The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  “He’s so cold,” I said to Alberto.

  “Yes”—he nodded—“that’s my baby brother.”

  I saw Ricardo two more times, once again at the Valhalla jail and once at the Downstate Correctional Facility in Fishkill, New York, to which he was soon transferred to await a final prison assignment.

  For these visits, I had time to do a little more preparation. I called John McGrath, Gordon McEwan’s partner, and asked him, as an experienced detective, to give me some tips about how to get Ricardo to be more forthcoming. I hadn’t spoken to McGrath in a number of months, but he was nevertheless eager to be of help.

  “Start by getting his side of the story,” he suggested. “And build up his ego.”

  I said I’d instinctually done pretty much just that.

  “Well, do it some more, and then come at him from left field. I mean, if you want to ask him about Jacqui Bernard, don’t just pop out with it. Say, ‘You must have had a hard time, being an immigrant and all. Did anyone ever try to help you get a visa?’ Or, ‘Did anyone ever loan you a car?’ We know from the informant that Jacqui did those things for him, but you act like you just came up with them out of the blue.”

  I said I’d ask those questions, and then I called Inspector Sanders in San Francisco. He and I had talked frequently in the months since I’d been out to see him. I’d even told him about my trip to Argentina, a report that had prompted him to assume his professorial mode and say, “I just knew the mother played a role in getting Caputo to turn himself in. I always tell my students, when you want a black or Hispanic guy to surrender, you gotta get to the mother. He’ll listen to her. With Asian guys, it’s the father. With white guys, forget it. They don’t have the same kind of feelings about their parents.” Now, I told him I’d been to see Caputo, which elicited from him an exuberant, “Boy, I wish I could have been there. Just a little speck on the wall. There’s a lot of questions I’d have liked to ask him.”

  “You might not have gotten the answers you wanted. He’s pretty cagey.”

  “Of course. How in hell would he have kept himself hidden for twenty years if he wasn’t.”

  Sanders was planning to let Caputo settle into the New York State prison system, then extradite him to California for a first hearing in the murder of Barbara Taylor. “We’ll probably be coming for him in six weeks or thereabouts. So if you’re going to see him again, you better go soon.”

  “Thanks for telling me. I will. And meanwhile, do you have any tips for me? Any suggestions about how to question him?”

  “Just be friendly. Get him talking.”

  “I did. And he told me some interesting things. But mostly, he was banal.”

  “End of story,” Sanders said. “Most murderers are banal. It’s just their crimes that are interesting.”

  For my second visit, the one to Valhalla, I applied for permission to enter the jail as a journalist, which would have allowed me to take notes and interview Ricardo in a private area. But after first granting me the permission I sought, a police captain at the jail called back and told me it wouldn’t be possible. “We’ve checked with the inmate,” he said, “and he doesn’t want to see you.” This puzzled me, for Ricardo and I had parted perfectly amicably the last time. And when the captain went on to say, “This Caputo is a very dangerous man, and we don’t want to have the responsibility if anything happens to you,” I figured that that was the real reason I was being denied the permission I sought, and that most likely the jail authorities had not even bothered to check if Ricardo wanted to see me.

  This proved to be the case. I went up to the jail—alone this time, as Alberto hadn’t wanted to pay another visit to his baby brother so soon after the last one—logged in once again as a friend of prisoner 28176, was assigned a table in the visiting room, and shortly was greeted by a swift-moving Ricardo, who was not only glad to see me, but who this time offered his hand in greeting.

  That little hand, extended toward me, gave me the willies. But I took it and shook it, wondering if the grip would add something to my knowledge of the man. It didn’t. Ricardo’s fingers grasped mine loosely, perfunctorily. Whatever power resided in that hand, Ricardo had decided not to reveal it.

