Evil Breeding

by Susan Conant

  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.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  IF HE’D BEEN CROSSING from the cemetery side of Mount Auburn Street to the Star Market side, I’d probably have decided that the worst he was up to was shoplifting. In my dogs, that up-to-trouble air often heralds a spree of food-stealing. But he was making his strangely abstracted yet resolute way across the street to the sidewalk that runs by the cemetery fence. Mount Auburn Cemetery is, I might mention, the largest fully fenced yard in Cambridge. It’s much larger than Harvard Yard, which is walled rather than fenced, and the walls are, in any case, rendered almost completely useless by the wide-open gates. Imagine! An institution of so-called higher learning where dogs can’t pursue advanced obedience skills because it’s unsafe to work them off-leash! And with Harvard’s endowment! Disgraceful! There’s no excuse.

  Mount Auburn does have an excuse: disrespect for the dead. Eager though I am for a clean, attractive, spacious, and fully fenced area right near my house where I can train and exercise the dogs off-leash, I have to admit that it would be a little unseemly to allow even such splendid and civilized animals as Kimi and Rowdy to lift their legs on B. F. Skinner or Mary Baker Eddy. Skinner’s presence, though, sustains my hope. Skinner? Harvard psychology professor. Renowned behaviorist. Pigeons, not dogs, but learning is learning, or so Skinner maintained. Best publicist that operant conditioning ever had. Anyway, there lies Skinner, cold and mute, when, damn it, if I could just warm him for a minute or two of animated chitchat, he’d come up with a clever solution to the vexing problem of how to train dogs not to pee on tombstones. The other part I’ve solved myself: The owners carry plastic cleanup bags. The pla
n as a whole is perfectly sound. There’s ample precedent. From the beginning, Mount Auburn has been more than a place to bury the dead. Since 1831, it’s been an arboretum, a nature preserve, a sculpture garden, and a bird sanctuary as well as a cemetery. Precedent! Precedent for its reincarnation as the world’s largest and most beautiful training facility and off-leash dog park. The transformation wouldn’t cost a thing. You’d just have to persuade visitors to close the gates.

  Gates. The fence. That’s where we were. As I was starting to say, in contrast to Harvard Yard, which has high, solid, uniformly expensive-looking brick walls on all sides, Mount Auburn Cemetery has a stretch of handsome, obviously costly wrought-iron fencing on either side of the main gate, which is a towering gray stone, Egyptian-looking affair that somehow fits the popular conception of the gates of hell, but with a different inscription and radically different intentions, of course. The point of a garden cemetery cum bird sanctuary and dog park and so forth is to urge people to reclaim hope, right? Not to abandon it. Anyway, the wrought-iron section wouldn’t have disgraced Giralda, but having sensibly put their money up front, where it shows, the Mount Auburn people have economized around the rest of the cemetery’s perimeter, most of which is bounded by chain-link, good chain-link, mind you, quality stuff, but not in a class with wrought iron. Not that I’m complaining! The Committee for the Canine Reclamation of Mount Auburn is perfectly satisfied with the existing dog-containment system. The chain-link is heavy and sturdy, and it’s high enough all the way around to prevent dogs from leaping over. People, too.

  The cemetery had closed for the day. The main gate was shut, as the back gate undoubtedly was, too. If the tattooed Mercedes man intended to enter, he’d need to force a gate, scale the fence, or cut a hole in it. On the night of Peter Motherway’s murder, someone had apparently climbed over. The gates hadn’t been tampered with. The chain-link hadn’t been cut. Rather, someone had hauled the body over the fence before transporting it to the Gardner vault.

  Whatever the man’s intentions, he wouldn’t carry them out here on Mount Auburn Street. Now, even after the rush hour had ended, cars and trucks passed, their headlights on. The Star Market was busy. Streetlights shone on pedestrians. I’d had practice in sneaking a dog into Mount Auburn when it was open to the public. Now, stopped at a red light, I quickly tried to plan what I’d do if I wanted to enter unobserved after dark. If I walked along the fence in the direction the man was taking, I’d come to Coolidge Avenue, where I’d turn right and continue to make my way along the boundary of Mount Auburn. The inhabitants of the big, handsome houses on the opposite side of Coolidge Avenue would be arriving home late from work, leaving for evening activities, walking dogs, and otherwise coming and going. After a quarter mile or maybe a half mile, the houses would give way to the grounds of the Cambridge Cemetery, which has a magnificent view of the Charles River, but is otherwise an ordinary cemetery, lacking as it does Mount Auburn’s magnificent monuments, impressive vegetation, imaginative landscaping, and famous remains. Ah, the eternal town and gown! Still, there’s a fairness about death. Residents on both sides slept the same six feet under. Even along that stretch, Coolidge Avenue wouldn’t be deserted; it served as a convenient shortcut from Cambridge proper to several large condominium buildings, a tennis and fitness club, and a big shopping mall. But tall trees grew inside and, in some places, outside Mount Auburn’s fence. Furthermore, somewhere along Coolidge was a gate I’d seen in daylight when the dogs and I took this route to the river. I vaguely remembered the gate as small. I’d never paid much attention to it because it was always closed and secured with a length of chain; a permanently locked, evidently unused entrance was no place to sneak in a dog.

