Flat Lake in Winter

by Joseph T. Klempner

  Finally, Fielder knew he had the right to request the assignment of an associate counsel, another defense lawyer to work alongside him, at a rate only slightly lower than his own lead-counsel rate. But here, too, he decided to hold off. It wasn’t for nothing that Matt Fielder had chosen to make his new home in a remote section of the Adirondack Mountains. He’d come to like living alone, and he’d always preferred working alone. If the CDO felt he needed associate counsel, they wouldn’t be bashful about letting him know. In the meantime, he’d wait for Kevin Doyle to call and suggest it. Doyle knew where to find Fielder, after all. That much was clear.

  THAT NIGHT, FIELDER sat in front of his wood-burning stove. It was warm enough to keep the doors of the stove half open. He watched as the flames licked at logs of ash, oak, maple, and birch. The first summer he’d bought the land, he’d marked the dead trees with bands of red ribbon, so they’d be easy to spot even after the living ones had dropped their leaves and were indistinguishable from the dead ones. When he hadn’t been building his cabin, he’d been busy cutting, splitting, and stacking wood, until he had a pile high enough to get him through the most ferocious winter imaginable.

  He could tell the story behind every log he burned. Not only what kind of wood it was, but precisely which tree it had come from, and which section of the trunk. Whether he’d had to top the tree before felling it; whether it had fallen true or fooled him (which was rare, but had happened once or twice); how difficult it had been to cut up, split, and haul; how solid or rotten it was inside; what insect infestation or other blight had caused it to die in the first place; and how long it had had a chance to season.

  He’d come to feel the same way about burning wood that he imagined a hunter must feel about eating meat. He’d never learned to lay a log on a fire without suffering some degree of pain over the realization that he was about to destroy it forever. No wonder some groups of Native Americans had solemnly begged their prey for forgiveness even as they sat down to feast upon it. It was a love-hate thing, a struggle over the desire to preserve, and the need to survive. But Fielder the wood-burner had also come to feel a slight but significant moral edge over the meat-eaters, at least so long as he had a good supply of red-ribboned trees to fell: He spared the living. But what did that make him? A scavenger, reduced to picking at the carcasses of the already-dead. Was that any better?

  His thoughts turned to Jonathan Hamilton, alone in his cell at the Cedar Falls jail, with no fire to warm him. What was it, he wondered, that had gone so horribly wrong in Jonathan’s poor, damaged brain, that had suddenly compelled him to lash out at the two people he should have loved and respected more than anyone else in the world? What on earth could possibly have triggered such terrible, murderous rage?

  If Matt Fielder had no answers to those questions, it was reasonable to speculate that neither did Jonathan Hamilton himself. At that very moment - at least according to the entries in the log kept by the night-duty officer - he lay fast asleep on the cot that, when folded down, took up a third of the six-by-nine cell that had become his home a week earlier. If Jonathan was at the eye of the storm that was just then beginning to brew over the nation’s youngest death-penalty statute, he certainly gave no sign of recognition of his special status. Not that that fact is altogether surprising; ask any meteorologist, and he’ll tell you that one of the very first lessons learned about truly violent weather is that there’s often a dead calm at the center.

  But if Jonathan slept that evening, his lawyer did not. Sixty miles to the southeast, Fielder sat fully awake, staring at the flames and embers of the fire in the stove in front of him, but all the while composing in his mind endless lists of things he’d be needing to do for a client so profoundly ill-equipped that he was unable to help himself. And so the process was already at work: the process which some twenty-five years earlier had driven Fielder from a minor-league baseball park in Galveston, Texas, to a major law school in Ann Arbor, Michigan; that had caused him to suddenly come awake one day and lift his head in the middle of a first-year criminal-law class; that had put him to work for underdog after miserable underdog in his Legal Aid days; that had sent him off to something they called Death School, only to leave him convinced he was emotionally unprepared to do the work they were asking him to do. The same process that, when he’d listened to the message from Kevin Doyle that Monday afternoon, had forced his hand to pick up the phone, return the call, and grudgingly agree to be the one to do whatever it was that had to be done, to put every bit of learning, experience, wisdom, and strength he’d ever acquired - in other words, every ounce of his being - into a struggle that, in the most literal sense imaginable, was nothing less than a matter of life and death.

