Blind Faith

by Joe McGinniss

  Pretensions! To Kelly, that was one of the most vulgar words in the English language. When Kelly worked out (which he did often, for he was proud of his weight lifter’s build) he worked out at Lou’s Gym on Brick Boulevard. None of these Toms River “health salons” with tinted glass and carpeted floors that looked like a car dealer’s showroom. And none of this jazzercise crap, either. You work out, you work up a sweat, you go home.

  “At Lou’s,” Kelly liked to brag, “they don’t even have a shower.” He showered at home, and he showered the way his father had taught him: the military shower. You turn the hot water on and once you’re wet you turn it off. Then you soap yourself up. Then you turn the hot water on again to rinse off. Then you’re done. That’s it. Next. In a house with eight kids you learn fast not to waste the hot water, and even now that he was a thirty-nine-year-old bachelor living alone (though with a steady female companion who lived only ten minutes away), Kelly still showered that way.

  And if somebody gave him a million dollars, he wouldn’t move to Toms River from Bricktown. Bricktown. Kelly even liked the name of the place. No way anybody was going to get pretentious living in a town with a name like that. It sounded like a slum neighborhood in Belfast. He could picture skinny, pale Catholic kids tossing a bomb through the door of a Protestant pub and then running like hell to get away. Tough kids. Smart kids. Like himself. All they needed was a little red meat, a little time with the weights, build themselves up. Kids like that, they ever came over here, you could be damned sure it’d be Lou’s Gym they’d work out at, not one of those faggoty Jacuzzi joints where the country club ladies went to wiggle those extra inches off their fannies. And you could be damned sure it would be Bricktown they’d live in, not Toms River.

  The most hilarious article that Kelly had ever read in the newspaper in his whole life, he thought, was the one in the Asbury Park Press about the fortieth birthday party held for some dame named Rosenberg who was the daughter of Fred Frankel the car dealer. He remembered reading the story and laughing out loud and then passing the paper over to his girlfriend, Alice.

  “Hey, Alice,” he’d said, “Take a look at this. What a bunch of smackers.”

  He also remembered reading the story in the Press about the murder of Maria Marshall. It was a Saturday morning and he was sitting on his back deck, overlooking a marshy section of the bay in which he’d just placed several crab traps. His mother and his brother were coming down that afternoon and he was looking forward to plenty of crabs and beer.

  The story was on the front page. It took him a minute, but then he remembered the name. “Hey, Alice,” he said. She was inside, fixing breakfast. “Hey, Alice, I know this guy. This is that flamer that sold me that mutual fund the first month I moved to town.”

  “What are you talking about, Kevin?”

  “This story here in the paper. About the murder. Didn’t you read the paper this morning, Alice?”

  “No, Kevin, you took it right out there with you on the deck before I even saw the front page.”

  “Yeah, well, wait a minute, wait a minute. Let me finish reading this.” So he went back to his deck and sat in the sun and read the rest of the story.

  Then he stood, and stepped into his kitchen and tossed the newspaper on the table.

  “Hey, Alice,” he said. “Read that. I’ll tell you right now—that guy’s story is bullshit.”

  Which is pretty much what Kevin Kelly’s mother said later that afternoon when he showed her the story. “My mother,” he said later, “you got to understand. You could sell my mother the Brooklyn Bridge. But she took one look at that story and she said, ‘Baloney.’ Then she said, ‘The guy did it, what do you think, Kev?’”

  And Kevin Kelly had said, “Yeah. With a story like that he had to have done it. Just wait and see. I’ll bet there are going to be two things coming out in this story. One, the guy had a girlfriend. Two, I bet there’s a shitload of insurance on the wife.”

  So when it finally came time for the prosecutor to explain to Kevin Kelly what this case was that he’d be trying, there were not too many things he had to say twice.

  The Marshall case would be Kelly’s last as an Ocean County assistant prosecutor—he was about to leave the office to devote full time to his private practice. And it was the first one he’d ever asked to try.

