Evil Breeding (26 page)

“You were in no shape to go home last night,” I said. “You were incoherent. You were heavily drugged.”

“This is what Christina needed. This kind of care.”
Jocelyn patted the neatly made bed. Tears spilled down her cheeks. “This is what she deserved.”

“I’m sure you took good care of her. I’m sure you did your best.”

“My best wasn’t good enough. Not that she was in physical pain. She wasn’t. And toward the end, a lot of the time, she didn’t know where she was. Or she did, in her own mind. She was in Germany, she was a little girl, she was in New Jersey…. You never knew where she was, how old she was. Sometimes she spoke English, sometimes she spoke German, so you’d get a clue that way.”

“You speak German?”

“A little. Enough. Christina taught me some. Before she got sick. I understood her pretty well, better than I understand other people, because I learned from her. She used to get so homesick for Germany, and no one else in the house spoke it except him, and he made everyone speak English. I mean, supposedly she was born in this country. And you wouldn’t have guessed, because she came here when she was young enough, so in English she didn’t have a German accent.”

“The birth certificate,” I said.

“Christina Heinck. I think he picked it because it sounded German. Christina looked German.” Jocelyn paused. “She looked like him. Christopher looks exactly like both of them.”

I didn’t want to be the first to utter that phrase that Jocelyn had repeated so compulsively the night before:
brother and sister, brother and sister.
I hadn’t said B. Robert Motherway’s name aloud, either. I’d been waiting for Jocelyn. So far, she’d referred to Mr. Motherway only as
he
and
him.
A little exchange I’d had with
him
kept coming back to me. I’d remarked that his stepfather had had a major impact on what he’d done with his life. “With my
wife?”
he’d demanded.

“Her real name was Eva,” Jocelyn said. “She liked housework. She liked making things clean. She was beautiful. When she was old, she was still beautiful. If you don’t know him, if you don’t know what he’s like, he’s a handsome old man. Christina had that same look.” Jocelyn lightly tapped a hand on her face. “Those cheekbones. The very fair coloring.
When he brought her to this country and sent her to that mansion in New Jersey, he made her dye her hair. That was the thing she minded most! He made her dye her hair red! With henna. She used to go on and on about that henna. It was the one thing she never really forgave him for. Funny, isn’t it?”

“Christina was supposed to case the house for him,” I said. “Giralda, it was called. It really was a mansion. The woman who owned it was a Rockefeller. She was a major art collector.”

“Christina was happy there.” Jocelyn managed a little smile. “The woman was nice to her. Mrs. Dodge. That was her name. She was crazy about dogs. They were all over the place. Christina didn’t mind. She liked dogs. Christina had her own room. She liked that. Except for the henna, she was very happy there. That’s why she kept that letter, because she wrote it when she was happy. She had this ‘treasure chest,’ she called it. That’s where that stuff came from. She liked to go through it, talk about it. It’s still there at the house. Under her bed. She used to get me to get it out, and we’d go through it together.”

“Did the, uh, robbery take place?”

“Not that I ever heard of. Not that Christina knew. She would’ve said something. She used to talk about how the old fascist bastard—my words, not hers—got mad at her because she didn’t find out anything. I mean, she didn’t find out anything
he
wanted to know. Christina was supposed to find out about a dog show there, and she didn’t because she couldn’t, could she? She didn’t have anything to do with the dog show. She was busy cleaning the carpets and washing the floors. And she was supposed to tell him about the paintings in the house, but all she knew was that there were a lot of them. She was no art expert. She dropped out of high school and went to Germany to be a maid. What was she supposed to know about art? So all she knew was about there being dogs all over the place, and I guess that security was pretty tight. Well, if the woman was a Rockefeller, it would be, wouldn’t it? I didn’t know that about her. I don’t know if Christina knew that. It wouldn’t have meant much to her. Christina was the
kindest person I ever knew, but she wasn’t … He was always trying to get her to read, but he didn’t have much luck. Not that she was stupid or anything. She just wasn’t very complicated. She was very loving. And very friendly. Unlike him. I mean, that’s the main thing he was afraid of. No matter where she went, even at the end, like to a nursing home or a hospital, she would’ve talked to people, not necessarily in English, but you can never tell who’s going to speak German, can you?
He
didn’t give a sweet goddamn if she ended up in an institution. He just didn’t want her talking where anyone but us could listen in.”

