Flat Lake in Winter

by Joseph T. Klempner

  The feds had him.

  FOLLOWING GUNN’S SATURDAY-NIGHT epiphany, locating Porter Hamilton Jr. was almost anticlimactic. On Sunday, Gunn telephoned the U.S. Bureau of Prisons and convinced someone to punch a name and date of birth into his computer; in less than a minute, Gunn learned that Porter was a guest of the Federal Correctional Institution in Atlanta, Georgia.

  “What’s he doing?” Gunn asked.

  “Stamping out D.C. license plates, probably,” came the reply.

  “No,” Gunn said. “What kinda time?”

  “Oh.” There was a pause, punctuated by the sound of more computer keys being hit. “Three hundred sixty months.”

  Which translated to just over twenty-six years, if you took time off for good behavior. Just as Gunn had figured all along: Nobody beats a series of robberies. Especially against the feds.

  FOLLOWING THE CALL, Gunn had reported to Fielder, who fired off a letter to Porter the very next morning, informing him that his brother Jonathan was in serious trouble, and asking that Porter call collect at his earliest opportunity so that arrangements could be made to have a member of the defense team fly down to interview him.

  Porter called three days later, to say he’d be happy to meet with whoever came down. Fielder declined to fill him in on the nature of the trouble Jonathan was in, explaining that the call was probably being monitored. The truth was, Fielder didn’t want to reveal what had happened; he wanted whoever flew down to be able to confront Porter with the news face-to-face, in order to gauge his reaction. Despite the fact that everything about the murders pointed to Jonathan, Fielder knew that he, of all people, had to try to keep his mind open to other possibilities. Sure, Porter’s involvement was a long shot. But when your chances are down to slim and none, you go with slim.

  Later that day, Fielder took a drive over to Cedar Falls. It was a spectacular afternoon, crisp and cloudless, and the sun lit up the colors of the turning leaves the entire way. He passed red sumacs, purple maples, orange oaks, yellow birches, and a variety of other tans, ochers, and browns, all interspersed among the evergreens, which in turn ranged from darkest green to palest blue-gray.

  He found Judge Arthur Summerhouse in his chambers and presented him an order authorizing travel expenses for Pearson Gunn and Hillary Munson to interview a witness in Atlanta.

  “What’s the matter, he can’t fly up?” the judge joked. “You going to tell me he’s indisposed, or something like that?”

  “Something like that.” Fielder smiled.

  “Why do they both have to go down there?”

  Fielder had anticipated this question, ever since he’d decided against making the trip himself. On the one-in-a-million chance that Porter were to say something incriminating to himself, Fielder didn’t want to be the one to hear it. He didn’t want to risk becoming a witness to some aspect of the case, and end up having to recuse himself as Jonathan’s lawyer. The next best thing, he’d decided, was to send both Gunn and Hillary; that way there’d be two witnesses, and not just one, to anything Porter might say.

  “Actually,” he now told Judge Summerhouse, “I should be going with them. I was hoping to save the taxpayers a few dollars. But now that I think of it-”

  “That won’t be necessary,” said the judge, hastily signing the order before Fielder could add his own name to it.

  FOUR DAYS LATER, Pearson Gunn and Hillary Munson sat side by side in a small cubicle, facing a Plexiglas partition and holding telephone receivers to their ears. The man who sat across from them on the other side of the Plexiglas, holding his own receiver to his own ear, bore little physical resemblance to Jonathan Hamilton. To his visitors, Porter James Hamilton Jr. - or Junior (or “P. J.,” according to both his stated preference and the crude tattoo that adorned the two middle knuckles of his left hand) - looked pretty much like Hollywood’s idea of a typical thirty-something, burned-out white convict. Sean Penn might have gotten the call, or maybe Kevin Bacon. P. J. was blond, like Jonathan; but while Jonathan was clean-shaven, this man sported a wispy mustache and matching chin whiskers. In place of Jonathan’s clear blue eyes were smoky gray ones that peered out darkly beneath sleepy, hooded lids. An old scar that began at one corner of his mouth disappeared somewhere under his jawline, vaguely suggesting that his chin might be mechanically attached to the rest of his face, like that of a ventriloquist’s puppet.

