The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  “We had suspected this from the first. When he came to the hospital, Ricardo told us he was depressed. But he did not seem depressed. His mood appeared to be normal, and he was pleasant and charming and interested in having everyone be fond of him, which is not often the case with depressed patients. He was also very manipulative. He told us he had no place to stay, so we treated him as an inpatient. But he knew someone who worked at the hospital, and I think he thought of it as a good place to live. Certainly, the whole time he was with us, he wanted whatever was the best that the hospital could offer—the best place to sleep, the best food. And to get these things, he would manipulate anybody and anything he could.

  “He had been living on the streets until he came to us. And he told us some things about how he made his living. He sold himself sexually to wealthy homosexuals in order to obtain money and expensive clothes. But he himself liked girls, he said, and he also obtained money from them on occasion. One thing that was notable about him was that he had absolutely no scruples. He would seduce the girls by telling them lies about his family.”

  “What sort of lies?” I asked.

  “Oh, that his father had been a rich Italian count.”

  The mention of his father made Alberto suddenly leap again into the role of questioner. “But of what importance are such lies? I, too, told lies about my father. I remember once telling a girl whose father was a lawyer that mine was a lawyer, too. And both Ricardo and I told lies about our stepfather. When he first came to live with us, we were ashamed, and we said he was a cousin of our mother’s.”

  The doctor shrugged. “Ricardo’s lies were constant.”

  “Yes,” Alberto subsided. He had had plenty of experience of them.

  “And how is your mother?” Padin inquired.

  “She’s not doing so well,” Alberto, who was increasingly taking over the interview, said. “And I worry about her. She feels guilty about Ricardo and mulls over everything that ever happened when he was little, finding fault with herself as a mother.”

  The doctor nodded. “I imagine Ricardo would not be unhappy to hear that. When he was at the hospital, he always complained about your mother, about how she left the two of you alone with your father, and about how when she came back, she always deferred to your stepfather. But basically, what he was doing was blaming his family for what he was. He took no responsibility for himself. He had absolutely no ethics. Well, there you have it—your classic antisocial personality disorder.”

  “Full-blown, when he was an adolescent?”

  “It generally is.”

  “But what about adulthood? Could you have predicted the course his antisocial personality disorder would take?”

  “Not precisely. Still, we know that adolescent males with this disorder often turn out to be dangerous criminals of one sort or another.”

  “But what is the cause of the disorder?” Alberto again interrupted. And after mentioning, as he had to Linares, Ricardo’s bout with tuberculosis, but this time receiving no support for that theory, he said worriedly, “Can it be the environment in which he grew up? I myself have some similarities to my brother, so perhaps it is the environment. Our childhoods. Our home life.”

  Dr. Padin must have recognized a subtext in what Alberto was saying, understood that he was anxious about sharing some characteristics with his brother, for Padin said, “We do not know what causes this personality disorder, but I do not think you need to worry about resembling Ricardo. You are obviously very different. You are, for one thing, concerned about your mother. He had an innate selfishness. He was concerned about no one.”

  Alberto looked relieved. And in that moment I understood what I had only vaguely comprehended before, namely that one of the reasons he had lent himself to my endeavor was that he had been hoping to obtain precisely the reassurance he had just now received.

  Outside on the street, where the wind was beginning to blow ever more strongly, Alberto thanked me cheerfully for having let him come on the interview. I was glad that he felt happy, but I myself was feeling sad. Hearing Padin describe how Ricardo had already been seducing women with his lies when he was not much more than a boy had made me think of Natalie and Judith, Barbara and Laura, and remember how easily he had charmed them. And how brutally he had killed them. Natalie, her flesh perforated a dozen times over with her mother’s fish-boning knife. Judith, her nose and cheekbones shattered and her nylon stocking twisted around her throat. Barbara, her face barely recognizable and her skull cracked by the repeated thrust of a stomping boot. Laura, her forehead and jaw smashed to a bloody pulp by a steel bar. Ricardo, I thought, had been in training for his encounters with his victims long before he ever met them, and although his potential dangerousness had been recognized, no one had stepped in to control or limit it.

