Above Suspicion

by Sharkey, Joe;

  Not knowing exactly what to do, she dressed quickly and walked down the hallway to Danielle’s bedroom, where the sight of Chris, asleep in the spare bed, vaguely irritated her. How could you be sleeping at a time like this? she thought, shaking her sister until her eyes were open. “Wake up! I need you!”

  “What in the world is wrong?” Chris asked sleepily. Kathy was put out, as if Chris should somehow know that a calamity had occurred. “I can’t believe he did that!”

  “Did what, for God’s sake?”

  “Mark killed that woman!” Kathy hissed like a madwoman.

  Chris, fully awake now, gasped, “What woman?”

  Kathy began to cry with frustration, sensing that this was only the start of the pestilence of explaining that lay ahead of her. “The one in Kentucky!”

  Chris’s own police instincts snapped into place. Full explanations could come later. “Should I get you and the kids out of here?”

  “What for? No! He’s fine!” Kathy sobbed, afraid of awakening Danielle, who slept on with her face turned to the wall.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  Kathy threw her hands up. “Leave me alone!” she said in a shrill whisper, and stormed into the bathroom, where she mechanically brushed her teeth. Absently, she fumbled in the medicine chest for her makeup and dabbed it at her face.

  There was no protocol for starting such a day. The closest parallel was a sudden death in the family, but Kathy had not even had any adult experience with that—she was only thirty years old; her own parents were relatively young; even three of their parents were still alive. She found herself in the kitchen, staring in bafflement at the wall phone in her hand. She put it to her ear and heard it ringing at the other end.

  Her father answered huskily. Why him? she thought furiously; why couldn’t she have picked it up? Her voice quavering, she managed to say, “It’s Kathy. It’s serious. I need you guys to come down here right away,” but that was, all she could get out. Sensing Mark’s presence behind her, she slammed the receiver down on the breakfast counter.

  “I’ll handle it,” Mark said, rushing back upstairs. Wordlessly, she put the phone to her ear, listening to her father’s labored breathing. When Mark picked up the extension in the bedroom, she heard her husband say, “Ray, it’s Mark. There’s something I have to talk to you about . . .” With a trembling index finger, she pressed the button down and placed the phone into the cradle.

  By now it was after six; little Mark had wandered into the bedroom, waking Danielle. Chris took charge of the kids and didn’t ask questions. Once she had decided that no one was in any danger, she figured the best she could do was to keep the kids occupied and not worry about clarifications until Kathy and Mark sorted out whatever had occurred. She made a deliberate decision not even to speculate, beyond supposing that an accident of some kind had happened involving Mark and someone else when he was in Kentucky. She was vaguely aware of the problems they had experienced in Pikeville, especially of Kathy’s misery there just before they left. She had heard something, during the time she had been living with them in Florida, about an informant being missing. But she figured these were just normal headaches of FBI life.

  When she brought the kids down for breakfast, Chris spotted Mark on the couch watching her with a stricken and questioning look. She ventured a cheerful but shaky, “Good morning.”

  “Hey,” he said very softly, forcing a smile. “How’s it going, Chris?”

  During the six years she had known him, Chris had come to respect her brother-in-law for his equanimity and his steady good sense. She thought, without any question, that Mark was the best thing that had ever happened to Kathy. The months she had spent living with them had only reinforced that assessment. If Mark was in control, how bad could it be? She had never even heard the man raise his voice. Kathy, the volatile one, was out in the kitchen making coffee, which was reassuring in itself, although Chris did observe that her sister had spilled the grounds in a small heap on the counter and had not poured any water into the machine. Furthermore, Kathy’s makeup, usually light, appeared to have been jabbed on with a paintbrush, and her outfit looked as if it had been assembled in the dark. Chris took over the coffee making and said nothing.

  Kathy broke down again when she called her boss at the restaurant. As gently as he could, Mark took the phone and explained that a family emergency had come up and she wouldn’t be in. The manager was considerate and concerned. To Mark’s relief, he didn’t pry for details.

