Above Suspicion

by Sharkey, Joe;

  Huggins listened politely but he was thinking, what kind of an unholy mess is this going to turn out to be?

  Not having Ray on hand was a major disappointment. Kathy had wanted the Kentucky cops there when she said her piece. Yearning to comfort her, Huggins heard himself giving assurance to Kathy’s obvious belief that the investigation was routine, a technicality perhaps muddled by police ham-handedness. He did not let her see his own misgivings about the previous day’s questioning of her husband.

  “I understand why you’re angry,” Huggins said. “Look, all I can do is explain to you what the FBI is doing. We are officially involved now in the investigation, and we’re going to see to it that this thing is taken care of once and for all. There are questions that need to be answered—you know as well as I do the kinds of allegations that are flying around in Pikeville. Well, now the big guys are involved.” He smiled. “The bureau is on the case, and we’re going to get to the bottom of it, no fooling around now. Everything’s going to be fine once the air is cleared.”

  Kathy relaxed a bit, satisfied that she had at least staked out a defense of Mark’s honor. She figured the investigation would get the questions answered—Mark would take a few lumps, of course. He had been sloppy with informants such as Susan, who should have been closed out long before she disappeared. But it wasn’t Mark’s fault the FBI had let that office get out of control, and besides, Mark had plenty of credit in the bank. Wasn’t he one of the bureau’s fair-haired boys? Police work was never neat. You got kicked in the teeth at times; he’d recover. And besides, Kathy wasn’t about to let her husband take the heat alone—she remained determined to make the bureau confront and concede its own culpability in sending a rookie agent to a hellhole like Pikeville with all of sixteen weeks’ training, including a two-hour class in working with informants. With no supervision. And then compounding the error by stashing a manipulative fuck-knuckle like Poole there? Dick Tracy would have had a hard time under such circumstances.

  “Mr. Huggins,” she said calmly, “it’s no secret that we went through a terrible ordeal. I don’t know how far you’ve looked into what was going on in Pikeville, but they’ve used me and Mark. My family was almost destroyed because of what happened down there. As I said, I don’t understand when Mark’s name was thrown out initially why the FBI wasn’t all over this thing.” This time there actually were tears in her eyes as she pressed on. “Where were you? Nearly a year has gone by since Susan supposedly disappeared and all of this talk started. Mark is distraught over this thing. When he came home last night, I’ve never seen him like that. And it’s his own people doing this now. We left Pikeville behind, but it keeps coming back to haunt us. And Mark’s own former partner Poole is up there taking part in the whispering campaign. That has to stop!”

  “Kathy, I hear what you’re saying. Mark is one of the finest young agents in the bureau. That’s why we’re involved now. Why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind?” Huggins took out a yellow legal pad.

  She obliged, launching into an indictment that she had mentally prepared for months, honed the night before, and rehearsed on the drive down from Fort Lauderdale. Right off, she threw in the person she held almost as responsible for Mark’s difficulties as Susan was.

  “As far as Mr. Poole is concerned, I have absolutely no respect for that man. He’s got no business carrying a badge. If you want to talk to somebody who’s had a relationship with Susan, don’t forget Poole. From what Susan told me, Poole spent an awful lot of time trying to get her to go to bed with him.”

  “Poole,” Huggins grunted, scribbling some notes, realizing that this could get complicated. One by one, Kathy spelled out her grievances about the Pikeville office, impressing him with her command of details about FBI business in an operation that had clearly gone badly out of control. Informants tripping over each other and making secret, often conflicting deals. Crossed signals. Huggins’s pencil worked furiously to keep up. He hadn’t known about the abortive drug sting; he’d never heard of an agent’s wife being encouraged to risk her neck like that. That alone was very, very irregular. And then, Kathy’s allegation that Mark’s partner leaked it to an informant? For a man like Huggins, who took great pride in the professionalism of the FBI, what Kathy told him was gravely disturbing.

