As Kelly resumed questioning, nearing the end now of what had been more an annihilation of a human personality than a cross-examination of a defendant, Chris Marshall shut his eyes tight. He was wishing he could also shut his ears. What he was really wishing was that he could get up and walk out of the courtroom and never come back, never see his father’s face again, never again have to listen to the sound of Kelly’s voice.
But he could not do that. He was as trapped as a fly stuck in amber. From the beginning, he’d promised himself that he would offer his father support until the end. And it wasn’t the end yet. Not quite. Although Chris began to pray that there might be some way to hasten it. Even a farm animal would be mercifully shot to end this kind of misery.
“You do acknowledge the fact, sir,” Kelly was saying in what was now a tone of perfect calmness, “that Maria Marshall’s ashes are still sitting in a brown paper box. You never bothered to pick them up. You acknowledge that?”
“I don’t know what container they’re in,” Rob said. “The reason that her ashes have not been buried is because we were trying to decide where to bury her. It was a family decision. We hadn’t reached a decision and then I was arrested.”
“Sir. This murder happened September seventh, 1984. You were not arrested until December nineteenth, 1984. Correct?”
“Yes.”
“You had the rest of September, October and November, during this mourning period, to dispose of her ashes. Correct?”
“It was a decision,” Rob said, “whether we should bury her in Florida, which was at one point what she had expressed to me that she wanted to do. We had planned for the family to go to Florida during the Christmas break, the school break, so the boys would be off and we all would go to Florida. One consideration was, we would bring the ashes with us and bury the ashes. We never got to that point.”
Chris could not believe he was hearing this. Not once had he ever heard a word spoken about his mother’s ashes being buried in Florida.
But Kelly seemed glad that Rob had brought it up. He smiled, and walked across the courtroom with a fresh spring in his step.
“Let’s talk about Florida,” he said. “After your suicide attempt on September twenty-seventh, you went to Florida for three or four days, isn’t that correct?”
“That’s correct.”
“Who did you go there with?”
“A friend. I didn’t go with anybody. I went to see friends.”
“Who did you meet down there, sir?”
“Friends.”
“Did you have a girlfriend at the time?”
“Objection,” Seely said.
“Judge,” Kelly said, “he opened up the door about undying love and affection for Maria.”
“I’ll overrule the objection,” Judge Greenberg said.
“Terri,” Kelly said. “Does that name ring a bell?”
Rob was just shaking his head, as if in disbelief that things could continue to get worse.
“What was the name of the girl you were with in Florida?” Kelly pressed.
“I went down to see a woman I had met by the name of Terri,” Rob said wearily.
“And that was, let’s see—Maria died September seventh, September twenty-seventh was your suicide attempt—when did you go to Florida?”
“I don’t remember the dates.”
“September, end of September?”
“I don’t remember the dates.”
“Was it October?”
“I think it might have been November, frankly, but I don’t remember the dates.”
“And where did you stay when you went down there?”
“I stayed in a hotel—a motel.”
“Did you visit Jim and Molly Stevens?”
“Yes.”
“Now, sir,” Kelly said, and here he paused to heighten the effect he knew this question would have, “isn’t it a fact that you are now engaged to marry Molly Stevens?”
“That’s not true.” Rob said this with a bit of snap to his voice.
“Did you not,” Kelly said, “request as recently as two months ago to have a contact visit with a woman whom you were engaged to marry?”
“I did make that request, yes.” The snap was gone.
Kelly put his glasses back on. He was holding a piece of paper in his hand. “This is a letter,” he said, “that you wrote October nineteenth, to Captain—what’s the name?”
“Heddin,” Rob said.
Kelly started to read. “‘I am writing to request a contact visit on a date early in November, probably Wednesday, the sixth, with a woman who will be my future wife.’”
“This is November 1985,” Rob said. “I’m talking 1985.”
“Who was that woman?” Kelly asked.
“The woman that was coming up was Molly Stevens, but I was not engaged to her.”
“Is the woman you’re referring to in that letter the Molly Stevens who’s married to your friend Jim Stevens?”
“She’s separated from him now, but yes, that’s the same woman.”
Kelly put the paper down, took his glasses off, and scratched his head, as if he were truly bewildered. “So you go to Florida in October and November of ’84 with a girl named Terri, you meet Molly Stevens, and now as of ten nineteen eighty-five you’re going to marry Molly Stevens?”
“I’m telling you,” Rob said impatiently, “I was not—”
Kelly pointed to the letter. “Does that say ‘future wife’ or not?!”
“Yes, it does. It was an attempt to get a contact visit and I used that as a reason, because they don’t give contact visits to anyone but family or your wife or someone like that.”
“What did Jim have to say about that?” Kelly asked.
“Objection,” Seely said.
“Objection sustained,” Judge Greenberg said.
Kelly took three quick steps forward until he was standing as close to Rob as the witness box enabled him to get. “Didn’t you tell your kids,” he said, “that ‘Molly Stevens is just like Mom. You’re really going to like her’? Didn’t you say that, sir?”
“Didn’t I say what?”
