The Second Mrs. Pecker

Then you must speak of one that loved not wisely but too well,

Perplexed in the extreme

--William Shakespeare, Othello, act V, scene 2

They say I am here because I am a monster; I did wrong and got caught. No.

Only fools and amateurs get "caught". The simple fact is this: I fell through betrayal. I was duped by the worst sort of betrayer: a lover. A female Judas. Would she, I wonder, be properly termed a Judith?

I write this using a legal pad and a couple of Bic pens the prison chaplain--no doubt risking his job if caught (that damnable word again!) at it--snuck in tucked within his ever-present leather-bound Bible.

I married for love. Her name was Alicia. She was small, blonde, beautiful, and vivacious. I met her when I was in college and she a high-school senior. Her father owns a brewery distribution company (I won't name it, but you'd know it if I did), and her mother is an attorney. I was four years her senior, although in the ways of carnality she was far more schooled than me. Only eighteen, she had already had seven lovers before me, be-ginning at thirteen. Yet her past was immaterial--her charms bewitched me. Four years later, in 1979, I made her mine with a ring.

If Alicia's past had remained just that, I wouldn't have minded. But early in the marriage she admitted she was bored with me and had sought other men's attention. I per-suaded her to seek psychological treatment...and it was discovered she suffered a histrionic personality disorder that caused her to manifest these "urges", throw tantrums if she felt neglected, and to gravitate towards inappropriate romantic partners to fulfill her needs.

Like many wealthy girls, Alicia's parents, though loving, had largely ignored her in their pursuit of material wealth. This interpretation of rejection by her father sought her to seek surrogate paternal figures in the beds of men. These affairs were hot, brief, shallow, and left her only miserable and hungry for more; her lovers left her because her unreason-able demands and fits of jealousy fast became tiresome. In short, she was a lost child crying for love.

For the next six years our love was pure and deep; her affairs and her outbursts ceased, and her temperament was calm. Then, in the fall of 1985, Alicia took a job as an aide in the office of a local physician. These duties--secretarial work, washing instruments, and assisting on minor operations like injections and applying bandages--required many late nights and cold dinners, with her at the office sometimes until after midnight.

It was then that my brother informed me that Alicia had been carrying on an affair with her superior in the office. A friend of his wife (he told me) had seen a single light--a private office's, she judged--burning far into the night, although the place was empty, all the patients having been discharged hours before. Alicia and Dr. F___ (I will refrain from giving his real name, so as not to damage his practice), the only ones in the building, were having their illicit trysts right there, upon his office desk. Dr. F___'s wife, a good friend of my sister-in-law and of her friend, was wholly ignorant of what he and my wife were doing.

I was angered on several levels. First, of course, there was the lack of professional decorum exhibited by Dr. F___, having relations with an employee at work, to consider. Secondly, the return of my wife's early hysteria concerned me. I confronted her about it, asking her in carefully couched, non-accusatory terms about her late hours, and she ranted at me with such explosive fury that I relented. She accused me of pursuing an affair with a certain redheaded woman I worked with--highly untrue, and what psychologists term pro-jection, or the attribution of one's own negative characteristics onto another. This infantile defense mechanism infuriated me further. For the first time I considered divorce.

In the maelstrom of pain and regret, I became reacquainted with Alicia's younger sister Jennifer. Recently graduated from college, she had majored in criminology. I first met her at our wedding when she was fifteen. Eight years and a college degree later saw a blossoming woman of twenty-two, with mid-length brown hair, soulful doe eyes, and a countenance that could be soberly adult one moment and the smile of an imp the next.

Ever studious, she had no time for men in school; hence, she was unattached. She worried her nose was too big; I thought it merely sculpted, like that of a Grecian statue. She was self-conscious of her laugh and thought it braying; I heard only wind chimes.

Did I love her? Yes, I believe I did. She was far more grounded than her sister, though almost ten years younger; she projected a maturity, poise, and self-esteem tempered with enough healthy doubt to not be taken for ego.

One evening we sat in my kitchen, drinking beer from the bottle, talking far into the night. I knew that meantime in his chambers Dr. F___ was entering my wife, penetrating her secret chambers, devouring with relish her pained, pleasured moans.

"Poor James," said Jennifer. "I remember Allie bringing all sorts of seedy-looking boogers home back when she was a teenager. I was six or seven, maybe, when I figured out what she was doing with them. Our walls were cracker-thin.

"I heard the creaking bedsprings and Allie doing all that ungodly panting and moaning like a dog. She'd say she'd had the TV up too loud, or that she had stubbed her toe on the bedpost or tripped on her wastebasket. For three straight hours, Allie? Nobody's that accident-prone. And you don't get your bed sheets that sticky and sweaty stumbling around."

