Blind Faith

  The members of this new acquisitive class worked hard at stamping out their blue-collar roots, at forgetting where it was they had come from. They built a wall of credit cards to shield their past from view. A lot of Cadillacs were bought, a lot of wives drove all the way to Short Hills so they could shop at Bloomingdale’s instead of Bamberger’s, and a lot of backyards found room for swimming pools even though the ocean was less than ten miles away.

  It became, in fact, a mark of status to brag about how long it had been since one had actually gone to the beach. It was an even bigger mark of status to own a home in Brookside, which was now populated largely by people who didn’t even know (or pretended they didn’t) that Brookside had once been called Long Swamp.

  There were people who bought houses in Brookside and then discovered that they had no money left with which to furnish them. This meant that for months or even years they could not invite anyone to dinner. They couldn’t invite people from their old neighborhood because those were the kind of people that Brookside residents no longer spent time with, and they couldn’t invite their new neighbors because they could not let it be learned that they couldn’t afford proper furniture.

  So instead they joined the country club, which they couldn’t afford either, because at the country club they would be able to socialize with the kind of people they were trying to become.

  The country club crowd took itself very seriously, even though the building looked as if it had been made from LEGOS and even though its members had only a nine-hole golf course to play on and even though they had only each other to try to impress on Saturday night.

  They were, for the most part, middle-aged, restless and bored. They were too far from the cities to be hip, but not far enough away to be oblivious. They turned their backs on New York and Philadelphia because they felt threatened: by the standards of those cities their own quarrels and aspirations were laughable. But, facing inward, they saw only reflections of themselves.

  It was neither an easy nor a rewarding way to live—that barrenness, that abyss covered only by a thin veneer of apparent affluence which they had to strive desperately to maintain.

  Cocaine helped. (Besides, it was expensive enough to be a status symbol.) So did the surface glitter of the Atlantic City gambling casinos. So did spending the night with a spouse who was not your own.

  They laughed when they heard their town called Peyton Place. Each new item of gossip or scandal would bring a clucking and chuckling and shaking of heads. “Imagine that,” they’d say. “Right here in River City.”

  But it was okay. No harm done. We’re all grown-ups. Nobody gets hurt. This is what life in the fast lane is all about. This is what it means to be successful. This is the way they do it on TV.

  The fact is, life in Toms River—at least life as lived by certain members of the Toms River Country Club—was lived at the miniseries level. Only it was a miniseries without an event.

  Until the night Maria Marshall was murdered.

  4

  Once inside the house, Rob headed straight for Sal Coccaro. He seemed less concerned with the emotional state of his sons or in-laws than he did with Sal’s list of phone calls received. He stood in the living room, scanning the fifteen or twenty names.

  “David Rosenberg? At two P.M.?”

  “That’s right,” Sal said.

  “Where did he call from?”

  “I don’t know, Rob. Probably the office. I wasn’t asking people where they were calling from.” David Rosenberg, husband of Felice Rosenberg and formerly a pharmacist, was the manager of Fred Frankel Motors on Route 37, a car dealership owned by Felice’s father, Fred Frankel.

  “Well, what did he say? What did he say?” Both Roby and Chris noticed that their father seemed extremely agitated.

  “Rob, he didn’t say anything. He just asked for you and I said you weren’t here but I’d tell you he called.”

  Rob began to pace back and forth across the living room. Without seeming aware that he was doing so, he slowly crumpled the paper on which Sal had written the names.

  “Sal,” he said. “This is very important. How did David seem?”

  “Rob, I don’t understand.” Sal glanced around the room at his wife, Paula, and Dr. and Mrs. Puszynski, all sitting on the same couch, silently weeping.

  “How did he seem, Sal? Was he warm, was he cold, was he friendly, was he hostile?” Rob’s voice had acquired a new edge of impatience.

