“This is Felice.”
“And this is Dave.”
“And this is the office of Video Village, Inc.”
“If you wait for the beep…”
“Before you begin to speak…”
“We’ll call you back…”
“As quick as a wink.”
Then they chanted in unison: “And we mean business.”
24
It was nine o’clock Monday night, February 24, and Roby Marshall was lying on his bed in the dark listening to a Mötley Crüe tape when the phone rang in his off-campus apartment near Villanova.
Chris was calling. It was the night before their father was due to testify.
“How you doing?” Chris asked.
“Hah! Listen to this,” Roby said, jumping out of bed and switching on the light. “You’re not going to believe this. I’m in advanced expository writing today, right? And this teacher, my God, I couldn’t believe it, you know, it’s a pretty big class and I don’t think she really knows who I am, but she says, ‘Okay, here’s the assignment for this week: write an essay about the worst experience of your life.’ Can you believe it? I said, ‘Hey, lady, where do I start?’”
“Did you really?” asked Chris, who would never say “Hey, lady” to a teacher.
“No, but I did go up to her after class and explain that, like, maybe I was still in the middle of the experience, you know, and I was still having a little trouble figuring it out.”
“So what did she say?”
“Well, when I told her Dad was going to start testifying tomorrow she almost had a stroke. She started that ‘oh, you poor boy’ stuff. So I wound up getting a week without an assignment.”
“You going to be there on time for once?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll be there on time. But remember, I don’t have a big sturdy Jeep to drive like you do. All I’ve got’s the same crappy old yellow Mustang. That would’ve been the best thing about Dad committing suicide. Maybe I really would’ve gotten a new car.”
The boys had reached that stage where they could joke with each other about anything.
“Hey, Chris,” Roby said. “How do you think things are going?”
“Oh, gee, Roby, you know—” he said, his voice full of mock enthusiasm. “Just like Tessie says. Everything’s great. There isn’t any evidence. The detectives are dumb. Kelly’s falling flat on his face.”
“Yeah, but then how come every time I go down there everything I hear from the prosecution makes sense?”
“That’s just a minor difficulty you’re having with perspective, brother. You should come study architecture, like me. You’d learn all about the different ways in which perspective can affect your sense of what you see.”
“How about my perspective on what I’m hearing?”
“And what sort of perspective is that?”
“That it doesn’t sound good.”
“Yeah, well, like Tessie says, that’s only been their side we’ve been listening to. Our side hasn’t even gotten the ball yet.”
“Hey, Chris?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you as sick of Tessie’s bullshit as I am?”
“Yes, and not just Tessie’s, either.”
“Who else’s?”
“Dad’s. All those ‘I love you’ signs. And always wanting us to hug him whenever he sees a cameraman around. What I want to say to him is, ‘Don’t be such an asshole. If you’re innocent, you’re innocent. And if you’re not, all this bullshit isn’t going to change a thing. It just makes us all look like jerks.’”
“Yeah, Tessie called me before. She says, ‘Now make sure when you walk into the courtroom tomorrow to give Kelly an extra-dirty look.’ Like that’s really going to shake him up. A bad look from Tessie McBride. Or from some lame Joe College like me.”
“The thing is,” Chris said, “despite all that, I still want Dad to do well tomorrow.”
“I know. I’ve just been lying here in the dark thinking about it. I want so badly to believe him. He’s got to be telling the truth, Chris. He’s just got to be.”
“Yeah, but why would all of those other people lie?”
“Well, Mrs. Rosenberg would lie just because she’s a dirty bitch and she’d do anything to hurt Dad because she’s not going to make a million dollars out of their affair the way she’d hoped to.”
“And L’Heureux?”
“Just like Mr. Baird said, Chris. He’s got the biggest motive to lie—to save himself. And you should hear Brenda Dew get started on L’Heureux. She paints him like the devil himself.”
“I suppose I would, too, if I were her. It’s her husband as well as Dad he’s trying to ruin. And with her husband there isn’t even any evidence.”
“You mean, like, with Dad there is?”
“There’s sure a lot of phone numbers and dates and bank records and insurance applications and other crap. I just hope…I just hope Dad can get up there tomorrow and tell the truth and make it so obvious that it’s the truth that not only you and not only me but everybody in the courtroom will know it right then and they’ll call off the rest of the trial.”
“That ain’t going to happen, Chris.”
“I know the calling-off-the-trial part won’t happen. But the truth? So we really can feel it? Wouldn’t that just be the greatest thing in the world?”
“Yeah. I might even feel happy again for the first time in a year and a half.”
“Me, too.”
“But you know what worries me?”
“What’s that?”
“If all of a sudden he’s just going to tell the truth and have it make sense, how come it hasn’t made sense up until now?”
“I don’t know,” Chris admitted. “That worries me, too.”
“You know what would be really weird?” Roby asked.
“What’s that?”
“If he told such a good story that the jury believed him—because he’s such a good salesman, you know—but you and I still weren’t sure. Then he’d be acquitted and we’d never, ever know the truth.”
“Don’t even say it, Roby. I’m still having nightmares about that.”