  Clearly, Mark Putnam was not the only one who needed to come up with some answers. And whatever happened with him, there would still be the fury of Kathy Putnam to contend with. This was not a woman who stayed in the background. And while he realized that Kathy was projecting some of her anger and frustration onto Mark’s former partner, she was also prepared to hold forth in detail on matters that would add complications that this investigation, highly touchy to begin with, that he did not need right now. Especially if she went public.

  When she wound down, Huggins sat back and exhaled loudly. “I can’t believe what went on down there,” he said, then asked, “You don’t think Poole killed her, do you?”

  “No,” Kathy replied, sitting back and smoothing her skirt over her knees. The fact was she didn’t even believe Susan was dead. Had Huggins invited her to make a guess, she would have guessed the same thing the authorities in Pikeville had assumed, that Susan was hiding out somewhere, lying low because she had shot off her big mouth once too often and someone was threatening to shut it up permanently. That was Susan.

  Huggins cleared his throat and thanked her for coming. “We’re going to see to it that we check all these things out, and that this is resolved as quickly as possible.”

  That sounded vague but promising to Kathy, who drove home with a degree of satisfaction that she had at least laid out the outlines of the Pikeville problem, had given them enough information to investigate properly, make their report, and let Mark get on with his career and them with their lives. So confident was she that things were moving along in the proper direction that she welcomed Huggins’s seemingly offhand suggestion, delivered as she was leaving, that Mark might want to take a polygraph test, just for the record. Mark had been ridiculously eager to cooperate anyway. “Oh,” she had said with an airy goodbye wave, “he’ll have no problem with that.”

  She was glad to find Mark at home out back watching Danielle and little Mark splashing in the inflated wading pool. She could tell he was nervous by the tentative way he asked her how it went at the FBI office.

  “Everything’s going to be fine,” she assured him. “You’ve got to relax. I gave them enough information to clear this thing up. If anybody has anything to worry about now, it’s Poole.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” he ventured uneasily.

  She wished he would just let her handle it. “Mark, you don’t realize the kinds of thing an investigation like this can uncover.” Hardly incidental to her concern was a desire that Mark not realize the extent to which she had confided in Poole during the winter about getting them transferred out of Pikeville.

  Yet Mark remained as apprehensive as he had been the night before. “Well, I’m going to get dressed and go to the office.” He kissed the kids and turned to go in the house. “I just want you to know how much I appreciate your going to bat for me.”

  “We’re in this together.”

  He didn’t say so, but Mark knew that was absolutely no longer true.

  After Kathy left and while they waited for Mark to arrive for more questioning, Huggins called Capt. Gary Rose back at the state police barracks in Pikeville. “We interviewed Mark for about seven hours yesterday and I think we’ve got some problems that we’re going to have to run through.” He also mentioned Kathy’s anger at Richard Ray.

  At noon, Mark entered the office where Huggins and Gavin were waiting. His feet felt as if iron blocks were attached to them. He was acutely aware that his lengthy twenty-five-page signed statement from the previous day, which had already been typed up, was full of holes.

  Gavin told him as he stood there, “We’ve been re
ading your statement and in talking to Jim here, there’s a few things we’d like to ask you.” Gavin asked Mark to sit in a chair and demonstrate how he could have managed to kick a car windshield to crack it. Mark tried half-heartedly, and dropped his head.

  “Just checking, man,” Gavin said sadly.

  Huggins said, “Well, Mark, you know you’re the only one here who knows the truth. You said you would be willing to take a polygraph.”

  “Absolutely, Jim. Let’s get this over with.”

  Very quickly, it was set up with headquarters for Mark and Huggins to fly to Washington that night, and for Mark to be polygraphed the next morning.

  Mark went home early to pack. After much wavering in his mind, he was now certain that they didn’t have a body. No one had found Susan. No one could prove that she was dead. But again, he had to think, She has been out there for a year. Wasn’t it time to bring her in?

  Now he was measuring his time in hours. Would there be one more night with the kids? He did not know. He did know that very soon, it would be out of his hands.

