Above Suspicion

by Sharkey, Joe;

  “Kenneth and Susan.”

  Mark grabbed the phone. “Kenneth, why don’t you just calm down. Get your shit together, Kenneth. There’s no point in raving over the phone, OK, Kenneth?”

  Kenneth suddenly hung up.

  When they got back into bed, Kathy said, “She’s so alone, Mark. I’m afraid he’s going to hurt her. Should we call the state police?”

  “Kathy, don’t do this! Go back to sleep. They’re always fighting. Susan should know better, Kathy. She instigates this. When it comes to Kenneth she says all the wrong things. Can you blame him for getting all pissed off?”

  Kathy’s anger flashed at her husband for his insensitivity in crudely blaming Susan. What kind of a cop are you, really? she thought. Fighting back tears, she stammered, “You can’t say that, Mark!”

  He turned his back to her in the bed. “Look, I’m not Susan’s babysitter. I’m tired of this shit and tired of the games Susan wants to play. I just can’t deal with her anymore.”

  They were silent for a full minute while she listened to him breathe.

  “Mark?” she said. “I thought she said she couldn’t have any more kids.”

  He exhaled heavily and leaned on an elbow to glower at her. “What are you talking about?”

  “She told me that when she had Brady there were complications. That she couldn’t have any more.”

  “She told me that too. What’s your point?”

  “She said on the phone that she was pregnant and lost it, and Kenneth said it was your baby. That’s why they were fighting.”

  Mark was silent.

  “Mark? Kenneth said it was your baby.”

  “Jesus Christ!” he said, exasperated. “Kathy, you should know by now that you can believe only about a tenth of what that girl says. It isn’t worth discussing. Leave it alone. Can we go back to sleep for the fucking hour that’s left before I have to get to work?”

  She did not sleep. For the first time, she felt doubt about her husband. She had already considered the possibility that Mark might have slept with Susan, but she dismissed it as ridiculous. Mark and Susan? So what if Susan said that she loved him. Lots of women found Mark attractive and some of them let him—and her—know it. She had asked him in the fall, point-blank, “You didn’t have sex with this woman, did you?” His reply had made her feel both foolish and slightly disloyal. “Of course not, Kathy. How well do you know me?” She didn’t see a need to ask him again. She knew him that well.

  Kathy had tried to contact Susan after that harrowing predawn phone call from Kenneth, but she didn’t answer the phone. When she did call back a week or so later, the happy Susan, brimming with self-assurance, was back. They talked of the weather and kids, but Kathy found it remarkable how little interest Susan expressed in Mark, to the point where Kathy herself brought her husband up.

  “I know Mark’s been out of touch,” she told Susan. “You wouldn’t believe how busy he’s been.”

  “Oh I know. He hardly ever even gets a chance to have dinner at home,” Susan said. “Poor baby.”

  That caught Kathy short. “You saw him?”

  “Oh, you know Mark!” Susan said but then flitted off to a new subject, her plans to go to the country-western bar on Route 23 that night to see the featured singer and owner, Marlow Tackett.

  “Marlow says he wants to audition me,” Susan said.

  Kathy shook her head as if to clear it. “For what?”

  “For my singing, ’course. He thinks I might have a recording career ahead.”

  “I didn’t know you sang, Susan. What do you sing?”

  “Well Marlow, he says that when I sing ‘Stand By Your Man,’ I do it even better’n Tammy Wynette does. Can you believe that? That’s such a mournful song, ain’t it, Kathy? If it’s done right, there ain’t a dried eye in the place.” In a thin off-pitch voice, Susan sang a line of that song into the phone, “Give him two arms to cling to . . .”

  In your dreams, Kathy thought, wondering what stimulant Susan was on this time. Actually, it was news to her that Susan even thought of herself as a singer. Clearly the girl could not sing. She dismissed that as another pitiful dream of a lost country girl. She was instead interested in what Susan had implied about seeing her husband, which she also doubted.

  “Listen, exactly when did you see Mark, Susan?” Kathy managed to ask as Susan prattled on.

  “Mark? I can’t say much because I’m working on an important case. You know how he is!”

