Flat Lake in Winter (20 page)

“Not all
that
bad,” he said. “Maybe a couple of Jacksons bad.”

“Make it a Grant,” Donnie said, “and I think I might be able to remember who it was looked into the thing.”

“You’re one greedy mick,” Gunn said to his fellow Irishman, handing him a fifty. “It’s not enough they pay you a million dollars an hour to play with Tonka toys all day.”

“Hey, the wife’s expectin’ again.”

“The wife’s
always
expecting.” Donnie already had about fifty kids, it seemed. “This better be good,” Gunn said.

Donnie slipped the fifty into his shirt pocket. “Was ackshully
two
guys who handled the followup,” he said. “They sent up some guy named Meacham, from the Schenectady arson squad. I hear he passed, though.”

“Passed what?”

“
Passed,”
Donnie repeated. “Like
dead.”

“Great,” Gunn groaned. “How about the other guy?”

Donnie hesitated a moment.

“No fucking
way!”
Gunn told him.

“Okay, okay. Lemme see. The other guy was the fire marshal from our outfit. I’m just tryin’ to remember his name, is all.”

“
Remember
it.”

“Hey, lighten up,” Donnie protested. But he suddenly managed to recall the name. “Squitieri,” he said. “Jimmy Squitieri, that’s it. Used to call him Spider.”

“Where can I find him now?” Gunn asked.

“Jeez, I don’t know. He retired, went down to Florida somewhere.”

“Florida’s a big place, Donnie.”

“Saratoga?”

“That’s right here in New York, over on the Northway.”

“Shit.
Sounds
like Saratoga.”

“How about
Sarasota?”

“Yeah,” Donnie said, “that could be it. Saratoga, Sarasota. Same thing.”

Which actually wasn’t so bad, Gunn had to admit later, as he thought about it. Locating a James Squitieri in Sarasota, Florida, might not be a piece of cake. But it sure beat looking for a Jennifer H. Somebody in Vermont, or maybe New Hampshire.

FIELDER AWOKE TO a loud ringing noise in his ears. After a moment’s disorientation, he realized he’d fallen asleep on his couch, in front of the wood-burning stove, for a change. The ringing noise turned out to be the phone. He found it under a cushion and answered on what must have been the fifth ring.

“I was about to give up,” said a familiar female voice.

“Who’s this?” he asked. He’d learned some time ago to ask right away, rather than to play along pretending to know until it was too late to ask.

“How soon we forget.”

“Jennifer.”

“I miss you,” she said.

“I miss you, too. I’ve been kinda busy, I guess.”

“How is it going?”

“Better,” he said. “Thanks to you.”

“Matthew?” She’d told him she preferred it over Matt, which reminded her of a sheriff with a droopy mustache.

“Yes?”

“Would it be all right if I visited Jonathan?”

“Visit Jonathan. . . .” he echoed. For some reason, it had never occurred to him that she might want to, given the original reason for her leaving, and the fact that she hadn’t been back in all these years. But now that she was asking, he guessed it was the most natural thing in the world. Here was her younger brother (not to mention the father of her child!) locked up for murder, possibly looking at a death sentence. Aside from P. J., she was the only family he had left. And P.J. wasn’t in much of a position to be visiting anybody, his offer to Gunn notwithstanding.

But as Fielder thought about it, he realized maybe it wasn’t such a good idea, after all. “I’m torn,” he told her. “I know you’d like to, and it might be nice for Jonathan. Only thing is, I may end up having to put you on the witness stand someday. When I do, the DA is going to want to show that you’re just trying to help your brother because you love him. One way of showing that is to ask you if you’ve been to see him. From there, it’s a short step to suggesting you went there to get your stories together, or to coach him.”

“I could deny it,” she offered, “say I wasn’t there.”

“He’ll subpoena the visiting records from the jail. It’ll look even worse if he catches you in a lie.”

“So I guess it would be better for me to stay away, huh?”

“From that standpoint, yes.”

“How about
you?
Can I come see
you?”

Fielder was caught off guard.

“Here?” That would not go down in history as one of the great recoveries of all time.

“There, here,” she said. “Wherever.”

The word
relationship
gradually came into focus. Fielder reminded himself how self-sufficient he’d become, how happy he was being alone in his cabin in the woods. He wasn’t so sure he was ready for any of this.

“I really miss you, Matthew.”

Then again . . .

