The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  At this, Dunne’s voice gained strength, and casting his cold eyes on Ricardo, he began speaking with a passion that bordered on fervor. “But I have reached a conclusion—which is that you, Mr. Caputo, are a brutal and cunning man. Your hollow statement to the national press, ‘I want to come in and face my past,’ shows not remorse but manipulation. Your claim that you would rather have your body locked up and your mind free can only be viewed as a transparent and plastic attempt to curry public and professional sympathy. And your wish, stated to the Nassau County Probation Department, that you want only to serve your obligation to this court and then return home to Argentina is what you are all about. Having led a life of murder, mayhem, and manipulation for these past twenty-five years, it’s obviously your belief that a few words of sympathy and mea culpa will make you free. But to the extent that this court can, your home, to the hour of your last breath, shall be of stone and steel. This step today should only be the first of two, three, or four jail sentences, which consecutively and together, shall lead to the end of your life and beyond. Your past you have devoted to murderish self-gratification, causing permanent pain and irreplaceable loss to others. Now, may your haunting recollections cause you the same pain and punishment during a lifetime of incarceration.”

  Dunne then sentenced Ricardo to the maximum sentence he was able, under the law, to impose—eight and a third to twenty-five years in prison.

  That afternoon, at four precisely, I called Kennedy, not expecting him to be in, just as part of our game. To my astonishment, his secretary said, “Mr. Kennedy left word that if you can get over here right away, he’ll give you forty-five minutes.” Was it another false promise? I couldn’t risk thinking it was and, speeding out of my apartment, hailed a cab for Park Avenue, where Kennedy had his office.

  When I arrived there, I still fully expected to be told he’d been called away, but a receptionist said, “Go right in. He’s waiting for you.”

  That was an exaggeration. He was on the phone. But he was there. And so was I. At long last.

  Waiting for him to get off the phone, I began to question whether talking with him would actually net me what I wanted—access to people who knew Ricardo. Probably not, I told myself; I was probably just wasting my time.

  Still, it was interesting to be in Kennedy’s baronial office, a huge room with huge windows that looked west across Park Avenue and south to lower Manhattan, offering the most extensive views of Manhattan’s skyline that I had ever seen from one office. More, the place was exquisitely furnished. The carpeted floors were overlaid with Oriental rugs, there were couches made from antique brass beds, and desks and tables and bookcases of glowing, burnished wood.

  I wasn’t at all surprised by the opulence. A lawyer’s pursuit of personal happiness, Kennedy had once advised the actor Raúl Julia when he was preparing to act the part of a lawyer in the film Presumed Innocent, involved “winning or at least getting paid a lot while losing.”

  I had plenty of time to remember that remark, as well as others of his I’d read, for Kennedy was still on the phone. I sat down at an inlaid table and waited for him to finish.

  When he did, he was extraordinarily entertaining, filled with anecdotes about a European trip he’d recently made. I’d known he was famous for having that top-of-the-trade lawyer’s ability to amuse, enchant, and had even seen a bit of it during our previous brief encounters. Now I feared that in view of the battle of wills that had ended in my being, finally, in his office, he’d prove himself the ultimate victor by consuming with small talk the time he had promised to allot me. So I plunged into questioning him: “Are you disappointed in how the case turned out?” I asked. It wasn’t what I really wanted to know, which was whether he’d put me in touch with Ricardo’s family. But I didn’t want to ask that first.

  “I don’t regret having taken the case, if that’s what you mean,” Kennedy said. “I’ve always been interested in the insanity defense and in diminished capacity.”

  “Why didn’t you take the case to trial?”

  “I realized that I didn’t have the evidence to prove that back in 1971 Caputo was not responsible. And Park Dietz couldn’t say with any certainty whether Caputo was legally insane back in 1971. Of course, he couldn’t say with certainty that he was sane, either. He just couldn’t be definite one way or the other.”

  “Is Caputo disappointed?”

