Above Suspicion

by Sharkey, Joe;

  “Wait, wait. I need to use your phone to call my sister, and I need to borrow a pair of shorts,” she said, sounding plaintive.

  “For what?”

  “I didn’t bring enough clothes with me. I just want to borrow them. You’ll get them back, Mark.”

  “But why do you need to use my phone? Use the phone in your room.”

  “I have to call my sister, and I don’t want Ron to know I did because it’s about him.”

  This didn’t make any sense, but he wasn’t in the mood to argue.

  He grabbed his bulging files off the top of the television and caught her injured look in the dingy mirror. “Okay, make your call, grab your shorts, and close the door when you leave,” he called back as he left, hooking his thumb at the table where his suitcase lay open.

  As he shut the door, he heard her mutter, “Bastard.”

  In the rented Ford, he wondered for a moment about Susan borrowing his clothes, but she was always borrowing somebody’s clothes. He deliberately put her out of his mind as he negotiated the high pass that cut through the mountain north of town.

  In Lexington, he was once again kept waiting until well after lunch. He and Tom Self finally met late in the afternoon, spending less than an hour going over details of trial strategy. Though Mark resented having his time wasted, he regarded Self as one of the few mentors he could name during his time in eastern Kentucky. Trying to please Tom Self during a prosecution was like trying to get an A from a particularly exacting teacher. Mark thought of him with grudging respect as a “ball buster” who insisted that every flap in a case be nailed down tight before he took it to trial. Often, he would ask Mark to go back and reinterview people he had already talked to, fill in more detail. Self was never confident and never let investigators relax until the jury adjourned.

  The chop-shop case was solid and ready to go, assuming Charlie Trotter didn’t bolt. Charlie seemed to have steadied the last time they spoke on the phone. Mark hoped he could keep him that way. Still, it was never a sure thing with a mountain jury. Cases got lost simply because jurors didn’t like the idea of outsiders coming down on a local boy living hard, making do. Mark never forgot his first trial, when witness after witness ostentatiously crossed their fingers as they swore on a Bible while the judge pretended not to notice, the jury’s eyes widened, and spectators nudged one another.

  He also knew that the bureau was watching this case carefully—after all the time and trouble, after the emergency transfer out of town, he knew that he had to bring a clean conviction to the table, especially if Susan persisted with her threat of going to his superiors.

  Feeling that he had wasted another day, he started back into the hills around five o’clock, as the afternoon sun edged the ragged mountains and cast deep shadows over the valleys. He realized that he needed a vacation. The past two and a half years had caught up with him—everything, even his nightly three-mile run, seemed to take extra effort. In a month, he would be thirty. He no longer felt young.

  Susan, determined to force the confrontation that Poole and Shelby had been insisting she have, waited all afternoon for Mark to return. Every fifteen minutes after four o’clock, she left her room to look for his car. Anyone who glanced at the pretty, brown-haired young woman standing on her tiptoes on the balcony of the motel might have taken her for a mountain bride on a honeymoon waiting for her husband to come back from the store: She would look, see nothing, smile wanly, and with studied dignity return to her room.

  Mark saw her at the railing when he turned into the parking lot. She did not acknowledge him except to glance his way, steadily but without apparent interest. At the end of a long drive and a frustrating day, he was furious to know that the next thing he could expect was a confrontation. He turned off the engine, braced his arms against the steering wheel, put his head down, and muttered, “Shit, shit, shit, shit, just leave me alone for five minutes.” All he wanted to do was read the paper and have dinner. But he forced a look of nonchalance and went up to his room with Susan hard on his heels.

  She followed him inside and stood silently by the door until he came out of the bathroom. She had changed into his gray gym shorts and T-shirt since their encounter that morning.

  “Are we going to talk about your baby now?” she said. He could tell she had been drinking, and by this time of the day there would be some pills at work, too.

  “Not tonight, Susan. Please. I have some calls to make, and I need to spend some time with Charlie.”

  She snorted. “Your job again.”

