsons, the Bluns, the Strongs, the Crams, the Macleans, the Minises, the Hartridges, the Haineses. But he hesitated when he came to the card of his old friend Millicent Mooreland. Though she had been steadfast in her belief that Williams was innocent, she had made the grievous mistake of not attending his last party on the grounds that it had come too soon after Danny Hansford’s death. For this transgression, Williams now put her on the Out stack. She would do penance this year. She would be chastened, and then she would be restored to grace next Christmas, assuming she did nothing to displease Williams before then.

As for Lee and Emma Adler, Williams simply dropped their
card into the wastebasket. Williams had no need to curry favor with the Adlers anymore. Lee Adler had been up to his old tricks, anyway. He had just returned from the White House, where he had received a National Medal of Arts award and posed for photographs with President and Mrs. Bush. This only made him more hateful to Williams and to most of the people who would be attending his party. On top of that, Adler had become embroiled in a bitter fight locally over his plan to build new Victorian-style housing for blacks in downtown Savannah. Adler’s scheme called for row upon row of identical houses covered with vinyl siding and jammed together with no lawns or green spaces in between. The Historic Savannah Foundation had risen up in angry opposition, decrying the substandard quality of Adler’s proposed dwellings. Adler had been forced to redesign the project, putting in green spaces and replacing vinyl siding with wood. Jim Williams knew that the guests at his Christmas party would be eager to exchange views about Lee Adler’s latest activities without fear of being overheard by either him or Emma. No problem; they would not be there.

Williams also dropped Serena Dawes’s card into the wastebasket—but sadly, and for a different reason. Some months earlier, Serena had decided that the 1930s and 1940s—the days of her glamorous full-page ads in
Life
magazine—had been the high point of her life and that it would be downhill from here on. She announced that she would die on her birthday, and she thereupon refused to leave the house or receive visitors or eat. After several weeks, she was taken to the hospital, where one night she summoned her doctor and nurses and thanked them graciously for looking after her. By morning she was dead. She had not died of starvation or committed suicide by any conventional means. She had simply willed herself to die, and being a strong-willed woman, she had succeeded. She had missed dying on her birthday by two days.

Serena’s death was not related in any way to the end of her affair with Luther Driggers, but Williams paused when he came to Driggers’s card anyway. Luther Driggers had been the focus of
much attention in recent months. He had been struck by lightning. It had happened at the height of one of Savannah’s typical summer-afternoon thunderstorms. Driggers had been lying in bed with his new girlfriend, Barbara, when a wiry tongue of fire licked out from the charcoal-gray sky and enveloped his house.

Barbara’s hair suddenly stood on end. The first thought that ran through Driggers’s head was that he had never had that kind of effect on a woman before. But then he smelled ozone in the air and knew it meant they were surrounded by a huge electrical charge. “Get down!” he yelled. Then it struck. Luther was thrown to the floor, and Barbara was knocked unconscious for several minutes. Later, when the power was restored, they discovered that the lightning had melted the innards of the television set.

At first, Driggers did not connect the lightning with his subsequent episodes of dizziness and an increasing tendency to fall downstairs and lose his balance in the shower. He had been drunk most of his life, and those things seemed attributable to liquor. But when he stopped drinking, the dizziness continued. Doctors found and removed from his brain a semifluid mass the size of a golf ball and the consistency of motor oil.

In the months that followed, Barbara’s stomach began to swell, and that did seem to be a direct consequence of the events of that tempestuous afternoon. They decided that if the baby was a boy they would name it Thor (after the Norse god of thunder). If it was a girl they would name it Athena (after the Greek goddess who carried Zeus’ thunderbolt). But Barbara was not pregnant after all. The lightning had damaged her internal organs, much as it had done to the television set, and within months she became sick and died. Driggers, though otherwise healthy, once again took to walking out of Clary’s drugstore without eating his breakfast. The old fears about his demons resurfaced, and once again people spoke darkly about the possibility that he might dump his bottle of poison into Savannah’s water supply.

“Anyone who believes that is a fool,” Driggers told me one morning in Clary’s.