  “He’s pleased with what he got. Kvetch that he is. Of course, he’d rather have gone to trial.”

  A while later, I asked Kennedy to tell me about the PrimeTime Live show.

  “I received more praise and more criticism for that than for anything else I’ve ever done in my life,” he said. “And there are plenty of things for which I’ve received lots of praise or lots of criticism. But this was different. Because this had never been done before. It was the first time, but I guarantee you it won’t be the last. Because it was a tactic all of us lawyers have to think about in this age of media, when everyone is basing everything they know on what they’ve seen on television. More and more, we lawyers have to think of preemptive ways to influence what happens with our clients. And this is a good way. It de-demonizes the client.”

  That Ricardo was demonic hardly mattered in this prescription. What mattered to Kennedy, I felt, was what always matters to defense attorneys, presenting their clients, no matter how execrable, in the best light possible, an ethic of the legal profession that strikes a great many of us, no matter how accustomed to it we become, as immoral. A part of me wanted to raise this with Kennedy, wanted to debate the value of a trade that demands such cunning of its practitioners. But, I’d best not provoke Kennedy, I cautioned myself. Not if I want his help in gaining access to Ricardo’s family. And, exercising the cunning that my own profession often requires, I repressed the urge to be contentious and asked Kennedy a few questions about Caputo’s surrender.

  “The police hate the person who turns himself in,” he said in answer to one of them. “Because they don’t get the collar. They don’t get the credit. We call the detectives who are out there searching for people who’ve disappeared the dogs, or we say they’re on dog duty. Because they’re sniffing, trying to get a trail. The people on dog duty hate it when someone voluntarily turns himself in.”

  Voluntarily? I thought. But what about that article in Clarín, the one that said Caputo had told someone he was being hunted in Mexico—if that was true, his surrender was hardly voluntary.

  Kennedy was still talking. “The people on dog duty particularly hate it when it turns out the people they’re hunting for are living in circumstances where the police should have gotten them, living right among us.” And he was still dwelling on the elective nature of Caputo’s surrender. “You hear all this garbage. Like that Caputo turned himself in because he was on America’s Most Wanted and he was afraid someone might have seen the show and identified him and that he’d be caught. I mean, come on, how many people in Mexico, which was where he was when that show was aired, watch America’s Most Wanted?”

  I’m hearing an argument about Caputo’s willingness to come in and take his punishment that Kennedy would have made in court, it occurred to me. I’m hearing the summation he’d have delivered if Caputo had been tried. But I’m like an obdurate juror. I don’t believe it. Any more than I believe that putting Caputo on PrimeTime Live—“de-demonizing the client,” Kennedy had called it—served some kind of high, idealistic purpose.

  But there’s no percentage in bringing up my dubiousness, I said to myself. Besides, it’s growing late. And suspecting we might have exceeded my allotted forty-five minutes, “Caputo’s brother,” I leaped at last. Kennedy had already told me about how Alberto Caputo, a friend of a friend of his, had called him and sought his help in the matter of Ricardo. “The brother,” I raced. “I want to ask you about the brother.”

  “What about him?” Kennedy sounded impatient and I glanced down at my watch. We had talked for more than three-quarters of an hour.

&nb
sp; “Whether you’ll call him for me.” I laid my cards on the table. “Tell him I’m doing a book and want to speak to him.”

  Kennedy snorted. “Me call the brother? He doesn’t speak to me anymore.”

  I groaned. Kennedy smiled. And then, as if he’d been jousting with me again, he said, “The brother still talks to my assistant, however. And while there’s no guarantee he’ll talk to you, I’ll ask her to call him for you.”

  I was out of there seconds later, trying to hail a cab in Park Avenue’s hectic rush-hour traffic and thinking gloomily of all the times Kennedy had promised to call me and failed to do so, all the times he’d said he’d see me but failed to do so. But he did finally see me, I buoyed myself as a taxi disgorged a passenger right in front of my feet. Maybe I’m getting lucky.

