Evil Breeding (25 page)

It would have been easy to hear the traded accusations as an ardent family spat about where Christopher had taken a suit to be dry-cleaned. In reality, the grandfather and grandson were quarreling about arrangements for the murder of the grandfather’s son, the grandson’s father. The full sickness of the family hit me at last.

“Peter could have been bought off,” responded Christopher, sounding like his grandfather’s identical twin. “And he was a mean bastard. But Mother’s done nothing. Not a thing.” As if to disclaim any respect he might have for Jocelyn, he added, “She doesn’t have it in her.”

B. Robert Motherway was haughty. “To the contrary, she is a sneak who has been scheming to reveal everything.” He paused. “And I mean
everything.”

“Impossible,” Christopher replied. “She doesn’t know a thing.”

Gerhard suddenly tuned in to the present. “Oh yes she does! I keep telling you and telling you! She
knows!
I don’t know how, but she does! She knows about the dogs! She said, Wasn’t it a miracle! All those canvases, and they didn’t get
chewed by dogs! Shepherds! All those shepherds, she said, and they didn’t chew the paintings! She said it, she said it, she said it!”

I was the one who’d talked about the shepherds and the paintings. I’d meant Geraldine R. Dodge’s dogs and Geraldine R. Dodge’s paintings, of course. Although Steve and I had been at Mrs. Gardner’s museum, I hadn’t been talking about her at all.

I was eager to hear more, but the elder Mr. Motherway finally lost patience. To my surprise, he didn’t shoot Gerhard, but slammed him on the head with the butt of the gun. Gerhard fell to the ground and lay motionless.

As if she were the one who’d received a hard blow to the temple, Jocelyn groaned. “Christina, my poor Christina! He brought her back from Germany, you know. She was happy there. He brought her back to case the mansion for him, to tell him what was where! Brother and sister! Brother and sister!”

“Pay no attention to her,” the elder Motherway said. “She came from nowhere. Her parentage is unknown. She is a nobody.” He moved to Jocelyn and held the gun to her head. The drug that was causing the compulsive babbling seemed also to have made her oblivious to the peril of her situation; she hadn’t tried to escape.

“What is she talking about?” her son demanded. Then he asked Jocelyn directly. “What the hell are you going on about?”

“I am cursed with women who
babble!
” Motherway exploded.

“Let her answer!” ordered Christopher, shoving his grandfather away from Jocelyn. “What’s this about a brother and sister?”

Jocelyn’s voice was wild with melodrama. “He fell in love with her! Oh, he fell madly in love with her! She was so beautiful! Christina! He brought her back to work for the rich old lady, and then he fell in love with her! And he married her.”

“The old lady?” Christopher asked, bewildered. “What old lady?”

“No, no!” Jocelyn was getting groggy again. Her voice dropped. “His sister. His very own sister.”

The grandfather raised the arm that held the gun. “Christopher, get out of the way!”

Almost simultaneously, Christopher must have understood the personal implication of what Jocelyn had revealed. With a roar, he sprang on his grandfather. “You son of a bitch! You dirty son of a bitch! Parentage! Hah! Parentage! Pig! Filthy pig!” Although grandfather and grandson seemed the same man at different ages, Christopher had no difficulty in wresting the gun from his grandfather. And no apparent difficulty in shooting him, either.

T
HE CRUISERS AND THE AMBULANCES
arrived with sirens silent and headlights off. Still, a short distance behind me, engines hummed, and tires droned. I could have sworn that the temperature suddenly rose a degree or two, warmed by the body heat of a large, yet furtive, presence. Someone, I felt certain, had discovered the slain guard’s body; only murder could speedily have summoned a force this large.

I saw no reason to remain at the scene. If my testimony were needed later, I would provide it. All I felt now was the primitive urge to get away and to take Rowdy with me. Rita informs me that I need feel no guilt about the impulse to flee. My horror, she claims, and my overwhelming compulsion to distance myself were normal, indeed, universal human responses to incest. “Hence,” Rita says smugly, “the taboo.” Human, maybe. But
universal?
Not half so universal as it ought to be, if you want my opinion. B. Robert and Christina. Rather, B. Robert and Eva Kappe. Brother and sister.

