Evil Breeding (9 page)

He let me down. I let myself down: I asked nothing. Our meeting ended.

He rose. We shook hands. “It has been a pleasure,” he told me. He sounded sincere.

“I’m especially grateful to you for seeing me at this difficult time,” I said.

“Distraction is the best medicine,” he replied graciously. “Shall we get together again? In a few weeks, let’s say?”

I mumbled a promise to call him. Then he escorted me to the door of his study.

“You don’t need to show me out,” I assured him. “Thank you again.”

According to the controls on the dashboard, my old Bronco had air-conditioning. The controls lied. Because the weather had taken one of those ghastly New England leaps from mild spring to sweltering summer, I’d left the windows down and parked in the shade of the barn, closer to the kennel runs than the resident dogs had liked. As I approached the car, the dogs in the kennel runs began barking, and Peter Motherway came stomping toward me from around a corner of the barn.

“That look like the driveway to you?” he demanded.

The complaint was unfair. Yes, I’d pulled off the gravel, but the spot I’d chosen was on a roughly mown area, not on the lawn. To make myself heard over the din of the dogs, I had to shout. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think anyone would mind. My air-conditioning doesn’t work too well. I always try to park in the shade. I’m leaving right now.”

With shamelessly bad manners, Peter shook a fist at me. “Good! And stay gone! In case you don’t know, this is a family in mourning.”

Blood rose to my face. I certainly did know that it was a family in mourning. The knowledge helped me to keep my mouth shut. As I was about to take a step toward my car, Christopher Motherway, Peter’s son, B. Robert’s look-alike grandson, threw open the front door of the house and took long, commanding steps toward his father. The resemblance
between grandson and grandfather, I instantly realized, had as much to do with attitude and demeanor as it did with physical attributes. Indeed, although Peter was shorter than his father and his son, he shared their fair coloring, their blue eyes, and their even features. But he dressed like kennel help. Did clothes unmake the man? Mr. Motherway had worn a dark summer suit. Christopher looked like a model in a magazine ad for some trendy chain of expensive sportswear shops. His blond hair was carefully tousled, and he had on tan pants, a white shirt, and leather shoes with no socks. Peter, in heavy canvas dark-blue work pants and a matching work shirt, could have been costumed to play the role of a garbage collector. In inexplicably skipping a generation, the glitter of moneyed aristocracy had excluded Peter from the elite to which his father and his son had been born.

With the air of taking the hired help to task, Christopher glared at his father. As he shouted, the barking of the dogs seemed to echo him. “You are out of line. Grandfather was looking out the window. He saw what happened. He can guess the rest. He offers his apology to Miss Winter, who is his guest here. In case you’ve forgotten, guests park where it is convenient for them to park.”

As if determined to top his son’s rudeness, Peter replied, “Mind your fucking business, you lazy little shit!”

I wanted to disappear. If the battery didn’t let me down, I had the means at hand. Quietly edging my way around the quarreling father and son, I made it to the driver’s side door and slid in. Looking anywhere except at the ugly family scene, I found myself staring into the distance as I turned the ignition key. As the engine caught, the great size of the distant kennels registered on me. Just how many dogs did Mr. Motherway own? Outside the open passenger window, the shouting grew increasingly violent.

“And keep that goddamned crazy Gerhard the hell away from me!” Peter bellowed. “Or I’ll break his fucking neck for him. And I know how!”

I shifted into reverse and backed out. My car backfired. The sound didn’t embarrass me. Neither did the car’s dents and scratches. I took a deep breath and savored the lingering
aroma of dogs. I could hardly wait to get home to Rowdy, Kimi, and Tracker. Rowdy and Kimi had an air of nobility that the cat and I lacked. Tracker hissed and scratched out of fear, but at least she didn’t scream obscenities in front of visitors, and the dogs literally fell to the floor at the feet of my guests. I made people feel welcome. I offered food and drink. Rowdy had the gracious habit of appearing before guests bearing toys he had carefully selected as tokens of friendship. Kimi occasionally pushed hospitality a bit far by merrily sailing into someone’s lap. In the privacy of our little family, I sometimes informed the dogs that they were out of line, but when they offered their paws, I said thank you. And when I needed Tracker to get off the mouse pad, I often added the word
please.
If the scene I’d just witnessed represented the graciousness of the moneyed aristocracy, I’d take genteel poverty any day.

