Above Suspicion

by Sharkey, Joe;

  He hadn’t noticed, but he told her, “Jeez, you look terrific.”

  “I started running every night, just like you.”

  “That’s great, Susan.”

  “Just in case you’re interested.”

  “Interested in what?”

  “Oh, like a little fling.”

  “A what?”

  She gave him a look. “A fling, Mark. You know?”

  “Jesus, Susan, I’m a married man. I got a new kid on the way. I can’t be doing stuff like that.”

  She persisted, “Come on I like you, you like me, right? I’ll tell you right now, whatever you want, we’ll do it.”

  “What? What about Kathy, Susan? She’s your friend, for God’s sake.”

  “Why’s she have to know?”

  He started the car and tried to make light of the situation, and Susan found other things to talk about as he drove her home.

  Not that propositions were especially startling to a good-­looking­ young man new to the region. In his first month on the job, for example, a bank teller had passed him a note with her phone number on it and the message, “Call me anytime.” Some women in Pikeville and in the mountain belt made clear enough signals of availability to any polite young guy who had all of his teeth, he had thought unkindly. As for Susan, Mark realized that his relationship with her, which evolved partly through a social process that almost necessarily involved elements of flirting, had become confused in her mind, if not in his. Susan’s attentions had been on his list of things to worry about over the holidays, as he came to wonder whether he really knew what he was doing in Pikeville. Keeping all things under control was Mark’s singular impulse. In dark reflective moments, especially when he woke up with a start in the middle of the night, he wondered anxiously about whether he was losing it.

  In the interim, he had to work closely with Susan as the Cat Eyes trial date approached. She was apprehensive about testifying—she said that Kenneth was making her life more miserable than usual, raging about her “ratting on a friend”—but she seemed to take comfort in the implicit protection offered by her alliance with Mark, who felt that he could not risk doing anything to shake her confidence. Sometimes, Susan managed to talk her younger brother, Billy Joe Daniels, known as Bo, into driving her the thirty-five miles from Freeburn to Pikeville, a chore that he resented. Bo had already decided, with circumstantial evidence bolstered by his sister’s uncharacteristically girlish prattling about her close relationship with the FBI man, that Susan and Mark Putnam were sexually involved.

  Susan came through valiantly in court. At the trial of Cat Eyes Lockhart, the fact that a local woman was actually taking the stand to testify was the talk of the courthouse. Informing for pay was one thing. Standing up to admit it in front of everybody was something else entirely. For Mark, it was a coup; for Susan, it was exposure.

  At the trial, Cat Eyes maintained his innocence with a sense of injured pride, though he did so with the rococo lexicon that any parent recognizes as a sure sign a child is spinning a whopper. According to him, he had been arrested and unjustly accused by authorities who would never let him live down his past as a bank robber.

  “It seemed like, wherever my personal being was, they would always be law enforcement agencies such as FBI, local authorities, whatever, because when the circumstances of a bank robbery would occur, in specifically speaking in the areas, which was a number of bank robberies, I would be the first individual they came to, regardless of my whereabouts,” Cat explained earnestly, if confusingly.

  Susan was more direct when she took the stand, avoiding the glares of Kenneth and her brother, who had come to court with her.

  “Mrs. Smith, do you know a person who is ‘Cat Eyes’ Lockhart?” the prosecutor asked.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Is that person in court today?”

  “Yes, he is. He is on the left in a plaid shirt.”

  “During the summer of 1987, did you have any occasion to see Mr. Lockhart with any firearms?”

  “Yes, I did. He stayed in my guest bedroom, with Sherri, and he had this green duffel bag—it looked like an army bag, you know, and a pillowcase that he had a lot of stuff in. And he had two guns . . .”

  “They were both shotguns?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were they both sawed off?”

  “Sawed off,” Susan said.

  “Did there come a time that you were aware that a bank at Belcher in Pike County had been robbed in early September of 1987?”

  “Yes.”

