Evil Breeding

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 bulk. 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 declasse. 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