Flat Lake in Winter

by Joseph T. Klempner

  Fielder broke into a grin. Had some watchful god detected his ulterior motive of hoping to be reimbursed for his $30, and punished him for being less than completely selfless? Well, easy come, easy go. Now he could feel truly noble about his investment.

  THE FIRST DOCTOR to interview Jonathan was a board-certified psychiatrist named George Goldstein. Goldstein was a nationally known professor of forensic medicine at Yale, with a seven-page curriculum vitae and a subspecialty in sleep disorders. He was also an accomplished hypnotist, though he shared Fielder’s concern that, at least at this stage, it might be too risky to use the technique with Jonathan, both legally and medically.

  He showed up at the Cedar Falls jail the day following Jonathan’s most recent court appearance, a day when the mercury would drop to 11 degrees Fahrenheit while the sun was still up. The first thing Dr. Goldstein noticed about the young inmate was his manner of dress. He would comment on it in his written evaluation, which he submitted some time later.

  Patient presents himself dressed in the usual prison garb, consisting of a lightweight, one-piece jumpsuit. He is further wrapped, Native American style, in a handsome, two-tone, woolen blanket. A cheerful smile on his face suggests that although he may be confined, he is nonetheless warm.

  IF ATLANTA HAD been a pleasant place to visit at the end of September, Florida was positively heaven in the third week of November. Pearson Gunn stepped off the plane at the Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport and made his way to the Thrifty Car Rental counter. Before leaving New York, he’d checked with the CDO to see if they’d reimburse him for Hertz rates. Not exactly, he’d been told.

  Jimmy Squitieri didn’t really live in Sarasota, any more than he lived in Saratoga. Only golf pros lived in Sarasota, it turned out, while tennis pros lived a bit to the north, in Bradenton. Jimmy Squitieri lived in someplace called Fruitville, just off Route 75 - which might go a long way toward explaining why he told people he lived in Sarasota.

  Gunn found the house and pulled up to the curb. It was a one-level stucco thing, very white. In front was a small lawn that to Gunn was surprisingly green for November, some neatly trimmed bushes, and a couple of pink plastic flamingos complete with whirlygig wings that spun in the breeze. Where the garage should have been, there was an open-sided structure that looked as if it had been custom-framed around a powder blue Chevy Monte Carlo that sat in its midst. A wiry, gray-haired man with a cigarette dangling from his lower lip was tying vines of some sort to the framing. He wore a permanent squint from either the sun or the smoke, it was hard to tell which. Gunn walked over to introduce himself. Before he could say anything, the man spoke.

  “It’s a carport,” he explained, the cigarette waving up and down like a conductor’s baton, but somehow managing to stay put. “It’s to protect the vehicle’s baked-on metallic finish from the harmful ultraviolet rays of the sun.” This was clearly a man who’d written too many reports in his day.

  “We don’t see too many of them back north,” Gunn commented.

  “Monte Carlos?”

  “Them too.”

  Inside, they sat on matching white Naugahyde Barcaloungers, above canary-yellow carpeting, Spider gripping a Stoli and tonic over ice. Gunn had refused a drink, noticing it was still before one in the afternoon.

  “Got any orange juice?” he’d asked on impulse.

  “Never touch the stuff,” Spider had assured him.

  Yes, Spider remembered the Flat Lake fire. It had been his investigation, his and Eddie Meacham’s. “Good guy, Eddie, but a stickler. Wanted to call it suspicious. I hadda talk him out of it.”

  “Was it suspicious?” Gunn asked.

  “Sure it was. You had your charring on the rafters, you had your alligatoring on the floorboards-”

  “‘Alligatoring’?” Gunn was beginning to think maybe Spider had been in Florida too long.

  “Yeah. That’s when you get a crosshatched pattern from where the heat is most intense. Ends up looking like alligator hide.”

  “The papers said it was an electric space heater caught fire,” Gunn said.

  “Yeah, I know. But the papers didn’t explain how come there was damage beneath the floor where the heater was, did they?”

  “No.”

  “Funny thing,” Spider said. “I always thought heat was s’posed to rise. Know what I mean?”

  Gunn nodded. “But you signed off on it,” he said.

