13

The tapes, when I watched them with Alberto some days later, proved mesmerizing. Dr. Park Elliott Dietz was one of America’s foremost forensic psychiatrists. Hearing him question Ricardo not only about his murders but also about his childhood memories and intimate sexual fantasies was, for someone like myself who fancies herself a scholar of the psychology of criminal behavior, as exciting as listening to a master class taught by a virtuoso. Dietz, whose boyish face and deep-set, owlish eyes were familiar to me from television, never appeared on the screen—the camera was focused exclusively on Ricardo—but I felt his presence. It was there in his gentle, soothing voice, his insightful questions, the subtlety with which he teased out the information that could help him determine Ricardo’s mental status.

He began his examination by informing Ricardo that he had come to ascertain the truth about that status, but he made no bones about his dedication to objectivity. “If the truth helps you,” he said, “I’ll tell it. But if it doesn’t, I’ll still tell the truth.” Then he asked Ricardo to tell him about his childhood.

“My mother left my brother and me for another man,” Ricardo said, and at once began to talk about himself in words full of self-pity. “I was left in the care of maids. I was beaten by my father. Then, my mother came back. But I was very much rejected by her.”

Dietz kept him talking, listened to him ventilate his anger at his mother: “When she went away, I was raped, I was bleeding, and she wasn’t there”; his rage at his stepfather: “He beat me, too, and later he made me pay for my room and board”; his wrath at the priests who had educated him: “They slapped you, slapped you hard, if you got in trouble”; and his fury at the doctors who had cared for him when he had hospitalized himself as a teenager: “They said they’d help me, but they didn’t, they studied me, treated me like a guinea pig.” And soon, Dietz began firing questions about those teenage years at Ricardo.

“When you were a boy, did you ever force yourself on a girl? Or another boy?” he asked.

“No,” Ricardo said indignantly. But he followed his denial by offering up the information that he had begun masturbating at the age of ten or eleven, as if that activity at what he seemed to consider a precocious age might indicate some tendency toward mental illness.

Dietz pursued the direction into which Ricardo’s thoughts had taken him. “What did you think about when masturbating?” he asked.

“Fornicating,” Ricardo said, providing nothing out of the ordinary. “And parts of a woman. Breasts and pelvis.”

“Did you ever use pictures to masturbate?”

“Yes, from magazines.”

“What were your favorites?”

“A woman sitting down with a bathing suit on. I used that all the time. The breasts were showing. They made me feel very excited.”

Dietz probed further, no doubt trying to see if Ricardo had ever entertained the kinds of sadistic or fetishistic obsessions that were the hallmark of orgasm-driven serial murderers. “Did anything else about the picture excite you? Anything about the hair or jewelry or shoes?”

But Ricardo said, “No. Breasts excited me. And eyes excited me.”

“What about clothing?” Dietz persisted.

“Yeah. Underwear. Black, soft underwear.”

“Did you ever buy underwear for a woman?” Dietz asked next.

“Yeah. For Natalie,” Ricardo said.

“Would she wear it for you?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you find other things useful as toys during sex? Handcuffs? Ropes? Gags? Leather or whips? Rubber or vinyl?”

“No.” Ricardo sounded uneasy and amplified his answer by saying, “With Natalie, it was just plain sex.”

“What about with other women?” Dietz pressed him.

But Ricardo’s responses continued to be within the range of normality. “Before Natalie, I went out with prostitutes and it was just regular paying and coming inside them.”

Having failed to elicit youthful sexual deviancy, Dietz moved to another line of questioning—a line that might establish psychopathy. “Did you use drugs before the age of fifteen?” he asked blandly.

“No.” Then: “Well, only marijuana.”

“Did you drink alcohol before the age of fifteen?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you get into trouble?”

Ricardo seemed more comfortable with this line of questioning, little recognizing that his answers to Dietz’s nonsexual queries were as potentially damning to him as any answers he might have given to the sexual ones. “Yeah. My stepfather and my mother threw me out of the house when I came home drunk. I was around thirteen.”

“What was the first time you left home and stayed away overnight?”

“It was right after I was finished at the priest school.”

“Why were you thrown out?”

“My family didn’t like me. Luis, especially. He thought I was no good. He used to tell my mother I was crazy.”

