Blind Faith

by Joe McGinniss

  The lawyers went to the jail and conferred privately with Ferlin. They came back and said he was interested in the deal and had the right kind of information to offer, and that, no, he hadn’t been the shooter, but first he wanted to hear the tape.

  So they played him the tape. They let him hear Rob talk about his torrid love affair, his crushing debt, his plans to walk out on his wife and kids. He heard Rob talk about all the insurance he’d taken on Maria’s life, and about how L’Heureux’s only purpose had been “to rip me off.” Then he heard about how he and Rob had met at Harrah’s on the night of the murder and how Rob had paid him more money.

  Ferlin L’Heureux began to frown as he listened to the tape. Then the frown deepened into a scowl. Then he began to clench his fists. When the tape ended, he jumped to his feet and shouted, “That squirrelly, no-good son of a bitch is tryin’ to frame me!”

  He sat back down and raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

  “Goddamn it,” he said. “The story I gave to Hamilton was all about how Marshall was a well-organized, well-settled individual who was happy with his lifestyle and family ties. And how since the time he’d got in touch with me, he and his wife was havin’ a second honeymoon, and things had taken such a good turn that he didn’t need an investigator anymore.

  “Goddamn! That’s what the loony bastard was supposed to put on the tape.” He stood up again, his face now red.

  “I never from the start should have trusted that crazy motherfucker.” He clenched a fist and pounded the table on which the tape recorder sat. Then he turned and looked directly at Bob Gladstone.

  “That man,” he said, pointing to the tape recorder, “is so stupid that you ought to put him to death just for that!”

  “Does this mean,” Gladstone asked mildly, “that maybe you’d like to take the deal?”

  “Shit, yes,” Ferlin said. “Shit, yes, I’ll take the deal. After hearin’ that, I don’t see that I got much of a choice.”

  “But, Ferlin,” Gladstone said, “there’s no deal if you’re the one who pulled the trigger.”

  “I didn’t pull the fuckin’ trigger.”

  “And you do know who did?”

  “I sure as hell do.”

  “And you are going to tell us. As part of the deal. And you’re going to testify to it in court.”

  Here, Ferlin hesitated. “You know,” he said, “I’d like to think some on that.”

  “No shooter, no deal, Ferlin. Simple as that.”

  Ferlin stared out the window of the prosecutor’s office. It was the first window he’d had to look out of in ten days.

  “Got to be some other way you can come up with the shooter besides me,” he said.

  “No shooter, no deal, Ferlin,” Gladstone repeated. “Simple as that.”

  “And what are you givin’ me? Tell me again?”

  “You give us the whole story. And it better fucking check out as true or this deal is gone faster than anything you ever saw in your life,” Gladstone said. “And you testify in court to everything you tell us. And after you’ve done that we let you plead to conspiracy to commit murder, which as your attorneys can tell you—”

  “They’ve already told me.”

  “—is a lot different from a conviction for murder for hire. Then we recommend a sentence of no more than five years with a special request that you be paroled on the first day you become eligible.”

  “And time I’m servin’ now counts toward that?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So if I sit on my ass here for another year or so, waitin’ on this case to get to trial, I could be free after that?”

  “Just about.”

  “And if I do go somewhere, it’s somewhere easy?”

  “If you do go somewhere for another few months or whatever, it’ll be a prison out in the western part of the state that’s mostly for women. It’s called Clinton. Low security. There’s a special wing there in which you’ll be housed.”

  “But you’ve gotta have the shooter’s name.”

  “We’ve gotta have the shooter’s name and everything else.”

  Ferlin L’Heureux looked around the room. He took a deep breath which turned into a sigh.

  “Okay, boys,” he said. “We got a deal.”

  18

  On the morning of December 14, Ferlin L’Heureux started to talk. Except for a few hours for sleeping, he didn’t stop until the night of the fifteenth. By the time he had finished, Bob Gladstone was a satisfied man.