  But he was surprised when she sauntered out without a commotion.

  Alone, Mark made a few local calls and then walked down a floor to talk with Charlie Trotter, again installed in his lawn chair, again wavering. “It’s going to be tough looking them boys in the eye when I’m on the stand,” Charlie said, reaching for the can of beer at his side. He dragged hard on the nub of a Marlboro that was barely visible under his black mustache, then flipped the butt over the railing and folded his hands on a prodigious belly.

  From where the two men sat, they could see the single bulb shining in the gathering twilight from atop the cupola of the Pike County Court House, repository of challenged deeds, ancient threats, and tenuously adjudicated brawls.

  Having to look the boys in the eye was the curse of this land, of course. But Charlie’s testimony was important, if not crucial. Without it, the case could well collapse.

  Mark sighed. Charlie slumped in the lawn chair, his powerful hands now tightly clenched between his knees, as if in combat. He turned slightly away, which Mark recognized as a telling shift in alignment, a sign of inner conflict signaling a potential for deceit. Give empathy, not sympathy, he recalled from his classes on psychological manipulation of informants and suspects.

  “Charlie, I’m not going to blow smoke up your ass,” he said, choosing his words deliberately. “I won’t even try to understand what you’re going through right now. Just do the best you can, man. You’re a stand-up guy. Remember all the bullshit these clowns put you through. Remember what they did to you, Charlie.” He stood up and clapped Charlie on the leg. “What do you say we grab something to eat and have a few beers? Uncle Sam’s buying.”

  “Already et,” Charlie said, sitting back to nurse his beer.

  A little later, Susan thumped pathetically at Mark’s door. She stood at the threshold with her arms crossed over her breasts, smiling unevenly. Again, he knew she was high. She lunged at him the moment he shut the door behind her, slapping him hard across the cheek with her right palm. She was wide-eyed and crying.

  “You’re avoiding me, you son of a bitch! I’m sick of this, Mark! High-and-mighty FBI—I’ll see you burn in hell!”

  He knew better than to aggravate Susan when she was having a tantrum. She had never acted this way with him before. Spit flecked the corners of her mouth. Her hair was unkempt; she looked as if she had fallen off the back of a truck. Another fifty pounds and ten or fifteen more years, he thought, and this was a woman framed in defeat in the doorway of a busted mobile home, yelling at the kids.

  She screamed at him, “My life has been fucked up since I met you!” He resisted the impulse to point out that it had been that way before she met him as well. At least now she was on the right side of the law more often than not.

  “Now you are going to pay for it!” she vowed. Her lips trembled. He wasn’t sure what she meant, but he looked around quickly to make sure his gun was in the drawer. He remembered: He had put it in beside the Gideon Bible.

  “I’m not having no abortion,” she repeated.

  He wanted to reason with her, and drug rage was complicating that. He felt shaky. He wished her no harm. All he wanted was for her to be out of his life. “Susan, I understand about the abortion,” he said, struggling to control the situation. “If this is my baby, I don’t want you to bring up that child. Kathy and I would raise it.”


  He had not anticipated making that suggestion. Immediately, he regretted the hurt the words caused.

  Susan was sobbing. “I am a good mother. This is your baby, Mark. You insinuate that I been fucking everybody in Pikeville, but I have not and this is yours!”

  “Susan, I didn’t insinuate anything like that. Please keep it down. I don’t want the neighbors to know our business.”

  That let her regain the offensive. She stamped her foot. “The damn neighbors? You’re so concerned with your reputation? Your reputation ain’t nothing now, Miami Vice!”

  Her pupils were dilated. Whatever was going on, he wanted to change the physical location and negate her ability to threaten him with a public scene. Exhaling loudly, he suggested, “Look, let’s go for a ride and cool off.” She surprised him by softly taking his hand, as if he had just asked her on a date. It was almost eleven o’clock at night.

