Flat Lake in Winter (4 page)

Gil Cavanaugh’s insistence that he knew nothing of the charges against Jonathan Hamilton until the day following the arrest takes on special significance in the context of the law. The same statute that brought back the death penalty to New York after a thirty-year moratorium (if that somewhat oxymoronic term can be forgiven) created a Capital Defender’s Office. Included in the Capital Defender’s mandate was the responsibility to maintain a house staff of attorneys to represent defendants accused of capital crimes; to train a small but select group of lawyers from the private sector, public-defender agencies, and legal-aid offices, so that they, too, would be qualified to accept assignments in capital cases; to provide a resource center to assist in all such defenses; and to assist in the education of those judges throughout the state who would be designated to hear the cases.

One of the points of contention during the debate that restored the death penalty involved the issue of just when in the accusatory process a person charged with capital murder should be provided counsel. Prosecutors argued that the traditional method of assigning a lawyer at the first court appearance was adequate; defense attorneys contended that the early stages of the process were often the most critical, and that the accused should be provided counsel at the earliest possible opportunity. After a good degree of haggling in the legislature, a compromise of sorts was hammered out: The district attorney in whose county the charges are being brought has an affirmative obligation to notify the Capital Defender as soon as he authorizes the filing of first-degree murder charges, so that the Capital Defender, acting as a clearing house of sorts, can designate either a member of his staff, or an outside qualified attorney, to immediately begin representing the accused.

The person appointed as New York’s first Capital Defender is a man named Kevin Doyle. Doyle is lean, youthful looking, and clear-eyed. He is bright, well spoken, and absolutely indefatigable. He is no stranger to the arena, having spent most of his career representing death-row inmates in Alabama, where the state pays $10 an hour - ditchdiggers’ rates - to those lawyers willing to devote their lives to the business of trying to save defendants from the electric chair.

As one of Doyle’s first official acts, he sent a letter, by certified mail, to the district attorneys of each of the sixty-two counties in the state, informing them of their statutory obligation to notify him the moment they had authorized the filing of capital charges. The letter included emergency pager numbers, whereby Doyle or a member of his staff could be reached at any time, day or night, no matter where they were, or what the circumstance.

There is some doubt as to whether Gil Cavanaugh (who had personally been one of the sixty-two recipients of Doyle’s letter) neglected through oversight to comply with the notification requirement, or deliberately chose to ignore it. But his version, that he was unaware of the case until Monday afternoon, is simply belied by the facts. In any event, he never notified Doyle’s office.

It wasn’t until late Monday afternoon, a full twenty-four hours after the time of Stanton’s log entry regarding his conversation with Cavanaugh, that Doyle, visiting friends on the south shore of Long Island, received a call from a member of his staff, informing him that the networks were airing reports of a double murder in some place called Flat Lake. Mumbling apologies to his hosts, Doyle rushed out to his car, grabbed a handful of road maps, and tore through them until he found the town. Back inside, he spent the next hour on the phone trying to identify and track down the Ottawa County District Attorney. He finally reached Gil Cavanaugh at the clubhouse of the Green Tree Country Club, outside of Cedar Falls.

Doyle got right to the point. “I’m told your office has authorized the filing of a complaint in what could be a capital murder case,” he said.

“That’s right,” Cavanaugh acknowledged. “Just found out about it myself.”

“When?” Doyle pressed him.

“When what?”

“When did you find out about it?”

“Just now, just now,” Cavanaugh said. “About, ah, a little while ago, more or less.”

UP AND RUNNING for less than two years at the time, the Capital Defender’s Office occupied temporary space in lower Manhattan, and had a single branch office, in Rochester. Back at the road map, Doyle estimated that Flat Lake completed a rough equilateral triangle with the two locations, and was nearly 200 miles from either one. He immediately ruled out assigning the case to one of his own staff attorneys. The next option was the public defender for the county. But Ottawa County was so sparsely populated that it had none. Doyle quickly found himself down to his final option: locating a private attorney in the geographical area who had been trained to take these cases.

As encyclopedic as Kevin Doyle’s mind is, as he studied the road map that afternoon, not even he could think of anyone from the area who had been through the training sessions. He was forced to call one of the office secretaries who lived in Manhattan, prevail upon her to go downtown, unlock the office, pull out the roster books, and phone him back. Then he had her read off the names of every private lawyer who was qualified to handle capital cases in the five counties closest to Flat Lake. Not that it took her very long to do so: There were only six names.

