Flat Lake in Winter by Joseph T. Klempner Read Free Book Online Page A

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