  Kathy had hoped to see a glint of optimism in her husband’s eyes, but he looked worse than ever. With more resignation than she thought appropriate, Mark told her that he had decided he had to take the polygraph, though Huggins and Tubergen had assured him it was strictly voluntary. To get it over with, he was planning to fly to Washington that night. The test was the next morning. She watched him stuffing underwear in an overnight bag.

  “Do you want to do this?” she asked, frowning at his mechanical motions.

  “It’s to clear my name,” he said without much conviction, turning to her with a look of helplessness. “Do you think I should or not?”

  Kathy took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. To her, the important thing was to get this behind them. After thinking for a moment, she accepted his decision. “I guess it makes sense for you to take the polygraph and straighten this out. Calm down. You’re making this into a bigger problem than it has to be. This is going to work itself out. How could it not work itself out? I don’t understand why you’re so upset.”

  “You’re right.” He seemed to brighten.

  Kathy made an early dinner. Mark didn’t eat much, and he barely noticed the kids at the table. Before he left for his flight, he went through his usual ritual of reading the kids their bedtime story. Kathy lingered in the hall and looked at the three of them on the bed, a tableau of familial trust, fatherly love, childlike devotion, framed in the doorway of Danielle’s room. Kathy unconsciously hung it like a photograph in her mind. Then she went out back to smoke and think.

  Her afternoon courage faded with the daylight; with a sick feeling, she considered what she should have realized a long time ago, the likelihood that her husband had had an affair with Susan. Nothing else that she knew of could explain his prolonged agitation, and what she now recognized as his abiding guilt. She despised the thought, threw it against the wall of reason, but it bounced back. He had. The son of a bitch had.

  If that was true, agreeing to the polygraph was a mistake. When he came out to say good-bye, she said, “Look, Mark, something’s obviously wrong.” She was thinking fast, trying to review the options realistically through her growing pain. “Whatever it is, you’ve got to know by now, with everything we’ve been through together, that we’ll work it out. If there’s something you have to tell me about, about you and Susan, or whatever, tell me now before you go and do this thing tomorrow. If there’s something that you’re hiding when you take this polygraph, it’s just going to make you look guilty. Whatever it is, you can tell me. Tell me what it is now and we can get through this, Mark. If we got through Pikeville together, we can get through this.” Desperately, she wanted an admission before he left her alone in the night with her thoughts.

  He didn’t comply. “Well, what would you think if I had?”

  She didn’t want to say, “Had what?” Instead, she tried to hurtle forward in time, forgive him, and start the healing. “Mark, we’ll work it out. If something happened between you and her, we’ll deal with it. There isn’t anything you can’t tell me—”

  “What if I had—”

  “—nothing, Mark,” she repeated, fighting tears as the truth displayed itself.

  “I want you to understand something. I have to take the polygraph tomorrow. I have to do it. And then I’ll tell you everything. You’ll understand.”

  And then he left for the airport.

  Huggins met him at the Fort Lauderdale airport and they sat together on the plane for the two-hour flight to Washington. Huggins kept the conversation off the obvious matter at hand. Instead they talked about the weather and the University of Kentucky basketball team. Huggins wanted to ask about Kathy and the kids, how they liked South Florida, but he thought the better of that. Instead, he reached into the seatback pocket for the inflight magazine. Mark pretended to read a copy of Sports Illustrated, trying to shut everything else out, including Huggins’s obvious discomfort.

  It was late when they got in to Washington National Airport. Mark remembered arriving there in 1986, a new agent in training, on top of the world. On their way to Quantico, the thirty-five rookies in the FBI class checked each other out for what they could spot: attitudes, guts, brains, physique. Looking for the edge. Hoping they’d make it. Wondering who among them would not.

  At the same airport on a Thanksgiving weekend, on a three-day leave from the academy, he was met by Kathy and two-year-old Danielle, all dressed up. They stayed at the Crystal City Marriott and visited the monuments with the happy tenacity of Japanese tourists. Would the baby remember the sense of proprietorship her old man felt when he showed her the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, the White House? Would she ever think of her father as a federal agent, in this city, that wonderful time, the three of them in love?

