“Dinners with clients,” Rob repeated, “and it was none of her business, she had no business snooping through my desk.”
“Right, and that’s apparently what you told her when she confronted you. In fact, Maria said you blew up. Said you scared the hell out of her, the way you started screaming. But she wasn’t stupid, Rob. Maria might have been naive, she might have led a sheltered and overprotected life, but Maria was not a stupid woman.”
Rob kept glancing over his shoulder, as if afraid that someone was eavesdropping on their conversation.
“She also showed me the phone bills, Rob. Forty, fifty calls a month to the same number down in Peterboro, which happens to be the number of Seaview Regional High School, where your friend Mrs. Rosenberg just happens to be assistant principal. Rob, she was not a stupid woman.”
“Why did she tell you all this?”
“Because she loved you, Rob. And she was afraid she was losing you. And she wanted me to try to help her save her marriage.”
Gene stood up. He walked to the edge of the deck and pointed toward the driveway. “You know your little closets, those little cubbyhole things right there by the back door, that you use for storing boating gear and all that crap?”
Rob was nodding, but absently, as if his mind already were elsewhere.
“She showed me what you’d stashed in there, Rob. An extra toiletries kit, toothbrush, toothpaste, the whole bit. Plus a little cologne for you and a little perfume, I guess, for Mrs. Rosenberg? And tapes, Rob. Cassettes with love songs on them. But not songs Maria had ever heard you play.”
Rob stood up, too. “This was none of your business,” he said, almost indignantly. “Maria had no right to discuss any of this with you.”
“Rob, every time she tried to bring it up with you, you told her she was losing her mind, you told her she should get psychiatric help, you told her she was having a nervous breakdown.”
“I suppose she told you that, too?”
“Yes, Rob, she did. Do you remember when I came back here in August, just after you got back from that little family vacation in Michigan?”
“Yes. You and I went out on the bay.”
“And then we docked at that restaurant, PJ’s. And we spent the afternoon boozing. Rob, I was trying to get you loose enough to where you’d admit to me that you were having the affair. Maria thought, if you’d only admit it to someone then maybe she could get you to talk to her. But it didn’t work. You were stonewalling. In fact, it seemed to me—and I told Maria this the next day—that you weren’t even there, mentally. You were someplace far away.”
“I did talk to you,” Rob said. “I told you I was depressed, bored with my work. I remember saying that I just didn’t see any challenges left in my life. And I also admitted that we were having financial difficulties.”
Gene laughed. “‘Financial difficulties’? You told me, to use your exact phrase, that you were ‘in debt up to your eyeballs and sinking fast.’ And you blamed it on Maria’s spending.”
“It’s true, Gene. She had to have everything. She spent money in the most irresponsible ways.”
“Don’t start, Rob. Don’t even start in about Maria. In fact, why don’t you sit down again? I’ve got a few more things to tell you.”
Rob sat. Gene walked back across the deck until he was standing almost directly in front of Rob. He looked down. He said, “Rob. You signed Maria’s name on a one-hundred-thousand-dollar home equity loan application.”
Rob looked up. “What are you talking about?” His voice was almost a whisper.
“Maria found those loan documents in your desk. She saw that you had signed her name.”
Rob stood again. “Listen, Gene, I can explain that very easily. I had a remarkable opportunity to buy stock in our local cable television company. It could have been an extremely lucrative proposition. But I knew Maria wouldn’t understand. She’d get nervous, be afraid we could somehow lose the house. You know, Gene, Maria was completely unsophisticated in matters of finance.”
“Yeah, but she knew her own signature when she saw it.”
“We also had a number of outstanding loans. Maria had been overspending and I had been trying to keep up. The home equity loan allowed us to consolidate the others at a much more favorable interest rate, but that’s not the kind of thing Maria could understand either.”
