Evil Breeding

by Susan Conant

  According to the TV report, Peter Motherway had last been seen alive the previous evening at the cargo area of Logan Airport. The TV showed footage of the long, bleak road that leads to Logan’s cargo terminals. According to the newscaster, the victim had worked in his family’s dog-breeding business and had been at the airport to ship three puppies. After accepting the puppies for shipment, airline employees had seen Motherway leave the building. Sometime thereafter, he had been strangled. His body had been found by a bird-watching group soon after eight o’clock this morning. Authorities were pursuing their investigations.

  I suppressed the uncharitable thought that if Peter Motherway had been as unpleasant to other people as he’d been to me, it was no wonder someone had strangled him. Instead, I mulled over the matter of the family dog-breeding business and the shipment of the three puppies. If there’s one thing that’s ethical, reputable dog breeding is not, it’s a business. My friend and mentor, Janet Switzer, was the prototype of a good breeder. And not just in the sense that her kennel had produced Rowdy! Janet bred selectively and seldom, almost always when she wanted a puppy for herself. Before her retirement, she’d worked to support herself and her dogs. Once in a while she shipped a puppy to someone in another part of the country, but only to someone she knew: another careful breeder, for example, or someone who’d previously bought a puppy from her. I couldn’t imagine circumstances in which Janet would ship three puppies. The conventional term for someone like Janet, or for that matter, for someone like my late mother, is “hobby breeder.” Hobby? Dear God! A hobby is a leisure pursuit. Whittling. Playing the glockenspiel. Making doll dresses out of pastel facial tissues. Tropical fish might be a hobby, I guess. But dogs eat every second of what would otherwise be leisure time, and they devour your income as well. Geraldine R. Dodge was about the only person I could think of who’d easily been able to afford the “hobby.”

  The media might have been guilty of misrepresentation. Still, I couldn’t rid myself of the image of those large kennel buildings separated from Mr. Motherway’s house and barn by a long stretch of field. How many dogs did they hold? Geraldine R. Dodge, I reminded myself, had luxurious kennel space for a hundred and fifty. For breakfast, her dogs ate oatmeal mixed with fresh eggs from Giralda chickens and fresh milk from Giralda cows. To maintain the manor house and kennels, Giralda Farms employed more than sixty people. By my standards, Mr. Motherway was loaded, but he was no Rockefeller. M. Hartley Dodge, Jr., had alarmed his mother by pursuing a passion for aviation; if he’d returned alive from that summer in Europe, he’d probably have joined his father’s business. He certainly wouldn’t have been drafted to serve as his mother’s kennel help. I’d scrubbed and disinfected the family kennels. I’d exercised, groomed, and trained our dogs. But our visitors met me; no one assumed I was a hired hand.

  Dog breeding as a true business takes several different forms. Wholesale commercial breeders, otherwise known as puppy-mill operators, mass-produce puppies sold to dog brokers for resale in pet shops. Puppy-mill operators and brokers are the scum of the world of purebred dogs. Equally scummy are operators of what are, in effect, direct-sales puppy mills. These breeders mass-produce puppies but eliminate the middlemen by selling directly to buyers, any buyers at all, anyone willing to pay cash or produce a credit card. The back pages of the dog magazines are packed with ads for these kennels. Some reputable breeders advertise there, too. The situation is a consumer nightmare. But the ads for mass-production kennels are pretty easy to spot. The phrase puppies always available should arouse suspicion. Never, ever does a reputable breeder have “puppies always available.”

  And B. Robert Motherway? Before I had a chance to check the ads in the dog magazines, Rowdy and Kimi announced the delivery of our mail in typical malamute fashion: They ran to the door, where they stood silently wagging their tails in happy ignorance of such human afflictions as overdue notices and threatening so-called reminders from banks. Today’s onslaught announced that my subscriptions to two dog magazines would expire unless I immediately sent money I didn’t have. I also received my second plain white envelope. Again, the upper-left corner was blank, and my name and address were printed in block capitals. This time, the postmark was legible: Boston. Opening the flap, I half expected to find another Soloxine leaflet. What I discovered was a handwritten letter dated March 1939. The writing paper might originally have been cream-colored. Or perhaps white had yellowed with age. The return address, handwritten, consisted of a single word that it took me a moment to decipher. When I succeeded, my heart pounded. The word was Giralda.