  Three days later, as I was dozing over a book, I picked up my clamoring phone to hear a silken voice with a trace of a sibilant Latin American accent say, “I’m Alberto Caputo. I hear you want to speak to me.”

  I was immediately alert. “Mr. Caputo!” I exclaimed. “How good of you to call me.”

  “You’re writing a book?”

  “Yes,” I murmured.

  “About my brother?”

  “Yes.”

  “And why should I speak to you?”

  It was a question for which I had no ready answer. I’ve never known why people should speak to me, or to any writer for that matter. But they do. Time after time, even when it seems to serve no purpose except gratifying a need for attention, they do. “I don’t know why,” I admitted to Mr. Caputo. “And I must tell you that my book won’t be sympathetic to your brother. I think he killed a friend of mine. But I am trying to understand him.”

  “Me, too,” Alberto Caputo said. “I have been trying all my life.” Then: “Perhaps”—he laughed, a deep purr of a laugh—“I will help you and you will help me.”

  PART TWO

  RICARDO

  12

  Alberto Caputo and I had numerous telephone conversations before we actually set an interview date. From the beginning it was apparent that he wanted to talk to me, wanted, he said, to humanize his brother and help me see that while what Ricardo had done might be termed evil, Ricardo himself wasn’t evil, merely sick. But Alberto wanted our meeting to take place at his home in Riverdale. “So that you can see that I’m not an inconsequential person,” he explained.

  I, on the other hand, wanted to interview him on my own turf—at my apartment, with my psychologist husband in a nearby room, or failing that, in a convivial, crowded restaurant. I’d been raised by a phobic mother, a woman so fearful that she never learned to drive, never traveled anywhere on her own, and who, when I went off to college, constantly deluged me with newspaper clippings about young women who’d been raped or otherwise brutalized. I’d long understood that there was a connection between those clippings and the things I wrote about, and that in part, I had chosen the work I had because I was attempting to counter the fears my mother had inculcated in me, fears that had limited and robbed her life and at various times seemed likely to do the same to my own. Yet I had remained a cautious person. And the fact of the matter was that I was afraid of being face-to-face with Alberto.

  It wasn’t only because his brother was a murderer. It was because, as I’d been reading in my husband’s psychological tomes, psychopathy can run in families. But my desire to perform well at my work had always made me less timorous than I was naturally inclined to be. And so one morning when Alberto insisted yet again that I come to his home, I said all right.

  Still, fear wasn’t far from my mind on the day I rode up there. The address Alberto had given me was on a lovely, shady street, but the property was surrounded by a high wooden fence. Barricading oneself from one’s neighbors is unusual in a friendly upper-middle-class community like Riverdale—I’d seen only one other fence as I’d driven through the neighborhood—and Alberto’s need to cordon himself off worried me. Yet, propelled by my obsession with Ricardo, I opened a side gate Alberto had said he would leave unlatched and headed for the house. At once, my footsteps were greeted by a frenzied barking, and a large, ferocious-looking dog appeared in a front-room window.

  It was too much for me. I turned to leave, and just then, Alberto opened his front door. “Come in, come in,” he said, one hand on the dog’s neck. “He won’t hurt you.”

  Alberto was wearing jeans, a sweater, and a pair of white, shearling-lined house slippers. But more than the man, I was concentrating on the dog—a muscular dog with a broad head and powerful-looking jaws. “What is he?” I asked, standing rooted to my spot.

  “A Staffordshire terrier.”

  “A terrier?”

  I must have sounded as unbelieving as I felt, for Alberto quickly came clean. “Pit bull. Staffordshire terriers are pit bulls.”

  Why on earth does he need a pit bull? I wondered. And perhaps that thought, too, communicated itself, for Alberto said, “They’re very good watchdogs, you know. They bark like crazy when anyone approaches. But they don’t bite. At least this one doesn’t.”

  “How come?”

  “It’s all in the training.”