The first five names failed to ring a bell with Doyle, but he jotted down their phone numbers as they were read off. It was only the sixth name that brought a wry smile to his face.

“Bingo,” he said softly.

MATTHEW FIELDER was out behind his cabin splitting firewood when the call came in. He heard the phone, but chose to let it ring away - that was what the answering machine was for, after all. Besides which, Fielder had a hard time imagining that the call could be from anyone he wanted to talk with.

At forty-four, Matt Fielder was a dropout of sorts. A criminal defense lawyer with the Legal Aid Society in Manhattan for sixteen years, he’d been good enough to have earned a promotion to the rank of supervisor. What that meant was, they’d taken him out of the courtroom - which was the only place he’d ever felt at home - and put him behind a desk, where he was supposed to push paper. When the Society had gone up against the mayor two years later over a contract dispute, the results had been disastrous. Instead of pay increases, there had been cuts. When it became obvious that heads would have to roll, Fielder had willingly offered up his own. He’d taken a buyout package consisting of the pension he’d accrued, plus three months’ severance pay. The total amount came to $43,562.19. The public-service version of a golden parachute.

With the check, he’d paid off the last of the alimony arrears he owed his ex-wife, taken care of a couple of long-overdue credit-card balances, and bought back his rusting Suzuki Sidekick from the finance company, who’d repossessed it for the third time the month before. With a little over $18,000 left from the buyout, he’d come across an ad offering ten-acre parcels of undeveloped land in the Adirondacks for $1,000 an acre. The photo showed deer drinking from a crystal-clear pond, surrounded by a forest of evergreens. Sight unseen, he’d written out a check and mailed it off.

Next he’d gotten himself appointed to the Assigned Counsel Plan, qualifying him to represent indigent defendants - the only thing he knew how to do after eighteen years of lawyering. The cases paid a whopping $40 an hour for in-court work, and $25 an hour out-of-court. He was responsible for his own overhead: office rent, phone, fax, copy machine, library, insurance, stationery, postage, and medical coverage. Because he couldn’t afford to hire a secretary, he bought a second-hand computer and did his own paperwork.

The first year he netted $4,562.38.

Just when Fielder was consoling himself with the good news - that at least he’d owe little or nothing in the way of income taxes - he received a notice from Internal Revenue informing him that since he’d neglected to roll over his pension fund, he now owed them an additional $11,000.

It was about that time that he decided to pull the plug.

He called the Assigned Counsel Plan to tell them he was packing it in. Laura Held, the administrator of the Plan, got on the phone. Matt and Laura had been colleagues at Legal Aid and friends for a dozen years or so, ever since Laura had cajoled him into representing a deaf-mute who couldn’t read, write, or converse in sign language.

Laura tried her best to talk Matt out of quitting, but this time he managed to resist her charms. He told her he was determined to head for the woods.

“This means you’ll have plenty of free time?” she asked him.

He should have seen it coming, but he didn’t. “I sure hope so,” he said.

“Then I’m signing you up for Death School,” she announced.

“
Say what?”

FIELDER FINISHED SPLITTING the last of the wood and tossed the sledgehammer and wedges to the side. He figured he’d done about a quarter of a face cord in two hours. He loved splitting ash. It was a good, hard wood for burning, but it was less work than either oak or maple, both of which tended to resist coming apart cleanly. Elm was the worst: The fibers clung and held on forever. Not like ash. With ash, you hit it right, it rewarded you. Life itself ought to be like that. But there sure did seem to be a lot of elm out there lately.

Fielder dried the sweat off his face and upper body with the sweatshirt he’d stripped off earlier. In the quiet of the clearing, he became aware of a faint beeping noise coming from inside the cabin. He remembered the phone call. Looking up at the sky through the branches, he figured he still had another half hour of daylight to stack the wood. He brushed the chips out of his hair and off his jeans and headed for the cabin door.

“
One . . . new . . . message,
” the robot inside the answering machine told him. A push of a button retrieved it.

