“Really, Susan. I talked to a couple of different people who told me you could make really good money. I was busting my ass bartending till two in the morning, and then waitressing for breakfast at the Holiday Inn. I was living in a housing project and basically just getting through the week. So I went and got a job at this massage parlor, and the manager guy who hired me had a quick look and said, ‘OK, talk to Erin. But you know the drill.’”
“Did you?”
“Hell no!”
“Who’s Erin?”
“The boss of the girls, I guess. She kept the schedule, anyway.”
“She told you what was going on?”
“Not really, because I was too naïve to get what Erin was saying. ‘Basically, what goes on in there—’ she pointed down a little hallway where there were some little private rooms with dim lighting and a single bed for the back rubs.”
Susan snorted.
Kathy went on, “‘—What goes on in there is between you and the client.’ I remember that she used the word ‘client.’ Now that I think of it, I wonder if she was being indirect because they were worried about cops, and maybe there was a worry about an undercover cop with a tape recorder. I have no idea. This place was basically a storefront with rooms in the back, definitely seedy, but really, Susan, I thought prostitution was illegal.”
“Well it is, honey. Did you do it?”
“I worked there a couple of days, a week or so maybe, I wasn’t catching on. OK, I took my shirt off—”
“Come on! That’s it?”
“I got the idea. I had this black nightgown? So, yeah, I would put on this nightgown and rub these guys’ backs, and they’d then ask for, you know, a hand-job, but I told them ‘You need to do that yourself.’ I was shaking so bad I actually scared the clients. They were probably afraid to complain, but the word got around that I was absolutely no good at that shit. There were things I drew the line at, is all.”
Kathy had been sipping wine through this long conversation, which occurred when Mark was out of town on a case. It was now after one o’clock in the morning.
“I turned a trick or two when I was down on my luck,” Susan said. “No big deal, really.”
“And?”
“Between you and me and the hitchin’ post?”
“Absolutely.”
“Up in Chicago a few years ago, I was introduced to this gentleman who ran an escort service for businessmen in town at hotels near the airport.”
“Not high class, then.”
“Well, all of them had folding money, let’s call it that.”
“What did you have to do?”
“What was necessary.”
“Was it ever any fun?” Kathy asked, giggling inquisitively.
“Hardly never.”
“But sometimes?”
Kathy could almost hear Susan shrug.
The nighttime phone conversations between the two women orbiting around Mark Putnam became regular occurrences. There was another story that Kathy had vowed never to tell, which came spilling out one night, lubricated by wine.
“When I was working at that place—”
“The massage parlor?”
“Yeah. I had gone shopping in Hartford one day and I bought myself a pair of jeans, and a man followed me home and pushed his way into my apartment. I recognized the guy from work, and I even knew his first name and that he was from the neighborhood. So I thought I could handle it.”
“Big mistake, honey.”
“Yeah, tell me about it. He raped me.”
“Shit.”
“I went to work and told them what happened and they were like, ‘Whoa!’ The guy was a regular. They were worried about the cops. And I’m just crouched in the corner, crying. And the manager goes to me, ‘You can just get your ass out of here!’”
“Scum,” Susan said.
“So I went to the police station and told them what happened, and they went and picked the guy up. I had lied to them that the guy had had a knife, because I didn’t know how I was going to explain how he got into my apartment without me screaming. Then they said they had the guy and they wanted me to testify—”
“’Course they did,” Susan interjected.
“And I said, these are rough people. I’m going to get hurt if I testify against them. They kept asking me all these questions about the massage parlor, about the things that went on there, and I said, ‘I don’t know!’ The only thing I know is they have red lights in the rooms, and if a cop would come in, the manager at the desk flips the thing and the lights come on and then you’re supposed to quick get your clothes back on. I told them everything I knew about the place, but I hadn’t been working there that long. I couldn’t stop crying. There were two cops at a desk facing me, firing questions. And then the door opened and I turned my head and the guy who raped me was there with another cop, and he wasn’t even handcuffed, and the cop said, ‘It’s your word against him, Miss. I just wanted to see your reaction.’ All I could say was, ‘Get him out of here, and get me out of here!’”
“Don’t cry, it’s in the past,” Susan said.
“Nothing is ever in the past, Susan,” Kathy said softly and went on, “so what they did was they put me in protective custody in a hotel for a week while they worked on closing the massage parlor and issuing a citation. And that night, the guy did come back to my apartment with three or four other guys and they trashed the whole place. Which is when they got arrested.”
“Guy wasn’t charged with rape?”
“No. I was too afraid to press it. I knew I would get hurt. All they cared about was busting the massage parlor. They didn’t care about me in the least. It really left a sour taste in my mouth about the police.”
“But you married an agent of the law.”
“That’s different, Susan. I am a different person now.”
All of her life, Susan had a way of getting people to talk, which was the skill that made her such a good informant. But as she laid out her own pitiful stories to Kathy, she was genuinely touched by the way Kathy responded to let her know that, current impressions of a poised, well-adjusted woman aside, they shared some hard times.
