Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

My 9 highlights

• Did Williams think he would be acquitted at a third trial? “Yes, of course,” he said. What would be the deciding factor? “Money,” he said. “My case has been about money from the very beginning. The D.A. spends the taxpayers’ money, and I spend my own—five hundred thousand dollars of it so far. The criminal-justice system is rigged that way, in case you haven’t noticed. I’d still be in jail if I hadn’t been able to pay for lawyers and experts and their endless expenses. So far I’ve managed to stay even with the prosecution. Dollar for dollar, tit for tat.”

• In 1964, Martin Luther King declared Savannah “the most desegregated city in the South.”

• “How does it feel to be nouveau riche?” he was asked on one occasion. “It’s the riche that counts,” Williams answered.

• The noise and the fumes of the buses irritated the residents of Lafayette Square, but the wedding parties nearly drove them to distraction. For these affairs, Joe literally annexed the square as his own front yard. He put a Dixieland band on the portico over his front door and pitched tents in the square without bothering to obtain a permit. The square reverberated with blaring music and the shrill chatter of a hundred wedding guests milling about. “Everybody loves a wedding,” said Joe, grievously miscalculating the tolerance of his neighbors.

• The murder victim in that case had been a thirty-three-year-old man from Columbus, Georgia, who had come to Savannah to judge a beauty pageant. Married and with two children, he was stomped to death in a darkened parking garage by four U.S. Army Rangers.

• The voice came over my shoulder like a murmuring breeze. “Oh, don’t do that,” it said. “Whatever you do, don’t do that.” I was standing at the sales counter in Clary’s drugstore after breakfast one morning, and when I turned around, I was confronted by a scarecrow of a man. He had a long neck and a protruding Adam’s apple. Lank brown hair hung over his forehead.

• For emphasis, she threw objects across the room—pillows, drinks, even Lulu the poodle.

• In private, he expressed bitterness. What galled him most was not his conviction or the harm done to his reputation or even the cost of his defense; it was the indignity of having been charged with any crime at all. From the outset, he had assumed that his word as a gentleman would be accepted and that the whole affair would be settled quietly, the way Savannah had settled past incidents involving prominent suspects—the mysterious bludgeoning of a socialite at the beach not long ago, for example, or the tumble down a flight of stairs that killed a rich man who was about to divorce his wife, or the case of the spinster who embalmed her lover’s bullet-riddled body before calling the police.

• “Rule number two: Never go south of Gaston Street. A true Savannahian is a NOG. NOG means ‘north of Gaston.’ We stay in the old part of town. We don’t do the Mall. We don’t do the southside unless we’re invited to a party for rich people out at The Landings. Everything south of Gaston Street is North Jacksonville to us, and ordinarily we leave it alone.