  WHEN MATT FIELDER had risen from the corner table in the Cedar Falls bar to bid Pearson Gunn good-bye, Gunn had also stood up, extended a large paw of a hand toward Fielder, and grunted something that sounded like, “Seeya.” Then, as soon as Fielder was out the door, Gunn had caught Pete’s eye, signaled his need for another pitcher, and sat back down. If Matt Fielder did his best thinking in front of a fire, Pearson Gunn did his over a seemingly endless supply of Adirondack Amber. He’d sat there for the next two and a half hours - drinking, staring straight ahead, and scheming. Around eleven, Pete had called Molly’s Cab Service and told Molly Molloy that it was time for what they referred to as the “Gunn run.”

  When Gunn woke up the following day, he had no trace of a hangover. He prepared and downed his usual breakfast of six eggs, a dozen slices of bacon, and four slabs of bread, washed down with three cups of black coffee hot enough to lift the skin off a rabbit.

  That out of the way, Gunn got ready to go to work.

  * * *

  HILLARY MUNSON HAS what she likes to call a no-frills education. She is a product of the New York City public school system, where she learned reading, writing, arithmetic, and how to fend off an attacker wielding a box-cutter. She earned an undergraduate degree in psychology from SUNY/New Paltz, and an M.S.W. from Albany State. While in school, she wasn’t a member of the debating team or the thespian society; she didn’t play field hockey; she didn’t date. What she did do was to work full-time at a women’s shelter and a drug rehabilitation program. In the process, she paid her tuition, room, and board, and managed to help more than a few people along the way.

  After getting her M.S.W., Hillary had teamed up with another graduate, Lois Miller. Together they’d founded Miller and Munson, a psychology social work team offering its assistance to corporations, municipalities, schools, and other entities in need of programs for individuals with problems in areas such as substance abuse, job retraining, child rearing, and crisis intervention. They opened a small, windowless office on the second floor of a run-down building in downtown Albany.

  In their first full year of operation, 1992, they landed three clients and netted $2,170.

  By mid-1993, they were deep in debt and three months behind in their rent. Then Hillary’s younger brother got arrested for breaking and entering a storefront on Eagle Street. He was promptly indicted for burglary in the third degree, a Class D felony carrying as much as two-and-a-third to seven years in state prison. Hillary went to see her brother’s lawyer, an earnest but overworked young public defender who figured that, with plea-bargaining, he might be able to keep the damage down to one-to-three. Hillary proposed that she present the court with a comprehensive alternative sentencing proposal, including counseling, job training, and community service. The lawyer told her to give it a try; it probably couldn’t hurt.

  The proposal ran to eleven pages, neatly typed and single-spaced. It included a thorough case history of the defendant, an assessment of his needs, and a strategy for his rehabilitation. The judge was so impressed that he placed the defendant on probation, with the special condition that he be monitored by Miller and Munson, who would issue periodic reports directly to the judge. Their services were to be paid out of public funds.

  Within two years, the firm had become a s
taple of the court system, with a broad range of clients from County Court, Family Court, and Juvenile Hall. Every lawyer in Albany County came to know that if you wanted to keep a defendant out of prison, gain custody of a child, or rescue a budding delinquent, you picked up the phone and called the gals at M&M.

  By 1995, with New York’s capital-punishment statute about to become law, Hillary Munson had been one of a select few non-lawyers invited by Kevin Doyle to attend Death School. Arriving late to one of the lectures, she’d tripped over a briefcase and scattered her notes in the aisle. The lawyer who’d helped her retrieve her notes (who also happened to be the culprit who had carelessly left his briefcase protruding into the aisle) took her to lunch by way of apology. He was single and was hardly the first man to be taken with Hillary’s good looks. She has a small face with delicate features and a captivating smile, framed by a mane of dark curly hair that bounces as she moves. The two of them got along well, and at the end of the meal they traded business cards.