Now Kelly’s voice began to boom, filling the courtroom, and filling Chris Marshall’s head with a sound he felt would never go away. “Didn’t you tell your kids that they’re going to really like Molly Stevens, she’s just like Mom. Didn’t you say that?!”
“I may have,” Rob said meekly. “Over the telephone.”
Kelly walked away from him, his face screwed up in distaste, as if he’d been exposed to a bad odor. He was finished now. He was ready to stop. But he couldn’t resist a final dig.
“When you were in Florida with Terri a couple of months after Maria’s death, did you buy her a car down there? Terri? The girl?”
“I gave her a thousand dollars so that she could buy a car, yes.”
“What was that,” Kelly said, “a used Porsche or a used Two-eighty Z-X?”
“I think it was a 1961 Oldsmobile,” Rob said.
“But Maria was the big spender, sir. Not you. Is that your testimony?”
“I didn’t say that,” Rob said.
Kelly threw up his hands. “Fine. That’s all I have, sir. Thank you.”
At lunchtime, all Chris wanted to do was to get into his Jeep and drive as far away as he could as fast as he could. He didn’t want to hear one word from Tessie McBride or from Brenda Dew or even, at least for a while, from his brother John.
“It was like,” he said later, “if they ever do carry out the death penalty, it wouldn’t matter if I was there to see it or not, because I’d already seen it. What Kelly did to my father…what Kelly did…it was like that eliminated the last trace of any living father I might have had. From then on, Dad was just as dead to me as Mom was.
“But in a way it was even worse than that. Because Kelly didn’t just wipe out my father. He wiped out everything my father had ever been. The father I’d always thought I had—at least until I started doubting him about the m
urder—he never existed. There never had been any such man. Everything, every smile he’d ever smiled at me, every hug he’d ever given me, every word of encouragement I’d ever heard—all false. All part of the big lie with nothing underneath.
“See, it came in three phases. First, my Mom got killed. Bad phase number one. Then, I came to doubt my father’s story. Bad phase number two. Then, I learned I never even had a father to begin with. That was bad phase number three and that was all the work of Kevin Kelly.
“To have to sit there through something like that—when it’s the only living parent you’ve got left who’s being destroyed—I just felt empty, like I was falling through space, that soon there wouldn’t even be a me, I’d just dissolve. There would just be a hole where I had been.
“And then they came out to me and told me I was going to have to testify that afternoon.”
* * *
The strategy was obvious, if not especially humane. Put the boys up on the stand as quickly as possible to try to win back from the jury some of the sympathy that their father had lost.
Roby wasn’t there, but they could throw Chris and John into the breach. (Or whatever it was. It seemed more like the hole left by a nuclear explosion than a breach.)
To do it now, when both boys were so stunned by the savagery of the morning, might be particularly effective. The jury could see them with wounds still fresh, could feel the raw pain they still suffered. Then maybe, just maybe, the jury would want to give them back their father at the end, whatever he’d done.
John was called first to the stand. He was there only ten minutes and all he said was that his father had called him at home on the evening of September 27 and had sounded “really depressed.” But it didn’t really matter what he’d said. He was someone upon whom the jury could take pity.
“Mr. Kelly, do you have any questions of this witness?” Judge Greenberg asked.
“Yes, I do,” Kelly said. He stood up. “Where do you go to school?” he asked John.
“High School East,” John said.
“Okay,” Kelly said, grinning. “That’s all. Now you can tell everybody you’re cross-examined.”
Chris was called next. He said that his father had sounded “nervous” when he’d called on the night of the twenty-seventh. That wasn’t quite good enough. So, after Kelly said he had no questions, Nathan Baird stood up and asked, “Did he sound like he was saying goodbye?” Chris said, “Yes.” Then he stepped down.
And at Lehigh that night, when Roby called to ask how badly the day had gone, Chris found that he had no words to describe it.
“Well, come on,” Roby said. “You must be able to tell me something.”
“Just be glad you missed it, Roby. It’s one less nightmare to live with for the rest of your life.”
“You mean it was even worse than yesterday?”
“Roby, the one feeling I had was that they should’ve just given him the injection right there. It would have been more merciful.”
There was a long pause on the line. Then Roby asked, “So you don’t think Dad has a chance?”
“Roby,” Chris said. “I don’t think there is a Dad. And I don’t think there ever was.”
But half an hour later, Roby’s phone rang. Sure, there was a Dad. It was him on the phone.
“I hear it was a rough day,” Roby said.
“Listen, Roby, you’ve got to testify tomorrow.”
“I don’t know, Dad, getting somebody as handsome as me up there after they’ve been looking at you most of the week might be too much of a shock.”
“Roby, I don’t have time for any jokes. This is a very serious phone call. This may be the most important conversation you and I will ever have.”
“Okay,” Roby said. “No jokes.”
“Your testimony, son, is going to be very, very important. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Actually, I don’t, Dad. I don’t see how I can do much more than go for the sympathy vote, like Chris and John did.”
“Roby, you’re not listening. Your testimony is vital. Your testimony can turn this whole thing around.”
