Profound and terrible moments that left Marina shaken for hours afterward.
Marina noted, though, that Derek never spoke of Lucille Peck as my mother or Mother but only as her, she. When she’d happened to mention to him that she’d known Lucille, years ago in school, the boy hadn’t seemed to hear. He’d been frowning, scratching at his neck. Marina repeated gently, “Lucille was an outstanding presence at Finch. A dear friend.” But still Derek hadn’t seemed to hear.
Lucy Siddons’s son, who bore virtually no resemblance to her. His glaring eyes, the angular face, hard-chiseled mouth. Sexuality reeked about him like unwashed hair, solid T-shirt, and jeans. Nor did Derek resemble Derek Peck, Sr., so far as Marina could see.
In the Finch yearbook for 1970 there were numerous photos of Lucy Siddons and the other popular girls of the class, the activities beneath their smiling faces extensive, impressive; beneath Marina Dyer’s single picture, the caption was brief. She’d been an honors student, of course, but she had not been a popular girl no matter her effort. Consoling herself, I am biding my time. I can wait.
And so it turned out to be, as in a fairy tale of rewards and punishments.
Rapidly and vacantly Derek Peck recited his story, his “alibi,” as he’d recited it to the authorities numerous times. His voice resembled one simulated by computer. Specific times, addresses; names of friends who would “swear to it, I was with them every minute”; the precise route he’d taken by taxi, through Central Park, on his way back to East End Avenue; the shock of discovering the body at the foot of the stairs just off the foyer. Marina listened, fascinated. She did not want to think that this was a tale invented in a cocaine high, indelibly imprinted in the boy’s reptile-brain. Unshakable. It failed to accommodate embarrassing details, enumerated in the investigating detectives’ report: Derek’s socks speckled with Lucille Peck’s blood tossed down a laundry chute, wadded underwear on Derek’s bathroom floor still damp at midnight from a shower he claimed to have taken at seven a.m. but had more plausibly taken at seven p.m. before applying gel to his hair and dressing in punk-Gap style for a manic evening downtown with certain of his heavy-metal friends. And the smears of Lucille Peck’s blood on the very tiles of Derek’s shower stall he hadn’t noticed, hadn’t wiped off. And the telephone call on Lucille’s answering tape explaining he wouldn’t be home for dinner he claimed to have made at about four p.m. but had very possibly made as late as ten p.m., from a SoHo club.
These contradictions, and others, infuriated Derek rather than troubled him, as if they represented glitches in the fabric of the universe for which he could hardly be held responsible. He had a child’s conviction that all things must yield to his wish, his insistence. What he truly believed, how could it not be so? Of course, as Marina Dyer argued, it was possible that the true killer of Lucille Peck had deliberately stained Derek’s socks with blood, and tossed them down the laundry chute to incriminate him; the killer, or killers, had taken time to shower in Derek’s shower and left Derek’s own wet, wadded underwear behind. And there was no absolute, unshakable proof that the answering tape always recorded calls in the precise chronological order in which they came in, not 100 percent of the time, how could that be proven?
(There were five calls on Lucille’s answering tape for the day of her death, scattered throughout the day; Derek’s was the last.)
The assistant district attorney who was prosecuting the case charged that Derek Peck, Jr.’s, motive for killing his mother was a simple one: money. His $500 monthly allowance hadn’t been enough to cover his expenses, evidently. Mrs. Peck had canceled her son’s Visa account in January, after he’d run up a bill of over $6,000; relatives reported “tension” between mother and son; certain of Derek’s classmates said there were rumors he was in debt to drug dealers and terrified of being murdered. And Derek had wanted a Jeep Wrangler for his eighteenth birthday, he’d told friends. By killing his mother he might expect to inherit as much as $4 million -and there was a $100,000 life-insurance policy naming him beneficiary, there was the handsome four-story East End town house worth as much as $2.5 million, there was a property in East Hampton, there were valuable possessions. In the five days between Lucille Peck’s death and Derek’s arrest he’d run up over $2,000 in bills—he’d gone on a manic buying spree, subsequently attributed to grief. Derek was hardly the model preppy student he claimed to be either: he’d been expelled from the Mayhew Academy for two weeks in January for “disruptive behavior,” and it was generally known that he and another boy had cheated on a battery of IQ exams in ninth grade. He was currently failing all his subjects except a course in Postmodernist Aesthetics, in which films and comics of Superman, Batman, Dracula, and Star Trek were meticulously deconstructed under the tutelage of a Princeton-trained instructor. There was a Math Club whose meetings Derek had attended sporadically, but he hadn’t been there the evening of his mother’s death.
