Gilded Lily (8 page)

But she didn't have it for long. Barely three years into their marriage, Alfredo started to have serious doubts about Lily, according to friends and business associates. Maybe it was those elaborate French dinners, prepared by someone else.

Despite what appeared to be a happy married life, there were tensions. Lily could never quite understand the close relationship that Alfredo enjoyed with his sister, even though Rosy spent most of her time abroad in New York and Italy after she divorced her first husband.

Whenever brother and sister were together, Lily felt like a complete outsider, recalled Rosy. Sometimes they used the secret language they had invented as children in Romania, confounding whoever happened to be in their presence.

Their preferred mode of entry into the Ritz hotel in Paris or the Dorchester in London was by pretending to lean on a flower. Alfredo
and his sister would drive up to the entrance in a Rolls-Royce, wait for a doorman to open the car door and, feigning great fatigue, they would lean on a lily or a rose and enter the building, laughing later at the incredulous expressions on the faces of the hotel staff.

During one such surreal exchange between Rosy and Alfredo in Paris, Lily had been so exasperated by their antics and role-playing that Alfredo took pity on her and ducked into Boucheron to buy her an exquisite diamond ring to make amends.

But while he indulged Lily with expensive surprises, he also loved to indulge his sister. He once wrapped a square-cut blue white diamond ring in crumpled toilet paper and tossed it carelessly on Rosy's coffee table at her apartment in New York.

Throughout Alfredo's life, Rosy remained his most important confidante. “Rosy dear, as usual I am filling a whole letter about me,” Alfredo wrote to his sister in one of the frequent letters he sent to her in New York and Italy, alternating between English, Portuguese, and sometimes Romanian. “Forgive my selfishness but somehow I feel like telling you how I feel.”

The relationship between brother and sister was troublesome to Lily, said one family friend, who did not want to be identified. “Lily was clearly jealous of Rosy,” she said. “She tried to outdo Rosy when it came to everything. If Rosy had redecorated her apartment in New York, then Lily would come up with the same color scheme to redecorate the family home in Rio.”

It's not clear whether Lily took her cue from her sister-in-law when she insisted that she needed to hire an architect and interior designer to redo their new home in Rio de Janeiro. Shortly after marrying Lily, Alfredo gave up his stunning penthouse in Copacabana and bought a sprawling modern house on a leafy residential street, with a garden in the back for the children and their dogs. The Monteverdes moved into the house at 96 Rua Icatu, in an exclusive hilltop neighborhood in Rio, in 1968, after the home had undergone extensive renovations overseen by Lily and their architect Fernando. The house was deceptively small
at its rather demure front entrance, which was partially hidden by tropical foliage. A visitor had to drive farther up Rua Icatu, a winding road that snaked up a mountain, to appreciate the home's full size. The bottom floor featured floor-to-ceiling windows in the sunken living room and a tremendous view onto the tropical garden in the back. Guests enjoying an afternoon glass of champagne in the living room had a view of lush foliage, lilac and white orchids, and flaming pink hyacinth. The tranquillity and quiet were so complete that guests might be forgiven for thinking that they were lounging at a country retreat far from the urban chaos of Rio de Janeiro. On the second floor, where the bedrooms were located, Alfredo helped design a large office that led into the master bedroom suite, where a large picture window overlooked the garden.

After the final renovations were complete, Alfredo did not want to stop. He set out to create an annex to the property so that he could house his household staff. Unlike most of his peers, Alfredo was extremely dedicated to his staff. Shortly after moving in, he confessed to his housekeeper Laurinda that he had bought a vacant plot of land near the Icatu house. He wanted to expand the house, he said, and construct separate quarters to accommodate more live-in servants.

“I want to be able to walk a short distance when I need to talk to you,” he told Laurinda, with a wink, ducking into the kitchen, as he did on most days, to sample the meals the servants cooked for themselves.

“Seu Alfredo ate filet mignon, but he loved the poor people's food,” said Laurinda, recalling how Alfredo would savor the smell of a steaming pot of bean stew in the kitchen.

On weekends, Alfredo took the children, along with Laurinda's two boys, Adilson and Ademir, to the Rio Yacht Club or the exclusive Caiçaras Club in the city's upscale Lagoa neighborhood.

“Seu Alfredo treated everyone like part of the family,” recalled Laurinda. “Everyone loved him.”

But as it turned out, not everyone was enamored of Alfredo Monteverde.