  This had not been the fault of Padin and his fellow doctors. Our society, whether north or south of the border, does not allow the insights of psychiatrists to serve it in any preventive way. I knew this, understood all the reasons, some of them good, why it was so. And yet I found myself thinking unhappily about how vulnerable women are and hopelessly wishing that Padin and his colleagues had been able to file their report on Ricardo in some great registry to which women, all women, could have had access.

  My mood didn’t lift throughout the entire evening, despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that Alberto and I went out to dinner with Guillermo to eat the traditional parillada, steer and cow innards that included kidneys, sweetbreads, even udders. And it seemed to me fitting that when we left the restaurant, the zonda was at last in full force, a swirling, biting wind that stung the flesh and gouged at nostrils and eyes. I had changed hotels by then, was staying at a more comfortable and modern establishment than I had at first, and my wall of glass windows rattled and shook and sounded as if it might shatter at any moment. I lay on my bed, unable to sleep, both from the racket the wind was making and from the images that the meeting with Padin had called back into my mind.

  Writing about murderers is a manageable occupation provided one merely keeps one’s attention on matters at hand, on the interviews that must be arranged, the questions that must be asked. Remembering the murderers’ crimes upsets that it’s-just-a-job applecart, and produces not just sleeplessness but the sense that the job cannot be done, that none of one’s words will ever adequately reflect the images that, once readmitted to memory, tyrannize the brain.

  16

  I was lethargic and out of sorts the next few days. But Mendoza began to work a certain magic on me. It was a lovely city, one of the oldest in Argentina, and although earthquakes had destroyed most of its colonial architecture, the town had numerous parks, long, tree-lined avenues, and of course, the spectacular backdrop of the Andes. I went up into the mountains one day with Alicia and Luis and Alberto. We had lunch at a little inn that provided a clear view of Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Western Hemisphere, and after lunch we walked along stony rills replete with sweet-smelling desert flowers and intricate thorny bushes. Alicia was interested in collecting the leaves of a particular plant that were said to cure rheumatism, and she and Luis, arm in arm, moved slowly, eyes to the earth, supporting one another on the treacherous ground. Looking down on their slow progress from a height well beyond them, I found it difficult to imagine this elderly, devoted couple as responsible in any way for what the wretched Ricardo had become.

  It was even more difficult on a subsequent afternoon, when the family gathered for a festive weekend lunch. Alicia was going to make empanadas, her specialty, and she had started the preparations early in the morning, stirring the traditional chipped beef and raisins in one huge pot and in another a brew of cornmeal and white sauce for Luis, who since his heart attack was trying to limit his beef intake. When I arrived at the house, there was still work to be done. The fillings Alicia had cooked had to be sealed into little doughy pockets, which could then be brushed with egg, baked in the oven, and put under a broiler to gain the classic golden brown e
mpanada color. Alberto had been drafted to do the sealing and was tracing a watery finger along the edges of circlets of dough, then laboriously crimping and indenting them. Luis, too, was helping, running the oven and broiler. The kitchen was hot, floury, redolent, and Alicia was commanding her troops like a gentle general. I pitched in, too, and by the time Magda and her husband and the two little granddaughters arrived, we had made scores of tiny pies, nearly all of which were consumed during a three-hour lunch.

  The dinner to which Graciela had invited me was that same evening. Like Alicia’s lunch, it was a family affair, a meeting of a cousins’ club that rendezvoused once a month or so. Graciela had commandeered her building’s asado, a room in the basement designed for barbecue parties, and her brother Guillermo and several of his male cousins were tending thick slabs of steak over a sizzling fire. A few outsiders, such as myself, had been invited, among them Dr. Linares and a guitar player famous for his tangos, and when the beef was deemed ready, we all sat down at a long, narrow table and dined on it and on salads of tomatoes and potatoes—that is, the women did. The men, I noticed, consumed nothing but the meat.