“Did you ever become violent to Luis?”

“I was afraid of him physically. But I told him to fuck off. And I dreamed about killing him. About making him suffer.”

“What other things did you do before the age of fifteen?” Dietz asked, his tranquil voice giving no sign of the significance of what he had been finding out.

“Nothing. I never did anything to anybody. I just had fantasies. And sometimes I said crazy things.”

“What kinds of crazy things?”

“What I felt, and what the world was all about.”

“What did you think the world was all about?”

“I thought it was mean and cruel.”

“Who was your best friend?”

Ricardo’s answer was like a classical illustration of the psychopath’s notorious detachment from other people. “Myself,” he answered unwittingly.

Alberto and I watched the tapes for hours. The camera never shifted from Ricardo’s face, a brooding face with thin lips that didn’t smile and dark-circled eyes that didn’t blink. The face seemed almost to inhabit a corner of Alberto’s study, for it hovered in his extra-large video-screen like some looming domestic icon. And what was strange was that even when it described stabbings and beatings, the screams of victims and the directives of imagined spirits, it remained expressionless.

These descriptions were curiously antiseptic. Ricardo claimed to remember little of his actual actions when he committed murder, remembered chiefly that each time, just before he killed, he saw colors and dots and lines in front of his eyes or heard growling voices in his mind’s ear. “They didn’t say to kill. But they said, ‘Blood,’ and, ‘We want your blood.’”

When he killed bank teller Natalie Brown, he told Dr. Dietz, “I can’t remember picking up the knife. Or striking her. I heard screams. But they were kind of far away. Behind the lines.”

When he killed psychologist Judith Becker, “I saw the colors. And I heard screams. But I remember nothing else.”

When he killed film editor Barbara Taylor, “I saw the colors again, and then I was looking at her hair, and I grabbed her throat.”

When he killed graduate student Laura Gomez, “we were sitting together and talking and all of a sudden I saw the colors and dots and I hit her with an object I had in my hand. I think it was an iron bar.”

Ricardo also provided Dietz, albeit in a guarded way, with further information about his sexual interactions with some of the women he had admitted killing. Natalie, he said, had had lots of men before him, but considered him the best of the lot. Barbara, he said, liked to make love after smoking pot. Judith, he claimed, was sexually kinky. “She would ask me, ‘Ricardo, why don’t you do something? Slap me. Go in from the back. Pose with a knife in your hand.’ When I did those things, she would start fingering herself. And she’d have an orgasm.”

“What other things did she ask you to do?”

“She asked me to push her onto the bed. To push her and slap her and make love from the back.”

“Did she ever ask you to tie her up?”

“Yes. With nylon panty hose.”

“Anything else?”

“She had leather. Short leather skirts that she used to wear during making love.”

“Did she have leather straps for tying up?”

“No.”

“Did she have a dildo?”

“I think so.”

“Did she ever ask you to use it?”

“No.” Then Ricardo hesitated, perhaps trying to ascertain what the best answer to that question might be, and suddenly he changed his mind. “Yes. Yes, once.”

Ricardo also provided Dietz with information about his interactions with the women immediately before he killed them, information that invariably served to present him rather than the women as having been victimized. Natalie, he said, had been pressuring him to get married, even though she knew he was feeling depressed. “We went upstairs and made love. It was short sex. I don’t even remember if I ejaculated. I got on top of her and I came off. And she asked me what was wrong. And she asked me about marriage. [But] I was feeling like in a daze. I was depressed. And I felt angry because I felt helpless.”

Laura, too, he said, had talked marriage to him at an unfortunate moment, a time when he couldn’t “take the responsibility. So I felt a huge depression. And I heard the voices again.”

Barbara, he said, had plied him with drugs just before he killed her because she wanted more sex from him than he was able to provide. “We had been making love and smoking marijuana all night. And then, I couldn’t get my sex erected anymore. She said she would give me a pill. I think it was speed. I don’t know if it was the pill or me, Doctor, but I saw the colors again.”