  They had to leave around nine for the drive to the office to talk with Gavin, the special agent in charge of the Miami FBI Bureau, who had kept in touch with Huggins in Washington the previous day. It was a meeting both men dreaded.

  At some point before they left the house, Mark telephoned his mother. Kathy could not imagine what he said to her.

  A janitor let them in a side door at the FBI offices. Gavin was already waiting. A large, affable man who supervised more than three hundred agents in one of the FBI’s most important regional offices, he had been fully apprised of a situation that was, as far as anyone could tell, unprecedented in the eighty-three-year history of the FBI: an agent, one of his boys, appeared to be facing a charge of criminal homicide. While Putnam had not confessed, he had badly failed the polygraph, and he wasn’t exactly protesting his innocence. Making the situation even worse, for veteran FBI men such as Gavin and Huggins, men who had seen it all and remained true to the faith, was that the offender wasn’t some rogue cowboy on some drug-addled flame-out. Of all of the eight thousand agents in the bureau, it had to be this guy—this walking personification of the goddamn Boy Scout code, this earnest, likable, gifted, indefatigable young man who seemed not only to avow, but to actually manifest and project every virtue that the bureau still imagined itself as representing.

  The guy they would have put on a recruiting poster now qualified for a wanted poster.

  Gavin greeted them in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, which made him look like an interloper behind his big mahogany desk. He was accompanied in the office by his second-in-command, the assistant special agent in charge, Larry Torrence, who had on a suit and tie. Gavin apologized gamely for the stifling atmosphere in the building and sent Torrence out to see if he could find someone to turn on the air-conditioning. He asked if they were comfortable, if they wanted coffee. All Kathy wanted was to smoke; seeing her desperation, Gavin went out himself to find an ashtray.

  The social preliminaries were excruciating for Kathy. She was mortified to find herself shaking with fright, which she knew was not over the confrontation at hand, but over what would follow. The fact was she and Mark had not yet been able to have a rational discussion about their future. Sitting there trying to get her body movements under control, she was suddenly afraid that her husband might not even make it home with her. She tried mightily to order her thoughts.

  Grateful for both the ashtray and the consideration Gavin showed in holding a match to her cigarette, she drew in great gulps of smoke, exhaling furiously between racking sobs, while Torrence returned and the two supervisors persisted in discussing the air-conditioning. “No dice on the AC,” she heard Torrence say. “It takes four hours for the building to cool down on a weekend.” Kathy was afraid she would scream, but she only cried quietly, painfully aware that if either Gavin or Torrence had any question at all about whether Mark was guilty, one look at the state of his wife would give them their answer.

  Trying to pull herself together, she asked where the ladies’ room was. Gavin invited her to use his private bathroom. She splashed water on her face and stood at the sink trying to steady herself. Overcome by dizziness, she sat down. This was what Mark could have had one day: an office with a private bathroom. There was a vanity in there, with shaving things arranged neatly on it, and an extra tie folded carefully over a hanger. She put her head between her legs to stop it from spinning and saw a cockroach scurry a
cross the floor.

  When she rejoined the men, she heard Mark apologizing for the disgrace he had brought on the bureau. She followed the uneasy conversation between Mark and the two supervisors only in phrases that pierced her staggered consciousness. “I can’t believe this has happened,” someone said. “The FBI family” was invoked several times. She heard “worst-case scenario” mentioned. She struggled to focus.

  On the sofa beside her, Mark was bowed, repentant, and, she saw with a mounting sense of alarm, compliant.

  She fought to resist the allure of the empathy that wafted over the desk of the supervisor, aware that while so far they had talked around any specific mention of the awful event itself, the parameters of the discussion were slowly constricting. She heard phrases that sounded familiar from somewhere: Stress of a cop’s job . . . We’ve all been there. Things can happen in a flash . . . She looked anew at the three men—the chief, brimming with concern and sympathy; his affable sidekick murmuring affirmations; the contrite, mortified suspect, abjectly grateful for small kindnesses—as if peering from an apartment window at a scene far below on the street, aware only that the participants were going through certain predetermined motions. Then she heard Mark utter the words, “I would like to take care of this and clear the air,” and she saw the trapdoor at his feet, triggered to spring open. Her husband was about to confess to a capital crime.