  To him, Rob Marshall personified all that Kelly found loathsome about the life in Toms River he scorned: the snobbery, the pretentiousness, the phoniness, the shallowness, the greed. He thought it would be a kick to get Rob Marshall convicted for murder. And so, for the first time ever, he went to the prosecutor and asked for a case. The prosecutor gave it to him willingly. For one thing, Kelly was the best trial lawyer on his staff, and, for another, Kelly understood the concept of loyalty and all that it could sometimes entail.

  Through the late fall and early winter of 1985–86, Rob Marshall became the focus of Kevin Kelly’s life, and the more he learned about the man and his activities the more he came to detest him.

  More than ever before in his career as an assistant prosecutor, Kelly would be taking with him into the courtroom not just a sense of outrage at the crime that had been committed, but genuine revulsion for the criminal. At least for one of them. Toward Ricky Dew, he felt indifference. Dew, in his view, was simply a gun for hire. A professional. If it hadn’t been Dew it would have been someone else. It was Rob Marshall who had knowingly caused the death of his wife, and he’d done it for the basest of motives: lust and greed.

  Kelly intended to make him pay.

  And still, despite all that buildup of emotion, it was not until the morning of January 14, when he walked into the courtroom and laid eyes upon Marshall for the first time since their lunch at Mr. Steak years before, that Kelly felt the full force of his hatred for the man.

  For there he sat, in blazer and khakis, pale, subdued, quite a bit thinner, his hairline having receded even further, but wearing his gold wedding band!

  There was something so cynical, so unfeeling, so blatantly manipulative about that act—after what he’d done to her, that he could sit there in court and wear the ring she’d placed on his finger on their wedding day just to try to milk sympathy from the jury—that Kelly had to choke back the impulse to walk over to the defense table where Marshall sat and tear the ring from Rob’s finger himself.

  Instead, he said to himself, You’ll pay for that, you son of a bitch. Along with everything else, before this is over, you’ll pay for that.

  Two weeks later, however, after the jury had finally been chosen, when the time came for him to make his opening statement, Kevin Kelly had gotten a much firmer grip on the anger he felt toward Marshall. Indeed, in his opening remarks he seemed subdued to the point of indifference. He wore his glasses and a dark necktie and a very conservative suit and he stood straight and still, as if he were back at St. Benedict’s and had just been called upon to recite a poem to the class.

  This was, of course, a carefully calculated pose. Kelly knew that juries liked to sympathize with lawyers they felt just a little bit sorry for, and, once he’d observed his opponent, he had decided to play his off-the-rack look for all it was worth.

  Carl Seely had spent the two weeks prior to trial in the Caribbean and thus brought to court not only the slicked-back hair and shiny gold Rolex and the suit that looked as if it could have cost a thousand dollars, but also a tan that was the envy of every New Jersey resident—jurors included—who could not afford a winter vacation.

  So Kelly delivered his half-hour opening in a monotone and riddled it with all the confusing dates and names and places and insurance policy amounts and didn’t even try to explain what anything meant. He wanted it to seem, at this point, as if maybe he didn’t quite understand what he was doing; as if, perhaps, he’d been thrust into this courtroom and this case on short notice, maybe because a more senior man had taken ill, and he was just going to try to do the best he could, but, really, nobody should be expecting very much.

&n
bsp; But there was one point he did want to make clear right from the start. A deal had been made in this case. The state had made a deal with Ferlin L’Heureux.

  Making deals with accused murderers who are willing to talk in return for lessened punishment is a practice that some might view with disapproval. Kelly wanted to be certain that the jury understood the need for it in this case.

  The murder of Maria Marshall, he told them quite unemotionally, had been “a terrible, terrible act.” It had also been the result of a conspiracy. “Normally,” he said, “conspiracies are shrouded in secrecy, silence and furtiveness. Rarely, if ever, does anyone outside the circle of conspirators become privy to its details.”

  In order to find out the truth about what had happened to Maria Marshall, he said, that circle had had to be broken. The state had done it by making its arrangement with Ferlin L’Heureux.

  There. He had finished reciting. He sat down. A nice boy, certainly, but clearly not the brightest in the class.

  Carl Seely might not have been the brightest either, but he would definitely have gotten the gold star for good grooming. He wasted no time going after what he perceived as the weak link in the case against Rob: the plea-bargain arrangement with L’Heureux.

