Authors: Jacqueline Briskin
Joscelyn stepped aside from the embrace. “He’s in the bathroom . . . he’s badly hurt.”
Curt went down the short hall, halting in the doorframe of the bathroom. He blanched, holding up his palm to keep Honora and Joscelyn back. Firmly closing the door, he moved hastily into Malcolm and Joscelyn’s bedroom.
Honora knelt, reaching under the table for Lissie. The child huddled farther into her cave. Honora, coaxingly, formed a
V
with two paired fingers, wiggling bunny ears, an old game, and though Lissie’s expression of blank horror didn’t alter she permitted herself to be lifted. With a tiny sigh, she rested flaccid against her aunt.
“Let’s come in here, Joss,” Honora said, leading the way into the living room.
Joscelyn paced around with edgy speed, unnecessarily fluffing a pillow on the sofa, shifting a highball glass from one spot to another, screwing the top of the scotch bottle, unscrewing it. A drop of blood splattered from her legs onto the pale carpet.
Honora could hear her husband in the other room. “Sorry about the time, but we need you right away. It’s urgent, Sidney, urgent as hell!” Sidney Sutherland was their friend as well as their personal attorney.
Malcolm’s dead
, she thought, hugging Lissie more tightly.
Joss must have finally had all she could take.
Although Joscelyn had never said a word against Malcolm, and although in Honora’s presence Malcolm exhibited an unchanging if slightly juvenile uxoriousness, Honora had not been taken in by the evidence of her own eyes. Through the years she had come to recognize the possibility of violence in the Peck’s marriage. Joscelyn’s humorous explanations of her string of accidents had never convinced her. Joss might not have been the world’s most graceful little girl but she had never been a klutz.
Lissie clung even tighter. Honora patted her niece’s shoulders reassuringly and glanced down. She drew her breath sharply. She had not previously noticed the large, fresh bruise on the child’s arm. Although Malcolm avoided the John Tracy Clinic and most of the time attempted—affably, to be sure—to downplay Lissie’s deafness, Honora had never had reason to doubt that in other respects her brother-in-law
was anything other than as he presented himself, a father so tenderly doting as to be a bit absurd.
To hit the baby? No wonder Joss did whatever she did.
“Joss, people’ll be here soon,” she said in a soothing tone. “Let’s get you decent and clean up your poor legs.”
“People? You mean the ambulance?” Joscelyn shifted the small armchair.
“I’ll get you something to wear,” Honora said softly.
Still holding Lissie, she edged next to the wall around the closed bathroom door where the red-brown footsteps were darkest. Curt sat on Joscelyn and Malcolm’s bed, phone at his ear, waiting. Silent, he shook his head at her, as if to say the worst had happened behind that closed door. Honora pulled a tent dress from the closet, retrieving the sandals Joscelyn had been wearing at the barbecue. In Lissie’s bathroom, she juggled the child, clothes, dampened washcloth, mercurochrome bottle. The Band-Aid box fell, spilling plasters adorned with bright stars. Encumbered by Lissie, she picked up a few, leaving the rest scattered.
As she helped Joscelyn on with the loose dress she saw the ugly raised bruise on her sister’s breast. Sirens were wailing up the block. Joscelyn, still wearing her bloodstained skirt underneath her dress, darted to the door.
“You have to help my husband!” she shouted as the patrol car halted.
“Joss, come back in here,” Honora called.
Joscelyn ran down the three front steps to
cry urgently, “My husband needs a doctor!” Two officers, one stocky and dark, the other tall, were hurrying up the path. She clutched the taller cop’s arm. “Why didn’t they send a paramedic unit?”
“How severely wounded is your husband, ma’am?”
“You have to get him to the hospital right away!”
The two cops glanced at one another and then the dark, stocky partner returned to the car with the blinking yellow and red lights.
Joscelyn led the tall policeman to the bathroom. “I didn’t mean to hurt him.”
“Joss.” Curt swiftly replaced the phone and in one stride gripped her arm. “Keep quiet!” he hissed.
The officer opened the bathroom door.
Joscelyn began to shake. What an indecent amount of blood. She would have followed the cop to kneel by Malcolm’s body and obsequiously beg her husband for forgiveness, but Curt was holding her back.
She could hear herself babbling that it was her fault, all her fault. Curt pulled her into the living room where, despite his and Honora’s combined efforts to silence her, she continued explaining that she hadn’t meant to hurt Malcolm.