For one thing, the rich man who was so kind to his household servants could also act with swift brutality when confronted with their disloyalty. About a year after moving into the Icatu house, Alfredo fired one of his longtime servants. Anita was a single mother from the impoverished northeastern state of Bahia. While Alfredo and Lily were away on vacation in Europe in June 1969 Anita had been put in charge of the house. She was to allow Laurinda and the other servants in to maintain the property. But Anita, who was not well-liked by the others who worked in the house, refused. When the Monteverdes returned and the house was dirty, Anita blamed it on the others, saying that they had not appeared while the family was away on vacation.

Laurinda had nothing but contempt for Anita, who often lit candles and made strange offerings to the Afro-Brazilian gods (known as
orixas
) in the black-magic (known as macumba) ceremonies that she had brought from her home in Bahia. “I told her, Anita stop smoking up the house with your spells, but she just kept on doing it,” said Laurinda.

Anita's lies to her employers about the other servants were the last straw for Laurinda, who also accused Anita of trying to turn the children against her. Feeling cornered, Laurinda left the house on Icatu without a word to her employer, who was at his offices downtown. When Alfredo heard of the resignation of his favorite housekeeper, he drove to the Parque da Cidade favela to find out what had happened. Laurinda was livid. When he tried to convince her to return to work, Laurinda told him that she refused to work alongside Anita. She related the black magic and the duplicity, but Alfredo wasn't listening. He opened the door of his convertible and sped to his house to get rid of Anita, whom he fired on the spot. He gave her five months' wages, and five minutes to collect her things and leave the house.

Anita, who moved slowly at the best of times, took her time, and
before she left the house, she may have taken her revenge on her boss. After Anita left, the servants discovered Alfredo's favorite shirt—white with pink stripes—which had been hanging to dry in the small outside area near the servants' quarters. The shirt was tied over and over again with twine and hidden under the wash basin.

“If I'm not staying, no one else is going to stay in this house,” said Anita in a menacing tone to the other servants as she walked through the kitchen and climbed the garden stairs to the servants' entrance through the garage.

Coincidentally, Anita's ouster occurred simultaneously with Alfredo's decision to get rid of Lily.

“Tell me,” he said to Maria Consuelo Ayres, his closest confidante at Ponto Frio. “How do you go about separating from your wife or husband?”

Maria Consuelo was used to such hypothetical, third-person questions from her unpredictable boss whenever he was having difficulties in his personal life, and knew it signaled the end of a romantic relationship. However, she does recall being a little bit surprised that Alfredo, whose ability to marry and divorce seemed to come so easily, was seeking marital advice from her. She knew right away that he was having trouble at home. Calmly, she told him that if one is indeed having marital problems, one must discuss them calmly with one's spouse. Maria Consuelo put the conversation out of her mind and assumed that all was well when Alfredo, Lily, and Alfredo's mother, Regina, took off on their European holiday in the summer of 1969. But when he returned, Alfredo matter-of-factly informed Maria Consuelo that her advice had not worked.

“By the way, what you said about calm, rational discussion,” said Alfredo during the course of a business day. “It didn't work.”

The crisis in his personal life became so overwhelming that he mentioned it to several friends, family members, and business associates. “Fred commented to my husband that he wanted to separate from
Lily,” said Lourdes Mattos, referring to a conversation that Alfredo had had with her husband, Geraldo, Ponto Frio's chief director.

For his part, Geraldo was also used to such pronouncements from his boss, and when he heard nothing further, he assumed that Alfredo and Lily had ironed out whatever differences they had, said Lourdes. Besides, at the time, Alfredo was on so much medication to treat his depression that Geraldo assumed that he wasn't thinking straight.

Alfredo also must have confided his marital difficulties to his mother, who told her bridge partner that all was not well with Lily. “Shortly before Fred died Regina told me that she was completely wrong about Lily,” said Masha. “She said, ‘That's not a marriage for Fred.'”

Alfredo had also spoken to his accountant about an imminent divorce. “I didn't really deal with Fred's personal tax matters,” said Trotte. “But as the divorce would involve issues directly affecting Ponto Frio, he told me that he and Lily would need to make some financial arrangements, pending their divorce.”

But other than his family and closest business associates, few others knew anything about their imminent divorce. They didn't fight or raise their voices, at least not in front of the servants.