  He had also decided not to reveal himself this time in anything but his victim role. In response to my asking why his parents had sent him to the sleepaway school at which he’d contemplated suicide, he explained that the children at the school he had previously attended were always making fun of him. “I was crazy, but to the kids I knew, crazy was a joke, something to laugh at.” In response to a question about his adolescence, he told me that Luis had thrown him out of the house, whereupon he’d been picked up by a doctor who had taken him to a park and offered him money if he’d let him have anal sex with him. “I did it, but it brought back all the memories of the time I’d been raped,” he said mournfully, “and afterward, I felt so bad that I went back to my house and stole a gun from Luis and put it to my head and cocked the trigger.”

  I was deeply into my own role, that of sympathetic listener, and I shook my head in dismay, the way one does when someone describes a suicide attempt. So it was Ricardo again, not me, who said, “Maybe it would have been better if I’d pulled that trigger. Others wouldn’t have had to die.” I agreed gently, cautiously, and he said, “And I wouldn’t have had to suffer the way I did.”

  This spurred him to flood me with tales of the miseries he had endured, starting with his earliest days in the States. “I had to work two jobs. I worked all day washing walls in one hotel, then all night cleaning floors in another. And people made fun of my accent. Treated me like scum. Because I was a Latino.”

  Was this what he had told Jacqui Bernard? If he had, it would have affected her deeply. For myself, I was impervious. My apparent softness and concern for him was a performance as devious as his own. We were two actors on a stage.

  I didn’t like my part very much, but he seemed to be enjoying his. “Only Natalie,” he was going on, “only Natalie took an interest in me in those days. That’s why I loved her so much.”

  “But then she decided to break up with you,” I said, still, trying to sound sympathetic. “I guess that disappointed you. Made you upset.”

  “No,” he said firmly. “Natalie never wanted to break up with me.”

  I was tired of the play we were enacting and I decided it was time to become more confrontational. “But you told the police back when you killed her that she told you she was seeing another man.”

  Ricardo opened his eyes wide, then made the pouting expression Alberto had once described to me and shook his head. “No, no, I never said that.”

  “And Judith, didn’t she decide to break up with you?”

  Again, he shook his head.

  “But Judith told you she had a new boyfriend. A policeman. That must have made you angry.”

  “No. She’d told me about him a while before I killed her. I’d gotten over it. I know the prosecutor told my lawyer that they have a witness who heard me and Judith quarreling on the night I killed her, but that’s wrong. We didn’t quarrel. We had supper. I went to the bathroom. And I came out and killed her.”

  “And Barbara?”

  “Same thing.”

  His denials made me remember the story Alberto had told me about how when he was a boy, Ricardo had been observed taunting a ram, only to insist, despite the accounts of those who had witnessed his behavior, that he had never done such a thing. As a result, I didn’t mention that Inspector Sanders had told me that he, too, had a witness who had also overheard a quarrel—this one on the night Barbara was killed. What was the point? Ricardo was clearly going to stick to the story he liked best, no matter what anyone else said. Still, I asked him about Laura, just to cover all the bases. “And you had no reason for killing Laura?”

  “None. She loved me, too. Though sometimes I think that the reason I killed her was that I wanted to put an end to her suffering. You see, she loved me and wanted to marry me. And I knew I
couldn’t marry her. I was a killer. I couldn’t tell her that. She’d never have understood. So I couldn’t marry her. But when I said I couldn’t, she got very unhappy. And I wanted to end her pain, her longing for me.”

  “You beat her with an iron bar to put an end to her pain?” I said, incredulous.

  “Yes,” he allowed, straight-faced. “Yes, that’s right.”

  I’d never asked questions of a psychopathic liar before. It gave me the feeling that I was trying to clamber up a mountain with slopes so sheer that it was impossible to gain even a toehold. And I fell silent, as exhausted as if I’d actually been climbing.

