Paul Cleave - The Cleaner

I still have the ticket as a memento. It’s hidden beneath my mattress at home.

When I first started out it seemed to me that dumping the body was the way to go. That quickly evolved, though, because in all the other cases somebody ended up finding them anyway, and the first place the cops went after identifying them was to their houses. All I was doing was putting myself to extra work. Well, live and learn, I guess. I decided to start leaving them in their homes.

The woman in long-term parking isn’t among the faces looking at me. Instead a stranger looks out from the lineup. Number four in the allotted seven. I know her name and I know her face, but until her picture was pinned up I’d never seen her before. She has been up there for six weeks now, and every day I pause to look at her features. Daniela Walker. Blond. Pretty. My type of woman-but not this time. Even in death her eyes sparkle out from her corpse like soft emeralds. She has both a pre- and post-death photograph. At first Detective Inspector Schroder didn’t want me coming in here because of these pictures. Either he simply forgot after a while, or he just doesn’t care.

The picture of Daniela Walker in life shows her as a happy thirtysomething, two or maybe three years before her death. Her hair shimmers over her shoulder as she turns toward the camera. Her lips are parting in a smile. Her picture has been on my mind every day since it has been up here. And why?

Because whoever killed her pinned her murder on me. Whoever killed her was too scared to take the credit, so rather than try and get away with it in his own clever fashion, he gets away with it by using me. All without my permission!

I keep looking at her picture. One in life. One in death. Green eyes sparkling in each.

For the last six weeks I’ve thought of little other than finding the man who did this to us. Can it be that difficult? I have the resources. I’m smarter than anybody else in this department, and that’s not just my ego talking. I scroll my eyes over the victims. Look at them closely. Fourteen eyes staring at me. Watching. Seven pairs. Familiar faces.

Bar one.

A ring of deep bruises form a necklace around Daniela Walker’s throat from strangulation. They aren’t consistent-ruling out a scarf or a rope-and look like they were formed by knuckles. More pressure can be applied with knuckles than fingers. It’s also harder to defend against. The problem with strangulation is it takes four to six minutes to complete. Sure, they give up struggling within the first, but the pressure needs to be kept on for at least another three to starve the body of oxygen. That’s three minutes I could be using for something better. Using knuckles increases the chances of crushing the victim’s windpipe.

Beneath the corkboard is a set of shelves, and on top of these are seven piles of folders-one per victim. I head over to them. It’s like looking at a menu and already knowing in advance which item to choose. I walk to the fourth pile and pick up one of the folders from the top. Every detective on the case has one of these folders and the spares are here for anybody who becomes assigned.

Like me.

I unzip the front of my overalls, stuff it down my front, then zip them up again. Back to the wall of the dead. I smile at the latest two. This is their first morning here in the assembly. No doubt they were pinned up last night. They don’t smile back. Angela Durry. Thirty-nine-year-old legal executive. She suffocated on an egg. Martha Harris. Seventy-two-year-old widow. I’d needed a car. She had caught me taking hers.

I take my spray bottle and rags and move to the window. I spend five minutes cleaning it, staring beyond the streaks and my reflection at the world outside to the little people walking among the little streets. I spend some quality time with the plant. I replace the microcassette tape from the audio recorder I have hidden in there, careful to touch the recorder only with the rags. I tuck the tape into my pocket. I still have a job to do, and I head back to my office to grab the vacuum cleaner, then return and use it to clean up.

Ten minutes later I leave the conference room as I found it-only tidier and without as many files. I wheel the vacuum cleaner into the supply room on the other side of the floor and start vacuuming. Nobody is around so I do the Boy Scout thing and stock up on a few more pairs of gloves-not that I’ll be killing anybody tonight. I don’t suffer from compulsions to kill all the time. I’m no animal. I don’t go running around venting childhood aggressions while looking for excuses to kill. I’m not itching to make a name for myself or gain the notoriety of Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer. Bundy was a freak who had a following of groupies during and after his trial, and he even got married after he was sentenced to death. He was a loser who killed more than thirty women, but he got caught. I don’t want fame. I don’t want to be married. If I wanted fame, I would kill somebody famous-like that Chapman chap who loved John Lennon so much he shot him. I’m just a regular guy. An average Joe. With a hobby. I’m not a psychopath. I don’t hear voices. I don’t kill for God or Satan or the neighbor’s dog. I’m not even religious. I kill for me. It’s that simple. I like women, and I like to do things to them they won’t let me do. There have to be maybe two or three billion women in this world. Killing one every month or two isn’t a big deal. It’s all about perspective.

I grab some other stuff. Nothing major. Gear officers are always taking. Nothing anybody will notice gone. Nobody notices anything around here. The supply room is good like that. It supplies. No reason for it not to supply me. I look at my watch. Twelve o’clock-lunchtime. I head back to my office. The tools and the cords and the paint-this gear I don’t get to use. All I do is clean. Everybody here thinks I have the IQ of a watermelon. But that’s okay. In fact, it’s perfect.

My chair is uncomfortable and my lunch isn’t that great. With several nice sights out the window, I lean over and look at the women out there as prospective lovers. Should I go down there? Find where one works? Where she lives? Then, one night, find her in between those two places?

Men and women are walking back and forth, treating the warm afternoon street like a singles bar. Women dress like whores and take offense when men stare at them. Men dress like pimps and take offense when nobody notices. I use the two-inch knife to cut into my apple, small drops of juice spraying out. I slice it into sections. I’m chewing them while picking a target. My mouth waters before taking each bite.

Of course, I can’t go down there. I have other things to do now, a new hobby. What sort of guy would I be if I picked up a new hobby and dumped it after only an hour? I’d be a loser. The sort of guy who can’t finish what he starts. And that’s not me. I didn’t get to where I am by never finishing anything.

My thoughts are interrupted by a knock on my door. Nobody ever comes here while I’m eating lunch, and for the briefest of moments I’m sure the police are going to burst in and arrest me. I start to reach for my briefcase. A moment later the door swings open and Sally is standing there, making me think I need to put a lock on that door.

“Hi, Joe.”

I lean back. “Hi, Sally.”

“How’s the apple? Is it nice?”

“It’s nice,” I say, though I’m quickly losing my appetite now. I jam a slice of it in my mouth so I don’t have to make more conversation. What in the hell could she want?

“I made you a tuna sandwich,” she says, closing the door behind her and heading over to my bench. My office has only one seat and I’m in it. I don’t offer it to her because I don’t want her to stay. I take the tuna sandwich from her and smile at her, showing my fake gratitude along with a mouthful of apple. She offers me the kind of smile that suggests she would sleep with me if only, please God, if only he would ask. But I’m not going to ask. Her tuna sandwiches are always pretty good, but not that good. I swallow my piece of apple and take a huge bite of tuna and bread.