  The ink was faded. The backhanded penmanship was almost illegible. Here is my best try at a rendering of the letter:

  Dear Bro,

  A brief note to report I am settled here in great happiness in a little room of my own with fresh yellow paint and flowers on the curtains.

  The arrangement is as you were told. Outdoors there are large numbers of dogs and inside at this moment a dozen, which do as they please. They are sweet of temperament, and small wonder! The best of everything goes to the dogs. Their hair makes a mess. You see I find myself in a topsy-turvy world with the husband’s own fine house far away. Here the dogs occupy His place of honour.

  Your,

  Eva

  “Very strange,” I remarked to Rowdy and Kimi, who were sniffing at the old letter. “Did this come from someone who has dogs? Is that what you’re smelling? Or could it be”—I paused for dramatic effect and then lowered my voice—“the lingering scent of Giralda?” The dogs consider me the reincarnation of Sarah Bernhardt. They also love my singing, which is unrecognizable as such by any other creatures on earth. In their eyes, I perform miracles: Impenetrable barriers open before me; I unlock doors. A mighty hunter am I, departing unarmed, yet returning with forty pounds of premium kibble. Amazing grace.

  “Your faith in me is entirely unjustified,” I said. “I have no idea who Eva is or was, who sent this to me, or why.”

  Malamutes “talk,” as it’s said. Kimi is wonderfully vocal. She delivered herself of a lengthy reply that culminated in a question: Rrrr-ah-rooo?

  “Hypothesis,” I replied. “This second mysterious missive has something to do with the first. Same kind of envelope, same block-cap printing. Soloxine, Giralda, the husband in one house, the dogs in his place in the other. So … ?”

  Where thought should have been, I found a great void.

  Chapter Eleven

  “SO,” SAID KEVIN DENNEHY, his big face suffused with self-congratulation, “they get this kid on the stand, Jeffrey, age fifteen, and they ask him why his big brother, Robert, wanted to kill the parents. And what’s Jeffrey say?”

  “Kevin, I saw that in the paper, too,” I replied. “He testified that Robert didn’t like their parents because they wouldn’t get him everything he wanted. Robert asked for a cellular phone for Christmas, and he didn’t get one. It’s a good thing for the rest of us that these kids didn’t shoot Santa instead.”

  Kevin ignored my frivolity. Although nothing makes him happier than a family murder, he expects his morbid interest to be taken seriously. The murder he was discussing took place in New Hampshire; Kevin had nothing to do with investigating it. Still, he followed the newspaper accounts and police scuttlebutt about it with interest and pride. Until Robert and Jeffrey evened the score, New England, sadly lacking its very own Menendez brothers, was one down on California. Kevin is not a ghoul; violence is not what makes him happy. On the contrary, he has a strong personal and professional commitment to preventing it. What delights him about family killing is his pleasure in being proven right. You can tell by looking at Kevin that there’s nothing macabre about him; with his red hair, blue eyes, and freckles, he presents an altogether wholesome, if overwhelmingly enormous and looming, appearance. If the murder of Peter Motherway had led Kevin to visit the victim’s father, I hoped Mr. Motherway had had the sense to protect the delicate antique chairs. My own kitchen chairs had withstood the test of Kevin’s bu
lk. Now, as he sat across from me with his greasy, empty plate in front of him, his mammoth frame entirely obscured the chair, but the wood hadn’t cracked under his weight.

  “I’ve forgotten the last name of those kids,” I said. “Dingbat?”

  Kevin was not amused. “Dingman. Jeffrey shot both of the parents first, and then Robert took the gun and finished the job. But it was Robert’s idea. Robert’s eighteen. He conned the kid into it. The little one, Jeffrey, went along. Eighth-grader. Said his parents yelled at him a lot.”

  “You want another beer?” I asked unnecessarily. Kevin almost always wants another beer. Most of the beer in my refrigerator belonged to him, anyway.

  Kevin said he’d get it himself. When he rose, the dogs did, too. They’d been patiently lying on the tile floor waiting for the chance to lick our plates. I cleared the table and let the dogs sanitize the dishes before I stacked them in the dishwasher. When I turned around, the dogs were posed expectantly, Rowdy on Kevin’s left, Kimi on Kevin’s right.