  But Ricardo was still enjoying himself. Without prompting, he began describing how difficult his life had been after he’d killed Laura. “The police were hunting me like I was a dog,” he said, his voice full of pathos. “I had to flee from place to place, always looking over my shoulder, always having to hide, always having to pretend I was someone else. And I couldn’t even look for a decent job. I had to be a waiter, all the time a waiter, because people don’t really look at waiters. Once, when I was living in Cicero, though, I thought I could make something of my life by opening a restaurant. I’d learned to make stocks and soups, and I thought, I’ll open a little place of my own. I even went looking for a spot and found the perfect one. A place where there’d been a restaurant before. But I couldn’t do it. I was afraid if I opened a restaurant, I’d have to get permits, and the police would get wind of me. So I just went on working for other people. And taking my lumps. Getting ordered about. Pushed around. A Latino in the United States. Here without a visa.”

  I felt this was as good a chance as any I was likely to get to ask the questions John McGrath had suggested, the questions that might lead Ricardo to say something about Jacqui Bernard. So I interrupted him and said, “And in all that time, was no one ever kind to you? Did no one ever offer to help you out with Immigration? Lend you money? Loan you a car?”

  He was way ahead of me. “No,” he shook his head sadly. “No one. No one ever offered to help me.”

  “I’m not getting anything out of him,” I complained to my husband that night. “Just lies and self-pity.”

  “That’s not nothing,” he said supportively. “You’re getting him.”

  “I suppose. But I’m finding it hard to understand what all those women saw in him.”

  “I guess they believed his lies. They didn’t know all you know about him. And I guess they thought they could make him stop feeling so sad and sorry for himself.”

  I guess.

  “But why don’t you ask him what they saw in him. I always ask something like that when I’m doing a psychiatric consultation. At the very least, you’ll learn what he considers the secret of his success.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “I’ll try it.”

  My third visit to Ricardo took place at the Downstate Correctional Facility in Fishkill, New York. This time, once again, I went with Alberto, and after a long drive, we found ourselves in an even more modern prison, this one with an airy visiting room that, with its color-coordinated chartreuse tables and dark green chairs and its gleaming machines dispensing soft drinks and snacks, reminded us of a school cafeteria. When Ricardo arrived in the room, he ignored me and fell immediately into an intense conversation with Alberto. “Last night,” he told him emotionally, “I realized there is no God. We are alone here. I am alone. God doesn’t exist. I’m sure of this now and I’m feeling like a fool because all this time, I’ve been going down on my knees and praying to Him. Like Mami told me to do.”

  “What happened last night?” Alberto asked.

  “Mami let me down. I got a letter from my wife and she told me she hasn’t heard a word from Mami. She went back on her word. She promised to support Susi, and she hasn’t done it.”

  “But Mami has no money,” Alberto said soothingly. “You know that.”

  “I’m not talking about financial support,” Ricardo exploded. “I’m talking about moral support. She promised me. But she lied.”

  “She’s getting on,” Alberto reminded him. “She’s not the woman she used to be.”

  “I don’t care,” Ricardo fumed. “She promised. It’s because of her that I lost my faith.”

  In his rage at his mother, he sounded like a two-year-old. He was having a tantrum, a shouting, blaming, irrational tantrum.

  I was glad to be outside the conversation, to let it swirl past me. But soon, Ricardo tried to involve me. “You know, when I went to Argentina,” he said, turning toward me, “I went there with the intention of killing my mother and Luis. I wanted them dead. The two of them. That’s why I went home.”

  I looked at him with a deadpan expression, but the fact of the matter was that I couldn’t believe my ears. He had always maintained that he had gone to Argentina with the intention of turning himself in. Had that been a lie? And was this the truth? It was impossible to be sure, but as he continued to speak, I began to think he was at last being honest with me. “I was sick of my life,” he said, his lips a vivid red slash across his white face. “And it was all their fault. My mother’s especially. She never loved me. She just said she did. She was always lying. Pretending. And I thought that if I killed her, I could stop hating her for lying about loving me.”

  Was that why he had killed all the other women? Because he was convinced when they tried to break up with him that they had lied about loving him? I didn’t ask that question. I was too frightened of his rage. I just let him rant on, until finally, the energy beginning to drain from his voice, he said, “I was going to kill her, but in the end, I didn’t. My mother looked so pitiful and small and I couldn’t do it.”

