MEXICO: Appointment in Acapulco

In Pacific-coast Acapulco, Mexico’s hibiscus-cum-chromium Riviera resort, this is the time of year when the dizzy whirl of swimming, sunning, sipping and sinning spins fastest, and each night’s gaiety produces a ration of racy gossip for the shorts-and-halter set to savor the next day. But never before was there such a scandal as the one that had the peso-elite buzzing last week. Its ingredients were tried and true: a deceived socialite wife, a smoking pistol, a far-from-bullet-proof husband and a toothsome girl who was—in the fashionable Mexican euphemism—the husband’s “second front.” Holiday Buildup. Señora Maria Luisa Escobar de Rosas, 40, had learned last year (from an unsigned letter) that her husband was dallying with a dark, devastating 24-year-old bank teller named Hilda Parrao. Maria soon had a showdown with the pair; after a painful scene, husband Rodolfo Rosas, 45, a wealthy builder, promised to break off with Hilda. But a private-eye checkup soon revealed that he had not. When, following their annual custom, the Rosas family went to Acapulco for the Easter holiday season, the air was full of unresolved suspicion. The 281-mile drive from Mexico City tired Maria, and she went to bed. Her husband, on the other hand, went out “to have a few drinks with the boys”—adorned with his handsomest pale blue tie and lashings of cologne. “Can it be possible?” Maria asked herself. After a couple of confidential phone conversations with a friend in Mexico City, she established that Hilda had also gone to Acapulco. Maria sprang from bed, dressed, got Rodolfo’s pistol out of the Cadillac’s glove compartment, and slipped it into her handbag. Midnight Payoff. She confronted her husband and his mistress at midnight in the lobby of Hilda’s hotel. Rodolfo was past the point of offering excuses or explanations. “You know why I am here,” he said. “You’d better get something through your head right now: I am sick of you and I am tired of you.” Maria, her face drawn and her grey-flecked hair awry, backed away and drew. The two stood motionless for a moment while the unheeding, laughing crowd pressed by them. She fired twice. Rodolfo, clutching his belly, shouted, “Maria, don’t shoot! Please don’t shoot!” She fired four more times, saw her husband drop to the floor, then collapsed. “Tell me he’s not dead,” she pleaded. But he was. As the suntan crowd on the beaches had it figured last week, Maria will probably get off easy. Under an unspoken Mexican codicil to the unwritten law, judges are generally tolerant toward respectable women who punish faithless husbands—especially when the man has had so little discretion as to make a bungling public show out of his second-front operation.