  At one-thirty in the morning, when the meal was finished, I thought the evening was over. But in fact, it was just beginning. We left the asado, took the elevator up to Graciela’s penthouse, and settled down in comfort to drink champagne, eat strawberry shortcake, and hear the tango player.

  I was lulled by the heavy food and copious wine and for a brief while forgot that I had come to Mendoza on a mission, that I had been hoping that somehow here I might discover the source of the Clarín article Elise McCarthy had so long ago shown me and with it the true reason Ricardo had turned himself in. Nothing except getting to know my newfound companions and listening to the haunting sounds of the tango singer seemed to matter. “Volver, con la frente marchita,” the singer was intoning as he strummed his guitar, “las nieves del tiempo platearon mi sien.” It was a song about a man returning home after a long absence, the snows of time having withered his brow and silvered his temples.

  “Do you dance the tango at home?” Guillermo asked me when the song was done.

  “Yes, I adore it. It’s so sensual and sinuous.”

  “But it is not really a dance, is it?” Linares said. “It is more, as we say here, a sad feeling to which one moves.”

  This was interesting to me, for like most Americans, I thought of the tango as a dance of seduction not sorrow. I mentioned this to Linares and he said, “Yes and no. It started as a dance that men who had come to this country from distant places and were far from their wives and families performed alone. Then the local prostitutes began doing it with them, doing it in order to seduce them. The prostitutes were sexy, inviting. But the men were never altogether free of guilt or nostalgia or sorrow when they danced with these women. You have only to listen to the words of tango songs to understand this. Have you noticed that the words are invariably about lost love, lost friendship, lost opportunity? Tango songs are lamentations—the music of the human psyche, as it were.”

  “Do the Mendoza song for Linda,” Graciela directed the singer.

  “Yes, the Mendoza song,” Guillermo echoed her.

  The guitar player began to strum, a lilting, lamenting sound, and then his voice lifted in an ode to the city. Mendoza, he sang, was more beautiful than any other place on earth, especially in the autumn, when the leaves turn to orange and red. Mendoza, he sang, was a place where one could feel true friendship.

  I was back on track the next afternoon. On my behalf, Luis had called Mario Luquez, the lawyer who had arranged Ricardo’s surrender to Michael Kennedy, and Luquez had scheduled an appointment with Alberto and me.

  When we arrived, he wasn’t in his office—“delayed in court,” his secretary advised me. We sat down to wait for him in a dimly lit anteroom where the seats were backless stools and there was nothing to read but shabby magazines that were two and three years old. I imagined the lawyer would prove to be similarly shabby, but after an hour or so, a tall man with shiny black hair slicked back in the style once affected by Juan Perón and wearing a stylish formal coat entered the anteroom and hurried grandly past us, looking neither to the left or right but leaving in his wake a heavy scent of pomade. It was Luquez, and we were soon called upstairs to his office, where, the coat removed to display an immaculate white shirt and expensive-looking gray tweed jacket, he rose imposingly from behind a large desk.

  His costume was elegant but his face was even more so. Thin and long, with sunken cheeks and an upper lip that was a mere tight stripe, it was the face of an aging toreador.

  “You have come about Ricardo Caputo?” he said, and shook my hand. His fingers, the nails elaborately manicured, were also thin and long. “I know no English, señora,” he said as they grasped mine, his Spanish as formal and exquisite as his attire. “And I cannot tell you much. I am bound by a professional code.”

  I sat down, placed my tape recorder on his vast desk, and said, “I understand. Just say whatever you feel comfortable about saying.”

  “And you are going to tape me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that necessary?” He pointed a long finger at the little machine as if he were leveling a picador’s lance at some doomed animal.

