Evil Breeding (16 page)

I
HAVE NOTHING AGAINST
eulogies, prayers, hymns, memories, or tears. What bothers me about funerals is the presence of a dead body. Consequently, I didn’t exactly attend the service for Peter Motherway. Instead, I observed it through Rita’s binoculars while pretending to scan for migrating warblers. Rita made me borrow a tan hat that she considered fashionable for birding. On me, it looked stupid. She also insisted on accompanying me. “Birding is a companionable activity,” she informed me. “Birds of a feather! You’ll be more credible if there are two of us.”

“I’ll be credible if I go alone. Plenty of novice birders go to Mount Auburn,” I countered. “You, for example. I just don’t want the Motherways to notice me. I don’t want to look as if I’m spying on the funeral.”

It was Rita’s fault that we arrived ten minutes late. She had to change into one of her khaki outfits. In case the Motherways recognized my car, we took hers. After we drove through the main gate, I took a guess about the location of the grave. I directed Rita to the right, then the left until we were on the hill that overlooks the new part of the cemetery. In the few minutes since we’d left home, the sky had darkened. Pausing by a tree with a gnarled trunk, I trained the binoculars up into its leafy canopy and then downhill to the
small group of people assembled for Peter Motherway’s service and burial.

“Kevin’s there,” I reported to Rita. “He looks exactly like what you see in movies when cops go to a funeral. He’s even wearing a trench coat.”

“We should have, too. It’s probably going to rain,” Rita said. “If it does, that’s it. I don’t want my binoculars getting ruined.”

Like everything else Rita owned, the binoculars were not only expensive but worth the money they’d cost. If a bird had landed on the shoulder of a mourner or a mortician, it would have appeared before my eyes in sharp focus. The only plumage in sight, however, consisted of the dark suits worn by the father and the son of the deceased; B. Robert and Christopher Motherway were disconcertingly dressed exactly as I’d envisioned in imagining Christina Motherway’s funeral. Peter Motherway’s widow looked, as usual, more like an employee than like a member of the family. Jocelyn’s navy blue suit and white blouse would have done so nicely as a nanny’s uniform that I had to quell the impulse to check for a toddler at her side. Her face was as expressionless as if the body in the shiny casket had been a stranger’s. A remarkably young man with white-blond hair read from a small black book. He seemed too young to be a minister, but his reversed collar and his obviously central role in the ceremony said otherwise.

“Let me look,” Rita demanded.

I handed over the binoculars, which were, after all, hers. “Kevin does look like a cop in a movie,” she conceded after a few seconds. “Maybe he’s seen
The Thomas Crown Affair
too many times.”

Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway? But the real star was Mount Auburn Cemetery. I hadn’t seen the movie for years. It wasn’t possible, was it, that half of it had been filmed at Mount Auburn? But that’s how I remembered it.

“The tall men who look so much alike are Peter’s father and son,” I informed Rita. “B. Robert Motherway and Christopher.”

“Distinguished,” Rita commented.

“The woman is Peter’s wife. Widow.” There was no need
to describe Jocelyn. She was the only woman there. The group was pitifully small: Peter’s father, his son, his widow, Kevin Dennehy, the minister, a few men who radiated the professionally glum dignity of undertakers. And one more man.

“Rita, let me take another look.”

Peering again, I rested the index finger of my right hand on the little wheel of the binoculars and forced the anomalous face in and out of focus. “The art student,” I said aloud.

“What?”

“I don’t know what he’s doing here,” I said more to myself than to Rita. “Steve and I saw him at the Gardner. First in the restaurant. Then upstairs. He was acting odd. He was in front of the John Singer Sargent portrait of Mrs. Gardner. He was on his knees in front of it. He seemed to be praying.”

“How bizarre.” Rita, I remind you, is a clinical psychologist. When she says
bizarre
, that’s exactly what she means.

“It was,” I agreed. “I also saw him here. At Mount Auburn. He was acting normal then, I guess. He was just walking along.” I paused. “He has a strange tattoo on his arm. We noticed it in the restaurant. I couldn’t tell what it was supposed to be. Steve couldn’t either. It was very ornate.”

Two days later, on Monday, I repeated the phrase. “It was very ornate,” I said to Kevin Dennehy. “With curlicues, I think. I couldn’t tell what it was supposed to be.”

“Heart with ‘Mother,’” Kevin ventured.

“That’s exactly what it wasn’t,” I said.

