Penzler, Otto Ed v2

by Murder For Revenge

  I can’t bear this anymore.

  I need rest.

  The quick brown fox jumped over...

  I need to forget about Ric.

  Now is the time for all good men to...

  Joyce Carol Oates

  The high imaginative powers of Joyce Carol Oates are by now seen as a virtual force of nature: like waves, her fiction comes ever on, beating up against our fragile defences and sucking us into the very heart of its intensity. She began her career in 1963 with the novel ‘By the North Gate’; since then she’s published scores of books, none less sharply observed or intricately textured than the next. Under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith, she produces some of the most compelling psychological suspense stories of our time.

  It is, of course, always an honour to be able to present a new work from her, particularly when it relates to a theme as suited to her hypnotic talents as revenge.

  Trust Ms. Oates to spiral around the issues of guilt and motive, keeping us once again off balance and attempting, futilely, to hold our own against the onslaught of her diabolic inventiveness. ‘Murder-Two’ quite intentionally echoes the headlines we wince to read these days, but the character of its subtle surprises is unique to this author.

  Murder-Two

  1.

  This, he swore.

  He’d returned to the town house on East End Avenue after eleven P.M. and found the front door unlocked and, inside, his mother lying in a pool of squid ink on the hardwood floor at the foot of the stairs. She’d apparently fallen down die steep length of the stairs and broken her neck, judging from her twisted upper body. She’d also been bludgeoned to death, the back of her skull caved in, with one of her own golf clubs, a two-iron, but he hadn’t seemed to see that, immediately.

  Squid ink?—well, die blood had looked black in the dim foyer light. It was a trick his eyes played on his brain sometimes when he’d been studying too hard, getting too little sleep. An optic tic. Meaning you see something clearly, but it registers surreally in the brain as something else. Like in your neurological programming there’s an occasional bleep.

  In Derek Peck, Jr.’s case, confronted with the crumpled, lifeless body of his mother, this was an obvious symptom of trauma. Shock, the visceral numbness that blocks immediate grief—the unsayable, the unknowable. He’d last seen his mother, in that same buttercup-yellow quilted satin robe that had given her the look of an upright, bulky Easter toy, early that morning, before he’d left for school. He’d been away all day. And this abrupt, weird transition—from differential calculus to the body on the floor, from the anxiety-driven jokes of his Math Club friends (a hard core of them were meeting late, weekdays, preparing for upcoming SAT exams) to the profound and terrible silence of the town house that had seemed to him, even as he’d pushed open the mysteriously unlocked front door, a hostile silence, a silence that vibrated with dread.

  He crouched over the body, staring in disbelief. “Mother? Mother’.”

  As if it was he, Derek, who’d done something bad, he the one to be punished.

  He couldn’t catch his breath. Hyperventilating! His heart beating so wildly he almost fainted. Too confused to think, Maybe they’re still here, upstairs? for in his dazed state he seemed to lack even an animal’s instinct for self-preservation.

  Yes, and he felt to blame, somehow. Hadn’t she instilled in him a reflex of guilt? If something was wrong in the household, it could probably be traced back to him. From the age of thirteen (when his father, Derek senior, had divorced his mother, Lucille, same as divorcing him), he’d been expected by his mother to behave like a second adult in the household, growing tall, lank, and anxious as if to accommodate that expectation, and his sand-coloured body hair sprouting, and a fevered grimness about the eyes. Fifty-three percent of Derek’s classmates, girls and boys, at the Mayhew Academy, were from ‘families of divorce,’ and most agreed that the worst of it is you have to learn to behave like an adult yet at the same time a lesser adult, one deprived of his or her full civil rights. That wasn’t easy even for stoic streetwise Derek Peck with an IQ of, what was it?—158, at age fifteen. (He was seventeen now.) So his precarious adolescent sense of himself was seriously askew: not just his body image (his mother had allowed him to become overweight as a small child; they say that remains with you forever, irremediably imprinted in the earliest brain cells), but more crucially his social identity. For one minute she’d be treating him like an infant, calling him her baby, her baby-boy, and the next minute she was hurt, reproachful, accusing him of failing, like his father, to uphold his moral responsibility to her.

  This moral responsibility was a backpack loaded with rocks. He could feel it, first fucking thing in the morning, exerting gravity even before he swung his legs out of bed.

