1

I remember clearly the day—it was over a dozen years ago—that I first heard the name Ricardo Caputo. The person who mentioned the name to me was a private detective who’d been hired to find out who had murdered a New York writer, a woman noted for philanthropy and social activism. The detective had been on the case for a year and a half, and on a February afternoon in 1985 he informed me that he at last knew the killer. It was Caputo.

I remember how relieved I was to hear the name. It didn’t mean anything to me—any name would have done. And the feeling of relief didn’t last long. In a few minutes, it would dissipate, then vanish altogether. But before I get to that, let me explain why I was at least momentarily relieved. It was because I’d known and admired Jacqui Bernard, the dead woman, and had long been hoping that the mystery of her death would be solved.

I’d even tried to solve it myself. Amateur sleuth that I was, after Jacqui was killed in the summer of 1983, I spent weeks interviewing people who might be able to shed light on her murder and published my findings, such as they were, in an article in New York magazine. At the time, I was relatively new to crime reporting. I was also shy, not the kind of person to whom asking questions of strangers came easily. Still, I managed to turn out a fairly decent piece of work about Jacqui, and because of this I’d gotten to know McEwan. He’d looked me up after my article appeared and we’d become friends of a sort. Phone pals, mostly, though occasionally we got together for a talk, a meal.

I enjoyed knowing him. Writing about Jacqui, I’d become obsessed with discovering who had killed her, and McEwan shared that obsession. Our reasons were different. He was on a job. I was just intensely curious. I think it was because Jacqui’s murder had spoken to a particular fear of mine—and, I believe, of many women. She’d been killed not by a stranger but by someone she knew, someone who hadn’t had to sneak into her home or force his way into her room. She had let her killer in. Or come home with him. She had been killed by an intimate.

I hadn’t known this at first, and neither had the police. Indeed, at first they hadn’t even believed that Jacqui had been murdered. Her body had been found by her sister and brother-in-law, who’d been expecting her for dinner. When she failed to show up, they went to her apartment to see if anything was wrong. They got a key from a member of the co-op board, let themselves in, and saw Jacqui lying facedown on her bed, her head leaning against a small velvet pillow. She didn’t stir, and they realized she was dead.

Nothing suggested foul play. When the police arrived at the spacious co-op, they observed that it hadn’t been broken into—not just the door but all the window locks were still intact. They noted, too, that the rooms showed no signs of disarray. No drawers had been dumped, no closets ransacked, and the bed on which the dead woman lay wasn’t rumpled or disturbed. The only odd thing was that she was wearing a long-sleeved bathrobe—odd because it was an exceedingly hot night and her apartment had no air-conditioning. But strokes and cardiac arrests weren’t altogether uncommon in women of Jacqui’s age, which was sixty-two. Maybe, the police reasoned, she’d put on the robe because a sudden chill had presaged an incipient heart attack or stroke.

This view was shared by the medical examiner the police summoned to look over the body. The ME pronounced that Jacqui had died of natural causes.

But of what sort of natural cause? Jacqui’s sister wanted to know if she’d been sick or had a coronary, and she asked to have an autopsy performed. The body was taken to the medical examiner’s office, and one of the doctors there undertook the slow, careful examination of every inch of flesh and expanse of inner organ. Not long after this second medical examiner began his autopsy, he noticed something the original ME had not. Jacqui’s larynx had been fractured. She had been strangled to death by someone with strong, deadly fingers.

It was at this point that Gordon McEwan had entered the picture. Having lost confidence in the police, Jacqui’s sister had enlisted him to look into what had happened to her. He and his partner had gone to her apartment, searched the rooms, and found something, a clue—a yellow towel or bedspread, a close friend of Jacqui’s told me—though exactly what the clue was and what its significance might be, I certainly didn’t know. Not when I wrote my article. At that time, given that the cause of her death was a mystery and few facts about it were at my disposal, I wrote as much about Jacqui’s life as about her death.