  “Well, to tell you the truth, Rob, not that I have the faintest idea why you’re so concerned about it, David seemed very cold. He just asked if you were here and when I said no, he asked what time you’d be back.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him about six or seven o’clock. I should have known better, Rob. I should have known you’d be late, as usual.” Sal, too, had turned his voice up a notch.

  “Did he say he was going to call back?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “Did he say he expected me to call him?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “All right.” Rob sighed and looked around the room. For the first time since entering the house, he seemed aware of the presence of other people. “All right, how about a drink, how about a drink? I think everybody could use a drink.”

  Rob made himself a rum and Coke. Coca-Cola, even without rum, was by far Rob’s favorite drink. Indeed, he seemed addicted to it, drinking, at a minimum, a six-pack a day and often more as he worked in his office until the early hours of the morning.

  “All right,” Rob said. “Sal, Gene, I want the two of you to handle any calls. I’m just not available to talk to anyone.”

  “Not even David?” Sal asked.

  “That’s right, Sal,” Rob said, glaring at him. “Especially not even David.” Then he turned and walked into his office and closed the door.

  The phone continued to ring until almost midnight. Tom Kenyon, the lawyer, who with his wife, Madge, had come by during the afternoon when Rob was gone, called back to ask Sal to look for Rob’s phone directory. He said it should have Andrea Alfonso’s new number in Florida. He said Maria would want her to know what had happened, which did not strike Sal as strange, since he knew Maria and Andrea had been friends.

  Other friends of Maria’s came to the house. Friends from the neighborhood and country club, like Anne Peck, who was married to Burton, a lawyer, and her sister-in-law, Kathy Peck, who was married to Benjamin, a high school principal, and Diane Critelli, who was married to Pete, who owned a car dealership.

  An odd thing about Maria was that while she had many acquaintances and even a number of women who would have described themselves as her friends, she didn’t have any close friends. It was widely agreed that she was an exceptionally warm and caring mother and avidly interested in everything her boys did and that, unlike her husband, who was viewed as testy, pretentious and overly aggressive in both business and social situations, Maria was easy to get along with and seemed to have a genuine interest in other people. (At least in other people who seemed pretty much like herself.)

  But with her, according to the country club consensus, the surface of things, the appearance, mattered most. Intimacy seemed to make her uncomfortable. Emotion was untidy, and Maria had never permitted a hair out of place. It was as if there had been an invisible screen around Maria. You could get only so close and no closer. Too close and you might see a wart. People who had known her for twenty years could not remember ever having seen her perspire. If she’d had a motto, it would have been: “Looking Perfect Is the Best Revenge.” She had always appeared to be the perfect wife, the perfect mother. She and her family had been a symbol of what the good life in Toms River was all about.

  That was what made her murder so upsetting on so many levels. If it could happen to her, despite all her expensive insulation from the less pleasant aspects of reality, then it could happen to any of them, despite their husbands’ incomes and their lifestyle. Thus, whoever had shot Maria Marsha
ll had taken not only a human life but a talisman that, unconsciously, all of them had looked to for protection.

  After giving Sal Coccaro the new number for Andrea Alfonso, Rob emerged from his office and began to play the role of the perfect host, making sure everyone’s drinks were freshened, offering cold cuts, trying to carry on the sort of conversation that might have occurred if Maria had simply been in bed with the flu and friends had stopped by for a drink.

  The only obvious signs that the mother of the house was not just sick but suddenly dead were Chris, curled up on one couch in fetal position, crying uncontrollably; the Puszynskis on the other couch, so dazed and shaken that they might have been survivors of a plane crash; Roby in the kitchen with his hands covering his face, refusing to speak to anyone; and John, the thirteen-year-old, following his father around the living room, hugging him constantly, as if the hugs could bring his mother back.

  Eventually, it became obvious that there was no more that any friends or neighbors could do that night and, in small groups, they departed. Then, one by one, the Puszynskis and the Marshalls went to bed. All three boys lay awake in their separate bedrooms for hours, unable even to cry themselves to sleep.