  “No!” she said, the force of her protest causing the three men to stop, shift their positions, and fix her with surprised stares. “Mark,” she said with a glaring look, “we have to talk.”

  The interruption broke the momentum. Kathy now saw that Gavin was less assured about the process than she had supposed. There was a small bend in his tone; an opportunity for reflection crept in. Of course, if Mark wished to take care of this thing, he could make a statement now. A stenographer would be called in, he could lay it out, get it over with. He would be treated with respect and consideration: Kathy was now evaluating each word. Of course, on the other hand, she heard, perhaps Mark and Kathy wanted to discuss it privately. Maybe they wanted to think about getting a lawyer. Gavin said that it was not his role to recommend a course of action. Seeking legal counsel was a decision only Mark could make. Nevertheless, names of good defense attorneys could be provided, if Mark wished.

  “Could we talk privately?” Kathy asked.

  Mark had the look of a man who has no choice but to acquiesce to his wife’s wishes. “No disrespect, sir,” he stammered.

  Gavin told them to go into an adjacent office and talk it over.

  Jumping up, Kathy marched her husband next door. Just as she thought, Mark wanted to spill his guts. “I have to take care of this thing,” he protested. “It’s time.”

  Time? He could talk about time? She thought about time: How much did they really have? A day ago, to her, it was a lifetime; now what was it—days, hours, before they hustled him off to prison? Mark tried weakly to protest. “This is the FBI. They’ll treat me right,” he insisted. But she shook her head violently. “Those men are cops! They will do their jobs!” she told him, not caring that she had begun to shout.

  The unspoken arrangement in their marriage was that on certain occasions, one partner could invoke an ex cathedra privilege and demand that the other shut up and comply. It worked both ways, which was why it worked. Now Mark listened, although sulkily. “They can arrest you and put you in jail today!” she said. “We haven’t even told the kids!”

  For the first time, they talked soberly about what would happen after he confessed. He had not given it any real thought. Thirty years? Life in prison? Execution? Neither of them really knew. In all the time that he had been obsessed with his guilt, over the entire year since he had killed Susan, Mark had never thought through his options. It had simply never occurred to him that he had any, except to confess, to “put things right” and accept disgrace and whatever punishment the authorities saw fit to impose. It was as if the problem were strictly an intensely personal crisis of conscience, with consequences so overwhelming that no single person could affect the outcome in any way. Kathy suddenly understood that she had been omitted from that estimation. Her eyes flashed with resentment.

  While the Putnams were talking, Gavin called Lou DeFalaise, the federal prosecutor in Kentucky, for advice. DeFalaise told him that since there was no outstanding state or federal arrest warrant, Putnam would be free to leave the office, even if he gave a statement, pending the filing of charges once any statement he gave was corroborated.

  Gavin also called Huggins at home in Kentucky. “He’s talking to his wife now and they thought it was probably in his best interest to get an attorney,” Gavin said.

  “Of course,” said Huggins, who had slept soundly at home for the first time in weeks.

  “One more thing. Can you get back here? If something happens this week I need you here.”

  “Of course,” Huggins said, “I’ll be there tomorrow morning.”

  When he and Kathy came back in, Mark apologized for not being able to give his statement immediately. He asked for the names of some lawyers. Torrence made a phone call to a Fort Lauderdale defense attorney who had previously been an assistant US attorney in Miami. In the upside-down world into which the Putnams had tumbled, this was good, because former prosecutors were “cops’ lawyers.” Mark and Kathy retreated again to the privacy of the spare office, where he picked up the phone. “Don’t say another word until you see me,” said the lawyer, a former assistant US attorney named Bruce Zimet.