It had been a remarkable life. Although Jacqui’s father was a French count, she’d been raised in America, where she had grown up to eschew the aristocratic and champion the rights of the disconsolate and disadvantaged. She’d co-founded the famous organization Parents Without Partners. She’d raised money for the historic black-voter-registration drive in Mississippi. She’d taught remedial reading and writing at a college designed to educate minority students. She’d done volunteer work for an association devoted to stopping human rights violations. She’d started a foundation to help illiterate Southern women record their oral histories, using her own money to fund the grants. And she’d published two well-received works of nonfiction, Voices From the Southwest, a collection of profiles of Native Americans, and Journey Toward Freedom, a biography of the black abolitionist and early feminist Sojourner Truth.

In the period before her death, Jacqui’s interests had shifted toward Hispanic politics and culture. Just before her murder, she had joined an organization that supported the left-wing regime in Nicaragua and had spent two weeks in Cuba at a health conference.

Jacqui’s passion for social action was paralleled by a tireless devotion to her friends. The divorced mother of one child, a son, Jacqui had never remarried, but instead she’d surrounded herself with friends, men and women alike, lavishing on them a maternal and inspirational affection. She’d had scores of friends, but she’d always been open to meeting just one more.

When I wrote my article about Jacqui, I interviewed people who’d known her far better and far longer than I had. A few of them feared, they told me, that her political activities might have had something to do with her death. But most were convinced that the motive for her killing was robbery: once her apartment was thoroughly searched, her purse and a gold watch were found to be missing.

One of Jacqui’s best friends had a theory about who might have stolen these items and then killed Jacqui—but no name to attach to her theory. She informed me that Jacqui had recently mentioned she’d been dating a man she’d met in a local bar, a fellow who had thoroughly charmed her. “I think he killed her,” her friend said. “It was probably just like in that book, Mr. Goodbar.”

I still have the notes I took of that conversation: “She met a guy in the West End Cafe about six months ago. A young guy. Black or Hispanic. She said he was very attracted to her.” And I can still remember thinking as I scribbled that Jacqui must have felt proud about garnering such a fellow’s attentions, for although she was attractive, she was no longer young, no longer at an age when a woman hears with some regularity that this man or that finds her appealing. I expressed this thought to the woman who told me about the man in the West End Cafe, and she replied, prophetically it would turn out, “I keep wondering what sort of guy this fellow was. The kind of younger guy who really digs older women? Or just a con artist feeding her a line.”

I was fascinated by this particular friend’s information, though it was just a tidbit leading to an insight that went nowhere. Still, I kept thinking about it even after my article appeared, and I kept mulling over the other clues I’d gotten. Such as the long-sleeved robe. Why had she been wearing that on such a scorching night? And what about that yellow bedspread or towel? That had to be significant. Because when I’d mentioned it to the police, they’d refused to comment about it.

But no matter how I tried to arrange and rearrange the pieces of the puzzle, it was all to no avail. Jacqui’s fate continued to elude me, and I continued to be obsessed with it.

And then Gordon McEwan called. He asked me if I’d heard anything more about Jacqui’s killer since my article came out, and I said, no, I hadn’t. “Well, you never know,” he said. “You might. You journalists hear things.”

I was flattered by his perception of me as a skilled investigator who might yet produce important leads, and when he added that he’d like us to get to know each other, just in case one day I did hear something that might prove useful, I cheerfully said I’d like that, too. Still, I thought he was talking in general terms, the equivalent of “Let’s have lunch someday.” But then he suggested, “Tomorrow?”

I speedily accepted. I’d never met a private eye before. Like most writers, despite the heady things I sometimes wrote about, I led a life that was essentially prosaic, populated by a husband and children and friends who did ordinary things—taught, counseled, labored at desks in busy offices. The idea of meeting a man who made his living by snooping intrigued me, partly because it seemed such an exotic way to earn one’s livelihood and partly because, like all Americans, I’d grown up on books and movies about private eyes. Indeed I was sure, before I met McEwan the first time, that I knew just what to expect. I figured he’d be a rueful loner like Sam Spade, and that he’d speak in an oblique, tough American slang, like Philip Marlowe.

