Above Suspicion

by Sharkey, Joe;

  “The bank in Phelps just got robbed!” Poole cried. “What the hell do I do? I don’t even know where this place is!”

  Mark groaned and suggested, “Call Susan.”

  Poole was of course happy for that suggestion. In his conversations with Kathy, he’d made his interest in Susan very clear. He’d also said that he believed Susan was still in love with her husband, which came as no surprise to Kathy, since Susan herself had confided the same thing. Kathy thought it pathetic. She also was worried about Susan’s increasing drug use. She despaired of ever being able to help her straighten out her chaotic life. Kathy warned Poole, who was separated from his wife, not to get involved.

  “I can take care of myself,” Poole replied angrily, and he startled Kathy by hanging up.

  For her part, Susan realized that Mark was shunting her aside. That knowledge made her more miserable, her drug use worsened, and her need for money increased.

  She turned to Mark’s wife as usual. “Poole wants me to work with him on these drug cases, but I need to work with Mark,” Susan told Kathy through angry tears.

  The bureau money was available for a productive informant, of course—and Susan was desperate to put enough together to move out of the house she shared with Kenneth into an apartment with her two children. So with few other options, she began working small drug cases with Poole. She complained, however, that more often than not, these were investigative trips where they always ended up alone at a bar or a restaurant. Steadfastly, she rebuffed Poole’s overtures, but she worried how long it would be before he would cut her off financially if she didn’t give in.

  By the summer, Kathy decided unilaterally that it was time for a real vacation. Except for the Christmas trip back home when little Mark was born, they hadn’t been away together since before Mark went into the academy, which now seemed like ages ago. Kathy had squirreled away enough money to do it right. She announced to Mark that she had already made the arrangements. Like it or not, they were going to a place they had visited once and loved: Myrtle Beach, a resort on the coast of South Carolina. At first, he resisted mightily, insisting that his workload was too staggering even to think about getting away. She was adamant.

  “We’re going,” she said. “You’d better go find your bathing suit.”

  She prevailed. In August, they packed up the car and the kids and drove across the Appalachians and the coastal plain beyond to the sandy sweep of Myrtle Beach, where they spent ten days. It was a sun-drenched island of peace, serenity, and intense joy in their still-young marriage. It would be their last truly happy time together.

  6

  The vacation reverie faded fast. The night after they returned, Poole was on the phone, telling Kathy the last thing she needed to hear, which was that the bureau was cutting back on spending and that “first-office agents” such as Mark, who could usually expect to be routinely transferred after two years or so in one place, were now likely to spend four or five years before being relocated to one of the offices of their choice.

  She was crying when Mark came home. He didn’t want to talk about transfers. Instead, he read Danielle her bedtime story and without a word went out for a longer run than usual. While he was out, the phone rang.

  “Is this the FBI’s wife?” a gruff voice said.

  “Who’s calling?”

  “Just this: Your old man’s fooling around with a girl named Susan Smith. That’s all.” The caller hung up.

  When Mark came back, she tried to talk to him about Susan. But all he would say, was, “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Mark, in fact, was furious over the rumors about him and Susan that were circulating, not only because they weren’t true, but because they confirmed that he had allowed the situation to get out of control. Out of his depth, stretched to his psychological limit, he felt himself sinking under the weight of his inexperience. At the same time, at home with two small children, in a place she had come to despise, besieged by an increasingly distraught Susan, annoyed by constant calls from Poole and Trotter, Kathy had fixed her hopes on getting out—soon. Now, with the bureau’s policy change, she plunged into a depression that deepened as the sunlight began its steady fade into fall and that mountain looming over the back of their house grew darker.

  Three mountains away, in Freeburn, Susan, herself dejected about Mark’s indifference, depending on pills to lift her spirits in the morning and to put her to sleep at night, threw off any semblance of discretion. Desperate to recover emotional ground and persuade herself that there was hope, she told anyone who would listen that Mark Putnam was in love with her and was planning to leave his wife. She openly described herself as being under FBI “protection.”