  “A pact with the devil,” he called it. “And but for that pact, Rob Marshall, who was a respected member of his community, would not be here. And I want to tell you one other thing now at the outset. Rob Marshall will take the stand and Rob Marshall will testify. I will tell you right now, and I will honor this commitment and so will Rob—he will get on this stand and he will testify and he will tell you how he, too, in addition to his wife and his three children, is a victim of the treachery of Ferlin L’Heureux.”

  It had a nice ring to it: respected family man versus the devil. Rob Marshall as a victim, too.

  “Now, to get into Rob a little bit,” Seely went on, “Rob was born on December sixteenth, 1939. He is now—”

  But Kelly was on his feet with a pained expression on his face. “Excuse me, Judge. I’m sorry to interrupt. I just wish we’d get into the facts of this case. I mean, 1939…”

  Judge Greenberg was possessed of both a calm demeanor and a quick mind. He had about him the reassuring aura of the pediatrician you were never afraid to go to as a child. If he had bad news to give or an unpleasant procedure to perform, you knew it really would hurt him more than it hurt you. Indeed, he seemed as if he’d have been very comfortable residing in a Norman Rockwell painting, one of those suffused with the spirit of fairness and kindness and warmth. On the bench, he was a man who never raised his voice, because he didn’t have to.

  “Well,” he said now, displaying also a gift for understatement, “it would not be impermissible to show the age of a defendant, so that comment is not beyond the bounds of propriety. I’ll overrule the objection.”

  As, of course, he had to. Kelly could hardly deny Seely the right to tell the jury how old his client was, but Kelly had known that before he stood. His purpose had been twofold: to let Seely know that the part-time prosecutor from Ocean County, even if he acted like a schoolboy to the jury, wasn’t going to let the slick Philadelphia lawyer skate all over him, and, second, to distract everybody for a moment, so that the notion of Rob as a victim just like Maria would not take hold.

  If Kelly had had L’Heureux as the albatross around his neck for the opening, Seely had one, too: Felice. And so, after giving Rob’s date of birth and fifteen minutes of further biographical detail, he confronted it.

  “Rob was involved in an affair,” he said. “We’re not proud of it. Rob is certainly not proud of it. But that is a fact that we are not going to deny. Felice Rosenberg, I anticipate, will be a witness in this case and will, in essence, confirm that which we now admit, and that is that she and Rob had a relationship. What we are denying, most vehemently, is that Rob had anything to do with the death of his wife.”

  Ricky Dew had his own lawyer, a man named Nathan Baird, who had been one of New Jersey’s leading criminal defense lawyers for twenty-five years.

  Baird was a tall man of ample girth. He had a jowly face, a quick wit, a powerful voice and an extensive vocabulary. White-haired, in his early sixties and attired always in a rumpled three-piece suit, Baird looked the part of the old warhorse, whose many battles before the bar had left him seasoned, mellowed, perhaps scarred just a trifle, but possessed of both tolerance and wisdom in full measure. Not that he couldn’t be a mean son of a bitch, too, if the occasion required.

  And there sat Ricky Dew himself, dressed in suit and necktie for purposes of the trial, and utterly blank-faced. He stared straight ahead expressionlessly as if this whole enterprise did not concern him in the least.

  Baird stepped forward to intone: “A famous patriot once said, ‘Give me liberty or give me death.’ In the case now before you, Ferlin L’Heureux has said, ‘Give me liberty and give them death.’”

  He proceeded to point out, briefly but clearly, that all the evidence the state had accumulated in the case, all the phone records and insurance policies and casino credit reports and American Express bills and motel registration cards and everything else—all of it—concerned only one of the two defendants in the case and it did not happen to be Ricky Dew.

  The whole story, Baird said, could well be true. He didn’t know. Maybe Marshall had conspired with L’Heureux to murder Maria Marshall and maybe the conspiracy had led to her death. Maybe it happened that way and maybe it didn’t. But either way, Ricky Dew, this mild-mannered, well-dressed family man and auto mechanic, had nothing to do with it and there wasn’t one shred of evidence to prove he did.