Perhaps Lily was hoping that Alfredo would change his mind. After all, most of her family now depended upon Ponto Frio for their income. Her brother Artigas Watkins worked as a security guard at a Ponto Frio warehouse when the Watkins family's business fell apart after Wolf's death in 1962. Her mother, Annita, and the other Watkins siblings also had their expenses paid for by Ponto Frio, said Trotte, who included the Watkins family's expenses in Ponto Frio's accounts. “It was a bit of creative accounting when it came to the Watkins family's expenses,” said Trotte. “We received their bills, and we charged them to the company as expenses.”

But below stairs, the hired help only found out that things were not well with their boss when they found Alfredo's cursed shirt. It was
Nelly, the maid who worked with Laurinda at Icatu, who found the striped dress shirt.

When Nelly showed Laurinda the shirt, she knew immediately that some kind of macumba curse had been put on her boss. Laurinda doused the shirt in hot water and cut the twine.

“But it was the wrong thing to do,” recalled Laurinda with great regret many years later. “Hot water only makes the curse stronger. I should have put cold water and salt on it to kill whatever macumba curse had been put on Seu Alfredo. But I did the wrong thing. I made the curse stronger.”

T
HE NIGHT BEFORE
Alfredo Monteverde died, Laurinda dreamed that she had fallen down the main staircase at the redbrick house on Rua Icatu. It was Alfredo himself—tall and handsome, in his pinstripe suit and his favorite pink and white striped shirt, smelling of sandalwood—who rushed to her rescue in the dream. “Did you hurt yourself?” he asked her, staring intently into her eyes. But before she could answer him, she woke up crying.

“When you wake up crying from a dream, it always means death,” said Laurinda. “The dream told me that Seu Alfredo was going to die. It couldn't have been clearer what was about to happen.”

On the morning of Monday, August 25, 1969, Laurinda woke at dawn, prepared her children for school, and set off from her modest home in the hillside shantytown where she lived. By the time she hopped on the series of crowded buses that would take her to Alfredo's home, Laurinda had forgotten about the terrible dream that presaged the death of her beloved boss.

Icatu, a sleepy residential stretch of road that curls up a mountain, is surrounded by lush tropical forest in Rio's Humaita neighborhood. There are brightly painted colonial-style homes at the foot of the
street, but the farther you climb into the forest, the grander the homes and gardens.

In the early mornings when the street is quiet, tiny tamarind monkeys, their long tails dangling beneath them, dart out of trees, balancing themselves like skilled tightrope walkers on overhead electrical wires. For a split second at a time, they seem to stare in rapt attention, their small bulging eyes scanning any passersbys who have stopped to catch their breath in midclimb before attempting the last steep incline to number 96.

On that fateful Monday morning, the monkeys didn't stray from their routine. In the silence of the early morning, they startled Laurinda with their chatter as she climbed the last, steepest part of the hill. Catching her breath, the diminutive, roly-poly housekeeper stood to watch them gathering bits of rotted papaya and banana. Then she rounded a corner and headed into the cul de sac high above the street where the servants' entrance was located through the garage at the back of the Monteverde house.

Looking back, Laurinda couldn't remember anything amiss. When she reached the back of the house, Waldomiro Alves, the gardener, already had the garage door open and was cleaning the interior of Alfredo's car—a white 1966 Oldsmobile convertible with red leather seats. Laurinda waved to Waldomiro as she headed down the steep set of stairs that took her through the lush garden with its caged macaws. She patted Barbarella and Sarama, the two Irish wolfhounds, as she walked towards the servants' part of the house, off the kitchen.

Laurinda nearly collided with her boss. In his charcoal gray pinstripe suit, neatly pressed white striped shirt, and striped black and brown tie, he was heading up the garden stairs, taking them two at a time, and humming the melody of his favorite samba: “Everything is in its place / Thank God, thank God / We shouldn't forget to say / Thank God, thank God.”

Rushing up the stairs after her husband was Dona Lily, blonde and elegant even in her bathrobe, which opened slightly as she ran to re
veal a silky nightgown. As she did most mornings, Lily accompanied Alfredo to his car to kiss him goodbye. Laurinda didn't actually see them kiss that morning, and for about a split second she wondered why Dona Lily was running after her boss, rather than walking by his side, as she usually did. But then she heard the car speed away and saw Lily walk back down the stairs and head back to the bedroom. She didn't give it another thought.

It was 7:30 a.m., and time for Laurinda to change into her maid's uniform and begin her work.

