“I’m sorry, Mr. Frankel, but I’m not going to interrupt the interview,” Gladstone said.
“Didn’t you hear me the first time? I said I’m a close friend of Ray DiOrio’s. I’m going to tell him about this and I guarantee you, Gladstone, there is going to be hell to pay!”
“That’s fine, Mr. Frankel. You call anybody you want to. And as soon as the interview is completed, I’ll let your daughter know that you’re eager to speak to her.”
“You son of a bitch, you might not believe me, but the minute I walk out this door I’m calling DiOrio.”
“That’s fine, Mr. Frankel. If you’ll excuse me now, I’ve got a few calls to make myself.”
In early evening, McGuire and Mancuso came into Gladstone’s office to report on their session with Felice. Their impression, they said, was that she knew more than she was telling. Gladstone was not surprised to hear this.
Marshall, when asked, had denied he was having an affair. That, apparently, had been a lie. And now it turned out that it was not only an affair, but one that soon would have resulted in both parties’ leaving their spouses. And it turned out that Marshall had been so heavily in debt that, months earlier, his wife had seriously explored the possibility of filing for bankruptcy. And it also turned out that he’d embarked upon a frantic quest for life insurance on his wife the very week she was murdered. He ran through these circumstances with McGuire and Mancuso. Then one other thought occurred to him.
“Felice works at Seaview, right?”
The two other detectives nodded.
“That means she drives past the murder site twice a day. That would give her a chance to know it pretty well. To know just how dark and secluded it was.”
“But she wasn’t there,” McGuire said. “She was up in Bricktown having dinner with her father and a bunch of other people, and boy, does she remember every single drop of salad dressing.”
“She wouldn’t have to have been there when it happened to know it was a good place to get the job done,” Gladstone said. “It’s just a thought, just a thought. Incidentally, her old man was just in here. I’m surprised you didn’t hear him. He sounded like a wounded water buffalo. By now he’s on the phone to Ray DiOrio, complaining that his daughter’s not getting enough respect.”
“We were respectful,” McGuire said. “We were very respectful. We fingerprinted her with the utmost of respect.”
“We said ‘please,’ ‘thank you,’ the whole bit,” Mancuso said.
“She wants respect,” Gladstone said, “maybe she ought to hire Ray DiOrio as her lawyer.”
The three of them laughed about that.
But then, after the others had left, Gladstone began to ponder the implications of Felice’s mention of the name of Patsy Racine.
His real name was Patsy Ragazzo and, among other things, he ran a restaurant called Patsy Racine’s Rainbow Room in Toms River. He was also, Gladstone knew, at least a minor-league figure on the fringes of organized crime. The question in Gladstone’s mind was, how come he was a friend of Felice’s? Or at least a good enough acquaintance so that when Robert O. Marshall asked her for the name of someone who might assist him in disposing of his wife—just kidding, of course—Patsy Racine/Ragazzo was the name she came up with?
Well, it wasn’t so strange that she would have had some name to give him. If he’d tried, Marshall could undoubtedly have come up with a name on his own. The Mafia was not exactly a low-profile presence in Toms River.
It had started, like everything else, with the real estate boom in the midsixties, when Ocean County suddenly became a land of opportunity for illegal as well as legal enterprise. That was when Vinny Gigliotti had been sent down from North Jersey by “Big Top” Tornicelli of the Lucchese crime family, to organize a gambling and loan-sharking operation.
Like everyone else in Toms River, Gigliotti got caught up in the real estate boom and, in addition to his bookmaking and loansharking, he started a contracting business. In fact, he built a number of the town’s more expensive homes, including many in Brookside that came to be occupied by members of his extended family.
Gigliotti himself had lived only a few blocks away from Robert Marshall. He had, that is, until his untimely demise back in June, when three men in ski masks had shown up at his construction company office on Route 9. Ski masks in June were strange enough, but what even more quickly caught the eyes of witnesses (who very soon thereafter made themselves scarce) was that the three men in ski masks were carrying golf clubs. The men had begun to swing the golf clubs at Vinny Gigliotti. They kept swinging until he was dead. Then they walked out the front door, climbed into a gray Lincoln Continental, and drove away. No one happened to catch the license number. And no one had ever happened to get arrested for the crime.
