As the song ended she felt Poole’s hand creep down from her waist to pat her ass. Her eyes rimmed with bitter tears.
“Whiney hillbilly shit,” Poole said into her ear as she moved free.
Around 11:00 p.m., he brought her back across the mountains to the ramshackle jumble of Freeburn, where she was staying with Shelby and Troy. In the gloom of reality, she slipped into bed and retreated into the fantasies that had begun to sustain her.
Had her romance been no more than five or six tumbles in a car on a strip-mine road with a good-looking man having troubles at home? No! She persuaded herself. She and Mark had been lovers for two long years, despite the obstacles that kept them apart. Why, he had even brought her to his house, where they fucked like teenagers while his wife was away. It was only a matter of time until they would be together; even now, he was down in Miami making the arrangements to leave his wife and marry her! As she elaborated on it in her mind, Susan also shared this fantasy with anyone who would listen.
What’s more, she was pregnant with his child, she told people. Why, they even had names for the baby she carried: Mark, if it was a boy, and Markella for a girl. It did not seem to matter, and no one really had the heart to point out, that Mark already had a namesake. In Florida, it would all work out. It might be complicated, though, given her activities as an undercover informant on major drug cases. Susan even suggested to a few people that they should not worry if she disappeared without a trace. That was how the federal witness protection program worked, after all.
Just how embroidered her tales were not even those who knew her well could say. Among her vivid repertoire of stories of her glamorous life as an informant was one that would later be repeated as gospel by some, about Mark Putnam’s parrot. A woman who had known Susan for many years in Freeburn remembered the story clearly years later because she had never heard of such a thing in Pike County.
“A parrot? What’s he doing with a parrot?” the woman asked when Susan told her about it.
“He keeps it in his house, of course. It’s in a big old cage in the living room, but sometimes he lets it set on his shoulder like a pirate.”
“Does it talk?”
Susan rolled her big brown eyes. “Oh, it don’t ever shut up! In fact, I was afraid that stupid parrot was going to get us in terrible trouble back when I was living with him, when his wife was up in Connecticut that time? One morning, a deliveryman come to the door and I had to scrunch down behind the couch so he wouldn’t see me in there. I thought that parrot was going to give me away. But all it said was, ‘Hello! Hello!’” Susan said, “And do you know what that rascal parrot calls Mark?”
“What?”
“G-Man! It says, hello G-Man!”
Susan laughed and laughed, savoring the tale, firmly fixed in her mind. In reality, however, little Danielle had a pet parakeet, which Kathy had casually mentioned to Susan once in a phone call. The parakeet had metamorphosed into a radiant creature with feathers as red as the stripes on the flag, as blue as the sky in Florida.
Susan told her stories at a beauty shop on the road beside the river in Freeburn not far from the foot of the Barrenshee. Being in a house, the beauty shop offered the informality and camaraderie of a coffee klatch. Many of the customers had known Susan all her life, and overlooked the odd stilted enunciation she had developed to disguise her hillbilly twang as she chattered on about the life she imagined for herself far from the Tug Valley. It did not matter that she had gone away before and come home desperate. Dreams required no plans; they happened haphazardly, like everything else she had ever known in life. All she had to do was be there and hope for the best.
Susan did not know that the older women eventually came to look at her with pity. Once, her girlish chatter and brassy boasts had been amusing, but now she seemed shrill, desperate, and somehow past her prime. Now she insisted on not just attention but deference, which was something a girl from the head of a holler was not about to get in Freeburn, not with that act.
The women talked among themselves about how different she had become with her children, on whom she once doted, seven-year-old Miranda especially. Now they got slaps across the face for interrupting, and they had learned to wait for her silently in the beauty parlor, their eyes watchful.
