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

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 refuta-tion 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 Marina 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 defi-ance 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