  If you want a killer, Baird suggested, you need look no further than L’Heureux. He’d had the motive, he’d had the opportunity, he’d had the car, he’d had the gun, he’d had it all. The only reason he wasn’t on trial for murder, Baird said, was that the state needed his testimony in order to win a conviction against Marshall. And they couldn’t make a deal with him if he’d been the shooter. So he’d had to invent a shooter for them. And for some reason unknown to any man on earth but Ferlin, he’d fixed upon Ricky Dew.

  Well, said Baird, one unsupported statement of a proven liar who had, in this instance, every reason to lie, didn’t seem much of a reason to drag a man fifteen hundred miles away from his home and lock him up for fourteen months until they could get around to trying him. But nobody ever said life was fair. What would be fair would be this trial. And in a fair trial there was no way that the guilt of Ricky Dew could be established.

  “I am astonished,” Baird said, “truly astonished at the paucity of evidence against my client. And I suspect that you will be, too.”

  21

  Roby had been present for the opening statements, but Chris had remained at Lehigh. They spoke by telephone that night.

  “What did you think?” Chris asked.

  “I think I wish Dad had Mr. Baird as his lawyer.”

  “If he’s innocent, Roby, it shouldn’t matter.”

  “Don’t start the civics-class bullshit again.”

  “But what about the prosecutor? What about Kelly?”

  “Oh, he looks like a real jerk. A zero. He just stood up there and rattled out a lot of mumbo jumbo.”

  “Somehow, Rob, when I pick up the Philadelphia Inquirer tomorrow morning, I don’t think that’s what they’ll say.”

  “It’s just a lot of phone bills and receipts, Chris, just like Dad always said. It’s all circumstantial. And that’s all it will be. Until they drag out their paid liar, L’Heureux. You know, Chris, it would have been nice if you could have been there.”

  “Why? To hear a lot of mumbo jumbo?”

  “No. For Dad. To show some of your famous support.”

  “Roby, every day since he’s been in jail I have written Dad a letter. Every day. And do you want to start counting how many times you visited him last summer compared to me? No. No, you were the one with the big party over at the beach that couldn’t wait. And I was the o
ne who had to go down there and tap on the glass. ‘Hi, Dad, it’s me, Chris. Just like old times. Except they’ve got you so locked up I can’t even hug you. I can only kiss the six-inch-thick bulletproof-glass window in the steel door they’ve got you locked up behind. And I can only talk to you on this shitty little intercom phone. And that may be the way it is for the rest of my life.’ And then I go home and sit up with John while he cries. While you spend the night on the beach, drowning in six kegs of beer.”

  “Let’s not start that again,” Roby said. “I was there today, Chris, and I’m backing Dad all the way.”

  “Yeah. You and John and Tessie McBride. And the rest of the world is wrong, including our former uncle Sal—remember Uncle Sal, Roby? He’s no longer welcome in the house, is he? Just because he hasn’t joined the team. Just because maybe, like me, he’s interested in what the facts turn out to be.”

  “Chris, I love Sal. I’ll never forget how he helped me. But he just lost faith in Dad. He just lost faith. Like you’re losing faith. And yes, you’re right. Tessie doesn’t want him around.”

  “And all of a sudden it’s what Tessie wants that matters. It’s Tessie who’s running our lives.”

  “You have to admit, Chris, since she moved in at Christmas she has been a tremendous help.”

  “She’s been a tremendous pain in the ass is what she’s been. All this ‘Trust in the Lord’ shit. After we’d seen her, what, maybe once in five years before Mom died?”

  “So? She and Mom didn’t get along.”

  “That’s because Mom had good taste. And now that she’s dead Tessie has moved right in to take her place. Just like Mrs. Rosenberg was supposed to. If you want to know the truth, Roby, it gives me the creeps.”

  “Then I guess you’re not going to want to hear the latest.”

  There was a pause. After a certain point, you come to feel that all the unpleasant surprises are already out of the bag, and when someone says to you, “You aren’t going to want to hear the latest,” it gives you a chill down the spine and a dry mouth and a rapid increase in heart rate all at once, and you know instinctively that, yes, that’s correct, you are not going to want to hear the latest.