“Look,” he said. “I want to see you, too. But for the same reason it might be better for you to stay away from Jonathan, it might not be the best thing for you and I to be, you know-”

“Linked romantically?”

The phrase reminded him of one of those television entertainment shows, or the newspapers they sold at the supermarket checkout counters. He could picture their photos on the cover of the
National Enquirer
, under three-inch headlines.

“Right,” he said. “Listen, I’ve got to finish some paperwork. But by next weekend, I may need to take a drive, and-”

“Interview me again?”

“Yeah. Something like that.”

FIELDER PUT THE finishing touches on his motions. He’d ended up asking for everything he could possibly think of, all the way down to disciplinary records of any state troopers and investigators who might be called to testify at trial. Then he drove to Cedar Falls, where he served a copy of his papers on the District Attorney’s Office and filed the original with Dot Whipple at the courthouse. While he was there, he dropped into the jail to see Jonathan again. He wanted to prepare him for visits from the various doctors who’d soon be coming in to talk to him.

Jonathan had been talking to doctors since early childhood, it turned out, and he seemed to take the news pretty much in stride. But Jonathan seemed to take everything pretty much in stride.

Again, at some point during their conversation, he muttered the word “Baby.” Again he drifted off when Fielder tried to follow up on it. And again, he looked pale, thin, and tired. And even more withdrawn than he had at the previous visit. Fielder had the strange sensation that they were starting to lose him.

“SURE, I REMEMBER Jennifer,” said Sue Ellen Blodgett. She’d dropped the Simms when she’d gotten married. “It was just too much of a mouthful,” she’d explained. “Sue Ellen Simms Blodgett. Know what I mean?”

Hillary Munson had smiled and assured her she knew what she meant. Hillary looked across the Formica kitchen table at Sue Ellen. The gawky, unattractive girl had grown up into a slightly less gawky woman, but the addition of fifty pounds hadn’t done much for her unattractiveness. She balanced her youngest daughter on one knee as she gazed back at Hillary through purple-framed glasses.

“When was the last time you saw her?” Hillary asked.

“Oh, not for years. But we’ve talked on the phone a couple of times. And exchanged a letter or two.”

“Do you remember her brothers?”

“Yup. Porter, he was a hell-raiser. Jonathan, he was always real quiet-like.” She paused to wipe a glob of purple jelly from her daughter’s chin. “Are they really going to, you know, give him one of those lethal injections, like?”

“They aim to try,” Hillary said. “What else do you remember about him?”

Sue Ellen did her best, but it was clear from listening to her that she had never spent much time at the Flat Lake estate and hadn’t seen anything of Jonathan in the ten years since his sister had left the state. She recalled the boy’s good looks, his shyness, and, above all, his slowness.

“He was one step above a
retard,
if you ask me. No offense, but he was always pickin’ up sticks or rocks or pine cones, or going, ‘Can we play now?’ or ‘Can we eat now?’ He could barely take care of his self, like.”

A second of Sue Ellen’s daughters wandered into the room and began tugging at her mother’s sleeve. “When can we
go out
?” she whined.

Hillary decided to cut to the point. “Do you remember anything about Jonathan’s sleeping?” she asked.

“He used to wet the bed, if that’s what you mean. Then, later on, he started walkin’ in his sleep.”

Hillary sat up. “Walking in his sleep?”

“Yup,” Sue Ellen nodded. “What do they call that, Sominex, or something? Got so they had to put special locks on the doors. I even heard he was the one who lit the fire. Prob’ly did it in his sleep, huh?”

“Where’d you hear that?” Hillary asked her.

“I think there was talk,” Sue Ellen said. “And, of course, you know about how he used to come into Jennifer’s room?”

Hillary nodded noncommittally.

“She musta told you about that?”

“How did
you
find out about that?” Hillary asked her.

“Oh, she told me,” Sue Ellen answered. “We were best friends, like. I mean, I always had other friends. But I don’t think Jennifer did. I was her only friend, far as I know.”

“What do you know about her child?”

“Troy? I know Jonathan’s the father, if that’s what you mean.”

“How do you know that?”

“She told me. She even sent me a snapshot. I might still have it somewhere.”

“Do you think you could take a look?”

Hillary meant sometime after the meeting, but Sue Ellen stood right up, shifted her baby to one hip, and walked into the next room. When she reappeared a few moments later, her second daughter was holding on to her skirt, and a third one had somehow materialized and was trailing a few feet behind them. But Sue Ellen was carrying a cardboard carton under one arm.

