Read Online Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt - Free Book Online

take you. He drives trailer trucks back and forth, and he likes to have company in the cab. I should warn you, though, he makes the trip in just under three hours. Nobody who’s ever been on one of those wild rides has ever gone back for a second one.”
    A girl with a red ponytail was talking on the telephone in the kitchen. Joe told me she was a disk jockey for one of Savannah’s Top 40 radio stations. He added that a man she was dating had just been arrested for dealing cocaine and for making terroristic threats against the police. In the dining room, a blond man dressed in a white shirt and white slacks was cutting a woman’s hair. “That’s Jerry Spence,” said Joe. “He cuts all our hair, and right now he’s doing Ann, my first and second wife. Ann and I were childhood sweethearts. We got married the first time while I was in law school and the second time on the anniversary of our first divorce. And, of course, you’ve met Mandy here. She’s my fourth wife-in-waiting.”
    “What’s she waiting for?” I asked.
    “For her divorce to come through,” said Joe. “There’s no telling when that will happen, because her attorney’s a lazy cuss who hasn’t gotten around to filing the papers yet. I guess we can’t complain about it, though, because I’m her attorney.”
    The social center of the house was the kitchen, which overlooked the garden. It had a piano in it, and it was from this room that the music and laughter spilled out over the garden walls up and down the street.
    “I notice you leave your front door unlocked,” I said.
    “That’s right. It got to be too much trouble going down to answer it all the time. That was one of my third wife’s grievances.” Odom laughed.
    “Well, the front door happens to be one of my grievances too,” said Mandy. “Especially since the burglary last week. Joe says it wasn’t a burglary, but I say it was. It was four o’clock in the morning, and we were both in bed. I woke up and heard noises downstairs, and I shook Joe. ‘Joe, we got burglars,’ I said. But he didn’t care. ‘Oh, it could be anybody,’ he said. But I was sure it was burglars. They were opening cupboards and drawers and I don’t know what-all. So I shook him again and I said, ‘Joe, go down and see.’ Well, Mr. Cool just lifted his head a few inches off the pillow and hollered, ‘Angus? That you, Angus?’ There was total silence, of course. So Joe says to me, ‘Well, if we got a burglar, his name ain’t Angus.’ Then he went back to sleep. But it
was
a burglar, and we were lucky we weren’t murdered.”
    Joe started to play the piano in the middle of Mandy’s story. “In the morning,” he said, “three bottles of liquor and a half dozen glasses were missing. That doesn’t sound like a burglary to me. It sounds like a party. And the only thing that annoys me about it is we weren’t invited.”
    Joe’s smile indicated that the matter was closed, at least as far as he was concerned. “Anyway, as I was saying, I originally left the door unlocked as a matter of convenience. But pretty soon I realized that whenever the doorbell
did
ring, it was someone I didn’t know. So the bell became a signal that a stranger was at the door. I’ve learned never to answer it myself when that happens, because it’s likely to be a deputy sheriff wanting to serve me with some kind of paper, and of course I don’t need to be home for that.”
    “Or for little old ladies with hammers in their hands,” I said.
    “Hammers? I don’t believe I know any old ladies who carry hammers.”
    “The one who punched out your windows certainly had a hammer.”
    “A little old lady did that?” Joe looked surprised. “I was wondering how that happened. We thought somebody slammed the door too hard. You mean you saw her do it?”
    “I did.”
    “Well, we’ve got our share of little old ladies here in Savannah,” said Joe, “and it looks like one of them’s unhappy with me.” He did not seem