Evil Breeding

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 all 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.”
    Althea smiled gently. “Not to mention the occasional family or two in which no one murders anyone else.”
    “Exactly, Althea! And in which everyone works for an honest living instead of banding together to go around robbing museums and fencing stolen art and murdering people. So how was I supposed to guess that Gerhard was a cousin? Gerhard Woolf? Have you ever heard a more made-up-sounding name? He doesn’t have a German accent, he doesn’t look German, and he doesn’t look anything like Mr. Motherway or Peter or Christopher. And nobody called him ‘Cousin Gerhard’ or anything. Not that he’s all that close a relative. He’s something like B. Robert Motherway’s mother’s sister’s great-grandson. I think I’ve got that right. And Christina’s mother’s, too, of course. Eva Kappe’s mother’s sister’s great-grandson? Maybe I’m off somewhere. Anyway, it’s the part of the family that Eva—in other words, Christina—went to in Germany when she dropped out of high school in New Jersey. Later on, B. Robert told the family in Germany that she died here. And he told people here that his sister died in Germany. The German part of the family just thought he’d married a woman named Christina, which he had, of course, only it was the same woman. Eva.”
    “Appalling,” said Althea, “but not unprecedented. There was a couple in Spain, wasn’t there? Brother and sister. Ceci and I heard about them on National Public Radio, if I recall. They had two children. They were allowed to marry. The parents, that is, not the children, although one does have to wonder.... But it’s interesting to observe, isn’t it, that in this case, the madness one tends to associate with inbreeding shows itself most blatantly in a family member, this Gerhard, who, so far as one knows, is not the child of close relatives.”
    “Peter Motherway didn’t even look all that much like his father,” I pointed out, “even though his parents apparently looked quite a lot alike. There was a family resemblance, but nothing out of the ordinary. That kind of thing happens with dogs all the time, of course. You can linebreed two beautiful dogs of a similar type and get a whole litter of funny-looking puppies. Good dogs aren’t necessarily good producers. They can throw all kinds of stuff you wouldn’t expect.”
    “Three heads,” Althea said mischievously.
    I smiled. “Not exactly three heads. Missing teeth, bad bites, incorrect coats, all kinds of faults you don’t see in the parents. And the kind of strong resemblance between B. Robert and Christopher does sometimes crop up in dogs, including between grandsire and grandson.”
    “And evil, too?” inquired Althea. “Does evil, too, run in canine families?”
    “Certainly not! Althea, you’re teasing me. No, evil has nothing to do with dogs. There are dogs with bad temperaments, and there are a few vicious dogs, but evil is an exclusively human characteristic. I don’t think it has a thing to do with genetics. The person who really got B. Robert Motherway started was his stepfather, who was a small-time crook. Christina told Jocelyn about it. The guy—”
    Althea blanched.
    “Pardon me. The man, the Mr. Motherway who adopted B. Robert, ran what was really a junk shop rather than an antique shop, but he had higher ambitions. When he returned from Germany with his German bride and her two kids— children, pardon me—he also smuggled some stuff with him. And I think that’s when he discovered that the boy, B. Robert, could be useful to him.”
    “Fagin!” Althea exclaimed. She