Gigliotti had been one of three first cousins in Toms River. A second, Vito Quadrozzi, was a lawyer who had been, for a time, a municipal judge. His days on the bench had come to an end in 1980 when the proprietor of a pornography shop and homosexual sex club in Bricktown had been shot to death through the living room window of his home, and the three .38-caliber revolvers used in the shooting were found in a shoebox in Judge Quadrozzi’s basement. He explained that he had simply been asked to hold a package for a friend.
Quadrozzi’s son, Gino, was also a resident of Brookside. In 1979, he and his cousin, Michael Gigliotti, son of Vinny Gigliotti, had opened a beachfront nightclub called the Key West Lounge.
As it happened, the Key West Lounge became the chief distribution center for a cocaine-trafficking ring headed by Gino Quadrozzi that sold more than seven million dollars’ worth of the drug annually in Ocean County.
The ring included such Toms River notables as John Maloney, former operator of Sultan’s Delight Pleasure Spa in Bricktown, and Richard Bianchi, owner of River City Automotive, another Route 37 car dealership.
Also included were a former assistant football coach at Toms River East High School and a recent graduate of Toms River East named Joseph Maselli, who, when once stopped in a school hallway and found to be carrying more than five thousand dollars in cash, explained that it was “lunch money.”
Maselli turned out to be the brother of Gino Quadrozzi’s wife. In all, five other members of the Quadrozzi and Maselli families were charged with being part of the ring, including Joseph Maselli’s mother. Gladstone remembered the joke that Maselli was one teenager who didn’t have to worry about his mother going through his pockets and finding drugs: she was probably the one who put them there.
The other joke was that, at River City Automotive, when they told you a car came fully equipped they really meant it. Bags of cocaine, available for quick sale, were kept stashed above removable panels of the main showroom ceiling. Of the fifty-seven people charged with being part of the ring, twenty-one were River City employees.
The other of Vinny Gigliotti’s cousins was the quiet one: John Riccio. He owned a restaurant on the boardwalk but his primary business was sanitation. He had affiliations with most of the private garbage haulers between Asbury Park and Atlantic City. He, too, lived in the Brookside neighborhood, Gladstone recalled. In fact, Riccio lived only three blocks away from Robert Marshall.
* * *
Gladstone’s phone rang. It was Fred Frankel, speaking in a much softer voice. He said he wanted to apologize for his behavior that afternoon and told Gladstone he had spoken to his daughter and had learned of the affair. He also stressed that he could personally account for her whereabouts during the hours immediately preceding the crime and he assured Gladstone that both he and his daughter would do anything they could to assist the prosecutor’s office in its inquiries. The name of Raymond DiOrio was not mentioned.
Also, that evening, Detective Mancuso got a phone call from Felice. In fact, he got two. In the first, she said she wanted to change a statement she’d made during her interview. Now, she said, she remembered that Rob had, in fact, told three or four people about the affair, including lawyers Patrick Reilly, Jay Jar
vis (who, along with Minsky, had been representing her that afternoon) and Tom Kenyon (in whom Maria had also confided). She added that Rob had even asked her to call Jarvis and inform him of Maria’s death that morning, after he had called to tell her.
Then she said, “Don’t you see? It would be stupid to suspect Rob of killing his wife, with Rob knowing that all those people knew he was having this affair.”
After he’d hung up it occurred to Mancuso to wonder if she had, in fact, “forgotten” those facts that afternoon, or whether it wasn’t more likely that in a subsequent conversation with Marshall he’d instructed her to call back with the new information, as well as with the theory that it somehow should relieve him of suspicion.
Ten minutes later, Mancuso received his second call. This time, Felice told him that she’d forgotten yet another name—that of a divorce lawyer, Martin Manning, whom Rob had consulted several months earlier and whom he had informed of the affair.
