Above Suspicion

by Sharkey, Joe;

She was livid. “I ain’t no whore like your wife! I haven’t fucked nobody except you! How dare you say that!”

  “Well, that isn’t what I heard, Susan. I heard your sister threw you out of her house—”

  “That’s not true!” Again, she was crying.

  Sensing advantage, he bored in, impulsively brandishing an option he had not yet even considered discussing with his wife: “If the baby is mine, Kathy and I will adopt it. We will adopt it. You’ve proven what kind of a mother you are by signing over custody of your kids to that drunken ex-husband of yours. I’ll be damned if I’d let any kid of mine grow up here with a slut like you.”

  Humiliation overcame her. Shrieking, she slammed into him, slapping and scratching wildly, like a child having a tantrum: Mark realized what Bert Hatfield had meant when he said that Susan could fight like a rained-on rooster.

  “I won’t let that whore raise my kid!” Susan cried.

  “She’s a better mother than you’ll ever be!” Mark retorted, pushing her away roughly with an exaggerated show of personal disdain in the cramped confines of the car. This made her hysterical. She was on top of him, pounding down with her fists. He couldn’t get his arms free to shield his face.

  “Susan, cut . . . the . . . shit.” He struggled into a dominant position, working to pin her arms. Her screaming horrified him. Fogged by their breath, the windows were as opaque as if covered by snow.

  “You used me! You owe me!” she protested.

  “I paid you,” he said with cruel sarcasm.

  “You bastard!” Susan screamed, flailing at him. “I should have killed your kids.” With a guttural moan, she dug a long fingernail at his eye. Electrified by the sudden pain, he swung at her, this time with a fist and as hard as he could. But he missed. His hand slammed into metal on the dashboard.

  “Fuck you to hell!” she cried as the punch flew past. Blood oozed from the gash across his knuckles. She saw the bleeding hand and bit it, with her feet pressed stiffly against the windshield. The pain was astonishing. She hissed through her teeth. He needed quiet. He needed to think. Shut up! he thought, wrenching his hand free and grabbing her neck with both hands. He held her that way, pressing for silence for almost two minutes, until her fury and his abated. He let out his breath steadily while she struggled weakly and then submitted to his will. “Relax, Susan, relax,” he said, almost as if he were giving her a massage. When his breath was fully exhaled, his grip relaxed. The tension drained from his arms, which fell heavily and painfully to his side.

  Susan was quiet. He opened his eyes and inhaled unsteadily, not knowing whether ten minutes or ten seconds had passed. His face stung from the slapping. She was a fighter, all right. But now she was leaning against him, her fight gone. He stroked her damp brown hair, wondering why she was not breathing heavily after she had struggled so hard.

  “Susan, are you going to take it easy now?” he said, nudging her gently as if to wake her up. He regretted the insults. His lips brushed the top of her head. His shirt was soaked; his right hand throbbed, the knuckles wet with blood. He’d never felt more physically exhausted. “Susan, let’s go.”

  The night had grown chilly; he thought of starting the car to get the heater going. Freeburn was still ten miles around the mountain. Quietly he said, “I’ll drive you home.”

  She slumped forward when he removed his arm. As he tried to ease her gently off the console and into the passenger seat, her neck craned at a grotesque angle.

  He blinked and said, “Oh, my God. Oh, shit. Oh, my God.” He shook her. He sat her back and pounded on her chest. “Susan! Susan! Oh, my God!” He tried blowing air into her mouth, but her lips were cool and unyielding. He pounded on her chest and felt frantically for a pulse.

  His first thought was that it was a coincidence; she’d had a tragic heart attack exacerbated by the excitement. He certainly hadn’t killed her, not that easily. There would be some explaining to do, but . . .

  Then he knew. She was dead and he had killed her.

  He cradled her head and rocked back and forth sobbing, staring in disbelief at her face, very white and composed in the chill glow. I have killed this person, he thought. A mother of two children. This girl in my arms.

  Trembling uncontrollably, he got out of the car as if to walk away. But there was nowhere to go. The door slammed and the sound reverberated from black-faced mountain walls. He screamed. That came back, too, with the same empty echo. He fell against the car, hearing only his breathing and the grunts of bullfrogs in the soggy brush, and in the distance the splash of water spilling off a slate ridge like a broken spigot.