  He and Huggins took a cab to their hotel. Huggins went his own way. Mark put his things in his room and went back out to wander the empty streets of the capital. The walking gave him the boost of energy he needed. He was still an agent of the government he swore to protect. A damned fine agent, one of the goddamned best. Hardworking, focused, a self-starter, a guy you only had to ask once. He wasn’t the smartest or the best educated or the craftiest. He was naïve. But he was ethical and honest, and he would match his dedication against anybody’s. Briefly, he savored that.

  He thought of getting rip-roaring drunk, but quickly ruled that out. He walked for hours. God, he had wanted to belong. This is where he belonged, in this meticulously dignified capital with its monuments like alabaster tablets forced on the sky by floodlight.

  He turned back to the hotel. As he walked, he spoke to her. “Well, Susan, my time is up. I don’t know how you’re feeling about this, but it’s time to get this thing squared away. It’s time to bring you home.”

  He went to bed feeling at peace.

  In Florida, his wife found no peace that night, nor any other night that followed. Kathy went to bed crippled with doubt. Okay, she thought. He did it. Yes, the bastard slept with Susan! She cringed to recall how pathetic she had found Susan at the time. She closed her eyes and thought hard, as if to summon the unknowable: When and how did they do it? Where did they do it? How did they keep it from her? They. They.

  Susan blabbed about everything—how could she have kept her mouth shut about such a coup as sleeping with Mark? For that alone, Kathy hated her, for mocking her so effortlessly.

  But her imagination recoiled. No, she decided abruptly, it was not true. Mark never lied to her. It had never happened. Oh, it almost happened, probably, but it never got that far. He had better sense than that. Her heart flooded with love and gratitude for the loyalty her husband had shown, at a time when their marriage was strained; she cherished him for the guilt he must have felt, at what he almost did to her—and to Danielle, his sweetheart, to dapper little Mark . . .

  She kicked off the covers and l
ay there, wide-awake, her thoughts spinning. Nothing stayed in place long enough to make sense. She steadied her impressions, fixed on them one at a time, ran down a mental checklist. The hazard lights were flashing. Come on, she told herself brutally. There was something seriously wrong with Mark’s demeanor and behavior, and there had been all year. She could see it now. A man who was never sick suddenly always complaining about diarrhea. That scratching at his chest to the point where he had to go to the doctor to get medicine for the rash. Mr. Easygoing, now so distracted he couldn’t brush his teeth without moaning. What the hell was wrong with him?

  And that rental car! The cracked windshield, his bandaged hand. Why had he lied about it? Why had he gone to so much trouble to bring it up when she had pretty much forgotten about it, would never have given it another thought? She could see his boyish face, lying as brazenly and haplessly as a child. And Susan throwing her head back with that shrill laugh. How foolish she must have sounded to her: Susan, you are an intelligent, attractive, and worthwhile woman. Mark is not the only man in the world. You can have what I have, Susan. Don’t sell yourself short. Susan! Susan always looked for the easy way. Susan was a thief. She took what she wanted when she knew she could get away with it. Of course she took Mark. Of course she did! Only an idiot wouldn’t see that!

  She burrowed into the covers feeling desperately alone. You can have what I have, Susan. You have to set goals and work toward them. How delicious that must have seemed to her lying in Mark’s arms, against his body. And she had; Kathy now knew it as surely as she knew her children’s names. Susan had slept with her husband.

  Dammit, she was closer to Susan than Mark was! Susan was her friend! She’d been the one to teach that trailer-trash hillbilly how to behave like a lady! She knew all of Susan’s tricks, all of her brittle fears, her inadequacies, and futile, ridiculous ambitions. Susan was pretty, if you liked the Daisy Mae type, but she was dumb as a doorknob. Kathy and Mark used to make cruel jokes about her. For a fleeting, righteous instant, Kathy resented her husband deeply for the contempt he had shown Susan, her friend and admirer. Hadn’t Susan even started dressing like her, talking like her, for God’s sake? Hadn’t she begun to say you, not y’all? Susan had told her she loved Mark, that Mark was “gorgeous.” Kathy merely shrugged that off.