But McEwan wasn’t like my collective vision of the private eye. For one thing, he was married and adored his wife and children, not to mention the huge collection of pets, of turtles and rabbits, snakes and ducks, he’d gathered for his family. For another, he was Scottish, and although, having been brought to the United States as a youngster, he did speak American slang, he spoke it with a lacing of the Queen’s English and the hint of a lilting burr.

I liked him from the start. A well-built man who appeared to be in his mid-fifties, he was dressed in a suit and tie and had silvery hair, a taut-lipped smile, and sad, penetrating eyes that looked as if they’d seen many things their owner wished they hadn’t. He was also sweet-natured, given to compliments. “I learned a lot about Jacqui from what you wrote,” he said to me that first day. “You made her sound real special.”

“She was,” I said. “Feisty. Opinionated. But essentially a very giving person.”

“Yeah. But of course, that was her undoing.”

He launched then into a detective’s view of personality. It was a view that took traits most of us think of as virtues and turned them around so that they came out as character flaws. I have since heard this view many times, from many other detectives, and have come to see some truth in it, but this was the first time, and it made me uneasy. “Your friend Jacqui was always befriending people. She was trusting. She was generous. She treated everybody equal. She acted the way religion and ethics tell us to. But you know, it really ain’t smart. It gets you killed.”

He was filled with other police theories that have since become familiar to me but which at the time were new and slightly perplexing. “Jacqui must have gotten herself involved with a psychopath,” he said, “the kind of person—it could have been a man or a woman, but most likely it was a man—who’s got no morality, no conscience. This one probably came on like a lost puppy. Told her he needed help, love.”

How did he know? “Just a guess,” he said. “A guess based on what we’ve found out about Jacqui. About her being bighearted.”

He then went on to say something that sounded suspiciously like what is today called blaming the victim, and although I didn’t know the phrase then, his words made me testy. “The psychopath chooses his victim,” he said. “But the victim chooses him, too. Because she’s got something in her that makes her willing.”

“Willing to what?” I objected. “Bring about her own destruction?” I didn’t believe, still don’t, in that kind of ex post facto reasoning, though I’d heard it often enough from friends in thrall to inferior psychotherapists. But McEwan, as it turned out, didn’t mean that Jacqui was self-destructive. “Take it easy,” he said. “You’re getting on the wrong trolley. I don’t think your friend wanted to die. I’m just saying there’s a kind of tango between victimizers and their victims. I’m just saying that in a lot of these cases, you find a man who wants someone he can take from, and a woman who wants someone she can give to. A nurturer. He picks her, but in a way, she’s also choosing, fastening on to someone who fits her particular receptors.”

Once I understood what he was saying, McEwan’s explanation sounded right to me. Jacqui had been a nurturer. Her whole life had been about helping people she perceived as needy. “Got you,” I said, and moved on to whether there were any suspects.

McEwan shook his head. “Nobody who panned out.”

“What do you do next?”

“Sit back and wait.”

Body taut, eyes sharp, he made it sound as if sitting back and waiting was an active, not a passive, endeavor, and I thought of asking him, wait for what? But I let the opportunity slip by, inquiring instead about the clue he’d found. I’d rehearsed that question from the moment we’d made our appointment. “Tell me what it was you found in Jacqui’s apartment. The towel. Or was it a bedspread? The police would never tell me.”

“The police?” he muttered disdainfully—though, as I would later find out, he’d been on the police force himself for more than twenty years before starting his investigative agency. “They wouldn’t tell you because they didn’t find it.”

“What was it?”

“A bedspread. You want me to tell you about it?”

Something in his voice suggested that what he had to say was distressing, or at least that he wanted to be sure I could take being given the kind of information he was accustomed to imparting. I felt it so strongly that a part of me wanted to answer, no, forget it, but I knew I couldn’t do that, not if I was ever going to succeed as a crime reporter. So I said, “Yes, what was so important about the bedspread?”