Why would his classmates lie about him?—Derek was aggrieved, wounded. His closest friend, Andy, turning against him!
Marina had to admire her young client’s response to the detectives’ damning report: he simply denied it. His hot-flamed eyes brimmed with tears of innocence, disbelief. The prosecution was
the enemy, and the enemy’s case was just something they’d thrown together, to blame an unsolved murder on him because he was a kid, and vulnerable. So he was into heavy metal, and he’d experimented with a few drugs, like everyone he knew, for God’s sake. He had not murdered his mother, and he didn’t know who had.
Marina tried to be detached, objective. She was certain that no one, including Derek himself, knew of her feelings for him. Her behavior was unfailingly professional, and would be. Yet she thought of him constantly, obsessively; he’d become the emotional center of her life, as if she were somehow pregnant with him, his anguished, angry spirit inside her. Help me! Save me! She’d forgotten the subtle, circuitous ways in which she’d brought her name to the attention of Derek Peck, Sr.’s, attorney and began to think that Derek Junior had himself chosen her. Very likely, Lucille had spoken of her to him: her old classmate and close friend Marina Dyer, now a prominent defense attorney. And perhaps he’d seen her photograph somewhere. It was more than coincidence, after all. She knew!
She filed her motions, she interviewed Lucille Peck’s relatives, neighbors, friends; she began to assemble a voluminous case, with the aid of two assistants; she basked in the excitement of the upcoming trial, through which she would lead, like a warrior-woman, like Joan of Arc, her beleaguered client. They would be dissected in the press, they would be martyred. Yet they would triumph, she was sure.
Was Derek guilty? And if guilty, of what? If truly he could not recall his actions, was he guilty? Marina thought, If I put him on the witness stand, if he presents himself to the court as he presents himself to me…how could the jury deny him?
It was five weeks, six weeks, now ten weeks after the death of Lucille Peck and already the death, like all deaths, was rapidly receding. A late-summer date had been set for the trial to begin and it hovered at the horizon teasing, tantalizing, as the opening night of a play already in rehearsal. Marina had of course entered a plea of not guilty on behalf of her client, who
had refused to consider any other option. Since he was innocent, he could not plead guilty to a lesser charge—first-degree, or second-degree, manslaughter, for instance. In Manhattan criminal law circles it was believed that going to trial with this case was, for Marina Dyer, an egregious error, but Marina refused to discuss any other alternative; she was as adamant as her client, she would enter into no negotiations. Her primary defense would be a systematic refutation of the prosecution’s case, a denial seriatim of the “evidence”; passionate reiterations of Derek Peck’s absolute innocence, in which, on the witness stand, he would be the star performer; a charge of police bungling and incompetence in failing to find the true killer, or killers, who had broken into other homes on the East Side; a hope of enlisting the jurors’ sympathy. For M
arina had learned long ago how the sympathy of jurors is a deep, deep well. You would not want to call these average Americans fools exactly, but they were strangely, almost magically, impressionable; at times, susceptible as children. They were, or would like to be, “good” people; decent, generous, forgiving, kind; not “condemning,” “cruel.” They looked, especially in Manhattan, where the reputation of the police was clouded, for reasons not to convict, and a good defense lawyer provides those reasons. Especially they would not want to convict, of a charge of second-degree murder, a young, attractive, and now motherless boy like Derek Peck, Jr.
Jurors are easily confused, and it was Marina Dyer’s genius to confuse them to her advantage. For the wanting to be good, in defiance of justice, is one of mankind’s greatest weaknesses.
“Hey: you don’t believe me, do you?”
He’d paused in his compulsive pacing of her office, a cigarette burning in his fingers. He eyed her suspiciously.
Marina looked up startled to see Derek hovering rather close beside her desk, giving off his hot citrus-acetylene smell. She’d been taking notes even as a tape recorder played. “Derek, it doesn’t
matter what I believe. As your attorney, I speak for you. Your best legal—”
Derek said pettishly, “No! You have to believe me—I didn’t kill her.”
