partner. Learned early in life that the only way to keep people close is through sex. I've always had a hard time making friends, but even a harder time sustaining friendships. I know people tire of me, that I whine too much, but I also know that I'm worthy of someone's unconditional love, if only I could find it.' “
“Doesn't exactly sound as if he's into abstinence,” Sturtevante quipped. “Sounds like the usual teen angst stuff,” said Jessica.
Jim Parry continued to scan the diary, resting it on the volume of Byron. Jessica filled her lungs and stared at the crowd that had gathered about the crime scene. Uniformed policemen held people in check at a temporary barricade.
As she was about to slide into the patrol car, James said, “Listen to this part.”
As much as she wanted to object to his reading aloud the victim's private words here on the street at this moment, Jessica said nothing. Jim read, “ 'I am lousy at maintaining and cultivating a friend, or at least a worthwhile one. What's the point of trying? In the end, it only causes pain and suffering. They all die off like neglected weeds. I have allowed the weeds to infest my garden. It's all my own fault. I am a poor gardener in the field of friendships.' “
“Like I said, the usual teen angst, heartache, and suffering.”
“But listen to this,” he insisted.
“Hey, that's private, personal stuff there!” shouted someone who'd bolted from the crowd, having gotten past the police tape and uniformed cops. “Give me that!”
They looked up to find a pretty young woman of perhaps twenty glaring at them. “That's mine!” She snatched at the diary, but Parry held it overhead, too high for her to grasp.
“Sorry, no, young lady. This belonged to the victim, and as such, it is evidence in a crime.”
“God damm it all to hell, I knew Maurice would wind up like this one day!”
“Like what?” asked Sturtevante, trying to calm her.
“Cops pouring over his life, his apartment, and his stuff! Damn fool, Maurice.”
Lieutenant Sturtevante introduced herself. “I'm the one who left a message on your answering machine to get over here. Got your number out of Maurice's Rolodex. I'm a homicide detective with the PPD.” But the words homicide detective did not appear to register with the young blond woman, who remained distraught. 'Tell me, miss, exactly what kind of relationship did you have with Maurice?”
“He was my brother, dammit. My fucking, wide-eyed, idiot brother. He liked to pretend otherwise, that he was my sister, and he liked to believe that the fucking world was filled with goodness and light-that is, when he wasn't so depressed he couldn't drag himself out of bed. But he thought the best of everyone and everything. Opened his door to anything off the street. 'Helping out,' he called it.”
“I see.”
Jessica thought it quite likely a different view of Maurice than that held by the person who had killed him.
The sister shouted now, “Where is he? Have you sent him to the hospital? How badly is he hurt? One of those creeps he let stay with him hurt him, didn't they?”
She thought he'd been beaten but was still alive. No one had informed her of her brother's death.
“Where can I catch up to him? What hospital did you send him to?”
“He's… I'm afraid you can't,” said Sturtevante.
The young woman stared at them as if they were all mad aliens. Her head began a slight shaking, her lip quivering. She eyed the window of Maurice's bedroom, where what looked like an innocent game of shadow play was going on. The attendants wrapping the body for transport. The sister rushed for the stairs leading up to the apartment. She hadn't gotten far when a uniformed cop restrained her and she saw Thomas Ainsworth coming slowly out of the building, dejected and trembling. She tore loose from the officer holding her and rushed toward the boy, tearing into him with her nails and screaming, “You did it! You got Maurice into big-time trouble this time! Didn't you? Didn't you?”
The sister ranted until she was pulled off, and then she suddenly froze, petrified at the entryway, seeing the prone body on the gurney. “Where the fuck are the medics? Why aren't you resuscitating him? Why're you all standing around doing nothing, reading his private papers?”
Jessica went to her, put an arm over her shoulder, and simply pronounced her brother dead.
“No, nooooooo!” the girl cried, and tore at the cold, black, and unyielding polyethylene body bag. “Open it! Open it! I don't believe it,” she wailed. “Not unless I see it, I won't believe it.”
“Open it,” Jessica ordered the ambulance attendants. One of them, biting his lower lip, zipped the bag open, and the sister screamed, her wail penetrating the night sky. She fell prostrate across her brother's form, clutching him.
As Jessica pulled her away, the distraught sister nearly pulled Maurice's entire head from the bag, as if attempting to drag him back into life from his eternal sleep.
“I loved him so much,” she cried out.
Jessica guided her up the stairs, and snatching away yellow crime-scene tape from the door, she found the only privacy that might be had. The others followed. Jessica pulled up a chair and sat Maurice's sister at the table where they had all sat earlier. She poured the young woman a cup of leftover, lukewarm coffee and offered it to her, but the sobbing, heaving girl refused it. Her eyes had become black concentric circles, her blond hair a tangle of thin noodle-shaped snakes.
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.