After she was raped and her apartment destroyed, Kathy sought refuge with her ex-boyfriend and together they moved to a trailer in Jacksonville, North Carolina, where he said he could find work painting houses near the sprawling Marine Corps advanced-training base at Camp Lejeune.
Kathy told Susan, “I got a job tending bar, and I saved up a little money, a few hundred dollars. But I’m working all the time and I’m not meeting my bills. I just wanted to just go back home even if it meant living with my father’s rules. I’d do whatever it took. So I set up a street hustle.”
“You? What kind of a hustle?” Susan was laughing at the incongruity of Kathy, who she had seen as so elegant, contriving something as rough as a street scam.
“It was my idea. I thought up what you’d call a ‘dry hustle’ to do on the Strip in Jacksonville, this military town. So we went down to the Strip and I more or less propositioned five guys—you know, young Marines with money burning a hole in their pockets. I said we had five girls at the hotel, and if they’d give me money up front I would take them up there to have fun. I had my boyfriend waiting in a car and I’d told him, I’ll get the money, break into a sprint, get in the car with you, and we’re gone.”
“How’d that work out?” Susan asked skeptically.
“Not good. I got less than two hundred dollars. As we were driving away, a cruiser pulled up with the lights flashing. It turned out that one of the guys I hustled was an undercover cop. They arrested us both. I couldn’t believe this was happening! I was eighteen! I tried to explain to the cop, because they were charging me with prostitution, they were asking me about these girls supposedly in the hotel. I said ‘There are no girls at a hotel!’ I
poured my heart out. I told them about the rape and handwrote out a long statement, but I could tell that the cops thought that I was hiding something bigger. I said all I wanted to do was go home to my parents and have enough money to see a doctor. I had been very worried that I had got some infection from the guy that raped me. But they threw me into jail for a few days. I got home and my parents did get an attorney for me and they eventually dropped the charges.”
“Mark knows about this?”
Memory floodgates fully open, Kathy couldn’t stop talking to the only person she knew in the world who would fully understand.
“I told Mark after we were married and he applied to the bureau, when I was really scared that this was going to come up. The FBI does a background check on you. But it didn’t come up, as far as I know. Maybe because it was a misdemeanor and the records weren’t kept.”
“Adjournment with contemplation of dismissal. ACD,” Susan said knowingly.
“What?”
“That’s what your lawyer got you, to settle some piddly misdemeanor charge. It means the record is wiped clean if you don’t do it again.”
“Really?”
“So don’t be dry-humping no Marines, Kathy.”
“Dry hustle, Susan, for Christ’s sake!”
“Whatever,” Susan said, and both women dissolved in throaty laughter and mutual cigarette coughing.
Kathy’s parents had been very clear about their conditions for her coming back to live with them in Manchester, Connecticut. If you’re going to come home, you’re going to live by our rules, her father had said, and when she returned, she did her best to comply, and to accommodate herself to their diminished expectations.
Then a man ten years her senior, who had a steady job in a gravel factory, entered her life. She married him virtually on impulse. Her father gave her a job managing an apartment complex that he and his father had built in Manchester; she got her high school equivalency diploma and enrolled in community college. It looked like things were working out at last.
But there was a dark side to her new husband that Kathy hadn’t anticipated. He deeply resented the “airs” he said she was putting on by insisting on continuing college. He was also intensely jealous. The marriage, which lasted four months, ended one night when, in a drunken rage, he smacked her around in the car and pushed her out, bruised, mortified, and half-naked, onto her parents’ well-groomed front lawn.
Not at all sure that she was getting through, Kathy tried to make Susan see the parallels in their lives, by way of showing her that it wasn’t too late.
“Susan and I both had lifelong feelings of inadequacy,” Kathy would explain later. “We got involved with the wrong people, looking for love wherever we could get it, always looking for easy answers. We both got involved with impossible men. We both had a history of running away. We never felt we were good enough. We didn’t face reality and just assumed it would somehow magically work out.”
Susan confided to Kathy that she was a regular drug user, “Pills, to help me relax.” Though she definitely liked to drink, especially as her unhappiness with being alone in Pikeville grew, Kathy herself had never abused drugs, but she’d spent enough of her life with people who did to understand the predicament involved in being around them. “I was scared by cocaine, but I was pulled into that world. It was the same thing as Susan’s life, basically—the people around the kitchen table, people coming and going all day, strangers asleep on the couch when you got up in the morning,” she said later, describing her late teen years.
However, by the age of twenty-one, Kathy was on track at last. She recalled, “My overriding resolution was not to have to crawl back to my father. I was determined by then. I was no longer married, and I got my associate degree. I had a decent job managing the apartments; I was living in a nice apartment that I’d furnished beautifully from secondhand shops. I even had a new Datsun 280ZX. Then I saw Mark and he changed my entire life.”
They met serendipitously on a Friday night in July of 1982, two days before Mark’s twenty-third birthday. In the apartment next door to her lived an avuncular, hard-drinking elderly man, who had asked Kathy to join him for dinner at a local restaurant where a woman he was dating would be singing. At dinner, however, he drank so excessively that he was listing severely by the time the singer came on. At an adjacent table, a sprightly middle-aged widow sitting with a male friend noticed Kathy’s plight and caught her attention.
