Evil Breeding (21 page)

Maybe Jocelyn’s terror was justified. As Rita, the psychologist, always says, just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean you’re not being followed.

O
N THE LAST DAY
of his life, Peter Motherway drove to the cargo area of Logan Airport, where he shipped three puppies. Peter never made it home. The terminally ill Christina Motherway also perished during what was, in another sense, a journey home. A third member of the Motherway family, Jocelyn, was now heading home. Or so I assumed.

After failing to persuade Jocelyn to accept whatever sanctuary Rita and I could find for her, I’d resolved to enlist Kevin Dennehy’s help. Jocelyn was, it seemed to me, too acutely terrified and too chronically cowed to act in her own interest. If she wouldn’t voluntarily seek refuge from the violence she obviously feared, then she belonged, I decided, in protective custody. I had no idea how protective custody worked or what it meant for the person in its grips, but it couldn’t be worse than what Jocelyn faced alone. If she were taken to a police station for questioning, or even arrested and locked in a jail cell, she’d be in the care of people whose job it was to make sure she didn’t share her late husband’s fate. Just how rational or irrational
was
Jocelyn’s panic? Indeed, how rational or irrational was the woman herself? Her husband had in fact been brutally murdered; his body had been propped against the Gardner vault at Mount Auburn.

There was, however, no comparable evidence that Christina
Motherway’s death had been unnatural; the notion might be Jocelyn’s delusion, a symptom of her need for psychiatric help. In mailing a series of mysterious packets to a near stranger, Jocelyn had acted senselessly. A person of sound mind seeks help by enlisting the aid of someone qualified to provide it; Jocelyn, instead of cogently relating her suspicions to a police officer, a private detective, or a psychotherapist, had sent cryptic messages to a dog trainer! The choice was crazy. What was I supposed to do about the whole mess? Housebreak it? Peter’s widow had not
imagined
his murder. Still, the true meaning of everything she’d sent me might not be murder, after all, but her own madness. Yes, the Motherway family evidently had secrets that its members wanted kept as just that, family secrets. So did every other family! Wasn’t it characteristic of the mad to fabricate sinister connections between unrelated events? To quake at inner demons projected outward?

In Harvard Square was a wild-acting man who alerted passersby to evil schemes concocted by professors, including his stepfather and his own mother. The man’s demeanor undermined his credibility. If he’d been hell-bent on convincing people that the sun rose in the east, he’d have turned all eyes westward at dawn. When he was in an agitated mood, he planted himself in the middle of the street to bellow warnings about electrical currents and laboratory rats. At other times, he lingered in doorways to stage-whisper bits of his secret knowledge. The man was blatantly deranged.

As I followed the Mercedes that tailed the old Ford truck, I had to wonder whether I was now being taken in by a subtle madness that I’d failed to see for what it was. Jocelyn Motherway’s appearance was unremarkable; she was a tall, dowdy woman with poor posture. She didn’t block traffic or accost strangers. Or did she? To me, a near stranger, she’d mailed what were, in effect, tangible bits of secret knowledge. It was I who had fought to discover sinister connections, I who had enlisted Althea in my efforts. Althea, of all people, the fanatical Holmesian whose greatest delight came from following, or in this case from concocting, a sinister plot!

Just beyond the Star Market, Belmont Street forks to the
right. Jocelyn bore left, staying on Mount Auburn Street, with the Mercedes and my Bronco trailing after her truck. For a second, I saw the three vehicles as a mockery of a funeral cortege. As an empty hearse trailed by mourners, the old black pickup was a bad joke. There were no flowers, no tears. And far from driving toward a cemetery, we were crawling away from one. Caught in rush-hour traffic, we moved from Cambridge to Watertown with funeral slowness. Jocelyn got stuck at a red light. When it turned green, our procession moved through an intersection, but was soon brought almost to a standstill near Kay’s Market, an Armenian greengrocery that also sells tenderly fresh Syrian bread, exotic spices, pistachio nuts, taramosalata, Greek olives, and other specialty foods so literally attractive that hordes of customers are forced to double-park.