“Listen, Rob. Maria knew all about your debts and she was just as worried as you were. The overdue bills, the installment loans, the personal loans you’d taken out, then you signing her name on the home equity loan. Maria was scared to death. She didn’t know where all the money was going. You’re making a hundred and twenty-five, a hundred and thirty thousand a year and there’s not a damned thing to show for it except debt.”
Gene motioned to the deck chairs. “Let’s both sit down again. I’m not quite finished yet.”
They sat. But Rob’s physical movements had suddenly become awkward and disjointed, almost as if he were a life-sized marionette.
“Maria called me on Tuesday,” Gene said quietly, leaning forward now. “She sounded more upset than I’d ever heard her before. She said everything was coming to a head and that she was, to use her phrase, ‘truly worried.’ I asked her about what, and she wouldn’t say.”
“This is preposterous!” Rob said. “The woman was having a nervous breakdown.”
“She said she was finally ready to confront you but she was afraid to do it alone. She asked me to be with her and I agreed. I was planning to come over Monday morning, Rob. Maria and I were going to sit down with you and she was going to tell you everything she knew.
“Then I was going to remind you of all you’d be losing if you kept on the way you were going. Your reputation, Rob, which seems to concern you so much. That civic status that’s such a big deal to you. Your precious country club. If Maria divorced you, or if you left her because of Felice, they’d either throw you out or laugh you out and it wouldn’t really matter which.
“Not to mention, of course, your three sons. I was going to remind you of how much their happiness and well-being depended upon you and what you did.
“But it didn’t happen, Rob. We never got there. So we’re having this little meeting instead.”
“I don’t believe this,” Rob said. He was shaking his head. “I don’t believe any of this.”
“Maria loved you, Rob. She was willing to do anything to save the marriage. But she’d gotten to the point where she knew she had to do something to save herself. And, as I’ve mentioned, Rob, she wasn’t stupid. She’d hired a private detective. To follow you.”
“What? What did you say?”
“I don’t know how long she’d had him, Rob, but on Tuesday she told me that he had full documentation of the affair. This was what she was going to confront you with on Monday morning.”
But Rob did not even seem to be listening. Beads of perspiration had popped out on his forehead. He spoke audibly, but slowly and softly, as if to himself. “Maria had a private detective. Following me…”
He looked at Gene. “Was this detective still working this week?”
“I don’t know, Rob. She didn’t say.”
“Who was it?”
“I don’t know that either. She didn’t mention his name.”
Rob put his head in his hands. “Gene, Gene,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“We were going to tell you everything on Monday morning.”
“But you don’t understand, Gene.” Rob’s voice seemed suddenly hoarse with tension. “If you had told me about Maria’s detective, then none of this would have happened.”
For the first time all morning, Gene looked startled. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he said.
“Oh. Oh, yes,” Rob said. “I see your point.” He looked around uneasily and licked his lips. “What I mean,” he said, “is that if I had known Maria already knew about the affair, then I would have left her sooner and we wouldn’t have been in Atlantic City Thursday n
ight.
“You see, Gene, what I guess you don’t know, and Maria didn’t either, was that Felice and I were planning to move in together. We’d already put down a deposit on a little beach house in Manahawkin. We’ve opened a checking account and a safe deposit box. But we thought it would be easier on the kids if they were all back in school before we made it official. Felice has two children, you know, and they both go away to boarding school. And I wanted Chris to get started at Lehigh without having to be upset by something like this. As you know, he’s always been particularly close to Maria.”
Gene Leahy lit a cigar. A thick billow of smoke rose into the warming September air. He leaned forward and slid an extra deck chair into a position that would enable him to rest his feet upon it. Then, when all was arranged, he sat back in his own deck chair and looked at Rob, for the first time, less like a brother-in-law and more like a lawyer. Rob had loosened his tie, which was something he rarely did because he thought it looked vulgar and sloppy.
“Question, Rob,” Gene said.
“What is it?” Rob had seemed slightly dazed since Gene had told him about the detective.
“You have any life insurance on Maria?”