  Downstairs, Gene Leahy—Uncle Gene, the lawyer who was thirty-eight years old, drove a Mercedes, smoked big cigars and enjoyed a beer or two in the evenings, especially along with a good story, and who could have passed for a ward leader in any Irish neighborhood in Boston, New York or Philadelphia but who, in fact, was senior partner of his own eight-lawyer firm in Wilmington—sat alone in the darkened living room. He was the only person in the house, he knew, who realized why Rob had asked so many questions about David Rosenberg’s phone call.

  Now the question that he sat up asking himself until nearly dawn on September 8 was, what could or should he do about it?

  The Philadelphia Inquirer for Saturday morning ran a brief item in its regional news section under the headline WOMAN SLAIN AT REST AREA ON N.J. PARKWAY. The story described how Maria Marshall had been shot twice and her husband knocked unconscious after they’d pulled into the picnic area to change a flat tire. The story also said Marshall had told investigators he’d been robbed of an undetermined amount of money and mentioned that a spokeswoman for the Ocean County prosecutor’s office had said robbery was the motive in the attack.

  The Asbury Park Press, which paid considerably more attention to doings in Toms River, ran a three-column headline on page one: WOMAN SHOT TO DEATH AT PARKWAY PICNIC SITE. The story quoted the Ocean County prosecutor as saying that while robbery appeared to be a possible motive, he wasn’t yet ruling out others. “We never settle on any one motive in the early part of an investigation,” the prosecutor said. He added that while bullet shell-casings had been found in the front seat of the car, there were not yet any suspects.

  The story went on to say that the Oyster Creek picnic area was unlighted and heavily wooded with scrub oak and pine and that there was a sign at the entrance that forbade parking after dark.

  A spokesman for the New Jersey State Police, whose jurisdiction included the entire length of the parkway, as well as the New Jersey Turnpike and all interstate highways within the state, said that Marshall’s 1981 ivory Eldorado had been impounded for forensic testing and that underwater recovery teams wearing wet suits and snorkels were searching for a weapon or other evidence in the waters of Oyster Creek itself. Anyone who had been traveling the parkway at the time of the murder and who had seen anything unusual was asked to contact the Bass River state police barracks.

  The story concluded by saying that Rob Marshall, in addition to operating an insurance and estate-planning business in Toms River, had served as 1982–83 fund-raising chairman for United Way of Ocean County.

  He was up early on Saturday morning, which was extremely unusual. Normally, Rob worked in his den until 1 or 2 A.M. and then slept until nearly noon. Maria had always said it was the caffeine in all the Coca-Cola he drank that kept him up. He said it was just that he often got his best ideas after midnight. Even when he finally went to bed he would be apt to sit up suddenly and turn on the light so he could write down something he’d just thought of. Eventually, on one of his birthdays, Maria had given him a combination pen and flashlight to make it easier for him to write in bed at night. Like many of the other possessions he’d acquired, it seemed to please him mostly because nobody else in Toms River had one.

  By 7:30, Rob was out the door. It might have been the earliest he’d ever left his house, if one did not count the day before, when the police had come for him at 5 A.M.

  An hour later, Chris emerged. He got in his brother’s yellow Mustang and headed north to Newark Airport to meet Jennifer, his girlfriend, who was arriving from her college in Atlanta. He turned on the car radio and heard a news broadcast describing the death of his mother. He pushed a button to change the station. “Toms River socialite slain on parkway,” an announcer said. “Back in sixty seconds with details.”

  Chris pushed another button, but even as he did so, he heard himself laugh. “Toms River socialite.” His mother would have found that hilarious. When the third station he’d turned to also began to broadcast an update concerning the “parkway slaying,” Chris simply turned the radio off.

  In the silence that enveloped the remainder of his trip, Chris was plagued by the one thought that he least wanted to have: “What if my father was involved?”