  “Susan—”

  “Gotta go, Kathy dear. Guess who just pulled up out front!” The call ended.

  Shocked, Kathy immediately dialed the FBI office in downtown Pikeville. The call was picked up on the third ring.

  “FBI Pikeville, Special Agent Putnam,” Mark said.

  An early spring came to the Appalachians. The narrow streams in the hollows tumbled with runoff from the melted snow, and the wildflowers bloomed on scarred hills—but not on the mountain that loomed behind the Putnam house, where the runoff merely left muddy stripes that Kathy thought looked like great claw marks.

  After well over a year, the indictments in the chop-shop case had finally been handed up in February. Vernon Andrew Mullins, his nephew Charles Edward Tackett, his son, Michael, and four other Letcher County men had been charged with conspiracy to violate federal law by receiving, possessing, concealing, storing, and altering the identification numbers on stolen motor vehicles and equipment that had crossed interstate boundaries. They all pleaded not guilty.

  In early March, a detention hearing was held in the federal courthouse in Pikeville. Tom Self, the assistant United States attorney who would prosecute the case, asked that the men be held without bail and specified that Vernon and Charles Tackett presented a threat to the community.

  Almost frantically, with Poole whispering encouragement in phone calls that Mark still didn’t know about, Kathy began to pressure her husband to make his case for a transfer as quickly as possible. With less reluctance now than he would have had before the indictments were in place, but still uneasy because he believed that he was stretching the facts, Mark testified at the detention hearing that the defendants presented a danger to his family. He alluded to information from Charlie Trotter that some of the defendants had made veiled threats against him, his wife, and his children.

  “I do not feel safe,” he told federal magistrate Joe Hood. “I have a gut feeling that given the opportunity, some harm could come to myself or my family.”

  The judge allowed the men to go free on bail after warning them not to have any contact with Mark or his family.

  But the implied threat was enough for Hulse, who had become deeply sympathetic to the Putnams’ plight in Pike­ville. After the hearing Hulse sent a memo to his own supervisor in the Lexington office to request that Mark and his family be transferred. It was clear from what Hulse wrote that the situation had become severely tangled not only for the Putnams but also for the bureau itself. Hulse described Mullins as “a very arrogant individual,” previously convicted for other stolen-vehicles operations, who “has allegedly been paying off state and local law enforcement personnel to protect his operation over the past years.”

  Noting the threats that had been made to Mark, Hulse added in his message to the Lexington supervisors that Judge Hood had told the defendants in court “that they better pray to God that nothing happens to any potential witness” and specifically ordered them to stay away from the Putnams. Hulse said that Trotter had been working “both sides of the fence” and had told Mark that Mullins knew “where Putnam lives and what bedroom Mark and his wife sleep in, as well as his daughter.” Hulse said that Trotter had been threatening to take back information about payoffs of state and local cops and threats to the Putnams “unless we pay him more money.” Hulse noted, “We have paid the source approximately eleven thousand dollars over the past two years.”<
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  Moreover, Hulse pointed out, a Kentucky state police officer whom Mullins claimed to have paid off had potentially embarrassing information. Along with Trotter and Mullins, the dishonest cop was fully aware of the drug transaction with Kathy Putnam and the politician from Letcher County.

  Hulse added that a local newspaper had run an article on the hearing that mentioned the threats to Putnam, and that “the neighbors on Putnam’s street told them that they did not want their children at the Putnams’ house for fear of something happening to them.” Hulse said he had spoken with Mark and believed it to be “in his and his family’s best interest to move him as soon as reasonably possible. You and I have previously talked about a Miami transfer, but Putnam understands that he can go anywhere.”

  In a follow-up memo, explaining the requested transfer to the FBI director’s office in Washington, a supervisor in Louisville referred to Mark as a “highly motivated, dedicated, competent, and aggressive agent who has spent over the last two years in an area that borders on qualifying as a hardship assignment, and at best could be described as undesirable.”