She laughed again, that bell-like peal. "I'm sorry. That's so tasteless." I forgave her. "Lord, I thought she grew out of that behavior." So had I. I told her I had been contemplating divorcing Alicia.

"Oh, good god, no," Jennifer said. "You do that, with circumstantial evidence--because you can't prove she's banging her boss, not really--plus the fact that she's inherited a good wad of Mom and Dad's beer money, and she can afford the top lawyers in the country, and the courts will crucify you, James."

Long story short, beer and love make a man very suggestible to all sorts of things that he wouldn't consider if not poisoned by either. Jennifer, being schooled in criminology (for many of the best criminals were once police and detectives, who have an insider's perspective on the law and how to circumvent it), knew how to rid myself of my unfaithful wife...permanently.

"Cyanide," she told me, her soft eyes glittering like a knife blade. "It tastes like burnt almond, and the victim is less apt to detect it and spit it out. It can kill slowly, in minute doses. The victim suffers slowly for weeks, with flu-like symptoms. It's an excruciating way to die. A perfect punishment for a perfect whore."

I knew it was Alicia's habit to drink a dessert coffee before bed. A simple matter to, when I prepared her drink, lace it with the silvery-white poison. I then kissed my wife's sister with forbidden--with what can best be termed incestuous!--abandon. She was my salvation from the horns my wife was putting on my head, and I loved her for it.

Within days I procured a tiny bottle of white cyanide, a medicine spoon, and new hope for the future. Every night when Alicia came home I would have her much-loved drink waiting, with the poison mixed in carefully. "This tastes a bit different," she com-mented the first time she sipped my brew. "Did you spice it with cinnamon, or nutmeg, or some such thing?"

Stifling laughter by biting the inside of my cheek, I answered it was a bit of al-mond flavoring. A little treat for my beloved.

"Mmm," she moaned deliciously. "It's so good."

We made love, and I thought of Jennifer as Alicia gasped in ecstasy beneath me, no doubt thinking of Dr. F___. I could almost feel his stickiness within her, polluting her body, making me a stranger to her. Dr. F__ overshadowed me, eclipsed me in her mind. No matter. In mine, it was my sister-in-law I sought.

Within several weeks, Alicia began looking hollow-eyed and peaked. She started losing weight and developed a persistent phlegmy cough. In two months, she had to quit her job and be confined to bed. Perched on her pillows, she became a ghost of her former lustre--sagging breasts, skin like tissue, eyes like holes poked into soft bread with a finger. And she still continued drinking her evening coffee, saying when she saw me bring it to her, "Ah! nectar of the gods!" or "The cure for what ails me!"--the bitter irony being it was that "cure" that was eating her alive before me, leaving a skeleton in its wake.

Yet I felt no sympathy, no remorse. Jennifer and I had become very close over the course of my wife's sickness. A week before her passing, I proposed to her, and she accepted. "The moment Allie is dead," said she, "I'll marry you."

Jennifer was oddly as tender towards her sister during her death-agonies as I was cruel. She read to her until the wee hours, changed her bed linens and her incontinence pants (in the last couple of months, they were necessary; my wife was reduced to an infant in regard to her bodily functions--appropriate, I told myself, for such an immature creature), and, when her thin, stringy hair became too long and tangly, gave her haircuts. These trims were conducted, as necessary, about every three to four weeks.

Alicia died on April 26, 1987, after seven months of suffering. Jennifer and I saw her parents at the funeral, their faces the color of whey from weeping. Of course, in deference to taste and society's norms, I did not mention my upcoming nuptials with their younger daughter.

Two months later, after a suitable period of mourning, Jennifer Cox became Jennifer Pecker. As the sole surviving heir, also, to the Cox fortune, she came into her late sister's share of the estate...a sum totaling millions.

The next four years were Elysium. After the wedding Jenny and I moved, in order to escape both her parents' eye (who surely wouldn't approve of my marrying so soon after Alicia's death, and to the dead lady's sister to boot!), and the suspicions of the police, should they start investigating the former Mrs. Pecker's passing.

The official story was, of course, death of a sudden and lingering sickness; there was no reason to suspect foul play, for, as Jenny had said, cyanide's symptoms are similar to influenza and other debilitating respiratory maladies--weight loss, weakness, thinning hair, and such.

Despite being a beer heiress, Jenny did not permit wealth to corrupt her; she was a faithful wife, and attentive to all my needs. She was--unlike her sister--spiritual and not carnal, giving and not taking, and one who could be talked to and confided in on an adult level, not a constant torment of walking on eggshells and guarding my speech to avoid a fit of irrational sulkiness or mistrust. We could share so much--my love of literature and music and art, and her love of hockey and children and spicy food. She was the humble and grounded sister, the calm yin to Alicia's lascivious yang, and for that we gave ourselves utterly to one another. For she was my partner in so much...not the least of which was the dark secret behind my late wife's treasured bedtime drinks.

