Paul Cleave - The Cleaner

I look around. “Where is he? In the park?”

“Who?”

“Your dog, Walt.”

He shakes his head. “No, no. Sparky died two years ago.”

I have no answer for that. I do my best to think that he’s joking, but I’m pretty sure he isn’t. I start nodding slowly, as if I completely understand. He starts nodding slowly too, mirroring me. A few more seconds go by before he speaks.

“What about you, Joe?”

“I’m just driving. You know how it is.”

“Not really. I don’t drive anymore. Haven’t since the stroke. Doctors tell me I’ll never drive again. You know, Joe, I must catch up with your mother. Boy, she’s some woman. They don’t make them like that anymore.”

Don’t make them insane? Yeah, they do, Walt. I shrug and say nothing.

“What are you doing with yourself these days, Joe?”

“I sell cars.”

“Really? I’m in the market for a car,” he says, confusing me since he just said he can’t drive anymore, and perhaps he’s confusing himself too. I’m desperate to know whether he saw the corpse in the trunk. “Where do you work?”

“Umm. .” I struggle for a name, “Everblue Cars. Heard of it?”

Slowly he nods. “Fine establishment, that one, Joe. You must be proud.”

“Thanks, Walt.”

“That one of yours there?” He nods toward the car.

“Yeah.” Walt is a witness. Nice old Mr. Chadwick. “Want to take a ride?”

“For sale, is it?”

“Yep.” I take a stab at the price. “Eight grand.”

He whistles. Like people do after you’ve quoted them a price. The whistling is one step away from tire kicking.

“Gee, that’s cheap,” he says, and tries to kick the nearest tire, but misses.

We climb into the car. I do up my seat belt and Walt works on his. He starts whistling again, all the time he’s looking at the dashboard, air-conditioning, and radio controls.

“You know, Joe, I haven’t seen your mother since your dad died.”

I envy him.

“That was a real tragedy,” he adds, sounding upset.

I find myself nodding. I want to tell him that I thought it was a tragedy too. I want to tell him how it hurt when Dad was no longer with us, how I just wanted him to be alive, but I say nothing. “Yeah,” I manage, keeping my voice under control.

“Did I ever tell you how sorry I was?”

I have no idea what in the hell he told me back then. What anybody told me. “You did. Thanks.”

He opens his mouth, but says nothing. He seems to be thinking. “How are you coping these days?”

“I’m over it,” I say, not bothering to mention how empty life became without him.

Now it’s his turn to start nodding. “That’s good, Joe. When a man takes his own life, his family can be a mess for years. Thank God you’ve come out of it as a nice young man.”

I’m still nodding. When Dad killed himself, the only thing I felt like doing at first was joining him. There were hundreds of questions, but the biggest one was Why? Mom knows, I’m sure of it. Just as I’m sure she’ll never tell me. The second why is just as important: why did he leave me alone with Mom?

“She still got the place in South Brighton?”

I stop nodding. I’m thinking of Dad and feeling depressed. I know Melissa is watching me, but for the moment I don’t really care.

“Yeah.” I start the car. “Shall we take her for a spin?” I ask, needing to change the subject.

“Sure, Joe.”

We watch the city go by. Life has wound down in this part of the world. We spot only a few other cars on the road. We pass a service station with a police car parked outside and two officers standing over a man they have handcuffed laying facedown. Walt makes conversation about the car and the weather, and tells me that his dead dog keeps running away.

“My God, who would have thought I’d run into Evelyn’s son? You know, Joe, I’ve known your mother more than forty years.”

“Really.”

“We’re both single now. Single and old. Isn’t life sad?”

“Sad,” I agree.

I stop north of the city, turning into a long stretch of road just before the highway where a thousand trees block our view in every direction. Out here, we’re all alone. Out here, I can do what I want.

“Maybe I’ll give your mother a call tomorrow, invite myself around for dinner.”

Keeping one hand on the wheel, I reach behind the passenger seat and open my briefcase.

“Something I can get for you, Joe?”

“No. I’m fine.”

“Your mother and I knew each other quite well before she met your father. Did you know that, Joe?”

“No, I didn’t know that, Walt.”

“Would you mind if I called her? I wouldn’t mind getting to know her again.”

The opportunity knocks so loud I actually drop the knife. Candy’s in the trunk of the car, but Walt doesn’t know she’s there. He couldn’t. He’s too damn old to make sense of anything even if he had seen her, and he’d be blabbing on about her, asking me a whole bunch of questions. I close my briefcase. If I let Walt live, he’s going to spend time with my mother, and that’s time she won’t be able to devote to me.

“What are you smiling about, Joe?”

“Nothing. You want to drive back, Walt?”

“No, son, I’ll let you do the driving.”

I drive back toward town. We pass the same trees. Same service station with the same police car parked outside only now the handcuffed guy is in the back of that car. Walt talks the entire way, touching on subjects that I’m still too young to care about. Things about diets and diseases and loneliness. He tells me about my mother, delves into a past that existed before she met my father. Walt speaks so much that I can see why he got on so well with my mother, having the ability to turn nothing into something even less interesting. His sentences flow from one to the next, and mixed in there in those same breaths are directions to his house. The house is small and well kept. It’s obvious Walt’s dead dog doesn’t crap all over the lawn.

“I’ll call your mother tomorrow morning,” he says, leaning back into the car and smiling at me.

“I think she might like that. Give her somebody to talk to. I think she has issues more in her age group that I can’t relate to, like pensions and cancer.”

He gives me a knowing nod, his eyes twinkling a little. “Evelyn,” he says, more to himself than to me, then he turns and heads up the pathway to his door.

I pull away and head south. I turn on the stereo and sing loudly. After ten minutes, I pull the car off to the side of the road beneath a bank of trees. The grass, burned dry from the last few months of hot sun, has been sheltered enough by the trees to keep most of the day’s rain off. I study the body again, hoping that I might be able to learn something from it, or more likely, that Melissa has left me a message. I shift the corpse slightly. Deep cuts smile at me. Dark red flesh gleams from beneath thick flaps of skin. I have a good idea what caused the wounds. I wrestle Candy from the car, careful not to get blood on myself, and dump her on the ground, which reveals the murder weapon in the bottom of the trunk.

My knife.

Or, to be more accurate, a photograph of my knife.

Seeing this leads me to a couple of conclusions: one, Melissa is definitely stalking me, and two, I’m in serious trouble. The knife has my fingerprints on it, as does my gun.

I remove a red plastic container full of gas and set it on the ground.

Just what game is Melissa playing? If she were going to give the weapons to the police, she would have done so by now. That means she wants something else. And I’m sure she’ll let me know soon enough.

I dump Candy back into the trunk. Her hands are still tied, her mouth gagged. Both those are my doing. I wonder what she thought when she was desperate for help and a woman came along and opened the trunk. It was the end of things going badly for Candy. It was the end of everything.