Above Suspicion

by Sharkey, Joe;

  Poole lobbed in a comment that interrupted his thoughts. “Doing anything this afternoon?” he asked. He invited Mark along on a drive to Letcher County, where he had to do an interview. Mark, who wasn’t due in Lexington until the next day, agreed to go, but on the long trip down through the depressing coal towns, along a mountain highway with road signs that said, like a bad joke, THE TRAIL OF THE LONESOME PINE, he regretted that he had. Susan didn’t come up in conversation. They gossiped about cases and discussed the possibility of reactivating Charlie Trotter as a working informant once the chop-shop trial was over. It was an awkward trip with a companion he didn’t like, and Mark was glad to get back to the motel in the early evening. He went down for something to eat, called Kathy and the kids, and climbed into bed to watch television. After a while the phone rang. Susan.

  “Where are you?” he asked. The connection from Freeburn was usually fuzzy; now it sounded as if she were next door.

  Which was about right. “I’m in the motel,” she said.

  “This motel? When did you get here?”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “Susan, I’m beat to hell. I have to get some rest because I have to be up at five to drive up to Lexington. I promise you, we’ll talk when I get back tomorrow.”

  “We are going to talk about this, goddammit. Don’t think we’re not!” She abruptly ended the conversation.

  He was up before dawn. He did not look forward to the three-hour drive westward over the mountains to the federal building in Lexington, where Tom Self, a prosecutor known for being methodical, wanted to conduct intensive reviews of the chop-shop case evidence before the trial, which was scheduled to begin in late June.

  Mark was there at nine and felt greatly put out to learn that Self had been called to court. Tired and ornery, he cooled his heels for six hours in the US Attorney’s office, brooding about his troubles. When Self came bustling in around three, he only had a few minutes to talk. He asked Mark to come back the next day.

  On the endless drive back over the mountains, Mark thought about his ex-partner. “What the hell are you doing putting her up in the motel when you know I’m going to be there, Ron?” he said aloud, watching the rearview mirror as an eighteen-wheeler loomed bigger, tailgated menacingly for a few seconds, swerved into the passing lane, and roared on out of sight.

  No sooner was he back at the motel, showered and trying to relax, when there was banging on the door. Susan stormed in, and her mood clearly hadn’t improved any. Her eyes were bloodshot, and he wondered which chemicals were at work.

  “You’re avoiding me,” she said.

  “Hello to you, too, Susan. How are you?”

  “Don’t give me that shit. We are going to talk.”

  “Listen, I promise I’ll set some time aside this weekend. Susan, I’m exhausted. I just can’t do it now.”

  “That’s just like you. You put everything before me! I should have killed them all when I had the chance.”

  He had no idea what she was talking about. “Killed who?”

  She shrugged. It didn’t matter.

  It was obvious that Susan was high. Afraid of a commotion that he wasn’t prepared to handle, he asked her if she wanted to go out to McDonald’s for something to eat. With that, an amazing transformation occurred—the old Susan came back. They ate in the car and talked. Crying now she poured out her misery. She was afraid someone was going to kill her. She described the beatings by Kenneth, by Sherri Justice. Shelby and Ike were threatening to turn her out. She had no money. Kenneth was keeping her children away from her. Poole was pressuring her to work for him, and she didn’t know if she could do it. And he, Mark, a man she had trusted as no other, had gotten her pregnant and abandoned her to all that.

  “Would you consider having an abortion?” he asked.

  She most certainly would not. The fury came back. He could see no solution. As he took her back to the motel, he glanced at the woman sitting stiffly beside him in shorts and a t-shirt and thought, If this is my kid, she’s five months pregnant. The last time was before January. Shouldn’t she be showing? Maybe the drugs keep it small. But he dismissed the thought as craven and wishful. She went back to her room petulantly, without replying when he said he would find more time to discuss it next week.