“I
T WASN’T AN ANCHOR
, either,” I told Kevin. “Or a dolphin. It certainly wasn’t a portrait of a dog. I’m pretty sure there weren’t any letters or words. I think it was an object, a fancy object I couldn’t recognize. Or that’s what I thought at the time. Kevin, who is he? And what was he doing at Peter Motherway’s funeral?”

“We weren’t introduced,” Kevin said rather resentfully. “I wasn’t invited back to the house.” He added, with a trace of smirk, “I wouldn’t make too much of that genuflecting. A lot of people are nuts on the subject, and the
Globe
and the
Herald
fan the flames. Sells papers. You see that crazy letter in the
Globe?
Typical case in point.”

“Today’s
Globe?”
I always read the letters, but this morning, Monday, I’d made myself skip the paper entirely. I hadn’t done any housework, either, and I hadn’t trained the dogs, returned phone calls, or even checked my e-mail. Instead, I’d frittered away my time drafting and polishing my column. Question frequently asked of freelance writers:
What do you do when you don’t feel inspired?
Answer:
Write anyway.
The payment for my column wouldn’t buy me a third dog, but it would help to feed the two I already had. Hey, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote for money. The key issue for him, as I understand it, wasn’t feeling artistically inspired; no, no, it was feeling desperately broke. Of course, writing about
new approaches to the ancient problem of flea control isn’t exactly a literary achievement on the order of
The Great Gatsby.
I do understand that. My goals are modest. But by comparison with F. Scott’s, so are my needs. By comparison, Rowdy and Kimi are a bargain. Which would you rather support? Yourself and two dogs? Or Scott and Zelda?

Anyway, I’d spent Sunday and most of Monday at home with my column. By the time I’d finally finished the column and sent it as a file attached to e-mail to my editor at
Dog’s Life
, it was five o’clock. After taking a glance at my incoming e-mail—just a quick hit, really, I swear, just enough to take the edge off the craving and stave off incipient delirium tremens—I fed Tracker and the dogs, washed my face, brushed my teeth, and remembered that, gee whiz, there was a whole World Wide World
outside
my computer, one that, among other things, smelled good to dogs and wouldn’t short-circuit if they lifted their legs on it. Yes, Kimi as well as Rowdy. Hey, Zelda was female, too. And right out in public, she did a lot worse.

Returning home from walking my nondigital dogs in the highly nondigital streets of Cambridge, I noticed that some vandal had defaced my property by jamming a bundle of hard copy into the quaintly decorative object fastened next to the front door of my house. Having inadvertently wandered into a time warp, the dogs and I had been transported back to the paper-polluted days of snail mail. In addition to an extremely inconsiderate missive from the electric company and the premium list for a show I couldn’t afford to enter, the litterer had left yet another of what I had come to think of as my Soloxine packets. This time, instead of mulling over its contents, I did the sensible thing: I called the police. Literally. I stuck my head out the back door of my house and called to Kevin Dennehy, who had pulled into his driveway and was just getting out of his car.

Is everything in neat, linear, chronological order now? It’s Monday. I have finished my column, sent it to my editor, fed my animals, walked the dogs, belatedly taken in my mail, opened what proved to be the last of the mysterious Soloxine packets, and called out to Kevin Dennehy, who has made a
fast-food run and is now sitting at my kitchen table. Kevin has devoured one of three quarter-pound cheeseburgers with bacon and half of a large order of fries that he has painted with squiggles of ketchup. Idly wondering whether the Jackson Pollock effect is deliberate, I am chewing a bite of what is supposed to be a fish sandwich, but is obviously a fried fillet of rawhide chew toy. I am suctioning a chocolate milk shake through a straw. Kevin is drinking beer out of a can. Rowdy and Kimi are stationed on either side of Kevin. A droplet of saliva plummets from Kimi’s mouth and hits the floor. A string of drool as fine as a spider web hangs from Rowdy’s lips. Instead of answering my reasonable question about the identity of the tattooed art student I’d first seen at the Gardner Museum and lately noticed at Peter Motherway’s funeral, Kevin has just asked whether I saw a crazy letter to the editor evidently published in today’s paper.

“Lunatic,” pronounces Kevin. When it comes to diagnosing mental illness, he always speaks with clinical authority that Rita, the psychologist, would envy. For good reason. As a cop, he probably has more experience with the extremes of looniness than she does. Rita’s clients, after all, have voluntarily sought psychotherapy. In contrast, a lot of the people who end up in Kevin’s office haven’t exactly made appointments in the hope of finding help and understanding. Of course, his services are free, more or less. Except to the taxpayers.

“What was it about?” I asked, meaning the letter.

“You still got the paper?”

