Blind Faith

by Joe McGinniss

  Fred Grasso had a clear and vivid recollection of his first meeting with Maria. Kenyon had called him and had explained the circumstances and had told him to expect her call. It came within the hour. Maria said her husband was having an affair with Felice Rosenberg, wife of David, daughter of Fred Frankel, and vice principal of Seaview Regional High School. Maria said she wanted to see Grasso right away but she said she couldn’t just go to his office, she might be seen.

  So he had told her the way to arrange it. He described his car to her and told her he’d be parked in it at the far end of the parking lot by the Super Foodtown on Route 37. It was one of the biggest parking lots in Toms River, not counting the mall, and a meeting there would not attract attention. She was to pull her station wagon up next to his car. He’d be facing north, so she should face south, so the driver’s side windows would be next to one another. They would stay in their own cars to escape detection.

  As he explained this to her carefully, Grasso thought she seemed almost too nervous to comprehend it. She seemed terrified at the thought that she might be observed.

  “I understand,” Maria told him. “I’ll be there. I’ll drive up to you slowly, but if I don’t stop I don’t want you to follow me.” This must be a big step for her, he figured, and up to the last moment she wanted to be able to change her mind.

  She did stop, however, and Grasso was impressed by his first sight of her. Not only attractive but very well spoken, with her nervousness now firmly under control. She had, as he’d told Gladstone, a strong smile, a lively expression on her face. Fred Grasso liked her right away. Her husband has got to be some kind of shmuck, Grasso thought, to give this lady a hard time.

  They did not linger in the twilight of the mid-December afternoon. Maria handed Grasso a photograph. It was a picture taken at one of the country club’s many costume parties. The photo showed Rob and Maria and David and Felice, with Felice dressed as some sort of belly dancer who’d been taken captive by the pirates. Her hand was reaching out toward, almost touching, Rob’s crotch. He was grinning and holding a sword to her throat.

  “What’s this for?” Grasso asked.

  “You said to bring a picture of her.”

  He shook his head. Jesus, Jesus, sometimes he wished he’d never left the state police. “Yeah, Mrs. Marshall, I said bring a picture, but that was for identification purposes, so when I see her I can be sure that it’s her.” He held up the photograph. “This would be great if they ever sell her into white slavery, but I don’t think they let her into Seaview Regional dressed like that.”

  Maria looked crushed. Her first investigative assignment and she had botched it. “Never mind, never mind,” Grasso said. “It’ll be fine. I’ve seen her around town, I’ll recognize her. And if she’s not the one, I’ll also be able to tell you that.”

  She still looked so sad and hurt that Grasso felt sorry for her. Two weeks before Christmas, twenty years of marriage, three kids back at the house, this couldn’t be any fun for her.

  “Listen, Mrs. Marshall,” he said. “Don’t worry. I’ll get right on this. Maybe I can’t solve your problems for you, but I promise I’ll get you the information you need.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “And, listen, I’ve seen this kind of thing a lot of times. It happens more than you’d ever guess. And usually it all works out fine.”

  She smiled at him. “Thank you,” she said again. Then she reached into her purse and handed him a hundred-dollar bill. “Is this enough to start with?”

  “That’s fine, Mrs. Marshall. You don’t even need to give me this. I can just bill you as we go.”

  “No,” she said. “That won’t do. The way our money’s disappearing, I’d better pay you in advance.”

  “That’s fine,” Grasso said. “I’ll get right on this. Do you want me to call you directly or do you want me to call Tom Kenyon when I’ve got something?”

  “Don’t call,” she said hurriedly. “Don’t call anyone. I really don’t want anyone to know. I’ll call you. I’ll wait a few days and then I’ll call you.”

  “Okay, Mrs. Marshall, we’ll leave it like that. And hey—try to have a merry Christmas anyway.”

  She smiled once more, then raised her window and drove off.

  And now she was dead. Shot to death in the front seat of Rob-O’s Cadillac. With Rob-O standing outside, holding a hanky to his head, according to what Grasso had heard on the radio. Well, he had his whole file with him and Bob Gladstone was welcome to it, pictures and all.