“Matt, this is Kevin Doyle. We’ve got a double murder up in Ottawa County that’s going to be arraigned tomorrow morning in Cedar Falls. The DA’s a meateater. This could be the real thing. I’m hoping you can take it. Call me as soon as you can, at (516) 555-7282. Thanks.”

“DEATH SCHOOL,” Laura Held had explained, was the intensive training program run by the CDO to qualify attorneys to handle capital murders. It was open to lawyers who had extensive backgrounds in defending murder cases, and offered to only the very best of those, Laura had confided. For the next ten minutes, she’d played up to Fielder’s commitment to justice, empathy with the underdog, and - pulling out all the stops - his ego. Fielder, of course, had never had a chance: This was the same Laura Held, after all, who had once convinced him to represent a client so totally impossible to communicate with that he may as well have been from Mars.

Death School had been a grueling three days of lectures, seminars, demonstrations, and participation. Classes had begun at eight in the morning, and discussion groups ran late into the night. Experts from all around the country had come to share their knowledge, strategies, anecdotes, successes, failures, and secrets. David Bruck had flown in from Seattle to re-create his closing argument on behalf of Susan Smith, the mother who had strapped her two young children into her car before rolling it into a lake. Andrea Lyon came from Ann Arbor to discuss the merits of bursting into tears in front of the jury. Cessie Alfonso, a social worker from Jersey City, described going back more than 100 years to document the recurrence of mental illness, sexual abuse, alcoholism, and drug dependency in every generation of a particular defendant’s ancestors.

Fielder had come away from the experience almost shell-shocked. While colleagues all around him rubbed their hands together, eager to get to work on capital cases and the higher hourly rates they were expected to pay, Fielder cringed at the thought of being responsible not only for a client’s freedom, but for his very life. When invited to fill out a form, the final question of which asked when he’d be available to take his first case - a question others were answering with replies like “Immediately,” “Tomorrow,” and “ASAP” - he’d sat for twenty minutes before inking in his response. “I’m not at all certain,” he’d finally written, “that I’m emotionally prepared to do this work.”

Which was, of course, exactly what Kevin Doyle wanted to hear. So when three young Hispanics were arrested in the Bronx for gunning down a police officer, Fielder had been the first lawyer Doyle had reached out to. When a fifty-five-year-old man had emptied his gun into his girlfriend and her son in their Manhattan apartment, Fielder had again been tapped. But both of those cases had quickly gone “non-death”: the Bronx case because the ballistics evidence soon established that it was one of the co-defendants who’d been the actual shooter (he subsequently cheated the system by hanging himself from the bars of his cell), and the Manhattan case because the defendant’s age, poor health, good work record, and minimal criminal history made him an unlikely candidate for capital punishment.

“Non-death” was certainly good news for the clients, and Fielder breathed a sigh of relief the moment he knew that while he might be responsible for the defendants’ lives, at least he wouldn’t be held accountable for their deaths. But “non-death” was bad news for the bank account. It meant back to the old $40 in-court and $25 out-of-court rates. Fielder didn’t care; he was happy to have the pressure off. He worked six, and sometimes seven days a week on the two cases, and it was three months before he managed to take a week off and make the six-hour drive up to the Adirondacks to see what his $10,000 had bought him.

What he found was ten acres, all right, and it was certainly undeveloped. The crystal-clear pond turned out to be a low-lying depression that had flooded over in the spring thaw and was guaranteed to become an ideal hatchery for mosquitoes by summer. But it had a meandering brook, plenty of deer, and the promised forest of evergreens. Counting on borrowing against the money he’d eventually be getting for the two murder cases, Fielder ordered logs from a local lumberyard. After all, he figured, how hard could it be to build a cabin?

The next time he got back upstate was three weeks later. He stopped first at the lumberyard to tell them they better hold off, the bank had turned down his loan.

“Already delivered ‘em,” said the sawyer.

“Sorry,” Fielder said.

“Don’t be sorry,” he was told. “Build yer cabin. Pay me when you get around to it.”

Just like New York City.

