Paul Cleave - The Cleaner

“Hello, Joe. This is your mother.”

“Mom. . why. . why are you ringing me?”

“What’s this? Do I need an excuse to ring my only child who I thought loved me?”

“I do love you, Mom.”

“You have an odd way of showing it,” she says.

“You know I love you, Mom,” I say, wanting to add that I wish that for once she could say something positive toward or about me, because if she could it’d make loving her a whole lot easier to do.

“That’s great, Joe.”

“Thanks.”

“You misunderstand,” she says. “I’m being sarcastical.”

“Sarcastic.”

“What, Joe?”

“What?”

“What did you say?” she asks.

“Nothing.”

“It sounded like something.”

“I think I have a bad line,” I tell her. “What were you saying?”

“I said I was being sarcastical. I’m saying that it’s great that you now think I’m only imagining you love me. Are you saying I’m supposed to assume that you love your mother? I don’t see how I can assume such a thing. You never visit me, and when I call, you complain! Sometimes I just don’t know what to do. Your father would be ashamed to see how you treat me, Joe. Ashamed!”

Part of me wants to cry. Another part wants to scream. I do neither. I sit down and let my head and chest sag down slightly. I wonder what life would be like if Mom had died instead of Dad. “I’m sorry,” I say, knowing I can only apologize rather than try to correct her way of thinking. “I promise to be better, Mom. I really do.”

“Really? That’s the Joe I know. The loving, caring son who I knew I could only have had. You truly can be an angel at times, Joe. You make me so proud.”

“Really?” I start to smile. “Thanks,” I say, praying she isn’t being sarcastical .

“I went to the doctor today,” she says, changing the subject-or more accurately, getting around to the reason she actually called.

The doctor? Oh Jesus. “What’s wrong?”

“I must have been sleepwalking last night, Joe. I woke up this morning with my bedroom door open, and I was lying on the floor.”

“The floor? Oh my God. Are you okay?”

“What do you think?”

“What did the doctor say?”

“He said I had an episode. Do you know what an episode is, Joe?”

I feel closer to crying than screaming. I think about Fay, Edgar, Karen, and Stewart from Mom’s favorite program. Yeah, I know what an episode is.

“What kind of episode?”

“Doctor Costello says it’s nothing to be worried about. He has given me some tablets.”

“What sort of tablets?”

“I’m not sure. I’ll tell you more when you come over. I’ll cook meatloaf. It’s your favorite, Joe.”

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Doctor Costello seems to think so. So what time will you be coming over?”

Suddenly I’m not so sure there was an episode. In fact I’m almost positive Mom is making all of this up to make me feel guilty. “Do you have to go for more tests?”

“No. Around six? Six thirty?”

“No tests? Why? What more are they going to do?”

“I have my pills.”

“I’m just worried, that’s all.”

“I’ll be better when you get here.”

I suck in a deep breath. Here we go. “I can’t come over, Mom. I’m kind of busy.”

“You’re always busy, no time to spend with your mother. I’m all you have, you know. All you have since your father died. Where will you be when I’m gone?”

In paradise. “I’ll come by on Monday, like normal.”

“I guess we’ll find out on Monday.” The line suddenly goes dead.

I stand back up and hang up the phone. Hearing it ring reminds me that I never called the vet back, but being reminded doesn’t make me want to do it now. I walk over to my battered sofa. I sit down and throw my feet up onto the scarred coffee table. In the silence of my room I can hear the pump circulating the water around in the fishbowl. I wonder what kind of peace I could find if I was a goldfish with a memory that spanned only the last five seconds of my mother’s conversation.

I look over at the folders containing the printouts of the four men left on my suspect list. If I start looking through them, I’ll at least stop thinking about my mother. Meatloaf on Monday. It’s a prelude to having her nagging me for not living there, for not having a life, for not owning a BMW. Will reading the files put her out of my mind?

I figure it’s worth a shot.

I pick them up and begin looking through them.

Detective Harvey Taylor. Forty-three years old. Married. Four kids. Been on the police force for eighteen years. Became a detective in the burglary squad at the age of twenty-eight. Promoted to homicide at the age of thirty-four. Has been assigned to some of the biggest homicide cases New Zealand has ever seen. He’s a part of the team tracking the guy who left all the bodies in the cemetery lake-a guy the media are calling the Burial Killer. He’s a part of the team trying to track me too.

I’m reading through Taylor’s history, seeing he was a straight-A student at school. Several outstanding sporting achievements. High IQ. The type of guy I hated when I was at school. The type of guy I wanted to be.

Listed in the folder are results from his school days. Results from the Royal New Zealand Police College. Results from psychological tests. I look through the questions for Have you ever strangled a woman to death after raping her? but it’s not there. I figure he would have ticked No. Most of the questions are pretty lame. What is your favorite color? What is your favorite number? Would you steal if you were desperate? Have you ever smoked drugs? Ever killed a pet? Ever beaten anybody up at school? Ever been beaten up? Do you like setting fires?

The yes-or-no questions take up five pages before the tests move on to questions that require written answers instead of ticks in boxes. What should we do with murderers? How did it feel being beaten up at school? What did you do about it? Why this and why that. Big fucking deal this and big fucking deal that. They’re designed to make up a psychological profile. Something like “I was beaten up at school, but my favorite color is blue, which means I can’t be gay. Right?” Yeah, right.

I stop looking at the questions and go to the results. Taylor was basically rubber-stamped sane. No further explanation than that. The “insane” graduates become parking attendants.

I continue reading through his record from officer to detective: the arrests he’s made, the cases he’s solved. The guy has put in several of his own hours into these cases. You don’t get compensated for those hours, but you do gain some respect. They help you get promoted, so you can do even more work that you won’t get compensated for. The report indicates the man is dedicated, to his work and to his family. I don’t know what the balance is, but so far he still has both.

This doesn’t eliminate him as a suspect. For all I know he’s missing his wife so much his imagination and right hand can’t accommodate him any longer. Maybe he seeks sexual release with a stranger. I have no way of knowing. All I do know is that besides the burglary cases, which have such an extremely low solution rate it’s appalling, Taylor has solved nearly every one of his investigations. That’s why he’s here. Not that his being here has helped either investigation.

The photograph supplied with the file is probably ten years old, taken when he was in his early thirties. Even then Taylor looked ten years older than he was. Now, he looks twenty years older. These days his hair is ash gray with peaks at the corners of his forehead that threaten to see him bald within a few years. He doesn’t have the black eyes of a killer. Instead his friendly blue eyes mask an intelligence I don’t associate with many detectives. His face is lined with wrinkles from age and from the sun. His skin is weathered and tanned, and it’s easy to imagine him on a surfboard in the middle of the ocean.