  Mark found Charlie Trotter sitting by himself in a lawn chair outside the room where Poole had installed him a month earlier. Living temporarily at the Landmark was an arrangement Charlie liked just fine, and not only for the security it offered. Charlie had robbed a motel or two, but he was not in the habit of actually staying in them; he considered it the height of luxury to be able to pick up the phone, order a sirloin and a six-pack, and when it came, sign a piece of paper saying the US government was buying.

  But Charlie, the toughest man on the mountain, had gone jittery. He told Mark that he was afraid the “Letcher County boys” had located him and were watching. A couple of them, he thought, had been driving by every night.

  “They know where I am, Mark,” he said with grave eyes.

  “Christ, Charlie, do you want to change rooms with me? We can change motels if you want.”

  Charlie thought it over and said he would be okay. The FBI payment for his work was to come at the end of the trial. It would be substantial—in fact, it was going to be another $30,000 on top of the $15,000 he’d got to date. Charlie said he would stick it out.

  “We’ve been through a lot on this one, Charlie,” Mark said as he left. “We can’t let the case go down the tubes now, buddy.”

  Mark was deeply troubled, not only by the possibility of Charlie’s backing out, but by the implications of using this man, who had been a friend, and then leaving him to fend for himself. It did not matter much to Mark that Charlie worked both sides of the fence; that was the way the game was played. In another couple of weeks, assuming he could work his way through all of this, Mark knew he would drive over the hills and drop the rented car at the airport. A few hours later, he’d be back in the sunshine of south Florida, with the loving wife and beautiful children and the three-bedroom town house with beige walls and palmettos out front, with neighbors on either side who did not know each other’s names. But Charlie could call nowhere else home. After the trial, if he testified, he would have the big check in his pocket, with a pat on the back for a job well done. Charlie would be flush, though he’d piss that away on women and cocaine soon enough. But always, when he woke up in the morning, Charlie would be in these hills where the boys never forget an insult and always settle a score.

  These were the ethical compromises inherent in using informants like Charlie and Susan. Truth to tell, keeping them active, as the bureau insisted, was a monumental headache. God they wore him down. He was exhausted by the months of whining and crying, the nearly infantile dependence. Give them a thousand bucks, and they wanted two thousand more. Cultivating informants, keeping them happy and productive, required a huge and often debilitating personal effort: phone calls at three o’clock in the morning, paranoia, scheming, and double-crossing all came with the territory. He had seen how utterly different the FBI could be in a place like Miami, where the rules were clear-cut, the supervisors were on the scene, the work was dispersed among a large number of agents, and everybody had room to spread out: you weren’t looking at the same damn faces everywhere you turned. All he wanted to do was get this case finished, control the damage with Susan, leave these hills for good. Why was that so much to ask?

  The next day, he again made the drive to Lexington, wasted more time waiting for a meeting that he thought could just as well have been handled on the phone, and made the long trip back. When he got to his room, it was nearly nine o’clock; the only thing he had eaten all day was a glazed doughnut that a secretary had given him while he waited. But he was too tired to get in the car and drive out to a fast-food joint, or even to go down to the dining room, and room service had even le
ss appeal. Instead, he pulled down the bedspread and lay on the bed studying water stains on the ceiling and wondering idly what would remove them. Finally he fumbled backhanded to snap off the forty-watt bulb in the lamp on the nightstand. His eyelids drooped and closed. His body felt light; at last the weight of trouble fell away and he relaxed.

  He had been asleep for about a half hour when the phone went off like a firehouse bell in his ear.

  “Hello!” he barked, more forcefully than he had intended.

  “Heeeeeey.” Oh, sweet Jesus, Mark thought, recognizing his ex-partner’s signature greeting. The man had the unique ability to raise Mark’s blood pressure just by entering his consciousness. “How’s it going, buddy?” Poole asked.

  Trying to conceal his annoyance, Mark said evenly, “We’re all set to go with the trial, Ron.”

  But Poole hadn’t called for a legal report. “You talked the stuff over with Susan?”

  “Stuff?”

  “You know what I mean, old buddy.”

  “No, not really, Ron,” Mark replied warily. “I’ve been too preoccupied with this case.”

