Above Suspicion

by Sharkey, Joe;

  Kathy began to probe the wound again, fixing on the moment of betrayal, when he unzipped his pants. She tortured herself with the image. She looked at Mark’s pillow, demanding an accounting. Details, goddammit! Chapter and verse, buddy boy! When? How many times? What were you wearing? What did she do that I don’t do? How many times, Mark? Did she come? Did she squeal like a little hillbilly pig? Did you kiss her precious little face, hold her precious little hand, walk her in the precious goddamn woods? Did you! What did you say to her? Did you laugh about me? What did you tell her about me! What did you say! Why didn’t I know about this!

  How stupid she felt. Of course she should have seen it. But a worse fear was overwhelming her merciless insistence: the ramifications of the affair, not the least of which was the possibility that the rumor she’d dismissed as ridiculous—that Susan had been pregnant with Mark’s child—might also be true. That there could be a baby—her husband’s baby—Danielle and little Mark’s half brother or half sister! Kathy struck her clenched fist on the mattress with each word: “That’s why this had such an impact on him.”

  The only sensible thing to do was to divorce him. She groped through doubts: Can I live with this? Do I throw away eight years, especially knowing what I know about Pikeville, who Susan was, where she came from? She meant nothing! They would never see her again! Then it struck her anew: if he had had an affair with her and lied to cover it up, it was going to make him look guilty if Susan really was dead. She thought of the damaged hand, the disjointed comments, the phone calls and brooding looks of the past year. What if he did know something about her being missing? What about the lies about that windshield? There were too many lies leering like hobgoblins in the shadows.

  At last her mind began working like a cop’s. Okay, they are in the car. They make love in the car. (How tacky, Mark! The car?) He has a short affair with her, and one night they are in the car and they get in an accident. She’s hurt, hurt bad—he panics and leaves her. That could explain the cracked windshield.

  No, Mark would never leave Susan lying somewhere, injured and helpless. But was there any other way Mark could have been involved in Susan’s death—assuming Susan was dead? Say they skid off the road, hit a tree. Susan dies. Mark panics and then leaves her in the mountains somewhere. No, that would mean there would have been more damage to the car than just a broken windshield.

  Or they’re having an affair; they have a fight when they’re in the car. There’s a big argument, Mark gets pissed off, punches the windshield, Susan storms out of the car and wanders away . . . and later, one of these other things happens to her, like that scummy ex-husband catches her and beats her once too often, or one of those other lowlifes she knows kills her, one of the drug dealers or bank robbers who always seem to be in the wings of her life. So Susan is dead, and Mark is indirectly involved. This is possible.

  Hellish images rage through her mind. His bandaged hand, their faces gazing at each other, Susan’s inane giggle, countless casual comments now swollen with cruel irony. The way Mark brooded when they discussed Susan’s disappearance, his reaction that time when Kathy mused, “She could be lying dead somewhere,” now startling in hindsight: “Don’t ever say that!”

  Kathy weighed her own role. She was an adult, a child of the 1970s, an honors graduate of the sexual revolution. So he had a tumble with some mountain girl, big deal. He came home to his wife, didn’t he? She thought of a defiant country-western song, “You ain’t woman enough to take my man.” It wasn’t the end of the world; affairs happened to the best of people in the worst of times. But why did it hurt like this? She’d found the false base on her life, on their relationship. Her husband, once a part of her very being, suddenly seemed as alien as the man in the next car at a red light. She felt foolish and exposed. She had never measured up. She heard ghostly laughter rise in chorus, from a grade school in Connecticut over fog-chilled hollows of a Kentucky night. “Ponticelli, your ears! Your ears are sticking out! Look at her!”

  She opened her eyes to a dull headache. The sun warmed the bed, flooded the room. Downstairs, she could hear Danielle lecturing her brother on the proper way to pour cereal into a bowl.

  In the kitchen, as she banged the kettle down on the stove, the phone rang. It was Mark. His voice was shaky. She pressed her eyes shut against the sunlight, knowing that the nightmare hadn’t ended.

