Blind Faith

by Joe McGinniss

  Ferlin said that Rob had explained to him that he’d be taking Maria to dinner at a posh restaurant called the Ram’s Head, in a town called Absecon, just across the bridge from Atlantic City. He already had it all figured out. He and Maria would come out to the parking lot after dinner and get into Rob’s ivory Cadillac. Then Rob would tell her that he had to run back inside to use the men’s room. “Then, he says, ‘You can walk up to the Cadillac and kill her.’ Simple as that, he thinks. While he’s standin’ inside there, wonderin’ why the pee won’t come out.”

  “So, what did you say?” Gladstone asked.

  “I says, ‘How do you want it done?’ See, I’m still just string-in’ him along. And he tells me how he don’t want it done. He didn’t want a shotgun used on her, he didn’t want a knife used on her, he didn’t want it done in his house where his kids might be present, he didn’t want her carried off in a rape, he didn’t want anything that could tear her up. He said, and these were his exact words—‘I don’t want to mar the beauty of my wife, Maria.’”

  “And what did you say?” Gladstone asked.

  “I said, ‘You know somethin’? You’re crazy.’”

  But Rob was also in a hurry. He kept looking at his watch. He said he had to get back up the parkway to meet his girlfriend. But before he left, he wanted to be sure it was settled: the murder would be committed that night, in the parking lot of the Ram’s Head, in a manner that would not mar the beauty of Maria.

  “So I said, ‘I’ll look at it. See if it can be done.’ Hell, I already had twelve thousand dollars just for talkin’. I was in no hurry to shut down the well.’”

  Ferlin said the two of them walked together to the parking garage across from Harrah’s, where Rob pointed out the ivory Cadillac and made sure Ferlin copied down the license number. Wouldn’t want the wrong lady killed by mistake. Rob said they had an 8 P.M. reservation, which meant they should be out between ten and ten thirty. He said he would park at the outer edge of the lot.

  “I told him,” Ferlin said, “I told him, ‘You know, it’s gonna be hard. There’s gonna be a lot of heat, a lot of pressure. They’re gonna rake you over the coals. Your business, your girlfriend—they’re gonna look at everythin’ you got.’

  “But he told me not to worry about any of that. That he was an outstandin’ member of the community and had a lot of influence and he could handle that. So I told him, okay, I would check it out. And that if it could be done, you know, well, it would be done.”

  Then Ferlin told the men from the prosecutor’s office that he actually had ridden up to check it out. He said he’d spent the afternoon playing blackjack and wandering around and then he had a couple of drinks and a bite or two to eat, and then he’d taken out the card that the Korean cabdriver had given him the night before and called him. The Korean had picked him up at the front door of Harrah’s Marina and had driven him to the Ram’s Head, which was ten miles away but, unlike the Islander, easy to find.

  “The goddamn place,” Ferlin said, “it looked like the state capitol buildin’ in Baton Rouge. Least it had as much security. And it was lit up even brighter. ’Specially the parkin’ lot. There were lights all over the place. And all those limousines. I’m thinkin’ the captain of the state police is probably inside, havin’ his dinner. And those bodyguards out beside the cars looked like they was all carryin’ guns. I said, ‘Now I know this guy is crazy, thinkin’ I could do it someplace like this.’

  “I never even got out of the cab. Just made the circle around the parkin’ lot. I said, ‘Nice restaurant.’ The Chinaman said, ‘You don’t want to stop?’ I said, ‘Fuck, no, just take me back to the casinos.’”

  “And then what?” O’Brien said. “You just wake up in the morning and go home?”

  “Shit, he woke me up. Called my room at eight o’clock in the mornin’. And he wasn’t happy. He wanted to know why the job wasn’t done. I said, ‘Man, you’re crazy. That parkin’ lot was filled up. There was no place for anythin’ like that to happen. Besides, I didn’t bring nothin’ but a shotgun’—which, of course, I didn’t bring no gun at all. I flew on the plane with walk-on luggage. ‘I got to go back home, get what I need,’ I said. ‘You send me that other three thousand and I’ll be back in a week or so.’ He said, ‘I’m bringin’ her down to Harrah’s Friday. Can you be back by then?’ I mean, this guy was determined. There was no way he was gonna let that lady live.”