  “Yes and no,” said Spider, taking a long drink of Stoli. “We interviewed the kid. He was a retard. What was his name? Johnny?”

  “Jonathan.”

  “Yeah. Jonathan. So I ask him if he’s been playin’ with matches, maybe had a little accident? He says, ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’ You hear me? ‘I don’t think so.’ Not ‘Fuck no!’ or ‘Who, me? But ‘I don’t think so.’ So I talk to the grandfather. I can see he’s in charge now, know what I mean? I tell him it don’t look too good. We call it arson, we gotta lock the kid up. Next thing, the adjuster from the insurance carrier shows up, starts sniffin’ around for accelerant fumes. I suggest he and Grandpa take a little walk together up the path, see if maybe they can work somethin’ out. Know what I mean?”

  Gunn nodded.

  “You sure I can’t get you somethin’?” Spider asked, rising to refill his glass.

  “No, thanks.”

  “About twenty minutes, they come back. Grandpa’s decided not to put in a claim on the life policies. That’s the big money, see? But the family’s loaded; they don’t need it. To make it look good, the adjuster agrees to cover the damage to the premises. What could thata come to? A coupla grand, tops? Everybody’s happy. We can all go home.”

  “Except,” Gunn said, “Meacham still wanted to call it suspicious.”

  “Yeah,” Spider said. “Good old Eddie, may he rest in peace. Listen, you were on the job, right?”

  Gunn nodded. “State trooper,” he said.

  “Soon as we walked into the place, Eddie took a sniff around, smelled sumpin. But he didn’t smell no accelerant. He smelled money. Thought right away we could make a score. Know what I mean?”

  Gunn nodded. He knew what a score was.

  “Eddie figgered if we threatened to call it arson, or even suspicious . . . Well, you know what I mean.”

  Another nod from Gunn.

  “But the way I was lookin’ at it, the family had had about enough agita for one day. Retard kid gets up in the middle of the night, starts a fire, kills his parents. On toppa that, they just found out they gotta let the life policies walk. Way I saw things, enough was enough. It was no time for the old Shake ‘n’ Bake.” Spider drained his glass again. “Know what I mean?” he said.

  “IS THIS THE Princess of Nightingale Court?”

  “Matthew?”

  “I always feel like an apostle when you call me that. Or a saint.”

  “Yes, but you’re my saint. God, I miss you!”

  “I’ve missed you, too,” he said.

  “When can you come?”

  “Should take me about twelve minutes.”

  “Don’t tease,” she scolded him. “And don’t be gross. It’s not nice.”

  “I’m not teasing or being gross,” he said. “I’m at my trusty Motel Six. I really can be there in twelve minutes.”

  “No,” she said. “Stay right where you are. I’ll throw on some clothes and get someone to come over and watch Troy.”

  “Don’t worry too much about the clothes,” he told her.

  AROUND THE SAME time Fielder was waiting in his motel room for Jennifer, Pearson Gunn was ordering his first pitcher of ale at the Dew Drop Inn. Gunn had flown back from Sarasota that afternoon, making it a total of four flights in two days. Flying disoriented Gunn, who much preferred the feel of solid ground beneath him. Ale, on the other hand, tended to restore equilibrium, even as it produced a general sense of well-being.

  “Bonjour, étranger.”

  Gunn looked to his right, the direction the voice had come from. Bu
t he knew it had to be that of Roger Duquesne, the state police captain who’d once been his partner, and now (though Gunn will not confirm the fact) was his prime law-enforcement source.

  “Roger!” Gunn called.

  Duquesne was out of uniform, but he sometimes worked in civvies, making it hard to tell whether he was on the taxpayers’ time right now or his own. Whichever it was, he had a drink in his hand and a glow on his face.

  It being a Friday night, there were no empty tables, so they stayed at the bar. There they soon fell into their regular routine of trading war stories and hoisting a few for the old days.

  AS MUCH AS Matt Fielder was taken with Jennifer, he’d managed to keep his thoughts about her under control during the weeks he’d been back home working on her brother’s case. That control disappeared the moment she walked into his motel room.

  The clothes she’d thrown on were a faded pair of jeans, an oversized pullover sweater, a pair of sneakers, and a wristwatch. That was it. Nothing on top of that, and - as Fielder discovered soon enough - nothing underneath. He tried to imagine just what it was she must have been wearing when he’d called.