  “Well, I can understand that. I’ll bet you can’t wait to be done with that and get out of here, huh, buddy?”

  “Yeah, I’m anxious to get back to Miami.”

  “Talk to you later,” Poole said abruptly, and hung up.

  Mark was annoyed at his own cordiality. Why didn’t he just tell Poole to take a hike? They were no longer partners; even given the bureau’s insistence on agent-to-agent bonhomie, Mark saw no good reason to extend courtesy to a man who always let you know he had a little something on you, then had the nerve to press for acknowledgment of that fact.

  Mark thought back to Kathy’s warnings about Poole, which he had largely written off to her desperation to get out of Pikeville. “You’re naïve,” she had said. “This guy has his eye on Susan, and he thinks you’re in his way. This guy will do you harm.”

  He’d replied, with dismissive assurance, “An FBI agent wouldn’t deliberately try to screw another FBI agent.” He still had no idea how much Kathy had talked to Poole as she plotted to get them out of Pikeville.

  Again Mark had fallen into a deep sleep, this time dreaming of the beach, the happy shrieks of his children over the crash of surf, when the insistent ringing of a telephone again broke through. He ordered himself awake. The voice on the phone was Susan’s. It was eleven-thirty, she reported in a slurred voice, and asked, shrilly, “Sleeping? You sleeping son of a bitch.”

  The vehemence surprised him. “Susan, would you shut up and let me get some sleep?”

  She banged the phone down. His anger was raw now with rudely dislocated sleep. He hated Susan, wished he had never recruited her, used her, paid her, encouraged her, comforted her, depended on her, and finally, stupidly, dropped his guard enough to have sex with her on the front seat of a car amid the sorrowful debris of an abandoned strip mine on a Kentucky mountain. That, finally, was where she had him, pregnant with his child or not, and they both knew it.

  That was his abject ruin, the mortal sin for which absolution could not be had. And grievous sin was not a simple matter; with its commission came the torture of ambivalence and ambiguity. The fact was, as he knew very well, Susan had been there when he needed her, and Susan cared greatly for him. She had accepted this outsider when a lot of people hadn’t. Later, she helped get him on the map. Working cases, she was as patient with Mark as he had to be with her. It was a weird balance. He pitied her circumstances and her upbringing. Like Kathy, he wished he could help her. They had always tacitly maintained the fiction of her unsullied reputation, and in a funny way, between them it was true. She had offered herself not only in desperation and desire, but also out of deep and simple trust. Their passion hadn’t been devoid of love, no matter how flickering and transient. Furthermore, she had shown physical and even moral courage, beyond the lure of the money, to turn against people he knew she would have to face for the rest of her life, people who knew her parents, her aunts and uncles, her siblings, and her kids. Susan was brave, she had guts; in her own defiant way she was as loyal as a sister. Susan had put her ass on the line for him. Mark knew that his sacred career had benefited—directly, immediately, and substantially. She was an indelible part of his record.

  He thought back on the first time he and Susan had had sex, steaming up the car windows like adolescents, the gearshift knob jabbing at shifting limbs. He had always felt nothing but contempt for cops who kept framed pictures of their wives on their desks and meanwhile screwed anything that didn’t resist. And now he had done worse. As a civil matter, becoming sexually involved with an informant was a fireable offense. Morally, it was unforgivable.

  Now she was charging hard at him, hostile, impatient, unreasonable, and dangerous. She wouldn’t give him time. It was going to be like working the bomb squad; disarming her would be tricky, especially with Poole lurking in the background. It could blow up in his face at any time.

  He thought of what she had said the other night: “I’m going to be a thorn in your ass, Mark. I’m coming down to Florida to make sure you don’t forget me.”

  9

  He had pulled the motel room curtains tight the night before, but they did not fit the window well and the gloom seeped in with the dawn. When he opened his eyes, he looked at the dingy stains on the ceiling.