  That memo argued that Pikeville “is recognized as an area of extensive criminal activity where individuals, groups, and entire families accept violence as a way of life, routinely carry firearms, and have little regard for law and order.” Because of that, the memo recommended “an agent with previous law-enforcement experience be selected” to replace Mark.

  The transfer orders arrived within days, and Kathy was stunned. It was over at last. It was the middle of April 1989. Springtime.

  She barely had time to pack. The bureau sent the movers in and ordered her and the children to leave, with Mark to follow in a few weeks. They were going to Miami! And this time, unlike when they had come to Pikeville from Connecticut, the bureau was even paying for the move. She and the children left Pikeville on March 25 when the moving van pulled away. Mark stayed behind to ready the house for sale and planned to join his family in a week at a temporary two-bedroom apartment in Fort Lauderdale that the bureau had arranged until the Putnams could sell their Pikeville house and Kathy could find a new one in Florida.

  8

  Mark vowed to keep a very low profile during that week alone in the house on Honeysuckle Lane. He avoided the office, stopping by only a few nights when the courthouse was more or less deserted. With Mark out of the way, Susan was exposed to the persistent attentions of Ron Poole, much to Poole’s satisfaction. And as an informant for Poole, Susan had some income, and she could at least work in rural areas farther from the knowing eyes around Freeburn. Poole relished having an attractive young woman at his side, which he believed helped his undercover operations, including the planned sting in Cicero, Illinois, his old turf.

  Mark had warned Poole not to underestimate Susan, and as Poole himself had discovered, sometimes she actually did deliver. If the drug operation in Cicero panned out, all the better. Even if it didn’t, it would be an adventure, with expense-account dinners in Chicago and ballgames at Wrigley Field, instead of Big Macs out on the Pikeville four-lane. After a year and a half in Pikeville, a break in the monotony would be welcome. And maneuvering Susan into a sexual relationship—one that she manifestly did not want but would probably eventually accept—would be the bonus.

  At the prospect of wooing Susan and taking their relationship from a working one to a romantic one, Poole felt not like a grossly overweight man approaching middle age, but more like a young college student. “There’s just something about that girl,” he told Mark in a phone call shortly after Mark arrived in Florida. Weary of Poole’s previous jealous needling about his own relationship with the infatuated Susan, Mark replied with encouragement, “Go for it buddy.”

  Susan’s agenda fit into Poole’s well enough. She was lonely, afraid, destitute, confused, and defiant. She had told Mark that she did not want to work with Poole, but her options were few. Poole at least offered protection, a status of sorts, and most importantly, income. She understood the game well enough to know that she needed to provide useable information to keep Poole happy. It was a delicate balance that she desperately needed to maintain. She couldn’t imagine kissing Poole, let alone sleeping with him. In her mind, she truly believed that if she could not handle Poole at any point, Mark would somehow arrive from Miami to set things right.

  Within weeks, Poole was calling Mark in Miami, complaining that Susan was difficult to handle and asking him to intervene. Reluctantly, he complied.

  “When I contacted her she started crying and told me that I was leaving her out in the cold,” Mark said. She told him that Sherri Justice had beaten her up. “I asked her what I could do to help and she said, ‘Fuck you. You don’t give a shit. You’re happy in Florida with your family and you don’t give a shit about me.’”

  Breaking drug cases was no easy task deep in the remote hills of southern Appalachia. The serious drug business was city-based. Marijuana was just a mountain-grown weed, a modest crop scarcely more subject to outside market forces than turnips. Cocaine was another matter, a complicated industry involving financing, manufacture, import, wholesale distribution, and retailing. Only the end of the process, small-time sales, had any appreciable base in a sparsely populated rural area; the Tug Valley was not exactly prime territory. And it had been a long time since Susan and Kenneth ran with the city crowd; most of their friends had forgotten her. Susan tried to rewire her connections. But in the urban drug business, perky little Susan Smith of Freeburn, Kentucky, wasn’t a top candidate for doing business with. Still, Susan and Poole were quite a sight, the sassy girl and the fat agent with the mangy hair whom Susan brazenly referred to as “Jethro,” behind his back.