Susan talked of going to Florida, but instead she went to Kenneth, and that was inevitable, too. “All that boy ever has to do is promise that he is going to straighten out, and Susie gets down and kisses the ground in front of him,” one woman said. She had been a teenager when Susan was a little girl and had once thought that Susan’s irrepressible nature would let her beat the odds. As she watched Susan in the beauty shop, she was saddened to see the pallor under Susan’s tanning-parlor bronze, the dark puffy half-circles under her eyes, the tight lines at the corners of her mouth. She tried to remember the sassy little girl in a white cotton dress, skipping along the road beside the Tug as if she always had someplace to go. What had happened to that child? As if alerted, Susan turned and met the woman’s distracted gaze defiantly before resuming her monologue about being a “bonded informant” on a mission for the FBI.
“It’s a top-secret operation,” Susan said, addressing the room at large.
“If it’s top secret, Susie, you probably shouldn’t be talking so much about it,” someone suggested gently.
“Shoot. It don’t matter. It don’t have nothing to do with this place,” Susan replied, shifting her eyes to the window and the shabby old hamlet outside. “Besides, I’m fully protected. Nobody dares do nothing to me. I could even be placed in the federal Witness Protection Program under a new identity.”
When she left, they talked about her, not unkindly, but with general sadness. “That must be some protection,” one of them said. “My husband saw the poor thing sleeping in her car the other night.”
“Susan was leaving messages on the answering machine,” Kathy recalled in their new home in Florida. “In one of them she said she was pregnant. Mark told me she was crazy, and I assumed as usual that that was just Susan being Susan.”
Early in May, Susan filed charges with the police against her ex-husband. She said that in one of his rages, Kenneth had tied her up and dragged her through the house in West Virginia. He had accused her of being an informant and betraying her own people, she said. From his car outside Shelby’s house, he had shouted that she was a whore, and when she got in to settle him down, he drove off, shoving her out the door a few blocks away. She said he threatened to shoot her.
Kenneth retaliated by reporting her to the West Virginia welfare office for receiving benefits from two states. As a result she lost her West Virginia check and was left with the $249 a month from Kentucky. Meanwhile, Susan was finding it difficult to score cocaine and pills just when she needed them most. Since she had announced all over the valley that she was on a top-secret undercover drug mission for the FBI all of her local sources had dried up. Desperate for cash and drugs, she turned to Pikeville.
Almost every Thursday night she took a room in a motel at the crest of a hill behind a strip mall on the four-lane north out of Pikeville, not far down the highway from Marlow’s, the country-western bar where she had once dreamed about the singer who would take her away to Nashville. A clerk who worked nights at the motel would later recall that Susan Smith was working as a prostitute.
“She was annoying, demanding, and arrogant and expected to be treated like a queen,” the woman said. “She had this attitude that, no matter what she did, she was untouchable. It was obvious what she was doing—she was always with a different man. You’d be surprised at what goes on in this small town.”
Adrift, frightened, strung out on whatever cocaine and amphetamines she could scrounge, Susan saw danger everywhere she looked. Here fantasy collided with paranoia and reality; but to those who knew her, there was a sense that Susan was coming perilously close to the end of the line.
A
gain, there was public trouble. In the middle of May, Susan ran into Sherri Justice, Cat Eyes Lockhart’s girlfriend, who threatened to kill her and commenced to beat her up. Kenneth, Susan’s brother Tennis, and Tennis’s girlfriend witnessed this thrashing.
Confused and battered, Susan now turned with more desperation to Poole, the FBI man who was still in her life, who encouraged her to focus the blame for her problems on the FBI man who had walked out of it, Mark Putnam.
In April, in a telephone call to Mark in Fort Lauderdale, Susan told him that she was pregnant and asked what he intended to do about it. Stunned, Mark asked her if she was sure. She said she was. He was due to come back to Pikeville to finish up work on the chop-shop trial. They would talk then, he promised.
The call from Susan shattered any illusions he had about leaving Pikeville behind. He had convinced himself that the affair with Susan, disturbing as it was to his notion of himself, was a mistake that he had gotten away with. All he could do, he decided, was keep the trouble to himself and find a way to work it out, alone.
