Flat Lake in Winter

by Joseph T. Klempner

  The list went on. By the end of two hours, they had compiled an outline of some dozen mitigators, each carefully phrased so as to avoid giving the prosecution more ammunition than it already had, or provoking Cavanaugh to react with any increased zeal. The whole time, Fielder never once let his thoughts stray from the business at hand, with the possible exception of noting at one point that Hillary Munson wore no ring on the fourth finger of her left hand, and a little later deciding that whatever perfume she was wearing reminded him of jasmine. Up near Big Moose, the only women he’d run into smelled of sawdust and chain oil.

  “I’ve got a splitting headache,” Fielder finally said, only slightly exaggerating. “Do you have any aspirin?”

  “I think I may have some Midol,” Hillary offered, reaching for her handbag and beginning to rummage around in it.

  “I don’t have cramps, or my period, or anything like that,” Fielder told her. “I just want some aspirin,” he said. “Good, old-fashioned aspirin.”

  “On second thought,” Hillary said, “maybe we’ve got something around here for grumpiness.”

  “I’m not grumpy.”

  She raised an eyebrow. For some reason, Fielder found the act highly seductive. If his headache complaint had been genuine, and not simply step one of his Master Plan (and to this day Fielder insists with a straight face that it was the former), then the sight of Hillary’s one raised eyebrow brought about an immediate shift of gears, no less so than had it been a skirt or a blouse that she’d raised instead.

  The Plan, of course, called for Fielder to somehow segue gracefully and unobtrusively to the topic of dinner. The headache certainly provided him an ideal jumping-off spot. The cause of the headache was the fact that he hadn’t eaten a thing all day; the remedy was all too obvious.

  The problem was Hillary’s raised eyebrow. It had the immediate effect of shattering Fielder’s concentration.

  Looking back at what happened next, it is reasonable to accept Fielder’s claim that what he meant to do was to repeat “I’m not grumpy,” followed by the words “I’m just hungry.” From there, dinner would be a done deal.

  Instead, the words that actually came out of Fielder’s mouth were, “I’m not grumpy, I’m just horny.”

  PEARSON GUNN SAT the bar for a while, catching up on local news with Pete, and gradually lowering the level of Adirondack Amber in his pitcher. But the bar stools at the Dew Drop were too small - or Gunn’s butt was too big - for true comfort, and eventually he repaired to one of the tables, somehow managing to make it in one trip - pitcher, glass, briefcase, hat, and all.

  The problem was, at the table, there was no Pete to talk with. True, from time to time, folks would come into the place, and if they knew Gunn (and almost all of them did), they’d stop by to chat, and maybe even sit awhile. But sooner or later they’d move on, leaving Gunn to himself. In fact, it was during one such period of solitude that Gunn decided to pass the time by reaching for his briefcase and extracting a file he’d been working on earlier that day. The file, of course, was that of Jonathan Hamilton. Gunn found a dry spot on the table and spread the papers out in front of him.

  The first document he came to was the will of Mary Alice Hamilton, the one Wilbur Maple had recited to him from memory. Gunn looked through it; it was exactly as Maple had described it.

  Underneath it were the wills of Jonathan’s parents, the ones that had been probated after their deaths eight years ago and had led Gunn to Maple in the first place. Gunn began leafing through one of them. It was Porter’s. It, too, was of the “joint and mutual” variety, apparently a Maple specialty. It had been drawn up in August 1988, revoking all prior wills and codicils. A stamp on the cover indicated that it had been probated in November 1989. Stapled to it was the death certificate of the deceased, reflecting the date of death - February 17, 1989 - and the cause - a “fire of accidental origin.”

  Gunn returned to the text of the will. It recited that Porter was of sound mind and body, but mindful of the tenuousness of human life. Accordingly, he’d left his estate to his wife, Elizabeth. Next he’d addressed the possibility (which, of course, had become a reality) that the two of them might die together. In that event, Porter’s parents, as the current holders of the bulk of the Hamilton inheritance, were “well enough situated in their own rights” that the will would leave them only a few personal effects. A small sum was left to Elizabeth’s surviving brother, John Greenhall, said to be living in Sydney, Australia. Gunn recalled Maple saying something about Jonathan’s having an uncle in Austria. Not much of an expert when it came to matters of global geography, Gunn assumed the two places might be one and the same. Austria, Australia. They certainly couldn’t be too far apart.