  In Pikeville as well, she did everything she could to encourage the notion, now widespread in the courthouse, that she and Mark were having an affair. It was as if she were on a campaign to make it all come true.

  Whenever she managed to cajole her brother into driving her to town, she’d drop into the FBI office unannounced, and when she didn’t find Mark there, she would poke her head into one of the nearby offices, put on a long face for the marshals and probation officers, and say, “Where’s Mark? He promised to meet me.”

  When Mark would get back, they’d say, “You’re in trouble, buddy. You done stood her up.” Mark refused to get drawn in the teasing. He’d just force a grin.

  Once he stopped to chat with a small group of courthouse workers.

  “That girl is nuts,” one said.

  “Today she come in looking for you. She had a tank top on, no bra,” another put in. “Somebody made a remark about her chest, you know, and she said ‘Well, you want to see?’”

  “She pulled up her shirt! She’s flat!” the courthouse worker said gleefully.

  Later, Susan told her own version of the incident. It was obvious that she believed she could make Mark jealous by flashing the courthouse workers.

  Mark understood that some of this situation was his own fault. For a time before the Cat Eyes trial, he had thought it helpful to keep certain people with their eyes on courthouse comings and goings from thinking that Susan was acting strictly as an informant, that their relationship was somehow more personal, if only by way of ensuring her some protection. But he sensed that it was more complicated than that. In ways he did not care to explore, he was possessive of Susan. The unhappier his wife became, the more pliant Susan seemed. He looked forward to her smile and coquettishness. In painful moments of introspection as he ran long laps alone in the night around the high school track near his home, he also wondered whether he was exploiting Susan’s unconditional trust just to prove that he had, in fact, managed to fit in as an outsider in this alien place.

  Susan, running sprints on her own mental track, gave him no room to maneuver. Kathy, meanwhile, had begun to take Susan’s pitiful nighttime calls less with the attitude of a concerned friend and more with that of worker for a crisis hot line.

  Susan’s family was furious with her because of her testimony, which had sent a local rogue to prison. As she became brazen in her insistence that she would continue her work as an informant for the FBI, the abuse from Kenneth intensified. She made no attempt to put on a brave front with Mark. “My family doesn’t like this at all,” she told him. “They don’t talk to me anymore. Somebody gives me a hard time in a bar, they won’t come to my rescue. Shelby doesn’t agree with me working with a Yankee cop.”

  Shelby Jean Ward was Susan’s older, more responsible sister; often, during her battles with Kenneth, Susan stayed at Shelby’s house in Freeburn. Mark had only spoken to Shelby on the phone a few times when he needed to reach Susan. He was well aware of her antipathy.

  Years later, Mark tried to sort out how and why the experience in Pikeville deteriorated so drastically.

  “Both Kathy and I would talk about her at home,” he remembered. “Kathy would say, ‘That girl has it so hard. K
enneth beats her up; the other people are threatening her for testifying for you. Social Services are trying to take her kids away. She’s doing a lot of coke and pills.’

  “The first thing they teach you at the FBI Academy is don’t get involved with your informants. That’s rule number one. I knew I was already over the boundary with Susan. I thought, ‘This girl had really helped me out. She’s put me on the map with the bureau, and because of my association with her, more and more people are helping me out. And she has this incredibly shitty life.’

  “Man, I was starting to go over the edge. I was feeling sorry for Susan, but the truth is, I was feeling sorry for myself, too. I knew the invitation was there with Susan. At home, things between Kathy and me were sporadic. We’d hook up, we wouldn’t. I was always working. We weren’t communicating at all. Kathy was miserable—I would come home from work, and she’d be crying. And I just didn’t want to hear it because I heard so much crying from people all day long. I just wanted to come home and relax without any problems, but there she was, laying problems on me: ‘I hate this place and these people; we’ve got to get out of here; you’re working too much; you don’t care about me; all you care about is that job.’ I’d go out for a run, or I’d drive back to the office and do paperwork until Kathy was asleep. I just abandoned her.”

