Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (44 page)

“I’m told he might be out even sooner,” I reply, “if a certain lady named Delia has anything to say about it.”

“Who?” The flack cups his ear.

“Delia.”

“Who is Delia?”

“You mean who
was
Delia,” I say. “That’s all I know about her. She’s dead.”

The posthumous powers of the late Delia, if she had any, were apparently not the sort that took effect immediately. This became clear the day after Jim Williams’s conviction, when his lawyers went before Judge Oliver to ask for his release on bond and were curtly turned down. The judge did relent on one point, however: Williams would not be transferred right away to the much-feared state penitentiary at Reidsville. He could remain in Savannah at the Chatham County Jail so that his lawyers could consult with him while they worked on his appeal—and that could take a year or more. This concession displeased the county commissioners, who voted to sue Williams for room and board while he remained at the county facility—$900 a month. (The suit was dropped when the county attorney advised the commissioners it would not stand up in court.)

In the absence of its master, Mercer House assumed a ghostly air. The interior shutters of its great windows remained closed against the outside world. The gala parties were over. The elegant guests coming up the walk in evening clothes were only a memory now. But the hedges remained neatly clipped, the front lawn was mowed, and in the evenings slits of lamplight shone though the louvered windows. In fact, Blanche Williams had
moved into the house from her home in Gordon. She lived alone in the house, biding her time. She polished the silver and dusted the furniture, and every week she baked a fresh caramel cake in expectation of her son’s return.

The shop in the carriage house stayed open for business and was tended by Williams’s shopkeeper, Barry Thomas. From time to time, Thomas could be seen standing in the street outside the shop taking Polaroid pictures of a plantation desk or a chest of drawers being off-loaded from a truck. Thomas would then deliver the photographs, together with catalogs of upcoming sales and auctions, to the jail a few blocks away so that Williams could see his new purchases and make selections of what to buy or bid on next. It was common knowledge that Williams was running his antiques business from jail.

He was aided in this effort by the lucky chance that there was a telephone in his cell. Ordinarily, an inmate serving a life sentence would not have ready access to a telephone; however, Williams’s cell housed not only convicted criminals but men who were still awaiting trial and therefore had a need—and also the right—to talk to lawyers and family. The phone was set up to make outgoing calls only, and all the calls had to be collect. It would have been unthinkable, of course, for Williams to make business calls that began with an operator announcing bluntly, “I have a collect call from Jim Williams at the Chatham County Jail”—but he got around that easily enough. He would make a collect call to Mercer House, and then his mother or Barry Thomas would accept the charges and use three-way calling to put his call through. By routing his calls through Mercer House, Williams stayed in touch with major figures in the world of antiques without ever having to reveal that he was calling from jail. He chatted with Geza von Habsburg at Christie’s auction house in Geneva and placed a bid for a pair of imperial-presentation Fabergé cuff links made for a Russian grand duke. He spoke with the editor of
Antiques
magazine about an article he had promised to write on the eighteenth-century portrait artist Henrietta Johnston. Williams followed up each call with a short
note, dictated over the phone to Mercer House and typed on his engraved personal stationery—“It was good talking to you today. Hope to see you soon ….”

The pretense that he was calling from the dignified confines of Mercer House was a difficult ruse for Williams to carry off, as I discovered the first time I spoke with him. A television set blared in the background, and I could hear raucous shouts and an occasional high-pitched scream. Williams had been placed in a cell for homosexuals and the mentally unstable. He and his cell mates were segregated from the general jailhouse population for their own safety. The cell was known as the “pod.” It was twenty feet by twenty feet and held eight inmates. The mix of personalities confined in it created an unpredictable atmosphere.

“It all depends who’s here at any given time,” Williams explained. “Right now, there’s one other white inmate and five
garçons noirs.
Three of the five
noirs
play cards all day, but whenever there’s any music on TV they get up and dance and sing at the top of their lungs. That happens a lot, because the TV’s on from eight in the morning till two or three at night, with the volume turned up to scorch. I wear earplugs, and over that I clamp earphones so I can listen to tapes. But the noise from the TV cuts right through, and when they get to singing and stomping, I can barely hear my own music. I dread it when
Soul Train
comes on.

“The other two
noirs
are a pair of long-lost lovers who were reunited in here last week. There was much wailing and carrying on when they recognized each other—accusations of betrayal, declarations of love and forgiveness, weeping, laughing, screeching. It went on for hours. As we speak, they’re braiding each other’s hair into corn rows. Pretty soon they’ll be into face-slapping, and then they’ll probably have sex. The white inmate is a little weak in the head. They put him in here this morning, and he’s been rubbing the walls and preaching out loud ever since. We can’t make him stop. It’s a zoo.

“Things usually quiet down at feeding time, though. The menu usually consists of stale peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches
or a small slice of rancid meat. It’s completely inedible, of course, but my cell mates don’t know it, and it calms them down for a while. That’s when I make my phone calls. At other times, if I need to, I can usually bribe them into shutting up with cigarettes and candy bars I buy from the commissary cart.”

Williams discouraged his friends from coming to see him at the jail. “The visitors’ room is a long, narrow hall with a row of stools facing plate-glass windows,” he said. “Whole families come to see their criminal loved ones. Babies are crying, everybody is shouting to be heard, and nobody can hear anything. It’s bedlam.” Williams clearly preferred not to be seen in such humbling circumstances. The telephone suited his purposes far better. He generally made his social calls in the evenings. There were no ice cubes clinking in his glass, but he was allowed to smoke his cigarillos, and I could hear him puffing on them as he spoke.

“We’ve had a little excitement in here,” he told me one night in mid-November. “We have a new cell mate who crawls around on his hands and knees and barks like a dog all day long. Once in a while he lifts his leg and pees on the wall. We’ve complained, but nobody does anything about it. Yesterday afternoon while the man was asleep, I bribed the others into turning down the TV and being quiet so I could make a few quick business calls. I was in the middle of a conversation with an important art dealer in London about a painting I was offering for sale when the new inmate woke up and started barking. I kept right on talking. ‘Oh, that’s my Russian wolfhound,’ I said. But then the barking moved up an octave and turned into yapping. ‘What’s that one?’ the dealer asked. ‘A Shar-pei?’ ‘No, no,’ I said, ‘that’s a Yorkie,’ and then I cupped my hand half over the phone and shouted,
‘Won’t someone please put the dogs out in the garden?’
At that point I nodded at my other cell mates, and they tackled the madman and clapped their hands over his mouth. The dealer and I went on politely discussing the niceties of the English landscape tradition while my cell mates scuffled at my feet. There were grunts and muffled strangulation noises. I don’t know what the dealer thought, but in the end he bought the painting.”

Although Williams spoke with his customary self-assurance, he made no attempt in our conversations to conceal the grimness of his existence. He had no visual contact with the outside world. The cell’s six narrow windows were fitted with a muddy brown translucent glass, and the lights inside the cell stayed on twenty-four hours a day. Williams said he could not eat the food and lived mostly on peanuts and candy bought from the commissary. A hard bump had appeared on his forehead, and there was a ringing in his ears and a rash on his arms and back. When the rash worsened, he went to the doctor and found five other inmates in the waiting room with the same rash. “Neither the blankets nor the mattresses are cleaned between inmates,” he said, “and I have no confidence in the doctor here.” Several crowns had fallen off Williams’s molars, and there was no dentist at the jail. A trip to his own dentist could have been arranged, but he would have been forced to go in chains, shackled at the waist, so he dropped the matter.

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.”