Gilded Lily (9 page)

Laurinda recalled that Lily visibly stiffened when she rifled through the drawer. Perhaps she realized that the revolver wasn't there. Dressed in a black dress with thin shoulder straps, her blond hair beautifully coiffed and smelling of hairspray, she entered the room where Waldomiro was standing as if momentarily frozen.

“I'm afraid it's not good news, Dona Lily,” said Waldomiro, as Lily tried to get past him. “Seu Alfredo is dead.”

It was the elevator operator at the Ponto Frio offices on Rua do Rosario in downtown Rio who informed Vera Chvidchenko, a secretary at Ponto Frio, that her boss was dead. Vera was rushing back to the offices for a meeting with Alfredo when she heard the news that
was spreading throughout Rio's business district like a brush fire in a dry forest.

At the office, people were weeping.

Shot himself in bed?

But he was just here! He was in a good mood!

A stone-faced Maria Consuelo was gathering her things and preparing to go to the house on Rua Icatu to help Lily with the funeral arrangements. Geraldo, the director of the company, had offered to drive her. Company lawyer Conrado Gruenbaum would drive himself to the house later. Felix Klein, another executive who would prove invaluable to Lily in the future, began the process of sorting through Alfredo's complex financial arrangements in Brazil and Switzerland immediately after receiving instructions from Conrado.

“Eventually, everyone left the office. I just couldn't bring myself to go to the house,” recalled Vera. “It was too painful. I was too upset.”

Alfredo's friend Abitbol was among the first to arrive at the house. “I saw him lying on the bed, but I only took it in for a split second, because I rushed out to get help,” recalled Abitbol years later. “It was so strange because we had played poker the night before, and he was in great spirits.”

Trotte, the accountant, showed up soon after, accompanied by Geraldo and Maria Consuelo. “I saw Fred stretched out on the bed with blood covering his chest,” he said.

In the space of a few hours, dozens of friends, business associates, and family members began arriving as news of Alfredo's death spread throughout the city. “I came as soon as I found out about his death on the news,” said Victor Sztern. “The house was full of people.”

Anita, the fired servant, appeared up at the house ahead of the police. “Is he really dead?” she asked Laurinda as she made her way to the servants' quarters.

“I wanted to know how she knew he was dead, and what she was
doing at the house,” recalled Laurinda. “But she just kept repeating the question with a mad look in her eye: ‘Is he really dead?'”

Anita didn't need to see the body to know her former boss was dead. The distraught strangers crowding the living room and back garden must have immediately answered her question.

Carlinhos was dispatched to a friend's house, and the other children, who had been at the Copacabana Palace, were picked up by one of the chauffeurs and taken to the home of a family friend.

Maria Consuelo and Geraldo made their way to Alfredo's second-floor office where Lily was lying on a couch, attended by one of the servants, and speaking on the phone.

Maria Consuelo gingerly entered the bedroom. Perhaps it was the severe shock mingled with a deep sorrow at seeing her beloved boss splayed on the bed, the blood still oozing out of his mouth, or perhaps it was her meticulous secretarial instinct that propelled Maria Consuelo to do what she did next. Whatever the reason, she was hard-pressed to explain to police why she picked up the revolver that was lying on the floor on the right-hand side of the bed and placed it neatly on the bedside table, where the officers assigned to the investigation would find it later.

The Ponto Frio executives who assembled at the house immediately began the process of carrying out Lily's orders. Alfredo's will, which was drafted a year after their marriage, put her effectively in control of the company, and divided his assets between Lily and Carlinhos. Regina was mentioned in a separate legacy, but her take was relatively minor. Alfredo had left his mother a handful of shares and the sprawling apartment she occupied in Copacabana.

Although grief-stricken at her husband's sudden death, Lily was completely in control, especially when it came to consolidating Alfredo's financial holdings around the world. Securing Alfredo's fortune became the first order of business.

For except for Abitbol, who rushed out to get help, nobody at the house on Rua Icatu thought to call an ambulance or the police, even
though under Brazilian law a suicide must be reported to authorities immediately.