“Some of my memorabilia,” she explained, setting the carton down. “I’m very organized.” She rummaged through the contents for a minute or so, before extracting a worn envelope, which she raised above her head with a triumphant “Da
-dahh!
” and presented to Hillary. Inside was a photograph of a baby, who could have been Jonathan himself, and a letter, written in fading blue ink.

“Can I keep this?” Hillary asked.

“I guess so,” Sue Ellen said. “She’s moved a couple of times since then, anyway. But the other part, you’ll keep that quiet-like?”

“‘The other part’?”

“About who Troy’s father is.”

“Mum’s the word.”

HEADING BACK TO Albany, Hillary figured it was a deal she could live with. From what she knew of Matt Fielder, given enough time, he’d be able to convince Jennifer Hamilton to testify on her brother’s behalf, even if it meant delving into the dark recesses of her own past, and reliving such things as rape, incest, and illegitimacy. But that would only be Jennifer’s word. The letter corroborated Jennifer’s testimony. It described Jonathan’s sleepwalking in writing, a full nine years prior to the Flat Lake murders - long before there was any possible motive on the part of lawyers, doctors, and loved ones to put their heads together and concoct some clever defense that might play at trial.

That
was its importance. And in that respect, it became the first piece of solid physical evidence with which they’d be able to fend off claims that their defense had been fabricated.

Hillary Munson had come up with the smoking gun.

JONATHAN HAMILTON’S CASE was back in court on November 17, the forty-fifth and final day Judge Summerhouse had given the defense to get its motions in. Since Fielder had already submitted his papers the week before, the judge could do nothing but adjourn things for the prosecution’s response. He gave Cavanaugh five weeks, until December 22.

“See that?” the judge told Fielder. “You got forty-five days. I’m only giving the DA thirty-five. Talk about being
fair.”

Talk about being
disingenuous.
All three of them - Summerhouse, Fielder, and Cavanaugh - knew full well that prosecutors are routinely given two weeks or less to answer motions, which is more than sufficient time for them to print out computerized responses reciting their opposition to whatever the defense asks for. On top of that, it had already been close to a week since Cavanaugh actually received the papers.

But Fielder held his silence. There was certainly nothing improper about the judge’s giving Cavanaugh a cushion. Besides, the doctors could use the extra time to conduct their interviews of Jonathan and start preparing their reports. Gunn was trying to find a Florida address for somebody called Spider, and Fielder himself was anxious to take another drive to New Hampshire.

Jonathan struck Fielder as a little improved. They spent an hour talking in the lockup area off the courtroom. Again, Jonathan’s worries didn’t seem to be particularly case-oriented. Instead, he complained of the cold and of being tired much of the time. He thought it might have something to do with the food, or the pills they gave him each morning. Fielder promised to look into both matters. Other than that, however, Jonathan seemed to be holding his own. Fielder told him to be patient, that things were moving along about as fast as could be expected. But the repeated delays didn’t appear to bother Jonathan. In fact, it was hard to know if he even had a sense of time, the way most people do. It was more like dealing with a child in that respect. You talked about today; “tomorrow” tended to be a tricky concept.

From the courthouse, Fielder took a walk around the corner to an army-navy surplus store he’d noticed earlier on Maple Street. There he bought a couple of woolen blankets, which he brought around to the jail and left for Jonathan. That, too, was the kind of thing they’d talked about at Death School - winning your client’s trust by tending to his personal needs. The cost involved was often minimal, and sometimes even reimbursable. But even when it wasn’t, it was well worth the effort. Take the blankets, for example. They’d come to a little over $30 counting tax, an expenditure well within Fielder’s budget. And for once he’d even remembered to ask for a receipt, which he placed on his dashboard when he reached his car, just so he wouldn’t lose it.

Driving back to his cabin, he realized for the first time that Cavanaugh had had no official statement to make following the court appearance. No death-penalty decisions to trumpet, no DNA test results to celebrate, no motives to reveal. As for Fielder, silence was still the order of the day. There might come a time when he’d want to go public with the defense of sleepwalking, but that time was still off in the future.

As the Suzuki’s ancient heater finally began to warm up, Fielder loosened the knot of his tie and cracked the window an inch in order to get some fresh air. The receipt which he’d placed on the dashboard immediately lifted off and became airborne. It fluttered about for a second, before being sucked out the opening.

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.

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. But 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.”