  He tried to arrange his thoughts. A steady wind rushed through the trees on the mountaintop, like the roar of a stadium. Foolishly he looked around in the dark, as if for a pay phone. He got back in the car and replayed the scene in his mind, desperate for explanations or excuses—the threats, the insults, the rage, the tears, the blows and flailing arms. He went over the story he would tell to the state police or, better yet, to Bert Hatfield at his place on the Tug beside the bridge.

  He would expect no special treatment, beyond a certain professional courtesy, a cop-to-cop understanding that this girl had got run over just as surely as if she stood in the middle of a mountain road shaking her little fist at a twenty-ton coal truck rumbling out of a switchback. It was strictly his fault, of course. He would take his medicine. Bert would be heartsick; Bert would know what to do. He would tell him how to break it to Kathy. Kathy would tell the kids.

  Another image crept into his mind, that of Danielle as an infant, three or four weeks old. It was the time of their marriage when he and Kathy were happiest—he was working hellish hours, the day job clerking in a liquor store, nights clerking at the FBI in Hartford, praying for an opening at the academy. When he came home after work at one o’clock one morning, the baby lay curled in her crib. Gently, he woke her and she smiled at him sleepily. He scooped her tiny sweet-smelling body into his arms, held her to his chest, and whispered hoarsely, “I promise you: I am going to be the best father I can be. You will always be proud of me. And you will always be able to come to me, with anything. I promise you that, Danielle.”

  One life was destroyed. Why destroy others? He was on a lonely mountain road. Not a single car had passed in the time they had been parked there arguing and fighting. Furthermore, they hadn’t seen anyone else when they left the motel. Chances were, no one even knew that he and Susan had gone out together.

  The chilly night was robbing Susan’s body of its warmth. Absurdly, he reached over to roll up the window for her sake. Looking at her blankly, he considered suicide, but he didn’t have his gun. Then another thought broke through the guilt and terror: He could fake a car accident. He was hurt, she was dead. This he quickly dismissed, however. People don’t get strangled in car wrecks.

  He got out and walked around the car several times, as if to encircle the problem and confine it, but he couldn’t, no matter how hard he marched. All of my life, he thought, I stayed out of trouble. I was the one who got the other guys out of jams in college! I kept my nose clean. But he was the one alone now on a mountaintop with the body of a girl he had killed. What would his father say to that?

  He stumbled to the passenger door and struggled to lift her out, astonished at how heavy she was. He had eased the body almost out of the car when it abruptly toppled to the ground, the head hitting the gravel with a whack. Mark screamed in horror as if he had injured her anew. He fell to his knees and vomited, bile burning his throat. He cradled her head, rocking on his heels, keening. She is not dead, she is badly injured, in a terrible coma. It would be horrible, there would be some jail time, but she would be alive and maybe, someday, she would forgive him.

  A light drizzle materialized from the mist. He stared at his hands. A mosquito landed on his arm. He watched it take its fill but was unable to swat it. The rain became heavier; rivulets of water spl
ashed from the high escarpments into crevices and hollows and creeks, the rain beating hard on the rocks and leaves as it fell over the Cumberland Plateau, from the watershed where the Tug starts down from the hills to the flatlands where Susan once thought she had seen her future.

  He saw the lights of a vehicle coming up the mountain road from far away, blurred through the rain. He watched, squatting beside his darkened car. A big yellow bulldozer lumbered into sight and passed by, emergency lights throbbing. It emitted an insistent beeping sound that changed pitch as it climbed the mountain and disappeared over the crest of the road.

  At some point, the rain stopped. Mark was cold and his clothes were drenched; he had no idea how much time had passed. The sky was full of stars.

  It was time to move on. Shakily, his muscles aching, he managed to lift Susan’s body into the trunk of the rental car. Now his degradation was total. Laying a hand on her small still breast, he said, “Susan, Susan, how did we ever let this happen?”

