Those Bones Are Not My Child (93 page)

Mason was all for calling J. B. Stoner to the stand. “Whereabouts unknown,” the paper said. “Jumped bail,” Vernon reported. “On vacation,” a crony maintained. “I’m confident that my client will not forfeit his bail,” Stoner’s attorney was quoted as saying. The bail bondsman merely grinned for the reporters. Lafayette continued to hope that the GBI agent who’d infiltrated a Klan family in Atlanta would be subpoenaed. A Kluxer had told the wired informant that he and his friends had killed nigger boys before and would do so again. That was in the April-dated memorandum Spence had secured from Judge Webber. There was no word from the snoopers on this angle. That the prosecution had tagged to Williams ten additional cases, one being Lubie Geter, mentioned in the wiretap, the other Clifford Jones, about whose murder several witnesses had given testimony to the police over a year ago, forced Inquiry to conclude that either the Brady file had been doctored or there’d been a hell of a lot of tampering with investigative reports before the DA’s office began assembling its case.

While Inquiry members continued to update the packets and look for an opening, others in the corridors those first few days converged on one name as the prize witness: “Cheryll Jenkins,” the name Williams had offered on May 22 when asked by the stakeout detail why he was on the bridge. To make sure he’d know where to meet her, a prospective
client he’d made an appointment with, Williams was checking out her address.

By the second day of the actual trial, security had been relaxed. The thousands of out-of-town and overseas reporters who’d been expected to create havoc with the courtroom seating never showed. Surprise witnesses and anticipated media throngs crowding into the sixty-seat press box were forgotten about. A space in the press box was made available for former mayoral candidate Mildred Glover. Seat passes were made available to the defendant’s parents, to attorneys’ relatives and errand runners, and for various friends of the court. Relatives of “official” and “unofficial” Missing and Murdered victims had to scramble for seats like any other miscellaneous persons.

Near the first checkpoint in the courthouse lobby, Zala noticed a law professor and her students, a class who’d been in attendance from December 28 to January 5 for jury selection, discussing the Miranda law and flipping through their notebooks to answer the professor’s question, how many times Williams had been questioned but not read his rights. Either they’d arrived too late to be seated upstairs in courtroom 404, or the trial had recessed early because of the expected blizzard. But people were still noisy overhead. Zala went through the surveillance, glad she’d taken Schumake’s advice, and headed for the stairs. Perhaps she would spot someone who fit the descriptions Sonny and Michael had given.

She’d been shocked by the eagerness people displayed to be picked as jurors. Some, of course, asked to be excused because of young dependents or ailing relatives at home; none on the grounds that the trial was a hoax. After a few rounds of elimination, the judge asked those remaining if they could live within the limits of sequestration and the prospect of a lengthy trial. A very few had asked to be excused, citing medical conditions or claustrophobia, or other reasons murmured so low only the hired lip readers who worked for either team understood and passed ahead to the tables on squares of yellow paper.

Asked if he or she had formed any opinion concerning the guilt or innocence of the defendant, each prospective juror had said no. Despite the round-the-clock repetition of “beast,” “fiend,” “mad-dog killer,” and “child snatcher finally jailed” from June to December. Despite the “no more murders since Williams’s arrest” official bulletins. Despite the well-publicized behavior of the authorities; state patrol roadblocks discontinued;
FBI agents withdrawn; undercover police on park duty reassigned; Task Force personnel drastically reduced; Task Force posters removed from phone booths, corner waste bins, public walls. Safety education programs in the schools were no more, civilian search teams had disbanded, Community Watch had wound down, people had stopped wearing green ribbons; but no prospective juror had formed an opinion concerning the defendant’s guilt, and Sunday sermons urged people to give thanks and return to normal.

Nor, they had said, were they related to or acquainted in any way with the defendant. The man whose picture, whose parents, whose bio, habits, home, dog, car, resumé, and psychological profile had filled the news for six months running. Not acquainted in any way with the man whose photo had been flashed at community centers, parks, skating rinks, music stores, funeral parlors, recording studios, schools, gas stations, movie houses, bus stops, and MARTA stations, the Neighborhood Art Center, Cap’n Peg’s fast-food joint, and apartment complexes from Dixie Hills to the Jackson Parkway Bridge as the attorneys’ foot soldiers scoured the city, frequently crossing the path of Inquiry scouts, looking for potential witnesses. Two prospective jurors who’d survived the first few rounds of peremptory challenges used to live in the Verbena—Anderson Park neighborhood, an erstwhile neighbor had notified the defense table.