But it was Judith, who had once inspired him to write love poetry, who came in for the harshest blame. Not only did she want nothing but sex from him, Ricardo said, but the sex she wanted, particularly just before he killed her, was abhorrent to him. “I went to her house and right away she wanted to make love. She took her clothes off. She kissed me on the penis. And masturbated me. Then she asked me to do the real part—insert my penis into her anus. She had an orgasm while I was in her anus. Then she wanted the vagina. She didn’t ask me to wash in between.” He further insisted, somewhat stuffily, “I didn’t want to do it. I think it’s unhealthy.”

I’d never believed that Judith had asked Ricardo to make love to her anally; I’d thought it more likely that he himself had demanded the act of Judith—and not because I didn’t believe that some women enjoy anal sex. My conviction had sprung from the fact that, in Judith’s case, Ricardo’s claim that she had had a taste for pain and fear in bed had also been hard to believe. More recently, my conviction had been reinforced by a passage I’d read in V. S. Naipaul’s insightful study of Argentina, The Return of Eva Perón: “The act of straight sex, easily bought, is of no great consequence to the [Argentine] macho. His conquest of a woman is complete only when he has buggered her. This is what the woman has it in her power to deny; this is what the brothel game is all about, the passionless Latin adventure that begins with talk of amor. La tuve en el culo, I’ve had her in the arse: this is how the macho reports victory to his circle, or dismisses a desertion. Contemporary sexologists give a general dispensation to buggery. But the buggering of women is of special significance in Argentina and other Latin American countries. The Church considers it a heavy sin, and prostitutes hold it in horror. By imposing on her what prostitutes reject, and what he knows to be a kind of sexual black mass, the Argentine macho, in the main of Spanish or Italian peasant ancestry, consciously dishonors his victim.”

I remembered this passage as I listened to Ricardo talk about Judith’s final sexual demand and I was awestruck by the man’s insatiable need to present himself as a victim, a dishonored victim. Had Dietz recognized this? From his calm voice on the videotape, there was no way of telling. But it didn’t matter. In the end, he had, of course, come to the conclusion that Ricardo’s view of himself as a victim not just of women but of mental illness wasn’t valid.

The whole while Dietz had been asking his questions and Ricardo had been giving his answers, Alberto, sitting alongside me on a small couch with Truman curled at our feet, had kept stopping the tape with his remote to proffer observations. When Ricardo talked about Natalie’s wanting to marry him, he said, “He’s lying. I think every time he was rejected by a woman, he killed her. But he always makes it sound as if he was rejecting them.” When Ricardo talked about his isolation as a child, Alberto said, “You know, I think the prosecutors may be right that he’s malingering. He remembers all sorts of little details, but not the big things, as if he’d planned certain parts of his story.” And when Ricardo mentioned to Dietz that he was contemplating suicide and had no qualms about doing away with himself because he didn’t believe the soul lived on after death, Alberto blurted out, “This really gets me! Because Ricardo’s been asking me for Bibles and saying he’s religious, and I’ve been telling him that no matter what he’s done, it’s not too late to square himself with God.” He spoke so sharply that Truman stirred from his nap and gave a low, sleepy growl. “I’ve been talking to Ricardo like I’m a priest or something,” Alberto went on indignantly. “But maybe he isn’t religious. Maybe he’s been lying about that, too.”

I felt that the tapes were opening Alberto’s eyes, giving him a new view of his brother, or at least allowing him to express a view that he had long held but, out of family loyalty, denied, even to himself. Indeed, I was certain that although he had initially agreed to speak with me because he’d wanted me to see Ricardo as he claimed to see him, as someone ill rather than evil, what was happening was that as a result of watching the tapes, he was coming around to my view—that Ricardo was a manipulator.

This certainty grew when, after we finished watching the tapes, Alberto rose and, pulling open the drapes that masked the windows in the TV room, said, “I wish I knew the real reason Ricardo turned himself in. He says it’s because of remorse, but somehow, I don’t believe him.”

“Why not?” I asked as the previously darkened room flooded with late-afternoon sunlight.

“I don’t know. But when his wife was here doing that PrimeTime Live show, she told me that the medical-supplies people Ricardo was working for in Mexico were like the Mafia down there. Then he decided to go into business for himself, and his bosses got very mad. And that’s when he disappeared.”

“And turned up in Argentina,” I exclaimed.

Alberto nodded.