  When the traffic light turned green, I drove past the turn at Brattle that would have taken me home and past the man, who was now moving swiftly. At Coolidge, I made a right and cruised by the big, illuminated houses. Somewhere to my right, not far beyond the fence, was the fine old Mount Auburn neighborhood that included the Mary Baker Eddy Monument and the Gardner family vault. The tattooed man had prayed before Mrs. Gardner’s portrait at Fenway Court. Did he also worship at her grave? If the vault was his destination, he might scramble over the fence soon after turning onto Coolidge. But maybe not. The discovery of Peter Motherway’s corpse had generated lots of media attention. Especially near the Gardner vault, people would be on the alert, wouldn’t they? Cemetery guards, residents of Coolidge Avenue, passersby. As I’d expected, lights were on in the houses along Coolidge, but no children played on the front lawns, and no one sat on the steps or porches by the front doors. There wasn’t a dog in sight. These suburban-style houses had side yards and backyards, many of them fenced. What had I been thinking? This wasn’t an area where neighbors visited back and forth to gossip on front stoops or where children played anywhere near the street. The yards probably had teak benches and those expensive wooden climbing structures that combine swings, ladders, slides, and gymnastics equipment with adorable little tree houses. Cambridge being Cambridge, Mommy and Daddy sat outside congratulating themselves on the papers they’d just had accepted by peer-reviewed journals. Cambridge being Cambridge, the kiddies prepared for adult life by imaginatively scaling the ladder from assistant to associate to full professor upward, ever upward, toward the tree house, transformed by the infant vision of the future into the ivory tower of academe. The family dog, a black Lab, kept hopefully dropping a tennis ball. No one threw it for him. Why bother? You don’t get tenure by playing with your dog.

  The traffic was lighter than I’d predicted. For a skilled interloper, almost anywhere along here would offer access to Mount Auburn. I began to look for a place to pull over, preferably a place where I could sit in my car and reconnoiter. A row of parked cars would have camouflaged mine; here, not a single car was parked on the street. What’s more, its age and dents made the old Bronco distinctive; the man could have noticed it on the way to Waltham or at the fast-food place. My car was more recognizable than I was, I thought. Bigger, too. On foot, I could become all but invisible in the dark. I could flatten myself against a tree trunk or lurk in a shadow. I had to get rid of the car.

  Just after turning onto Coolidge, along the stretch with the big houses, I’d passed a couple of narrow side streets, one of which dead-ended at the Shady Hill School. Like other elite private grade schools, Shady Hill would have liberated its students at the end of May or the beginning of June; there’d be no parent-teacher meetings or school plays tonight. On the other hand, the school’s parking area might be gated shut for the night, or there might be a security guard who’d have my car towed. The access road undoubtedly had permit-only parking; my Cambridge permit was good for my own neighborhood but not for this one. What’s more, the area around Shady Hill had the kinds of fancy houses that attract burglars; my disreputable Bronco might be mistaken for a getaway car. Feeling outclassed, I ended up leaving the Bronco much farther from Mount Auburn Street than I’d have liked, in the parking lot of the older of two condo complexes near the intersection of Coolidge and Grove. I pulled in, parked, and killed the engine. In his crate, Rowdy stirred. When he shook himself, the tags on his collar jingled. He’s always thrilled to go anywhere.

  “Sorry, boy,” I said. “I’ll be back as soon as possible.”

  I hated to leave him. I always hate to leave my dogs. Rowdy is, however, a big, flashy showman who knocks himself out to become the center of all eyes. He carries his plumy white tail over his back. Except in a complete blackout, you can see his white face, and it’s hard to miss the watch-me wag of that magnificent tail. Unobtrusive he’s not. Tonight, I wanted to pass unnoticed.

  In the absence of Rowdy and Kimi, I imagined their leashes in my hands and their familiar rear ends surging ahead of me as I set off back down Coolidge Avenue on the side opposite Mount Auburn. A short stretch of sidewalk ended, a guardrail appeared, and I found myself forced into the road. On this side of Coolidge, though, I was free from the irrational fear that th
e man would vault over the fence from inside the cemetery to plummet on top of me. I always walk fast; ever since I first toddled, my pace has been set by big dogs. Now I almost trotted. It still seemed to take me forever to cover the ground. I felt a strange, senseless annoyance at the absence of lights in Mount Auburn. The place was closed to the public. Why waste electricity? The only living people who belonged there were guards, who certainly carried flashlights and knew their way around, and maybe a few of those topflight birders who were rumored to possess cemetery keys. What bothered me, I realized, was the contrast with the cozy, residential atmosphere of Mount Auburn by daylight. The cemetery had its Chestnut, Oak, Spruce, and Magnolia avenues, its Pond Road. The graves, too, bore familiar names. Julia Ward Howe, Winslow Homer, and their neighbors weren’t just buried at Mount Auburn; they lived there. Immortality was the point, wasn’t it? The nighttime darkness of the Cambridge Cemetery, on my right, felt normal. Mount Auburn, however, was a charming little town abnormally blackened by a massive power failure.

  Soon after I passed the Cambridge Cemetery, just before the access road to Shady Hill, I heard the approach of a car behind me. So what? A few others had passed in both directions. Those cars, however, had been speeding along. This one was moving slowly. Before its headlights reached me, I impulsively stepped to the right, flattened myself on the ground between a hedge and a fence, and peered. What I was seeing might, I thought, be known as a town car. Or was that Town Car, with capitals? Anyway, it was a big American car, not a limousine, but the kind of long, dark car from which a uniformed chauffeur could emerge without surprising anyone. As the car crept by, I read the license plate. The tiny bulbs mounted above it struck me as ridiculous: A license plate was not a work of art that deserved to be admired in good light. What really drew my dog-person’s eye, though, was the vanity plate. You can’t attend a dog show without seeing hundreds of vanity plates: DACHSLUV, MALS R A1, DAL-PROUD, and all kinds of others printed with breed brags and abbreviated kennel names.