But in October of 1991, the Elysian Fields withered. A knock on the door proved to be two policemen, who presented me with papers stating that I was under suspicion of murdering Alicia Pecker. My wife was out of the house that day. I was taken into their custody.

It was then that I learned the hideous truth. Jenny, mi vida, mi amor, mi todo, had delivered me into the enemy's hands! My ignorance of science be damned. For cyanide, like most chemical poisons that enter the body and its systems, collects within the hair shafts and can be traced.

An atomic absorption spectrophotometer was employed on hairs from Alicia's head, and it was determined through these locks that the cyanide content in her body had increased exponentially until her death.

This, as well as Jennifer's testimony on the witness stand, undid me. I was portrayed to the jury as not an innocent, loving man, and the victim of an adulterous wife, but as the unfeeling killer of a woman who obviously had psychological problems that manifested themselves as desperate affairs through which she sought the affection I refused to give.

Know this: I did all in my power to love Alicia. She rejected me. I offered to help her; I took her to the top doctors. She spat on me. I murdered her, yes. I shut my ears to her suffering, yes. But only after it was evident she had long ago rejected my hand.

Ah, but how were these hairs procured, you ask? Through the wanton betrayer I had married, believing she loved me! As I had said, Jennifer had cut her sister's hair every few weeks. These hairs she then collected, sealed in plastic bags, and marked with the date it was obtained. Each collection of locks had a slightly higher cyanide content, the highest corresponding with two weeks before Alicia died.

When asked by the prosecutor why she would go through the pain to collect and label the hairs, the perjurous bitch faced the jury, daubed her eyes with a tissue, and said, "I don't know. My sister was as healthy as a horse up until about five years ago. James told me he suspected her of having an affair with Dr. F___, but couldn't prove it. Then she started getting really sick. Coincidence? I wondered.

"As a former psychology major, I do have a sixth sense about things like murder, and I know about poisons and their effects on the body, and how to trace certain mixtures. I knew James was up to something crooked...but I had no proof. So I took samples of her hair, and labeled them, and sent them to the college chem lab. They confirmed what I had suspected: cyanide poisoning.

"But by then I was in love with James. I don't know why; I was blind, and stupid. I married him not two months after my sister was in the ground. By the time I realized what he was up to, we were two or three years into our marriage. I debated this for hours before I said to myself, 'Girl, if you don't turn him over to the FBI, and he starts thinking you're screwing around on him, you'll be in the plot next to Allie in a couple of years. Do it.' "

Lying harlot! She was the one who originated the murder plot, and the one who schemed to marry me the moment her sister was buried. She schemed to take control of Alicia's share of the family brewery fortune by murdering her. Using my distress over Alicia and Dr. F___'s nightly rendezvous, she convinced me into playing her pawn, knowing I, being taken with her, wouldn't question either the ethics behind using cyanide or its traceability. Duplicitous woman, playing on my lust, manipulating my ignorance! Then she used an act of familial devotion--the haircuts--to mask her plan to double-cross me so as not to have to share her wealth. Oh, how it burns to think I could have been so wrongly led to brink of doom by a black heart wrapped in the prettiest, whitest covering!

"James Pecker, you are hereby accused of murder in the first degree," the judge boomed in a voice like a god from Olympus. I looked over at Jennifer's parents, and they were weeping; Jennifer, sitting next to them, seemed almost to smirk. No one--not the judge, or the jury, or her parents--suspected her of being my partner in crime, or saw how she profited from Alicia's death and my imprisonment. No one saw she was no innocent girl led astray by Bluebeard and fearing death every moment, but a wanton Jezebel who delighted in devouring men.

The judge told me I was to serve a life sentence, with no possibility of parole. In my ears I could hear Alicia laughing; even in her grave, she'd well played me for a dupe. She and Jennifer were not yin and yang, not polar opposites; they were deadly wantons of the same skin.

There. Let it be known that this is no sinner's deathbed confession, or madman's justification; merely a bald telling of truth. Let it be told and let it be done. The pen is starting to go dry, just like my mind, and to make any sense the words have to be forced out and doubled over to be legible.

Life. It's 1992. I've been in this cell mere months and already find it cloying. I could live another fifty years. I could commit suicide and end my pain...but won't. Religious conviction? Ha! Don't patronize me with your hollow God-is-good mantra. I am simply afraid of the unknown...and of the known. I have no desire to be with Alicia in death.

For it is Jenny, the living sister, I love. She betrayed me, she used me, she ruined me. And still do I love her. I will love her ever and forever, incessantly, forevermore.