  “I just wanted you to know that this is not going to go well today. I’m really scared about this. I don’t know if you’re going to understand,” he said.

  An artery in her neck throbbed. “I’m glad you called. Don’t do this! I want to talk to you first.” She wanted to hear the truth in his own words, even if it meant a situation she could no longer control.

  “I told you I have to do this. But be prepared.” His voice broke.

  “Whatever happens, whatever the results of the polygraph, don’t talk to them until you talk to me. Don’t give them a statement or any information. You don’t have to do that, Mark.”

  He was noncommittal. “I’ll talk to you afterward.”

  The FBI Polygraph Unit was located on the second floor of a nondescript office building a few blocks from FBI headquarters. Huggins was glad to see that Mark had arrived by 10 o’clock and was quietly reading the Washington Post in the waiting room. Huggins greeted him cordially and went into a separate room where a bureau polygraph examiner, a supervisory special agent who specialized in lie-detector testing, was just finishing up reading the missing person’s case file. Huggins and the examiner spoke for almost an hour about the case.

  Then Mark was summoned. He nodded to Huggins and followed the examiner into the polygraph room while Huggins waited down the hall in a vacant office, reading the newspaper Mark had left behind.

  After wiring Mark up and asking the usual preliminary questions about name and birthplace, the polygraph examiner asked, “Did your rental car in June 1989 play any role in the disappearance of Susan Smith?”

  “No,” Mark said.

  “Did you have anything to do with the disappearance of Susan Smith?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever been convicted of a crime?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever violated the FBI’s guidelines regarding illegal substances?”

  “No.”

  “Did you have sex with Susan Smith?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “Did you cause the disappearance of Susan Smith?”

  “No.”

  Only a few minutes had gone by. The examiner frowned over his graph, asked Mark, “Would you step outside for a minute?” and went to the office where Huggins was waiting. “You have problems with your guy. He’s off the charts. Do you want to continue?” the examiner said.

  “Let me talk to him,” Huggins replied, heartsick. In a minute, Mark was standing beside the desk where Huggins sat. A bureau stenographer sidled in and sat in the corner, her pen poised above her pad.

  Huggins avoided looking directly at him. “Mark, you’ve got some problems, buddy. I think you know that,” he said.

  “I know. It was the question about sex. I did kiss her.”

  Huggins shook his head sadly and murmured, “No, no, no, no.”

  Mark took a deep shaky breath and looked pleadingly at him. “Jim, I want to get this over with.”

  Huggins sighed and asked him to sit. Mark’s lips were tight, then he said, “Before we do anything, can I call Kathy?”

  Huggins was playing this by ear, and a part of him still insisted that maybe there was an explanation other than the obvious one. Huggins stepped out of the office so Mark could speak privately to his wife.

  Kathy answered on the first ring.

  “How did it go?” she asked.

  “Not very well. Things are bad.”

  She was trembling. “Are they holding you there?” Her words sounded muffled and disc
onnected, like a television playing through an apartment wall.

  “No, they’re not keeping me. But they have a stenographer who is taking down everything I say now.”

  “No! Mark! Mark? Don’t say anything! If they’ll let you come home, come home and we’ll talk about it here. Don’t say anything else. Do you hear me? Come home.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  He sensed a flurry of activity outside the office after Huggins retuned. Someone on another phone, papers being shuffled. A different process being set into motion. He remained outwardly calm, but his mind raced. It was clear that the atmosphere had changed. Other agents were standing watchfully by.

  Mark was exceedingly apologetic in speaking to Huggins. “Jim, I’m so sorry, but Kathy wants me to come home, and she doesn’t want me to say anymore. Am I under arrest?”

  “No, Mark. You’re not under arrest. You’re free to go.”

  “Jim, I really don’t want to be uncooperative, but Kathy wants me to tell her first. I’m really sorry.”