  “Turn your attention to the few days before that, and I want to ask you if you had the occasion to see Mr. Lockhart and Ms. Justice a few days before that robbery.”

  “Yes, I did,” Susan said as Cat Eyes’s girlfriend, Sherri Justice, looked daggers at her. “It was at my home on a Friday night a week before the bank was robbed, about eleven o’clock. They came to my house. They were very nervous, upset . . .”

  “Was there any discussion by Mr. Lockhart and/or Ms. Justice in your presence of robbing a bank?”

  “Yes, both of them was speaking at the time to me.”

  “What did they say?”

  “About robbing a bank. They didn’t say what bank, they just said a bank in Pike County.”

  Susan’s testimony, with her positive identification of the shotgun, clinched the prosecution’s case. Cat Eyes was found guilty and sent back to the penitentiary, but even as he was going to prison once again, he refused to believe that little Susie Smith, a girl he said he loved, had done it to him of her own free will.

  “That Kenneth, he done put her up to it,” Cat Eyes said sadly.

  A few weeks after the trial, Dan Brennan was due to be transferred out, and Mark considered the possibility that his replacement, Ronald Gene Poole, a thirty-seven-year-old agent coming down from the Chicago office with a reputation as a good undercover investigator who liked to handle drug cases, might be the man to shoulder some of the growing burden of carrying Susan as an informant. Most of Susan’s tips lately had to do with drug cases, which Mark himself had little interest in, since he thought they were too easy and accomplished little even if you broke one. He hoped that if his new partner were interested, he’d be able to pass Susan on to him, neatly solving one looming problem with a gracious gesture of welcome besides.

  Brennan asked Mark to accompany him to the Landmark, the most prominent of only a handful of motels in Pikeville, to meet Poole, who was staying there while he found a place to live.

  Brennan had already met Poole, and he had a word of caution on their short drive across town. “This guy’s a little, uh, different from what you would expect in an agent,” Brennan said tentatively.

  “How so?”

  “Well, you’ll see.”

  Mark soon understood. At over three hundred pounds, with shaggy hair and perspiring heavily, Ron Poole looked like an overweight school crossing guard with a patronage job from a town school board. Holy shit, Mark thought when he saw Poole shambling toward them. Maybe this guy does such great undercover work because the last thing you’d take him for is an agent.

  Not only Poole’s appearance, but his attitude as well, offended Mark’s idealized sense of what an FBI agent should be. It was clear from the start that this was going to be an uneasy relationship.

  Poole invited them into his room for a get-acquainted chat and looked over his new partner sharply. “I don’t care who I work with,” he told Dan in a cool tone, “as long as it’s not a goddamn Yankee.”

  “Surprise,” Mark replied curtly, holding out his hand.

  Poole cultivated his unruly image and let Mark know right away that he had no intention of “carrying” a rookie. Staking out his position clearly, he said that he worked alone and without interference—which suited Mark fine. Poole let it be known immediately that he had been transferred out of
the Chicago office after drug dealers threatened his life. He was also known, during eight years in the bureau, as an agent who delivered the goods. As Mark initially guessed, Poole did, in fact, manage to infiltrate criminal activities because he was persistent and because he looked like anything but a cop. He delivered, but his superiors apparently preferred to keep him at arm’s length, which meant teaming him with a rookie in a remote office like Pike­ville without on-site supervision. Poole had been an accountant before he joined the FBI. Using Poole to fill the vacancy opened by Brennan’s departure seemed eminently logical on paper—in Pikeville, the former accountant could be paired, with perfect bureaucratic logic and expedience, with an ex-clerk.

  Mark, who had hoped for a new partner from whom he could actually learn things, quickly understood that Poole would not be that man. A few days after Poole arrived, Terry Hulse phoned Mark from the Covington office to check in. Terry extolled Poole for his record of investigative expertise and bravery. Mark’s impression was that he was laying it on a bit thick.

  Does he want me to cover for this character? Mark asked himself as Hulse went on. But all he said was, “I’ll do anything I can to help.”

