Evil Breeding (17 page)

Kevin named a doctor and made a slanderous accusation.

“Many doctors,” I insisted, “would have sympathized with a family that decided to speed the death of a woman who was dying anyway, and dying confused and in pain, at least in psychic pain. Besides, there wasn’t necessarily anything to arouse suspicion. Christina was terminally ill. The whole idea was to let her die at home. And then she did. A person who was disoriented to begin with, a person with advanced Alzheimer’s, got to die in familiar surroundings. Good! She died at home. What could be more natural? Why ask questions? Or maybe you wonder about them in private, but why ask them in public?”

“Why ask you?” Kevin demanded. “No doctor’s going to ask you.”

“I know that. What does seem possible is that the family didn’t do this together. Someone ended Christina’s life. Someone else knew that and didn’t consider it mercy killing. But in that case, the logical thing would be to go to Christina’s doctor and start asking questions. Or go to the police. I mean, why send mysterious collections of hints to someone who’s writing a book about famous old dog shows? Believe me, Kevin, it doesn’t make any more sense to me than it does to you. But what’s solid, what’s not just speculation, is that Peter Motherway
was
murdered. And this strange collection of stuff that’s been sent to me
is
about Christina’s death and, as of what arrived today, Peter’s murder.
That’s
why I’m showing it to you. It’s your business, not mine. For all I know, someone knew we were friends and sent this stuff to me on the assumption that I’d do exactly what I’m doing right now.”

A
T NINE O’CLOCK
the next morning, the wail of sirens on Concord Avenue set off sympathetic vibrations in my dogs’ vocal cords. With all the free will of fine crystal shattering in response to the power of a high soprano note, I snatched a little yellow-and-white noisemaker and a handful of cheese cubes and began to click and treat. The scenario serves as a handy paradigm. An environmental stimulus triggers a response in dogs that itself acts as a stimulus for a human behavior. This neat behavioral chain is what we in the profession succinctly refer to as “dog training.” I am happy to report that a mastery of the fundamentals of this sport enables the trainer to generalize her skills to the modification of human behavior.

Consider, for example, my success in letting Kevin Dennehy elicit a ton of homicide-relevant behavior from me while supplying me with hardly any information. What had I learned from Kevin? That Peter had not been murdered at Mount Auburn. That the murder weapon had been a length of wire. That B. Robert Motherway and his look-alike grandson, Christopher, alibied each other for the time of Peter Motherway’s demise, and that Jocelyn claimed to have been home alone. So what? I already knew that the elderly Mr. Motherway lacked the physical strength to have garroted Peter or to have moved the body to the Gardner vault. Although Christopher
was young and powerful, what motive could he have had to kill his father? Although he was B. Robert’s biological grandson, Christopher was, in effect, his grandfather’s favorite son. Why do in a rival he had already defeated?

And the unalibied Jocelyn? I continued to see her as the victim, not the victimizer. This was, after all, a woman who passively played the role of servant to her in-laws. She couldn’t even stand up to an ill-mannered dog. In desperation, she might have lashed out at her husband. But Peter had been intercepted at Logan Airport, not killed at home, and he’d been garroted. The murderer must have prepared the garrote in advance. And the method was gruesome. Kevin might be right that murder was often a family affair. But murder by garroting? Women shot their husbands and lovers, didn’t they? They poisoned them. Or stabbed them with kitchen knives. If I decided to murder someone, I’d choose a weapon I at least knew how to use. A length of wire: How long? With handles fastened to the ends? Handles? What kind? Fastened how? Then wrap it around the victim’s neck. But what if the victim resisted? Even if he didn’t, then what? Yank hard? Once? Repeatedly? Twist the weapon? Or not? Pull and keep pulling? For how long? I couldn’t possibly garrote anyone. Even if I were that kind of person, I wouldn’t know how. And Jocelyn? Even if she had the specialized knowledge I lacked, did she have the requisite force of will?

But let me return to the application of the principles of dog training to the shaping of human behavior in everyday life. After making great progress in using the click-and-treat method with the dogs, I settled in front of my computer and retrieved my e-mail, which included a message from my coauthor, Elizabeth Kublansky. “IMHO,” she wrote in e-mail jargon—
in my humble opinion
—“if you cannot get it together to turn out straightforward text in your usual orderly fashion, you should just say so, and I’ll find someone who can. I don’t know about you, but I need the second half of our pitiful advance. My part of this book is done. Where’s yours?”