* * *

FIELDER HIT THE REWIND button on the answering machine and listened to the message again.
A double murder.
As he knew from his Manhattan case, that fact alone qualified the case as a capital one; it was what the statute termed an “aggravating factor.”
Cedar Falls.
That was Ottawa County, a good hour’s drive from Fielder’s cabin outside Big Moose. Two hours, if it was snowing.
The DA’s a meateater.
Fielder knew Doyle had a “book” on every prosecutor in the state, the way a coach keeps scouting reports on opposing team’s tendencies. There was a general rule: The closer the county was to a big city, the less likely it was that the DA was an avid proponent of the death penalty. Fielder’s two earlier cases had illustrated the point: In the Bronx, Robert Johnson was so outspokenly opposed to capital punishment that the state attorney general had taken the case away from him; in Manhattan, Robert Morgenthau was also opposed, but was at least going through the motions of evaluating cases on their merits as they came up.

But Ottawa County was about as far away as you could get from a big city, in almost every way imaginable. Demographically it was much like Herkimer County, where Fielder’s cabin was. Instead of settling the area vertically in apartment buildings, folks had spread out laterally and had left a lot of space in between. They drove pickup trucks, owned shotguns, drank beer, voted Republican, and figured that that old “eye for an eye” stuff made pretty good sense. So when Doyle had said, “
This could be the real thing,”
he meant that here was a case that was going to start out death, and probably
stay
death.

Even as he copied down the phone number, Fielder knew he wanted no part of this one.

IT HAD TAKEN FIELDER almost a year to build the cabin. Along the way, he’d made every mistake known to carpentry, and even come up with a few innovations of his own. He’d poured the slab in the rain, so that when it had finally set it was uniformly pockmarked. He’d hung the front door upside down and the picture window inside out. He’d cut his knee, hammered both thumbs, broken a toe dropping a log on it, and fallen from the roof, luckily landing in a snowdrift. But by the time he was finished, he could cut a log with one pass of a chainsaw, drive home a ten-penny nail in three swings, and snap a pretty mean chalk line.

And he had his cabin.

True, it was more or less equal parts log and caulking, but it kept out most of the rain and even some of the wind. It had wide-board pine floors, electric lights, and real plumbing. Heat came from a wood-burning stove, which worked with its doors open when atmosphere was called for, or closed when efficiency was needed. Atmosphere tended to end, and efficiency began, around early September.

The checks from the two murder cases finally came in, and Fielder paid off the lumberyard. His apology for the delay was met with an unconcerned shrug and the observation, “Figgered you couldn’t git too far with all them logs in that little wind-up car of yours.” The next summer, he took his remaining $600, rented a backhoe, and dredged out his swamp. If it didn’t look much like a crystal-clear pond quite yet, at least it was a start.

Down to pocket change and faced with the necessity of earning some real money, Fielder turned to legal writing. He took on a handful of appeals, drafting briefs for defendants seeking to overturn their convictions. The same Assigned Counsel Plan that had paid him to go to court for $40 an hour and prepare motions for $25, now paid him $40 to sit at his computer and compose legal arguments. For once, being far from the city proved to be no drawback, particularly when it came time to visit the inmates, who were experiencing their own version of being upstate - in places with names like Dannemora, Malone, Lyon Mountain, and Comstock. He also wrote short stories, even managing to sell one to a regional literary magazine,
St. Lawrence Currents
, for $75. Talk about real money.

Of course, there were certain drawbacks. Slow to make friends under the best of circumstances, Fielder now found himself moving dangerously close to full hermit status. He’d occasionally force himself to drive into town on the thinnest of pretexts, in search of a two-day-old local newspaper or an extra bag of sugar. At such times, he suspected that what he was really doing was checking to make sure that the town - Big Moose, population 75 - was still there, and that he hadn’t missed some cataclysmic event that had plunged the rest of the world into nuclear winter while he slept. A few minutes at the general store were generally all it took for reassurance. Somebody’d be complaining about the rising price of kerosene, or debating the merits of sandworms versus hellgrammites, or ordering new sap buckets in time for syrup season. A glance at the headline of the
Adirondack Advertiser,
the regional newspaper/ realty lister/ pennysaver, would serve to bring him up on the important news: Locally, there’d been a drunk driving arrest on County Road 19, while, on the international scene, the bass were taking No. 2 Lazy Ike lures up in Little Bog Lake. He’d given up trying to find the
New York Times
except on Sundays, when desperation would take over and compel him to make the sixty-mile drive down to Utica.