“You didn’t miss anything this morning,” a woman on the landing was saying to her companion, whom she recognized as one of Mattie’s neighbors. “A bunch of landlords and apartment-house managers testified that no Cheryll Jenkins lives anywhere near the bridge. Like those guys know who the hell’s in them apartments.”

“So big deal. Since when do you need an alibi for driving over a bridge?”

Zala made way on the stairs for people coming from the Techwood trial. Judging from their dress and conversation, they were supporters of the “outside agitators” and “jungle joes,” the members of the Techwood Homes Defense Squad who had been charged in the spring with displaying weapons in public, and a few for possessing weapons without proper permit. Additional charges against three dated back to 1979 and 1980. For demonstrating on the Atlanta University campus when Lester Maddox was giving the commencement address and later when then First Lady Rosalynn Carter came to speak, they’d been charged
with disturbing the peace. Though those charges had long since been docketed, they were used again at the trial that had been going on since December 4. Things were apparently going well for the defendants, though they faced four-year sentences and fines of four thousand dollars.

Zala recognized the woman ahead of her at the corridor checkpoint as an aide who used to help pick jurors, help read the judge’s expressions, the opposing teams’, witnesses’, and jurors’. A host of lip readers, body-language experts, linguists, behaviorists, sociologists, criminologists, and psychologists were in court each day as guests of the prosecution, the defense, or the judge. It was their job to study postures, gestures, facial expressions, tics, eye movements, breathing rhythms, all the numerous variables that might help them determine the outcome of the trial. Along with the defendant’s family, the attorneys’ relatives, friends, and errand runners, a few members of STOP, court artists, and media people from newspapers not prestigious enough to secure them a seat in the press box, these experts had seat passes and filled up the first five rows on either side of the center aisle. Male relatives of victims on the Task Force list, unfamiliar to the bailiff, had frequently been locked out.

The Williams family seemed to be totally friendless in court. There was no cheering section for Wayne Williams other than his parents, who sat behind him slightly to one side or the other each day.

Past the checkpoint, Zala continued on to courtroom 404. Opportunity, means, and motive thus far had not been established as promised in the prosecution’s opening statement on January 5, day 1. Nor, as far as Zala could tell, had the prosecution even established that the two dead men fished from the Chattahoochee were in fact Cater and Payne and had been in fact murdered. Payne’s and Cater’s relatives disputed several key features of identification, just as several relatives of victims attached to the charges by “fiber pattern” disputed the clothing identified as their child’s. Binder, in cross-examining the coroners about Cater and Payne, had succeeded in having heart trouble, suicide, and accident not ruled out as cause of death. According to the law students who spent the recesses below by the vending machine, the whole trial was illegal anyway because of venue. The splash the stakeout team said they heard on May 22 would have occurred in the Cobb County sector of the river, not in Fulton County. On day 2, when the prosecution introduced
a twelve-foot model of the bridge, the place where their expert witnesses said the bodies had entered the water was also in Cobb County.

What did the prosecution have? A splash, some fibers, some hairs. On day 3, the stakeout officer who said he’d been a lifeguard and could distinguish the splash of a human body from that of a beaver was forced to answer no when Binder asked if he made any attempt to jump in and save the person he thought he’d heard hit the water. Watching the police on the Jackson Parkway Bridge attempt to simulate the May splash had become an October spectator sport. People watched the authorities heave rocks, cinder blocks, and other objects into the river, watched them try to attempt to muffle the sound of car tires going over the expansion plates in the bridge to justify “Williams sneaked across,” and pointed out to one another how high the rail had been before it had been lowered, asking whether the short, pudgy Williams could have heaved Cater over the rail unassisted. As for the prosecution’s witnesses, so far they were on the order of the apartment managers Mattie’s neighbor had said the courtroom laughed at.