  Crouched over her now, badly trembling, shaking as in a cold wind, whispering, “Mommy?—can’t you wake up? Mom—my, don’t be—“ balking at the word dead for it would hurt and incense Lucille like the word old, not that she’d been a vain or frivolous or self-conscious woman for Lucille Peck was anything but, a woman of dignity it was said of her admiringly by women who would not have wished to be her and by men who would not have wished to be married to her. Mommy, don’t be old! Derek would never have murmured aloud, of course. Though possibly to himself frequently this past year or so seeing her wan, big-boned and brave face in harsh frontal sunshine when they happened to descend the front steps together in the morning, or at that eerie position in the kitchen where the overhead inset lights converged in such a way as to cruelly shadow her face downward, bruising the eye sockets and the soft fleshy tucks in her cheeks. Two summers ago when he’d been away for six weeks at Lake Placid and she’d driven to Kennedy to pick him up, so eager to see him again, and he’d stared appalled at the harsh lines bracketing her mouth like a pike’s, and her smile too happy and what he felt was pity, and this, too, made him feel guilty. You don’t pity your own mother, asshole.

  If he’d come home immediately after school. By four P.M. Instead of a quick call from his friend Andy across the park, guilty mumbled excuse left on the answering tape, Mother’? I’m sorry guess I won’t make dinner tonight, okay?—-Math Club—study group—calculus—don’t wait up for me, please. How relieved he’d been, midway in his message she hadn’t picked up the phone. Had she been alive, when he’d called? Or already... dead?

  Last time you saw your mother alive, Derek? they’d ask and he’d have to invent for he hadn’t seen her, exactly. No eye contact. And what had he said? A rushed schoolday morning, a Thursday. Nothing special about it. No premonition! Cold and windy and winter-glaring and he’d been restless to get out of the house, snatched a Diet Coke from the refrigerator so freezing his teeth ached. A blurred reproachful look of Mother in the kitchen billowing in her buttercup-yellow quilted robe as he’d backed off smiling ‘Bye, Mom!’

  Sure she’d been hurt, her only son avoiding her. She’d been a lonely woman even in her pride. Even with her activities that meant so much to her: Women’s Art League, East Side Planned Parenthood Volunteers, Health-Style Fitness Centre, tennis and golf in East Hampton in the summer, subscription tickets to Lincoln Centre. And her friends: most of them divorced middle-aged women, mothers like herself with high-school or college-age kids. Lucille was lonely; how was that his fault?—-as if, his senior year in prep school, he’d become a fanatic about grades, obsessed with early admission to Harvard, Yale, Brown, Berkeley, just to avoid his mother at that raw, unmediated time of day that was breakfast. But, God, how he’d loved her! He had. Planning to make it up to her for sure, SAT scores in the highest percentile he’d take her to the Stanhope for the champagne brunch then across the street to the museum for a mother-son Sunday excursion of a kind they hadn’t had in years.

  How still she was lying. He didn’t dare touch her. His breathing was short, ragged. The squid-inky black beneath her twisted head had seeped and coagulated into the cracks of the floor. Her left arm was flung out in an attitude of exasperated appeal, the sle
eve stained with red, her hand lying palm-up and the fingers curled like angry talons. He might have noted that her Movado watch was missing, her rings gone except Grandma’s antique opal with the fluted gold setting—the thief, or thieves, hadn’t been able to yank it off her swollen finger? He might have noted that her eyes were rolled up asymmetrically in her head, the right iris nearly vanished and the left leering like a drunken crescent-moon. He might have noted that the back of her skull was smashed soft and pulpy as a melon but there are some things about your mother out of tact and delicacy you don’t acknowledge seeing. Mother’s hair, though—it was her only remaining good feature, she’d said. A pale silvery-brown, slightly coarse, a natural colour like Wheaties. The mothers of his classmates all hoped to be youthful and glamorous with bleached or dyed hair but not Lucille Peck, she wasn’t the type. You expected her cheeks to be ruddy without makeup and on her good days they were.

  By this time of night Lucille’s hair should have been dry from her shower of so many hours ago Derek vaguely recalled she’d had, the upstairs bathroom filled with steam. The mirrors. Shortness of breath! Tickets for some concert or ballet that night at Lincoln Centre?—-Lucille and a woman friend. But Derek didn’t know about that. Or if he’d known he’d forgotten. Like about the golf club, the two-iron. Which closet? Upstairs, or down? The drawers of Lucille’s bedroom bureau ransacked, his new Macintosh carried from his desk, then dropped onto the floor by the doorway as if—what? They’d changed their minds about bothering with it. Looking for quick cash, for drugs. That’s the motive!

  What’s Booger up to, now? What’s going down with Booger, you hear?

  He touched her—at last. Groping for that big artery in the throat—cateroid?—-cartoid? Should have been pulsing but wasn’t. And her skin clammy-cool. His hand leapt back as if he’d been burnt.

  Jesus fucking Christ, was it possible—Lucille was dead?

  And he’d be to blame?