However, Laurinda did recall that there were a few things amiss on that fateful Monday morning. For one thing, the children didn't go to school. Lily informed her that she was taking her children to the Copacabana Palace hotel for the day to see their father, who had recently arrived from Buenos Aires. Alfredo's son, Carlinhos, as he was known to Laurinda, would stay behind at the house.

After Lily and the children left for the hotel with the chauffeur, Lily's brother Artigas dropped by in the late morning, lounging in the garden.

“Seu Artigas was at the house for a very long time,” said Laurinda, adding that it was not unusual for members of Lily's family to drop by unannounced. “I brought him juice, coffee, and water.”

Despite this unexpected visitor and the enforced school holiday, everything else appeared to be in its place at 96 Rua Icatu on the day Alfredo Monteverde died.

 

ALFREDO WAS IN
good spirits when he arrived at his offices in downtown Rio, recalled Maria Consuelo. “He wasn't in one of his depressions,” she said. After twenty-three years of working alongside Alfredo, Maria Consuelo was familiar with the silence and irritability that always seemed to accompany one of those rapid downward spirals.

Shortly after arriving, Alfredo disappeared into a lengthy business
meeting with his chief executive Geraldo, but before he did, he asked Maria Consuelo to make reservations at the Copacabana Palace hotel for lunch. He would be dining with Lily, and her first husband, Mario, he told her. He wanted to discuss what would happen to Lily's three children after they divorced. In the four years that he had been married to Lily, he and Carlinhos had grown very attached to Claudio, Eduardo, and Adriana. He wanted to maintain a relationship with the children, and needed to make arrangements with Lily and their father.

“He told my husband that he was having lunch with Lily that day to discuss the fate of her children,” said Lourdes Mattos, Geraldo's widow. “In fact, this was the whole purpose of the lunch.” At the meeting with Geraldo, Alfredo discussed plans for opening several more stores, recalled Lourdes.

Most of Alfredo's executive team at Ponto Frio knew that he was planning to divorce Lily. He had also confided his intention to Rosy, and on the weekend before he died he had made plans to join her at her home in Italy for a short holiday.

But if he was at all worried about the lunch with Lily and Mario, he wasn't showing it. Shortly after arriving at the Copacabana Palace hotel at midday, Alfredo bumped into his friend Michael von Lichnowsky, the personal assistant to Octavio Guinle, then the owner of the hotel. Von Lichnowsky later told Rosy that Alfredo emerged from the newspaper stand at the hotel, joking and brandishing a copy of the latest
Time
magazine. He wasn't the least bit anxious or depressed, Von Lichnowsky told Rosy.

Still, lunch must have been a tense affair for Lily, who was not in agreement about the divorce. “I know that Lily did not accept the divorce,” said Maria Consuelo. “Lily didn't want to separate from Fred.”

Indeed, Lily, who had spent her life trying to land a rich man, was now faced with the prospect of losing everything. No good could come of this divorce for Lily and her entire family.

Although they were by no means destitute after Wolf's company folded, the Watkinses relied on their monthly stipends from Ponto Frio to continue the comfortable lifestyle to which they had all become accustomed when Wolf's business was at its most profitable during the Second World War.

While it is not clear what took place at the luncheon, Alfredo seems to have emerged from the meeting with a headache. Instead of heading straight back to work, he decided to return home for a short nap. Alfredo appears to have headed straight for the second-floor master suite, and told one of the servants to wake him at three in the afternoon, which would allow him enough time to return downtown for an afternoon business meeting.

Alfredo was so tired that he didn't bother to change his clothes when he reached the bedroom. He removed his jacket and his shoes, pushed aside the satin-covered pillows Lily was so fond of clustering on the bed, and appears to have casually flipped through the pages of
Time
before drifting off to sleep, according to police reports.

Downstairs, the servants had gathered in the kitchen for a hearty lunch of rice, beans, and manioc. Their animated conversation, and the transistor radio, which played the latest sambas, must have drowned out the two loud pops on the second floor when the gun was fired.

Alfredo was already dead by the time Laurinda began calling the extension in the master suite.

“I thought he had a headache and had gone upstairs to lie down,” said Laurinda. “But I knew when he didn't answer the phone that something bad had happened.” It was just after three in the afternoon when Laurinda began to make the calls to the private extension in Alfredo's bedroom. Moments before Laurinda began to call the extension, Lily had called to say she was still at the Copacabana Palace hotel, just finishing up with Alain, her hairdresser.

