A Moment On the Edge : 100 Years of Crime Stories By Women

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 approx-imately 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 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 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 embezzle-ment, 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 ambi-tious. 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