One of the policemen was advising her of her rights.
But how could she remain silent? Speech was a barrier to ward off the unfaceable. As long as she was talking there was no need to reconcile
the instantaneous swiftness of picking up the ornamental Venetian glass jar with the infinite permanency of death.
The ambulance had arrived plus a paramedic truck; police cars were parked every which way with their lights flashing and their radios metallically blaring calls. The neighbors had clustered across the street. When she emerged between the original tall cop and his partner, the little crowd edged forward.
Sirens howling, Joscelyn zoomed north to the police station in the tall, tile-domed Beveral Hills city hall. That stuff of TV drama, the formalities of violent death, seemed remote yet familiar, like going through a well-rehearsed presentation to a client. She couldn’t keep quiet, distressing Curt and his attorney, Sidney Sutherland, who had a foxy-red beard.
First thing tomorrow, Sidney Sutherland promised, she would be out on bail. For tonight, she was locked up.
Beverly Hills is a quiet community, and the other cells were empty. She sank onto the cot, still talking, blabbering a distant prayer from childhood. Finally her sobs came, a flood more violent for having been bottled up, scalding her cheeks, soaking the striped pad.
On a bright, warm afternoon in mid-September, Honora was pruning a rosebush on the garden’s most secluded terrace while a step away Lissie picked red and yellow zinnia heads.
On the night of Malcolm’s death six weeks ago—it seemed eons—Curt had engaged a twenty-four-hour guard service to keep watch at the estate’s electric gates. It had been a smart move. The public had latched avidly onto the lurid details of the case—sex, blood, money—and automobiles had jockied between the TV trucks and press cars that clogged the end of the cul-de-sac.
Honora, attempting to succor a shaking, pale Joscelyn through the funeral and the police investigation and at the same time take care of her withdrawn little niece, had not ventured from the estate. An enterprising free-lance photographer had scaled the Ivory’s ten-foot wire mesh wall, scurrying down a swathe of yellow gazania ground cover to aim his zoom at Lissie’s exquisite, unhappy face. The photograph, entitled
Millionaire Child of Tragedy
, appeared in hundreds of newspapers and on CBS. Curt had hired additional guards to patrol, and Honora circumspectly kept her charge away from the perimeters of their acreage.
Now, in the pretrial doldrums, only an occasional thrill seeker drove up to the Ivorys’
gates to be warned off by shifts of paired Pinkertons stationed in a conspicuous black Lincoln.
Lissie held up her short-stemmed little bouquet. “Mah-mah.”
Honora turned. “Do you want to give the flowers to Mama now?” she signed slowly.
The fervid media attention had put an end to Lissie’s nursery school. Since signing was not taught at John Tracy Clinic, Honora had engaged an out-of-work young actor—he had hearing but both his parents were profoundly deaf—to give them lessons in American sign language. It was a large philosophical jump to Total Communication, but as Honora had intended, during these hours Joscelyn had emerged from the gloomy pressure—and Lissie sometimes smiled.
The child was nodding and reaching for Honora’s hand.
She seldom let go of either Honora or Curt, grasping a convenient leg, a nearby hand. Physical contact with them had become a vital necessity to her. If one were seated, she climbed into the lap, quietly looking through an illustrated story book or popping her thumb in her mouth to rest her head against a breast or chest. Unless she was in her human perch she could not swallow her food. Sleep was another problem. She stubbornly refused to drop off unless she was centered in their king-size bed. Honora would sit in the nightlit gloom of the adjacent room—until three years earlier it had been Curt’s study, but now the handsome
natural cyprus shelves were crammed with dolls and Fisher-Price toys. Lissie’s eyelids would tremble closed, her face and body would relax, she would appear solidly in the arms of nod. The instant her aunt tiptoed from the room, though, she would burst into wild, oddly pitched sobs. Joscelyn diverged from her program of canonizing Malcolm long enough to mutter that on the night of the murder he had somehow switched off the night-light, and possibly this was the reason behind Lissie’s sleep problems.
Lissie, once a mah-mah’s girl, avoided Joscelyn. When Honora suggested she sit in Joscelyn’s lap or go to bed in Joscelyn’s cottage, Lissie showed that lovely profile, so like Crystal’s, averting her gaze from lips and signing hands, transparent evasions that haunted not only her mother, but Curt and Honora as well.