  At least it was June. By noon, the sun was high enough in the sky that the light came over the hilltops. The trees were full and green on the mountains. People were ashamed when the hills lost their cover, exposing the deep gashes from the strip mines, the giant conveyer machines trellised over stepped ridges of blasted sandstone and slate, the sallow streams and tumbledown shacks. Winter was not a good time to sell a house in Pikeville, although now spring was over and still their place up in Cedar Creek remained unsold. Tending to the house was another of the unwelcome chores Mark had to do before he could go home.

  He turned over and pressed his face into the pillow, imagining south Florida, Danielle hopping off her bike to run to him in the front yard when he got in from work, Kathy happy again and making plans to complete her degree, little Mark bright and mischievous, a miniature image of his old man. It had taken a lot to get there; all he wanted now was to get back. The bathroom faucet dislodged another drop of water that hit the sink with a resonant plonk. Kicking off the thin blanket and stiff bedspread, Mark sat up naked on the edge of the bed, feeling sore and dizzy. He thought, I’ve got to start eating and sleeping better than this. Cut back on the hours, loosen up, work out more. In a few weeks, he hoped, Ron Poole, Tom Self, the bureau supervisors in Lexington, the Hatfields, McCoys, and everybody else in Pikeville, Susan especially, could then do him a great favor by losing his phone number.

  His head rested on his chest. The date was June 8, his father’s birthday. His father had been dead for ten years, but he still thought of him without fail every day. If the old man had been around, Mark wondered if he would have gone to him and said, Look, Dad, I’m jammed up here. I messed this thing up bad, and I don’t know how to get out of it. Mark tried to imagine his father’s face when it was strong, but what he recalled instead was a familiar sad photograph of a man in his late forties gaunt and defeated with a month left to live.

  Wishing that he had inherited his father’s equanimity in the same measure as his introspection, Mark made his way to the bathroom, where he scowled at his face in the mirror and gingerly pressed at the puffiness under his eyes. In the shower, the spray was weak, but at least the water was hot and soothing against the tight muscles of his shoulders. He closed his eyes and let the water beat on his face.

  There was a pounding on the door as he was drying off on the tacky blue rug. He wrapped a towel around his waist and had barely pulled back the dime-store bolt when Susan pushed her way in, red-eyed and looking as if she’d slept in her car.

  “Don’t you look nice,”
she said smiling broadly and tugging at the towel till it came off. “Is that your new Miami Vice outfit?”

  “Hello, Susan,” Mark said wearily. “You’re up early.”

  She brushed past him and went to the bed, but he continued to face the door not willing to acknowledge her possession of his room. Christ, not now, he thought. This was business for tomorrow, maybe. Not now.

  “I’ve got to leave for Lexington in five minutes, Susan. I’m going to be tied up there all day.” With resignation, he turned to face her, trying not to show the disgust he felt with himself. She didn’t look pregnant in her little shorts and University of Kentucky T-shirt. When had Kathy started to show? He couldn’t recall.

  “Are you avoiding me again, Mark?” Susan demanded, planting herself on the bed. “We got to talk. How many times do you and those guys need to meet, anyway? Why didn’t you just get a room up in Lexington?”

  “Because I wanted to straighten out some problems here, Susan,” he said pointedly. The shoulder muscles had tightened up again. He felt sweat building under his arms; a rivulet began a jerky path down his back.

  “Don’t give me that bull, Mark. Don’t fuck with me.”

  “If I didn’t do that, we wouldn’t be in this mess, would we,” he said, but he regretted the juvenile crack immediately. He didn’t want her riled. All he wanted was for her to let him get out of there. He walked over to put a hand on her thin shoulder and was surprised to feel her flinch. “We’ll talk this weekend, okay?” he said.

  “I always take a backseat to the precious FBI, don’t I?” she said petulantly. He’d heard that before, of course. And the reply, had he chosen to give it to her, would have been: Yes, dammit. Everything else takes a backseat. Why was that so hard for people to understand?

  Instead, he said, “I’ve got to get dressed and get out of here.” When he came out of the bathroom, she was still sitting on the edge of the bed.

  “I’ve got to go, Susan.”