  Why was he thinking that? How could he be so disloyal? He knew there was something irrational, even dangerous, and quite possibly unforgivable about such an idea. Chris had never taken a serious psychology course and knew little about the murky and treacherous world of the unconscious, but he had some vague awareness of a Freudian idea concerning a son wanting to sleep with the mother and developing hatred for the father who prevented fulfillment of the child’s desire.

  But that was crap. Chris was a logical, disciplined, rigorously controlled young man (he had never, for example, drunk so much as a can of beer and would not even remain in a room where marijuana was being used). If there were no rational basis for a thought, it was invalid and should therefore be suppressed. The thought that his father might have somehow been involved in the murder of his mother was like the worst, sickest fantasy that some really lame and screwed-up loser might succumb to.

  Chris knew that it was a notion he could never talk about. Not to Roby, not to his uncle Gene, not to Sal Coccaro, who was really a great guy to have around in bad times, not even to Jennifer. He just knew the way they’d look at him: like the whole thing had proven too much, like he was losing it, like they’d better quickly take him to a doctor. And what if his poor father ever heard? Maybe the only thing worse than finding your wife of twenty years shot to death on the front seat of your car (though perhaps the death of a child would prove equally traumatic) was hearing three days later that one of your sons suspected you of involvement in the crime.

  Back at the Marshall house on Crest Ridge Drive, a bleary-eyed and slack-faced Gene Leahy, having just endured his first entirely sleepless night since law school fifteen years earlier, carried a cup of black coffee to the patio that overlooked the backyard pool.

  He knew so much and yet he didn’t know anything. And one of the things he didn’t know was what to do about the things that he did know.

  He was still sitting there an hour later, his first cup of coffee finished, his second forgotten and gone cold, when Rob returned to the house. Rob seemed paler than normal and his typical blend of confidence and arrogance was not evident. He took a seat next to Gene.

  “There’s something I’ve got to tell you,” he said.

  “Good,” Gene said. “And when you’re done, there are a few things I’m going to tell you.”

  Rob blinked twice in quick succession. “What are they?” he said.

  “No,” Gene said. “You go first.”

  Rob, in blue blazer, rep tie, neatly pressed chinos and brown loafers, looked out of place by the pool. Gene, still in the same clot
hes he’d put on in Wilmington more than twenty-four hours earlier, looked as if he wanted to dive in.

  “Gene, I’ve been having an affair.”

  “I know,” Gene said. This was not the response Rob had been expecting. He seemed to turn just one shade paler.

  “You know?”

  “Yes, Rob, I know. You’ve been having an affair with Felice Rosenberg, who lives right down there, about two blocks away, and it’s been going on for at least the past year.”

  Rob jerked forward so quickly that his lawn chair almost tipped over. “How did you know that?”

  “Maria told me.”

  “Maria told you?! What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Rob, do you remember back in June when Sally and I were down in Annapolis for the weekend looking at boats, and I saw that ad in the Inquirer for the sailboat up here?”

  “Of course.”

  “And you went down and made a five-hundred-dollar deposit on it for me and it turned out to be such a piece of shit that I couldn’t believe you’d actually put down the money?”

  Rob nodded.

  “Well, that day, Rob—it was a Monday when we came up to look at the boat—afterwards, we stopped over here to say thanks, anyway, before we went home. You were out and Maria was here alone and she looked like she was about to tear her hair out.”

  “Maria didn’t know about the affair,” Rob said softly, but the remark seemed directed as much at the swimming pool as at Gene.

  “It was so obvious that she was in distress that I asked her what the trouble was and that’s when she told me. She brought me right out here on this deck and showed me a folder filled with American Express receipts that she’d come across in the spring while she was pulling your tax stuff together. I don’t remember the names of all the motels, Rob, but there were two or three on Long Beach Island and one, over and over again—the Best Western in Lakewood.”

  “Those were dinners with clients,” Rob said.

  “Hey,” Gene said. “I’m not Maria. Don’t bother lying to me.”