  The name on his card was Matthew J. Fielder.

  THE WAY PEARSON GUNN figured it, his first job was to rule out the possibility, however slight, that anyone other than Jonathan Hamilton had committed the murders. With that in mind, he picked up the phone and dialed a number he knew by heart. The reason Gunn still had a rotary phone was that he was firmly convinced that the push-button ones were a passing fad that would soon go out of style, along with digital clocks, air conditioners, and cars with automatic transmissions. The number that Gunn dialed belonged to a source of his at the state police barracks in Saranac Lake. Although Gunn refuses to this day to name his source, it was likely none other than Captain Roger Duquesne, the same man who had been rather vaguely identified as “the responding supervising officer” to show up at the Hamilton estate the morning of the killings.

  Gunn himself had been a trooper for fifteen years, before he’d been forced out of the ranks in the aftermath of a severe beating administered to a suspect arrested in connection with the rape/murder of a six-year-old girl at the Blue Mountain Lake campground. Gunn and Duquesne had been partners at the time. Gunn had “taken the fall” for the beating, testifying at a departmental hearing that Duquesne had been nowhere in the vicinity when the suspect had injured himself by falling down a flight of stairs, three times. The hearing examiners found the story incredible, but without Gunn’s implication of Duquesne, Gunn’s was the only head to roll. As a result, Gunn became an ex-trooper and a private investigator, while Duquesne eventually rose to the rank of captain. But loyalty is a virtue second to none in law enforcement, and from that day on, Pearson Gunn has never lacked for a confidential source within the barracks.

  So while Gunn refuses to confirm the fact, and Duquesne steadfastly denies it in both English and French, it is highly probable that the two men met sometime over that weekend, most likely late Saturday night. What is certain is that on Monday morning (to Gunn, any time before 3:00 p.m. still counts as morning), Gunn showed up at Matt Fielder’s cabin near Big Moose and presented his report.

  Gunn’s “report” was an oral one. He’d learned as a trooper that whenever you took notes, sooner or later some smart-ass defense lawyer was going to get ahold of them, put them under a microscope, and manage to make a fool out of you and a choirboy out of his client. Later, as a defense witness, he’d found the rules were pretty much the same, only reversed - there, it was the DA who ended up with the defense’s notes. So Gunn had learned to store almost everything in his head. And as long as he stuck to his limit of three pitchers of Adirondack Amber in the space of any twenty-four-hour period, his system seemed to work pretty well.

  What Gunn reported orally to Fielder was that in the minds of the state police and the district attorney, this one was a no-brainer, an absolute lock, a rock crusher. The investigators had found and photographed a blood trail that began in the victims’ bedroom, led down the stairs and out the door, and continued all the way to the bathroom in Jonathan Hamilton’s cottage. In the back of a vanity cabinet that contained Jonathan’s sink, they’d found two blood-soaked towels. Wrapped in one of the towels was a large hunting knife. Preliminary typing tests conducted on the blood indicated that it was a mixture of types O+ and A-. According to the medical examiner, blood drawn from the victims established that Carter Hamilton was type O+, while Mary Alice Hamilton was A-. Many of the samples had been sent for DNA testing, and although the results wouldn’t be known for about four to five weeks, it was a foregone conclusion that the blood would test out as being that of the two victims, to a nearly mathematical certainty.

  In addition to the blood-drop trail, there was also a bloody footprint trail, though contamination had made interpretation of it more difficult. A barefooted person, with a foot consistent with size-12 shoes, had tracked blood both entering and leaving the crime scene. The problem was that, according to a statement taken from one Brian McClure, aka “Bass,” McClure had accompanied Jonathan Hamilton in and out of the house, at a time when Jonathan was barefooted. Furthermore, Hamilton, in his first account of discovering the bodies, made to McClure, had apparently indicated he had been barefooted at that time, as well.

