Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (42 page)

Lawton steps up to cross-examine Williams. Williams regards him with undisguised contempt.

“You indicated that you and Hansford had sex from time to time,” says Lawton. “Is that right?”

“Mm-hmmm.”

“And that you feel that sex is a perfectly natural thing.”

“Well, you see, it’s not only just natural. At the time, Danny was a hustler on Bull Street selling himself to anybody who wanted to pay for it.”

“Exactly,” says Lawton. “Right. So he was a street kid and had been since fourteen years of age, I think you indicated?”

“Oh, yes.”

“An eighth-grade dropout, and something on the order of twenty years old, is that right?”

“He was twenty-one. He was no child.”

“I wouldn’t, of course, dispute your right to have any relationship you wanted to. But you were fifty-two and he was twenty-one. Was that a natural and normal relationship?”

“Mm-hmmm. I was fifty-two years old, but he had fifty-two years’ worth of mileage on him.”

“I don’t have anything else,” said Lawton. “Thank you very much.”

Williams’s choice of words may not have been what Seiler had hoped for, but his frankness has made it unnecessary for Lawton to call Hansford’s two friends in rebuttal. That, Seiler believes, has spared Williams major damage.

During a recess, Seiler tells me Judge Oliver is old and tired. He is also terrified of being reversed by the state supreme court again, so he is allowing the defense to bring in a lot more evidence about Danny Hansford’s history of violence than he did in the first trial. “We wouldn’t get half that stuff past a younger, more able judge,” says Seiler.

Barry Thomas, the foreman of Williams’s shop, is one of the people permitted by Judge Oliver to tell a story about Hansford’s violence. A slightly built Scotsman, Thomas recalls how, without warning and for no apparent reason, Hansford physically attacked him at Mercer House two months before he died.

“It was the end of the workday,” Thomas says, “and I was getting ready to leave through the front door of Mercer House when I heard these footsteps behind me. I looked around and saw Mr. Hansford charging toward me. He just went at me and kicked me in the stomach. Jim grabbed him and pulled him off me and said, ‘You better get out of here. Danny’s gone crazy.’

“Well, a couple of days later, Mr. Hansford apologized for kicking me. He said he didn’t know why he did it. He wanted me to kick him in the stomach in return, but I said no. I thought he was sick. I have no idea why he attacked me, other than it was just his nature.”

Thomas steps down after testifying. As he goes out into the hall, a hand reaches up and grabs his ear. He lets out a sharp
“Aiieee!”
as the door closes behind him. I slip into the corridor and see that the hand clutching his ear is Minerva’s.

“Why did you say that?”
she hisses.

“Say what?” says Thomas, grabbing hold of her arm.

“About the dead boy,” she says, giving his ear a sharp yank. “Why did you say that?”

“’Cause it’s true,” says Thomas. “He kicked me in the stomach for no good reason.”

“That don’t matter,” she says, letting go of his ear. “You got the boy angry again. Now we gotta calm him down.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Git me some parchment. I need a pen too. One that’s got red ink in it. And let me think … scissors! Gotta have a scissors. And a candle and a Bible. I need ’em quick!”

“Parchment?” Thomas asks. “Where am I gonna fi—” Minerva grabs him by the ear again.

“I know where you can get a Bible,” I say, stepping forward. “At the motel across the street.”

Five dollars coaxes a Bible and a candle out of the desk clerk at the motel. At Friedman’s art supply shop, Thomas buys a red felt-tip pen and a package of heavy vellum tracing paper, which is the closest thing they have to parchment. When he starts to pay, Minerva puts her hand on his arm and stops him. “Lay the money down on the table first,” she says. “That way the lady can’t work with your hand. Kiss it before you lay it down, so it will come back to you.” Thomas obediently kisses the money and lays it on the counter.

Back in Thomas’s car, Minerva spreads out her paraphernalia on the backseat and says, “Take us close as we can git to water.” Thomas drives down the steep cobblestone street leading from Factors’ Walk to River Street. We move slowly along the River Street esplanade—the docks on one side, the old warehouses on the other. Minerva points to an old three-masted schooner. “Right there.”

Thomas pulls to a stop at the ship’s bow, and Minerva lights the candle and begins to chant. With the red pen, she scribbles phrases from the Bible onto the vellum. When she is done, she cuts the vellum into small squares and sets them on fire one by one. Glowing ashes float around like black snowflakes inside the car.

“Take these three pieces I ain’t burned,” she says to Thomas, “and tell Mr. Jim to put them in his shoes.”

Suddenly, I become aware that there are four of us present, not three. The fourth is a policeman who is looking in the window about a foot from my face.

“Ma’am?” he says.

Minerva holds the burning candle in front of her face and stares at the policeman through her purple glasses. She opens her mouth wide. “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” she says. Then she puts the candle in her mouth and closes her lips around it. As she does, the light sets her cheeks aglow like a jack-o’-lantern. The glow goes out with a sizzle. She hands the extinguished candle to the policeman. “We ain’t burnin’ no more,” she says softly. She taps Thomas on the shoulder, and as we pull away, I can see the policeman in the side-view mirror. He is still holding the candle and looking blankly in our direction when we turn the corner.

Back in the courtroom, a psychiatrist testifies that as a child Danny Hansford was a breath holder. What he means by that, he says, is that Danny used to torment his mother by holding his breath until he turned blue and passed out.

Minerva will not testify after all. She has suddenly realized that she knows one of the jurors, and he knows her.

“I done some black magic on him,” she says. “He’s still mad as hell.” She will not say what she did to him or why.

Dr. Irving Stone, the forensic pathologist from Dallas, takes the stand and makes forceful arguments for the defense about the gunshot residue and other aspects of the shooting, as Seiler said he would. His comments are supported by Joseph Burton, the medical examiner from Atlanta who testified in the first trial and has returned for this one. More compelling than their testimony, however, is the casual shoptalk they engage in while waiting in the corridor to take the stand.

“I identified 357 bodies in that Delta crash we had in Dallas the other day,” says Stone. “Got thirty a day. It took twelve days.”

“Jeez,” says Burton. “Nice going. How many did you get from fingerprints?”

“Seventy-four percent.”

“How about dental records?”

“Can’t remember. Ten percent, maybe. My favorite was the one I got from a pacemaker. Noted the serial number. Called the manufacturer. Got the name that way.”

Seiler has saved his two surprise witnesses for late in the trial.