  “Kevin,” I said firmly, “you are to stop sneaking them beer!”

  “Builds the blood,” Kevin replied defiantly.

  “The whole performance is beneath them,” I said. “It’s the setting that’s déclassé. I know a malamute, Tazs, who went to Germany to do weight-pulling demos, and he learned to drink beer, but that was German beer! Out of a stein! He was toasting international friendship at a festival in Berlin. He wasn’t guzzling Bud out of a can in a kitchen in Cambridge.”

  “Hey, hey!” Kevin protested. He caught the dogs’ eyes. “What we’ve got here,” he told them in dire tones, “is a saboteur hell-bent on breaking up an important meeting of the Irish-Alaskan Friendship League. We gonna stand for that?”

  “Yes we are!” I said. “They’re my dogs. No beer!”

  Then I poured myself a glass of jug red wine and resettled myself at the table. “So,” I said, “you want to hear everything about the Motherways?” I’d already told Kevin that I knew Mr. Motherway and had met Peter and Jocelyn. In fact, the topic of the Motherways was what had led Kevin to the Dingman brothers.

  “The wife is an odd duck,” Kevin commented. It was, I thought, his way of beginning an indirect interrogation.

  I supplied her name. “Jocelyn. The first time I went there, I mistook her for a maid, or maybe the older Mrs. Motherway’s nurse. That was Christina, B. Robert Motherway’s wife. She just died.”

  “Advanced arteriosclerosis. Alzheimer’s.”

  “Jocelyn took care of her. The family was determined that Christina would be allowed to die at home. Or her husband was, anyway. And she did. I think that Jocelyn was genuinely devoted to her.”

  “Takes flowers to her grave,” Kevin informed me.

  “I didn’t know that. She’s buried at Mount Auburn. Is that … ?”

  Kevin’s beefy face broke into a grin. “A clue?”

  “Well, yes. Peter was killed where his recently deceased mother was buried. By coincidence?”

  Kevin’s head is about the size of a mastiffs. When he shakes it, I involuntarily flinch in expectation of being spattered with drool. “He wasn’t killed there. The body was moved.”

  “Where was he killed? At Logan? Speaking of which, I have a lot to tell you about this puppy business of theirs. I really was very stupid. I thought Mr. Motherway was perfectly respectable. He’d been in shepherds forever, and he was an AKC judge, and he knew these important people. And I never questioned that. Until today. When I heard on the news that Peter had been shipping three puppies and that he was in the family’s dog-breeding business, it made me wonder, so I did some checking. Kevin, these people are not who I thought they were. Ages ago, Mr. Motherway, old Mr. Motherway, was respectable, but now they run what’s basically a direct-sales puppy mill. They run ads in all the dog magazines. They sell to absolutely anyone. They breed tons of dogs.”

  “So how come you didn’t know?”

  “If they’d had malamutes, I would’ve known. And now that I do know, I can see that people were giving me hints. Someone e-mailed me that she’d love to be a fly on the wall when I talked to Mr. Motherway. I couldn’t understand what she meant. I asked, but I never got a reply. Now I realize that she expected me to give Mr. Motherway a lecture on responsible breeding. What a dope I am! I thought people were impressed that I knew Mr. Motherway. And, uh, I sort of overplayed the extent of my acquaintance with him, so naturally, people didn’t come right out and say insulting things about someone they thought was a friend of mine.”

  As I didn’t bother telling Kevin, I now viewed the mysterious Soloxine leaflet as a hint I’d ignored. The point of sending it to me, I’d now decided, had been to suggest that Motherway was breeding hypothyroid dogs. Once my suspicions had been aroused, I’d checked the dog magazines and found big ads for Haus Motherway German Shepherd Dogs. Puppies, adults, and stud service were always available. There was even a toll-free number to call. In every magazine, the Motherway ad prominently displayed a professional photo of a black-and-tan male shepherd with an impressive number of German titles. A phone call to my friend Elise, who does shepherd rescue, gave me a piece of information omitted from the ad: The dog in the picture had been dead for twenty years. German Shepherd Rescue knew all about the Motherways. Elise said that no one was sure how many dogs the Motherways had. Guesses ranged from fifty to a hundred. The Motherways’ puppies were notorious for health and temperament problems attributable to a lack of genetic screening compounded by repeated inbreeding: autoimmune disorders, hypothyroidism, hip dysplasia, elbow dysplasia, and everything from extreme shyness to outright viciousness.

