Joyce Carol Oates

The high imaginative powers of Joyce Carol Oates are by now seen as a virtual force of nature: like waves, her fiction comes ever on, beating up against our fragile defences and sucking us into the very heart of its intensity. She began her career in 1963 with the novel ‘By the North Gate’; since then she’s published scores of books, none less sharply observed or intricately textured than the next. Under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith, she produces some of the most compelling psychological suspense stories of our time.
It is, of course, always an honour to be able to present a new work from her, particularly when it relates to a theme as suited to her hypnotic talents as revenge.
Trust Ms. Oates to spiral around the issues of guilt and motive, keeping us once again off balance and attempting, futilely, to hold our own against the onslaught of her diabolic inventiveness. ‘Murder-Two’ quite intentionally echoes the headlines we wince to read these days, but the character of its subtle surprises is unique to this author.

Murder-Two

1.

This, he swore.
He’d returned to the town house on East End Avenue after eleven P.M. and found the front door unlocked and, inside, his mother lying in a pool of squid ink on the hardwood floor at the foot of the stairs. She’d apparently fallen down die steep length of the stairs and broken her neck, judging from her twisted upper body. She’d also been bludgeoned to death, the back of her skull caved in, with one of her own golf clubs, a two-iron, but he hadn’t seemed to see that, immediately.
Squid ink?-well, die blood had looked black in the dim foyer light. It was a trick his eyes played on his brain sometimes when he’d been studying too hard, getting too little sleep. An optic tic. Meaning you see something clearly, but it registers surreally in the brain as something else. Like in your neurological programming there’s an occasional bleep.
In Derek Peck, Jr.’s case, confronted with the crumpled, lifeless body of his mother, this was an obvious symptom of trauma. Shock, the visceral numbness that blocks immediate grief-the unsayable, the unknowable. He’d last seen his mother, in that same buttercup-yellow quilted satin robe that had given her the look of an upright, bulky Easter toy, early that morning, before he’d left for school. He’d been away all day. And this abrupt, weird transition-from differential calculus to the body on the floor, from the anxiety-driven jokes of his Math Club friends (a hard core of them were meeting late, weekdays, preparing for upcoming SAT exams) to the profound and terrible silence of the town house that had seemed to him, even as he’d pushed open the mysteriously unlocked front door, a hostile silence, a silence that vibrated with dread.
He crouched over the body, staring in disbelief. “Mother? Mother’.”
As if it was he, Derek, who’d done something bad, he the one to be punished.
He couldn’t catch his breath. Hyperventilating! His heart beating so wildly he almost fainted. Too confused to think, Maybe they’re still here, upstairs? for in his dazed state he seemed to lack even an animal’s instinct for self-preservation.
Yes, and he felt to blame, somehow. Hadn’t she instilled in him a reflex of guilt? If something was wrong in the household, it could probably be traced back to him. From the age of thirteen (when his father, Derek senior, had divorced his mother, Lucille, same as divorcing him), he’d been expected by his mother to behave like a second adult in the household, growing tall, lank, and anxious as if to accommodate that expectation, and his sand-coloured body hair sprouting, and a fevered grimness about the eyes. Fifty-three percent of Derek’s classmates, girls and boys, at the Mayhew Academy, were from ‘families of divorce,’ and most agreed that the worst of it is you have to learn to behave like an adult yet at the same time a lesser adult, one deprived of his or her full civil rights. That wasn’t easy even for stoic streetwise Derek Peck with an IQ of, what was it?