He told me. And afterward I was sorry, because I was never able to forget what he said or the picture it summoned up. “Me and my partner, John McGrath,” he fired off, “went through Jacqui’s place with a fine-tooth comb, opening all the closets and cupboards, looking at everything. And in a linen closet right next to the bed, we found this bedspread, a ribbed, light-colored spread, all rolled up. When we unrolled it, we saw it had feces on it. Jacqui’s sister was in the other room, and I called out, ‘Did Jacqui have a dog?’ She said no. And we knew then what had happened. The killer had choked Jacqui and her bowels had let go, and he’d wiped her with the bedspread and dressed her in that long-sleeved, heavy robe she was found in.”

I closed my eyes, but it didn’t faze McEwan. He was too far into his story. Without any further prompting, he went on to explain why the bedspread mattered. He said it showed that the killer had some fastidiousness, some shame about leaving his victim lying in excrement. “That’s also why he didn’t leave her naked, why he dressed her in the robe. It’s usually a sign that the killer knew his victim, had some sort of relationship with her.”

Eyes open now, wide open, I burst out, “Could it have been the man she met in the West End Cafe?”

He shrugged. He’d heard that story, too. “Yeah. But who is that man? He could be anyone.”

McEwan called me frequently over the next few months. “Heard anything?” he’d ask.

“No,” I’d always say, and feel dejected. “How about you?”

But it was always no on his end, too. Still, he kept calling me. And one time he sent another private eye to talk to me, a detective named Frank Hickey, who was now working with him on the case. Hickey was young and redheaded, and he came to see me straight from the street, his hands specked with dirt, his jeans torn, his ancient T-shirt stained and ill-fitting. He looked like someone I’d give wide berth to if I ran into him on a West Side street corner. But for all his disguise, I didn’t find Hickey threatening. He was funny and warm and proud of his sister, a TV newscaster. Besides, by this time I was getting used to private eyes, so fast does the exotic become old hat once you’ve had a little taste of it. I was also getting used to the monotony of being asked if I’d heard anything more about Jacqui’s killer and the sadness of having to say I hadn’t.

Hickey had posters with him that he’d put up all over my neighborhood, posters offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Jacqui’s murderer. He left one with me, and for a long while after he departed, I stared at the photograph of Jacqui on the poster: Jacqui gray-haired, dignified, and smiling in that unusual way she had, a smile so ample that her cheeks got round and full and made one remember those drawings of the wind that decorate antique maps; Jacqui decked out in beaded hoop earrings and a turtleneck sweater that hugged her delicate throat. When I thought of her killer clutching that throat, then wiping and garbing her as if her body were his giant doll, I could scarcely keep from crying.

It was many months afterward that McEwan called me and said he knew who had killed Jacqui. “Who? Who?” I demanded. But he wouldn’t tell me over the phone. “Let’s get together,” he said. “There’s something I want to show you.”

We made a date for drinks the next day. We met and sat down in a quiet Italian restaurant. And before we’d even ordered, he began talking. “The man who killed Jacqui,” he said, “has killed other women. At least four more.” McEwan was excited. “The sonovabitch!”

“How do you know?” I asked, impatient to learn the details.

“I got a call from an informant about three weeks ago. He said he’d gotten high with some Hispanic guy and the guy boasted that he’d killed Jacqui Bernard.”

It was, I realized, just what McEwan had been hoping for when he’d said he’d just sit back and wait. I’d always imagined that killers buried the secret of their crimes deeper than gravediggers buried the bodies they left behind, but McEwan had known, as I hadn’t then, that a vast number of killers get caught because they’re proud of their savagery and sooner or later want to brag. “This guy’s clever,” McEwan went on. “But he’s stupid, too. His name’s Ricardo Caputo.”

At this moment, I felt the relief I’ve mentioned earlier, at this moment and all the while that McEwan was telling me about his tipster. “My informant said he was calling in response to one of the posters Hickey and I put up,” McEwan said. “Wouldn’t give me his name. Said he’d been arrested in September 1983, gone to jail, got out a few months ago, and did drugs a few weeks ago with this Caputo fellow, who was living up around One Hundred and Fifty-eighth Street.” McEwan’s voice was breathless, as if he were running, not sitting on a banquette. “My informant had his girlfriend with him,” he went on, “and she said something that made my fellow mad and Caputo said, ‘Any bitch gives me trouble, I’d kill her.’ Then the girlfriend left, and Caputo started bragging about how he really had killed people. Men as well as women. And he mentioned Jacqui Bernard specifically. Said he’d met her in a bar or at some sort of outing. Said she was too old for him but he started seeing her anyway. Because she was rich. Because she loaned him money. Let him use her car. Even said she’d help him out with a problem he was having with Immigration. She knew people who could fix it. Then one night, he went to her apartment to borrow her car. He needed it for some job. But this time, Jacqui didn’t want him to have it—maybe she was starting to have her doubts about him. Anyway, she said no, and they started quarreling. And he strangled her.”