  “They just churn them out as fast as they can,” Elise had said, “and take no responsibility afterwards. When someone turns one of their dogs over to us, we don’t even bother calling him. Motherway has never taken a dog back in his life. The reputable German breeders won’t sell to him anymore. They’re sorry they ever did. They think he’s garbage.”

  Pouring a little more of the vinegary wine into my glass, I said to Kevin, “I should have known there was something fishy. Mr. Motherway came across as the gracious old gentleman, American antiques, European travel, the whole bit. The grandson, Christopher, looks exactly like him. Christopher struck me as sort of arrogant. ‘Entitled,’ Rita would say. And Peter was definitely unpleasant. Sullen. But the strange thing was that it was as if Christopher, the grandson, was Mr. Motherway’s son, and Peter was some serf who worked for both of them. Except that Peter didn’t exactly play that role gracefully. He obviously didn’t get along with his father or his son, and he sort of went around radiating resentment. His wife, Jocelyn, is the original doormat. They have this dog, this big black shepherd, Wagner, that tags along with Mr. Motherway, and even the dog realizes that Jocelyn is at the bottom of the hierarchy. The dog growls at her, and no one interferes, and she just kind of takes it as her due. It’s pitiful. But there’s something likable about Jocelyn. I offered to help her with the dog, but I guess she wasn’t interested.”

  Kevin was sipping his beer from the can. Although I knew he was listening, his eyes were on Rowdy and Kimi. Rowdy lay in almost comatose bliss on his side as Kimi leaned over him and energetically scoured his face with her maternal pink tongue. She licked repeatedly at one of his ears, moved to the other, then ministered to his eyes, which he was forced to close to avoid having his eyeballs groomed. After that, she apparently meant to give herself a break, but Rowdy stirred. Gently and tenderly, he poked her in the chest with one of his big forepaws. More! As if she were glad to know that he appreciated her efforts, she resumed her task. The sight of Kimi playing dental hygienist with her tongue was too much for Kevin. He looked back at me.

  “Quiet type.” Kevin’s tone was ominous.

  “Kimi? Kevin, I’d hardly call her the—”

  “The widow. Jocelyn. Sometimes it’s the mousy ones that—”

  “That what? Turn out to be bubbling with murderous rage that finally comes spewing out? Kevin, Jocelyn Mot
herway is not some sleeping volcano. I’ve met her. She just isn’t.”

  Stretching his gorilla-like arms in an immense shrug, Kevin said lugubriously, “Marriage. It’ll do that to a person.” Kevin’s prejudice against the institution is not based on personal experience, unless you count his experience with his mother and his late father, who died a natural death, at least as far as I know. Rather, according to Kevin, he merely possesses a professional understanding of the risks of marriage and parenthood. For as long as I’ve known him, his view has been that if your spouse doesn’t kill you, your parents, your siblings, or your children will.

  I hoped Kevin wouldn’t launch into statistics. He did. Forty-five percent of murder victims were killed by people they knew. Twenty-six percent of female murder victims were done in by a husband or boyfriend. When women committed murder, in thirty-one point four percent of the cases, the victim was the husband. Mate homicide is a phrase he savors.

  “Kevin, I don’t remember numbers the way you do, but I seem to recall from one of our previous discussions that the great majority of murderers and victims are men. Violence is a predominantly male phenomenon. It is in dogs. The typical dog that bites someone is an intact male. Unneutered.”

  Kevin turned red.

  “But,” I added, “does that mean that Rowdy is going to bite someone? No. And all the statistics going do not mean that this particular murder is a mate homicide. Since most murderers are male, the raw probability is that Peter was killed by a man.”

  “Never said otherwise.” With a look that falsely suggested a change of subject, Kevin asked, “You read about that guy in Watertown?”

  Watertown is west of Cambridge. I’d assumed until now that Kevin had been too busy to follow the latest local example of what was definitely a family murder. This one was especially gory and dramatic. At five-thirty in the evening on a quiet street of small houses, a thirty-six-year-old man cut his sixty-seven-year-old father’s throat. The father got up and ran. Neighbors tried to intervene, but the son caught the father and stabbed him to death.