Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil Read Online Free PDF Page A

numbers. You’re eliminated if you roll three times in succession without getting any of the numbers you need. The object is to get all four numbers in the fewest rolls.”
    Williams was sure he could improve the odds by sheer concentration.“Dice have six sides,” he said, “so you have a one-in-six chance of getting your number when you throw them. If you do any better than that, you beat the law of averages. Concentration definitely helps. That’s been proved. Back in the nineteen-thirties, Duke university did a study with a machine that could throw dice. First they had it throw dice when nobody was in the building, and the numbers came up strictly according to the law of averages. Then they put a man in the next room and had him concentrate on various numbers to see if that would beat the odds. It did. Then they put him in the same room, still concentrating, and the machine beat the odds again, by an even wider margin. When the man rolled the dice himself, using a cup, he did better still. When he finally rolled the dice with his bare hand, he did best of all.”
    From the few rounds we played, I could not say whether Psycho Dice really worked. Williams had no doubt that it did. He saw proof of it at every turn. When I needed a five and rolled a two, he proclaimed, “Aha! You know what’s on the other side of a two, don’t you? Five!”
    I could not let this pass. “If we’d been betting, I would have lost anyway, wouldn’t I?”
    “Yes, but look how close you came. You see, the same concentration that makes Psycho Dice work can make most things in life work. I’ve never been sick a day in my life except for a common cold once in a while. I just can’t be bothered. I don’t have the time. Being sick is a luxury. I concentrate on being well. Danny didn’t do more than let off steam tonight, because I cooled him down. I was concentrating on that.”
    I was tempted not to let that remark pass, either. But it was late. I rose to leave. “Isn’t it possible that other people will turn their mental energy on you?” I asked.
    “They try to all the time,” Williams said with a wry smile. “I’m told a lot of people pray fervently night after night that I’ll invite them to my Christmas parties.”
    “I can understand that,” I said. “From what I’ve heard, it’s the best party in Savannah.”
    “I’ll invite you to the next one, and you can judge for yourself.” Williams fixed me with an impenetrable look. “You know I have two Christmas parties, not just one. Both are black-tie. The first party is the famous one. It’s the one that gets written up in the newspapers, the one the high and mighty of Savannah come to. The second party is the next night. It’s the one the papers never write about. It’s … for gentlemen only. Which party would you like to be invited to?”
    “The one,” I said, “least likely to involve gunfire.”

Chapter 2

DESTINATION UNKNOWN

    It would be stretching things to say that I had left New York and come to Savannah as a result of eating a paillard of veal served on a bed of wilted radicchio. But there is a connection.
    I had lived in New York for twenty years, writing and editing for magazines. Thomas Carlyle once said that magazine work is below street-sweeping as a trade, but in mid-twentieth-century New York it was a reasonably respectable calling. I wrote for
Esquire
and had served as editor of
New York
magazine. At any rate, in the early 1980s it happened that New York City had embarked on a
nouvelle cuisine
eating binge. Every week, two or three elegant new restaurants would open to great fanfare. The décor would be sleek postmodern, the food superlative, and the prices steep. Dining out became the most popular leisure activity in town; it replaced going to discotheques, the theater, and concerts. Talk of food and restaurants dominated conversations. One evening, as a waiter at one of these places was reciting a lengthy monologue of specials, I scanned the