It may not have been Kevin Kelly’s chief motivation, but by the time he had finished his cross-examination of Rob Marshall on the afternoon of Wednesday, February 27, one thing was certain: he had cured Chris (and almost all others who were present) for all time of the possibility of ever having a nightmare about not being certain of the truth.
But before that happened, Carl Seely gave Rob the last, best chance he’d ever have to tell his own story his own way.
And Rob’s story, really, was very simple. He was a good family man who’d happened to fall in love with another woman. He’d been planning to tell his wife all about it, and then to leave her, except that she’d unfortunately been murdered before he ever got the chance.
“Our plan was,” he said, “to leave our respective spouses and to live together and then eventually get married. It was to be done in such a way so as not to give the impression that we were having this relationship before I left Maria, or before Felice left her husband. I was to leave first, then she was to leave, and we were to meet sort of after the fact, thus giving the impression—to my children, at least—that this relationship wasn’t going on before I left Maria.
“I was also concerned,” Rob went on, “for two other reasons, of course. One, she was in a very sensitive job position and if news of a relationship like ours, with people who were somewhat well known in the community, were made public, it would hurt her image as an assistant principal, and mine to some extent as an estate planner with my own clients, possibly potential clients. So we were concerned with that.”
Seely inquired about the phone call in which Rob allegedly had asked Felice for the name of someone who could help him “dispose of” Maria.
“It did not happen on the telephone,” Rob said. “We were together in a motel room. We were having a conversation about why didn’t we go to lunch,
why didn’t we have dinner together. It seemed as though we spent all of our time together in motel rooms.
“We couldn’t go public because we were too well known. She knew people in every walk of life, I knew people in every walk of life. It was just our luck if we went to a restaurant for lunch somebody would follow us.”
So it was in a motel, Rob said, that the subject—the subject—was first broached. And it was Felice, he said, who’d done the broaching. “She said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if Maria and David were out of the picture?’”
“David!” Roby said to Chris. “Holy shit, do you think anyone ever mentioned this to David?”
“If I were David,” Chris said, “I think I’d change my beneficiary.”
“And I said to her,” Rob continued, “‘I bet you know somebody who would do that, too.’ And she said, ‘Sure, I do.’ And that was it.” The whole thing, Rob said, was “a joke.”
Regarding his meeting with Andrew Myers at the Riccio party, Rob spoke as if nothing could have been more natural. He and Maria had arrived late and all seats at tables appeared to be taken, so they had seated themselves at the bar. Then, he said, “Mrs. Riccio introduced Andy to both of us.”
That was odd. That was not what Myers had said. And that was not what the wife of John Riccio had said either, when she’d been called to testify, oh so briefly, earlier in the trial. She had said that she recalled Myers “sitting at the bar most of the night,” but when asked, somewhat trepidatiously, by Kevin Kelly whether she’d ever seen Myers speak to Marshall, she had said, “I don’t remember.” And Kelly had not pressed.
Now, as Seely guided Rob along the somewhat circuitous but (they hoped) clearly blameless path that led from May to September, he asked, at one point, why—especially after it had come to seem likely that L’Heureux was simply ripping him off—Rob had continued to place such reliance upon the recommendation of a man like Andrew Myers, who was, after all, merely a hardware clerk whom he’d met only once at a party.
“Because,” Rob said, “of his relationship with the Riccios.”
The trouble was, no matter how he told it—and this version was accompanied by a dabbing of the eyes with folded handkerchief at every mention of Maria’s name—Rob’s story just didn’t make sense.
Not even when he explained as well as an insurance man could why it was economically sound for a nonworking spouse to have her life insured for $1.5 million.
Not even when he explained that his signing of Maria’s name was not really a problem because he and Maria had always had a clear understanding that he could sign her name to any document he chose.
Not even when he stressed that it was his innate sense of discretion—and, really, it was for the sake of Maria’s reputation as much as his own—that had caused him to employ an “out of town” investigator.
And, especially, not when he tried to explain that last ride up to Oyster Creek.
“Just prior to the Barnegat toll plaza she had put her head in my lap,” he said. “Prior to that we were talking about the plans for the next day. We were talking about our win at blackjack. We were enjoying ourselves, listening to the radio on the ride home. And then we ran out of things to talk about. She put her head on my lap and tried to sleep, or did. I’m not sure.
“As we approached the Barnegat toll, I slowed down. She sat up, she woke up, and we went through the toll. That’s when she said. ‘You’d better hurry, it’s getting late.’ She looked at her watch or the clock in the car. So I accelerated to sixty-five and that’s when I felt something different about the car, about the tire performance. It felt to me the way a tire feels when it’s going flat, lower than it should have been, lower air pressure than it should have been.
“I looked for a place to stop and I saw a sign that said either ‘Picnic Area’ or ‘Oyster Creek Picnic Area’ or a symbol for a picnic area sign, and I moved into the left lane and went up the ramp and went in, made another left, turned my high beams on and stopped the car.