-158, at age fifteen. (He was seventeen now.) So his precarious adolescent sense of himself was seriously askew: not just his body image (his mother had allowed him to become overweight as a small child; they say that remains with you forever, irremediably imprinted in the earliest brain cells), but more crucially his social identity. For one minute she’d be treating him like an infant, calling him her baby, her baby-boy, and the next minute she was hurt, reproachful, accusing him of failing, like his father, to uphold his moral responsibility to her.
This moral responsibility was a backpack loaded with rocks. He could feel it, first fucking thing in the morning, exerting gravity even before he swung his legs out of bed.
Crouched over her now, badly trembling, shaking as in a cold wind, whispering, “Mommy?-can’t you wake up? Mom-my, don’t be-“ balking at the word dead for it would hurt and incense Lucille like the word old, not that she’d been a vain or frivolous or self-conscious woman for Lucille Peck was anything but, a woman of dignity it was said of her admiringly by women who would not have wished to be her and by men who would not have wished to be married to her. Mommy, don’t be old! Derek would never have murmured aloud, of course. Though possibly to himself frequently this past year or so seeing her wan, big-boned and brave face in harsh frontal sunshine when they happened to descend the front steps together in the morning, or at that eerie position in the kitchen where the overhead inset lights converged in such a way as to cruelly shadow her face downward, bruising the eye sockets and the soft fleshy tucks in her cheeks. Two summers ago when he’d been away for six weeks at Lake Placid and she’d driven to Kennedy to pick him up, so eager to see him again, and he’d stared appalled at the harsh lines bracketing her mouth like a pike’s, and her smile too happy and what he felt was pity, and this, too, made him feel guilty. You don’t pity your own mother, asshole.
If he’d come home immediately after school. By four P.M. Instead of a quick call from his friend Andy across the park, guilty mumbled excuse left on the answering tape, Mother’? I’m sorry guess I won’t make dinner tonight, okay?--Math Club-study group-calculus-don’t wait up for me, please. How relieved he’d been, midway in his message she hadn’t picked up the phone. Had she been alive, when he’d called? Or already... dead? 
Last time you saw your mother alive, Derek? they’d ask and he’d have to invent for he hadn’t seen her, exactly. No eye contact. And what had he said? A rushed schoolday morning, a Thursday. Nothing special about it. No premonition! Cold and windy and winter-glaring and he’d been restless to get out of the house, snatched a Diet Coke from the refrigerator so freezing his teeth ached. A blurred reproachful look of Mother in the kitchen billowing in her buttercup-yellow quilted robe as he’d backed off smiling ‘Bye, Mom!’
Sure she’d been hurt, her only son avoiding her. She’d been a lonely woman even in her pride. Even with her activities that meant so much to her: Women’s Art League, East Side Planned Parenthood Volunteers, Health-Style Fitness Centre, tennis and golf in East Hampton in the summer, subscription tickets to Lincoln Centre. 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’d 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 breakfast. 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 Centre?--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 dialled 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, neighbours from the adjoining brown-stone and they and the driver stared at this chalk-faced grief-stricken boy in an unbuttoned duffel coat, barehead running into the street screaming, “Help us! Help us! Somebody’s killed my mother!”