  That Booger, man! One wild dude.

  His nostrils flared, his eyes leaked tears. He was in a state of panic, had to get help. It was time! But he wouldn’t have noticed the time, would he?-—11:48 P.M. His watch was a sleek black-faced Omega he’d bought with his own cash, but he wouldn’t be conscious of the time exactly. By now he’d have dialled 911. Except thinking, confused, the phone was ripped out? (Was the phone ripped out?) Or one of them, his mother’s killers, waiting in the darkened kitchen by the phone? Waiting to kill him?

  He panicked, he freaked. Running back to the front door stumbling and shouting into the street where a taxi was slowing to let out an elderly couple, neighbours from the adjoining brown-stone and they and the driver stared at this chalk-faced grief-stricken boy in an unbuttoned duffel coat, barehead running into the street screaming, “Help us! Help us! Somebody’s killed my mother!”

  2.

  EAST SIDE WOMAN KILLED

  ROBBERY BELIEVED MOTIVE

  In a late edition of Friday’s New York Times, the golf club-bludgeoning death of Lucille Peck, whom Marina Dyer had known as Lucy Siddons, was prominently featured on the front page of the Metro section. Marina’s quick eye, skimming the page, fastened at once upon the face (middle aged, fleshy, yet unmistakable) of her old Finch classmate.

  “Lucy! No.”

  You understood that this must be a death photo: the positioning on the page, upper centre; the celebration of a private individual of no evident civic or cultural significance, or beauty. For Times readers the news value lay in the victim’s address, close by the mayor’s residence. The subtext being ‘Even here, among the sequestered wealthy, such a brutal fate is possible.’

  In a state of shock, though with professional interest, for Marina Dyer was a criminal defence attorney, Marina read the article, continued on an inner page and disappointing in its brevity. It was so familiar as to resemble a ballad. One of us (Caucasian, middle aged, law abiding, unarmed) surprised and savagely murdered in the very sanctity of her home; an instrument of class privilege, a golf club, snatched up by the killer as the murder weapon. The intruder or intruders, police said, were probably looking for quick cash, drug money. It was a careless, crude, cruel crime; a ‘senseless’ crime; one of a number of unsolved break-ins on the East Side since last September, though it was the first to involve murder. The teenaged son of Lucille Peck had returned home to find the front door unlocked and his mother dead, at about eleven P.M., at which time she’d been dead approximately five hours. Neighbours spoke of having heard no unusual sounds from the Peck residence, but several did speak of ‘suspicious’ strangers in the neighbourhood. Police were ‘investigating.’

  Poor Lucy!

  Marina noted that her former classmate was forty-four years old, a year (most likely, part of a year) older than Marina; that she’d been divorced since 1991 from Derek Peck, an insurance executive now living in Boston; that she was survived by just the one child, Derek Peck, Jr., a sister, and two brothers. What an end for Lucy Siddons, who shone in Marina’s memory as if beaming with life: unstoppable Lucy, indefatigable Lucy, good-hearted Lucy: Lucy, who was twice president of the Finch class of 1970, and a dedicated alumna: Lucy, whom all the girls had admired, if not adored: Lucy, who’d been so kind to shy stammering walleyed Marina Dyer.

  Though they’d both been living in Manhattan all these years, Marina in a town house of her own on West Seventy-sixth Street, very near Central Park, it had been five years since she’d seen Lucy, on their twentieth class reunion; even longer since the two had spoken together at length, earnestly. Or maybe they never had.

  The son did it, Marina thought, folding up the newspaper. It wasn’t an altogether serious thought but one that suited her professional scepticism.

  3.

  Boogerman! Fucking fan-tas-tic.

  Where’d he come from?—the hot molten core of the Universe. At the instant of the Big Bang. Before which there was nothing and after which there would be everything: cosmic cum. For all sentient beings derive from a single source and that source long vanished, extinct.

  The more you contemplated of origins the less you knew. He’d studied Wittgenstein—Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. (A photocopied handout for Communication Arts class, the instructor a cool youngish guy with a Princeton Ph.D.) Yet he believed he could recall the circumstances of his birth. In 1978, in Barbados where his parents were vacationing, one week in late December. He was premature by five weeks and lucky to be alive, and though Barbados was an accident yet seventeen years later he saw in his dreams a cobalt-blue sky, rows of royal palms shedding their bark like scales, shriek-bright-feathered tropical birds; a fat white moon drooping in the sky like his mother’s big belly, sharks’ dorsal fins cresting the waves like the Death Raiders video game he’d been hooked on in junior high. Wild hurricane-nights kept him from sleeping a normal sleep. Din of voices as of drowning souls crashing on a beach.