  The way Ferlin remembered the start of it was quite different from the story Andrew Myers had told. For one thing, Ferlin said that Myers knew very well who he was—last name, as well as first—and knew also (or thought he did) that Ferlin would be just the right man for this job. There had been nothing casual or coincidental about the contact.

  “See,” Ferlin said, “I guess I was his idea of what the Mafia looked like down there. One day I’d be in old clothin’ and the next day dressed to a T and drivin’ different cars—lookin’ like a guy that was connected.

  “So he started with me, but he was smart enough not to—for me not to know that he was doin’ what it was that he was doin’. See, he never come right out and told me that what Marshall wanted was his wife murdered, but I’m sure Marshall told him, you know, ‘Get this done for me and I’ll take care of you.’

  “Anyway, he called me at home. Told me he had a friend of his who needed some help in New Jersey. He called—talked to my wife, actually—asked me to stop by the next mornin’. Said at ten or nine or somethin’ like that, a friend of his was goin’ to call and talk to me about doin’ some kind of divorce work, or some kind of domestic case on his wife.

  “So I stopped by. Myers told me the man was very well off, had plenty of money. Told me he had met Marshall at some Mafia friend of his’s party. Somethin’ to do with restaurants, garbage collectin’ or somethin’. He’d been accused of bein’ in the crime family and also his son or somebody had just been beaten to death with golf clubs.

  “So Marshall called. I went to the back of the store and took the phone. Marshall told me who he was and that Myers had told him about me, that I was an investigator, and he wanted to hire someone from outside the New Jersey area who wouldn’t be familiar with his wife, so it’d be less likely this business would get out, because he knew so many people.

  “He said he was a man with a lot of status in his town. So he didn’t want me to meet him there. He wanted me to come to Atlantic City. Told me that he was also well known in Atlantic City, so even there he had to be extremely careful. Well, I come to find out that he was weller known in Harrah’s than anywhere else in the world and that’s where he wanted me to meet him, and I thought that was kind of stupid. But that came later.

  “Anyway, I said, ‘That’s going to be expensive.’ Told him I’d need five thousand expenses up front. Wired to Shreveport, Louisiana. I told him to send it in the name of Ernie Grandshaw. Purpose of that was, I don’t want to pay no more taxes than I have to.

  “In a couple of days, Myers calls and tells me the money is in and to come by Caddo Hardware, he had the information written down on a piece of paper. I went by and he gives me a sheet of paper which says the money was sent in the name of Ernie Grandshaw, and had some other information written down there—that Marshall wanted me in Atlantic City on such and such a date, at the O’Hara’s, or the Harrah’s, whatever the hell it is, the Marina motel or hotel—the gamblin’ casino.

  “So I went and got Ernie off the jobsite where he was at and we went to the Western Union and he went in and picked up the money order. Then I drove him to the nearest bank and cashed the check. I took the money and took him right back to the job-site. Told him it was for a gamblin’ debt.”

  But what he’d found, he said, was that the money order had been for only twenty-five hundred dollars instead of the five thousand that had been agreed upon.

  “I went back to Caddo Hardware and told Andy Myers that Marshall
had not sent me all the money that I asked for. Told Myers I had a good mind to not even go. So he had another phone conversation with Marshall and then he told me, ‘When you get there, he’ll give you the other twenty-five hundred.’ I said, ‘Look, I ain’t goin’. The guy didn’t send the money that I asked for.’ He said, ‘He’ll give you that other money as soon as you arrive.’ I said, ‘Okay, I’ll think about it.’ And Myers told me to go to Harrah’s Marina, register in the name of Ernie Grandshaw, and that Marshall would call me there on the morning of June the eighteenth.”

  The way he saw it at that point, Ferlin said, was that he’d already received twenty-five hundred dollars for no more than a twenty-minute phone call. That would more than pay the plane fare and hotel bill for a two-day trip to Atlantic City, which Ferlin had never seen before, even if he never laid eyes on Robert Marshall. Besides, the way Myers had been talking, it sounded like there was a lot more money where the first twenty-five hundred had come from.