  Next came the modest sums left to the heirs of Elizabeth’s other brother, Nathan, who had died “with issue.” Gunn wasn’t exactly certain what that meant. Figured maybe he had some sort of unresolved conflict when he’d bought the farm.

  After that, the entire estate was to be divided equally among Porter and Elizabeth’s two sons, Jonathan and Porter Jr., and their issue, if any.

  AS SOON AS Matt Fielder said “horny,” instead of “hungry,” the damage had been done, as baseball broadcasters like to say. Not that he didn’t try to unsay it, to inhale the word back from whence it had come. Failing that, he blushed, grimaced, and tried desperately to compose an apology. But trying to apologize for using a disastrously wrong word is something like trying to regrow a redwood forest. The destruction is accomplished in a heartbeat; the restoration takes many lifetimes.

  By this time, Hillary was wearing a broad grin. “Excuse me?” she said, hand on hip, lips pressed together tightly to hold back the laughter, eyebrow raised higher than ever.

  “Sorry,” Fielder managed to mumble.

  “For what?” Hillary laughed.

  “For the slip. I meant to say, ‘I’m hungry.’”

  “Freud would be proud.”

  “Sorry,” he said again. “It’s not just that I’m horny, though God knows it’s probably true. The truth is, it’s you. I’m like, attracted - very attracted - to you.” It came out sounding like a line from a soap opera. “Hell,” he said. “I want to go to bed with you.” Maybe if he tried hard enough, he could parlay mere defeat into total disaster.

  “I’m flattered.”

  Flattered? Here Fielder had bared his soul, confessed everything, and made a total fool of himself in the process. He expected nothing short of an extreme reaction in return - either on-the-spot swooning, or outraged, indignant rejection.

  “‘Flattered’?” he heard, from a voice sounding very much like his own.

  “Quite,” she said, apparently also having heard the ventriloquist. “And, under different circumstances, I might even consider the invitation.”

  Fielder did his best to ignore the less-than-enthusiastic “might even consider” part. Instead, he repeated her phrase, “‘Different circumstances’?”

  “Yes,” Hillary said. “I’m-”

  “-Seeing someone?”

  “Ah, that too.”

  “That’s nice for you,” Fielder allowed. “Who is he?”

  “He isn’t.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He is actually a she,” Hillary explained. “You met her a little while ago.”

  Fielder groped helplessly. “Lois?”

  “Lois.”

  “You’re-”

  “Gay.” She nodded. “When I introduced Lois to you as my ‘partner,’ I thought you might get a clue.”

  “Hey,” he said, “they don’t call me ‘Myopic Matt’ for nothing.”

  “You’re not myopic, Matt. You’ve just been living in the woods too long.”

  PEARSON GUNN STARED at the words he had just read. Jonathan had a brother. A brother named Porter Jr. A brother who had been included in the wills of their parents, but later omitted from that of their grandparents, the ones with the real money.

  Even in his two-pitcher Amber haze, Gunn fou
nd that to be an interesting set of circumstances. He drained his glass, rose to his feet, and ambled over to the pay phone, where he proceeded to dial Matt Fielder’s number. He listened to four rings, before the answering machine picked up, offering him nothing but Fielder’s recorded voice.

  THE REST OF Fielder was at that moment 120 miles to the south, at a small restaurant in downtown Albany, sitting down to what would turn out to be a very pleasant dinner with Hillary Munson and her partner, Lois Miller. The news about Jonathan Hamilton’s having a brother would have to wait until the following day.

  THERE IS A TINY speckled chameleon, indigenous to the very northern reaches of the Adirondacks, called the spotted darter. If you watch one of them for any length of time, you come away convinced that it is physically incapable of moving forward in a straight line. Instead, it zigs first this way and then that, frenetically advancing three steps, only to retreat two. It seems such a study in pure paranoia that the local Franch Canadians have dubbed it le lézard lunatique, “the crazy lizard.”