2.

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 centre; the celebration of a private individual of no evident civic or 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 defence attorney, Marina read the article, continued on an inner 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 had 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. Neighbours spoke of having heard no unusual sounds from the Peck residence, but several did speak of ‘suspicious’ strangers in the neighbourhood. 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 walleyed 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, on 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 scepticism.

3.

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 a 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 colour 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.

4.

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 colour 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: a probable psychopath-matricide who not only claimed complete innocence but seemed actually to believe it. He gave off a complex odour of the ripely organic and the chemical. His skin appeared heated, of the colour 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 by Derek Peck, the boy 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 1980’s, in an era of celebrity-scandal trials, that Marina Dyer made her reputation as a ‘brilliant’ criminal defence 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 to 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-coloured hair in a French twist, ballerina style; her favoured suits were Chanels in subdued harvest colours and soft dark cashmere wools, the jackets giving some bulk to her narrow frame, the skirts always primly to midcalf. Her shoes, handbags, briefcases, 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 fervour. 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 near her, to know.
Marina’s first highly publicized case was her successful defence of a U.S. congressman from Manhattan who’d been charged with criminal extortion and witness tampering; her second was the successful, if controversial, defence 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 mesmerising. 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 pummelled, 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-lupine 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.

5.

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-chiselled mouth. Sexuality reeked about him like unwashed hair, soiled 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 one hundred 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 cancelled 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 rumours 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 before 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 behaviour,’ 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 behaviour was unfailingly professional, and would be. Yet she thought of him constantly, obsessively; he’d become the emotional centre 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 defence 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, neighbours, 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, tantalising, 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 defence 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 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 defence 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.

6.

“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...? that 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 Boqgerman!--one wild dude. But now they were impressed. Whacked his old lady? No shit! That Boqger, man! One wild dude.
Never dreamt of it. Nor of Mother, who was gone from the house as if travelling. 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 passivism. There was the great Indian leader, a saint. Gandy. Taught the ethic of passivism, 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 favourite 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! Boooqgerman. 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 neighbourhood 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?

7.

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 cauterise the emotional wound, make of its very misery something trivial, negligible. The trip was indeed strenuous, and cauterising. There in the infamous Galapagos, in the vast Pacific Ocean due west of Ecuador 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, storm lashed, barren. Inhabited by reptiles, giant tortoises. There was little vegetation. Shrieking seabirds 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 Galapagos 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 unexpected 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. 
Lucy, good-hearted repentant Lucy, sought her out where she hid in a locked toilet stall, sobbing in fury, a bloodstained tissue pressed against her nose. Marina?--don’t cry. They don’t mean it, they like you, come on back, what’s wrong? Good-hearted Lucy Siddons she’d hated the most.

8.

