Jessica asked, “Do you know of anyone, anyone at all, who may have wanted your brother dead?” Even as she asked the stock question, she knew it hardly began to cover the circumstances here. Perhaps none of the conventional questions applied, and she feared that perhaps she might never know the right questions to ask.
“No, no one. But it had to be one of his strays. I warned him. So many times I warned him.”
“You warned him?”
“And he'd just call me mommy in that sassy tone of his, and I just went on warning him.” Her entire frame shook, racked with grief. “He didn't damn deserve this!”
“Did he speak of anyone staying with him here, recently or otherwise?”
“No, no one but Ainsworth. Worthless is what I call him.”
“Maurice mentioned no one else that he may have recently become infatuated with?” she pressed.
“No, but he stopped talking to me about anything to do with his personal life. He couldn't take the least criticism, crumbled under it the way a butterfly might. He so… so liked being needed, and he had such a need to be loved.”
“So you think your brother Maurice may have brought this on himself?” asked Jessica, now seeing the resemblance in brother and sister. “What precisely did you mean by that?”
“It was his way of doing good for his 'karma,' he thought. But it was really self-indulgent in a peculiar way.”
“How so?”
“He was a fool, taking pity on every stray animal, and taking in runaways, street people, all that, and I told him how dangerous it was, like playing Russian roulette, but it made him feel, I don't know, angelic and above all the rest of us. Some such shit. A shrink could've had a field day with Maurice, could've made him into one of those whacha macall its, a case study.”
“So, he brought home stray humans?” Jessica asked of the sobbing teenager.
“Human strays, yeah… God damn it all.”
“We're going to need to ask you some questions, Miss Deneau,” said Sturtevante.
“Deneau was Mayo-Maurice's name, not mine. I'm Harris, Linda Sue Harris.” She said this with a proud defiance.
“Big surprise, a fake name?” asked Parry, standing in the doorway now.
“No, not fake,” Linda Sue countered. “He had changed his name to Deneau legally.”
“Man, this kid sounds confused. First he has his name legally changed to this highfalutin moniker, and then he puts it out he wants to be called Mayonnaise?”
“He was confused! Unclear what he wanted, what he wanted to be, all of it. He was forever preoccupied with the questions the rest of us eventually let go of. You know how it is. Still believed fairy tales and myths were true. He never fucking grew up.”
“What kind of questions?” asked Jessica.
“You know, the usual claptrap about who am I, what am I, where did I originate from, where am I going to after this life, all of it. Went from one belief system to the next, trying to tie it all together, but nothing ever really satisfied him.”
“What did the family think of the name change?” asked Parry.
“Not much, but then they didn't give Maurice much thought anyway. They didn't approve of his lifestyle.”
“Then his family name was-”
“Harris. Maurice's real name was Patrick William Harris-Pattie, I grew up calling him-but that was too… too standard issue for him.”
“For his soul, you mean?” Kim interjected.
“That's right, for his friggin' too sensitive soul! I loved him for it, his sensitivity, but I also hated him for it-for the depth of it, for the obsessiveness of it, and now for this.”
“For getting himself killed over it?” asked Jessica.
“For doing this, for hurting me and our parents. I know it has to do with his personality. He was a victim waiting to happen.”
Jessica offered her a shoulder to cry on. She took it, and after some long moments of sobbing, the young woman sat back again, wiping her eyes with a handkerchief Parry had provided earlier. “I hate him for what he's done.”
“Did he think he was born at the wrong time and place?” Kim asked. “I mean, judging from his paintings and furnishings…”
'Try wrong dimension,” she countered. “Maurice was a misfit in this life; always had been.”
“Can you explain that further?” pressed Jessica.
Linda Sue looked into Jessica's eyes. “Pattie, he once told me he thought he'd been born with the heart and soul of a butterfly, that he'd somehow gotten his wires crossed and ought to be in life as a butterfly, said his life as a human would be as short as a butterfly's life as a result. Said he was born in the wrong time and place and with the wrong name, so he dreamed up Maurice Deneau. Been going by it since he turned old enough to vote.”
“And how old is… was Maurice?”
“All of twenty-four going on thirteen. Never wanted to grow up. Damn you, Pattie,” she finished with a fist to the sky, as if cursing his spirit.
Parry knelt beside her now and said, 'Tell me, was Maurice… Pat… was he-”
“Gay! Spit it out, and what's that got to do with anything? Damn people, damn people for condemning my brother. Yes, his sexual orientation was gay, but he wasn't loose. He didn't sleep around, and I doubt he'd give you a second look, mister.” Jessica stifled a laugh at this.
The girl continued: “He remained true to anyone who was man enough to remain faithful to him. That was Maurice, and for the time being that jerk Tom Ainsworth was it, but they were having problems, you can bet, but Maurice and Tom've been together for the past three years, you know?”
“Sounds like your brother was a caring person,” offered Jessica.
“Caring as we humans get, but what did it get him but killed? He took people in, people who were in need. Tom got tired of it. Maurice lent them money and gave them things, and as a result he had people coming and going through his life all the time, and secretly, I think he liked it that way, regardless of what he told himself in that diary, or what he told me.” She dropped her head, sobbed further. “The Good Samaritan, that was Maurice, and Jesus but he liked the role he played.”
Jessica gently urged Linda Sue to go on.
“He believed in a pure and saving-grace kinda love that he had been searching for since his birth, but Ainsworth wasn't it, and he looked for it in all the wrong places. Said he'd recognize it when… whenever it came along. He was a fucking romantic; absolutely addicted to it.”
“Why do you think Thomas Ainsworth got him killed?”
“That idiot kept hurting Pattie. Ainsworth slept around. He… Pattie knew that Ainsworth had just been using him these past months. It sent Pattie into a grave… grave depression. Sent him out nights looking.”
She wrung her hands and dabbed at her eyes. “ 'Course, it wasn't all Tom's fault that it ended in failure. Nobody could measure up to Maurice's standards. The perfect partner would have to be from another era, like one of those freaks in the paintings all over his place. Crazy bastard.” She burst into tears once more. Sturtevante now held up the parchment with the poem they suspected to have been written by Maurice, and she asked point-blank, “Ever see anything like this before around your brother's place?”
The girl stared. “The Poet Killer. I saw it on the news. My brother was killed by the Poet?” News people had not been told that the killer left his poems emblazoned on the backs of his victims.
“Do you know this handwriting? Ever see it before?”
“Never.”
“Then it's not your brother's?”
“No… no… well, I mean, isn't it the killer's handwriting?”