  In midmorning, Gladstone got a second call, this one from a lawyer named Michael DeWitt, whose practice was in Bricktown, a raggedy collection of blue-collar tract homes and mini-malls that had sprung into existence just north of Toms River.

  DeWitt said he had been Maria Marshall’s lawyer. He had begun to represent her the previous December, after she’d been referred to him by Tom Kenyon, the Toms River lawyer whom she had first consulted.

  Her problems, DeWitt said, had been twofold. First, her husband was having an affair. The woman involved in the affair was sufficiently well acquainted with Kenyon so that, when he’d heard her identity, he’d decided it could pose a conflict of interest for him to represent Maria and thus he had referred her to DeWitt.

  Mrs. Marshall’s second problem had been financial. She had discovered that her husband had plunged the family horrendously into debt and had attempted to disguise the problem by taking out a $100,000 home equity loan. In order that she would not know that he had done this, he’d signed her name on the loan application.

  DeWitt had prepared both a bankruptcy petition and a divorce filing for Mrs. Marshall, he said, but whenever she’d reached the point that action was required, she’d pulled back. Her goal, she had told him repeatedly, was to save her marriage, not destroy it.

  Over the summer, however, she had grown increasingly concerned that her husband might be involved in activities that were criminal in nature. She feared he might be using, or even selling, cocaine, or that he’d fallen in with people engaged in such illicit trafficking. She was also deeply concerned, even fearful, about the depths of his involvement with the Atlantic City casino-gambling world. And she feared, too, that his desperate financial plight might have made him dependent upon people connected to organized crime. She had taken to listening in on his phone calls and to searching through the contents of his desk, but she’d been afraid to confront him with what she had learned or suspected.

  DeWitt said he had worked actively in her behalf in December and January. There had then followed several months when she had hoped, apparently, that she would be able to resolve her difficulties without any legal assistance. In July, however, she’d suddenly gotten back in touch with DeWitt and, by the end of the month, he’d prepared all the paperwork necessary for a public divorce filing, including the naming of Felice Rosenberg as correspondent, and a notice of Lis Pendens, which would place a lien on the Marshall house, so that Robert Marshall could not employ it as an asset in any way.

  The papers were ready on July 26, DeWitt said. But she’d told him to hold off on filing, that the family was leaving on vacation the next day, and that she still hoped to resolve matters privately. Except for one day in mid-August, when she’d stopped by the office to pay her bill, DeWitt said, he’d never heard from Mrs. Marshall again.

  By noon, Gladstone had the results of the autopsy. Maria Marshall had been shot twice in the back at very close range with a .45-caliber pistol. The entrance wounds were so close together that a fifty-cent piece would have covered them both. The trajectory of the bullets made it apparent that she’d been lying facedown on the front seat of the car when she’d been shot. It was obvious that whoever had shot her had done so with the definite intention of killing her. This had not been a panicky overreaction during a robbery attempt gone awry. To Bob Gladstone, it had the mark of a professional execution.

  By one o’clock he’d already assigned a detective the task of determining how much insuranc
e had been carried on Maria Marshall’s life.

  By three o’clock he’d given the order that Felice Rosenberg should be brought in for questioning.

  No question about it, they did it up right. They waited until she left Seaview Regional at 3:30 that afternoon, waited until she got that black Buick Skyhawk cranked up to about eighty, eighty-five on the parkway, and then, lights flashing, unmarked car in addition to patrol car, pulled her over to the side of the road.

  No, they told her, they didn’t want her license and registration. Speeding wasn’t what was on their minds. It was more along the lines of, “Follow us, ma’am. We’re bringing you in for questioning.” About what? About the murder of Maria Marshall.

  When they brought her in, they booked her, they fingerprinted her, they took a mug shot. This was real. This wasn’t a fortieth-birthday surprise. Gladstone had assigned Detective Al McGuire to the interview. Al was really a very sweet guy, but from a distance of more than, say, forty feet, he was hard to distinguish, in size and shape, from a grizzly bear.

