Faithless: Tales of Transgression

  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 was 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: a probable 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 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 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-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 mid-calf. 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 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 Saint Teresa in her ecstasy. Her clients were martyrs, their prosecutors persescutors. 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 embezzlement, fraud, obstruction of justice; there had been a woman journalist charged with attempted murder in the shooting and 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, or 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 mesmerizing. 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-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 the blemished skin, buckteeth, 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. 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 famous 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 punishme
nt 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 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 as if 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, the hard-chiseled 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 what 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 7 A.M. but had more plausibly taken at 7 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 4 P.M. but had very possibly made as late as 10 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 proved? (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 townhouse 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 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, Jr., 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 hover
ed 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 Marina had learned long ago that 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,” not “cruel.” They looked for reasons not to convict, especially in Manhattan where the reputation of the police was clouded, 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.