  I was still standing stock-still. And I might have remained that way except that at that moment a slender, serene-looking woman came up alongside Alberto and extended a hand to me. “I’m Kim Caputo,” she said in a voice as high and sweet as a child’s. “Won’t you come in?” Behind her was a real child, a ten-year-old boy in a baseball cap and shirt. “Our son.” Kim pushed him forward. “Matt.”

  “Truman,” Matt said, shaking my head. “The dog’s name is Truman.”

  “Truman Caputo—you get it?” Alberto smiled. It was a quirky, hundred-watt smile—as dazzling as Ricardo’s must once have been, I told myself. Yet I let the man and his wife, the boy and his dog, lead me into the house. My thoughts of the sinister had vanished. They’d been subsumed by the tableau before my eyes, the sight of what I now saw—and hoped I would continue to see—as being simply an ordinary suburban family and its unlovely but loved pet attempting to welcome a stranger.

  I had told Alberto that what I was interested in were his reminiscences about his and Ricardo’s childhood. I wanted to know who their parents were, what their rearing had been, at what age Ricardo had begun to seem violent or bizarre—if he ever had. And I wanted to know details about the events to which Kennedy had alluded in his sentencing-day speech and various press conferences: the beatings that Ricardo had suffered when he was a boy—had Alberto been beaten, too?—the rape he’d endured, his adolescent hospitalization.

  Alberto had promised he could inform me about most of this, and as soon as I entered the house, I suggested we start our discussion. But the Caputos wanted to show me around. So we roamed through the house and I dutifully admired the dining room with its antique-reproduction table that Alberto had assembled and finished himself, the kitchen with its handsome china and pottery that Kim had collected, and the step-down study and rambling foyers lined with photographs taken by the many famous photographers whose pictures Alberto’s company had developed.

  Then at last, Alberto and Kim led me into the living room, a peaceful expanse dominated by a blue-and-white-tiled fireplace, and sat down opposite me. Matt, who had accompanied us on our tour of the house, sat down, too, an act that made Alberto frown. “We’re going to be talking about Ricardo,” he said gently to the boy, “so maybe you should go work on your computer.”

  Matt begged to stay, his face pouting like that of any ten-year-old being turned away from an adult cabal. But he was a well-brought-up child, mannerly and obliging, and after a few moments, he slipped away. When he did, I said, “He knows about Ricardo?”

  “Everything,” Kim replied in her sweet, high-toned voice. “We told him everything as soon as Ricardo turned up. We thought it would be best because it was all going to be on television, and if we hadn’t told him, his friends might have.”

  “But although he knows about Ricardo,” Alberto interrup
ted, “we don’t want him dwelling on it.” He was startlingly handsome, short but wiry, with an oval face, suntanned complexion, high forehead, and arresting blue eyes.

  I nodded at the soundness of the decision he was reporting to me and felt a moment’s pity for him and Kim. It couldn’t have been easy for them to tell their ten-year-old that his uncle was a practitioner and purveyor of slaughter.

  I felt this burgeoning sympathy but I also felt edgy. When were we going to get started? So, producing my notebook, I said impatiently to Alberto, “Tell me about your parents.” He leaned forward and shook his head, and for a moment I thought he’d changed his mind about talking to me. But a second later, as he again moved his head from side to side but this time smiled his winsome smile, I realized he was shaking his head at his memories, not at me. And indeed, soon afterward, he began talking, a stream of words cascading from his lips. “My parents? My parents? For years I hated them. Ricardo did, too. But now that I’m a father myself, I’m beginning to see that much of what I blamed them for were things they couldn’t control or fix or do anything about. They were the products of their time, their place. No, the victims of those things.”

  As it turned out, I had opened a floodgate.

  The story Alberto told me that afternoon reminded me of a Latin American novel. It was a story filled with mystery and religion, deep loves and tragic hates, cruel deceptions and hurtful betrayals, all set amid a background of paradisiacal islands, immense mountains, and desolate deserts.