  Meanwhile, Susan’s calls to Kathy became more frantic. Kathy hardly even mentioned them to her husband anymore. Sometimes when they were together nights at home the phone would ring.

  “Mark and I would look at each other, and I’d pick up. Sure enough: ‘Kathy? Is Mark there?’ And I’d say no.”

  Susan’s intrusions became so frequent that Kathy paid less attention even when they did speak. But she did listen raptly when Susan told her in one call how “close” she had become to her husband. “I like to feel him near me,” Susan said dreamily, and there was no denying what she meant. Kathy discounted it as drug induced fantasy, but still she warned Mark, “Don’t you ever get involved with this woman.”

  He looked insulted. “Kat—”

  She was furious at him, for the same naïveté that she had once found so charming. “You know what I’m saying, Mark. She will get pregnant and she will ruin you.”

  “Kathy, I’m not stupid. I love you.”

  As winter approached, with the sun behind the mountains for much of the day, shacks clustered on the ridges and far up into dark hollows were exposed under bare trees, with wisps of chimney smoke curling into a gray sky. Kathy resented even the season. Susan’s calls persisted like a cold drizzle. Fielding them at night, Kathy would tell Susan that Mark was out when he wasn’t, using hand signals to convey to him how drugged and agitated Susan sounded. Yet she maintained her sympathy, even when the drugs and despair turned a conversation with Susan into an emotional ordeal.

  “What’s the matter, Susan?” Kathy said, hearing her familiar sniffles one night.

  “Oh, Kathy, I don’t know what I’m going to do. Kenneth, he just makes everything so hard. I know I got to get out of here, but he’ll come after me, Kathy. He won’t never let me go.”

  “Susan—”

  “It’s always about the money, and Mark. He knows about my working with Mark, and he won’t let me just do what I need to do and get paid for it. He wants it all. He’s saying I should give him the money.”

  “Listen, Susan, calm down. We can work this out.”

  Sniffles became sobs. “I keep telling him, I’m the one that’s in danger, Kenneth! I can’t even think straight no more!”

  “Susan, you have to calm down and tell me what happened. Are you listening to me?”

  “Kathy is Mark there? Is Mark listening?”

  “No.” She caught Mark’s eye as he lay on the living room rug playing with the kids. “Why?”

  Mark retreated upstairs with the children.

  “I don’t want him thinking I’m crazy or nothing, Kathy. If he thinks I’m crazy, he won’t work with me. My work is important, Kathy. I don’t do it just for the money. Mark needs me, God’s truth. I just keep getting stuck in these horrible situations.”

  “Mark isn’t here, Susan.”

  Susan laughed derisively. “You sure that son of a bitch ain’t home?” she said with rueful chortle: “You’re alone just like me—we’re by ourselves while the big man is out making a name for hisself—himself.” Kathy sighed, lit a cigarette, and settled in for the duration.

  “I know he just wants to forget all about me. Mark thinks I can’t do nothing for him anymore, I know he does. It don’t matter to him about the danger I was in, it don’t matter that I could have got killed, just as long as he’s got his reputation and his big government job. I’m the one has to worry about these people up here. They all know that I’m an informer. I tell you one thing, Kathy. Mark, he don’t know the information I could give still. And I might not help him again, ever. All he cares about is that job; he don’t even care about me getting hurt, or you stuck at home with the babies. You know, you’re the stupid one!”

  Kathy stiffened and said, “Susan, where’s Kenneth?”

  “Gone. He hit me and took the car. I don’t even have a car!”

  “All right. What about the kids? Susan, are the kids okay?”

  Susan mumbled that they were. “Brady’s in bed. Miranda was running when I called you, but she’ll tire out and curl up somewhere. Kathy, he’s started to hit me in front of the kids and they cry. I just can’t deal with this no more.”