“Of course,” Rob said. “Of course I did. Listen, Gene, I believe in insurance. I’m in the insurance business.”
Gene nodded. He slowly blew a stream of cigar smoke into the air. “How much?” he asked.
“I believe,” Rob said, “that the exact figure at the time of her death was slightly in excess of one point five million dollars.”
Gene nodded slowly, almost absently, as if Rob had just remarked that it looked like it was going to be a nice day.
“I know it sounds high, Gene,” Rob said quickly, “but you have to understand. I used it as a sales tool. You see, a lot of times when I’m selling a policy to a doctor or lawyer or executive in town I make it a point to also sell one on his wife. But they always resist. They don’t realize how much economic impact the death of a spouse can have on the wage-earner in a family. The child-care expense, the reduced working hours, not to mention the temporary emotional dislocation. But they always say, ‘Come on, I bet you don’t have any insurance on your own wife.’ And I need to be able to say, ‘I certainly do. In fact, her life is insured for as much as my own.’ It’s a marvelous sales tool, Gene, it really is. It almost always breaks down resistance.”
“One point five million,” Gene said.
“That’s right,” Rob said impatiently. “I don’t see anything peculiar about that. What’s your point?”
“Well, Rob, I’m sitting here, out by the pool, lovely morning like this, after I lie awake on your couch all night wondering just what the hell is going on, and, you know, the thought just occurred to me that maybe I should ask that little question about insurance. You remember, Rob, before I went into private practice, how I used to work for the attorney general’s office down in Delaware?”
“Yes, I remember, Gene.”
“Well,” Gene said, exhaling one more long plume of smoke, then studying, for a moment, the ash that was forming on his cigar, “I was just thinking: suppose I still worked in law enforcement, only it was here in Ocean County where Maria Marshall was murdered. I learn (a) that the husband is having an affair; (b) that the husband is planning to leave the wife; (c) that the husband is in desperate financial straits; and (d) that the wife has a million five in life insurance riding with her when she gets shot to death in the front seat of the husband’s car. Sometime after midnight. In a thickly wooded picnic area. Where the husband has pulled in to check a tire. And the husband only gets hit on the head.”
Gene swung his legs to the deck and stood up. “Rob, my friend,” he said, gesturing with the cigar, “when the husband wakes up from his little tap on the head, what has he got, besides the lump?”
Rob was staring straight up at Gene, his face so pale he looked embalmed.
“What he’s got,” Gene said, “is one point five million coming instead of a wife who won’t give him a divorce.”
Gene studied the cigar for a moment, then looked down at Rob. “That,” he said, “is my point.”
It took a moment, but then Rob awkwardly got to his feet. “Gene,” he said, “that was a very effective and even chilling little performance. But there’s something which, not being a resident of this community, you have failed to take into account. There is no way that the authorities could possibly suspect me of any involvement in Maria’s death.”
“Why’s that?” Gene asked.
“I am, quite simply, far too prominent. In Toms River, I’m much too high up the civic ladder. My reputation within the community, in fact, places me beyond reproach.”
“Okay,” Gene said. “In that case, I’ll go back to being your brother-in-law and stop pretending to be a lawyer. Now, as your brother-in-law, let me give you some advice.”
“Of course,” Rob said.
“Knowing Toms River to the limited extent that I do, I am willing to make just one prediction: this is going to be all over town by Monday morning. Everything you’ve told me and everything I’ve told you. A lot of it isn’t going to sound very nice, Rob; I don’t care how high up the flagpole or the ladder you think you are.
“What you want to do, Rob, and you want to do this as soon as possible, is sit yourself down with Sal and Jack Rogers, and anybody else you think needs to hear about the affair, the financial problems, your plans to leave, the insurance, Maria’s detective. Let them hear it from you and not from the newspapers or the radio or the bartender at the country club.