  Several pairs of shoes had been found in Jonathan Hamilton’s cottage, and seized. All were size 12.

  Next, in their examination of the crime scene, the investigators had lifted a number of latent fingerprints. Matches had been made with known prints of both victims, supplied by the medical examiner, and with those of Jonathan Hamilton, taken during his processing. A number of hairs and fibers had also been recovered, including seven long blond hairs that, at least when grossly examined, appeared to be consistent with Jonathan Hamilton’s hair.

  A canvass of the neighboring houses had been conducted. The closest people were a husband and wife, Klaus and Elna Armbrust, who lived on the estate, a quarter of a mile away, and were employees of the Hamiltons - he as a groundskeeper, she as a cook and housekeeper. Neither of them reported hearing anything during the night, or recalled noticing any suspicious vehicles in the area. Possibly because the ground was so dry from lack of recent rainfall, the investigators had discovered no shoeprints or tire tracks of value. Besides the Armbrusts, no one lived within a mile of the house, or had seen or heard anything out of the ordinary.

  Finally, Gunn told Fielder that, according to his information, the Cedar Falls grand jury had indicted Jonathan Hamilton for two counts of murder in the first degree, and that it was an absolute certainty that Gil Cavanaugh would be seeking the death penalty.

  HILLARY MUNSON LEFT Albany at seven o’clock Monday morning, driving north on Route 87 in a light rain. By nine she was at the Cedar Falls jail. By nine-thirty, she was sitting across from Jonathan Hamilton in a visiting booth, looking up into his face. Hillary is an even five feet tall. Jonathan is about that tall sitting down.

  Hillary’s objectives at this first meeting with Jonathan were several-fold. First, like Matt Fielder, she wanted to win the client’s trust and confidence. This she found harder than she’d expected, despite her experience in dealing with a variety of individuals endowed with limited communication skills. Second, she needed Jonathan to sign a number of release forms, so that she could begin to gather documents from schools, hospitals, and other agencies. It was Hillary’s belief that if you collected enough paper on a person, sooner or later you were bound to strike gold. She liked to tell a story of hunting for medical records on a young man, only to be told that all that could be found were a few old dental reports. “Send them over,” she’d sighed. When they’d arrived, she’d looked through them and discovered that the man had had all his teeth extracted when he was fourteen years old. When she asked him why, he’d explained they’d all rotted, because no one had ever told him to brush them. Beginning with that single fact, Hillary had painted a picture of extreme childhood neglect, sufficient to save the man from a ten-year prison sentence.

  Jonathan’s teeth looked fine to her. He signed the forms agreeably but slowly, without so much as pretending
to read them. Hillary made a mental note that Jonathan seemed rather guileless.

  Then Hillary turned to the real task at hand - getting Jonathan to give her as many “contacts” as he could. By contacts, she meant family members, friends, and other individuals who could be leads to finding out everything there was to know about Jonathan. It was her job to draft as comprehensive a case history of the defendant as she possibly could. Who were his ancestors? What dysfunctional behavior had been programmed into him even before conception? What sort of pregnancy had his mother experienced? Had his birth been uneventful or traumatic? What impact had various family members had upon his first few years? What had his early childhood been like? How had he done in school?

  Fielder had already broken the news to Hillary that the process was going to be a difficult one. With no parents or grandparents around to help, and severely limited insights on his own, Jonathan was going to be a “hard case.” Not because he was determined to be uncooperative - neither Fielder nor Hillary found that to be true - but simply because he was so terribly isolated from the rest of the world, in so many ways.

  Over the course of the next two hours, Jonathan described a total of three living relatives. His two namesake uncles had moved away some years ago. Nathan, he believed, had died of “ammonia.” When asked to elaborate, Jonathan had placed both of his hands on his chest and had mimicked a person having difficulty breathing. As for his other uncle, John, he’d reportedly moved far away, though Jonathan didn’t know where.