  10

  The headlamps probed the fog that lay in the valley where Johns Creek makes its run off the Pikeville side of the mountain toward the Levisa. Mark drove with both hands locked on top of the steering wheel. Ahead the fog reddened with the lights of the Kentucky Carbon Company’s Johns Creek loading site, deserted as he passed the tipples and the lines of conveyors descending down the ridge like the monorails of hell. Beyond, at the base of a hill to the west, the trapezoid-shaped cars of a night coal train rolled along the Norfolk and Western spur line.

  Mark had decided to go back to the motel and wait. He wasn’t sure what he would wait for, but he needed time to consider whether there were any options beyond the single judgment that blared in his mind: You are done, pal. You are so done.

  Back in the motel he looked at the nightstand where he had left his service revolver in the drawer beside the Gideon Bible. He diverted himself for a moment with the idea of putting the barrel in his mouth and pulling the trigger, but it was not a realistic consideration. He took inventory, standing at the mirror like a suspect in a lineup. He had wrapped a towel around his damaged hand. The index finger throbbed more than the rest of the hand. He figured it was broken. Susan had fought hard, and those long nails were deadly. No, not deadly . . . they were effective. There were bloody scratches on his arms, and some on his jaw and neck. He certainly looked as if he had been in a fight.

  It was almost three o’clock. He took a shower, dressed, walked across the road to the all-night Super American convenience store and bought some Band-Aids and antiseptic. The checkout clerk barely noticed him. In his room he dressed the cut and got into bed with the light on because he was afraid to turn it off. He stayed awake and alert the rest of the night. He couldn’t think of anything to do except to go on with the day and see what happened. He had no idea what he would do about the body.

  He was still a federal agent with an important meeting in the morning. When dawn came, he forced himself out of bed, and an hour later was surprised to find himself in the car, dressed and shaved, his briefcase on the seat beside him, holding the steering wheel steady at fifty-five on the Mountain Parkway into Lexington. This was no time to attract a patrol car. The sun was shining brightly through the dirty windshield. For the first time, he noticed the long crack in the windshield on the passenger side. As he changed lanes, easing to the right on one of those stretches where a car can pass, he thought about Susan in the trunk.

  This time the meeting with the US attorney was long and detailed. Somehow he got through it. How could people not see how guilty he was? What kind of agents were they? Around lunchtime, Tom Self noticed his hand, and to his amazement, Mark heard himself blurting out a lie: “I was out at our old house in Pikeville taking care of a mess in the garage, and I ripped it on a nail.”

  He watched Self’s reaction carefully, and it didn’t show anything other than friendly concern. As a kid, any time he had told a lie, no matter how inconsequential, his red face had always given him away. Now that he was a killer, had lying become that easy? Was this something he had never understood about crime until now?

  Self and his assistants kept him occupied all day with the minutiae of the chop-shop case, which Mark knew by heart. If Self noticed the scratches on Mark’s neck, he did not mention them. In fact, Self seemed completely comfortable with him, even at a few points when Mark had to choke back the dry heaves. He thinks I’m hung over, Mark decided. He stopped worrying about the trembling of his hands until the group when to lunch at a corner restaurant, where ordered a sandwich so he wouldn’t have to hold a fork. Self was expansive and optimistic about the trial. Mark realized that people, even those with sharp police instincts, could overlook a lot when their guard is down.

  By the time Self turned him loose it was after four o’clock. Mark still had no plan. From the courthouse steps he spotted his car. The courthouse workers had rushed for theirs at the crack of four, leaving his alone on a side street in the deep shadow of a sycamore.

  Off and on during the day, he had wondered about the smell, figuring that if someone noticed and called the cops, that would be it. There would be nothing for him to decide. They’d cuff him and it would be done. But that hadn’t happened. He approached the car uneasily with his nostrils flared. Amazingly, there was no smell yet; the trunk was tight. He dug in a pocket for his keys, thinking, something is on my side here. For an instant, he considered opening the trunk and looking inside to make sure she was still there, but he came to his senses with a quick shudder. Best to drive off for the hills. He wondered how long his heart could pound this hard.