R
EMEMBER THAT MOUNT AUBURN
is a cemetery and not a public park and always act accordingly.
Considering Mount Auburn’s popularity as a birding spot, I hesitate to call this injunction the cemetery’s cardinal rule, but that’s exactly what it is. A sign near the main entrance on Mount Auburn Street specifically stated that dogs were not allowed. I had no need to take Kimi to the cemetery. It was Rowdy who had to visit the grave of his previous owner, Dr. Frank Stanton.

After returning from Mr. Motherway’s, I removed both dog crates from the back of the Bronco and placed a copy of Peterson’s field guide in a prominent position on the dashboard. Raising the backseat and settling Rowdy in a down-stay on the floor, I took pleasure in my ability to enrich the famous garden cemetery’s canine population, which, in Rowdy’s absence, consisted exclusively of marble and granite dogs. In memorializing Dr. Stanton’s birthday as he would have wished, I was making a creative contribution to Mount Auburn.

The first time Rowdy visited Dr. Stanton’s grave, he and Steve and I went on foot. In refining my technique, I’d switched to the car and explored alternatives to the main entrance. For a city cemetery, Mount Auburn is big—174 acres. It extends beyond Cambridge into Watertown and has more
than ten miles of roads and paths. It started as a rural cemetery for Boston’s elite dead. Just why do I have these facts at my nontouristic fingertips? Because in preparation for writing my article about the dog statues of Mount Auburn, I’d helped myself to free pamphlets available from a rack at the entrance gate. I’d also bought a map, a necessity for finding your way around as well as for plotting ways to sneak in a dog. As my map shows, the cemetery stretches from Mount Auburn Street all the way back to the intersection of Grove Street with Coolidge Avenue, which borders Mount Auburn on the east and southeast. To the west is a Roman Catholic cemetery. Now and then, the dogs and I walked along Coolidge Avenue on our way to the Charles River. Grove Street, which is semi-industrial, has what I had hoped would be a useful service entrance to Mount Auburn. I tried it a few times, but eventually settled on the main entrance, where my car was just one of many carrying birders, walkers, tourists, and, of course, mourners.

As I turned in at the main gate, I spoke a warning to Rowdy. “Down!” I reminded him. “Good boy! Stay!” I could hear his tail thump. He is not immune to the delights of forbidden pleasure. After bearing right and then left, I followed Spruce Avenue—green line, no parking—through the heart of the cemetery and eventually turned onto the narrow road that led to Dr. Stanton’s grave.

“Now, be a good boy while I reconnoiter!” I told Rowdy. “Stay!”

Our adventure was not, admittedly, in a league with the Gardner heist. Even so, I didn’t want to get caught. If our secret forays became known, the guards might watch for my license plate and stop us before we even entered. Nothing worse would happen, I thought. I did, however,
imagine
worse outcomes, for example, wanted posters of a guilty-looking woman and her innocent accomplice, a handsome gray-and-white malamute, plastered on tree trunks throughout the cemetery. So far, we had pursued our life of minor misdemeanor with impunity.

Leaving Rowdy in the car, I walked the few yards to Dr. Stanton’s grave, which was marked by a plain granite stone
that bore only his name and the dates of his birth and death. Sometimes I brought flowers, but only as a prop. Dr. Stanton would have traded every blossom in the Garden of Eden for one glimpse of Rowdy. Today, empty-handed, I pretended to read his stone while concentrating my attention on the periphery of my vision. I listened. From the low branch of a shrub, a catbird imitated Tracker. Any species I could identify was too common to attract a flock of skilled birders. The catbird wouldn’t squeal on us. No one else was around.

I stepped back to the car, opened the door, picked up Rowdy’s leash, and smacked my lips. “Here we go, pal!” I whispered. Rowdy knew the routine. He moved swiftly out of the car and toward Dr. Stanton’s grave. Wagging his tail and tossing me a conspiratorial glance, he almost danced on the ground in front of the stone monument.

“Happy birthday,” I said. “Thank you for my perfect dog.”