“Because you wouldn’t dream of doing it, would you,” I said.

“Oh, I might very well do it,” he said, “if I
could.
Unfortunately, it’s not possible. Do you remember what I told you the day I first met you? That Savannah’s water came out of a limestone aquifer? And that
that
was the reason why your toilet bowl was encrusted with crystallized scum? Well, for the same reason—that Savannah’s water comes from an aquifer deep in the earth—I couldn’t poison it if I wanted to. I couldn’t get to it. Now, if there were an aboveground reservoir, I could dump poison in it very easily. But there isn’t.”

“I’m relieved to hear that,” I said.

“Don’t be too relieved,” Driggers replied. “With all the industrial pumping going on, salt water has already begun to seep into the aquifer, and it will soon be unusable. Then we’ll have to drink the filthy water from the Savannah River. And my poison couldn’t make that water any worse than it already is.”

Jim Williams held Driggers’s card between his thumb and forefinger, imperiously weighing the pros and cons. Luther Driggers was a friend of long standing, but Williams recalled how Driggers had ridiculed him for not being clever enough to dispose of Danny Hansford’s body before the police had come, implying that Williams had been guilty of murder and therefore should have removed the evidence. Driggers’s card went onto the Out stack.

Williams hesitated again when he came to the card of Joe Odom. Joe had first made it onto Williams’s guest list upon his marriage to his third wife, Mary Adams, whose father happened to be chairman of the board of the C&S Bank. That marriage had catapulted Joe into Savannah’s highest social circles. By the time of his divorce, he had become such a popular figure in his own right that Williams continued to invite him to his parties despite his increasing financial embarrassments. Lately, however, Joe Odom’s fortunes had taken a precipitous plunge.

In July, the landlord of Sweet Georgia Brown’s had padlocked the bar, evicted Joe for nonpayment of rent, and sued for arrears. Joe filed for bankruptcy. Mandy, who had lost more than $5,000 in the collapse of the bar, took her losses in stride until she happened
to overhear Joe referring to another woman as “my fourth wife-in-waiting.” With that, she stomped out of the Hamilton-Turner House, swearing vengeance. Her revenge took a particularly devastating form, as Joe learned when he looked at his newspaper one November morning and saw the headline
ATTORNEY JOE ODOM INDICTED FOR FORGERY.

According to the article, Joe had been charged with seven counts of faking the signature of Mandy Nichols, his partner in the “now-defunct jazz bar” Sweet Georgia Brown’s. The seven checks totaled $1,193.42. Forgery was a felony offense punishable by up to ten years in jail.

Joe knew at once what Mandy had done. She had sifted through the canceled checks from the Sweet Georgia Brown’s checking account—the account they had put in Mandy’s name because Joe’s name had been anathema to every bank in Savannah—and she had picked out seven checks that Joe had signed in her absence.

Joe stood in his front hall, newspaper in hand, absorbing the enormity of the crisis before him. It dawned on him that the sheriff would soon be arriving with a warrant for his arrest, so he pulled on a shirt and a pair of pants, climbed out a rear window, jumped into his van, and headed south on I-95. He had no intention of spending the weekend with sheriffs, bail bondsmen, and lawyers. Not this weekend anyway. The Georgia-Florida football game was on Saturday, and Joe would definitely be there. Nothing took precedence over the Georgia-Florida game. Ever. Not even a felony indictment.

“The sheriff can wait,” Joe said when he called friends from Jacksonville to inform them of his whereabouts. “I’ll be back on Monday.”

Upon his return, Joe appeared in federal court and told the judge that the seven checks were not really forgeries but rather an unorthodox way of doing business. He pointed out that one check had been made out to the linen service, another to the phone company, and another to the plumber—all to pay legitimate expenses for his and Mandy’s business. He produced de
posit slips showing that he had put more money into the account than he had taken out with the seven checks. He concluded by saying that if he had really intended to commit forgery, he would have taken more than $1,193.42.