“You weren’t, uh, bothered by what you heard?”

“Well, a lot of it wasn’t news to me. I mean, I was married to Peter, wasn’t I? I mean about the art, not the other business. Peter’s parents. Peter didn’t know about that. Like I said, he didn’t speak German, and back when she was herself, Christina wouldn’t’ve told him, and then after her mind was wandering, she made Peter nervous, so he didn’t spend a lot of time with her.”

“The blackmail?” I asked.

“Yeah, that.”

“That was about … ?”

“That was my fault. I shouldn’t have told Peter. I was the one who knew about it. Soloxine. You knew what that was, right?”

“Yes. A fair number of the shepherds are on it? Uh,
his
dogs? They’re hypothyroid?”

“Just about all of them. It’s no big deal. You just shove these pills down their throats, and they’re fine.”

“That’s sort of true.” I couldn’t restrain myself. “But they still shouldn’t be bred.”

“Oh,” said Jocelyn. “Why?”

“Because it runs in families. If you breed hypothyroid dogs, what you get are hypothyroid dogs.”

Jocelyn actually looked surprised. “Well, be that as it may, it was how I knew what he’d done, because the pills … You know what they look like? They’re kind of a bluish green. And Christina … When I came in, after it was too late, well, I could see she’d thrown up. This green-blue stuff.
The same color. And none of the medicine she took, the medicine she was supposed to take, was that color. It wasn’t anything like that color. Most of what she took was liquid, anyway, and I was the one that gave it to her, so I knew right away.
He’d
been there, in her room. He’d been there alone with her.”

“You decided not to say anything?”

“No! No, I loved Christina. I told Peter right away.”

“And Peter … ?”

At last, Jocelyn began to sob.

I spoke softly. “Peter didn’t go to the police. He went to his father instead. He didn’t care about avenging his mother. He used what you told him to try to blackmail his father.” I couldn’t bear to go on. Christopher was, after all, Jocelyn’s son. Last night, when grandfather and grandson had quarreled, Jocelyn had been too doped to understand the dispute. For the moment, she didn’t need to hear that B. Robert’s response to Peter’s attempted blackmail had been to order Christopher to hire an assassin to kill Peter. The grandfather married and then murdered his sister. Their son tried to use his knowledge of the murder to blackmail his father. The grandfather then enlisted the grandson in a scheme to murder the grandfather’s son, the grandson’s father. I felt sick.

“The stingy old Nazi bastard,” said Jocelyn, sipping her juice. “Money would’ve fixed Peter, you know. If we hadn’t been so damned hard up, none of this would’ve happened, but
he
was a stingy son of a bitch. He could’ve bought Peter off, but he was just too stingy. You know, for that matter, he could’ve bought me off, too. I shouldn’t’ve sent you that stuff. It was a mistake.”

“Why did you?”

“I was upset about Christina.”

“Why me? Because of the dog? Wagner?”

“Yeah. That took some guts. It’s a nasty dog.” She sipped more juice. “You struck me as a nervy woman.”

“Is that why you stayed with them? With Peter? And then with, uh,
him?
Because you weren’t”—I hesitated—“nervy? I assumed you were afraid someone would kill you, too.”

The freakish smile reappeared. I’d almost forgotten it.
Why, I can’t imagine. It haunts me now. “I was, sort of. But, really, nerves had nothing to do with it,” Jocelyn said. “I’m in the old man’s will. So is Christopher.” She laughed. “You didn’t guess? Yeah, it’s all ours. It’s all ours now. And Christopher will be all right. I mean, who’s going to send a boy to jail for saving his mother’s life?”

“I
WAS WRONG
about Gerhard,” I told Althea, who was seated in her wheelchair on the wide terrace that overlooks the long, sloping backyard of the house she shares with her sister. Despite the heat of the day, Althea was wrapped in a fuzzy pink wool shawl. I wore thin cotton jeans, a black tank top, and my Geraldine R. Dodge hat. Rowdy and Kimi had been given the liberty of the large fenced yard, but after a few minutes of tearing around, they’d returned to the terrace, to pant in the shade under an iron table.