“Men,” the older woman commiserated, rolling her eyes.
Kathy smiled back. “What are you going to do with them?”
The woman looked Kathy over appraisingly and asked a few tentative questions about her age and marital status. “You know,” she said, pulling her chair closer, “my son would be perfect for you. He’s a good-looking guy. He just graduated from the University of Tampa, and he’s going to be an FBI agent. I can call him and ask him to come over.”
Sure, Kathy thought. Some guy sitting at home on a Friday night while his mother hustles dates for him? And what kind of guy wants to be an FBI agent? But the woman was engagingly persistent. “Come on,” she said, getting up. “Come on! We’re going to call him.”
“Listen, we need to leave,” Kathy protested, noticing that her companion’s elbows were sliding off the table. “I have to get him home.” But the man got unsteadily to his feet and wobbled across the dance floor to join his friend the singer between sets, announcing that he was going home with her.
On her way to the ladies’ room, Kathy passed the older woman at the pay phone. “You’ve got to meet this girl,” the woman was saying into the phone. “She’s beautiful.” She grabbed Kathy by the elbow and thrust the receiver into her hand. “Talk!”
Flustered, Kathy mumbled, “Hello?”
There was embarrassed laughter on the other end, and a deep voice said, “I have to apologize to you for my mother putting you on the spot. The woman is incorrigible.”
Kathy was intrigued by the sound of his voice. They talked for a while and seemed to have things in common. She liked his sense of humor. She heard herself saying, “Well, why don’t you come down here then, if you want to talk?”
“Would it be worth my while?” He didn’t sound arrogant, just assertive enough to be worth a look.
“Yeah, it would be worth it.”
Twenty minutes later, a dark-haired young man with flashing eyes and a dazzling smile walked in. He shook her hand, held her chair, made her laugh, and treated her like the most important person in his life. By the end of the night, she was hopelessly in love.
“We connected right away,” she recalled. “We talked all night long. He told me about his plans to get into the FBI as a special agent by working his way up from clerk. I told him about my own hopes to have a husband and a family, a good, working marriage, security, and simple happiness. It was very clear very fast that this was the man I really wanted in my life, and he felt the same way about me. We talked and laughed, and we made love for the first time in the morning, in my apartment, as the sun came up.”
When he met Kathy, Mark was two months out of the University of Tampa, where he had been the captain of the championship soccer team and from which he had graduated with a degree in criminology. In September, he was to start work as a clerk at the FBI office in New Haven.
Mark, his younger brother, Tim, and his sister, Cindy, had spent part of their early childhood in a public housing project in East Hartford, while their father worked hard to provide a better home. A burly, soft-spoken man who always had another job or two to do after his regular workday driving a truck for Sears, Walter Putnam soon put together the down payment for a comfortable house in middle-class Coventry. Walter had dropped out of high school to enlist in the Navy, and he and his wife, Barbara, placed great value on their children’s education—although it was Tim, not Mark, who was considered to be the brains of the family. Tim was “college ma
terial.” Mark was the jock.
However, in his freshman year of high school, Mark was offered an athletic scholarship to the prestigious Pomfret School in Pomfret, Connecticut, fifty miles away. Going off to prep school posed a tough decision for a boy who stayed close to home and was already a star soccer and baseball player in high school. His mother opposed it, advising him, “Stay at home. You’re going to be all-American.” Characteristically, his father’s response was to throw the question back at him. “Think it out. I know the answer, but think it out.”
In time, Mark knew, too. He recognized the opportunity and welcomed the chance to prove himself to his father. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to coast through Pomfret on a soccer ball and a smile, as he had so far through public high school. His teachers had been padding his grades and told him so. Mark had already decided that he wanted to be an FBI agent, although he hadn’t told anybody yet, and he was aware that the FBI was fussy about accepting only college graduates with good academic records. His father, delighted that Mark opted for Pomfret, told him, “If you want to go, you go. I’ll handle your mother.” Despite the scholarship, it would cost Mark’s parents about $1,000 a year to send him. They’d make do, his father said.
Later, Mark would recall his apprehension about leaving home for an expensive school like Pomfret. “For the first time, I had to study. I had to prove myself in a group of people who I knew were intellectually superior. I was so intimidated by that. I absolutely hated the place when I got there. It was such a totally alien environment. My initial impression was that I was surrounded by these prissy rich kids who had it made all their lives.
“I was never comfortable having people know much about my private life, so it took me a while to acclimate. But then I began to realize that some of these kids, their parents had just shipped them off to get them out of the house. And others I got to know and found out they were in the same boat as me—working-class kids who were there on grants or scholarships. I began to relax.”
The summer before he went to Pomfret, Mark broke his leg in a soccer scrimmage. The cast came off only a week before classes began, but he started anyway on the team, playing through the pain, never mentioning the injury to any of his teammates. He rapidly assimilated. “The soccer team was going great—we were winning games right and left. Friends started coming, girls started coming around. My grades were good, and this time I worked hard for them. And boom, before I knew it, I was back in a fold again, a nest.”
Above Suspicion Page 6