  Sadly, and at last extinguishing in his mind the tiny ember of hope that Mark was innocent and an explanation would be forthcoming, Huggins told him, “That’s okay, Mark, you go ahead and tell Kathy what you need to tell her, and when you get home, in the morning you get hold of Bill Gavin first thing. He’ll help you get through this, Mark.”

  It was well after one o’clock. Huggins had a flight home later in the afternoon for Lexington; Mark to Florida. The two men grabbed their bags and walked without speaking to the closest Metro station, where they rode together to the airport.

  In midafternoon on a Saturday, the subway car was nearly empty. Sitting beside Mark, Huggins finally broke the silence, speaking as softly but clearly as he could. “Listen to me, Mark. You don’t have to say a thing, just listen. I think something happened when you went back to Pikeville. You didn’t expect to see Susan there at the hotel. She probably started firing on you the minute she saw you. There was a hell of an argument, and then I don’t know what happened, but I think maybe you did something accidentally. Something happened that you probably didn’t intend to happen, and then you panicked. And here you are.”

  Mark did not reply. Eyes cast downward, he nodded. Huggins felt his lips tremble. He held back tears.

  His flight was the last one into Fort Lauderdale airport, arriving around midnight. An after-hours glare harshly lit the faces of the stragglers shuffling past the darkened shops, shut cafés, and unattended ticket counters. Kathy found Mark waiting alone at the far end of a wide, empty corridor.

  He started to speak, but she held up her hand and said, “Just don’t talk yet.”

  In the car, she suggested that they stop at a Holiday Inn near the airport for a drink. It was a conversation neither of them wanted to have at home, where Kathy’s sister, Chris, was still living with them. Kathy looked straight ahead and lit a cigarette in the car, something she hadn’t had the nerve to do in many years.

  It was nearly one o’clock when they walked into the Holiday Inn lounge. At the bar, Kathy ordered a double Black Russian for herself and a beer for Mark. Carrying the drinks, she led him silently to a table in the darkness. Across the room, a four-piece band was playing heavy metal; couples in their twenties, the last gasp of the fading Fort Lauderdale beach scene, danced under lights that flashed like those on a patrol car.

  Defiantly, Kathy lit another cigarette and blew the smoke at a point just over Mark’s shoulder. She moved her glass to the side and looked directly at him for the first time that night. She waited.

  “This is really serious,” he sputtered.

  You’re goddamn right about that, she thought. In a cold fury, she smoked and waited.

  “I’m sorry—”

  Get on with it, she thought angrily.

  “It’s—”

  “Look,” she said in the sarcastic tone of a prosecutor trying to dismiss the ridiculous before homing in on the self-evident. “Did you kill her?” She spat out the words with a street swagger she hadn’t used since she was a teenager.

  “Yes.”

  This was not an answer she had anticipated. She had been expecting a nervous chuckle, a “Come on, Kathy!” before she probed the painful details and watched him squirm. She blinked slowly, her mind two beats behind the words.

  “So you slept with her!”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “And this could have been your baby.” She flung the sentence across the table.

  “Kat—”

  “Just answer the questions! How did this happen?” He kept crying. “Was there a car accident?”

  “No.”

  She let out a furious, thin stream of smoke. “It wasn’t a car accident. Did you shoot her?” Her voice was rising. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a middle-aged man in a business suit drinking alone at a table a few feet away. He had been casually watching them, with his eye on her. Now he stiffened at what he overheard.

  “No. I choked her.” Mark made a feeble little choking motion.

  “You choked her,” she said in a sarcastic flat tone. Then her voice rose, her face contorted with sarcasm, and she made an exaggerated choking motion, as if to show him how it was done. “You strangled her?” With that, the eavesdropper at the next table abandoned any pretext of indifference. He got up, slapped a twenty-dollar bill on his table, and scuttled away.

  She waited until the man was gone. “How do you know she was dead? If you left her, are you sure she was dead? Are you sure, Mark! They haven’t found the body. She was unconscious. Maybe she just got up and walked away.”