  Mostly, it was the man’s size that hinted at the family relationship, but even that resemblance disappeared when P. J. slouched back on the visiting-room chair.

  “So, Saint Jonathan’s got himself jammed up, huh?” were P. J.’s first words, following the introductions.

  “That’s right,” Gunn acknowledged. “Your brother’s been arrested.”

  “What kinda beef?”

  “Murder.”

  P. J. shifted into an upright position. “You’re shittin’ me,” he said.

  “We didn’t fly down here to shit you,” Hillary assured him.

  “Who’d he do?”

  Hillary was momentarily put off by the con talk, but Gunn didn’t miss a beat. “They claim he ‘did’ your grandparents,” he said.

  The hooded lids disappeared, and P.J. stared wide-eyed and open-mouthed, in a display of astonishment that Gunn and Munson would later agree was so authentically spontaneous as to be almost comical. The “No fuckin’ way!” that came from P. J.’s lips was all but superfluous.

  They spent a few minutes filling him in on some of the details, before turning to the subject of P. J.’s own troubles. If his reaction to the news hadn’t been enough to convince them of his lack of involvement, there was also the little matter of his alibi: P. J. had been picked up outside of Syracuse in October 1996 and had been in custody ever since. He’d finally copped out to four bank robberies, but they’d pinned another dozen on him. Even with his guilty plea, it had added up to thirty years under the guidelines.

  “Coulda been worse.” He shrugged. “At least I’m in a federal joint. Food’s better. Hey, they coulda sent me to Marion, Illinois, to give blowjobs to John Gotti. Pardon my French,” he added with a crooked smile, for Hillary’s benefit.

  They pumped him for information about Jonathan’s formative years, anything that might prove useful to Matt Fielder in his attempt to establish mitigating circumstances. It seemed to them that P. J. wanted to be helpful. It was clear he considered his younger brother something of a pampered brat - calling his brother “Saint Jonathan” had established that at the outset. Still, he tried his best to help, particularly after they told him that Jonathan was a candidate for the death penalty. But the truth was, there wasn’t too much he was able to tell them. Just as Elna Armbrust had said, P. J. had begun abusing drugs, as well as alcohol, early in his teens, at a time when Jonathan was still a boy. By the age of twenty, Junior had already committed a dozen petty offenses, but had yet to be arrested. At twenty-two, he’d left home, never to return. He’d learned of his parents’ deaths three years later from an item on the TV news. He’d tried to get to the funeral, but was in jail somewhere in northwestern Pennsylvania at the time, and they refused his request for an accompanied furlough.

  “If they woulda, I was goin’ to make a break for it,” he admitted with a smile.

  There seemed to be nothing left to talk about. “Well,” Hillary said, putting her pen into her briefcase, “we appreciate your help.”

  “Glad to be of service to you, ma’am.”

  “Not that you were an easy guy to find,” Gunn added. “For a while there, we didn’t even know you existed. We thought Jonathan was an only child.”

  “Oh, no,” P. J. said. “There was the three of us.”

  AROUND THE SAME time that Pearson Gunn and Hillary Munson were finding it was their turn to open their eyes wide and let their lower jaws drop, Matt Fielder was sitting at his computer, putting final touches on his mitigation letter to Gil Cavanaugh. He’d read it over so many times that he knew it by heart. He’d faxed a copy of it to Kevin Doyle at the
Capital Defender’s Office, to make sure he wasn’t including anything that might be used against Jonathan in any way. Doyle had phoned him with his approval, but also with a sobering comment.

  “It’s a great letter, Matt,” he’d said. “But from everything I know about Cavanaugh, he’d go death against his own mother if it’d get him reelected.”

  But, hey, what did Doyle know? After all, he was only the leading authority, the number-one capital defender in the state. Who was he to say?

  Fielder printed out a final draft, signed his name at the bottom, and folded it into an envelope. Then he took a drive into Big Moose, where he handed it to the postal clerk.

  “I want this sent by Express Mail,” he told her. “Overnight. Return receipt requested.”

  “The works, huh?”

  “The works.”

  “We don’t get too many of those,” she admitted. “Must be a matter of life and death or something, huh?”