  We are in the bullring, for sure, I thought; there’s no way I’m going to interview this man without getting his responses on the record. I said, “Yes. I don’t write Spanish very well, and it would be exceedingly difficult for me to take notes in that language and keep an interview going.”

  Luquez saw the sense to that, and when I turned on the machine, he began talking to it without further ado.

  “Ricardo came to my office on January twenty-first, 1994. He was brought by Mr. Luis Pinto, for whom I once handled a civil matter. That summer afternoon was very warm. Ricardo started telling me all that had happened to him. We talked for a few hours. I was astonished. I turned pale listening to what he had to relate. And I thought he was making it up. He related things that had happened from the 1970s to the present day, a story of twenty-four years, with all the details, the names, cities, personalities, everything. And he asked me to make the necessary arrangements to get him into a psychiatric hospital.

  “I told him to go home and write everything down—that way I would be able to check his information and find out if his story was true. I told him to do this, and to come back the next day. But I didn’t think he would come back. And I also didn’t think that if he did, he would bring the written account. Yet he did. He brought it the very next day.”

  “What was Ricardo like when he came?” I asked.

  “He was always very correct with me. He talked slowly, humbly, with respect. He seemed very educated, poised, calm, and intelligent.”

  “And did he say that he wanted to turn himself in?”

  “He said he wanted to be in a psychiatric hospital in New York.”

  “Did he say why he wanted to turn himself in?”

  “Yes. He said that sometimes he became very worried and was afraid that he might kill again.”

  “Did he consider surrendering himself in Mexico?”

  “No, he was afraid of something in Mexico.”

  I wish I could say that what Luquez went on to tell me about Mexico was in response to some other question of mine, that it was offered up because I am such a clever interviewer. But no, he was simply going on about arranging Ricardo’s surrender when he said, “He told me he had had to run away from Mexico City. He gave me details, said that four policemen stopped him when he was in the airport there and held him and that he offered them money to let him go. He convinced them to stop at a bank. He gave them six thousand dollars and whatever he had in his pockets, except for his credit card and passport. They got back in the car and then he realized they were going to hurt him because they were taking him somewhere else and not where he wanted to go. So he attacked one of the guys—he knows karate, you know—and they realized he was very strong and could defend h
imself so they dropped him off, and he ran back to the airport and bought a ticket to Argentina.”

  I caught my breath. There it was, the story that had been in Clarín—a story that had clearly originated with Ricardo! Had Luquez passed it along? Had it been someone in his office? It didn’t really matter. What mattered was how this story of Ricardo’s tied together with everything else I’d learned. There was what Susana had told Alberto, that while working for some people in Mexico, Ricardo had decided to part from his employers and go into business on his own. There was what Alberto had told me, that the people from whom Ricardo had decided to part had the same kind of power down there as the Mafia does in the States. There was what Detective Hines had told me, that Ricardo had claimed that these powerful bosses of his were in the business of selling medical supplies—a business that had sounded suspiciously like drugs to me. And now there was this tale, that Ricardo, having struck out on his own in whatever dangerous business it was in which he’d been engaged, had been in fear for his life. All these bits and pieces came together in my mind, and I felt I had come to the end of my long quest, that I had found the explanation for why Ricardo had turned himself in.

  I was elated by this, but I kept a bland expression on my face, and Luquez went on talking, returning now to the matter of his first encounter with Ricardo. I barely listened. Ricardo had to turn himself in, my mind was racing, he had no choice—just as Elise McCarthy and John McGrath and so many other detectives who’d worked on the Caputo case had assumed. Ricardo had to turn himself in, he had no choice—and not because he was suddenly remorseful, but because he was suddenly being actively hunted by pursuers who were mightier and more merciless than those from whom he’d previously been hiding. No wonder he’d hightailed it out of Mexico. No wonder he’d surrendered. Sure, he’d figured he’d be sent to a psychiatric hospital, the kind of place from which he’d managed to escape in the past. But he must also have figured that no matter where he was sent, he’d be safe. Alive.