When one of the double-parked cars pulled out between my Bronco and the Mercedes, I thought about taking its spot. For all I knew, the unfortunate Jocelyn suffered from delusions of persecution so severe that the Motherway family hired someone to keep an eye on her whenever she left home. Maybe the family’s determination to keep Christina out of an institution had been innocent and kindly. If so, family feeling might extend to an equally strong determination to keep Jocelyn out of a mental hospital. Her terror was unquestionably genuine. Its source? I’d seen her as the potential victim of violence. Was she in reality its source? Tormented by guilt, criminals sometimes surrendered to satisfy an underlying need for punishment. True? On television and in movies, anyway. Jocelyn was strong enough to have garroted her husband and strong enough to have carried or dragged his body a great distance. She had no alibi. Maybe Kevin Dennehy’s view of marriage as murder was justified after all. If so, there was no reason for me to follow the Mercedes that tailed her truck. Its tattooed driver might be an odd sort of bodyguard, an eccentric, of course, a man with a bizarre crush on Isabella Stewart Gardner, but a guard nonetheless, a hireling whose task was to prevent Jocelyn from committing new acts of violence. B. Robert Motherway had shown no affection for Peter. But would he shield the woman who had murdered his son? As
I’d heard myself, Christopher had quarreled bitterly with his father. And as Jocelyn’s son, Christopher might protect her. All along, what I’d seen as Jocelyn’s oppression, her relegation to the status of household help, might represent the family’s weird effort to contain her violence. On the other hand, genuflecting before the John Singer Sargent portrait of Mrs. Gardner wasn’t exactly what Rita always calls “appropriate behavior.” Jocelyn’s inner demons might not be the only threat she faced; now and then, paranoia coincided with reality. If the man in the Mercedes planned to waylay her, my presence as a witness should deter him.

In the heavily congested approach to Watertown Square, a feat of Boston-driver maneuvering landed me in the right-hand lane, still with only one car between mine and the Mercedes. By now, the driver of the Mercedes had a teal minivan between his car and his quarry’s truck. Jocelyn’s right turn onto Main Street supported my assumption that she was heading home. Main Street in Watertown would lead her to Main Street in Waltham. A half mile or so past the center of Waltham, she could take Route 117 or veer left staying on Route 20. Either road would take her home.

By obeying what is evidently a Massachusetts traffic law, I interpreted the yellow light as an injunction to pick up speed, and thus managed to jam the Bronco among the other cars clogging Watertown Square. After that, the traffic eased a bit. The teal minivan remained between Jocelyn’s truck and the Mercedes, which made no effort to pass. I deliberately let a second car slip between mine and the Mercedes. After what seemed like hours, we crossed a railroad bridge and descended to the part of Main Street in Waltham that’s thick with pizzerias, storefront offices, and discount this-and-thats. A working-class town and proud of it, Waltham is also home to lots of high-tech companies, but the impressive new office and industrial buildings cluster along Route 128, America’s Technology Highway. Ages ago, Waltham was Watch City, USA, but you’d never call it a Little Switzerland; these days, in downtown Waltham, there’s not much to watch.

I was listening to “All Things Considered” on National
Public Radio. The traffic thickened in the center of town. Soon after we passed City Hall, on the left, then the public library, on the right, an NPR segment ended. The announcement that followed raised my hackles. All I remember about the segment is that it had nothing to do with dogs. What remains clear in my mind is that funding for it had nonetheless been provided by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. Ggrrr! Catching Rowdy’s eye in my rearview mirror, I exclaimed, “A gross miscarriage of dog-loving justice! A crime against caninity! By rights, buddy boy, her whole damn eighty-five million should’ve gone to the dogs!”

During the second my eyes had been off the road, a gigantic refrigerated truck had appeared just in front of the Mercedes. A block or two ahead, on the left, was a big supermarket; the truck would probably turn there to make its delivery. When it did, Jocelyn’s pickup would reappear. In accordance with Massachusetts custom, the teal minivan signaled for a left turn before veering right into the parking lot of a convenience store. Moving ahead, I could see that the tattooed driver of the Mercedes was again using his car phone. He hung up. Then, with no signal, he made an abrupt right turn. While I’d been fuming about NPR and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, he’d presumably kept his eye on Jocelyn. The gigantic truck hadn’t blocked the view of her pickup after all, I decided. Rather, the driver of the Mercedes must have seen her turn into the parking lot of this fast-food restaurant.