  “The thing is,” Ferlin said, “I like to take advantage of opportunities and this sure looked like an opportunity.”

  He’d gone home and told his wife to make the necessary reservations. Harrah’s was booked, but after calling around a bit, she’d found him a room at the Islander Motel.

  As Ferlin reached this point in his story, Gladstone flipped to the page of his notes where he had a list of the toll calls made from L’Heureux’s house. June 17: to Harrah’s Marina, to the Clipper Ship Motel, to the Islander. It checked.

  He said he’d flown Delta to Philadelphia on the afternoon of June 17. From Philadelphia he’d taken a commuter flight to Atlantic City. From there, he’d taken a cab to the Islander.

  Rather, he’d tried to take a cab to the Islander. The cabdriver, a Korean fellow, couldn’t find it. They drove around for more than an hour, L’Heureux said, to no avail. By now it was almost 10 P.M. Ferlin had received an extensive tour of Atlantic City and environs and had not been impressed.

  “Just a slum, a cruddy place. I couldn’t believe it. Finally, I told him, told the Chinaman, just take me to O’Hara’s and that I would walk in and try to get a room. If not, I’d just mess around in the casino for the remainder of the night and advise the desk clerk in the mornin’ that I was expectin’ a call.”

  It turned out that a room was available at Harrah’s and, using the name Ernie Grandshaw, L’Heureux had signed in. The next morning, he said, he’d eaten a big breakfast (that part of the story Gladstone found easy to believe) and had dressed up in what he considered his “investigator’s clothes—slacks, sports shirt, leather-cashmere coat, dark sunglasses.” He’d laid a briefcase and a notebook on the table and waited for the phone to ring.

  Shortly after 9 A.M., it did. It was Rob Marshall. Saying he was running a little late. Saying he’d be down about eleven. But it was almost noon, Ferlin said, before he heard from Rob again, this time a call from the lobby to say he was on his way up.

  Ferlin opened the curtains to let bright sunlight flood the room. He made sure to keep his dark glasses on. The man didn’t know his name and Ferlin didn’t want him to know his face, either. At least not until he learned for certain what this was really about. “You have to understand,” he said, “there was an air of mystery about the whole thing.”

  His first impression, he said, was that Rob Marshall was a very nervous man. “The minute he showed up, he was jumpin’. He was scared. It was like somebody was pursuin’ him. Like any day the bottom was going to fall out.”

  L’Heureux’s “investigator’s greeting” didn’t do much to put Rob at ease. “I shook him down,” Ferlin said. “Patted him down to make sure he didn’t have any kind of recordin’ device on him. He was kind of squirrelly-lookin’ to me. I thought he might be part of some kind of federal strike force to entrap me, to coerce me into cooperatin’ with some of those other matters they might have goin’ on.”

  The next thing he did, Ferlin said, was remind Rob that they had some “unfinished business.” There was no argument. Rob said he had already stopped at the casino cashier before coming up to the room and had drawn $2,500 on his credit account. He then handed L’Heureux twenty-five crisp, new one-hundred-dollar bills.

  Then he started to talk. “At the outset,” Ferlin said, “he told me that it was his impression that his wife was havin’ an affair with someone, he didn’t know who, and he wanted a domestic surveillance conducted on her.”

  Ferlin’s first question was the obvious one: why hire a detective from Louisiana for that? But Rob explained that he was so well known, such a prominent citizen of Toms River, that no local or even nearby detective could be trusted to maintain confidentiality. The temptation to gossip about a man of Rob’s social status would simply be overwhelming. “He said anybody he went to up here had a way of leakin’ out his business,” Ferlin recalled.

  Rob had then given him various details concerning Maria’s daily life, “what she drove, where she played tennis, clubs she went to, where she banked, her friends, things of that nature, so I could pick her up and follow her around.”

  But Ferlin noticed that Rob seemed strangely distracted, jittery, impatient. As if he were having trouble coming to the point.

