Murder For Revenge

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. Ru

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 i

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 ca