  He was into Metallica, Urge Overkill, Soul Asylum. His heroes were heavy-metal punks who’d never made it to the Top Ten or if they did fell right back again. He admired losers who killed themselves OD’ing like dying’s a joke, one final FUCK YOU! to the world. But he was innocent of doing what they’d claimed he’d done to his mother, for God’s sake. Absolutely unbelieving fucking fantastic, he, Derek Peck, Jr., had been arrested and would be tried for a crime perpetrated upon his own mother he’d loved! perpetrated by animals (he could guess the colour of their skin) who would’ve smashed his skull in, too, like cracking an egg, if he’d walked in that door five hours earlier.

  4.

  She wasn’t prepared to fall in love, wasn’t the type to fall in love with any client, yet here is what happened: just seeing him, his strange tawny-yearning eyes lifting to her face, Help me! Save me!—that was it.

  Derek Peck, Jr., was a Botticelli angel partly erased and crudely painted over by Eric Fischl. His thick stiffly moussed unwashed hair lifted in two flaring symmetrical wings that framed his elegantly bony, long-jawed face. His limbs were monkey-long and twit
chy. His shoulders were narrow and high, his chest perceptibly concave. He might have been fourteen, or twenty-five. He was of a generation as distant from Marina Dyer’s as another species. He wore a T-shirt stamped SOUL ASYLUM beneath a rumpled Armani jacket of the colour of steel filings, and pinstriped Ralph Lauren fleece trousers stained at the crotch, and size-twelve Nikes. Mad blue veins thrummed at his temples. He was a preppy cokehead who’d managed until now to stay out of trouble, Marina had been warned by Derek Peck, Sr.’s, attorney, who’d arranged, through Marina’s discreet urging, for her to interview for the boy’s counsel: a probable psychopath-matricide who not only claimed complete innocence but seemed actually to believe it. He gave off a complex odour of the ripely organic and the chemical. His skin appeared heated, of the colour and texture of singed oatmeal. His nostrils were rimmed in red like nascent fire and his eyes were a pale acetylene yellow-green, flammable. You would not want to bring a match too close to those eyes, still less would you want to look too deeply into those eyes.

  When Marina Dyer was introduced by Derek Peck, the boy stared at her hungrily. Yet he didn’t get to his feet like the other men in the room. He leaned forward in his chair, the tendons standing out in his neck and the strain of seeing, thinking, visible in his young face. His handshake was fumbling at first, then suddenly strong, assured as an adult man’s, hurtful. Unsmiling, the boy shook hair out of his eyes like a horse rearing its beautiful brute head, and a painful sensation ran through Marina Dyer like an electric shock. She had not experienced such a sensation in a long time.

  In her soft contralto voice that gave nothing away, Marina said, “Derek, hi.”

  It was in the 1980’s, in an era of celebrity-scandal trials, that Marina Dyer made her reputation as a ‘brilliant’ criminal defence lawyer; by being in fact brilliant, and by working very hard, and by playing against type. There was the audacity of drama in her positioning of herself in a male-dominated courtroom. There was the startling fact of her physical size: she was a ‘petite’ size five, self-effacing, shy seeming, a woman easy to overlook, though it would not be to your advantage to overlook her. She was meticulously and unglamorously groomed in a way to suggest a lofty indifference to fashion, an air of timelessness. She wore her sparrow-coloured hair in a French twist, ballerina style; her favoured suits were Chanels in subdued harvest colours and soft dark cashmere wools, the jackets giving some bulk to her narrow frame, the skirts always primly to midcalf. Her shoes, handbags, briefcases, were of exquisite Italian leather, expensive but understated. When an item began to show signs of wear, Marina replaced it with an identical item from the same Madison Avenue shop. Her slightly askew left eye, which some in fact had found charming, she’d long ago had corrected with surgery. Her eyes were now direct, sharply focused. A perpetually moist, shiny dark-brown, with a look of fanaticism at times, but an exclusively professional fanaticism, a fanaticism in the service of her clients, whom she defended with a legendary fervour. A small woman, Marina acquired size and authority in public arenas. In a courtroom, her normally reedy, indistinct voice acquired volume, timbre. Her passion seemed to be aroused in direct proportion to the challenge of presenting a client as ‘not guilty’ to reasonable jurors, and there were times (her admiring fellow professionals joked about this) that her plain, ascetic face shone with the luminosity of Bernini’s St. Teresa in her ecstasy. Her clients were martyrs, their prosecutors persecutors. There was a spiritual urgency to Marina Dyer’s cases impossible for jurors to explain afterward, when their verdicts were sometimes questioned. You would have had to be there, to near her, to know.