It was one I’d visited before, mainly because—surprise!—it was near or on the way to various hotbeds of dog activity. Leah and I sometimes took the dogs to obedience matches and breed-handling classes at the nearby Waltham Boys and Girls Club, or followed the scenic Route 117 to dog-training classes and seminars in towns west of 128. Stopping at the fast-food place had become a habit for the usual reason: dogs. It used to be that if you had a dog in the car when you went to the drive-up window, you’d get a free dog biscuit along with your food. Even after the dog treats were discontinued, I kept on stopping there. Ah, the lasting power of intermittent positive
reinforcement! Not that the results were all that positive. On the contrary, Rowdy and Kimi learned to expect cookies whenever we went to a drive-through anything, and would rattle their crates and yelp gleefully at ATMs. Little did my trusting dogs suspect that on most days my bank balance wasn’t enough to buy two dog treats.

The Mercedes parked in a spot right near the restaurant’s main door. The driver got out and entered. I was puzzled. To reach the drive-through window, you had to go around to the back of the building, where you shouted your order through a microphone. Then you continued the circuit of the building and stopped at the window, where you paid, got your food, and failed to get free dog biscuits. When I hadn’t seen the black Ford pickup, I’d thought that Jocelyn must be in back of the building yelling her order into the microphone. So why was the guy going
inside
the restaurant?

As it turned out, he entered the restaurant to order and devour enough burgers, fries, ice cream, and cold drinks to fill a large tray. But I’ve jumped ahead. In search of Jocelyn’s truck, I circled the parking lot, looked up and down Main Street and the side streets bordering the fast-food place, and saw no sign of the pickup. Damn! It must have been ahead of that semi after all. Yet the driver of the Mercedes hadn’t followed. Instead, he’d pulled into this fast-food joint. Why? The phone call? Had he received instructions to drop his surveillance? Passed on the task to someone else? Was it possible that he hadn’t been tailing Jocelyn at all?

It was, I decided, useless for me to try to catch up with her. She had at least a five-minute head start, and I had no idea whether she’d taken Route 117 or Route 20. At Mount Auburn, she’d rejected my offer of sanctuary. Despite that dismissal and despite my increasing doubts about Jocelyn’s innocence, I’d done my best to see that she reached home without falling victim to the kind of fatal assault that had killed her husband. When I got home, I’d turn the whole problem over to Kevin Dennehy.

The time was now an almost incredible six-thirty. The traffic on Main Street had eased. With luck, I’d be back in
Cambridge in half an hour. No time at all. Except with a full bladder. I parked in a spot near the side door of the fast-food place, went in, and used the ladies’ room. Emerging from it, I saw the Mercedes man, who was seated alone at a table for two with his back toward me. Not that it mattered. Why would he remember someone who’d sat at a table next to his at the Gardner Cafe, someone he might have seen briefly at Mount Auburn, someone he’d never met? Besides, he wasn’t looking around. Rather, he was concentrating on the tray in front of him. At the moment, he was raising a double burger to his mouth. If anyone had ever told him to keep his elbows in when he ate, he hadn’t listened. The sight of bad table manners and the man’s messy tray shouldn’t have stimulated my appetite, especially after all the shortcake I’d eaten at Ceci and Althea’s, but I instantly craved food, the greasier the better. Impulsively, I joined the shortest of four lines, waited, and ordered a fish sandwich for myself and, I confess, a cheeseburger for Rowdy.

Back in the car, I fed him his unearned treat, which he downed in one gulp. I ate with a bit more decorum, but I’m sure I didn’t linger; the cuisine and surroundings weren’t conducive to elegant tarrying. Besides, it was past Kimi’s dinnertime. I wanted to get home. Either I took longer than I remember, or the Mercedes man bolted his food at a speed to rival Rowdy’s: Driving out of the lot, I saw that the Mercedes was gone. So what? I wasn’t following it anymore. At least not knowingly.

Retracing my route, I made it back to Cambridge in less than half the time it had taken me to reach Waltham during the rush hour. I want to emphasize that I was not trying to follow the Mercedes. For all I knew, it had gone in a completely different direction. It wasn’t the Mercedes I saw, anyway, but its driver, and the only reason I spotted him was that he jaywalked across Mount Auburn Street directly in front of my car. He didn’t notice me. What attracted my attention was, in fact, his weird look of alert and purposeful obliviousness. His gait was more a trot than a walk, and his head was tilted upward at an awkward angle. As he crossed in
front of my car, I couldn’t actually see his nostrils, but I’d have bet anything that they were twitching. Everything about his gait, his posture, his facial expression was intimately familiar to me. I know all too well the unmistakable air of a dog who’s up to something.