A Moment on the Edge:100 Years of Crime Stories by women

by Elizabeth George

  teeth ached. A blurred reproachful look of Mother in the kitchen billowing in her buttercup-yellow quilted robe as he’d backed out smiling ’Bye, Mom!

  Sure she’d been hurt, her only son avoiding her. She’d been a lone woman even in her pride. Even with her activities that meant so much to her: Women’s Art League, East Side Planned Parenthood Volunteers, HealthSty Fitness Center, tennis and golf in East Hampton in the summer, subscription tickets to Lincoln Center. 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 had 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 break-fast.

  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 sleeve 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 Center?—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 dialed 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 of neighbors from the adjoining brownstone and they and the driver stared at this chalk-faced grief-stricken boy in an unbuttoned duffel coat, bareheaded, running into the street screaming, “Help us! Help us! Somebody’s killed my mother!”

  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 center; the celebration of a private individual of no evident civic 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 defense attorney, Marina read the article, continued on an inside 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 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. Neighbors spoke of having heard no unusual sounds from the Peck residence, but several did speak of “suspicious” strangers in the neighborhood. 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 wall-eyed 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, at 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 skepticism.

  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 lik
e 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 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 color 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.

  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 twitchy. 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 color 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: probably psychopath-matricide who not only claimed complete innocence but seemed actually to believe it. He gave off a complex odor of the ripely organic and the chemical. His skin appeared heated, of the color 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 to Derek Peck, the boy I 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 1980s, in an era of celebrity-scandal trials, that Marina Dyer made her reputation as a “brilliant” criminal defense 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 in 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-colored hair in a French twist, ballerina style; her favored suits were Chanels in subdued harvest colors and soft dark cashmere wools, the jackets giving some bulk to her narrow frame, the skirts always primly to midcalf. Her shoes, handbags, brief-cases, 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 fervor. 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 hear her, to know.

  Marina’s first highly publicized case was her successful defense of a U.S. congressman from Manhattan who’d been charged with criminal extortion and witness tampering; her second was the successful, if controversial, defense of a black performance artist charged with rape and assault of a druggie-fan who’d come uninvited to his suite at the Four Seasons. There had been a

  prominent, photogenic Wall Street trader charged with embezzlement, fraud, obstruction of justice; there had been a woman journalist charged with attempted murder in the shooting-wounding of a married lover; there had been lesser-known but still meritorious cases, rich with challenge. Marina’s clients were not invariably acquitted but their sentences, given their probable guilt, were considered lenient. Sometimes they spent no time in prison at all, only in halfway houses; they paid fines, did community service. Even as Marina Dyer shunned publicity, she reaped it. After each victory, her fees rose. Yet she was not avaricious, nor even apparently ambitious. Her life was her work and her work her life. Of course, she’d been dealt a few defeats, in her early career when she’d sometimes defended innocent or quasi-innocent people for modest fees. With the innocent you risk emotions, breakdown, stammering at crucial moments on the witness stand. You risk the eruption of rage, despair. With accomplished liars, you know you can depend upon a performance. Psychopaths are best: they lie fluently, but they believe.

  Marina’s initial interview with Derek Peck, Jr., lasted for several hours and was intense, exhausting. If she took him on, this would be her first murder trial; this seventeen-year-old boy her first accused murderer. And what a brutal murder: matricide. Never had she spoken with, in such intimate quarters, a client like Derek Peck. Never had she gazed into, for long wordless moments, any eyes like his. The vehemence with which he stated his innocence was compelling. The fury that his innocence should be doubted was mesmerizing. Had this boy killed, in such a way?—“transgressed?”—violated the law, which was Marina Dyer’s very life, as if it were of no more consequence than a paper bag to be crumpled in the hand and tossed away? The back of Lucille Peck’s head had literally been smashed in by an estimated twenty or more blows of the golf club. Inside her bathrobe, her soft naked-flaccid body had been pummeled, bruised, bloodied; her genitals furiously lacerated. An unspeakable crime, a crime in violation of taboo. A tabloid crime, thrilling even at second or third hand.

  In her new Chanel suit of such a purplish-plum wool it appeared black as a nun’s habit, in her crisp chignon that gave to her profile an Avedon-lupin sharpness, Marina Dyer gazed upon the boy who was Lucy Siddons’s son. It excited her more than she would have wished to acknowledge. Thinking. I am unassailable, I am untouched. It was the perfect revenge.

  Lucy Siddons. My best friend, I’d loved her. Leaving a birthday card and a red silk square scarf in her locker, and it was days before she remembered to thank me though it was a warm thank-you, a big-toothed genuine smile. Lucy Siddons who was so popular, so at ease and emulated among the snobbish girls at Finch. Despite a blemished skin, buck teeth, hefty thighs, and waddling-duck walk for which she was teased, so lovingly teased. The secret
was, Lucy had personality. That mysterious X-factor which, if you lack it, you can never acquire it. If you have to ponder it, it’s out of your reach forever. And Lucy was good, good-hearted. A practicing Christian from a wealthy Manhattan Episcopal family famed for their good works. Waving to Marina Dyer to come sit with her and her friends in the cafeteria, while her friends sat stonily smiling; choosing scrawny Marina Dyer for her basketball team in gym class, while the others groaned. But Lucy was good, so good. Charity and pity for the despised girls of Finch spilled like coins from her pockets.

  Did I love Lucy Siddons those three years of my life, yes I loved Lucy Siddons like no one since. But it was a pure, chaste love. A wholly one-sided love.

  His bail had been set at $350,000, the bond paid by his distraught father. Since the recent Republican election-sweep it appeared that capital punishment would soon be reinstated in New York State, but at the present time there was no murder-one charge, only murder-two for even the most brutal and/or premeditated crimes. Like the murder of Lucille Peck, about which there was, regrettably, so much local publicity in newspapers, magazines,

  on television and radio, Marina Dyer began to doubt her client could receive a fair trial in the New York City area. Derek was hurt, incredulous: “Look, why would I kill her, I was the one who loved her!” he whined in a childish voice, lighting up another cigarette out of his mashed pack of Camels. “—I was the only fucking one who loved her in the fucking universe!” Each time Derek met with Marina he made this declaration, or a variant. His eyes flamed with tears of indignation, moral outrage. Strangers had entered his house and killed his mother and he was being blamed! Could you believe it! His life and his father’s life torn up, disrupted like a tornado had blown through! Derek wept angrily, opening himself to Marina as if he’d slashed his breastbone to expose his raging palpitating heart.