Flat Lake in Winter

by Joseph T. Klempner

  Second, what was this business about only six of the seven hairs from the crime scene matching Jonathan’s? Wasn’t six out of seven pretty good? Perhaps the seventh hair was simply broken off and, therefore, missing a follicle, so that it contained no DNA material for comparison. Or perhaps it had belonged to one of the victims, or to Mrs. Armbrust (who probably made up the bed every day), or even to one of the investigators who’d been at the scene. Not much to go on, there.

  Then there was something in Hillary Munson’s report of her interview with Sue Ellen Blodgett. Fielder was every bit as excited about Sue Ellen’s contribution to the defense as Hillary was, particularly the 1989 letter in which Jennifer had mentioned Jonathan’s sleepwalking. But something about the letter bothered Fielder. In it, Jennifer had said she was enclosing photos of Troy. Yet according to Hillary’s report, there’d been only one photo in the envelope when Hillary opened it.

  Fielder looked at the clock and saw that it was almost three in the morning. He realized he’d reached the point where he was truly grasping at straws. He put another log in the stove, a piece of dry, unsplit oak, a good all-nighter. Then he flicked off the lights.

  “LOOK AT THESE STATISTICS!” Hillary Munson exclaimed. “Seventy-eight percent will believe us.”

  “Ninety-six percent,” added Gunn, “if it comes from the DA.”

  The vote had been swift and unanimous. Both Munson and Gunn agreed that, given the numbers the NJRI study had come up with, the defense needed to get the story of Jonathan’s sleepwalking defense out to the public as soon as possible.

  “Hillary,” said Fielder, “I want you to alert both Dr. Goldstein and Dr. Litwiller that we’re going to do this. Make sure they know that if anyone contacts them, all they’re to do is to confirm that they’ve interviewed Jonathan. And not a word about the fire, the rape, or any of that stuff.”

  “You got it,” Hillary said. “How are you going to do this? A press conference?”

  “I don’t know.” It was the one thing Fielder hadn’t figured out yet. He hated press conferences and tended to look down on lawyers who tried their cases in the media. Still, he knew the time had come for him to get over his aversion. His client’s life might depend upon it.

  Gunn spoke up. “Why don’t you give me a day or two to think about that?” he said. “I might be able to come with something.”

  As grateful as Fielder was for the reprieve, he knew time was running out on them. He agreed to hold off three days, but that was all. If Gunn couldn’t figure out a way to do it within that time, he’d call a press conference.

  How do you even do that? Fielder wondered.

  * * *

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, Fielder checked in with Kevin Doyle. He wanted to thank Doyle for putting him together with the people at NJRI and to tell him he was getting ready to air his defense in public.

  “Go for it!” Doyle has always been a big believer in what he likes to call the “unified theory of defense” in capital cases. He preaches that you can’t go through the motions of insisting your client’s factually innocent, and then - once he’d been convicted, and the penalty phase had begun - suddenly switch horses and start telling the same jury, “Yes, he did it, but he was high at the time, and he had a really tough childhood.” According to Doyle (and almost everyone else who does this work), you’ve got to put your money on one horse, and leave it there.

  Give me Sleepwalker to win in the seventh, Fielder wanted to say. “Kevin,” he said instead, “can I ask you a stupid question?”

  “Sure.”

  “How do you call a press conference?”

  Doyle laughed heartily. “Let me know when you’re ready,” he said. “I think I might have a few friends left in the media.”

  PEARSON GUNN WAS back at his usual table that evening, and the evening after that. All told, he went through five pitchers in the process. Tough work, as they say, but then somebody’s got to do it.

  Around eight-thirty on the second evening, Captain Roger Duquesne of the state police wandered in, just off duty from a split shift. He spotted Gunn, and greeted him with a loud, “Bonjour, mon ami!”

  Gunn waved. At the same time, he used one of his feet to slide an empty chair back from the table. It was a move he’d been practicing for two nights.

