Evil Breeding (27 page)

“You know quite a bit about your Mr. Motherway now,” Althea commented. Her eyes narrowed.

“He isn’t
my
Mr. Motherway. And he isn’t the only villain in the piece. Far from it. The stepfather seems to be the origin of a lot of what went wrong. For one thing, Christina sort of hinted to Jocelyn that the stepfather was the reason she was sent back to Germany. She was a pretty girl, a beautiful girl, young, and not his biological daughter. In fact, he’d never adopted her the way he had her brother. And the idea is that he was paying her inappropriate attentions, so her mother got her out of the country and away from him. There’s no way to know for sure. Anyway, the stepfather died rather sadly. He hanged himself in 1929. He hadn’t had a lot to invest, but he’d put it in the market, and after the Crash, he killed himself.”

“As did others,” Althea commented.

“Yes. But strangely enough, his wife, B. Robert’s mother, died right after that, too. B. Robert was in his senior year at Princeton. He was living at home, naturally. He had a scholarship, but nothing beyond that. Until his mother supposedly hanged herself.”

“Supposedly?”

“She’d managed to keep up the payments on a small insurance policy.”

“Ah-hah!”

“But it was assumed that she was overcome with grief and shame about her husband’s suicide, and followed suit. Anyway, by then, Eva was in Germany, and before long, our Mr. Motherway, B. Robert, had a degree in art history from Princeton. When he graduated, he took over his stepfather’s business, mostly the shady part of it, and his stepfather’s dogs, but he apparently decided he needed a better cover than a junk shop. That’s when he moved here, to Massachusetts. He got a job teaching art history at exactly the kind of prep school he wished he’d gone to, and he had the perfect excuse to keep going back and forth to Europe: escorting student tours. And he liked what he saw in Germany in the thirties: the art, the music, the tidiness, the nationalism. What impressed him most of all was Eva. He hadn’t seen her since
1926. She was beautiful. She liked housework. She was a simple person. She was the ideal Aryan woman. And she looked like him! After that, things get foggy for a while. What’s clear is that he discovered an elite employment agency in New York that Mrs. Dodge used, and Eva Kappe came to this country, and she was a big hit there. She really did have good recommendations, and her training in European household service was practically designed to appeal to wealthy American employers. And then there was an opening with Mrs. Dodge. One of her dogs had bitten a maid, so she’d fired the maid. And Eva got the job. She left other letters besides the one Jocelyn sent to me. She kept them in what she called her ‘treasure chest.’ I’ve read them. So far as casing the place went, she really was useless, except that she did give a picture of tight security. Anyway, he finally pulled her out of there.”

“The war began,” Althea said.

“Yes, but he didn’t go. He had a heart murmur. And flat feet. But he sure did go to Germany after the war. It was paradise for shady dealings in art, and he spoke fluent German. That’s when he really made a bundle. By then he’d married Eva, who was now Christina. He brought her to Massachusetts. Peter was born in 1946. From what Peter told Jocelyn, I gather that there was trouble from the beginning. Really, I think that B. Robert had the world’s worst case of sibling rivalry about the baby. He didn’t want to share Christina’s affection. Nothing Peter did was ever right. He got into trouble in school, kept flunking out of prep schools, and eventually got drafted and sent to Vietnam. When he got back, he moved into a cottage, a hovel, way at the back of his parents’ property, and just sort of stayed there, doing kennel work, yard work, odd jobs, drifting along. And assisting his father in other ways, too. Then he met Jocelyn, who didn’t know she was adopted until just before she got married. Her parents decided to tell her. And she stupidly told B. Robert, who threw a fit about having his family tainted with blood from God knows where. Can you believe it? Of all people?”

“Oh yes,” said Althea. “I certainly can believe it.”

“But strangely enough, when Christopher was born, his
grandfather moved in and took over. It reminds me of what Marcellus Hartley did. He was M. Hartley Dodge’s grandfather. He basically
was
Remington Arms and a lot else. His daughter died in childbirth, and he raised the baby, Marcellus Hartley Dodge, who, of course, married Geraldine Rockefeller. So in sort of the same way, Christopher became his grandfather’s son. And B. Robert did everything he could to poison the relationship between Peter and Christopher. Christopher lived in the big house. Peter and Jocelyn were still stuck in a hovel.”

“With expectations of inheritance.”

“Yes. Justified expectations, too. They really were included in B. Robert’s will. Both of them. Separately. He wasn’t stupid. He knew how to use people. He knew how to keep Peter and Jocelyn where he wanted them. Obviously, the strategy was effective.”

“And Gerhard?”

“A German import, so to speak,” I said. “Mr. Motherway brought Gerhard here from Germany when Gerhard was ten. I have a hunch that the immediate use he had for Gerhard was to help him smuggle something from Germany. Just as his stepfather had used him, of course. Once they got here, he must have made plans for Gerhard. He really kept Gerhard in a kind of servitude. Christopher got the education B. Robert had wanted for himself. Gerhard’s job was to do what B. Robert said when he said it. Jocelyn says he was a docile boy, not very bright, pitifully eager for approval, very shy and very isolated, socially awkward. He had artistic ambitions, but no talent. He couldn’t even draw. He didn’t finish high school. He became B. Robert’s lackey and, to some extent, Christopher’s. He took care of the cars, drove for Mr. Motherway, did what he was told. As far as I can tell, it was all the same to him. Polishing the car, murdering Peter, following Jocelyn and reporting back to Mr. Motherway. He was at Mount Auburn when I gave her the envelope. He called Mr. Motherway to tell him. Once Mr. Motherway was sure she was on her way home, he waited for her there. He sent Gerhard back to Mount Auburn. They talked on Gerhard’s car phone. Mr. Motherway wanted Peter’s murder explained. Jocelyn’s suicide
was supposed to do that. The police were supposed to decide that she drowned herself where she’d left her husband’s body.”

