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? — car toid? 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 dialed 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 of neighbors from the adjoining brownstone and they and the driver stared at this chalk-faced grief-stricken boy in an unbuttoned duffel coat, bareheaded, running into the street screaming, “Help us! Help us! Somebody’s killed my mother!”
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 center; the celebration of a private individual of no evident civic 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 defense attorney, Marina read the article, continued on an inside 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 returned home to find the front door unlocked and his mother dead, at about eleven p.m., at which time she’d been dead approx-imately five hours. Neighbors spoke of having heard no unusual sounds from the Peck residence, but several did speak of “suspicious” strangers in the neighborhood. 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 wall-eyed 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, at 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 skepticism.
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 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 color 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.
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 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 counseclass="underline" probably 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.