by Susan Conant
My advantage over the arriving forces was my recently acquired familiarity with the terrain. In the daytime, visitors who studied street signs and consulted maps still found themselves disoriented. Now, at night, the police were probably unsure of exactly what was where. But in this small part of the cemetery, I knew where I was and where I was going. Rowdy and I would crawl, slither, or dash, as needed, parallel to the trail that ran above the tiny lake. We’d stay uphill, above the path. That course should land us right near the gate to Coolidge Avenue.
All went well until a minor miscalculation of mine led us a bit too far above the trail. Taking one tentative step behind a massive monument, I came close to bumping into a police cruiser. I backstepped so rapidly that I bumped into Rowdy, but luckily managed not to step on a paw. To give myself a minute to regain my composure, I huddled behind the monument with my arms wrapped around Rowdy and my face buried in the warm comfort of his thick coat. As my heart slowed, I realized that the sight of the cruiser, far from alarming me, should have allayed my fears by offering visual confirmation of the conclusion I’d already reached. Yes, the police were indeed here, and in force, too. The cruiser I’d almost smacked into had been the middle car in a row of three. I’d heard more than that. There must be similar clusters of police vehicles throughout the area. Before long, I told myself, a Cambridge-cop voice with a heavy Boston accent would boom down through a loudspeaker into the little valley that contained the tiny lake and the Gardner vault. For all I knew, it might be Kevin Dennehy’s voice that issued the warning and the order you always hear in movies: It’s the police. We’ve got you surrounded! Put down your weapons!
The vision of Kevin Dennehy and his uniformed and plainclothes associates deployed all around the valley buoyed my confidence. With renewed determination, I rose to my feet, and Rowdy and I set off toward the Coolidge Avenue gate. Despite detours around low iron fences surrounding family plots and a few near tumbles on footstones, we soon found ourselves maddeningly close to our goal. At this point, the path forked. Virtually no distance ahead, both forks ended at blacktop. Somewhere to our right was the intersection where we had come upon the body of the guard. There’d be cops there, as well as at least one ambulance, and who knew what else. Straight ahead was the high boundary fence and, inches beyond it, Coolidge Avenue. If we went straight, then cut right, we’d be at the gate.
Just as I filled my lungs with oxygen, preparing to make the bold move out of the shelter of the trees and monuments and onto the exposed asphalt, I heard footsteps and then muted talk. It proved to be two large uniformed men heading onto the path, which is to say, directly toward us. Damn! Paths and roads converged so thickly here that there was almost no space between them. Immediately to my left, however, was a long rectangular monument with a flat top, the kind of memorial that’s unhappily shaped like a coffin. It took no effort to lure Rowdy onto it. With a quick hand signal, I had him posed in a perfect down-stay. A second later, I was on a down-stay myself, flattened on the grass behind the monument, squeezing myself against its cold stone. Unable to speak aloud, I issued silent commands. Stay! Good boy! Hold it right there! Freeeeeeze!
As I heard the two men pass quickly by, I decided with relief that we’d entirely eluded their attention. Then a young man’s voice said softly, “Hey, sergeant? Hey, wait up! There’s a dog back there.” The footfalls stopped. “There’s a great big dog on one of the—”
The sergeant guffawed softly. “This place is full of nutty statues. Statues of dogs all over! What you saw was—”
The footfalls resumed. The young officer was trailing after his sergeant. As they departed, I heard the young voice say plaintively, “But, Sergeant? Sergeant! It was wagging its tail! The dog was—”
“It was a stone dog, kid. It didn’t wag its tail.” The sergeant’s voice faded as the men disappeared. “Kid, you must’ve been smoking something you shouldn’t. You been doing that? Huh? What you been smoking? Wagging its tail! Wagging its tail! Jesus, what I gotta put up with!”
Once they were out of sight, I instantly got to my feet, brushed myself off, ran my fingers through my hair, and adopted the supremely self-confident air of utter obliviousness that is the hallmark of Cambridge eccentricity. I pretended to be an updated version of the parrot-walking Miss Whitehead, the near kin of a Cambridge personage so eminent that one could expect almost anything from me … and not be disappointed. The Cambridge attitude: Within the city limits, I am entitled to go where I please when I please with whom I please. My life is the life of the mind! Nothing could be further from my thoughts than the opinions of people I may encounter on my journey.
With Rowdy beside me in the improbable role of Miss Whitehead’s parrot, I marched straight along the asphalt and up to the gate through which we’d entered, where I was only slightly irked to discover that the scene I’d scripted for myself was already being enacted. Indeed, it was immediately clear that I was being radically upstaged by a Cambridge type who’d gotten there first. Unlike me, he was dressed for the part. His peculiar-looking binoculars were harnessed to his chest, he wore a funny-looking hat and a loose vest with dozens of bulging pockets, and he carried a device designed, as he was explaining to a cop at the gate, to enable birders to hear their quarry. Certainly he had a key! His defensive tone suggested that the cop had offensively mistaken a rara avis for a guttersnipe. Unlike me, the bona fide night birder was not accompanied by a dog. He was not, however, alone. Hanging back, embarrassed, I thought, by his companion’s arrogance, was, of all people, Artie Spicer, the leader of Rita’s birding group, the guy we’d had dinner with the night my house was broken into. As the costumed birder strutted before the cop, Artie and I made eye contact and exchanged wry little smiles. Artie carried what I guessed was some fancy kind of night-vision spotting scope, a contraption for seeing birds in the dark.
Fearful that my lack of fluency in the language of birding would give me away, I picked my words carefully. “Hi, Artie,” I said as normally as possible. “Anything interesting tonight?” I was hoping he’d mention some avian species so that I could say I’d heard it, too. Before encountering the real birder, I’d intended, if challenged, to brag about detecting the call of a black-crowned night heron, only because it was the only bird name I’d been able to think of that had anything to do with night. I’d felt apprehensive. Maybe the creature never flew north of Florida. Maybe it was voiceless, a cousin of the mute swan. Maybe the guard or the cop at the gate would be a birder with a life list approaching a trillion and would instantly spot me for the liar I was.
After taking down our three names and addresses, the cop waved the condescending birder through the gate. At Artie’s side, Rowdy and I followed. Nodding at Rowdy, the cop said, “Good idea. Birds or no birds, this is no place to go wandering around at night.”
With a knowing nod and a conspiratorial smile, I replied, “Well, Cambridge is Cambridge!”
The cop knew just what I meant. With a bob of his head in the direction of the costumed birder, he said, “Yup! A lot of odd ducks here, all right. A whole lot of odd ducks.”
In Cambridge, attitude is everything.
Chapter Thirty
JOCELYN MOTHERWAY ENDED UP in Mount Auburn. The other one: Mount Auburn Hospital. The two parallel universes—pardon me, venerable Cambridge institutions—are only a few blocks apart on Mount Auburn Street. Whether the proximity is depressing or convenient depends on your point of view. Jocelyn Motherway’s opinion on the matter was a bit difficult to decipher. She seemed less than overjoyed to be alive.
She was only a little paler than usual, and her hospital gown wasn’t any dowdier than what she ordinarily wore. I found it satisfying, however, to see her propped up in a bed she hadn’t made, sipping orange juice poured and served by someone else. The basket of flowers I’d brought rested on a windowsill. The arrangement contained a great many daisies and tons of those thick, coarse, cheap ferns, but it was better than nothing, I guess. I couldn’t afford delphiniums.
“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 jus
t 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?”
Chapter Thirty-one
“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.”