Once in a great while the little girl appeared overcome by a vestigial need to touch home base and see her mother: in Joscelyn’s presence, however, the blue eyes would widen, the mouth would quiver, and the child would dart away.
Lissie never said
Daddee.
A young Nisei child psychiatrist had made several house calls: he admitted it was impossible to know what, exactly, lay in the vivid, isolate landscape of the child’s mind, yet he said he felt reasonably certain that she remembered everything.
Hand in hand, Honora and Lissie descended to the house.
As they reached the terrace, a fat ball of
reddish fur came yapping toward them—the shelty pup that Curt had brought home for Lissie last week, Kimmy, so christened by his owner.
Kimmy got hold of the lace of Lissie’s sneaker and tugged. She dropped the flowers, pushing at him, laughing, yanking at her foot. Failing to get him to release her, she started to run along the terrace. The pup, unable to keep his small, sharp teeth on the shoelace, chased after her, growling and yapping. Suddenly Lissie swerved. She raced up the sloping grass, both arms over her head, her hair spreading behind her like a silky black dandelion puff. The puppy yipped at her heels. She let herself down on the thick grass, propelling herself back down the hill with her arms and legs, rolling over and over. Kimmy stayed close, trying for a grip on her pink sunsuit, her pink hairbow, her socks. On the third roll, she clutched him gleefully.
Honora, laughing, picked up the bedraggled, pungent bouquet, then ran to join the melee.
* * *
Joscelyn had emerged from the luxurious cottage that had been hers before marriage to watch them. Though the temperature on the sunlit terrace was well into the eighties, she hugged her cardigan around her. Since Malcolm’s death her metabolism had been out of whack: she was constantly cold and had steadily lost weight. A malfunction of her tear glands prevented her from wearing her contacts, and the thick-lensed glasses magnified her pale blue eyes, giving her
a blank, remote stare. In her gray sweater and black skirt, without a trace of makeup, she resembled a stern, cancer-ridden schoolmarm.
Gazing broodily at her daughter and sister, she shivered and stepped back into the comfortable study-sittingroom. The breeze, set up when she slid open the door, had fluttered a few papers out of alignment from the stacks of legal documents that surrounded her desk. Compulsively she straightened them before sitting down with her yellow lined pad.
Her trial was scheduled to be held in Santa Monica Superior Court, where the rare Beverly Hills homicide cases were judged. Her attorneys, readying themselves, had requested a list of provable incidences of Malcolm’s physical violence toward her.
A task that she had resisted with vehement unpleasantness.
The many facets of her guilt demanded that she pay—and pay and pay—for her crime. The physical dimension of her grief, her morbid self-horror could never be extirpated, but the full punishment that the California law provided for unpremeditated murder, a life sentence, would be partial atonement. And besides, being the keeper of the flame for her poor, dead love meant she could not blacken him from the witness stand. Curt, on the advice of Sidney Sutherland, had engaged Carter Veerhagen, considered tops in criminal law, to head the legal team for the defense. Accompanied by a phalanx of associates, Veerhagen had escorted Joscelyn to the modest two-bedroom Beverly
Hills house (now known to the public as “the swank scene of the crime”) where she had walked through the murder. The legal team had solicited statements from neighbors who to Joscelyn’s humiliated surprise had been in on the Pecks’ marital discord. Five people had signed affidavits that Mr. Peck, normally a charmer, the greatest guy there was, had a violent temper when it came to his wife. The young doctor, summoned from Beverly Hills’ emergency room to tweeze glass slivers from her legs, had included torso injuries, both new and faded, in his report. And Honora had informed the police and the attorneys about that fresh bruise on Lissie’s arm.
A victim who battered around his wife and deaf little girl? Self-defense, said Veerhagen.
His client at first refused this plea, saying that she did not care to put her dead spouse on trial. In the end, though, Joscelyn capitulated to Curt’s logic that she could not let Lissie grow to adulthood with a convicted murderess for a mother.
So here she was, culling her memory for every occasion when proof of Malcolm’s temper could be medically corroborated. She wrote: #5.
Lalarhein, December (?) 1964.
The night they had met Khalid and she, according to Malcolm, had lacked sufficient respect for the princeling. The nice old English doctor in Daralam Square had taped her chest in unquestioning silence, but he must have guessed the cracked rib was the result of marital discord.
Dr. Bryanston
, she wrote.