  It didn’t help matters much when, a few weeks after Poole began work, he met a young Pikeville woman named Myra Chico. Myra, who worked as a part-time reporter for the local radio station, made it a point to know all of the local cops, whose cooperation was always useful when a story broke. “If you wanted something out, you called Myra and hoped she got it right,” one cop said later.

  When she introduced herself to Poole, she tried to break the ice by complimenting him—on his partner. “To me, Mark Putnam is the epitome of what an FBI agent should be,” Myra chirped. Poole glowered at her.

  Still, however skeptical Poole was about being teamed with an agent who he thought looked like a magazine model, not a cop, and a goddamn Yankee to boot, Poole had to concede that Mark had obviously managed to put together sources, not the least interesting of whom to him was pretty little Susan Smith, the sassy girl from that coal-mine town. Even his wife, Kathy, had made a real effort to make Poole feel welcome in Pikeville.

  Shortly after Poole arrived in town, Kathy suggested to Mark that he invite him to the house for dinner. Poole eagerly accepted. Kathy recalled that he spent much of the time regaling them with war stories about his undercover work in Chicago and, before that, in the mountains of North Carolina, from the bureau in Charlotte. He also disarmed her by candidly discussing his weight problem, which, he said his previous supervisor had humiliated him over, going so far as to bring a bathroom scale into the office and making him publicly weigh in each day. Immediately sympathetic and characteristically empathetic, Kathy described to Poole the diet and exercise regimen she was using to firm up after having the baby.

  “I can see it’s been very successful,” Poole told her, looking her over. Mark made a mental note how his new partner seemed to leer at his wife.

  A few nights later, when Mark was working late and on the road, Kathy was surprised to get a phone call from Poole. Danielle and the baby were in bed; she’d been doing aerobic exercises and answered the phone out of breath.

  “Breathing heavy?” Poole said in a manner that struck her as oddly suggestive. But she brushed it off, and Poole said he was calling to see if he could borrow a diet book she had mentioned at dinner. They talked for about a half hour, mostly about diets, but also about the long hours Mark put in. Innocently, she mentioned that she was looking forward to the day when they would get out of Pikeville.

  Poole recounted his experience in Chicago when he’d been transferred after receiving threats. Given how miserable life in Pikeville had become for her, she was very interested to hear what he had to say about getting out. “That’s all you need,” he told her, in a tone that she thought sounded almost hopeful about seeing Mark, at least, get out of town. “Guaranteed. You’d be out the next day.”

  It occurred to her then, and she would become deadly certain of it later, that Poole might be jealous of Mark, and she wondered whether she should warn her husband. But she decided that Mark would think she was being silly. She could handle Poole herself. When he phoned back a few nights later to thank her for the diet book, she commiserated with him about the difficulties of staying in shape. He told her that he appreciated the help and added that he’d make it a practice to check in on her when Mark was working late “since you’re there by yourself with the kids.” And in very short order, Ron Poole had joined Kathy’s little assembly of regular nighttime callers. Kathy was lonely enough to welcome the acquaintance and canny enough to realize that Poole might become useful to her at some point, though she was repulsed by his sexual intentions.

  In fact, a quarter century later, Mark’s early cop buddy in Freeburn, Bert Hatfield, laughed when he remembered Ron Poole, who died in 2000 at the age of fifty. “Poole, that boy was a pussy-hound first and foremost, and an FBI agent, maybe second,” Hatfield said from his car lot in Freeburn. “Being a big-shot FBI guy, he managed to get plenty of women, but Susie would have nothing to do with him that way. She played him like a fiddle. It drove him nuts that he couldn’t get in her pants.”

  As Poole insinuated himself into the new region and began developing his own cases, almost exclusively those involving drugs, Mark was hoping for the opportunity to pass Susan along to his new partner—but his supervisor cautioned him to think long and hard about her proven value to his own career. Good sources like that, Terry Hulse told him, didn’t grow on trees in eastern Kentucky.