It would be several hours after they found the body that Conrado would be dispatched to the local police station to report the death. Conrado calmly drove to the Tenth District Precinct in nearby Botafogo to file a report. According to that report, Conrado showed up at the police station at 9:45 p.m. to inform the duty officer that Alfredo had killed himself in his bedroom at approximately three in the afternoon—nearly seven hours earlier.

In his initial report, Mario Cesar da Silva, the police constable who recorded Conrado's version of events as well as Alfredo's medical history when the lawyer showed up at the police station on that fateful Monday night, notes that Alfredo was undergoing regular treatments with a psychiatrist named Dr. José Leme Lopes, whose office was around the corner from Rua Icatu. Conrado told the officer that Alfredo was a manic depressive, and a possible suicide.

But Conrado didn't tell the police the whole truth about Alfredo's personal life. For it was from Conrado's testimony that the officer concluded that Alfredo's “family life was tranquil.” Perhaps Conrado was not aware that Alfredo was planning to divorce Lily, even though it was common knowledge among his business associates. If everyone from Ponto Frio's accountant, secretary, and chief director were already making provisions for the divorce, then it seems highly unlikely that Conrado, the company's chief counsel and Alfredo's personal attorney, did not know.

It's not clear why Conrado left out important details about Alfredo's personal life in his report to police. Perhaps he realized that following his boss's death, his new allegiance needed to be to his widow, who would inherit Alfredo's staggering fortune, valued at almost $300 million. Perhaps he felt that the widow would not appreciate a messy police investigation, especially if it appeared that Lily herself had a motive for wanting one of the richest men in Brazil dead.

The police themselves were among the last visitors to arrive at the
house on Rua Icatu. Detectives knocked on the door close to midnight, and hauled metal cases full of equipment—cameras, notebooks, measuring tape, and fingerprint kits. As they climbed the stairs to the second-floor bedroom, they had every reason to believe that they were off to investigate a suicide, not a homicide.

Nevertheless, they spent hours analyzing the room where the body was found. They seemed meticulous in their investigation, stripping Alfredo and affixing plastic arrows directly onto his body to show the wounds and the trajectory of the bullets. They took copious black-and-white photographs—of the body, the bedroom, the neatly folded suit jacket on the left side of the bed, the satin-and-brocade bedroll that appeared to have been thrown diagonally across the width of the bed. There is a photograph of Alfredo's shoes placed neatly under the bed. They even photographed the
Time
magazine carefully placed on the bedside table along with several bottles of medication.

They also photographed the weapon, which they placed on the floor just under the right-hand side of the bed, according to Maria Consuelo's description of where she had originally found it.

They demanded that Laurinda, Waldomiro, and Djanira remain in the house during the investigation, since they were important witnesses. They had been present at the time of the shooting, and police interrogated each of them separately about the day's sad events.

In the police report, handwritten on lined paper in a tight scrawl, da Silva described the corpse of a forty-five-year-old white male, wearing a white shirt, charcoal gray trousers, white underwear, gray socks, and a black and brown striped tie. “The first five buttons were open on his shirt and his tie was loosened with the knot to one side, and the left sleeve rolled up,” noted the report. “On his mouth, on the left side, blood was flowing, and had coagulated on the pillow and the bed.”

Alfredo Monteverde had been shot twice with a .32-caliber, Brazilian-made Taurus revolver. A bullet entered Alfredo's body at close range on the left side of his chest, leaving a circular wound that mea
sured five centimeters in diameter. According to the report, the first bullet seems to have traveled through his body, exiting on the left side of his back.

“On or about three o'clock in the afternoon, he locked himself in his bedroom, and committed suicide with two shots to his chest on the left side, with both of the two shots entering the same orifice and exiting in different directions,” said the police report. “One of the shots was piercing, with the bullet traveling through the right side of his back and embedding itself in the mattress of his bed. [He] committed suicide lying down and holding the revolver against his chest.”