“What do you want me to say, Dad? That I pulled the trigger?”
“This is the last time I’m telling you, son, this is no time for jokes. Now, just listen to me for a minute.”
Roby began to get an eerie feeling, as if he were somehow outside of himself, watching himself have this conversation. As if it were some kind of sci-fi flick.
“Son, do you remember that morning in September? The day we had lunch at the club?”
“Yeah, sure, I do. Mom woke me up about eleven and asked me if I wanted to go with you guys and then she said I’d better hurry because we’d be leaving as soon as you got back.”
“Roby. Think carefully. Can’t you remember that I actually was in the house at that time?”
Roby had been standing up, walking around the room as he spoke, twirling the long phone cord with his fingers. Suddenly, he felt weak and faint, as if he’d just taken a hard right hand to the belly. He carried the receiver to his bed and sat down.
“Dad,” he said. “You weren’t there. You were out. I remember asking Mom where, and she said, ‘Oh, God knows where your father is these days.’ Yeah, Dad, I remember it pretty clearly, now that you mention it.”
“Think about it some more,” Rob said. “Maybe you can remember it a different way. I’ll call you back in an hour.” Then he hung up.
Roby set the telephone on the floor and lay all the way back on the bed. This was sci-fi for sure. This wasn’t real. This wasn’t happening. Not this, on top of everything else.
For an hour, he lay on his bed and looked at the clock on the other side of his room. The first call had been at seven. He knew that at eight o’clock the phone would ring again. Suppose he just didn’t answer it. Suppose he just let it ring. That would be simplest. Or he could just leave the room and go out somewhere, stay out for a very long time. That way, he wouldn’t even have to hear it ring.
But he lay there, on the bed, unable to move. And when the phone rang at eight o’clock he answered it.
“Have you given it some thought, son?”
“Yes, I have, Dad. And you were not in the house.”
He could hear his father taking a deep breath. Then Rob spoke. “Would you have any trouble saying I was?”
There it was, what he’d been fearing, what he had known was going to come. It was out in the open now, right there in front of them, like some kind of sci-fi monster let loose in his room.
“Dad,” he said. “That would be a total lie.”
“I know,” Rob said. “And I hate to have to ask you to do it. But it would really help me out. In fact, it’s crucial. You’re the only person whose testimony can discredit L’Heureux. Listen—don’t answer now. Just think about it. My whole future—my life—depends on this. Stay there for an hour. I’ll call back.” And then Rob hung up again.
This time, Roby got up and paced. He didn’t leave his room but he didn’t stop pacing, either. He thought about a lot of things. He thought about his mother. He thought about his father. He thought about his own immortal soul, and the fate that would befall it if he committed the sin of lying under oath. He thought about how long an hour was. He wondered if this would be the longest hour of his life. He wondered if this still was his life, or whether, really, his life had not ended with his mother’s, or at the moment on that night when he awoke to see his father’s hand fumbling for the light switch in his room.
Maybe this was purgatory, Roby thought, and after a while longer here he’d get to heaven and be with his mom.
Or maybe this was hell. And he would be here forever—alone—waiting for the hour to pass and for the phone to ring again.
“Well?” his father said at nine o’clock.
“Dad, you always told us if we just told the truth we’d never have anything to worry about.”
“Can you help me out?”
“So if you’re tel
ling the truth, how come you have so much to worry about? If you’re telling the truth, how come it’s me who has to lie?”
“You’ve got to help me out, Roby. You’ve just got to grit your teeth and do it. For me.”
This time, it was Roby who hung up.
And the next day, when he testified, he told the truth.
26
While all had raged about him, Ricky Dew had just been sitting silently, emotionlessly, expressionlessly and almost invisibly through four weeks of trial.
When his turn finally came, he took the witness stand and quietly said he hadn’t killed Maria Marshall. Then six other witnesses, including his brother, his teenaged son and his wife, Brenda, testified that they remembered that Ricky had been down in Louisiana during the whole time all that stuff was going on.
Dew also said he’d never heard from either Travis Greene or Ferlin L’Heureux about any plot to kill Maria Marshall. And Greene, who was one of the witnesses testifying in Dew’s behalf, said that while he had accompanied L’Heureux to Atlantic City in July, he’d never seen either Rob or Maria Marshall at Harrah’s Marina or anywhere else, and said L’Heureux had never told him anything about any plot to murder anyone, and so, obviously, there was no way he had passed any such information along to Ricky Dew.
There wasn’t much that Kevin Kelly could do with that, nor did he try especially hard. (Lurking in the background, after all, was the nagging question of who, if not Greene, had put Dew into the picture, and that threatened to spill over into the question of—or become the same question as—who in New Jersey had really been responsible for a seventy-five-thousand-dollar contract on Ferlin’s life for failing to get his job done.)
These were not aspects of the case that Kevin Kelly pursued with much enthusiasm. Indeed, he did not pursue them at all. He just let the Greene bridge lie in its state of obvious collapse, and the entire Dew defense consumed less than two hours of trial time.
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