On Monday morning, September 10, Michael DeWitt, the lawyer from Bricktown, brought the Maria Marshall file to Gladstone’s office. He seemed a calm and deliberate man whose disposition, Gladstone sensed, had probably been well suited for a nervous, troubled woman just starting the plunge into the brief dark side of her life.
DeWitt called Gladstone’s attention to a note that Maria had sent him on July 23.
It said, “Dear Mike—More ‘stuff’ for the file. Holding my own, pray for me.” Attached were three telephone numbers, each in the 318 area code.
“Three one eight,” Gladstone said. “Where’s that?”
“Louisiana,” Michael DeWitt said. “Western Louisiana. Not New Orleans. Shreveport.”
“Why did she give you these numbers?”
“They worried her. You might even say they frightened her. But then she went on vacation and only came back to pay her bill.”
“‘Holding my own, pray for me,’” Gladstone read aloud. “She sounds frightened.”
“She was a lovely woman,” DeWitt said. “One of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet.”
“But a frightened woman in late July,” Gladstone said. “Frightened by phone numbers from Louisiana.”
“Or maybe,” DeWitt said, “by the people at the other end.”
Gladstone placed the file in a desk drawer. “It all depends,” he said, “on who they are. Don’t worry. We’ll find out.”
As soon as DeWitt left, Gladstone had McGuire contact New Jersey Bell headquarters and arrange to obtain a complete printout of all toll calls to and from Rob Marshall’s home and office for the past six months.
By late afternoon, McGuire was back, document in hand and a big grin on his bearded face. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said. “Where are those numbers? Those three numbers you got from DeWitt?”
Gladstone took them out of his desk drawer.
“Look at this,” McGuire said, standing over Gladstone’s desk. “This first one. There’s got to be twenty calls back and forth between Marshall’s house and this number, starting in June. And look at this—this last one, September fifth. That’s the day before she was killed.
“This other number shows up at least ten or twelve times. And the third is there a couple of times, too.”
“So what’s it mean, Al?”
“It means Marshall was doing a lot of business in Louisiana all summer long. Business that worried his wife. And business that ended the day before she got killed.”
“Hardware business,” Gladstone said.
“What?” McGuire looked puzzled.
“That first number,” Gladstone said, “5314. That’s the number—we learned this afternoon—of the Caddo Hardware Store in Shreveport, Louisiana.”
“A hardware store?” McGuire said.
“Yup. And this second one that shows up so much? That’s the home number of a Shreveport resident named Andrew Myers. And, McGuire, being that you’re such a hot-shit detective, I’ll bet you can figure out where Mr. Myers is employed.”
“Caddo Hardware?” McGuire said.
“You got it. Now if I can just get somebody in the Shreveport Police Department to answer the phone, maybe I can persuade them to send somebody over there to find out from Mr. Myers just what kind of hardware Rob-O was so interested in.”
“Maybe a forty-five?” McGuire said.
“Could be. They sell them. Hell, I think I could’ve bought one over the phone this afternoon.”
“Yeah, but if you had,” McGuire said, “you wouldn’t have had to have another twenty-three conversations about it. What about the third number?”
“Pay phone at an Exxon station ten miles west of Shreveport. That one I haven’t figured out yet.”
Gladstone stayed up late that night, trying to figure them all out. For hours, he studied the printout of Marshall’s calls, but the significance, if any, was hidden in a code he did not yet know how to decipher. In addition to the abundance of Louisiana calls, however, three others in particular caught his eye—all from the morning of September 6, the last day of Maria Marshall’s life.
At 9:46 A.M. Marshall had called Felice’s number at Seaview Regional.
At 9:48 A.M. she’d called him back from a different phone. That conversation had lasted ten minutes.
In her interview on Friday, she had not mentioned either of those conversations. And she hadn’t called Mancuso that night, either, to say that she’d suddenly remembered them.
