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.