With one click of the mouse, I deleted Elizabeth’s message. The treat was the Web. Having resolved to obey Elizabeth’s
sensible command by writing publishable sentences to accompany her photographs instead of continuing to amass increasing amounts of useless information, I rewarded myself with what was supposed to be a minute or two on-line to search for anything about Eva Kappe, the housemaid recommended by Mrs. Dodge, the writer of the 1939 letter from Giralda. There wouldn’t be anything. Why would there? In five minutes, after finding nothing, I’d be off-line and dutifully double-clicking the icon for my word-processing program, opening the file for the first chapter of the book, and otherwise clicking and treating the computer instead of letting it act like an untrained dog that dragged me around and dropped me where it pleased.

A scant thirty minutes later, I was revisiting the Web site devoted to the alumni of the Princeton, New Jersey, high school attended by B. Robert Motherway. As I’d previously discovered, Mr. Motherway had failed to stay in touch with the class of 1926. I didn’t wonder a lot about whether he’d been more loyal to Princeton than to his public high school. Which diploma hung on his wall? Anyway, the same high school’s class of 1930, I now saw, was searching for a member, Eva Kappe, who did not graduate, but left at the end of her sophomore year.

Chronology of the life of Eva Kappe: Due to graduate from high school in 1930? At age eighteen? So, she is born in about 1912. In 1928, she lives in Princeton, New Jersey, where she is a high school sophomore. At the end of the year, she leaves the school. By the thirties, she is working as a maid in Germany; she receives letters of reference from her employers. Rita had translated the letters for me; the recommendations were strong. In 1939, Eva Kappe is back in New Jersey. This time, she is in Madison, at Giralda, where she works as a housemaid for Geraldine R. Dodge. From Giralda, she writes a short note to Bro, whoever he is. She poses for a group photograph of Mrs. Dodge’s household help. She leaves with a recommendation from Mrs. Dodge.

From New Jersey in the late twenties to Germany in the thirties. In the late thirties, back to New Jersey. She speaks enough English to attend an American high school, enough
German to work in Germany. Back and forth. A go-between? Yes, my mysterious mailings were about the death of Christina Motherway and, as of yesterday, about the murder of her son, Peter. But the odd collection of items included the photograph of servants at Giralda, the note written from there, and Eva Kappe’s recommendations from German employers and from Mrs. Dodge. Could my cryptic messages have a double or triple meaning? Christina’s death. Her murder? Peter’s murder.
And
treasonous activity at Mrs. Dodge’s estate.

Ah yes, Mrs. Dodge, Giralda, the Morris and Essex shows. My book. Our book. Elizabeth’s justified ire. My unpaid bills.
Web:
silky net spun by predatory arachnids to trap prey. My love of animals, I reminded myself, did not extend to spiders. As a useful high-tech aid to the professional writer, the computer ranked somewhere below the stylus.

Fresh out of styluses, I settled for a pen, yellow legal pad, and the manila folders containing copies of articles culled from old microfilmed issues of the
New York Times.
Sitting at the kitchen table instead of at the computer, I would go through the reports on the Morris and Essex shows, and I’d study stories about the Dodges. Today, now, damn it, I would go through these folders for the last time, taking notes on articles that were gratifyingly unavailable in cyberspace. My notes, I resolved, would consist exclusively of information directly relevant to the book.

And so it went. For two scribbled pages. Then I happened on a little three-paragraph, three-sentence article published in the financial section of the
New York Times
on July 5, 1928. It read, in its entirety:

Hold it! I’d heard this story before, and certainly not from the lips of M. Hartley Dodge, Jr., who had died in France only two years after riding that wild steer to a finish. The storyteller had been B. Robert Motherway. A teller of tales he’d been! In his version, who was the youth who had won the applause at that Montana rodeo? Who had won his spurs by riding a wild steer to the finish?