Also, I was scared of crossfire. Christopher’s bullet must have shattered his grandfather’s skull and penetrated the brain, and Gerhard was comatose, at least for now, but Christopher was able and armed. Having come to his mother’s rescue, he’d be unlikely to risk a gun battle that could leave Jocelyn an innocent casualty. Still, I couldn’t be sure.

The police would certainly approach on Mount Auburn’s roads and paths. The paved streets and the trails all around the lake would be under surveillance, if not actually occupied, and there was bound to be a substantial force at the intersection where I’d found the dead guard’s body. Consequently, my spur-of-the-moment plan for evading detection called for staying off Mount Auburn’s major and minor thoroughfares; wherever possible, Rowdy and I would wend our way from monument to monument, stone to stone, tree to tree. Our destination would be the same gate through which we’d entered. It would be watched now, perhaps barred. But we’d deal with that problem when we came to it. If necessary, we’d go to some distant part of Mount Auburn and hide out until morning.

My advantage over the arriving forces was my recently acquired familiarity with the terrain. In the daytime, visitors who studied street signs and consulted maps still found themselves disoriented. Now, at night, the police were probably unsure of exactly what was where. But in this small part of the cemetery, I knew where I was and where I was going. Rowdy and I would crawl, slither, or dash, as needed, parallel to the trail that ran above the tiny lake. We’d stay uphill, above the path. That course should land us right near the gate to Coolidge Avenue.

All went well until a minor miscalculation of mine led us a bit too far above the trail. Taking one tentative step behind a massive monument, I came close to bumping into a police cruiser. I backstepped so rapidly that I bumped into Rowdy, but luckily managed not to step on a paw. To give myself a minute to regain my composure, I huddled behind the monument with my arms wrapped around Rowdy and my face buried in the warm comfort of his thick coat. As my heart slowed, I realized that the sight of the cruiser, far from alarming me, should have allayed my fears by offering visual confirmation of the conclusion I’d already reached. Yes, the police were indeed here, and in force, too. The cruiser I’d almost smacked into had been the middle car in a row of three. I’d heard more than that. There must be similar clusters of police vehicles throughout the area. Before long, I told
myself, a Cambridge-cop voice with a heavy Boston accent would boom down through a loudspeaker into the little valley that contained the tiny lake and the Gardner vault. For all I knew, it might be Kevin Dennehy’s voice that issued the warning and the order you always hear in movies:
It’s the police. We’ve got you surrounded! Put down your weapons!

The vision of Kevin Dennehy and his uniformed and plainclothes associates deployed all around the valley buoyed my confidence. With renewed determination, I rose to my feet, and Rowdy and I set off toward the Coolidge Avenue gate. Despite detours around low iron fences surrounding family plots and a few near tumbles on footstones, we soon found ourselves maddeningly close to our goal. At this point, the path forked. Virtually no distance ahead, both forks ended at blacktop. Somewhere to our right was the intersection where we had come upon the body of the guard. There’d be cops there, as well as at least one ambulance, and who knew what else. Straight ahead was the high boundary fence and, inches beyond it, Coolidge Avenue. If we went straight, then cut right, we’d be at the gate.

Just as I filled my lungs with oxygen, preparing to make the bold move out of the shelter of the trees and monuments and onto the exposed asphalt, I heard footsteps and then muted talk. It proved to be two large uniformed men heading onto the path, which is to say, directly toward us. Damn! Paths and roads converged so thickly here that there was almost no space between them. Immediately to my left, however, was a long rectangular monument with a flat top, the kind of memorial that’s unhappily shaped like a coffin. It took no effort to lure Rowdy onto it. With a quick hand signal, I had him posed in a perfect down-stay. A second later, I was on a down-stay myself, flattened on the grass behind the monument, squeezing myself against its cold stone. Unable to speak aloud, I issued silent commands.
Stay! Good boy! Hold it right there! Freeeeeeze!

As I heard the two men pass quickly by, I decided with relief that we’d entirely eluded their attention. Then a young man’s voice said softly, “Hey, sergeant? Hey, wait up!
There’s a dog back there.” The footfalls stopped. “There’s a great big dog on one of the—”

The sergeant guffawed softly. “This place is full of nutty statues. Statues of dogs all over! What you saw was—”

The footfalls resumed. The young officer was trailing after his sergeant. As they departed, I heard the young voice say plaintively, “But, Sergeant? Sergeant! It was wagging its tail! The dog was—”

“It was a stone dog, kid. It didn’t wag its tail.” The sergeant’s voice faded as the men disappeared. “Kid, you must’ve been smoking something you shouldn’t. You been doing that? Huh? What you been smoking? Wagging its tail! Wagging its tail! Jesus, what I gotta put up with!”