  The two men sat and talked almost to eleven. As always, Gunn refuses to divulge what it is they discussed. (To this very day, he refuses to confirm that Roger Duquesne and Gunn’s source, “CS-1,” are one and the same.) But according to Pete the bartender, who was on duty that evening, for once it seemed to be Gunn who was doing most of the talking, and Duquesne most of the listening.

  Which is not altogether surprising. Information, after all, is a two-way street. Just as successful private investigators need to have sources within government ranks, so too, do law-enforcement personnel depend upon informants in the private sector to keep them abreast of developments on the street.

  Or, looking at it another way, it is entirely possible that both men put in for expenses incurred that night at the Dew Drop Inn, during the course of official investigations. And that the taxpayers ultimately ended up picking up the tab for all three pitchers of ale.

  Twice over.

  TWO DAYS LATER, an exclusive story appeared on the bottom of the front page of the Adirondack Advertiser, under bold headlines.

  D. A. GIRDS FOR SLEEPWALKING DEFENSE IN FLAT LAKE MURDER TRIAL

  By that evening, all the major networks and their local affiliates had picked up the story. Most of them ran it against a backdrop consisting of a huge photo of Jonathan Hamilton. Copies of the photo had been dropped off earlier that day by messengers of unknown origin. It was in full color, and clearly showed Jonathan’s blond hair, pale blue eyes, and handsome features.

  Matt Fielder sat in front of his TV set that night, switching from one channel to another, his mouth open, his eyes wide. When the last of the newscasters finally finished her report and signed off, Fielder continued to sit in front of his set for a full twenty minutes, watching the evening sermonette, the playing of the national anthem, a test pattern, and finally a blank screen.

  “Holy shit,” was all he could think to say. “Holy shit.” Over and over again.

  IN RETROSPECT, it is extremely difficult to understand the thinking behind Gil Cavanaugh’s decision to go to the media with the story of Jonathan Hamilton’s sleepwalking. Obviously, he’d somehow learned of the defense’s plan to go public, and had figured that the best way to control the damage was to beat them to the punch. The preemptive strike tends to be almost a reflexive action among those accustomed to dealing with the media.

  The course Cavanaugh chose was probably doomed from the outset. On top of that, it was carried out with almost astonishing clumsiness.

  For a full week, he tried his best to stonewall it. In press conference after press conference (for, unlike Matt Fielder, the district attorney was no stranger to the ways of the media, or what it took to make them come running), Cavanaugh alternately dismissed the notion that Jonathan Hamilton had committed the crimes in his sleep, and blithely insisted that it was something the defense could never prove.

  “Nonsense!” was his first response. “This is nothing but the very latest ‘Twinkie defense,’ the desperate concoction of some clever defense lawyer. I’ll bet my last dollar nobody ever heard about Hamilton’s walking in his sleep before he killed his grandparents!”

  That very same afternoon, the reporters came flocking back to him. The defense, it seemed, was saying it was in a position to establish that Jonathan had been sleepwalking for many years.

  “Sure,” Cavanaugh retorted. “They’ll get someone to say that. But can they prove it?”

  Apparently so, they told him the following morning. There was talk of documents that went back almost ten years, and of nationally known psychiatrists and psychologists willing to stake their reputations on their opinions. Cavanaugh turned to his aides, but their response was a silent chorus of shrugs and qu
izzical looks. Evidently, they hadn’t heard that.

  In the days that followed, it became clear that just as Cavanaugh’s initial response had been ill-conceived, so, too, were his follow-ups. Gradually, he began to change his posture from one of doubting the authenticity of Jonathan’s sleepwalking, to one of attacking its relevance. “It’s nothing but another red herring,” he said. “First they said he wasn’t to blame because he was slow. Now they want to excuse what he did because he was asleep! What are they going to blame it on next? That he’s a victim of society? I say a man ought to be held accountable for his own acts, fast or slow, awake or asleep!”

  The problem was that each time Cavanaugh tried a different line of attack, the defense had an answer ready for it. And the back-and-forth process simply served to prolong the debate, and keep it front and center in the news.