Mark was actually scheduled for two trips back to Pikeville for pretrial hearings on the chop-shop case. During the first, a stay of only a few days, he managed to avoid seeing Susan, who didn’t find out he had been back in Kentucky until after he left. When he went back to Florida, Mark concealed his despair. Kathy, annoyed that Susan was still calling, but unaware of why, thought that in time, once the trial was over and they were settled into a new home, he would cut his ties.
Shelby had been pressing her sister to confront Mark about the pregnancy, but Susan had been afraid. After she found out that he had come to town and gone, Susan lied to Shelby, saying that she had seen him. They’d argued and he had tried to push her out of a car, just as Kenneth had done, she told Shelby.
The next time Mark was scheduled to return to Pikeville, this time for a few weeks of work, Ron Poole made sure that Susan was forewarned. He telephoned her at Shelby’s house and told her that Mark was due in on June 5. Shelby would later tell investigators that she was relieved that her sister would finally have the opportunity to confront Mark about the baby.
On Tuesday, May 30, Susan went to the public health center in Pikeville to have a pregnancy test and get a report confirming it. She explained to the physician that she needed the confirmation to apply for state welfare benefits, although in fact she was already receiving them. Based on what she said, the doctor who interviewed her gave her an estimated due date of November 19—indicating that the date of conception had been near the end of February. The doctor also noted that Susan had had a miscarriage and a D&C on January 2.
Susan took the report to Poole, who made a photocopy of it. That weekend, Susan visited her children at Kenneth’s place. It was the last time they would see her.
On June 4, Mark Putnam, full of dread, boarded a flight in Fort Lauderdale. The chop-shop investigation that had consumed him for eighteen months, and on which he had staked his personal reputation, was nearly ready for trial, and the US Attorney prosecuting the case had conveyed his nervousness to Mark. And waiting for him in Pikeville was a woman threatening to expose him as a fraud and an adulterer. He had no idea how he would control the damage.
On the plane, looking out across the vast dark mat of the Everglades he wondered how he had blown it all so easily and with so little thought to the consequences. He shut his eyes and considered how he had disgraced himself, his family, and his badge, perhaps that most of all.
Years later, he would describe what went through his mind on that flight: “Kathy and I were finally in an environment where we could thrive, in Florida. And I threw it away. What did I swear to? Fidelity, bravery, integrity, character beyond reproach—the things that got me into the bureau. As soon as I had the affair, I knew I wasn’t equal to my peers, even if some of them were up to their own things. I wasn’t upholding my own standards. Yes, I put a lot of pressure on myself. I had to be the best person I could be. And I failed. In Florida, I was in a new competitive environment now with three hundred smart agents, and I knew they’d see that I was a flash in the pan. The only way I got into the bureau in the first place was pure audacity—and a wife who fought for me. I sure did find a nice way to thank her for that.”
In gusts of memory, he denigrated his accomplishments. Soccer star, baseball journeyman, good student working hard to keep up his grades, loyal husband, and devoted father—all now seemed to be thin veneer on cheap wood. He’d always feared his father’s disdain, and now he knew why. He wasn’t good enough, not then, not now, and the truth was about to come out.
As the airplane leveled out at cruising speed over the Florida panhandle, his mind wandered back to his freshman year in high school, when he was hopelessly in love with a pretty girl. There was a dance at the school; she led him outside on a warm spring night, much like this one, to join some friends who had a private party going near the track—booze and marijuana, people acting sloppy. In a panic, he fled, leaving the gorgeous new girlfriend behind with a can of beer in her hand. He literally ran the three miles home.
In high school, in college, and later in marriage and parenthood, those closest to him knew that Mark Putnam insisted on having an unsullied record. He had to keep it that way, without ever asking the question, Who says?