  “I could see there was somethin’ that wasn’t right. He lingered on in the room. Then he took two pictures out of his wallet. One of them was of his house and the other one was his wife. He gave them to me. And then he said, ‘What I really want—’ And then he stopped. Then he tried it again. He said, ‘What I really want is my wife done away with.’

  “So I asked him, ‘Done away with?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘You mean divorced?’ He said, ‘No. I want to get rid of her.’ And I asked him, ‘What do you mean, get rid of her?’ The strange thing was, he just wouldn’t say ‘killed’ by himself. He would say ‘disposed of.’ He would say ‘get rid of.’ He would say ‘done away with.’ But he just couldn’t make himself say ‘murdered.’

  “So I finally done it. I said, ‘You’re tellin’ me that what you want done is your wife murdered?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ I looked down at her picture and then I looked up at him and I said, ‘Why in God’s name do you want to murder her?’

  “He went on to say he was in debt from gamblin’, he just overextended himself, he had a big house and new cars and kids in school—three boys, he kept tellin’ me—and he owned a condo in Florida, and just a number of things. He had just more or less been livin’ out of his means.”

  Ferlin asked him if there were another woman involved.

  “He first told me no, but I knew just from how he said it that that was a lie. So I said, ‘Just what is the problem?” And he said, ‘We’re not compatible.’ I said, ‘Well, why don’t you just divorce her?’ But he said, ‘No, that would ruin me. It would be devastatin’ to me. I couldn’t handle that.’ Then he said, yes, he did have a girlfriend that he intended on marryin’ one day, and that he had his wife heavily insured and that he wanted, he needed the money.”

  “So what did you tell him, Ferlin?” Gladstone asked.

  “I said, ‘These things can be done.’ And he wanted to know how much it would cost. Of course, I was thinkin’ in my mind that no money at all could make me commit any crime such as this, but through talkin’ with him I was faced with a man that I thought could afford, ah, a reasonable sum, or what he would consider a reasonable amount of money. A man who was desperate. So I told him a hundred thousand dollars. He said, ‘That’s too much,’ so we haggled back and forth there and finally come up with a figure of sixty-five.”

  Five thousand had already been paid. Rob agreed to go right back downstairs and draw another ten thousand from his casino credit line. The remaining fifty, Rob said, would be paid after he collected the insurance.

  “But I was skeptical about that,” Ferlin said. “I said, ‘That could be, ah, that could take forever to collect.’ No, he was an insurance man, he was on the board of the bank or board of the city, or whatever. He was an influential person and he didn’t
anticipate any problems in collectin’ this insurance money. The amount he told me it was, was one hundred and thirty thousand, but he said it was double indemnity so he’d be collectin’ twice that. Guess he didn’t want me to know how much he really had comin’ or he figured I’d be up here pesterin’ him the rest of his life.”

  “That’s the only thing he figured right all year,” O’Brien said.

  Rob left the room at that point, Ferlin said, to go downstairs and get the ten thousand. But when he came back he had only seven. “I told him, ‘This is seven. We said ten.’ And he said, ‘I’ll have the rest with me tonight.’ I said, ‘Tonight?’ And he was gettin’ all jittery and jumpy again. He said, ‘Yes, tonight. That’s when I want you to kill her.’”

  “Wait a minute,” Gladstone said. “Twenty minutes after he walks into your room, he’s not only telling you that he wants you to murder his wife, but that he wants you to do it that night?”

  “Listen, Gladstone,” L’Heureux said. “I was kind of taken aback by that myself. I had considered that I could string him along a while, tell him some kind of something and then blow the deal off—just never do it, after taking him for as much as I could. I didn’t like that ‘tonight’ shit, either.”

  “What did you say?” Gladstone asked.

  “I said, ‘No, no, you got to wait for the proper time, the proper atmosphere. It may take six months. Or a year.’ But he said right away again, as if somethin’ powerful was closin’ in on him, ‘I don’t have six months. I want you to do it tonight.’”