But forgery was forgery regardless of the amount. Furthermore, Joe could not quite explain why the two largest checks had been made out to cash. In the end, he had no choice but to plead guilty. The judge sentenced him to two years’ probation, stipulating that as a first offender he could wipe his record clean if he made restitution within a year. If he did not, he would go to prison for the remainder of his term.

Jim Williams put Joe’s card squarely on the In stack. Yes indeed. Joe Odom would be the man on the spot for a change, the man on the receiving end of the opprobrious glances. Joe would take it all very much in stride. Williams admired that about him, his resilience. Despite his mounting problems, Joe was still the gregarious, table-hopping, good-natured man-about-town. In fact, it was Joe Odom’s smiling face that first caught my eye when I arrived at the party.

“Well, it looks like you’ll have a happy ending for your book,” he said. “I mean, just look around you. Jim Williams isn’t a convicted murderer anymore, and I won’t be a convicted forger just as soon as I pay Mandy the one thousand, one hundred and ninety-three dollars and forty-two cents I don’t really owe her. We’re all out of jail, and it’s party time again. If that isn’t happiness, what is?”

I was mulling over Joe Odom’s formulation for happiness when Minerva appeared before me in a black-and-white maid’s uniform. She was carrying a tray of champagne glasses. Guests gathered around and helped themselves, and when the tray was empty Minerva moved closer to me.

“I need to git me some devil’s shoestring,” she said under her breath.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s a root. Some people calls it ‘the devil root.’ I calls it my baby, ’Cause it works good for me. I didn’t bring none with me,
though, and I need some before midnight. Trouble’s brewing. It’s that boy again.”

“Danny Hansford?”

“Uh-huh. He’s still workin’ against Mr. Jim.”

“But what can he do now?” I asked. “Jim Williams has been acquitted. He can’t ever be tried again for killing Danny.”

“There’s plenty that boy can do!” Minerva said. “He don’t need no murder trial to cause hell. The boy died hatin’ Mr. Jim, and that’s the meanest kind of curse you can have against you. It’s the hardest one to git undone.”

Minerva’s eyes narrowed. “Now listen,” she said, “I need to git me some a that root, and I know where there’s some growin’. It ain’t but two-three miles from here. Mr. Jim can’t take me there on account of this party goin’ on, so what I need to know is, will you drive me?” I nodded that I would, and Minerva told me to meet her in the square by the monument at eleven.

If the angry ghost of Danny Hansford was hanging heavy over Jim Williams’s party, it did not dampen the mood even slightly. Sonny Seiler was present, rosy-cheeked and smiling, accepting congratulations for his acquittal of Williams and condolences for the recent death of Uga IV, who had been felled by kidney failure at home while watching a Georgia basketball game on television. The bulldog mascot was buried in a private funeral service near Gate 10 of Sanford Stadium, alongside the graves of Uga I, Uga II, and Uga III. Seiler chose a successor, and within two weeks the state of Georgia sent him a new license plate for his red station wagon:
UGA V.

Blanche Williams, who had been the soul of stoicism throughout her son’s ordeal, wore an evening gown and a pink corsage. She pronounced herself as pleased as she could be. She was eighty-three, she said, and now that her son was safe the good Lord could take her anytime He pleased.

Jim Williams was decked out in black tie and Fabergé cuff links. He circulated among his guests, laughing heartily and displaying an ease and contentedness he had not shown in many
years. He raised his eyebrows slightly when I told him I had agreed to take Minerva on an errand later on.

“I think she’s going a little overboard this time,” he said, “and I told her so. I’m afraid she may be getting too fond of the twenty-five dollars I pay her each time she does a little rootworking for me. But it doesn’t matter. She’ll never cost me a fraction of what I’ve had to pay my lawyers.”

At eleven o’clock Minerva and I got into my car, and in a few minutes we were heading west on the road toward the airport.

“It’s growin’ wild just this side of an overpass,” she said, “but I don’t remember which overpass.”

We pulled off the road at the Lynes Parkway overpass. Minerva took a flashlight out of her satchel and thrashed around in the brush. She came back empty-handed. She had no luck at the second overpass either. At the third, she foraged farther afield and returned carrying a handful of weeds and roots.