  Long after that day, Kathy would refer to the calendar she kept for 1990 to try to sort out the chronology. She had made notes in big blocks of space on each page, next to the “Sesame Street” characters. It surprised her to see how compressed the events had been, how quickly things had happened, one after the other. At the time, it had seemed that they had neither beginning nor end.

  At home, the household did not turn to shambles, though Kathy thought it had. Chris soon pieced the story together, although she didn’t yet grasp the consequences. “Kathy was looking at me for a reaction, and I was like, is he going to be demoted at work?” she would later say. The house was immaculate; when she wasn’t crying Kathy was cleaning.

  Yet she moved through a mental fog. Late Sunday afternoon, she found herself at the airport, unable to understand why she was waiting at a gate, in what she noticed for the first time were mismatched clothes, her eyes swollen, holding her husband’s hand tightly. She saw her mother and father hurrying up the corridor toward them.

  “I don’t know how he’s going to react,” she heard herself say. “Don’t be surprised if he hits you.”

  “I hope he does.”

  Instead her father shook his hand. She collapsed on top of her mother, Carol. She felt safer yet more vulnerable than ever.

  Back home, practical matters had to be dealt with. Mark was on vacation time, but that would end; the $600-a-week paycheck would stop. Kathy’s pay at the Pancake House wouldn’t keep the household afloat, not with child-care expenses. Lives were shattered, but the mortgage was due, with no grace period for calamity. Mark was going to prison, perhaps for the rest of his life. She had two young children. Flaming wreckage lay everywhere. The idea of simply soldiering on was terrifying.

  There were moments of respite. She remembered having a drink and smoking a cigarette Sunday night with her parents on the back porch, the cool air coming in through the screens, lulling her into consideration of a future without Mark.

  She was focused well enough to discuss plans: She knew she could go home but the idea of asking for her father’s sanctuary again caused her deep anguish. Father and daughter faced each other from well-marked emotional positions.

  She broached the subject of moving back to Connecticut. She could work, finish college, get her life together. Her mother listened stoically as her father’s mind leaped forward to control the damage. He was anxious to have h
is daughter and grandchildren close by but he couldn’t stop himself from glancing with disapproval at the drink she had in her hand.

  “I am going to help you,” he said, and Kathy stiffened. “If you want to go wherever Mark is going, I understand that—”

  She exploded. “Sure, anything to get me and the kids out of sight!” Her father’s mouth was agape. She rushed out, thrusting the screen door behind her. Even more infuriated that it would not slam, she stormed into the garage and rummaged frantically for something expendable. She picked up little Mark’s lightweight stroller and smashed it again and again on the concrete floor until it was twisted and bent like an umbrella in a windstorm.

  The appointment with the lawyer was scheduled for Tuesday. On Monday, they decided to see a child psychologist. Huddled together in their bedroom, with Kathy’s parents and sister in the house and Mark’s mother on her way down to Florida, having no idea what anyone would say, or even where everyone would sleep, they had struggled with the need to tell Danielle that her father had killed someone and was going to prison for a time that would outlast her childhood. Danielle, alerted by the activity in the house, the houseguests, the urgent verbal reassurances and muffled cries through bedroom walls, knew that something terrible had happened. They knew that she was waiting to see what it was.

  “What do we tell her? ‘You’ve always been Daddy’s little girl, but now Daddy’s leaving?’” Kathy said. “How do we not destroy her?”

  Mark didn’t have an answer. Kathy went down a list of psychologists in the yellow pages and made an appointment with the first one who was available that day. As soon as they saw her, they realized how impossible it was to explain their situation coherently to a total stranger. But the psychologist surprised them by restating the problem succinctly: “Your husband is going to jail for killing someone, and it is a total shock. You are both loving parents. How do you explain this to your daughter, who is five years old and loves her daddy?” She suggested practical ways to begin sorting out the situation for both Danielle and little Mark. Find a previous example of how the child had handled adversity well, explain it, and hold it up as a way to approach the current situation. Offer love and as much stability as possible. Above all, hear the child out.