  With an extremely agitated Susan beside him, he drove north out of Pikeville on Route 23 where the big coal trucks hit cruising speed at night on the long haul up the valley, and east onto the seclusion of Route 119 through rippled mountains, negotiating treacherous turns on narrow winding roads. It was a long loop around Pikeville and then southeast through plateaus of strip-mined mountains over which a waxing crescent of the moon drifted like a sickle through dark clouds. The headlights stabbed at black mountain walls with cascades of harshly lit kudzu loping ghostlike down over rocky shelves streaked with thin coal seams.

  They drove into the mountains when they needed privacy from the prying eyes of Pikeville. Mobility eased conversation and they talked while he sped around the turns effortlessly, thanks to Bert Hatfield’s instruction.

  Again and again, he asked her what she expected him to do. She was nearly hysterical, but when she managed to connect her sentences, they were mostly in the form of disjointed threats. He realized that she had been saving her emotional ammunition for him for weeks.

  He tried to reason with her. “Well, with regard to a pregnancy—”

  “—With regard to? What are you, a lawyer?” She patted her belly. “This baby is yours!”

  “Susan, we can discuss this calmly.”

  “Your FBI will be interested to hear what I have to say. So will that whore wife of yours and those kids.” She pointedly did not speak Kathy’s name.

  She insisted that the baby was his, and that she would tell the FBI, his wife, and his children about it. But unless it was to renounce everything else and stay with her forever, he could not figure out what she expected him to do. He thought about the two and a half miserable years working grueling hours in Pikeville, the phone calls at three in the morning, the threats, the corruption he saw everywhere he looked, the stress of the impending trial, Kathy’s misery, the intimidating phone calls from Poole, Charlie Trotter wavering in his motel room, the stress of starting a job anew in a high profile bureau like Miami. And now, beside him, Susan shrieking. But then she took a breath and her voice was calm.

  “Ron says they’ll fire you when they find out.”

  He bristled at that. “What about Ron, goddammit?”

  She backed down. “Nothing. He didn’t say nothing. They will fire you, though, Mr. FBI.”

  At the coal town of Meta, he turned right onto Route 194, a narrow two-lane that winds southeast along Johns Creek into the rugged hills that border the Tug Valley. Once in the hills, the only turnoffs are narrow gravel roads put in by mine companies who then abandoned the roads when they finished blasting out the coal, leaving behind chewed out mountains.

  As they drove toward Freeburn and Barrenshee Hollow, Susan sobbed uncontrollably. As they approached the crest of Peter Creek Mountain, she caught her breath and lunged across the seat at him, slapping him with both hands. Fighting to keep control of the car, he made out the contours of one of the coal-road turnoffs in his headlights and turned abruptly onto it, bumping about fifty yards up the road and scattering gravel loudly under the car. He shut off the engine and the lights. Susan’s sobs were the only sound in the darkness. Where the sky showed above the ridge, it was filled with stars. Mark rolled the window down and felt the air on his hot cheeks and burning eyes. He listened, as if trying to extract from the gloom any sound other than Susan’s short panting.

  Placing his hand on her shoulder, he said, “Let’s try and work this out instead of acting like a couple of idiots.” This was exactly the kind of lonely dark setting that had led to sex on other occasions, but even the intimation of affection now caused Susan to recoil in revulsion and slap his hand away.

  “What’s gotten into you, Susan?”

  The question set her off again. “What do you mean me? You’re messing with me, Mark! I know that now. I don’t know why I didn’t see it before. I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to let you prance down to Florida with your little wife and your spoiled kids to resume your wonderful life. You owe me, buddy!”

  He had the sense that these were lines someone else had given her. Buddy wasn’t a word she used, and Mark thought he knew where she had picked it up.

  “Susan, I’ve given you everything I could. Leave Kathy and my kids out of this.” She looked down with surprise. He realized he had been using his index finger to poke at her chest for emphasis.

  “You sure did give me everything you got,” Susan said, and patted her belly again. He studied her body, thinking again that she did not look pregnant, but not having any good recollection of how a woman is supposed to look at five months.