  Alongside him sat Detective Tony Mancuso of the state police, who without even trying gave off the air of a man who wasn’t the least bit bothered by anything you said because he didn’t believe a word of it anyway.

  Felice took one look at those two and she wanted a lawyer. In fact, she wanted two of them, Lou Minsky and his partner, Jay Jarvis. They were social friends, as well as lawyers—all part of that big, extended family up in Brookside.

  Minsky and Jarvis wasted no time getting down to the prosecutor’s office. (Though Minsky had the unenviable task of first calling David Rosenberg at the car dealership and giving him a double dose of bad news: [a] your wife’s been having an affair; [b] she’s about to be questioned in connection with a homicide.)

  The two lawyers consulted with Felice privately and then informed Detectives McGuire and Mancuso that she would be willing to submit to questioning.

  She was advised of her rights several times, given a consent-to-question form to sign, advised again after she’d signed it that she had the right to terminate the interview at any time, that she was not under arrest and that the procedure they were going through was entirely voluntary on her part. Then they took her into the polygraph room and started to talk—without hooking her up to the machine.

  The story she told them was that yes, there had been an affair, commencing in the summer of 1983. Maria had grown suspicious in the fall, especially after finding records of Rob’s dozens of phone calls to her at Seaview. Felice herself had mentioned the affair to only one or two very close friends, and Rob, she was certain, had never confided in anyone about it.

  Rob, she said, had been unhappy in his marriage. He’d complained that Maria was overly possessive and spent too much money. She herself was unfulfilled in her relationship with her husband and she and Rob had planned to leave their respective spouses and live together.

  Plans for such a move had been in the works for some months, she said, and in fact, had just about come to fruition. Within a week, she and Rob had planned to make their respective announcements and take up residence in a beach house they’d just rented in Manahawkin. They’d already obtained a safe deposit box together, into which Rob had placed “a couple thousand dollars’ worth” of silver ingots, and they’d already signed papers for a joint checking account. Also, she said, for months they’d been sharing a downtown post office box, which they used for the exchange of tapes—little love messages they sent one another when they could not be together.

  She outlined in detail her activities of the previous day, acknowledging that she had met Rob at 4 P.M. in the parking lot of a shopping center not far from Seaview Regional. She had left her car there, she said, and had ridden with him to one of their favorite parking spots. It was an area of scrub pine, beyond a sign that said FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY, behind the site of a new housing development. He had mixed Cuba Libres (rum, Coke and lime) for them as he usually did, and they had talked for what she guessed was an hour, an hour and a half. She said she remembered him complaining that he didn’t want to go to Atlantic City that night, but that he had to because his wife had “insisted.”

  They’d parted at about five thirty and she’d proceeded to a Toms River exercise salon to lead an exercise class. Then she’d gone home, changed clothes, and had taken a small party of friends to a birthday dinner she was giving for her father at the Wall Street restaurant in Bricktown. She’d ordered a Caesar salad as a main course. She’d been waited on by a blond woman named Nancy. On the way home, they stopped at Carvel’s for ice cream.

  McGuire asked her how she’d heard the news of Maria’s death. She said Rob had called her at school that morning. “Are you sitting down?” he’d said. When she’d said yes, he’d said, “Maria’s dead.” Then, she said, he’d started to cry. He’d also said, “It’s terrible. I didn’t want it to be like this.” Then he’d described how it had happened. He’d pulled into the picnic area, got out of the car, heard a car pull in behind him but paid it no attention, asked Maria to “pop the trunk,” and then was hit on the head. When he’d regained consciousness he’d found her dead, shot in the back.

  McGuire stood up. He said, “We’re going to leave you here alone for a while, Mrs. Rosenberg. Just give you a little bit of time with your attorneys here, Mr. Minsky and Mr. Jarvis. What I want you to do is keep thinking. See if there might be anything else you can think of that might be helpful.” Then he and Mancuso left the room.