“So he had to flee Mexico,” I said triumphantly. In my mind’s ear I was hearing, as clearly as Ricardo claimed to hear voices, the raspy sound of John McGrath, Gordon McEwan’s partner, saying to me so many months ago, “People don’t come down with remorse like a flu or head cold. There’s got to be more to the story.” And in my mind’s eye, I could picture Elise McCarthy sitting opposite me and sliding across her scarred table the article from Clarín about Ricardo’s abrupt escape from Mexican police who were supposedly attempting to shake him down for money.

“Do you know about the article in Clarín?” I asked Alberto and when he shook his head, I told him about it. “The newspaper reported that Ricardo had told somebody or other that he had to bribe his way out of Mexico.”

“Who was it?”

“I don’t know. I thought maybe you’d be able to tell me.”

Alberto frowned. “I didn’t know anything about Ricardo, hadn’t heard a word from or about him for twenty years until my parents called me from Mendoza, said he was there, and put him on the phone.”

“Maybe your parents know the reason. Did you ask them?”

“No. It was all so chaotic. I’d just returned from a trip to Mexico, a trip where I’d been very close to the town Ricardo was living in. And when Ricardo got on the phone and told me where he’d been living and what he’d done, I was terrified the police would think I had seen him down there, which I hadn’t, and all I could think about was my own skin. I wanted him to just go away again, disappear. But anyway, by the time he called, he’d been home for a few weeks and he was already saying this stuff about being so religious and wanting to surrender himself in order to atone.”

“So you found him a lawyer?”

“Yes. Kennedy. I got to him through Hamilton Fish, who’d run for political office up here and was a friend of mine. I did it because my parents asked me to—they’d already taken Ricardo to an Argentinian lawyer, but he’d said an American attorney would be necessary.”

“What did you tell Kennedy?”

“What Ricardo told me to tell him. That he was nuts, that he’d killed those women because he heard voices, and that he wanted to turn himself in because he was suffering from remorse. But it could have been a story he concocted after he went home and saw my parents. I mean, when he showed up at home, he said he wanted to turn himself in. But he wavered, too, talked sometimes about getting my parents to hide him. They refused. My mother said he had to make his peace with God. And maybe she filled his head with all that atonement stuff and he thought it would fly, get him off or at least into a mental hospital, not a prison.”

I was surprised by how cynical Alberto was sounding about his brother. “You think he was scheming,” I pointed out, “yet you stood by him, got Kim to write that press release about his having hallucinations and being sick?”

“I believed it then,” Alberto, who had begun putting away the videotapes, said simply. “There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then. Like this stuff about Mexico.”

I sighed. “I wish I could track it down. Do you suppose Ricardo’s wife would speak to me?”

Alberto shook his head. “She’s scared of Ricardo. But maybe if you went down to Argentina, you could find out something about it. Find out who gave that information to Clarín.”

The thought had crossed my mind many times. But I’d made no plans to go. Now, however, I was experiencing a surge of enthusiasm for such an expedition. “Your mother,” I said, “how extraordinary that she would talk her own son into turning himself in. Do you think that if I went down there, she’d speak with me?”

Alberto was struggling to get a particularly recalcitrant tape into its jacket. “I imagine so,” he replied distractedly.

“But why?” I said, as much to myself as to him.

“Because for one thing, the local media picked up on Ricardo’s having called her a whore. She was very upset about that, along with everything else, and she might want to talk to someone who’d set that particular record straight.”

“You’d ask her to?” I persisted.

“Sure.”

“But why?” I said again. And then what was really on my mind tumbled out. “In fact, why the hell are you being so helpful to me?”

“Because I want you to find out the truth about why Ricardo turned himself in.” Alberto shoved the tapes into a cabinet and slammed the door. “Because I want to know if he’s been bullshitting me all these months.”

“Well, maybe I’ll go,” I said then, tentatively. “Maybe I’ll try to talk to that lawyer Ricardo saw down there. And the psychiatrist he visited.”

I had no idea if they would agree to meet with me. But the idea of going to Argentina had taken hold of my imagination. Argentina. The bottom of the world. “Who else do you suppose I could see if I go down to Argentina?”

“There’s that psychiatrist Ricardo saw when he was a teenager. I don’t know him, but I think he’s been talking to the press.”

“Good idea.” I was speaking firmly now. My idle daydream of going to Argentina was becoming a resolution, a plan.