Where was Seu Alfredo? Lily asked. Laurinda didn't find the question strange. Whenever she went out to the hairdresser or to her
boutique in the afternoons, Lily called the servants to tell them where she would be, just in case someone needed to speak to her. She sometimes did this several times a day. Lily had already called his secretary Maria Consuelo, who had told her that he was expected back at the office for a meeting.

Laurinda only knew he had retreated to his bedroom for a nap because Djanira Nascimento, one of the other housekeepers, had seen him arrive. Laurinda found it strange that he had not come through the servants' quarters as he usually did to have a chat.

After repeated attempts to reach Alfredo on the telephone, Laurinda walked up the stairs, through the second-floor office and hallway alcove, and knocked loudly on the door.

“Seu Alfredo? Seu Alfredo? Are you there?”

No answer.

What was he doing in his locked bedroom? Had he mixed his medications with the Mandrax that he was so fond of taking, especially when he needed a deep sleep? Mandrax, a powerful sedative, was initially marketed as a sleeping pill but became extremely popular as a recreational drug in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in Brazil. The drug, which was a precursor to Quaaludes, could send the user into euphoric states. One pill a day for a month was likely to cause physical dependence, severe headaches, irritability, and mania. Alfredo, of course, suffered from all of those symptoms, and the Mandrax, upon which he had become so dependent, seemed to exacerbate all his physical and mental problems.

Laurinda knew firsthand the effects of Mandrax. When she was having trouble sleeping, she decided to help herself to a bottle from Alfredo's collection. One pill had been enough to convince her that nothing good could come of taking the drug. The Mandrax knocked her out so completely that days before his death, she flushed the rest of the pills that she had swiped from his bedside table down the toilet.

“When Seu Alfredo had one of his headaches, he didn't talk to
anyone,” said Laurinda. “He just went upstairs to lie down. I thought he must have been suffering from another headache, or he had fallen asleep.”

When Alfredo was in the grip of one of his headaches, the servants were warned to tread lightly, the caged macaws in the garden were covered with towels or blankets so that they wouldn't screech, and the children were told to keep quiet.

As she walked down the stairs to the main floor, Laurinda was convinced that something awful had happened to her boss. Panic-stricken, she grabbed nine-year-old Carlinhos. Laurinda hoisted him up outside the second-floor bedroom window, which was wide open. Straining to reach the windowpane as Laurinda held his legs, Carlinhos shouted, “My father's sleeping!”

And then, as he had a better look, and perhaps noticed the blood staining the satin bedspread, he screamed, “My father is dead. He's angry. He's dead!”

Terrified, Laurinda tried to calm herself as she called for Waldomiro to fetch a ladder and climb in through the open window to investigate. Waldomiro leaned a ladder against the wall and climbed up to the window.

“Everyone in the house stopped working at that point,” said Laurinda. “We all knew that whatever had taken place with Seu Alfredo, it was nothing good.”

Waldomiro stepped over the window ledge and entered the room where Alfredo lay on his back on the bed, his head propped up on a pillow, thick, dark blood oozing from his open mouth.

Stunned, Waldomiro moved as if in slow motion to unlock the bedroom door as he tried to take in the scene in front of him. Alfredo's jacket was neatly folded on one side of the bed; his shoes were also neatly placed near the bed on the polished wooden floor. Alfredo was in his stocking feet. Waldomiro could still make out the sweat marks on the soles of his dark-gray socks. There were various bottles of medication on the bedside table, and the latest issue of
Time
maga
zine. Rolled-up towels from the bathroom were placed underneath the doors. With his left hand, Alfredo appeared to be pulling at his shirt collar. His mouth was slightly open. If it hadn't been for the blood, Waldomiro might have easily imagined that Alfredo was in a deep sleep.

Just as Waldomiro took in the scene, he heard Lily rushing up the stairs followed by Laurinda. As she passed through the study that led to the bedroom, Laurinda saw Lily stop to open the drawer of the cabinet that stood in the hallway alcove just outside their bedroom. Was she checking for their revolver, which was kept in the drawer of the hallway cabinet?

It's not clear why the Monteverdes kept a revolver in the house, especially since it was well known that Alfredo suffered from manic depression and had tried to kill himself in the past. But everyone who worked for him seems to have known where it was stored. Perhaps Alfredo was concerned about his family's security. After all, he was one of the twenty richest men in Brazil. But the Brazil of Alfredo Monteverde was a relatively calm, safe place, under the iron grip of the military junta that ruled the country. The urban violence that is associated with Rio de Janeiro today was almost nonexistent in the late 1960s.