  With the discovery of the existence of Porter Hamilton Jr., the defense team members began acting very much like spotted darters. On Tuesday, after speaking with Pearson Gunn and learning for the first time that Jonathan had a brother, Fielder assigned Gunn the task of locating Porter. It was a natural-enough selection, given the fact that Gunn was the team’s fact-investigator. Besides which, Fielder needed Hillary to continue helping him with the mitigation letter.

  On Wednesday, Fielder pulled Gunn off the detail and replaced him with Hillary. He’d decided Hillary might be in a better position to track Porter down, inasmuch as tracing family members was one of her specialties. He told Gunn to help him assemble facts for the letter.

  By Thursday, when Porter still hadn’t been found, Fielder put Gunn back on it, figuring that with Hillary and Gunn working on it together, they couldn’t fail. He’d write the mitigation letter himself.

  HILLARY MANAGED TO COME up with a birth certificate, reflecting the fact that a Porter Hamilton Jr. had been born at Mercy Hospital in Cedar Falls, on June 26, 1964. From there, she came up with a social-security number, a driver’s license, and a stack of school records, which she sifted through for some clue to Porter’s current whereabouts. Meanwhile, Gunn went back to the Flat Lake estate and re-interviewed Klaus and Elna Armbrust, the caretaker couple who lived on the grounds.

  Gunn had found in his first meeting with the Armbrusts, that they were people who didn’t tend to volunteer a lot of information. Once again he had to prod them to find out what they knew. Yes, they told him, they did remember Jonathan’s older brother, whom the family had always referred to as “Junior.” He’d been a bit of a troublemaker, according to Elna Armbrust, an angry boy who’d “got into the drugs” as a teenager. He’d left home sometime around 1985 or 1986, which would have made him twenty-one or twenty-two at the time. No, they hadn’t seen or heard of him since.

  Anyone who was angry and “into the drugs” ought to have a rap sheet, Gunn theorized. He called a source (and once again, we are invited to speculate that it might have been Captain Roger Duquesne of the state police, though it is reasonable to believe that, as a private investigator, Gunn had other contacts capable of helping him out in this area), and asked for a name and date-of-birth check. He got his response sometime Saturday afternoon. To his surprise, it came back negative: the New York State Criminal Justice System computer in Albany had no record of any Porter Hamilton, Junior or Senior, let alone one with a DOB of 06/26/64.

  Stymied for the time being, out of habit Gunn headed for familiar surroundings. The Dew Drop Inn is not only the place where Gunn does his best drinking; it is also the place where he does some of his more creative thinking, and almost all of his networking (not that the nineties term “networking” has a place in Gunn’s vocabulary, any more than does Fielder’s term for it - “schmoozing”).

  As Gunn sat at his customary table with his familiar pitcher and glass, the usual Dew Drop denizens came and went. As luck would have it, one who came in that afternoon was Bass McClure. McClure and Gunn knew one another and got along well enough. Gunn already had interviewed McClure regarding the early-morning telephone call from Jonathan the day of the murders, and McClure’s subsequent visit to the Flat Lake estate. Both men were aware that, as the first person on the scene other than Jonathan himself, McClure was a prosecution witness. Whether or not at that point Gunn actually knew that McClure had testified at the grand jury is uncertain; in any event, something of an arm’s-length relationship had resulted, with each man just a bit wary of the other.

  But alcohol has been known to lower inhibitions on occasion, and on this particular Saturday afternoon, Gunn hesitated only a moment before inviting McClure over to join him at his table. And if McClure had any second thoughts about the idea, he didn’t seem to show them.

  The two traded small talk for a while, noting how the days were already getting shorter and the leaves beginning to turn, and how it wouldn’t be too long before there’d be snow in the air. They compared notes on the coming hunting season, the level of water over in Stillwater Reservoir, the bald-eagle nests up at Wolf Pond, and the relative merits of full-time four-wheel drive versus part-time. Those topics of great importance out of the way, they fell silent.