  Rob, of course, had sent the three thousand. It arrived in Shreveport only two days after Ferlin did, and again, Ernie Grandshaw was prevailed upon to pick up the money order.

  “Then he started callin’,” Ferlin said. “Marshall kept callin’ and callin’ and callin’ Myers, and every time he did, Myers called me and said, ‘The man appreciates that you have twelve thousand dollars of his money and you haven’t done nothin’ for him yet.’ Andy was pressurin’ me to go up and do what it was I’d agreed to do.’”

  So, Ferlin said, he’d gone back up in July. More money was the major motivation. “As long as he was willin’ to put it out, I was willin’ to take it,” he said. He had called Myers to say he’d be back in Atlantic City on July 17 and that Myers should pass the message on.

  On the July trip, L’Heureux said, he’d brought a friend named Travis Greene, someone closer to the center of the bank robber gang. They’d left Shreveport at 9 A.M. on July 16 and had arrived in Atlantic City at seven o’clock the next morning. This time, Ferlin chose not to stay at Harrah’s. He stopped instead at an inconspicuous motel near the airport called the Seacomber. It was Greene who signed the registration card.

  Two hours later, he said, after a shower and another big breakfast, he’d left Greene sleeping in the room and had walked down the street to a pay phone outside the Airport Motor Inn and had called Rob Marshall at his office. He’d told Marshall to go out to a pay phone and call him back.

  Ten minutes later, Marshall had called back. He’d said he would bring Maria to Harrah’s Marina for dinner that night and then they would go to the casino for gambling. He told Ferlin, whom, of course, he was calling “Ernie Grandshaw,” to meet him in the rear lobby of the casino at 9 P.M.

  “He did meet me there,” Ferlin said, “but I told him this job was requirin’ a lot more money than I thought it would, that I would need more. Somethin’ like this was expensive, requirin’ stealin’ cars and guns, involvin’ other people, things like that.”

  “He must have been overjoyed to hear that,” O’Brien said.

  “Well, he said he was currently in the dinin’ room havin’ dinner but would come back in a little while, and he’d have more money then.”

  Which he did, bringing an additional seven thousand dollars’ worth of chips. But having paid that, Rob insisted on immediate action. “To him it was supposed to be, you know, just right then. He was ready.”

  Rob said that he’d leave the casino and drive to an all-night diner that was located just before the entrance to the parkway. He’d park behind it, telling Maria his favorite story: that his weak bladder necessitated a trip to the men’s room. He would try to see to it that she wouldn’t lock the door, but being as how she was such a cautious, timid woman, she probably would.

  “‘If she locks the door, I can’t get in,’ is what I told him. And he said, ‘Well, then, you’ll just have to shoot her through the glass.’ I tell you, he was on edge. Much worse even than in June. That man was driven. It was like he was gettin’ down to where he had to cover his money. He made some comment to me that he only had so long to get the money that it was that he needed. He was desperate to get this done. It was like these underworld people, they had the squeeze on him somewhere.

  “Somebody was puttin’—either himself mentally or someone else—was exertin’ a lot of pressure on him for a tremendous amount of money in a hurry and he was at the point of jumpin’ out the fuckin’ window.”

  Ferlin said he’d always heard that casinos, like banks, had cameras trained constantly on all areas where fin
ancial transactions were made, and he did not want to wind up on videotape. So he gave his friend Greene the chips to cash in, while he waited at the bar.

  Sitting there alone, he said, he looked casually out upon the crowded casino floor. His eyes moved randomly from table to table. It was sure some scene. The plush carpet, the highly polished brass and silver and wood, the bright green felt of the playing surfaces. And all those suckers dressed to the gills, as if an expensive wardrobe would guarantee gambling success.

  Then, he said, his eyes fell upon one particularly attractive and fashionably dressed woman, sitting at a blackjack table with an empty chair beside her.

  It was Maria Marshall.

  He recognized her instantly from the picture Rob had handed him the first time they’d met. She was holding a long-stemmed red rose. Ferlin thought that she looked even lovelier in person than in the picture. And he wondered again about what desperation a man would have to be driven to in order to feel he had to arrange for the murder of a woman like that.