  It was not yet seven o’clock when he got back to town. He found himself sitting behind the wheel of the car, engine off, in a parking slot in front of the Pikeville state police barracks, his mind as blank as a man’s in a stupor. He had no idea how he’d got there. For a long time he sat, listening to the hum of traffic on the grade below the cut-through. Numbly he stared at the lighted windows. A dispatcher would be at the switchboard in front to cope with the phones; there would still be a sergeant and a couple of troopers from the day shift at their desks in back. Someone he knew would be on duty, laboriously typing a report. Lt. Paul Maynard, the supervisor of the post’s overworked detective squad, usually stayed late. Maynard was a friend. Maynard would hear him out, at least, and maybe he’d have some advice to offer before he had to put the cuffs on.

  Mark’s head was wracked with pain, but the shock had diminished and he could see things more clearly now. He forced himself to think past the self-loathing. Okay, hotshot, here you are with a body in the trunk. Now what? Without realizing it, he was actually mouthing the words, as if addressing himself from nearby. But nobody caught you yet. Nobody knows yet, asshole. Why not wait and see what happens? He argued with himself for a while, then started the car and drove off.

  He took the Route 23 four-lane north out of town. A few miles past the strip mall where the K Mart was, just down the road from Marlow Tackett’s country-western bar, where he and Kathy had often stopped for a drink, he turned right onto Harmons Branch, a side road that briefly hugged the property line of a brick house whose lawn was bordered with a white wood fence. The car kicked up gravel; a man in shorts pulling weeds in the waning sunlight on his lawn paused to glower as he passed. Mark’s heart raced; his jaw set, he drove slowly, painfully extending his throbbing right hand along the top of the passenger seat in an effort to look casual. It was a road he and Susan had taken before. If you drove all the way up past the strip-mine equipment shed, you came to some bungalows set back in the trees from the foot of a high hollow. But he wasn’t going that far. He watched in the rearview mirror through the dust until he saw the man go back to his weeds. About a half mile up was the first mine road, now unused, which went up a few hundred yards into the ridge. Beside that was a ravine with a small creek at the bottom, thick with weeds. The car thumped, its bottom scraping the ruts gouged into the road by coal trucks. In this par
t of eastern Kentucky, once you got off a main road, the terrain was honeycombed with hollows and little creeks, mostly dry now. Through the trees, he could see some trailers at the strip-mine shed on a clearing a quarter-mile off; the area wasn’t isolated, but he knew that not many cars used the road, especially at night.

  When he turned in and stopped the car, he heard the brittle whine of dirt bikes, kids racing up and down on one of the mine roads. He couldn’t see them, but they were not far away. Through the open window he felt the soft breeze of a late spring night. This was where he would put her, at the edge of a ravine overgrown with brush and saplings. This, he figured, was where they would find her.

  Her body was heavy. His arms trembled; it was impossible to be gentle. He lugged her out, straining his ears for any approaching vehicle, but heard nothing other than the wind in the trees and the croak of the bullfrogs and the incessant whine of the dirt bikes. His braced his legs for leverage and dragged the body a little way down the ravine and just out of sight from the road. The slope was steep, and nettles scraped his arms as he struggled with his unwieldy cargo, limp in his arms. His feet got tangled in roots; he stumbled and fell with a shout. He began to cry. Then, getting a better hold under her arms, he pulled her down the hill as far as he could. They were about fifteen feet below the roadbed now, and this is where she would stay, barely concealed, like his guilt. Kneeling beside the body, his weight on his knees against stiff bushes like a prayer stool, tears streaking down his cheeks, he stroked her face and said, “I’m sorry.” Carefully, he removed the clothes, tugging the T-shirt off. His shorts, thirty-two-inch waist, slid off easily. Susan never wore underwear in warm weather. He did not think about whether she looked pregnant now that he saw her nude body. She was barefoot; her sandals had come off in the trunk. He gathered the clothes under his arm, turned, and abandoned her in the leaves.

  When he struggled up to the top of the ravine, he found himself looking into the eyes of a dark-haired young woman astride a chestnut quarter horse. There were riding stables a few miles down the mountain and the hour was late to be on a horse alone She stared implacably for a minute, with just a hint of a raised eyebrow, at the good-looking but disheveled young man climbing up from the bushes.