“He killed her because she wouldn’t lend him her car?” I said.

“He’s probably killed for even less. He’s been a busy sonovabitch. He killed a girl in Nassau County. Another one in Westchester. Two more after that.” McEwan had gone to the New York police and to the FBI with his informant’s story. They’d supplied him with a huge file on Caputo. “He stabbed and choked the first one. Strangled the next. The other two he beat to death. You want to know how?”

I had the same feeling I’d had when he’d asked if I wanted to know about the bedspread. But this time he didn’t wait for my response. He just began talking, talking fast. Maybe he needed to get it off his chest. “One of them he stomped to death,” he said. “The other one, he used an iron bar. And he tortured her first. Pulled out all her teeth.”

I felt sick to my stomach. I saw those teeth. Little pearls encrusted with blood. But I was determined to play the role of an unflusterable journalist. It meant that out of sight and under the table, I clenched my hands together and that I swallowed hard, but as surreptitiously as I could. Then I got my voice back and I asked, “You sure it’s the same guy?”

“Damn sure.” He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “This is what I wanted to show you.”

It was a photograph—a copy of a photograph, to be exact. The picture showed a soulful-looking young man with deep-set eyes, a sensual cleft chin, a graceful bowed mouth, and wavy, windswept hair: a handsome, even beautiful, young man. “This is Caputo,” McEwan said. “I got his picture from the FBI. And I’ve been showing it around. And you know what? I showed it to all the bartenders up near Jacqui’s building, and one of them, the bartender at a place called Cannon’s, said he’d seen this guy come into the bar. With Jacqui!” McEwan’s voice was triumphant. “And that’s not all. I showed it to the super at Jacqui’s building. He recognized the face, too. He said that a short while after Jacqui was killed, he noticed this very guy trying to get into the building. He had some keys that didn’t work, and when the super asked him what he wanted and who he was, the guy had a cock-and-bull story. ‘I’m Jacqui Bernard’s roommate,’ he says, ‘and I’ve got to get back into our apartment.’ The super doesn’t know anything about any roommate. Jacqui’d never mentioned one. So he says to the guy, ‘Jacqui’s dead, and the keys have been changed,’ and the guy doesn’t say a word, he just hurries away. But the super got a good look at him, and it was my guy. Caputo.”

I was astonished. And happy, sure that the next thing McEwan would say was that Caputo was about to be taken into custody. “I guess that’s it, then,” I said, and smiled. “I guess you’ve found your man.”

But McEwan didn’t smile back. “I haven’t found him,” he muttered. “No one can find him. He’s disappeared.”

Disappeared? The word brought my nausea back full force. “Yeah,” McEwan was saying. “He’s still out there somewhere. And that’s where you come in. I need a favor. I need you to get your magazine to run this picture.”

I was still feeling sick, and I had a strong urge to put my hand over my mouth, but I swallowed again and nodded acquiescence.

“I gotta get the picture out there,” McEwan said. “This guy could be anywhere. Here. Europe. South America. Who knows? But maybe someone’ll see the picture and recognize him, tell us where he is.”

The next day I called the editor who’d handled my story about Jacqui. I told him about Caputo and asked him to run the photograph. But the editor wasn’t interested. “We can’t run a photo of every guy suspected of murder,” he said to me. “What are we? A post office wall?”

I wish I could say that I argued with him. But I wasn’t a bold person then. When my editor told me no, I didn’t put up a fight. I just subsided, reported the conversation to McEwan, and told him unhappily that I couldn’t help him.