On the afternoon of the Friday before the Monday that would be the start of his trial, Derek Peck, Jr., broke down in Marina Dyer’s office.
Marina had known something was wrong, the boy reeked of alcohol. He’d come with his father, but had told his father to wait outside; he insisted that Marina’s assistant leave the room.
He began to cry, and to babble. To Marina’s astonishment he fell hard onto his knees on her burgundy carpet, began banging his forehead against the glass-topped edge of her desk. He laughed, he wept. Saying in an anguished choking voice how sorry he was he’d forgotten his mother’s last birthday he hadn’t known would be her last and how hurt she’d been like he’d forgotten just to spite her and that wasn’t true, Jesus he loved her! the only person in the fucking universe who loved her! And then at Thanksgiving this wild scene, she’d quarrelled with the relatives so it was just her and him for Thanksgiving she insisted upon preparing a full Thanksgiving dinner for just two people and he said it was crazy but she insisted, no stopping her when her mind was made up and he’d known there would be trouble, that morning in the kitchen she’d started drinking early and he was up in his room smoking dope and his Walkman plugged in knowing there was no escape. And it wasn’t even a turkey she roasted for the two of them, you needed at least a twenty-pound turkey otherwise the meat dried out she said so she bought two ducks, yes two dead ducks from this game shop on Lexington and Sixty-sixth and that might’ve been okay except she was drinking red wine and laughing kind of hysterical talking on the phone preparing this fancy stuffing she made every year, wild rice and mushrooms, olives, and also baked yams, plum sauce, corn bread, and chocolate-tapioca pudding that was supposed to be one of his favourite desserts from when he was little that just the smell of it made him feel like puking. He stayed out of it upstairs until finally she called him around four P.M. and he came down knowing it was going to be a true bummer but not knowing how bad, she was swaying-drunk and her eyes smeared and they were eating in the dining room with the chandelier lit, all the fancy Irish linens and Grandma’s old china and silver and she insisted he carve the ducks, he tried to get out of it but couldn’t and Jesus! what happens!--he pushes the knife in the duck breast and there’s actual blood squirting out of it!--and a big sticky clot of blood inside so he dropped the knife and ran out of the room gagging, it’d just completely freaked him in the midst of being stoned he couldn’t take it running out into the street and almost hit by a car and her screaming after him Derek come back! Derek come back don’t leave me! but he split from that scene and didn’t come back for a day and a half. And ever after that she was drinking more and saying weird things to him like he was her baby, she’d felt him kick and shudder in her belly, under her heart, she’d talk to him inside her belly for months before he was born she’d lie down on the bed and stroke him, his head, through her skin and they’d talk together she said, it was the closest she’d ever been with any living creature and he was embarrassed not knowing what to say except be didn’t remember, it was so long ago, and she’d say yes oh yes in your heart you remember in your heart you’re still my baby boy you do remember and he was getting pissed saying fuck it, no: he didn’t remember any of it. And there was only one way to stop her from loving him he began to understand, but he hadn’t wanted to, he’d asked could he transfer to school in Boston or somewhere living with his dad but she went crazy, no no no he wasn’t going, she’d never allow it, she tried to hold him, hug and kiss him so he had to lock his door and barricade it practically and she’d be waiting for him half-naked just coming out of her bathroom pretending she’d been taking a shower and clutching at him and that night finally he must’ve freaked, something snapped in his head and he went for the two-iron, she hadn’t had time even to scream it happened so fast and merciful, him running up behind her so she didn’t see him exactly-“It was the only way to stop her loving me.”
Marina stared at the boy’s aggrieved, tearstained face. Mucus leaked alarmingly from his nose. What had he said? He had said... what?
Yet even now a part of Marina’s mind remained detached, calculating. She was shocked by Derek’s confession, but was she surprised? A lawyer is never surprised.
She said, quickly, “Your mother Lucille was a strong, domineering woman. I know, I knew her. As a girl, twenty-five years ago, she’d rush into a room and all the oxygen was sucked up. She’d rush into a room and it was like a wind had blown out all the windows!” Marina hardly knew what she was saying, only that words tumbled from her; radiance played about her face like a flame. “Lucille was a smothering presence in your life. She wasn’t a normal mother. What you’ve told me only confirms what I’d suspected. I’ve seen other victims of psychic incest-I know! She hypnotised you, you were fighting for your life. It was your own life you were defending.” Derek remained kneeling on the carpet, staring vacantly at Marina. Tight little beads of blood had formed on his reddened forehead, his snaky-greasy hair dropped into his eyes. All his energy was spent. He looked to Marina now, like an animal who hears, not words from his mistress, but sounds; the consolation of certain cadences, rhythms. Marina was saying, urgently, “That night, you lost control. Whatever happened, Derek, it wasn’t you. You are the victim. She drove you to it! Your father, too, abrogated his responsibility to you-left you with her, alone with her, at the age of thirteen. Thirteen! That’s what you’ve been denying all these months. That’s the secret you haven’t acknowledged. You had no thoughts of your own, did you? For years? Your thoughts were hers, in her voice.” Derek nodded mutely. Marina had taken a tissue from the burnished-leather box on her desk and tenderly dabbed at his face. He lifted his face to her, shutting his eyes. As if this sudden closeness, this intimacy, was not new to them but somehow familiar. Marina saw the boy in the courtroom, her Derek: transformed: his face fresh scrubbed and his hair neatly cut, gleaming with health; his head uplifted, without guile or subterfuge. It was the only way to stop her loving me. He wore a navy-blue blazer bearing the elegant understated monogram of the Mayhew Academy. A white shirt, blue-striped tie. His hands clasped together in an attitude of Buddhistic calm. A boy, immature for his age. Emotional, susceptible. Not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. It was a transcendent vision and Marina knew she would realise it and that all who gazed upon Derek Peck, Jr., and heard him testify would realise it.
Derek leaned against Marina, who crouched over him, he’d hidden his wet, hot face against her legs as she held him, comforted him. What a rank animal heat quivered from him, what animal terror, urgency. He was sobbing, babbling incoherently, “-save me? Don’t let them hurt me? Can I have immunity, if I confess? If I say what happened, if I tell the truth-“
Marina embraced him, her fingers at the nape of his neck. She said, “Of course I’ll save you, Derek. That’s why you came to me.”