Bitter Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  “He doesn't see himself as pulling a hoax, I don't think,” said Jessica, “not from all that we've surmised.”

  Kim immediately agreed, bolstering Jessica's notion. “He doesn't see it as a game or a flimflam; he doesn't enjoy killing for the sake of killing. It's a means to an end. To the transmigration of the soul into what he be­lieves is a higher form, I suspect. It is the only way he can get his victims to quickly and efficiently cross over. His endgame, if you will, is to return them to some oth­erworldly force, or forces, that he sees or hears in his head. That would be my guess.”

  “Apparently his victims don't see him as any kind of threat whatsoever,” Jessica agreed.

  “Fact is, they likely gravitate to him as heroic.”

  “Heroic?” asked Parry, perplexed.

  “He's a grim, dark figure who seems to incarnate all they aspire to and surround themselves with. Look closely at Maurice's surroundings, his choice of habitat, the very things on his walls,” Kim explained.

  “And look as closely at what he has to say in his diary,” added Jessica. “Somewhere in it he may tell you what he most loves in life, and I suspect it is the belief that one day he will die.”

  “A death wish?”

  “More closely aligned with the notion that there's a bet­ter world beyond. Possibly a parallel universe far better and into which he ought to have been born,” said Kim. “It's less a death wish per se than a desire to transcend life as we mortals know it.”

  Jessica added, “So his savior, even if temporary, is the man who can both see and understand the desperately melancholy youth, and so becomes the young person's hero.”

  She saw Parry's eyes bore into her, questioning.

  “I noticed a book of Byron's works on the nightstand, the pages marked,” Jessica said.

  “Got it right here,” said Parry. “I'll look it over, see if it uncovers anything, along with the diary entries. Got some confidential stuff here that might prove helpful down the road. Listen to this.”

  Parry began to read from the diary. “ 'I chose the name Mayonnaise because I like licking it off my sexual 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 cal
l 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?”

  Jessica took Linda Sue's hands in her own. “We need you to be clear on this, Linda. We have reason to believe that this particular poem may have been written by your brother.”

  “He didn't, you know, kill himself, did he?” she asked.

  Jessica shook her head emphatically. “No, of that much we are certain.”

  The sister stared at the poem, reading its every line. “Sounds like Pattie's prattle. Yeah, looks like his handwrit­ing.”

  Sturtevante said, “I'd like you to come back to the sta­tion house with me, Miss Harris.”

  “What for?”

  “Routine questions. Get a fix on your brother's acquain­tances, his routine, that sort of thing. Any bit of informa­tion, you know, could lead to something else, which in turn could uncover something new in the case, you see.�
��

  “Until the trail leads to his killer, you mean? You have no idea the times I told him the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” She sniffed back sobs. “I won't let you all treat this as a typical death, do you under­stand me?” Sturtevante put a hand on her shoulder and said, “Of course.”

  Jessica reassured her. “There's nothing typical about what's happened here.”

  “No, dear,” added Kim, “there's nothing typical at all about this case. You're not to worry on that score.”

  NINE

  You shall see them on a beautiful quarto page, where a neat rivulet of text shall meander through a meadow of margin.

  —Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816)

  Philadelphia Police Department, three days later

  IT had been two days since Jessica's skilled hands and scalpel autopsied the remains of Maurice Deneau, but the procedure on the young man netted them nothing new save for the added DNA sample taken from the tearstains be­lieved to have come from his killer. Thomas Ainsworth agreed to having a sample of his DNA taken so as to be ruled out as a suspect; he'd claimed not to have touched the body beyond attempting to shake Maurice awake. He claimed that when he found this impossible, he immedi­ately called the police, and at no time did he shed tears di­rectly over the body. In fact, he found touching the body repulsive.

  All internal organs proved absolutely healthy and disease-free. They had simply ceased to function, along with the brain and the heart. Jessica could simply find no cause of death beyond the unknown toxins in the poisoned ink. Still, they knew the delivery system must be the ink, as they saw no internal destruction to lips, gums, throat, or stomach lining, and there were no exterior marks on the body save the poem. Some poison delivered through pen and ink, but what?

  Maurice's autopsy had shown only what they sus­pected: a young man in good health who had suffered a sudden trauma to his system, primarily his brain. A death by narcosis in which vital organs simply shut down domino fashion after the brain had ceased to send signals. They ran tests for any traces of the usual suspects: ar­senic, strychnine, household chemicals. But the usual routes to certainty were leading nowhere, and Jessica's attempt at getting results from toxicology had totally failed.