  By midweek, the local radio stations began getting wind of the public’s reaction to the debate. There was no flood of calls, to be sure, but there was a pretty steady flow, and according to the early reports, sentiment was running as high as ten-to-one in favor of Jonathan. “You can’t punish a man for something he does while he’s sleepwalking,” asserted one listener. “Why would you want to execute someone who’s not responsible for what he did?” asked another. Many callers seemed to have friends or relatives who’d been known to walk in their sleep. Others had read of such cases. A woman from Cooperstown phoned to say that she herself had wound up in her own garden once or twice. “Durned if I know how,” she added.

  By the end of the week, Cavanaugh had circled the wagons. In what he said would be his final public pronouncement on the matter, he retreated to his original stance of questioning whether Jonathan had really been sleepwalking at the time of the murders. “This wasn’t about being asleep,” he insisted. “It was about greed and evilness. It was about money!” Then, in a fairly transparent case of bet-hedging, he added, “And anyway, we can’t be having a lunatic running around in our midst. Who knows what’ll happen next time he decides to get up in his sleep?”

  Then he did what he probably should have done in the first place. He went to Judge Summerhouse and applied for a gag order.

  The judge, like just about everybody else, had evidently been following the brouhaha. “And just who is it,” he asked wryly, “that you’d like to gag?”

  For once, Matt Fielder had to smile. No, he told the judge when asked, the defense had no objection to the order. What he didn’t say was that, as far as he was concerned, the damage had already been done, and it was as good a time as any to let things quiet down and sink in, before the reporters’ questions became too difficult for him to answer.

  IF GIL CAVANAUGH thought the gag order was going to put an end to the uproar, he was mistaken once again. You can gag lawyers, but you can’t gag reporters. And you certainly can’t gag the public. The talk-radio hosts kept the story alive, and the calls kept coming in to the news stations. A poll of 850 Ottawa County residents over twenty-one years of age was reported in the Advertiser. Close to 90 percent of those responding believed the death penalty was inappropriate in Jonathan Hamilton’s case, while a full 33 percent maintained that he shouldn’t be held criminally responsible at all.

  Asked by an Advertiser reporter to comment on the results, Fielder replied that he couldn’t, seeing as the DA had obtained a gag order. His response was quoted verbatim in the next day’s paper, drawing a phone call from Judge Summerhouse, sternly admonishing him that a gag order was a gag order, and neither side was to comment on who’d sought it. “Sorry,” said Fielder. But once again, the damage had already been done, and the public’s perception was reinforced that it had been the prosecution all along that felt the need to put a lid on things.

  FIELDER WAS STARTLED by the ringing of his phone. He picked it up and said, “Hello.”

  “Matthew Fielder, please,” said a woman.

  “That’s me.”

  “Please hold for Mr. Cavanaugh,” she said.

  Not exactly his favorite way of being treated, thought Fielder. But then again, this was the man who’d started off their relationship by referring to him as a “Jew lawyer.” He wondered what it was the DA wanted now.

  There was a click on the other end, followed by Cavanaugh’s voice. “Hello, Matt,” he said. “Gil Cavanaugh here. I’m sorry - is this your office, or your home?”

  “It’s both,” Fielder said.

  “I see. How’ve you been?”

  “Not bad.”

  “Quite a ripple we caused there,” Cavanaugh said. “In the media.”

  “‘We’?”

  “Well, you know, the case.”

  “Right.”

  “I was thinking . . .” said Cavanaugh.

  Fielder waited.

  “I was wondering, just for the sake of argument, if your man might be interested in some sort of a disposition.”

  Fielder felt his heart begin to pound, but he held his silence.

  “Did you hear me?”

  “I heard you,” Fielder said. “I thought maybe you were going to tell me what you have in mind.”

  “Well,” said Cavanaugh, “we’d be talking life, of course.”

  “What kind of life?” There was life, and there was life. There was life without parole, there was twenty-five-to-life, there was fifteen-to-life, and there was everything in between.

  “I think the term is le-wop” said Cavanaugh, mispronouncing LWOP to make it come out sounding like a Frenchman’s slur for an Italian.

  “Well,” said Fielder, doing his best to conceal his excitement, “if that’s an offer, I’ll certainly run it by my client.”