Yet no one who was at 96 Rua Icatu had heard the shots “because of the vast dimensions of the house,” noted the officer after questioning the three servants. Since there were no signs of forced entry, and the servants had not reported anything unusual—the Irish wolfhounds Sarama and Barbarella would surely have alerted them if a stranger had attempted to break in—the police concluded their investigation.

But there were obvious gaps in their report. The police failed to interrogate any of the neighbors who may have heard the gunshots, even after one of the next-door neighbor's servants volunteered that she had indeed heard the gunshots. Similarly, the police did not seek out Artigas Watkins, who had been at the house earlier that day.

“He wasn't there when we discovered the body, that's for sure,” recalled Laurinda. “He had disappeared, without informing anyone that he was leaving.”

There were other elements missing from the police report. Why had the detectives not recorded their observations about the bedroom and the rolled-up towels they found under the doors, even though Laurinda and the other servants overheard them discussing all of these amongst themselves while they were at the house? As they gathered in the kitchen to drink cup after cup of sugary
cafezinho
, police puzzled over why Alfredo would have taken all the fresh towels from the en suite bathroom, rolled each of them up, and placed them underneath the door and the other openings in the room.

If Alfredo had committed suicide, perhaps he didn't want anyone to hear the sound of the gunshots. Clearly, the towels were placed around the room to muffle any sound. But if he was going to kill himself anyway, why would he care if anyone heard the noise? Obviously, the question did occur to police, which is why it is strange that they did not note it in their official report.

Nor did they enquire about Alfredo's habits. The police photographs show a dead body in a strangely immaculate bedroom setting. Yet anyone who knew Alfredo well would have been immediately suspicious of those photographs. Alfredo was a notoriously messy person, and it was unlikely he would have taken the time to arrange his blazer just so, or put his shoes away. This was a man who was accustomed to living with several servants who picked up after him. He was careless with his clothes, regularly leaving them in a heap on the bathroom floor, recalled Laurinda.

Of course, someone as meticulous as his secretary Maria Consuelo could have cleaned up the room before the police arrived at the scene. But why not also clean up the sheet of crumpled newsprint that police found on the bedside table? According to the police, the newsprint had been used to wrap the revolver while it had been in storage in the hallway cabinet.

The police photograph of the gun is probably the most intriguing piece of evidence gathered in the investigation because the most startling conclusion of the initial police report was not that Alfredo Monteverde had committed suicide by locking himself in his bedroom and shooting himself in the chest. What was more shocking was that somehow he had managed to shoot himself twice.

In the black-and-white photograph of the weapon, a police officer's hand points to the revolver's six-bullet chamber, showing four bullets intact and two missing.

“He shot himself twice,” said Alfredo's friend Abitbol. “He really must have wanted to die.”

Samy Cohn, another wealthy Romanian-born businessman whose wife Ruth was one of Lily's closest friends and who had introduced Lily to Alfredo years before, noted about Alfredo's passing that “we were all very heartbroken when he had to give [sic] two shots in order to die.”

 

SHORTLY AFTER REPORTING
Alfredo's death to the police, Conrado began the grim task of informing Alfredo's mother and sister. Regina was on a European cruise, and could not be reached, and Rosy was on vacation. After several phone calls to her home in Lake Como, Conrado finally tracked her down to the seaside villa of Camillo Olivetti, the Italian industrialist, who owned a magnificent vacation villa near Antibes, next to the legendary Hotel du Cap. Rosy and her husband were unpacking their bags when the telephone rang, no doubt echoing through the cavernous Mediterranean villa.

Rosy picked up the phone with some annoyance. She had left strict instructions with her secretary and the household servants in Italy not to bother her on vacation, and under no circumstances to give out her number in Antibes—unless it was an emergency, of course. What could possibly be so urgent at this hour? Why were they already bothering her when she hadn't even started this desperately needed rest cure?

But when she heard the voice on the other end of the phone pronounce her name with a familiar Brazilian-Portuguese inflection—“
Rozee
?” said Conrado—she knew immediately.