I obediently retrieved it and found the editorial page. “The one about Mrs. Gardner?” I skimmed the letter. “Honestly, this is ridiculous! They must have printed it because it’s so foolish. I’m surprised they published it at all.”

The letter was a response to a short article about the Gardner heist published during the previous week. Both Boston papers were always issuing optimistic updates about hopes for the recovery of the stolen art. The latest one had caught my eye mainly because it had described the FBI as “confident.” The word had tickled me. As I understood matters, a lack of self-confidence wasn’t the Bureau’s most notable
problem, or so Kevin always said. The letter in today’s paper, however, had nothing to do with the FBI. In a sentence or two I’d forgotten, the article had apparently provided readers with background on the robbery, the museum, and its founder. The irate writer of the letter objected to two phrases the
Globe
had used to sum up Isabella Stewart Gardner. According to everything I’d ever read, the
Globe
was justified in calling her “an eccentric.” Furthermore, there was universal agreement that she had been “no beauty.” Or so I had supposed.

Just who do you think you are
, demanded the writer,
to go around insulting the lady Mrs. Isabella Stewart Gardner who did more for the City of Boston and the World of Art than all of the rest of you combined? You think you know what she looked like better than the great artist John S. Sargent? If she and him was alive today, you wouldn’t have the nerve!!! From now on keep your ignorant opinions to yourself Some people don’t want to hear them. Me for example. If I ever pick up your paper and read that garbage again I’m not subscribing which I don’t anyway.

The letter was unsigned. A sentence stated that the name was being withheld at the request of the writer. “‘Which I don’t anyway!’” I exclaimed. “It must be here for comic relief. Anyway, you’re right. People do go nuts about Isabella Stewart Gardner.”

“Half the City of Boston.”

“Especially about the robbery. You know, Kevin, that really was a very personal crime. It wasn’t like having a bank get robbed. My mother used to take me to the Gardner and tell me about how it used to be Mrs. Gardner’s house, and now it was everyone’s because she gave it to us. After the heist, lots of people felt as if they’d been robbed of things that belonged to
them.
The letter is silly, but it’s true that Mrs. Gardner gave her house and her art to the public in a direct, personal way. Geraldine R. Dodge did the same thing when she gave dog shows. She gave them as personal gifts.” Need I mention that I’d told Kevin about Mrs. Dodge? Of course I had. I went on. “Maybe the papers really should express some gratitude by saying that Mrs. Gardner was gorgeous.
What does it matter now?” I sipped my melted milk shake. “Kevin, have you ever been there?”

“Where?”

“The Gardner Museum.”

“Me?”

“Well, you should go. It’s beautiful.”

Kevin had almost demolished the third cheeseburger. He rolled his eyes, swallowed, and changed the subject. “What else you know about these Motherways?”

“That’s what I wanted to tell you about. Actually, it’s going to be show-and-tell.”

Five minutes later, the fast-food debris was in the trash, the table was covered with everything sent to me in the mystery mailings, and I’d filled Kevin in on what Soloxine was. “I was beginning to think it was Peter Motherway who was sending this stuff,” I said. “Or I wondered, anyway. Obviously, it wasn’t.” I tapped a finger on the most recent material, which consisted of a snapshot of Wagner, the growly black shepherd, a photocopy of Christina Motherway’s death notice, yet another Soloxine leaflet, and a newspaper clipping about Peter Motherway’s murder. “Peter,” I said unnecessarily, “was in no position to send this. I don’t know who did. Possibly Jocelyn, his wife. Possibly someone else, including someone I don’t even know.”

Kevin grunted.

“The implication,” I continued, “as I see it, is that Christina Motherway was murdered. The recurring item is this leaflet about Soloxine. Thyroid medication for hypothyroid dogs. Sent to
me.
So at first I naturally assumed that in a cryptic way someone was telling me something about dogs. In a way that’s true, but what I think now is that the real message, from the beginning, was about Mrs. Motherway, Christina. The message I didn’t get was that she’d died of thyrotoxicosis. The Motherways have a lot of dogs. What I didn’t know at first, but what I’ve heard since, is that there’s a lot of hypothyroidism in those lines: a lot of dogs, a lot of Soloxine, a lot of brochures.” I hesitated. “And when I put that together, I thought maybe it had been more or less a mercy killing, although I’m far from sure that that kind of
death is merciful. Anyway, that’s what I thought. Christina was dying, and the family really wanted her to be able to die at home, not in an institution. I could sympathize with that. I know you disagree, Kevin, but in some circumstances, I don’t see that as murder.”