  “Poor Mami,” Alberto sighed.

  “Sometimes I’m sorry I didn’t do it,” Ricardo said.

  But his tantrum was subsiding. And soon, he fell silent, and I felt able to talk to him once again. “How would you have killed your mother?” I asked, wondering if he’d actually had a plan. “Did you have a weapon?”

  “I don’t need a weapon,” he replied scathingly. “I was going to do it with my bare hands.”

  He was quite calm after that, as if voicing his fury and his thwarted plan had given him a kind of peace. He even suggested that Alberto buy him a cheeseburger from one of the machines. And while he ate, wolfing down his burger hungrily, he made small talk, told us about his routine in jail, one hour for playing baseball, one hour for watching TV. “We always have fights over what to watch,” he said. “Me, I like Baywatch. All those girls!”

  This led him to reminisce about the days he’d lived in Hawaii and roamed the beaches picking up women. “My body was great then,” he said nostalgically. “I was very fit and very tan, and when I walked along the water, I could feel all the girls looking at me. I could have had any one of them I wanted.”

  “You certainly did attract some remarkable women,” I said, remembering the question my husband had suggested I ask. “I mean, really accomplished and beautiful women.”

  “Yeah”—he smiled—“like Laura. She was the best-looking. And the richest.”

  Talking about Laura didn’t fill him with regrets. In fact, it made him hungry. “Get me another cheeseburger,” he said to Alberto, who rose obligingly just as I asked, “What do you think it was about you that drew such wonderful women to you?”

  “I was charming. I told you that.”

  Alberto headed for the cheeseburger machine and, from behind Ricardo’s back, shook his head at me, amused by the braggadocio of the reply.

  I wanted to hear more. Something less simplistic, less superficial. And I said, “Well, yes, but lots of men are charming. What do you think was the secret of your particular success with women?”

  “My dick is very big,” he said earnestly. “I’ve got a ten-inch dick.”

  So much for my husband’s question, I thought. And so much for the banal Ricardo. I wanted to be done with him. Finished with his boasts, his self-pity, his lies. And unlike all the other women w
ho had eventually come to this view after first taking an interest in him, I could just walk away. I had, finally, just as I’d hoped back when I’d first decided to write about him, exorcised him. There was just one last thing I wanted to ask him, though I knew my chances of getting an honest answer were nil.

  “Did you kill Jacqui Bernard?” I said.

  “Jacqui?” Ricardo scrunched up his forehead, concentrating. “Jacqui Bernard? Name doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “An older woman. Tall. Very attractive. Lived in Manhattan. On the Upper West Side.”

  “No.” Ricardo shook his head. “I never knew the woman.”

  Epilogue

  Ricardo was sent to Attica. I never saw him again. Neither did his wife, Susana. She not only didn’t come up from Mexico to visit him, but even ceased responding to his letters. Only Alberto remained in touch, continuing to mail Ricardo packages and to speak with him on the phone from time to time.

  “How’s he doing?” I asked Alberto one day after he’d had a call from Ricardo.

  “Great. There’s an element of peace about him now that I never heard in him before. Like, he told me he’s begun sleeping the whole night through, something he never did during all those years he was on the run.”

  “How do you account for it? Is he on medication?”

  “No, none at all. I think it’s because he’s comforted by the structure of prison and the fact that he knows that now there’s no chance he’ll ever be able to do the kinds of horrible things he did in the past.”

  Alberto also reported to me on how Ricardo was spending his days. “He’s busy all the time. He works in a shop, repairing TV sets. He’s taking university courses—studying psychology, anthropology, the law. And he’s writing a book.”

  “About himself?”

  “Not exactly. It’s fiction, he says, with a character sort of based on himself. He’s so into it that it’s almost all he ever wants to talk about.”

  “And you? How do you feel about him now?”

  “I feel good about him. I feel that prison is the right place for him—not just because of what he did, but because finally he’s not just suffering.”