Once they were out of sight, I instantly got to my feet, brushed myself off, ran my fingers through my hair, and adopted the supremely self-confident air of utter obliviousness that is the hallmark of Cambridge eccentricity. I pretended to be an updated version of the parrot-walking Miss Whitehead, the near kin of a Cambridge personage so eminent that one could expect almost anything from me … and not be disappointed. The Cambridge attitude:
Within the city limits, I am entitled to go where I please when I please with whom I please. My life is the life of the mind! Nothing could be further from my thoughts than the opinions of people I may encounter on my journey.

With Rowdy beside me in the improbable role of Miss Whitehead’s parrot, I marched straight along the asphalt and up to the gate through which we’d entered, where I was only slightly irked to discover that the scene I’d scripted for myself was already being enacted. Indeed, it was immediately clear that I was being radically upstaged by a Cambridge type who’d gotten there first. Unlike me, he was dressed for the part. His peculiar-looking binoculars were harnessed to his chest, he wore a funny-looking hat and a loose vest with dozens of bulging pockets, and he carried a device designed, as he was explaining to a cop at the gate, to enable birders to hear their quarry. Certainly he had a key! His defensive tone suggested that the cop had offensively mistaken a
rara avis
for a guttersnipe. Unlike me, the bona fide night birder was
not accompanied by a dog. He was not, however, alone. Hanging back, embarrassed, I thought, by his companion’s arrogance, was, of all people, Artie Spicer, the leader of Rita’s birding group, the guy we’d had dinner with the night my house was broken into. As the costumed birder strutted before the cop, Artie and I made eye contact and exchanged wry little smiles. Artie carried what I guessed was some fancy kind of night-vision spotting scope, a contraption for seeing birds in the dark.

Fearful that my lack of fluency in the language of birding would give me away, I picked my words carefully. “Hi, Artie,” I said as normally as possible. “Anything interesting tonight?” I was hoping he’d mention some avian species so that I could say I’d heard it, too. Before encountering the real birder, I’d intended, if challenged, to brag about detecting the call of a black-crowned night heron, only because it was the only bird name I’d been able to think of that had anything to do with night. I’d felt apprehensive. Maybe the creature never flew north of Florida. Maybe it was voiceless, a cousin of the mute swan. Maybe the guard or the cop at the gate would be a birder with a life list approaching a trillion and would instantly spot me for the liar I was.

After taking down our three names and addresses, the cop waved the condescending birder through the gate. At Artie’s side, Rowdy and I followed. Nodding at Rowdy, the cop said, “Good idea. Birds or no birds, this is no place to go wandering around at night.”

With a knowing nod and a conspiratorial smile, I replied, “Well, Cambridge is Cambridge!”

The cop knew just what I meant. With a bob of his head in the direction of the costumed birder, he said, “Yup! A lot of odd ducks here, all right. A whole lot of odd ducks.”

In Cambridge, attitude is everything.

J
OCELYN MOTHERWAY ENDED UP
in Mount Auburn. The
other
one: Mount Auburn Hospital. The two parallel universes—pardon me, venerable Cambridge institutions—are only a few blocks apart on Mount Auburn Street. Whether the proximity is depressing or convenient depends on your point of view. Jocelyn Motherway’s opinion on the matter was a bit difficult to decipher. She seemed less than overjoyed to be alive.

She was only a little paler than usual, and her hospital gown wasn’t any dowdier than what she ordinarily wore. I found it satisfying, however, to see her propped up in a bed she hadn’t made, sipping orange juice poured and served by someone else. The basket of flowers I’d brought rested on a windowsill. The arrangement contained a great many daisies and tons of those thick, coarse, cheap ferns, but it was better than nothing, I guess. I couldn’t afford delphiniums.

“It was kind of you,” Jocelyn told me lethargically. “People here are very kind. Someone washed my hair. And they haven’t thrown me out on the street. There’s nothing really wrong with me, you know. Most hospitals would’ve sent me home last night.”