  “The first thing is, you have to calm down, Susan. Are you messed up now, or can you listen?”

  Susan insisted that she was straight.

  “Tell me what happened, Susan.”

  “He hit me in front of the kids.”

  “Did he hit the kids?”

  “No.”

  “Are you hurt badly? Do you need to go to a hospital?”

  “No, I’m okay.”

  “Why did he hit you?”

  “Oh, Lord, he was all fucked up and accusing me of having money. Money that he didn’t know about. And why wasn’t he getting any of the money. He said that I was spending too much time with Mark and not getting anything out of it. I told him Mark and me has to spend a lot of time together, it’s my work. I told him you knew all about it. You don’t object so why should someone who’s my ex-husband? When I talk about Mark, it gets him furious. He just loses it. And I told him I said sometimes me and Mark go to motel rooms and all—”

  “You told him what?”

  “I told him that, about motels—” Quickly, she added, “—Which ain’t true. You know I ain’t sleeping with Kenneth no more, and he’s real jealous. I tell him about my feelings for Mark, what a gentleman Mark is. I said, Mark cares about me as a person. I can’t help my feelings for Mark, Kathy! Mark would never do me like Kenneth does. He’s just like the devil, Kenneth is. He started slapping me and hitting me, and Miranda was crying—”

  “Susan, you have to realize, when Kenneth is like that and the two of you start fighting, you can’t antagonize him, Susan. It only makes matters worse for yourself—”

  “I know, I know. I don’t want to make things worse. I’m so sick, Kathy. I don’t want him hurting me; I just want him out of here. I wish I never knew him.”

  Kathy stubbed out one cigarette and lit another, and pulled the phone over to the counter where she could pour herself a drink. “Susan, how many times do I have to tell you? You are better than this, Susan! You have to take charge of your own life. You know that you’re smart enough to get you and those kids away from this! But you have to care enough about yourself first. All those children have is you. Do you want them growing up like this? You have got to give those children a chance at a decent life, Susan, by getting yourself and those kids out of there.”

  Calculating her position, Susan said, “There’s something I didn’t tell you about. I signed custody of Miranda to
Kenneth. I had left and I signed her to Kenneth. I don’t have rights where she is concerned. If I left, he could get her back. I think about what happens if I leave, and I can’t. The kids all dirty and without shoes—not like your kids. Mark don’t care about anything that’s happened to me—”

  “Susan, you have got to start taking responsibility for yourself.”

  “I have decided, Kathy.”

  “If you’re sure you really want to do something I will try to help you. But you have to take charge of yourself.”

  “I want that, Kathy. You’re a friend to me; I can’t talk to no one else.”

  Kathy sensed this was going nowhere. She said, “What are you going to do now?”

  “I don’t know. I did look at a couple of apartments, though. One was real nice. I got to be far away from where he is.”

  “You can do anything you set your mind to, Susan.”

  “Why couldn’t Mark just tell the court to fix it for me? He can do stuff like that if he wants to.”

  “No, he can’t, Susan. That has absolutely nothing to do with Mark or the FBI.”

  “It don’t matter because Mark won’t fix nothing for me anyway because there’s nothing in it for him, no big case for him to show off to his supervisor.”

  Exasperated, Kathy said, “Susan, that’s the point. You can’t expect everybody to fix things for you. You have to take responsibility—”

  Then Susan, or Kenneth, slammed the phone down.

  Whatever its social risks, informing for the FBI at least paid well, especially for people, such as Susan and Charlie Trotter, who were otherwise unemployed.

  Shortly after the raid on the chop-shop site, Mark had counted out $5,000 in hundred-dollar bills for Charlie’s work—bringing his total to $11,000 to date—with more to come after indictments and a trial. Yet Charlie was already broke and calling regularly, clamoring for more. He told Mark he had spent most of the money on prostitutes and cocaine.