  “You might say so,” said Matt Fielder.

  “THREE OF YOU?” said Pearson Gunn and Hillary Munson in tandem.

  “Sure,” P. J. replied, looking surprised at their ignorance. “There’s me, there’s Jonathan, and there’s Jennifer.”

  “Jennifer?”

  Hillary retrieved her pen from her briefcase. The interview would continue for another half hour.

  Jennifer was the middle of the three Hamilton children, born in 1967, making her thirty-three years younger than P. J., but still two years older than Jonathan. Physically she was said to favor Jonathan, in that she was blonde and fair and - at least according to P. J. - “drop-dead gorgeous.” Then again, it had been some time since P. J. had seen her, and also some time since he’d seen any “snatch” (as he so eloquently phrased it) at all.

  Like her older brother, Jennifer was apparently something of a black sheep in the Hamilton family. From the bits and pieces P. J. had picked up over the years since his departure, he was able to report that she, too, had left home never to return, about two years after he did. Last he’d heard, she was living somewhere in Vermont, or maybe New Hampshire, under a different name. He didn’t know just where, and couldn’t remember what the name was. About the best he could do was supply her birthday, September 6. But he seriously doubted that she had a criminal record.

  “Not that kinda black sheep.” He smiled.

  “What kind, then?” Hillary asked.

  “You know,” he said, looking her up and down, and smiling crookedly. “She always had a little bit of a taste for things.”

  And that was about it. Jennifer Somebody, thirty years old, living somewhere in Vermont, or maybe New Hampshire. With a little bit of a taste for things.

  SITTING TOGETHER ON the last leg of their flight back to Albany, Gunn and Munson compared notes. They’d certainly learned enough to rule out P. J. Hamilton as a suspect; that much they could tell Fielder. But when it came to shedding any new light on Jonathan, Junior had proved to be of very little use. On the other hand, he’d surprised them by revealing the existence of a third sibling. But once again, he knew so little about her that it seemed all but certain she’d turn out to be nothing but another dead end.

  That is, if they were ever lucky enough to find her.

  Gunn suddenly leaned across Hillary to get the attention of a passing flight attendant. “Excuse me,” he said. “I’ve got this medical condition. Do you happen to have any ale on board?”

  THE CASE WAS back in court on Friday, October 3. The media was there, but this time in modest numbers. The parties had settled into motion practice, which rarely produces sound bites worthy of the six o’clock news. So it was only those present, or those diligent enough to read the next day’s local newsprint, who would learn that while Judge Summerhouse, predictably, had denied the defense’s motion to dismiss the indictment because of the prosecution’s refusal to give them extra time to participate in the grand-jury process, just as predictably he’d granted the prosecution’s request that the defendant provide blood and hair samples and submit to the taking of footprints.

  Nor would the news viewers be treated to the sight of Matt Fielder’s objecting when Judge Summerhouse ordered him to have the rest of his motions filed within the normal forty-five-day period allowed by the statute for non-capital cases. “That’s plenty of time,” he told Fielder. “You get ‘em in. Case is adjourned till November seventeenth.”

  What the viewers would see and hear, as usual, was Gil Cavanaugh. He’d received Fielder’s mitigation letter three days earlier. “That,” he now told the courtroom and the pool camera, “has given me more than an ample opportunity to review it and consider it fully.”

  Never mind that it had taken Fielder almost three days just to type the thing.

  “The defense has asked me to refrain from seeking the death penalty in this case,” Cavanaugh intoned in his most resonating baritone voice, “as is their prerogative. But my orders come from the people of this county, and it is my sworn duty to uphold the law of this state. The defense points out that Mr. Hamilton had no prior criminal record before the commission of these crimes. Well, that may be true in a technical sense,” he allowed. “But once he killed the first victim, as far as I’m concerned, he was a murderer. If he’d stopped at that point, he wouldn’t have been eligible for the death penalty, though if it was up to me to write the laws, he sure would have been. But no, it’s only after he goes and kills the second victim, takes a second human life, that we’re allowed to seek true justice. In my book, Mr. Hamilton already had his criminal record at that point. He killed two God-fearing people. The law doesn’t require me to wait until he kills a third - maybe one of you - before I fulfill my obligation.