  An hour later, they lay together trying to catch their breath, their bodies coated with sweat. “Tell me again,” he said. “Why is it that I live alone in a cabin in the woods?”

  A laugh bubbled up from somewhere inside her. “You decided on that before we met?” she offered. Which was about as good an answer as anything he could come up with.

  “How’s the case going?” she asked.

  “Not too bad, actually. We found Sue Ellen. She confirms that Jonathan was known as a sleepwalker. It seems she even saved an old letter of yours, in which you talked about it. If the DA tries to show our defense is a recent fabrication, we can use that in rebuttal.”

  “So that’s good?”

  “Very good,” he said, kissing the tip of her nose as a reward. “The doctors have begun interviewing Jonathan. We’ll know more about that in a week or two. And it seems the rumors about the fire were right.”

  “Oh?”

  “It certainly looks like Jonathan’s doing. Middle of the night, definite signs of arson, doors locked inside and out. And then, when they asked him about it, he couldn’t say if he’d set it or not. Sound familiar?”

  “I’m sure he didn’t mean to do it,” she said.

  “Exactly the point.”

  “So what do you do now?” she asked.

  “Now,” he answered, reaching out for her, “is when I take you in my arms, and tell you how terribly much I love you.”

  Had he really said that?

  * * *

  SO IT’S REALLY a lock?” Pearson Gunn asked Roger Duquesne, forty-five minutes and a pitcher later.

  “A lock? It is the lock of all locks, mon ami,” Duquesne confided. “A fait accompli.”

  “No loose ends?”

  “Bien sur, there are loose ends,” said Duquesne. “Toujours there are loose ends. Otherwise, private dickheads like you would scream that it is all trop parfait, it must be a frame!”

  “Like what?” Gunn asked.

  “What ‘Like what?’”

  “What kinda loose ends?”

  “Caca stuff, mon ami. Like peut-être Deke Stanton didn’t read the young man his rights très bien. Or that Bass fellow messed up the footprint trail un petit peu. Or only six out of seven hairs were found to be a DNA match. Or crime scene got a little sloppy, handled the knife too much, so by the time the latent-print people got ahold of it, they came up with rien du tout. Tell me, mon ami. Is that kind of merde going to spring your guy?”

  “No,” said Gunn. “It sure ain’t.”

  But it was good to know about, just the same.

  IT WAS THE conclusion of the psychiatrist George Goldstein that Jonathan Hamilton honestly had no recollection whatsoever of stabbing his grandparents to death. That same lack of recollection, however, according to Dr. Goldstein, was “entirely consistent in every respect with Jonathan’s having committed the crime while in a somnambulistic state.”

  Jonathan’s first post-event awareness was when he awoke to urinate sometime later in the early-morning hours, and discovered blood on his hands. His first reaction had been confusion. As he’d followed the blood trail to the main house, he’d experienced a growing sense of dread. That dread had changed to full-fledged horror when he reached the scene of the crime and beheld the results of his acts. All of those reactions were typical to incidents of sleep-related violence, as was Jonathan’s prompt phone call to the authorities, in which he’d related that his grandparents had been “hurt real bad.”

  To Dr. Goldstein, Jonathan Hamilton presented a classic profile of a sleepwalker. Having familiarized himself with the results of Hillary Munson’s findings, he knew Jonathan had a probable history of fetal alcohol syndrome, or at least its less pronounced cousin, fetal alcohol effect. On top of that, he had reportedly suffered some significant degree of organic brain damage as a young adult, the result of smoke inhalation and carbon monoxide poisoning during a fire.

  Dr. Goldstein found that Jonathan himself seemed to have some awareness that he’d had sleepwalking episodes at various times in the past, though he was characteristically vague when it came to the source of that awareness. As to why the jail records contained no accounts of unusual nighttime activities, that fact could easily be attributed to the medication that had been ordered for Jonathan to combat his sleeplessness. The log entries showed it to be clonazepam, a Valium-like drug Dr. Goldstein often had prescribed to his own patients specifically for the suppression of night terrors.