“Have you ever noticed,” I continued, “that if someone keeps harping on something, then you tend to dismiss it? Well, I do. And that’s what happened. Kevin Dennehy has this twisted view of families. He’s always going on about matricide, patricide, mate murder, the Menendez brothers, Susan Smith, notorious crime families,
The Godfather, Parts One Through Ten Thousand
, cousins murdering cousins, until he’s covered all the ground and ail you can think of are the exceptions. And there are some! Strangers kill strangers! There are plenty of criminal organizations that aren’t composed exclusively of blood relatives.”

Althea smiled gently. “Not to mention the occasional family or two in which no one murders anyone else.”

“Exactly, Althea! And in which everyone works for an honest living instead of banding together to go around robbing
museums and fencing stolen art and murdering people. So how was I supposed to guess that Gerhard was a cousin? Gerhard Woolf? Have you ever heard a more made-up-sounding name? He doesn’t have a German accent, he doesn’t look German, and he doesn’t look anything like Mr. Motherway or Peter or Christopher. And nobody called him ‘Cousin Gerhard’ or anything. Not that he’s all that close a relative. He’s something like B. Robert Motherway’s mother’s sister’s great-grandson. I think I’ve got that right. And Christina’s mother’s, too, of course. Eva Kappe’s mother’s sister’s great-grandson? Maybe I’m off somewhere. Anyway, it’s the part of the family that Eva—in other words, Christina—went to in Germany when she dropped out of high school in New Jersey. Later on, B. Robert told the family in Germany that she died here. And he told people here that his sister died in Germany. The German part of the family just thought he’d married a woman named Christina, which he had, of course, only it was the same woman. Eva.”

“Appalling,” said Althea, “but not unprecedented. There was a couple in Spain, wasn’t there? Brother and sister. Ceci and I heard about them on National Public Radio, if I recall. They had two children. They were allowed to marry. The parents, that is, not the children, although one does have to wonder…. But it’s interesting to observe, isn’t it, that in this case, the madness one tends to associate with inbreeding shows itself most blatantly in a family member, this Gerhard, who, so far as one knows, is
not
the child of close relatives.”

“Peter Motherway didn’t even look all
that
much like his father,” I pointed out, “even though his parents apparently looked quite a lot alike. There was a family resemblance, but nothing out of the ordinary. That kind of thing happens with dogs all the time, of course. You can linebreed two beautiful dogs of a similar type and get a whole litter of funny-looking puppies. Good dogs aren’t necessarily good producers. They can throw all kinds of stuff you wouldn’t expect.”

“Three heads,” Althea said mischievously.

I smiled. “Not exactly three heads. Missing teeth, bad bites, incorrect coats, all kinds of faults you don’t see in the parents. And the kind of strong resemblance between B. Robert
and Christopher does sometimes crop up in dogs, including between grandsire and grandson.”

“And evil, too?” inquired Althea. “Does evil, too, run in canine families?”

“Certainly not! Althea, you’re teasing me. No, evil has nothing to do with dogs. There are dogs with bad temperaments, and there are a few vicious dogs, but evil is an exclusively human characteristic. I don’t think it has a thing to do with genetics. The person who really got B. Robert Motherway started was his stepfather, who was a small-time crook. Christina told Jocelyn about it. The guy—”

Althea blanched.

“Pardon me. The man, the Mr. Motherway who adopted B. Robert, ran what was really a junk shop rather than an antique shop, but he had higher ambitions. When he returned from Germany with his German bride and her two kids—children, pardon me—he also smuggled some stuff with him. And I think that’s when he discovered that the boy, B. Robert, could be useful to him.”

“Fagin!” Althea exclaimed. She concentrates on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but reads Dickens on the side.
“Oliver Twist”
, she informed me.

“Yes,” I said. “And the stepfather also seems to have pumped his stepson full of grandiose ideas about the glory of Germany and about rising to the aristocracy and so forth. And then when B. Robert got to Princeton—Princeton University—he happened to find himself in the same class as Hartley Dodge, Jr., who was in the same
Princeton
class, 1930, but in a whole other league from the townie son of a junk dealer. Christina told Jocelyn that B. Robert was totally obsessed with Hartley Dodge. He used to keep clippings about Hartley Dodge from the school newspaper, and sometimes he actually followed him around. When he saw Hartley Dodge, he saw a manifestation of the person he desperately wanted to be. Only he couldn’t, of course. For a start, he didn’t have any money. But the image was there: the glamorous, risk-taking heir to Remington Arms and to part of the Rockefeller fortune, the mansions, the show dogs, the incredible art collection! It was who he tried to become.”