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

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 mesmeriz-ing. 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.

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 Postmod-ernist 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