Love Me to Death by Linda Wolfe

Author:Linda Wolfe
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497637443
Publisher: Open Road Media

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.

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