A man who couldn’t tolerate small failings in himself was staggered by a big one. How could he possibly explain it when they came to him with the proof? With a female informant, he had compromised the bureau. There would be a scandal. Was resigning the only way? Could he simply tell the bureau, “Look, guys, I screwed this up. I’m sorry. Give me my punishment. I won’t mess up again. But there is nothing you can do to me that would be worse than what I have done to myself. Let me work it out. I promise you I will suffer”? No, he could not.
He did not consider discussing this problem with the person who knew him best and loved him unconditionally, his wife. He was in a terrible jam, but he would face it, and somehow overcome it, alone. Having never, ever, been in trouble before, Mark Putnam simply did not know how to ask for help.
In Huntington, West Virginia, which has the closest commercial airport to Pikeville, a hundred miles away through the mountains, he rented a Ford Tempo, in the standard bureau economy class, and told the clerk that he expected to keep it for about three weeks. It was a long and tedious two-hour trip south through the hills to Pikeville, on a road that narrows to two lanes as it climbs and plunges, with a constant barrage of coal trucks barreling north out of the hills toward the docks on the Ohio River.
As Mark drove gloomily south, Ron Poole hurried out to Freeburn to meet Susan at the post office across the road from Shelby’s house. He had already arranged a room for her at the Landmark, which he guaranteed with his American Express card. Another person was already at the motel on the FBI’s tab. Charlie Trotter, the nervous star witness in the chop-shop case, had been salted away there for weeks, to keep him out of trouble. Mark knew he was going to see Charlie at the Landmark. Susan would be a surprise.
After a restless night, Mark walked into the FBI office in downtown Pikeville and found Ron Poole on the phone.
“Hey, guess who’s here!” Poole boomed into the phone. Mark’s heart sank. Winking, Poole handed over the receiver as if he were doing Mark a favor.
Susan’s voice had a brittle edge. “We are going to get together, aren’t we?”
Mark tried to keep his voice down, though he could see that Poole was listening. “Susan, I’ll be here for at least three weeks. We’ll hook up, I promise you.”
“It’d better be soon, goddammit. I’m sick of this. You fucked me over.”
The hostility and crudity surprised him. Susan had always tried to be civil and “proper” in front of Mark, even when she was in a fury about something. That pretense was apparently gone. Watching Poole, who was feigning interest in a file, Mark wondered just what had been going on between the two of them, but he did
n’t want to get into it any further with her, not now.
“Yes,” he said patiently. “We’ll talk, Susan.”
Poole tossed him a suggestive smile when he hung up and said, “Hey, buddy, look there on the desk, would you? Hand me that piece of yellow paper there?”
Mark picked up the document, which lay next to a pamphlet about prenatal care. It was dated May 30; on the top was Susan’s childish signature, and at the bottom, that of a technician at the Pike County Health Center. It read, in part:
I fully understand that if the pregnancy test reading is NEGATIVE, it does not necessarily mean than I am not pregnant. . . . I also fully understand that if the pregnancy test reading is POSITIVE, this does not necessarily mean that I am pregnant. False positive readings can occur for such reasons as misinterpretation of results, undiagnosed medical problems (Aldomet, marijuana, methadone, aspirin in large doses, phenothirazine, antidepressants, antiparkinsonian, and anticonvulsants). . . . I have been informed that in order to lessen the chance of serious problems it is my responsibility to have the test results confirmed by a physician before considering myself pregnant or nonpregnant.
At the bottom was the notation: TEST RESULTS POSITIVE.
Mark felt sick. He glared at his ex-partner. Why was Poole involved in this? How many other people had he shown the report to? Clearly, this problem was already out of control. She was pregnant, the report seemed to confirm. And he was the father, she said. That certainly seemed plausible. The sex they had in the car had been hasty and impulsive. On those occasions, he hadn’t thought ahead to carry a condom, and he had no idea whether she was on birth control. And if Susan had been sleeping with another man during the short time they had been involved, he knew she would have bragged about it to taunt him. No, Susan was faithful, in her way. If there was a baby, he felt he was very likely the father.
Above Suspicion Page 15
