Evil Breeding

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 just 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