  Susan was often tormented with the cold reality of Mark’s rejection, but just as often buoyed by the fantasies with which she measured her days, supported by whatever drugs she could obtain. Her sister, Shelby, had taken her in, and while she appreciated the sanctuary, she also had to live under Shelby’s watchful eye. One or two nights a week, saying that her children needed her, she drove across the river to stay with Kenneth. Usually, she slept on the couch. She and Kenneth fought constantly, and she always got the worst of it. But she always went back. With Kathy gone, Susan had no one to call who would at least listen.

  Living with Shelby and her husband, Troy, in Freeburn, the three formed a tense triangle in the little house alongside the Tug. Susan watched television incessantly, while guarding the telephone like a jilted teenager. Shelby was distressed that Susan’s favorite television program was now Miami Vice, the police drama about brave young cops fighting crime in a stylized subtropical Florida.

  Susan’s brothers were no happier with her. They had welcomed Mark’s departure as a way to erase the stigma, not to mention the peril, of having a government informant within the family. But now, laughing off their warnings, Susan was determined to make a go of it with Ron Poole, even if it meant, as Poole insisted it did, being seen with him in public.

  In late April, Poole picked Susan up in Freeburn, handed her a Wal-Mart bag, and told her he had a present. She pulled out a t-shirt and looked at it with a frown. On the front it said, “I HAVE A HILLBILLY BONE DEEP INSIDE.” Grinning stupidly, Poole told her, “Get your short-shorts ready. You and me are going to Hillbilly Days.” He then let out a rebel yell, spraying spittle her way.

  Susan definitely was not going to attend the Hillbilly Days in Pikeville wearing a tight vulgar t-shirt like some coalfield slut, nor would she put on a hillbilly clown costume the way the well-heeled town Shriners and lawyers and shopkeepers and their wives did. “Hillbilly” tourists were even starting to come to southern Appalachia for the commercial hillbilly experience, parading around town dressed like cartoons in celebration of what they liked to think of as their heritage. Susan may have dropped out of school after seventh grade, but she was smart and perceptive enough to resent this ridiculing of her kind, no matter how culturally affirmative it was s
aid to be, even if the hurtful words “white trash” were never uttered during the carnival festivities. So when Poole picked her up one midafternoon at their usual meeting spot in front of Bert Hatfield’s car lot by the river in Freeburn, she wore a knee-length blue cotton dress, with small earrings and her favorite necklace, a gold chain on which dangled a tiny cross.

  Poole was transfixed. “You sure do clean up purty,” he said, clumsy as usual, but she smiled despite herself.

  Susan did not even think of herself as a hillbilly except during Hillbilly Days, when it was made so clear that she and her people were exactly that. On Saturday afternoon was the hillbilly parade, in which participants, with the occasional front tooth blackened with greasepaint, wear big, comic straw hats and bib overalls and behave the way hillbillies are thought to behave. Hooting and hollering, they parade through town in “hillbilly mobiles,” cars tricked out as jalopies, pickup trucks with rickety faux outhouses wobbling in the back, all festooned with signs, washboards, and other claptrap. Meanwhile, the real mountain people like Susan would come into town to ride the Ferris wheel on Courthouse Square and take in the sights.

  There was a murmur of curiosity as Poole, sweating profusely in a yellowed golf shirt, his great belly hanging over his belt like a mudslide waiting to happen, threaded his way through a crowd with a pretty girl in a blue dress in tow. Poole kept reaching for Susan’s hand, which she moved away from his sweaty grip as politely as she could. He gallantly held her back with his arm as a line of men in a footrace chugged by, part of the “Cornhole Tournament” of carnival-like sporting events held during three days of festivities.

  He had a greasy pork barbeque sandwich in one hand as his other reached again for hers. “You ever cornholed, sweetheart?” he asked leeringly.

  “Excuse me? I’m trying to listen,” she replied with some annoyance, straining on tiptoe to watch a bluegrass, country-western band on a brightly lit stage near the Ferris wheel ticket booth. She swayed gently to the song. It was “Blue Kentucky Girl,” a plaintive country ballad of yearning and love lost to the lure of the big city.