  Gunn figured it was as good a time as any. “What do you know ‘bout Jonathan Hamilton’s older brother?” he asked.

  McClure shrugged. “Junior?”

  “Yup.”

  “Haven’t seen him in ages,” McClure said. “He cut out a couple a years before the fire, if I remember correctly.”

  “Any idea where I might find him?”

  McClure furrowed his forehead.

  “Background info,” Gunn explained, “that sorta stuff.”

  That seemed good enough for McClure. “Not really,” McClure said. “Last I heard, he’d got himself jammed up on a series of robberies of some sort.”

  “Whereabouts?”

  “Syracuse area maybe,” McClure said. “Or Rochester. Someplace like that.”

  “What kinda time did he get?”

  “Dunno.”

  And that was all McClure knew. Fifteen minutes and a beer later, he was on his way.

  HILLARY MUNSON WASN’T doing much better. She’d checked social-security records, but according to those, Porter Hamilton Jr. hadn’t worked in almost ten years. On the books, anyway. Nor had he filed a state or federal tax return, registered a car in New York, or renewed his driver’s license. He had no post-office box or telephone (listed or unlisted) in the dozen upstate counties she checked, wasn’t on the welfare rolls, and hadn’t applied for Medicaid or food stamps. None of the branches of the military knew of him, other than the fact that he’d registered for the draft when he’d turned eighteen, back in 1982.

  It was as though he’d left Flat Lake eleven or twelve years ago and promptly fell off the face of the earth.

  WHILE HILLARY MUNSON and Pearson Gunn were exhausting their leads, Matt Fielder sat in front of his fire, putting together the first draft of his mitigation letter.

  Reducing an emotional appeal to a written presentation is an art, and it is an art that Fielder happened to be very good at. He’d been doing it in one form or another for all of his professional life - in pre-sentencing and pre-pleading memorandums, and in letters to prosecutors, judges, probation officers, and parole boards. He’d reached the point where he could write so persuasively that he’d invariably end up convincing himself of the merits of his position, no matter how tenuous that position might be.

  Now, reading the pages over, Fielder found himself succumbing to the old magic once again. How could anyone fail to agree with him? How could anyone seriously think of seeking the death penalty against this overgrown child-man, who’d never harmed anyone before, who’d turned himself in to the authorities, and who barely seemed to understand what he’d done? Surely even a Gil Cavanaugh would have to see how totally inappropriate death would be for this case.

/>   Around eleven, Fielder fell asleep on the floor in front of his fire, daring to believe in the persuasive power of his words. In his efforts to persuade Cavanaugh to spare Jonathan’s life, the evening would mark perhaps the highest point in terms of Fielder’s optimism, and certainly the lowest point for his realism.

  SITTING WITH HIS third and final pitcher of ale shortly before midnight, Pearson Gunn was truly perplexed. How could it be that an angry, drug-abusing man - for some time now old enough to be treated as an adult in the eyes of the law - could get “jammed up on a series of robberies of some sort,” and yet still not come back with a criminal record? Especially when the robberies had been committed in Syracuse or Rochester, both of which were definitely within New York State, last Gunn had heard.

  He emptied the last of the pitcher into his glass. No matter how he looked at it, it just didn’t make any sense. One robbery you might beat. Even two, if you were lucky enough. But a series? He drained his glass. Nobody beat a series of robberies. That just didn’t happen - it was the kind of thing you could take to the bank.

  Gunn’s jaw dropped open, in a move that might have gone largely unnoticed but for the fact that his mouth happened to be full of ale at the time.

  “That’s it!” he gurgled.

  Anybody who turned to look in his direction would have seen him drooling ale from his beard onto his lap. But Pearson Gunn couldn’t care less. The robberies were bank robberies, he’d suddenly realized. Almost all banks are insured by the FDIC, which means the U.S. Government shares jurisdiction over them along with the states.

  The reason New York had no record of Junior was suddenly very clear.