Paul Cleave - The Cleaner

“They’re okay,” I tell him. “I just pretend they’re not real people.”

“I guess that must be a luxury.”

“Coffee, Detective Schroder?”

“Not this morning, Joe. Thanks.”

I wander off to my office. I’m desperately curious about how the body was found, who found it, and who showed up at the scene. Detective Travers certainly hadn’t. He was tied up.

It was probably the husband, coming home to get his life back on track. Wondered what the smell was coming from upstairs. Déjà vu. Whether you breathe through your nose or your mouth, or even if you don’t breathe at all, the smell of decaying death will always get to you. It takes on a life in the same way fire does, looking for oxygen to burn to keep it alive, and, like fire, it has a hunger to be fed. A purpose for its survival. I wonder if the husband will ever walk up those stairs again.

I’ve heard of cases where old people have lived with their dead spouse for months because they didn’t want to part with their loved one. They lay them down in bed or set them in front of the TV watching game shows with their favorite cushion in their lap. Hold conversations with them. Hold their hand, even though the skin is slipping from it in rotted abrasions. For a while after Dad died, I kept checking on Mom to make sure she was home alone-I thought she might break out the superglue to try and piece Dad’s ashes together so she could nag the poor bastard to death one last time.

I remember a story I once read in a newspaper. Some guy in Germany had died, and although his rotting body stank, none of the neighbors wanted to disturb him. He was there for a couple of months and wasn’t found until the landlord wanted his rent. He’d been eaten by his flock of cats, and was mostly bone by that point. Guy probably got more pussy in death than he did in life.

I mop floors. Wipe windows. Get talked to like I’m a moron. Throughout the course of the morning, I eavesdrop enough to learn the footprints at the scene are identical to those at the other scenes. Residue from my gloves. Carpet fibers. Hair. Daniela Walker’s husband had come home to get his electric shaver-my electric shaver now-and had found her.

Because of the several differences between Lisa the Hooker’s death and Daniela the Battered Housewife’s death, more detectives have changed over to the theory that they are hunting two killers and not one. Each victim has been killed differently (though I’m repetitious in my day job, I don’t like to be with after-hours activities), but at each scene I’m leaving behind similar evidence, be it clothes, fibers, or saliva.

Two killers. It is the general assumption. Nobody who thinks otherwise has any theories as to why the killer returned to the scene with a hooker.

Just before lunch I run into the local gay cop and say hello to him. He isn’t in a talkative mood and dismisses me with a quick greeting. He looks distracted. He also looks tired.

I’m left with four men to study. Lunch comes and goes without a visit from Sally, and more importantly, without any of her sandwiches. I make do with the food I have. After lunch, using the computer and personnel files in one of the records rooms upstairs, I reproduce department records for each of the remaining four men for later reading. I’m getting excited at how my list keeps narrowing itself down. What I can’t figure out is why I have to eliminate all but one name until I find the killer. Why can’t the next person I investigate be the man I want?

Why must luck be against me? I decide to start with the two I don’t know as well, the two out-of-towners.

I’m in the records room running the vacuum over a toner-stained piece of carpet when Sally opens the door and steps in. She doesn’t look surprised to find me here, which means she must have been keeping an eye on me. Maybe I ought to be keeping more of an eye on her. I turn off the vacuum cleaner.

“How’s your day going, Joe?” she asks, always asking me the same thing, as if one day I’m going to have an answer different from Fine or Okay.

I decide to liven up her day and mix up the conversation.

“It’s going real good, Sally. Just like all the other yesterdays. I like my job.”

“I like my job too,” she says, and then she lowers her voice even though there is nobody else here to overhear her, “but I must admit I find it a little boring. Don’t you ever feel like you want to do something else?” She walks over to the photocopier and leans against it. The records I printed off are safely in my overalls, and the originals back where they belong. “I mean, don’t you think there ought to be more to life?”

“Like what?” I ask, genuinely curious. I can learn from this woman. If she has low-end goals in this world, I can say I have those same goals if it will help my act. This is what Method actors do.

“Anything. Everything,” she says, and maybe it’s the smell of the vacuum cleaner, or the window-cleaner fumes getting to me, but for the first time Sally sounds as though she’s thinking outside the box, beyond her limitations.

“I don’t understand,” I tell her, and I really don’t.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m not making any sense. Don’t you have dreams, Joe? If you could be anything in the world, what would you want to be?”

The answer is simple. “Joe.”

“No, I mean a job. Any job in the world.”

“A cleaner.”

“Besides that?”

“I’m not quer. . qual. . fied for anything else.”

“Do you like the idea of being a fireman? Or a policeman? Or an artist?”

“I drew a house, once. It had no windows.”

She sighs, and for a moment I think about documentaries on TV where some retarded guy will marry his female equal. Surely these are the conversations they must have during foreplay before trying to make mentally disabled babies. I decide to put an end to it and help her out.

“I would like to be an astronaut.”

Her face beams at my answer. “Really?”

“Yeah. Ever since I was a boy,” I say, winging it now because even though it isn’t my fantasy, it sounds like the kind of thing any man-regardless of IQ-would like to do. “I looked up at the moon and wanted to walk there. I know you can’t live there, but I could at least fly there and make snow angels in the moon dirt.”

“That sounds nice, Joe.”

I’m sure it does. I decide to go another step further into this romantic notion. “I’d be alone up there. I’d not worry about what people think about me. It would be peaceful.”

Her smile starts to waver. “You worry about what other people think about you?”

“Sometimes,” I say, though that isn’t necessarily true. I only worry about what other people think I’m capable of. “It’s not easy being retarted,” I say, putting emphasis on the second t .

“Retarded.”

“What?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “What about God?”

“God?” I ask, as if I’ve never heard of the guy. “Do you think he’s retarted?”

“Of course not. But do you ever worry about what He thinks?”

It’s a good question. And if I really believed in all those God-loves-you and God-will-smite-you fairy tales, then sure, I’d be worried. I look at the crucifix hanging from her neck. It’s an icon that introduces her to the world as somebody who believes in Heaven and Hell and all the good and bad things in between.

“I always worry, because God is always watching,” I say, and her face lights up again and I realize that if Sally doubled her IQ and halved her weight, she could be the kind of person I’d find myself following home.

“Do you ever go to church, Joe?”

“Church? No. Never.”

“You should.”