Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (41 page)

Spencer Lawton leads off with the police photographer, Sergeant Donna Stevens, who gives a photographic tour of Mercer House, using huge blowups on an easel. “This is an outside shot of the house,” she says. “This is the living room …. This is the hallway, and that’s a grandfather clock dumped over …. This is the doorway to the study, showing the victim laying on the floor …. This is a shot of blood on the carpet ….”

When she is finished, Seiler steps up for cross-examination.

“Do you remember photographing a pouch and a chair leg?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says.

“Did you photograph it when you first got there?”

“Yes, sir, I did.”

“And did you photograph it again after the detectives and other people had been stirring around in there?”

“Yes.”

Seiler holds up the two photographs showing the pouch and the chair leg in different positions. “I’m interested in the traveling pouch,” he says, raising an eyebrow. Sergeant Stevens concedes that the chair has been moved, but she denies that the pouch has been moved. Seiler asks if by looking at the designs on the carpet she can see that indeed the pouch, too, has been moved. No, she does not see any such thing. Seiler keeps at it. “Well, let’s look at the first picture and count the dots in the carpet,” he says. “One … two … three … four … five … six! And in the second picture there are only
two
dots, right?”

Sergeant Stevens grudgingly admits that the pouch has also been moved.

The jury is entertained by Seiler’s self-assured courtroom manner. He strides back and forth, impeccably groomed in custom-tailored suits, French cuffs, highly polished shoes. He thunders and growls. His tone shifts from curiosity to sarcasm to outrage to surprise. Lawton is dull by comparison. He stands flat-footed in a rumpled suit. His manner is shy and unassuming. He flinches whenever Seiler shouts “Objection! Mr. Lawton is leading the witness again.” Seiler does this repeatedly to unnerve Lawton and send a message to the jury that the D.A. lacks a grasp of basic courtroom procedure.

At Clary’s drugstore, Ruth wonders out loud whether this trial will be as “juicy” as the first. Luther Driggers says he thinks Williams made a mistake after shooting Hansford. “He should have taken Danny’s body out west, pulled his teeth, dissolved them in nitric acid, peeled off his skin, and fed it to the crabs.”

“Why such a complicated cover-up?” Ruth asks.

Luther shrugs. “It beats leaving the body on the floor of Mercer House.”

“Well, whatever Jim Williams should have done with the body, he’s going about his defense the wrong way,” says Quentin Lovejoy, putting his coffee cup down gently. Mr. Lovejoy is a soft-spoken classics scholar in his mid-sixties; he lives with his maiden aunt in a high-Victorian townhouse. “All this talk about Danny Hansford being a violent, brutal criminal! Jim Williams does himself no credit blaspheming the boy that way.”

“But Quentin,” Ruth protests, “Danny Hansford beat up his sister! His mother took out a police warrant against him. He’d been arrested umpteen times. He’d been in jail. He was a common criminal!”

“Not at all,” says Mr. Lovejoy in a voice slightly louder than a whisper. “The only crime that boy ever committed was turnin’ twenty.”

Seiler objects to the repeated use of the term “crime scene” by prosecution witnesses. “It has not yet been established that any crime has been committed here,” he says.

Judge Oliver apparently does not hear Seiler. In fact, the judge appears to be dozing. His eyes are closed, his chin is resting on his chest. The judge has made it abundantly clear, by heaving deep sighs and becoming increasingly cranky, that he is bored with this retrial. His apparent catnaps are causing comment in the courthouse. At any rate, he does not respond to Seiler’s protest. Less than a minute later, a prosecution witness says “crime scene” again, and Seiler lets it pass.

In the corridor during a recess, a pair of purple glasses catches my eye. Minerva is sitting on a bench with a plastic shopping bag on her lap. I sit down next to her, and she tells me she has been asked to appear as a character witness for Williams. The defense
hopes she will appeal to the seven blacks on the jury. She will identify herself as a laundress, which is her part-time profession, but from the witness stand she’ll be in a position to make direct eye contact with the D.A., the judge, and the members of the jury. This will enable her to put a curse on every one of them.

While she waits, she sits out in the hall, humming and gurgling softly to herself. Occasionally, she cracks open the door and peers into the courtroom.

Danny Hansford’s mother, Emily Bannister, also sits in the corridor. Sonny Seiler has listed her as a defense witness, just as Bobby Lee Cook did, in order to keep her out of the courtroom. She is quiet and composed, and it strikes me that Seiler’s main concern is not that she will cause a disturbance in front of the jury but that her waiflike appearance will win their hearts. In any case, she still refuses to talk to the press (or to me). As the trial progresses, Mrs. Bannister sits in the corridor just outside the courtroom door reading, writing notes in a journal, and needlepointing.

The first Saturday in court, both Sonny Seiler and Judge Oliver appear to be on edge. They are worried about the Georgia–Mississippi State game, which is taking place concurrently in Athens. Seiler stations an associate in the corridor listening to the play-by-play on a portable radio. Oliver, a past president of the University of Georgia Club, asks Seiler to keep him advised of the situation. Seiler does so during whispered conferences at the bench. Georgia wins, 20 to 7.

Monday morning. Williams testifies. Standing outside the courtroom beforehand, he appears relaxed. “Sonny called me last night to tell me to act humble and remorseful,” he says. “I don’t know if I can manage that, but I am making a sincere effort to
look impoverished. I’m wearing the same blue blazer I wore on Friday. It will give the jury the impression I haven’t got anything else to wear. What they won’t know is that it’s a custom-made Dunhill jacket, and that the buttons are eighteen-carat Georgia gold.”

Seiler puts his new game plan into effect. Before Williams takes the stand, his sister escorts his mother out of the courtroom. On direct examination, Seiler asks Williams to explain his relationship with Danny Hansford.

“He was a nice fellow,” Williams says. “He could be charming. He had his girlfriend, I had mine. But to me, sex is just a natural thing. We’d had sex a few times. Didn’t bother me. Didn’t bother him. I had my girlfriend, and he had his. It was just an occasional, natural thing that happened.”

The expressions on the jurors’ faces suggest they do not find this arrangement natural at all.