But then, what did the defense have? They had no money, that was for sure. It was as out-of-pocket an enterprise as Inquiry. From STOP members, Zala had heard in the corridors that there hadn’t been a case quarter to retain Dettlinger’s services. This had been said over and over and early on to squelch the rumor that the reason he’d turned down the prosecution team’s offer was that they hadn’t met his price. The defense didn’t have much by way of appeal, either. Binder was abrasive, and Welcome fumbled badly with names and dates. On the other hand, Jack Mallard, the assistant district attorney handling the questioning, won jurors over each time he made an incisive point, then smiled slyly their way. It looked bad for Williams.

Squares of a manila folder were taped over the door panes of courtroom 404. When Zala pushed at the door, she felt resistance on the other side. She could hear Attorney Binder shouting at a witness. There was no way that the body fished out of the river on May 24 and ID’d as Cater could have been the splash heard on May 22; bodies don’t decompose that badly in water, and he’d been seen on May 21. Actually, Zala had heard, Cater had been reported seen on the twenty-third as well. She leaned her ear to the crack. Stivers, the Fulton County medical examiner, argued that bodies can decompose swiftly. Binder came
at him again. Stivers was firm: No, he wasn’t trying to make the autopsy fit the splash theory, the facts were facts.

Zala draped her coat over her arm and headed for the water fountain, then sat on the stairs and eavesdropped on the two officers at the checkpoint.

They were discussing how they would conduct the trial. She sat up straight when she heard them name two witnesses they would call to take the stand: Hosea Williams, state rep and community worker, who’d had many a run-in with the police over, presumably, traffic violations; and state rep and civil rights leader Tyrone Brooks, who apparently was not a favorite either with the two white policemen. Hosea Williams and Tyrone Brooks were the subjects Zala had heard being discussed whenever she dropped by Paschal’s to pick up chicken dinners to take home. The cigar smokers who held court in the entranceway and the toothpick chewers who lounged against the window of the pool hall two doors down often traded versions of what must have transpired the day Williams and Brooks went to Wayne Williams’s house before his arrest. The stories differed widely but converged on two points: The politicos had urged him to tell all, to name names, to come clean. And he’d said, no way.

The Kibitzers downtown were certain that Hosea had promised to get a huge portion of the reward awarded to Wayne Williams’s family if he would talk. Wayne was in cahoots with a bunch of religious kooks who molested children, then disposed of them so they wouldn’t squeal. Zala had heard them theorizing as to what would come out at the trial and how it might impact on Andy Young’s administration if it looked like Black people couldn’t run the city. “If Maynard had just walked out of his house and gone around the corner to express condolences to Mrs. Mathis, none of this would’ve happened,” one of the cigar smokers had said the other night. This version of the case Zala had had her fill of: the notion that it never was a real case, but that the media had exploited the grief-stricken parents of the kind of kids that often got into deadly trouble; then, the thing blown up to create a phantom whodunit, those predisposed to exploit the situation got into the act; and next thing you knew, the administration was saddled with a nationally known embarrassment.

The officers at the corridor checkpoint seemed to have not even a
chewed toothpick’s worth of evidence for feeling that Hosea Williams and Tyrone Brooks knew what Wayne Williams had been up to for two years.

No matter how Zala strained to hear around the corner, no sound came from the courtroom. There’d been times when the only activity going on at all was the sketching. Often, for as long as five minutes, Judge Cooper would stare into space as the two attorneys waited for him to render an opinion as to whether the jury would be escorted out to the jury room while the attorney played out the scenario he thought relevant and legally appropriate, or could remain to hear it. The jurors would doze, waiting. The bailiff, having admonished spectators to put newspapers away and cease talking, would lean against the wall, waiting. The sketch artists alone remained busy, one fist full of drawing pencils, pens, and colored chalks, steadying the sketch pads, the other hand working swiftly.

Zala sat on the steps hugging her coat and bag and stared at the shadows thrown on the floor by the banister rails. For a minute she was back in the Georgia Sea Islands, squinting at the blue-green-mauve gray of the Spanish moss that hung from the live oaks in the cemetery five walking miles from Cousin Sonia’s house. Sonny kneeling at her father’s grave, examining the decorations. Sonny turning to ask her if she knew for sure that she was her father’s daughter. Spence had gotten around finally to telling the family that he’d been adopted. The issue of blood ties and obligations was very much Sonny’s theme for two straight weeks.