Then Rowdy and I bolted for the car. After meandering along roads and avenues with names that sounded more suburban than mortuary, we neared the main gate. It’s an area with a lot of foot traffic. People chain their bikes to the bike rack there, and there’s a bus stop nearby. I’d been driving at a respectfully slow speed, but now I slowed to a crawl and watched carefully for pedestrians. I saw one, too, one I recognized almost immediately as the art student from the Gardner museum. I’d last seen him on his knees in prayer before what the papers always called the “controversial” John Singer Sargent portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner. The thought crossed my mind that today, the art student might have been making a pilgrimage to her grave.

The incident would have remained just that, incidental, had it not been for the murder. I heard the story the next morning on WBUR, the National Public Radio station in Boston that broadcasts mainly news, commentaries, interviews, call-in shows, and many other features that have nothing to do with dogs, but are nonetheless generously and—in my dog-biased, Dodgian view—unjustly supported by grants from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. I was idly sipping coffee, glancing through the paper, and listening to NPR out
of the corner of my ear when I heard the word
Gardner
and caught a note of suppressed excitement in the announcer’s voice. The body of an unidentified man had been found only minutes earlier in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. A local bird-watching group had made the discovery. According to one member of the group, the body had been propped up against the Gardner family vault, the final resting place of Isabella Stewart Gardner.

During her lifetime, the flamboyant and eccentric Isabella Stewart Gardner was big news in Boston. She persuaded the zookeeper to let her walk a young lion on a leash. Her friends included Anna Pavlova and Nellie Melba. She wore a purple velvet robe copied after one owned by Marie Antoinette. The robbery had reawakened the legend. The Boston papers found frequent excuses for articles about Mrs. Gardner: the anniversary of the theft, the perpetration of a comparable crime anywhere, or the recovery of stolen art in some distant part of the world. The theme of these stories was always the same: We should remain hopeful! The stolen art might yet turn up, and the criminals might yet be identified. Federal and state statutes of limitations had expired, but the U.S. attorney could still charge the robbers if the art had crossed state lines within the past five years; the robbers might yet be punished.

Although the murder’s only connection with the robbery was the finding of a body at the Gardner vault, a local NPR reporter launched into a mandatory recap of the facts of the heist: thieves disguised as Boston police officers, guards who’d disobeyed orders by opening the museum door, the loss of thirteen pieces, all uninsured, the probable value of the stolen Vermeer and the three Rembrandts, the five-million-dollar reward.

When I switched from radio to television, a photo of Vermeer’s
The Concert
filled the screen. It vanished, to be replaced by the John Singer Sargent portrait of Mrs. Gardner. Then a live camera showed a slick-looking male reporter posed in front of a familiar scene: the main gate to Mount Auburn. “We have just been informed that the man whose body was found this morning here at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge has been identified,” He spoke a name
that startled me. “Authorities are working on the assumption that this was not, repeat not, a natural death.” After a pause, he added, with a smug note of happy finality, “James Mc-Dougall reporting. Live at Mount Auburn Cemetery!”

A sudden flash of horror crossed the reporter’s face as his closing words registered. Indeed, live at the cemetery. As Peter Motherway, among others, was not.

B
ESIDES BEING MY
next-door neighbor and an anomalously beefy long-distance runner, Kevin Dennehy is a Cambridge police lieutenant. With no success, I tried to reach him at headquarters and at home. I toyed with the thought of searching for him at Mount Auburn, but decided that the area around the Gardner vault would be sealed off. The entire cemetery might be closed to the public. What about burials scheduled for today? Would they be postponed because of murder? Held anyway? If I costumed myself in black and attached myself to a funeral party, I might get stuck at a grave in the new part of the cemetery, far from the prestigious old neighborhood of family burial chambers. Is there class after death? There is at Mount Auburn. The Gardners rest eternally in an august private residence in a tiny, thus exclusive, valley on the shores of a miniature lake. Nearby dwell Mary Baker Eddy and Henry Cabot Lodge. New neighborhoods will age. Saplings will become old trees. But they haven’t yet.

I phoned police headquarters again. This time, I left a message for Kevin, a gracious invitation to dinner that evening. I promised steak. Kevin lives with his mother, who is a Seventh-Day Adventist. A strict vegetarian, she allows no meat in her house. Kevin would turn up. I pay no attention to the old taboo on training with food.