  When they returned ten minutes later, Felice had thought of something. She said, apropos of the financial difficulties that she knew Rob had been experiencing, she’d remembered that he had taken out a $100,000 second mortgage on his house.

  McGuire nodded. “That’s fine,” he said. “That’s the sort of thing I mean. In a situation like this, you just never know what might be helpful. Now why don’t you stay there a few minutes longer with Mr. Minsky and Mr. Jarvis and think some more. We’ll be back soon.”

  This time, when they came back, she said she had thought of one other thing. Both McGuire and Mancuso found it to be of sufficient importance that they included it in their written reports of the interview.

  McGuire wrote: “During a conversation with Robert Marshall before Christmas of 1983, Marshall had stated to her, while discussing his financial difficulties, that ‘the insurance on Maria would take care of his debt.’ [He’d said,] ‘I wish she wasn’t around. Do you know of anyone who could take care of it?’ Felice Rosenberg stated to Rob Marshall at that time that she only knew of a subject by the name of Patsy Racine as the only person that she knew who had ever gotten in trouble with the law. She (Felice) stated she never wanted to be involved with [Marshall] if he could do anything like that to his wife.”

  Mancuso wrote: “Mrs. Rosenberg described one conversation when Rob asked her if she knew of anyone who could help him get rid of his problem (speaking of his wife). Mrs. Rosenberg advised that she was shocked and told Rob that if he was serious, she did not want to have anything more to do with him, but she added that the only person she knew who might be able to help him was Patsy Racine, but again added that she never wanted to hear him talk of it again.”

  McGuire figured that was enough for one day. But he told Felice before she left—in the company of attorneys Minsky and Jarvis—that they might be asking her back to take a polygraph examination.

  13

  While Felice was being interviewed in the polygraph room, Bob Gladstone was in his office down the hall, talking on the telephone with a local insurance agent named Philip Girard, who had called as soon as he’d heard news of the murder broadcast on the radio.

  Girard said he thought he should mention to someone that on Monday he’d been contacted by Rob Marshall, who said he needed an insurance policy taken out on the life of his wife, Maria, in the amount of $100,000.

  Marshall had stressed that he was in “a very big hurry” to get the policy into effect. He insisted that all paperwork be handcarried to speed the pr
ocess and that a medical examination be completed within forty-eight hours. He said he and his wife would be leaving on a long vacation by the end of the week and it was essential that the policy be in force before then.

  Girard said a medical examination had been conducted in the Marshall home at ten o’clock on the morning of September 6, and that he had arrived there shortly after noon to sign the papers, just as Marshall, his wife and a tall, handsome young man who appeared to be their son were leaving, apparently on their way to lunch.

  “Holy shit,” Bob Gladstone said to himself.

  Before he could say more, to himself or to anyone else, he was interrupted by the sound of raised voices in the hallway outside his office. He opened his door and looked out to see Felice’s father, Fred Frankel, demanding to see someone in authority.

  “I’m the lieutenant in charge of homicide,” Gladstone said quietly. “If this has anything to do with the Maria Marshall murder, I’ll be happy to talk to you about it.”

  “What the hell’s your name?” Fred Frankel demanded.

  “Gladstone. I’m Lieutenant Gladstone.”

  “You listen to me, Gladstone. I understand you’ve got my daughter down here and I demand to see her immediately. I want to know just what the hell is going on. What right do you think you have to drag my daughter in here off the streets like some common criminal? Do you know who she is? Do you know who I am? Listen, Gladstone, I’m a close friend of Ray DiOrio’s. And goddamn it, I’m going to call him about this. What the hell do you think this is, Russia?”

  “Mr. Frankel,” Gladstone said calmly, “your daughter is in the presence of two attorneys of her own choosing, she’s been fully advised of her rights, she has signed a consent-to-question form, she is speaking voluntarily and, as she and her attorneys know, she is free to terminate the interview at any time.”

  “Goddamn it, I want to see her. What the hell is this all about?”