  “Why don’t you do that?” Cavanaugh suggested. “You never can tell, he might decide he likes living.”

  They talked for a minute more before exchanging good-byes, neither man particularly comfortable. It was clear they had little in the way of small talk to share - the gregarious local country-club politician and the refugee loner from the big city.

  As soon as he’d replaced the phone in its cradle, Fielder pumped his fist in the air and let out a full-volume “Yesss!” Whether or not Jonathan Hamilton might be interested in pleading guilty - in exchange for living the rest of his life in prison - wasn’t really the point. In fact, as Fielder thought about it, he imagined he’d have a hard time just getting Jonathan to understand the choice presented to him. But that wasn’t the point. The point was, there was suddenly a light at the end of the tunnel. From a situation that had seemed utterly hopeless only a week ago, there had been a sudden and dramatic turnaround. And Cavanaugh’s phone call marked the first acknowledgment of precisely how meaningful that turnaround had been.

  The enemy had blinked.

  * * *

  THE SNOW THAT fell that night began softly, falling in large wet flakes that coated the branches of the evergreens and grasses, but melted when they landed on solid surfaces still warmed by the ground. Gradually, however, the temperatures dipped below the freezing mark and slid into the high twenties. The change was a matter of only a few degrees, but it was enough to cause the flakes to stick. The result was a rapid accumulation of wet, heavy snow that bent boughs and tree trunks low, even as it raised the white ground up to meet them.

  By daybreak, a full foot of snow had fallen in most of the area, even more in the mountains. Near midafternoon, with no letup in sight, some areas were reporting as much as thirty inches. Snow-plows began losing the battle to keep roads clear, trees snapped like kindling, and power lines fell with them.

  It wasn’t until the following morning that the snow let up, or moved out, or just figured it had done enough to remind folks who was in charge of things. By that time, the storm had broken records that had stood for thirty years. The entire Adirondack region lay blanketed under three feet of heavy snow, the kind that bends shovels and gets measured not only in inches and feet, but in strained backs, heart attacks, and deaths. Out on the highways, stranded motorists were plucked from the tops of their cars by heli
copters; 2,000 homes were reported to be without power and water; phone service would be out for days. For people and animals alike, life was reduced to a matter of pure, grim survival.

  Matt Fielder was in heaven.

  Dry in his woolens and warm by his fire, he watched the snow pile up outside until the drifts covered the lower halves of his windows. With his power out, he melted snow for drinking water, and cooked soup on the cast-iron surface of his stove. Twice he had to climb up onto his roof to shovel off the new accumulation, in order to reduce the danger of a cave-in. By the third time, he no longer had to climb; he simply strapped on his snowshoes and walked until he came to his chimney.

  This, too, was why Fielder had fled the city and come to the Adirondacks. The sheer beauty, the majestic quiet, and the awesome display of the elements reminded him how puny and powerless man could be in this world. There was no fighting back against Nature; whenever she decided to play hard, to dig into the batter’s box and take a full swing, she won, plain and simple.

  But there was room for accommodation.

  If you’d built your cabin for strength instead of beauty, and had driven the nails close enough and straight enough, its frame would stand up against the fiercest wind. If you’d triple-caulked the logs, had spent your money on insulation instead of decoration, and had chosen an ugly wood-burning stove over a dramatic open fireplace, your walls would keep out the bitterest cold. And if you hadn’t been so foolish as to install designer skylights where structural beams belonged, your roof would withstand the crushing weight of even the heaviest snow - provided you were willing to get off your butt now and then, and lend a hand with a shovel.

  If you did all that, the storm pretty much lets you be.

  What it didn’t let you do, was drive the sixty miles to Cedar Falls, to visit your client.

  IT WAS A full two days before Fielder’s power was restored. With electricity, his pump came back on, and he soon had water flowing from his well. Despite the freezing temperatures, no pipes had clogged or burst. Snow, which Homo temperatus tends to think of as cold stuff, actually makes pretty good insulation. Just ask anyone who’s ever built an igloo, or watched a sled dog bed down for the night.