  “She was just sittin’ there by herself,” he told the men from the prosecutor’s office. “And she was holdin’ that rose. Just holdin’ that rose. I never will forget that.”

  He didn’t kill her that night either, of course. “I took Greene back to the motel,” he said, “and then I took a ride up toward the, ah, twenty-four-hour restaurant, where, ah, the murder was to take place, and thought that I might wait and see, ah, Marshall enter and see if he would go through with what he said he wanted done. But it was the kind of place where every cop in three counties must stop for a cup of coffee on their shift, and I only stayed there a short period of time and decided, what the heck. You know, it was more just a curiosity on my part.

  “But I got to tell you somethin’ else I always wondered about. I always wondered what they talked about all the way home. I mean, what do you say to your wife when she is already supposed to be dead?”

  Back in Shreveport, he’d gotten a frantic call from Myers, saying Marshall was demanding to know why he’d failed to show up for their “meeting.” That was when he’d invented the picaresque tale about the stolen cars and hitchhikers and auto accidents and missing guns—he couldn’t even remember all the bullshit he’d put into that story.

  In any event, it had not mollified Rob. “Myers called me back,” Ferlin said, “and he says, ‘He is upset. Please give this man a phone number so he won’t keep calling and bothering me.’”

  Finally, Ferlin had agreed to give the number of the Exxon station at Buncombe Road, just off Interstate 20, four miles from his house. He had told Myers to tell Marshall to call him there at 7 P.M. on July 24.

  It wasn’t until 9:49, according to Gladstone’s records, that Marshall had made the call. But he had made it. To that number. Ferlin’s story was checking out in every particular. That call had lasted four minutes.

  “He wanted to know what had happened, what the problem was,” Ferlin said. “Why I didn’t take care of Maria. He had went inside the restaurant, he said, and he waited a good while inside, but he heard no gunshot. I said, ‘Well, weren’t you surprised?’ And he said, ‘Well, yes.’ And I said, ‘Well, all kinds of things happened. We stole the car and had a wreck and I had some other guys with me and two of them got arrested and, ah, we just had to get out of the area as quick as possible.’ And he said, ‘Oh, that’s too bad. But we got to get this thing done.’”

  Then Rob had told him that they’d be taking a vacation and he would not be back until early August. They arranged for Rob to call the same number—the pay phone at the Exxon station on Buncombe Road—on the evening of August 5.

  But Rob had apparently lost the number because Ferlin had waited by that phone for hours and the call never came. Instead, Rob had called Andrew Myers, asking him to relay the message, Ferlin said, that if the “investigation” was completed by Labor Day, “there would be an extra fifteen in it for me.”

  At that point, however, Ferlin had begun to think that he might be pushing his luck. He’d made more than twenty thousand dollars for doing nothing and he’d had a little fun in Atlantic City besides. Maybe the time had come to leave well enough alone. Being an “investigator” had been kind of fun, and it had taught him that people in New Jersey had a lot of money to throw around and got themselves in some godawful messes and sure were stupid to boot, but maybe this was a time not to be greedy. Marshall was a little too crazy and desperate for his taste. Besides, he’d kind of liked Maria when he’d seen her in the casino that night. She’d looked so darned pretty, sitting there all by herself, just holding that rose.

  “I just did not want to get on the road and come back up here,” Ferlin said. So he’d told Myers to pass the message along to Rob that it would be a while before he could get to it.

  Gladstone’s phone records indicated that that call would have been made on Friday, August 31, a date that Myers later confirmed, saying he remembered it exactly because it was his birthday.

  Within twenty-four hours, Ferlin said, he’d received a phone call from a man named Ricky Dew.

  “He said, ‘I need to talk to you right away.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m fixin’ to go out to dinner, can it be later?’ He said, ‘No, it can’t. I need to meet you now. Behind the McDonald’s on Pines Road and I-Twenty.’ I told him, ‘Okay, I’ll be up there in a minute.’”

  Ferlin tried to explain about Ricky Dew. He’d known Ricky for at least fifteen years, since back when he was a cop and Ricky was an auto mechanic.