  “I thought that a million times. She was dead. I know she was.”

  Mark had regained some control. His eyes were smarting from the smoke, which she was making no effort whatsoever to direct away from him.

  “I want to explain—”

  “All right,” she said abruptly. “Tell me how it happened.”

  He said that he hadn’t lied to her when she first asked him about Susan, back when Susan was shooting her mouth off about Mark. He had laughed it off as absurd. And it was—he hadn’t slept with her then. That happened later, but except for the night Kenneth called, the subject hadn’t come up again until now.

  All of the pieces fell together with a deafening thud. There was another round of drinks that was brought by a waitress wearing a thong bikini bottom and a lacy push-up bra under a little red jacket. Kathy was dimly aware of her trying to make eye contact with Mark. Her mind careened through uncertain frames of time: Mark and Susan drive into the mountains; they park, argue some more, suddenly she’s screaming, hitting—and he loses it. It’s over in sixty seconds. He pulls her out onto the ground, desperate, but she won’t breathe. Like that, she’s dead. She’s wearing his shorts and T-shirt, for some reason that Kathy forgets. He puts her in the trunk of the car and goes back to the motel. And then drives to a meeting in Lexington the next day and parks the car out front with Susan’s body in the trunk. He drives around with a dead woman locked in the trunk of his car, like a gym bag?

  “You have to remember, she was screaming at me, Kat. I was afraid that everyone else in the hotel would hear about it.”

  He succumbed to wrenching tears just as the reality of what Kathy was hearing slammed finally into consciousness. In a flash of contempt, she walloped him, smacked him so hard her arm resonated with pain. He tried to duck the blow, which caught him forcefully on the right side of his face. As he dodged, he lost his balance and fell to the floor, one hand grasping the little table on which the drinks had spilled. He was crying like a three-year-old when he came back up. She had never seen Mark shed more than a few sentimental tears and watched the spectacle with the detached interest of a motorist passing an accident scene.

  “I want to get out of here. Kathy, please let’s get out of here and go home and talk. I don’t want the neighbors knowing our busines
s.”

  She wasn’t budging. “No, I’m not moving and you’re not moving. I’m simply not ready to get up yet.” She had mustered a degree of haughtiness now and caught the eye of the waitress, who had wandered over expectantly when she saw Mark fall. Kathy regarded the waitress contemptuously in her skimpy costume, ready to wallop her, too.

  “Another beer?” the waitress asked Mark, and added with a look at Kathy, “Another double Black Russian?”

  “Yeah, another double. And he’ll have a beer.”

  Kathy turned back to Mark, but the conversation had begun to blur. Several surreal rounds of drinks later, she and the man she had long loved and respected, the father of her children, had explored every facet of the fact that he had killed Susan Smith.

  In the car, Kathy lay back and blamed herself: “I could have stopped this if I had been paying attention.”

  “Hey, I did what I did. Nothing you did could have prevented this.”

  “Yes, I could have! I could have! You don’t know what I know!” She was nearly hysterical.

  She recalled making a few clumsy thrusts: “You bastard, how could you do this to us?” and “Why did you tell me! Now that I know, I can’t lie for you!” She remembered him wordlessly and gently undressing her in their bedroom and taking his place in bed beside her. She sat up and shouted, “What am I going to do with the kids while their father is in prison, Mark! Did you think of that when you killed her?”

  15

  She slept for less than an hour. With her mind instantly reeling again, she bolted up in bed, sensing Mark lying beside her with his eyes open. She squinted at the glowing red numerals on the alarm clock. It was five-thirty. She was due at her part-time waitressing job at the International House of Pancakes at seven, to get ready for the first wave of the Sunday-morning church crowd. Her first cogent thought was that she needed to phone her manager to say that she wasn’t coming in, in time for him to bring in a substitute. But it was still too early to call. She remembered that Mark had told her he had to be in the office at ten, to talk to the special agent in charge. She wanted to go with him.