  “Listen, you started out with a bang down there,” Hulse told him when Mark broached the subject during one of his infrequent trips to Covington to review case files. “You were there a few months and you got this informant. And she actually testified. Keep on this woman, Mark. Look at the potential.”

  Mark agreed about the potential; he just didn’t want to be the one to develop it any further himself. He was worried that he was stretched too thin already. But he felt his resistance weakening in the face of his supervisor’s blandishments. “She can mix in with anybody, that’s for sure,” Mark had to concede. “She can talk to politicians, she can talk to drug dealers—anybody. I know we should keep her on, but I’m not sure I can get much more out of her. Poole thinks he can work with her on his investigations.”

  “Do you think she’s blown her cover for you?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. With her, it’s hard to say. She’s full of surprises, that one.”

  On the long drive back to Pikeville, annoyed with himself for not standing his ground, Mark tried to assess his position. As fond as he had become of her, he was uneasy about Susan, professionally and personally. On the other hand, every time he decided she had outlived her usefulness to him, she managed to come up with something new to make him reconsider. For example, after his impressive first year in Pikeville, he had decided that once the chop-shop case was finished it would be time to shift gears and move aggressively into what he regarded as the big time: political corruption. Through the bureau grapevine, he had heard that the US Attorney’s office in Lexington was starting work on a major, top-secret investigation into interlocking networks of corrupt politicians, judges, and sheriffs in the region. A web of kickbacks, shakedowns, extortion—the essence of official corruption—lay like a drying fishnet over eastern Kentucky. Once the investigation got going, there was no telling where the trail would lead in a place like that.

  With uncanny prescience, Susan showed up in the office at primary election time carrying a bag of red, black, and white pills. She held them up to Mark’s face.

  “Where’d you get that stuff?” he asked anxiously.

  She named a politician who she said had given them to her in Freeburn, “to pass out for votes.”

  Thinking it incredible that anyone in her hometown would trust her enough to give her illegal drugs, Mark took the pills away and flushed them down the toilet. While he c
ouldn’t be sure where she’d got them, the last thing he wanted was to have a sack of drugs on hand. He knew by now that Susan’s stories only checked out about half the time.

  But the problem was, he never really could tell which half. One day that spring, Susan sauntered in with new information. She named two men who she said were planning to rob a bank in Phelps, a town on the way to Freeburn. Overwhelmed with work on the chop-shop case, worried about Charlie Trotter wavering as an informant, Mark didn’t want to encourage her. He knew that Susan felt neglected and had been crying on the phone to Kathy about how miserable her life was, especially with Kenneth on her back all the time about her work with the FBI. She was broke again and desperate to get back into action. But Charlie Trotter had also started crying on the phone about feeling abandoned. By this point, Mark didn’t have either the time or the energy to coddle Susan, a task he more and more often left to the far more patient and sympathetic Kathy.

  “Susan, how do you know they’re going to rob the bank?” he asked her doubtfully.

  She insisted that she had heard it directly from one of the would-be robbers himself. She identified the man as an uncle of Cat Eyes who lived near Freeburn.

  This sounded even more preposterous to Mark. “Susan, he knows you testified against Cat Eyes. Why would his uncle trust you?”

  “Well, he wants to get in my pants.”

  Everybody wants to get in her drawers, he thought dismissively. “Susan, I can’t believe this, that he would tell you something like that,” he said.

  She insisted it was true. She said she had driven the man to the bank herself to look it over. To prove to him that she was not working for the FBI anymore, she had even given him the gun that he planned to use in the robbery. She had teed the whole thing up.

  “No way,” Mark told Poole, who had been listening intently, when she left. He wrote up a standard note to the miscellaneous file summarizing what she had said, and promptly forgot about it.

  A week later, Mark went to FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, for a few days of work on a case involving a fugitive terrorist. He was in the office of the FBI Technical Services Division when an urgent phone call from Poole interrupted him.