Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (43 page)

Vanessa Blanton, a brunette in her mid-twenties, is a waitress at the 1790 restaurant and bar. She says she used to live in a townhouse on Monterey Square, and she remembers seeing a young man fire a pistol into the trees about a month before Danny Hansford was killed. She did not know that this incident had any bearing on Williams’s trial until recently, when a law associate of Sonny Seiler’s happened to overhear her mentioning the incident to another waitress at the restaurant. Seiler subpoenaed her. She takes the witness stand.

“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?”

“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.”