The third call in which Gladstone was especially interested had come to Marshall at 9:59 A.M., almost the moment he’d hung up from talking to Felice. In fact, given that Marshall had more than one line in his office and a secretary to answer the phone, he might have still been talking to Felice when the new call came in. Conceivably, it might even have been the new call that prompted him to end his conversation with Felice, in order that he might receive it.
This call had been placed from a coin box in Atlantic City. A further check with the phone company disclosed that the pay phone in question was located at a motel called the Airport Motor Inn.
Early Tuesday morning, Gladstone called O’Brien into his office.
“Hey, Danny,” he said, “take a ride down to Atlantic City. Go to the Airport Motor Inn. Check their registrations for the first week in September. In particular, see if just by chance there might have been somebody from in or near Shreveport, Louisiana, staying there on the nights of September fifth or sixth.”
O’Brien called in just before noon.
“Guess what, Bobby.”
“There was.”
“That your guess?”
“That’s my first guess. If you say no, then my second guess is that there wasn’t.”
“No second guess needed, pal. We’ve got an Ernest Grandshaw, Jockey Club Lane, Shreveport, Louisiana, operating a 1980 Cadillac with Texas plates. He checked in at seven oh five on the morning of Thursday, September sixth, and checked out the next day. I should say ‘they.’ Grandshaw paid the rate for double occupancy.”
By Tuesday afternoon, much of the insurance information had come in.
In addition to two separate $100,000 policies on the life of Maria Marshall issued by the Provident Mutual Insurance Company of Philadelphia—Rob’s company—some years earlier, there was enough to cause small beads of perspiration to break out on Bob Gladstone’s brow.
—A $500,000 policy on the life of Maria Marshall issued by the Banner Life Insurance Company of Rockville, Maryland, in September 1983.
—A $500,000 policy on the life of Maria Marshall issued by the Manhattan Life Insurance Company of New York City in February 1984.
—A $100,000 policy on the life of Maria Marshall issued by the Fireman’s Fund Company of San Rafael, California, in February 1984.
—A $100,000 policy on the life of Maria Marshall issued by the Minnesota Mutual Life Insurance Company of St. Paul, Minnesota, in April 1984.
That put the total at $1.4 million, not even counting the $100,000 worth of coverage that Rob had ru
shed into effect on September 6. And $1.2 million of it, Gladstone noted, had been obtained after the affair with Felice had begun.
“Jesus Christ,” Gladstone said to himself. “No wonder the poor woman was frightened.”
Bob Gladstone was a loving and considerate husband under most any circumstances, but that night when he got home, he went directly to his pretty wife, Amy, an elementary school teacher, and gave her an especially tight hug.
“What’s that for?”
“Don’t ask,” Gladstone said. “You don’t want to know.”
She smiled at him. “I get it. You’re making some progress with the Marshall case.”
“Amy,” he said. “I sure am happy you’re my wife. And you know what? Just to celebrate, let’s cancel all the life insurance we’ve got.”
On Wednesday, September 12, Gladstone learned from phone company records that eight minutes after Rob Marshall had received the call from the Airport Motor Inn, someone had made a call to that pay phone from a pay phone at a 7-Eleven store located only five minutes from Marshall’s office.
“Do you get the feeling,” he asked Dan O’Brien, “that we ought to be thinking about heading for Shreveport?”
“I get the feeling,” O’Brien said, “that Rob-O ought be to thinking about heading for the Falkland Islands.”
“Are you kidding?” Gladstone said. “You’ve met the man. He’s a pillar of the community. Pillars don’t run, Dan. They crumble.”
On Thursday, Gladstone received a report from the credit department at Harrah’s Marina that showed Marshall had made twenty-five visits to the casino between the first of the year and September 6. He could have made others, of course, and he could have frequented other casinos—Gladstone had men in Atlantic City checking that out—but in order to qualify for the “comps” that meant so much to him, Marshall had apparently made a point of letting Harrah’s know when he was there and betting actively.
The records showed that he’d played blackjack for ninety-three hours and seven minutes during the course of his twenty-five recorded visits, and that his average bet had been $131. He had a credit limit of $10,000, but owed the casino only $3,000 at the time of Maria’s death.