“Then you want to sit yourself down with Roby and Chris and John and tell them the whole goddamned story, too, so they hear it from you first and no one else. And don’t expect them to be particularly thrilled when you get to the part about Felice.”
“They’re mature kids,” Rob said. “They can handle it.”
“Swell. I’m glad you’re so confident. But the third thing, Rob, and in fact, the more I think about it the more I think this ought to be first, is, since I’m just your brother-in-law, you’ve got to get yourself a lawyer.”
For the first time all morning, Rob looked relieved, even a little pleased with himself. “I’ve already taken care of that,” he said. “I’ve already retained a lawyer. In fact, that’s where I was this morning, meeting with him.”
“Good. Who is it? Somebody experienced? Somebody you trust?”
“Absolutely,” Rob said. “He’s the best, the very best. His name is Ray DiOrio, and he’s not merely an attorney, he’s one of the most influential political figures in the state. There’s certainly not a more powerful man in Ocean County. So don’t you worry about that, Gene. I am in the very best of hands.”
5
Roby slept late on Saturday. Even when he woke up he didn’t get up. His mother was dead. Somebody had shot her. She’d never hug him or smile at him or look at him with love and understanding. He’d never smell her perfume again or hear her sing. But at least he was nineteen. Poor John, down the hall, was only thirteen. What would his life be like without his mother? It was going to be up to himself, Roby knew, and to his father and to Chris, to grow enough, to be strong enough, to love enough to fill at least part of the terrible void.
That afternoon, more friends of his mother’s came to the house. He assumed they had come to console his father. But after watching them head straight for his mother’s closets he began to wonder if they had not instead come to visit his mother’s clothes. And it turned out to be more than a visit. It was, he said later, “a panty raid.” Roby, who was quite conscious of the labels inside articles of clothing, had the distinct impression that everything that said Gucci or Polo disappeared.
By late afternoon, Chris was back from the airport with Jennifer, lying on one of the couches with his head in her lap, and Sal and Paula Coccaro were there again, along with Jack and Barbara Rogers (he had his own engineering firm), and there seemed to be a limitless stream of other visitors, many of whom brought
food and almost all of whom were in tears.
The visitor whom Roby remembered most vividly was Jerry Mitchell, a loan officer at one of the banks, and it was because he didn’t seem sad, he seemed angry. He and his wife had come by with Les Perilli and his wife (Les was an orthodontist), and Jerry had stood right in front of the piano and demanded, in what was very nearly a belligerent tone, that Rob tell him exactly what had happened. Then, as Rob tried to, he kept interrupting.
“What the fuck did you pull in there for?”
“The tire felt a little wishy-washy,” Rob said, going on to explain about a doctor from Toms River who had been struck by a car and killed a few years earlier while changing a flat tire on the parkway. Then he described how he’d said, “Honey, pop the trunk,” and how, as he bent down at the rear of the car to inspect the mushy tire, he’d noticed that another car, with headlights off, had pulled into the picnic area behind him. The other car came to a stop a few yards away and killed its engine.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Jerry Mitchell said. “Rob, I know you—competitive you. What do you mean, ‘a car pulled in’?”
Roby noticed that his father seemed ill at ease.
“I’m just explaining what happened, Jerry,” Rob said.
“Wait a minute, Marshall. You’re trying to tell me you’re crouching down there in the pitch darkness with Maria in the front seat and a couple grand of the casino’s money in your pocket and you don’t even get back in your own car when somebody pulls in right behind you with his lights off and then he shuts his engine off?”
“That’s what happened, Jerry.”
“No, no,” Jerry Mitchell said loudly. “I don’t buy it.”
At that point, Sal Coccaro had heard enough. “Jerry, for Christ’s sake, back off.”
And that had been the end of it, at least for then.
Not long after the Mitchells and the Perillis had left the house, Rob asked Sal Coccaro and Jack Rogers to come into his office. He shut the door firmly and took a seat behind his desk, acting very businesslike, as though he were about to go over the fine print in a policy.