It was an awkward moment, a moment of exquisite tension in which there were numerous narrative possibilities. Marina Dyer and the son of her old, now deceased, friend Lucy Siddons shut away in Marina’s office on a late, thundery-dark afternoon; only a revolving tape cassette bearing witness. Marina had reason to know that the boy was drinking, these long days before his trial; he was living in the town house, with his father, free on bail but not “free.” He’d allowed her to know that he was clean of all drugs, absolutely. He was following her advice, her instructions. But did she believe him?
Marina said, again carefully, meeting the boy’s glaring gaze. “Of course I believe you, Derek,” as if it was the most natural thing in the world, and he naive to have doubted. “Now, please sit down, and let’s continue. You were telling me about your parents’ divorce…”
“’Cause if you don’t believe me,” Derek said, pushing out his lower lip so it showed fleshy red as a skinned tomato,”—I’ll find a fucking lawyer who does.”
“Yes, but I do. Now sit down, please.”
“You do? You believe—?”
“Derek, what have I been saying! Now, sit down.”
The boy loomed above her, staring, For an instant, his expression showed fear. Then he groped his way backward, to his chair. His young, corroded face was flushed and he gazed at her, greeny-tawny eyes, with yearning, adoration.
Don’t touch me! Marina murmured in her sleep, cresting with emotion. I couldn’t bear it.
Marina Dyer. Strangers stared at her in public places. Whispered together, pointing her out. Her name and now her face had
become media-sanctioned, iconic. In restaurants, in hotel lobbies, at professional gatherings. At the New York City ballet, for instance, which Marina attended with a friend…for it had been a performance of this ballet troupe Lucille Peck had been scheduled to attend the night of her death. Is that woman the lawyer? the one who…? the boy who killed his mother with the golf club…Peck?
They were becoming famous together.
His street name, his name in the downtown clubs, Fez, Duke’s, Mandible was “Booger.” He’d been pissed at first, then decided it was affection not mockery. A pretty white uptown boy, had to pay his dues. Had to buy respect, authority. It was a tough crowd, took a fucking lot to impress them—money and more than money. A certain attitude. Laughing at him, Oh, you Booger man!—one wild dude. But now they were impressed. Whacked his old lady? No shit! That Booger, man! One wild dude.
Never dreamt of it. Nor of Mother, who was gone from the house as traveling. Except not calling home, not checking on him. No more disappointing Mother.
Never dreamt of any kind of violence, that wasn’t his thing. He believed in passive-ism. There was the great Indian leader, a saint. Gandy. Taught the ethic of passive-ism, triumphed over the racist British enemies. Except the movie was too long.
Didn’t sleep at night but weird times during the day. At night watching TV, playing the computer, “Myst” his favorite he could lose himself in for hours. Avoided violent games, his stomach still queasy. Avoided calculus, even the thought of it: the betrayal. For he hadn’t graduated, class of ninety-five moving on without him, fuckers. His friends were never home when he called. Even girls who’d been crazy for him, never home. Never returned his calls. Him, Derek Peck! Boooogerman. It was like a microchip had been inserted in his brain, he had these pathological reactions. Not being able to sleep for, say, forty-eight hours. Then crashing, dead. Then waking how many hours later dry-mouthed and
heart-hammering, lying sideways on his churned-up bed, his head over the edge and Doc Martens combat boots on his feet, he’s kicking like crazy like somebody or something has hold of his ankles and he’s gripping with both hands an invisible rod, or baseball bat, or club—swinging it in his sleep, and his muscles twitched and spasmed and veins swelled in his head close to bursting. Swinging swinging swinging!—and in his pants, in his Calvin Klein briefs, he’d come.
When he went out he wore dark, very dark, glasses even at night. His long hair tied back rat-tail style and a Mets cap, reversed, on his head. He’d be getting his hair cut for the trial but just not yet, wasn’t that like…giving in, surrendering…? In the neighborhood pizzeria, in a place on Second Avenue he’d ducked into alone, signing napkins for some giggling girls, once a father and son about eight years old, another time two old women in their forties, fifties, staring like he was Son of Sam, sure okay! signing Derek Peck, Jr., and dating it. His signature an extravagant red-ink scrawl. Thank you! and he knows they’re watching him walk away, thrilled. Their one contact with fame.