“At the Gardner vault. Whence that eccentric interest in Isabella Stewart Gardner?”

“What Gerhard tells the police, Althea, is that it began after the heist. He’s confessed to that. He says he was one of the actual robbers, the men disguised as Boston police officers. He says that Fenway Court was the most beautiful place he’d ever been. His words are, I’m told, that he was crazy about it the second he walked in. Of course, he’s also confessed to ten or twenty other art thefts and to assorted other crimes. For example, the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby.”

“He wasn’t born yet.”

“He says he was. He also helped Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate John Kennedy, and that was before he was born, too. What’s not imaginary is his obsession with Isabella Stewart Gardner. He lived in a room in the basement of the Motherways’ house. Kevin Dennehy, my friend who’s with the Cambridge police, told me about it. He heard the place was a shrine to Mrs. Gardner. The walls were plastered with reproductions of works at Fenway Court, and there were tons of clippings about the robbery. What also seems to be true is that Gerhard cracked up about the time of the Gardner heist. Until then, he was peculiar and isolated. About that time, he started having what I guess were psychotic episodes. Jocelyn won’t say much more than that. She doesn’t want to talk about it. It occurs to me that she thinks a lot about the reward.”

“Five million dollars? There’s a good deal of room for thought there.”

“Yes,” I said ruefully. “Unfortunately, there’s a lot of room for thought and no proof at all. What does seem clear is that leaving Peter’s body at the Gardner vault was strictly Gerhard’s idea. On Mr. Motherway’s orders, Christopher was supposed to hire someone to kill Peter. Instead, Christopher got Gerhard to do it. He was supposed to make it look as if Peter had been attacked at the airport or on the way home by
some random assailant. But Gerhard wanted to offer a sacrifice to his heroine. So he did.”

“Holly, tell me, do you honestly believe that he was, in fact, involved in the Gardner robbery?”

“There is no proof, Althea. There is no proof.”

And there isn’t. What I know is that since being taken into custody, Gerhard has rambled wildly about many crimes and many people, me among them. Indeed, when he realized that the police didn’t believe he’d robbed the Gardner, he cited me, of all people, as a corroborative witness. He explained that while sitting at a table next to mine at the Gardner Cafe, he’d heard me reveal knowledge of the robbery that I could not have read in the papers. Not surprisingly, I’d been talking about the Gardners, Gerhard claimed. I’d mentioned, for example, that Jack Gardner had died of apoplexy, as he had. I remember talking about apoplexy. Steve and I had been discussing Mrs. Dodge, of course. I’d said something about her husband’s death. We’d joked about his having died of apoplexy when his wife got yet another dog. What convinced Gerhard of my inside knowledge, of course, was my remark that it was a miracle that all those priceless artworks hadn’t been chewed or otherwise damaged by dogs. Furthermore, Gerhard insisted, I even knew the breed that had had brief access to the Rembrandts, the Vermeer, and the other works lifted from Fenway court. If I hadn’t been privy to the hidden truth about the heist, how could I have known that the potential chewers were German shepherd dogs? Gerhard also makes much of my having stared at the tattoo on his arm. I did stare at it; he’s right about that. As you know, I had no idea what it was supposed to represent. According to Gerhard, it portrays a special item he selected during the Gardner heist: the finial from a Napoleonic flag.

B. Robert, of course, had dismissed Gerhard’s suspicion of me as delusional paranoia centered yet again on Isabella Stewart Gardner. Gerhard followed me from Mr. Motherway’s all on his own. It was, I am convinced, Gerhard who broke into my house and trashed my study. There did, after all, turn out to be one object missing, something I hadn’t noticed while straightening out the mess. The object was a
book. It was the guidebook Steve had bought for me at the Gardner, the guide to Fenway Court. Gerhard had clearly found nothing else in my house to connect me to knowledge of the famous heist.

A few last words. The book is done. Elizabeth and I have submitted it to our publisher. It has been accepted. It’s nonetheless a disappointment to me. It says nothing about Nazi spies. Were there any at the old Morris and Essex shows? There may have been many. I do not know. I know of only one. The proof was in Christina Motherway’s treasure chest. It consisted of a document in German, a letter to her husband that she had secretly kept because she was proud of him for serving the Fatherland. So there was a Nazi spy at Morris and Essex. His name was B. Robert Motherway.

My financial situation is improving. I had the Bronco fixed. It starts most of the time. I’m showing Rowdy and Kimi again. I scrape together the fees. But my hopes are great. I have applied for a grant, you see. I don’t know whether I’ll get it, but I’m optimistic. The funding agency is bound to love me. I have applied, you see, to the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. I am applying for a grant to write dog books. It is the perfect topic. I am the perfect candidate.