  Dr. Goldstein concluded by suggesting that a variety of tests be performed. Among his recommendations was first to take Jonathan off all medication, then hook him up to a polysomnograph machine, and - by applying a low-voltage electrical current to the large motor muscles - attempt to artificially induce a sleepwalking episode.

  Such an experiment, of course, would require the consent of the jail authorities. Because of that, there’d be no way of keeping it secret from the prosecution; and for now at least, it would remain in the suggestion box.

  EVEN AS MATT Fielder spent the weekend playing family with Jennifer and Troy, the defense continued to work. Pearson Gunn crossed off a few things from his list of “Things to Do,” and added a few others. He also started a new checklist, which he called “Things to Think About.” It began modestly enough.

  Turkey or duck for Thanksgiving?

  Miranda rights ever read to Jonathan?

  Why no prints on knife?

  Cut back on ale consumption?

  Why only six out of seven hairs?

  Enough antifreeze in car radiator?

  Taking a look at the list, Gunn decided that maybe he’d simply been looking at things the same way for too long. Perhaps it was time for a new approach, a little creativity. They even had a phrase for it these days, like everything else. “Out-of-the-box thinking,” they called it. So why shouldn’t he give it a try? After all, what did he have to lose?

  Duck it would be.

  HILLARY MUNSON WORKED late into the night to put the finishing touches on the report of her meeting with Sue Ellen Blodgett. She knew how important Sue Ellen’s testimony could be in terms of establishing a historical record of Jonathan Hamilton’s sleepwalking. She also wanted to memorialize in writing the chain of custody of Jennifer Hamilton’s letter to Sue Ellen, so as to preempt any attack on its admissibility at trial. And she wanted to have everything finished so she could overnight it to Matt Fielder before the holiday weekend began.

  Hillary was actually a little bit nervous about the holidays. She was driving down to New York (more specifically to Whitestone, Queens) to spend the weekend with her parents, her brother, and her aunts and uncles and cousins - all of whom she hadn’t seen in almost two years. And, at her mother’s urging, she’d agreed to bring that “special friend” she’d been talking about for some time, but whose name she’d kept secret all this time.

&nb
sp; Oh, were they in for a surprise!

  THE SECOND DOCTOR to go into the Cedar Falls jail and interview Jonathan Hamilton was a clinical psychologist by the name of Margaret Litwiller. Dr. Litwiller brought with her a briefcase full of materials - standardized test forms, blank paper, crayons, playing cards, stick-figure drawings, black-and-white photographs, inkblot cards, anatomically correct dolls, and tiny colored blocks shaped like houses, cars, and other everyday objects.

  She spent nearly three hours with Jonathan, during which time (at least according to the visiting-room guard’s observations, dutifully noted in the log book) the two of them “did proseed to play with alot of little toys.”

  In the confidential report she would submit to Matt Fielder some two weeks later, Dr. Litwiller would conclude that Jonathan, “while marginally oriented to person, place, and time, possesses only the most primitive level of insight into his own ideation and thought processes. . . . In particular, his MMI profile reflects almost childlike responses to his surroundings. . . . Notably, however, his Rorschach responses reveal surprising levels of hostility. Confronted with cards in the series six-a through eleven-c, normally suggestive of butterflies, songbirds, and teddy bears, Jonathan instead sees bats, birds of prey, and grizzlies. This hostility, while deeply suppressed, seems largely directed toward authority figures, in particular parents and grandparents.”

  In Dr. Litwiller’s considered opinion, it was quite evident that while asleep, and accordingly freed from the constraints of his superego, Jonathan had simply “acted out” his anger against the most convenient authority targets available.

  * * *

  THANKSGIVING DAY FELL on the twenty-seventh of November. A low cloud cover blanketed the Northeast, but a promised cold front stayed just above the Canadian border. Matt Fielder joined hands with Jennifer Walker and her son Troy as they said grace over the fold-down aluminum tabletop in the trailer park just north of Nashua, New Hampshire, before feasting on a small turkey. In Tupper Lake, New York, Pearson Gunn carved crisp duckling, stuffed with homemade venison sausage, for his wife and himself in their A-frame. Hillary Munson and her companion, Lois Miller, sat down with a roomful of slightly stunned family members, to a five-course dinner featuring rock Cornish game hen, in a split-level in Whitestone, Queens.