His old man and especially his lady-lawyer would give him hell if they knew, but they didn’t need to know everything. He was free on fucking bail, wasn’t he?
In the aftermath of a love affair in her early thirties, the last such affair of her life, Marina Dyer had taken a strenuous “ecological” field trip to the Galapagos Islands; one of those desperate trips we take at crucial times in our lives, reasoning that the experience will cauterize the emotional wound, make of its very misery something trivial, negligible. The trip was indeed strenuous, and cauterizing. There in the infamous Galápagos, in the vast Pacific Ocean due west of Equador and a mere ten miles south of the Equator, Marina had come to certain life-conclusions. She’d decided not to kill herself, for one thing. For why kill oneself, when nature is so very eager to do it for you, and to gobble you
up? The islands were rockbound, stormlashed, barren. Inhabited by reptiles, giant tortoises. There was little vegetation. Shrieking sea birds like damned souls except it was not possible to believe in “souls” here. In no world but a fallen one could such lands exist, Herman Melville had written of the Galapágos he’d called also the Enchanted Isles.
When she returned from her week’s trip to hell, as she fondly spoke of it, Marina Dyer was observed to devote herself more passionately than ever, more single-mindedly than ever, to her profession. Practicing law would be her life, and she meant to make of her life a quantifiable and unmistakable success. What of “life” that was not consumed by law would be inconsequential. The law was only a game, of course: it had very little to do with justice, or morality; “right” or “wrong”; “common” sense. But the law was the only game in which she, Marina Dyer, could be a serious player. The only game in which, now and then, Marina Dyer might win.
There was Marina’s brother-in-law who had never liked her but, until now, had been cordial, respectful. Staring at her as if he’d never seen her before. “How the hell can you defend that vicious little punk? How do you justify yourself, morally? He killed his mother, for God’s sake!” Marina felt the shock of this unex
pected assault as if she’d been struck in the face. Others in the room, including her sister, looked on, appalled. Marina said carefully, trying to control her voice, “But, Ben, you don’t believe that only the obviously “innocent” deserve legal counsel, do you?” It was an answer she had made numerous times, to such a question; the answer all lawyers make, reasonably, convincingly.
“Of course not. But people like you go too far.”
“‘Too far?’ ‘People like me—?’”
“You know what I mean. Don’t play dumb.”
“But I don’t. I don’t know what you mean.”
Her brother-in-law was by nature a courteous man, however strong his opinions. Yet how rudely he turned away from
Marina, with a dismissive gesture. Marina called after him, stricken, “Ben, I don’t know what you mean. Derek is innocent, I’m sure. The case against him is only circumstantial. The media…” Her pleading voice trailed off, he’d walked out of the room. Never had she been so deeply hurt, confused. Her own brother-in-law!
The bigot. Self-righteous bastard. Never would Marina consent to see the man again.
Marina?—don’t cry.
They don’t mean it, Marina. Don’t feel bad, please!
Hiding in the locker-room lavatory after the humiliation of gym class. How many times. Even Lucy, one of the team captains, didn’t want her: that was obvious. Marina Dyer and the other last-choices, a fat girl or two, myopic girls, uncoordinated clumsy asthmatic girls laughingly divided between the red team and the gold. Then, the nightmare of the game itself. Trying to avoid being struck by thundering hooves, crashing bodies. Yells, piercing laughter. Swinging flailing arms, muscular thighs. How hard the gleaming floor when you fell! The giant girls (Lucy Siddons among them glaring, fierce) ran over her if she didn’t step aside, she had no existence for them. Marina, made by the gym teacher, so absurdly, a “guard.” You must play, Marina. You must try. Don’t be silly. It’s only a game. These are all just games. Get out there with your team! But if the ball was thrown directly at her it would strike her chest and ricochet out of her hands and into the hands of another. If the ball sailed toward her head she was incapable of ducking but stood stupidly helpless, paralyzed. Her glasses flying. Her scream a child’s scream, laughable. It was all laughable. Yet it was her life.
A Moment on the Edge:100 Years of Crime Stories by women Page 52