That was pretty much the end of our dealings with each other, although we continued to speak on the phone for a few more months. Then I got busy on a book that required my living in Boston for a while, and McEwan got busy on other cases, and after a time we drifted apart. But I was happy to see when I turned on my television set one day in 1991 that he’d gotten Caputo’s photograph “out there.” On the popular true-crime show Unsolved Mysteries, there was McEwan, holding up the picture of Caputo, recounting the story of how he’d shown it around in Jacqui’s neighborhood, and urging viewers to call the show if they knew the whereabouts of the man in the picture.

Still, I gather that no one called. That is, no one who really knew where Caputo was, though the show got lots of tips and leads from people who said they’d seen a man like the one in the picture, tips and leads that the FBI checked out but that ultimately came to nothing. Caputo was gone; dust gathered on the files of the women the FBI had solid evidence he had killed; and Jacqui’s murder, for which he was now viewed as the prime suspect, remained unsolved.

All of which is by way of explaining why, when I unfolded my copy of the New York Times on the morning of March 10, 1994, I was beside myself with both amazement and excitement when I read, right on the front page, that Ricardo Caputo, who had been living in Mexico under an assumed name, had fled that country for Argentina and had there admitted who he was, confessed to having murdered several women, and arranged to turn himself in. He’d effectuated his surrender yesterday, the paper said, and was now in the custody of New York police. I wanted to share my amazement and excitement, and even though Jacqui’s name wasn’t among those Caputo had listed as his victims, and despite the fact that it was quite early in the morning, I reached for the phone and called McEwan.

A strange voice answered his phone. It was his old partner, John McGrath, a man I’d never met. “Gordon’s gone,” he said.

I thought he meant gone out, so I asked, “When can I reach him?”

“He’s dead,” McGrath said. “Died eighteen months ago. Cancer.”

It was hard to believe, the way getting that sort of news about people with whom you’ve been out of touch is always hard to believe. You visualize them the way they were when you last saw them, and in McEwan’s case the last time I’d seen him—nine years ago, I realized with a start—he’d been not just vigorous, but bursting with passion. Remembering his vitality on that day, I murmured, “I’m sorry. So very sorry.”

“Me, too,” McGrath sighed. “Especially today. Because Gordon would have been so happy today. The Caputo case drove him, you know.”

“I do.”

“It drove him almost to the day he died. He shoulda lived to see this.”

“He should’ve.”

“He shoulda got to meet that sonovabitch. Caputo.”

“So you think this Caputo really killed Jacqui Bernard?” I interrupted him, thinking as I did how much less reticent I’d become over the past decade, how much the years I’d spent at crime reporting since I’d first met McEwan had altered me, made me come to inhabit the role I’d once merely practiced with him.

“Yeah. Probably,” McEwan’s old partner said. “I’ve already talked to the police. They think he’s killed a lot more people than the ones whose murders he’s admitted.”

“Natalie Brown,” I said, glancing down at my newspaper. “Judith Becker. Barbara Taylor. Laura Gomez.”

“Yeah,” McGrath snorted, “the ones we were ninety-nine percent sure he killed. The ones he was known to have been romancing.”

They were all young women, much younger than Jacqui had been. “Maybe he didn’t want to admit he romanced an older woman,” I said.

“Yeah. Mr. Macho,” McGrath snorted again.

After that, we spent a few moments talking about why Caputo had turned himself in. The story we’d both read in the paper made no sense. It was that Caputo had suffered a sudden accession of remorse. “You know, folks don’t come down with remorse like a flu or a head cold,” McGrath said. “There’s gotta be more to the story.” I agreed. But what was the whole story? Neither of us could dope it out. Then, “They’re arraigning him this morning,” McGrath said. “Out in Mineola.”

As soon as he said that, I knew I was going to try to write a book about Caputo. Partly it was because I still imagined that I could solve the mystery of Jacqui’s death. But mostly it was because Caputo had inhabited my mind for so many years that I wanted to get him out of it, to exorcise him.

Mineola was half an hour by train from my apartment. I said a hasty good-bye to McGrath and headed for the railroad.