It was remotely possible that B. Robert Motherway had been among the party that accompanied Mr. and Mrs. M. H. Dodge and their son to Montana that summer. If the nephew of John D. Rockefeller, the son of the head of Remington Arms, rode a wild steer, the feat deserved mention in the financial section of the
New York Times.
Not so the equally daring accomplishment of a townie classmate. But if the young B. Robert Motherway had, in fact, traveled to Montana as a guest of the Dodges, the elderly Mr. Motherway would undoubtedly have exercised brag rights by telling me so. Furthermore, he’d have used his own words instead of precisely the phrases printed in the
New York Times.

Charitably speaking, B. Robert Motherway had borrowed an episode from the life of the young Hartley Dodge. Uncharitably speaking? B. Robert Motherway was a damned liar.

A
LTHEA BATTLEFIELD
is given to quotation. Her fanatical devotion to Sherlock Holmes means that her source is almost invariably the Sacred Writings. Today, however, she produced a line of verse that had not been penned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. “‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave,’” declaimed Althea, “‘when first we practice to deceive!’ Sir Walter Scott.”

“Web,” I repeated gratefully. “A tangled
Web.
Exactly. You see, Althea? I knew you were the right person to consult.” I thanked her as she likes to be thanked. “‘The tidiest and most orderly brain,’” I quoted, “‘with the greatest capacity for storing facts of any man’—or woman—’living.’” I had touched up the Great Detective’s famous description of his brother, My croft Holmes.

“Tampering with the Canon!” Althea scolded. “Shame on you!”

“If Sherlock Holmes had known you,” I insisted, “he’d have had to update his views. You are the ‘central exchange.’ You are the ‘clearinghouse.’ Your ‘specialism is omniscience.’”

“Your
specialism,” countered Althea, “is brazen flattery.”

It was Wednesday morning. When Rowdy and I visited Althea, we usually sat in front of the fireplace in the living
room or in the sunbathed alcove packed with rattan furniture and potted palms. Today, Althea and I were at her dining room table. Rowdy snoozed under it. The polished mahogany top was covered with manila folders and stacks of paper. In making sense of the plethora of information, Althea had a triple advantage over me. Her limited vision meant she couldn’t read most of what was printed on the material I’d spread before her; she was drown-proofed against the deluge. Because of her great age, she lacked the stamina for mental meandering; she reserved her energy for marching directly to the point. Most important, her tidy, orderly brain enabled her not only to absorb great amounts of information, but to distinguish between the useful and the useless, to ignore the irrelevant, and to sort what remained into meaningful patterns. Forced to organize and summarize for Althea, I found myself infected by her contagious intelligence. Or maybe all this blather is simply a way of saying that Althea was a retired teacher, a martinet, I suspected, in whose presence I felt compelled to
think.

The dining room of the house on Norwood Hill, I might mention, provided a suitably Holmesian setting for the one-act play in which Althea took the role of the brainy Mycroft Holmes, the archetypal armchair detective, who, except in the extraordinary case of the Bruce-Partington plans, walked from his rooms in Pall Mall around the corner into Whitehall, and was seen nowhere else but at the Diogenes Club, conveniently located opposite his lodgings. Indeed, with its wood-paneled walls, mahogany sideboard, ornate silver, and heavy crystal, the suburban American dining room could have passed for the Stranger’s Room, the only place at the Diogenes Club where talking was allowed. Heavy crimson velvet swathed the windows. Oil paintings hung on the walls. One showed two sailing ships about to capsize in deep swells under a dark sky. In the other, a pair of scrawny kittens took sentimental shelter from a rainstorm under an umbrella apparently made of skin as thin and translucent as Althea’s. The maudlin pictures were favorites of Althea’s sister, Ceci, whose mentality was as mushy and gushy as Althea’s was logical and sparse. It was certainly Ceci who’d chosen the
frilly white summer dress and white lace shawl Althea wore today, Ceci who’d lovingly daubed Althea’s prominent cheekbones with powdery pink blusher and glossed Althea’s age-thinned lips in rose. Fortunately, cosmetology had offered Ceci the means neither to reduce Althea’s great height by six or eight inches nor to shrink Althea’s amazonian feet to a girlish size six. Althea’s hair had, however, been becomingly trimmed, moussed, curled, and fluffed. Its white aura hovered around her pink scalp as if emanating from the electrochemical whoosh and crackle of logical thought beneath.