  “And now I’m going to have a little Mark Jr.,” Susan went on, having regained her composure. “I’m going to bring this baby down to Florida and knock on your door and put the little bastard right into your precious daughter’s arms. Your son is going to want to know why the baby’s name is Mark Jr., the same as him. I can’t wait to see the look in your wife’s eyes! Then you know what I’m going to do? I’m going right on down to your FBI Miami Vice office and tell your new friends there how you solved your cases by fucking an informant and leaving her pregnant and barefoot to look after herself in Kentucky. I own you, Putnam! I own you and your precious job!”

  She was determined. “I own you! Own you! Ron says they’ll fire you and Kathy will leave you!”

  “Ron again?” She laughed in his face.

  “Susan, just tell me what you want from me. From day one, all you’ve done is bitch and feel sorry for yourself. Now please just tell me straight, what do you want from me?” His heart was pounding.

  Now she was all business. “We are going to have this baby. You will be there when it’s born and sign the birth certificate as its daddy. Second, you will leave that whore Kathy and those spoiled kids and marry me. If you don’t, I’ll ruin your life.” She smiled triumphantly.

  Mark, never a negotiator, argued as if a compromise could be reached. Kathy hadn’t done any injury to Susan. Far from it. Kathy had been Susan’s friend, her confessor, even her role model. When Mark wasn’t in the mood, which had been very often during their last months in Pikeville, Kathy had been the stalwart who patiently endured Susan’s crying jags on the phone, the one to assure Susan that she had value, that she was better than she believed.

  Negotiating wasn’t working. “Fuck you and your whore wife!” Susan screamed.

  His anger flashed. “Hold it, dammit. If you ever call my wife a whore again I’ll smack the shit out of you, Susan.” And he realized that he meant it. He jammed his right hand under his leg.

  “You don’t have the balls to hit me, Mark. You’re a pussy with no balls! For someone so smart, we played with you so bad. I don’t even know why I let you fuck me—you’re no man! I’ve had real men before, and you’re nothing. You can’t fuck worth a damn, I told everybody that! You’re nothing but a spoiled rich kid.”

  This floored him. He thought of his father; taking on odd jobs to scrape together the thousand dollars a year that wasn’t covered by his
scholarship at Pomfret. The insult infuriated him. He smacked Susan across the face with the back of the fingers on his right hand. The blow barely fazed her. As if welcoming it, she let out a yelp of satisfaction.

  “Well the little boy has the balls to hit a woman! That’s the first real emotion I ever seen in you! I hope I didn’t hurt your delicate little hand!”

  He was breathing in gulps, close to hyperventilating. Sweat burned his eyes. She kept at him. “The only reason I worked with you in the first place was because I saw how pitiful you really were. Seen how they sent a pretty little Yankee boy down here with real men. Maybe your precious FBI wanted to toughen you up, but it didn’t work. All the cops used to make fun of the pretty Yankee boy who wanted to work all the time.” Having located the vein, she stabbed it in deep, “They laughed at you behind your back!”

  He tried to make out her face in the darkness. Her voice was cold and strange.

  “I own you, little boy! Now I’m going to have two little Putnam boys sucking at my tits.”

  “You’re a fucking bitch. Susan, you know that?” he said quietly, desperate to control the quiver in his voice, afraid that he was about to cry.

  “Oh, the great one spoke out! My hero spoke! Did it hurt to swear, Mr. Perfect?” Her breath was sour on his face. Mockingly, she said, “Your life sure ain’t so perfect now, is it, honey?”

  He tried reasoning again. “Okay, Susan. This is what I think about our problem—”

  “Our problem? Oh, no, Mark. Your problem. I’ve never been happier myself. I told all my friends I’m going to have an FBI baby. I can’t wait to see Kathy’s face when I show her our baby.”

  He resisted the urge to hit her again. His training told him to stay on track, be professional, avoid emotionalism and direct challenge, summarize frequently, maintain poise. Do not take the bait.

  “Since you won’t have an abortion, after the baby’s born I’ll come back and take a blood test to establish paternity,” he suggested.