  “Next thing they tell me, Mr. Hamilton is supposed to be a bit on the slow side. Like that should constitute some sort of an excuse for what he’s gone and done. Well, folks, the way I was always brought up to believe, being slow may be an excuse for reading poorly, or for not getting good grades in school. But it’s not an excuse for murder. No, sir. We will treat Mr. Hamilton the same way we will treat any other citizen of this county. We will not treat him any worse because he may have had a little trouble in his classes; that could have happened to anybody. But we won’t treat him any better, either. That’s simply the American way, folks: equal justice under the law.

  “And so,” and here Cavanaugh raised his voice theatrically, “I have come to the conclusion that the mandate of the legislature, the will of the God-fearing people who elected me, and my own personal conscience require that I do my duty, however unpleasant that duty may be. Therefore, I, Francis Gilmore Cavanaugh, the duly elected District Attorney of Ottawa County, do hereby solemnly certify that, in the event that the defendant should be convicted of these heinous and unforgivable crimes, I shall ask a jury of his peers to impose the only appropriate sentence, that of death.”

  If Cavanaugh’s decision surprised nobody, it certainly topped the evening news and made headlines across the state. Even the unflappable New York Times found room on the bottom of page one for a small item.

  UPSTATE PROSECUTOR SEEKS DEATH IN KILLING OF TWO

  Slowness Is No Excuse,

  Says Ottawa County D.A.

  CEDAR FALLS - A twenty-eight-year-old man could face the death penalty in connection with the August 31 stabbing deaths of his grandparents.

  Jonathan Hamilton, of Flat Lake, NY, was indicted last month for two counts of first-degree murder. Today Gilmore Cavanaugh, the Ottawa County District Attorney, announced his intention to ask for death in the event of a conviction.

  Rejecting the defense’s argument that Hamilton is not an appropriate candidate for capital punishment because of his lack of prior criminal history and his borderline level of comprehension, Cavanaugh countered by insisting that “slowness is no excuse for murder.”

  The defendant’s lawyer had no comment on the development.

  Should the district attorney get his wish, Hamilton could be the first person sentenced to death under the sta
te’s two-year-old capital-punishment law. The last execution in New York took place more than thirty years ago.

  Because the story had run in Saturday’s edition, Matt Fielder missed it. But a copy of it arrived in the mail three days later, courtesy of Kevin Doyle. The Capital Defender’s Office makes it their business to clip all stories bearing on the death penalty.

  Reading the article infuriated Fielder. In the first place, trial lawyers take second place to no one when it comes to the ego department. So, seeing Cavanaugh’s name mentioned twice, and his not at all, was annoying enough. But the real sting came from the reporting of his failure to comment on the matter. What did they expect him to say? Didn’t they realize he was thrust on the horns of a dilemma here? If he climbed up onto a soapbox and argued that his client should be spared because he barely knew what was going on, that was tantamount to admitting that Jonathan was guilty. On the other hand, if he reminded them that there was nothing more than circumstantial proof against Jonathan, that might be held against him later. He hated lawyers who used the “fallback” approach: “My client didn’t do it. But if he did, it was self-defense. And even if it wasn’t self-defense, then he was drunk at the time, or insane. Yeah, insane, that’s it!”

  He looked at the clipping. In the margin, Doyle had inked in the words, Talk about a rock and a hard place! At least he understood. Then again, what were the chances of getting twelve Kevin Doyles on a jury? What were the chances of getting one? He’d seen the public-opinion polls. According to the latest survey, something like 80 percent of the voters in Ottawa County approved of capital punishment. And most thought a death sentence was appropriate in all murder cases, let alone those the legislature deemed qualified because they contained aggravating circumstances. When the pollsters tried to find out what sort of defendants people might be willing to spare, the results were downright scary. They’d get responses like, “Well, I don’t think there should be a death sentence if the defendant acted in self-defense,” or “I’m not in favor of it if the death was the result of an accident,” or Fielder’s personal favorite, “I probably wouldn’t vote for death in a case where I didn’t think the defendant was guilty.”