“I looked for a flashlight. We have map cases sewn into the seats and I spent twenty or thirty seconds looking for a flashlight that I thought was there that was not there. So I got out of my side of the car, and I walked to the rear and that’s when I noticed another car pulling in.
“As the car came to a stop, his headlights went off. Nothing else happened that I noticed. No car door was opened. So I looked at the driver’s side rear tire and it appeared to be okay. I walked around the rear of the car and I saw at that point Maria had opened up her door and the light from her door gave me something—enough light to see the rear tire of my car.”
“Would you describe how that tire looked at that point?” Seely asked.
“It was—it had a bulging on the bottom like it had lost air. It was not totally flat.”
“What happened next?”
“Well, I had squatted down and I was looking at the car—at the tire—and I said, ‘Pop the trunk,’ and I was hit on the head and as I was hit, I heard her cry out, ‘Oh, my God.’”
At this point, Rob had to pause in order to compose himself. The jurors watched him, dry-eyed.
“…and when I woke up,” he continued, “I don’t know how long it was, I found myself—my head in a pool of blood and I immediately went to her and she was lying across the front seat of the car…”
Seely’s final question was: “Did you have anything to do with the death of your wife?”
“Absolutely not,” Rob said. “She was the mother of my children.”
“What did you think?” Roby whispered to Chris.
“Like Tessie always says, let’s wait until we hear the other side.”
They did not have long to wait. Kelly was on his feet even before Seely had returned to the defense table. And as Kelly sprang forth, a strange thing seemed to happen to Rob Marshall. It was as if he physically shrank in his chair, as if he were somehow, in that instant, forever diminished—the last trace of the insouciance, the smugness, the arrogance, gone even before Kelly began.
Rolling his weight lifter’s shoulders, Kelly hammered out his first question like a punch. “Sir, did you hear me tell this jury in opening statements that at or about the time of your wife’s death you were in debt in excess of three hundred thousand dollars? Did you hear me say that?”
One had the impression that had Marshall replied in the negative, Kelly would have had him by the throat. He was the all-powerful Benedictine with the leather strap in his hand now, and Rob Marshall was the quivering freshman who’d been caught whispering a dirty joke.
Within five minutes Kelly had a list of numbers up on a chart representing every known debt Rob Marshall had accumulated as of September 6, 1984.
Just once, Rob tried to explain away one of the figures. “It was First National’s practice,” he said timidly, “to let me renew the note, so I didn’t have to pay it off.”
“Just a minute!” Kelly shouted. “Did you ever renew the note?!” He took two steps closer to Marshall. “Did you ever renew the note?”
“Judge,” said Seely, “he doesn’t have to yell at him.”
“Please don’t, Mr. Kelly,” Judge Greenberg said.
But Kelly was almost finished with his numbers. “Grand total,” he said, “three hundred thirty-four thousand, seven hundred twenty-eight dollars and ninety-two cents. Do you accept my math on all these numbers?” he challenged.
“I have to,” Rob said, “because I haven’t been adding it as I went along.”
Then Kelly sped through a list of what supposedly had constituted Rob’s assets. “If you add it all up,” he said, “you have a minus two hundred forty-seven dollars cash on hand as of the date of your wife’s death, and in July of ’84 you went to the First National Bank of Toms River and asked for a twenty-thousand-dollar short-term note and they refused, isn’t that correct?”
“In July of ’84?”
“Right. July sixth.”
“I would have to rely on your records, that’s true.”
“…Because you wanted the application right away, isn’t that correct?”
“And there was a reason for that, which I’d like to explain.”
“You can explain when your lawyer has an opportunity to come back on redirect.” And Kelly pressed on.
“It’s just a coincidence, sir, that you took out a one-hundred-thousand-dollar policy on your wife’s life on September sixth, the last day of her life. Is that your testimony? Is that what you’re telling this jury?”
“Yes,” Marshall said, tonelessly. Then, after a pause, he tried to explain. “Our portfolio was constantly changing—”
“There’s no question pending!” Kelly said sharply to cut him off.
“There was a question pending,” Seely said.
“He answered the question,” Kelly said. “We can take a break now.” Even Judge Greenberg, for the moment, seemed governed by the force Kelly was exuding.
Back from the break, Kelly drove on. That Rob had taken out additional insurance on Maria on June 18, “the day Ferlin L’Heureux says you hired him to kill your wife, are you telling us that that’s a coincidence?”
“I did not hire L’Heureux to kill my wife,” Rob said feebly.
“I understand that,” Kelly said derisively. “But the fact that you sent that letter out the same day that he says you hired him, putting in your wife’s coverage in full force and effective immediately, is that a coincidence, then?”
“If you want to characterize it as that, I suppose it is.”
And then he jumped to July, when the same sequence of events had occurred.
“Is that a coincidence, sir?”
“If you wish to characterize it that way, I suppose it is.”
“And you say that you were not the big spender, but even the night of September twenty-seventh, when you checked into the Best Western you were still, in effect, spending money. I mean, you talked about a used Porsche—‘nothing too outrageous.’ Do you recall saying that on the tape?”
Blind Faith Page 33