  But Ricky wasn’t just an auto mechanic. Ricky was into a lot of things. Rattlesnakes (which he hunted for recreation). Silver mining. And banking. It was just that Ricky’s banking habits were somewhat unorthodox, Ferlin explained. Like he tended simply to go in and take the money.

  His was a name that Gladstone had heard mentioned a lot in Shreveport, and Gladstone knew that, among other things, Dew was a prime suspect in more than fifty bank robberies that had been committed since 1981 in northern Louisiana, east Texas, Arkansas and Mississippi.

  Ricky’s was the gang that Ferlin was trying to be part of, while hinting about it to law enforcement authorities at the same time. Thus, it had not been comforting to hear that Ricky wanted to meet with him right away. Behind McDonald’s.

  “One thought I had was, they may be waitin’ up there to take me out.”

  So, he said, he’d told his wife that they wouldn’t be going out to dinner after all. Then he’d taken his .45 from the glove compartment of his Cadillac, where he normally kept it, and he’d laid it on the front seat and he’d headed for the golden arches to see whether it was shooting or talking that Ricky had on his mind.

  As it happened, Ferlin said, it was both.

  “What he said was, ‘I hate to tell you this, but you are in a lot of trouble.’ And I said, ‘Is that right?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, a man out of Dallas has approached me. He wants you taken care of.’ And I said, ‘Why is that?’ But, see, I kind of already knew why. I mean, I hadn’t done anything up north.

  “And Ricky said, ‘He’s put out a seventy-five-thousand-dollar contract on you.’ Ricky told me that he understood that I had not fulfilled a contract that I had taken in New Jersey from a man and the man was willin’ to lay the money out to have me taken care of.

  “This went on for some time,” Ferlin said, “and it was a little upsettin’ to me. I didn’t know that what maybe he did have those kind of connections.”

  “That’s Mr. Marshall?” Gladstone asked.

  “Mr. Marshall,” Ferlin said.

  Then Ferlin explained that a few years earlier a mutual acquaintance had offered him five thousand dollars to kill Ricky, but that instead of doing it, he’d told Ricky about it. The thought occurred to him that maybe Ricky was simply returning the favor. Then he realized that Ricky wasn’t really the favor-returning kind.

  What seemed more likely, as Ferlin thought about it, was that Ricky figured if it was worth seventy-five thousand dollars to someone in New Jersey to go through a middl
eman in Dallas to have Ferlin killed for not killing someone he was supposed to have killed, then killing that someone might wind up being worth even more.

  “So he asked me, ‘Why haven’t you done it?’” Ferlin said.

  And that was a question that posed a problem for Ferlin. The reason he hadn’t done it was that he didn’t really want to kill Maria. Obviously, whoever had put Rob in touch with Andrew Myers at the Riccio party had expected that Myers would be able to supply a man who could solve any sort of problem Marshall might present for solution. And, just as obviously, there were people in Louisiana—Andrew Myers apparently being among them—who had been confident that Ferlin L’Heureux was that sort of man.

  Yet it hadn’t worked out. It had seemed so much easier to Ferlin just to take the client’s money and do nothing. Especially when the client seemed so squirrelly—wanting it done that very first night, in the parking lot of one of the most crowded restaurants north of Atlanta; and then the second time at an all-night diner where half the customers had seemed to be cops on a coffee break.

  Besides, he’d looked at those pictures Rob had showed him. The nice house, the good-looking kids, the woman herself, who looked like the sort of wife a man should kill to get, not kill to get rid of.

  Hell, having their mother murdered was going to be upsetting to those kids. And Ferlin liked kids. He had six of his own of various ages and he tried not to upset them any more than was absolutely necessary in the conduct of his own personal business.

  Then, once he’d actually laid eyes on the woman—sitting all alone there at the table, twirling that red rose in her hands. No way Ferlin had been going to do it that night. Or probably ever, if the choice had been left to him. Only now, it seemed, the choice was somewhat different. It wasn’t even so much a choice anymore as it was a matter of self-defense. Because it sure looked like somebody was going to die: the question was, would it be him or would it be Maria Marshall?

  Not that he’d wanted to get very deeply into that with Ricky. Or even with these Ocean County people now.