Paul Cleave - The Cleaner

Sally nods. She didn’t know Joe’s father had died.

“Joe became quiet. Withdrawn. Not long after, he moved out. Do you know, I’ve never been to his house? I worry about Joe. I suppose that’s the job of a mother.”

“I worry about him too.” Sally finishes off her drink. “Well, I’d best be going.”

“But you only just got here.”

“I know. Next time I’ll stay longer. I just wanted to come by and say hello.”

“You really are a nice young girl.” Evelyn walks her to the door and opens it. The night has cooled off in the fifteen minutes she has been here. She thinks it’s going to start raining again. “Did Joe tell you about Walt?”

“Walt?”

Sally stands in the doorway with her arms wrapped around her body, listening as Evelyn recounts the story of Walt. When it’s over, she thanks Joe’s mother, then walks down the path to her car. She grips the steering wheel, but doesn’t start the engine.

According to Evelyn, Joe is a car salesman. Joe was out test-driving a car when he ran into her old friend Walt.

She clutches the crucifix around her neck. Joe has created a fictional world to keep his mother happy. What else has he created? Joe is more than he seems and, in a way, that frightens her.

The next morning my internal alarm wakes me into what is another glorious Christchurch morning-according to some old guy giving the forecast on the radio. Looking out the window shows something different: gray skies and dark storm clouds on the horizon, which make me think the forecaster must be crazy or drunk. There is some condensation on the window and the floor is cold.

I stare at the coffee table before leaving for work. There is a tin of fish food on it and no dead cat. I leave my apartment and head downstairs and out into the first frost of the year. The lawn looks crunchy, and there are leaves filling the gutters. I’m shivering a little when I hand Mr. Stanley my bus ticket, and today he punches it. I wonder if this is an omen. I want to tell him about my goldfish, and I don’t know why. I don’t even know if he would care.

When he drops me off opposite my work, we exchange waves.

The day doesn’t suggest that it’s going to get much warmer. I keep my hands buried in my pockets as I make my way across the road. Sally catches me by the elevator. We make inane conversation up to my floor, but mostly Sally seems preoccupied, and then she is gone.

I’m unable to gain access to the conference room, so I end up doing what I’m paid to do. I keep an eye on Detective Calhoun when he is around. I try to figure out just how he’s feeling, but I don’t know him well enough to see if he’s going through a personal crisis. I also keep an eye out for Melissa, but she doesn’t show. I vacuum and clean and wipe and do the general workday things that bring in the big janitorial bucks. Nobody treats me any differently. Nobody gives me the sort of look they’d reserve for a serial killer.

The station doesn’t have the same buzz about it as yesterday, when everybody thought the case was about to bust wide open. Even the conference room is empty. I step inside and take a look around. The composite picture Melissa helped them with is on the wall. Dark, bushy hair; cheekbones that can’t be seen, let alone felt; lots of stubble. A flat nose, big eyes, high forehead. The cold, calculating expression on his face looks mean, as though the person in this picture was born to be a criminal.

The picture in no way represents how I actually look. My hair is finer, swept back, and kept reasonably short. It’s dark, which is the only similar thing, but I have high cheekbones with no flab, and my eyes are thinner too. And stubble? No way. I’m lucky if I need to shave once a month. I grin at the picture. It doesn’t grin back. On the table with the folders is the knife. Shrouded inside a plastic bag, sitting inside a cardboard box, it has already been studied for fingerprints, blood, and DNA. If my fingerprints were found on it, I would know by now. All employees in this building have been fingerprinted. It’s standard. Melissa wasn’t lying. It isn’t standard for all of us to have given DNA samples.

I grip the handle tightly, feel it beneath the thin plastic. This knife was stolen from me in circumstances I can never possibly forget. This knife was there the night I suffered my greatest indignity, my greatest pain, and experienced my greatest hatred. I quickly put it back down. It isn’t mine anymore.

I take time to read the reports. The prostitute I left in the alleyway has been identified. Charlene Murphy. Twenty-two years old. I’d pegged her at being closer to thirty. Prostitution ages people fast. She was, however, a mother of one. That much I’d guessed. Her boyfriend isn’t a suspect, since he was in jail at the time on unrelated charges. Her photograph is up on the wall keeping company with the other women.

The second whore who died, Candy number two, is still to be identified.

I don’t need to take any information away with me, but I find myself collecting what I can anyway, more as mementos than anything else. I also take the tape from the recorder in the potted plant. I’m back in my office when Sally knocks at the door and comes in.

After the usual pleasantries, Sally stops talking, as if she’s used up all the words she’d remembered for the day. She just stands there as if somebody has reached inside her and flicked the big off switch. About half a minute goes by, and then she just starts looking around.

“Sure is a cold day,” she says, but the switch has been flicked to automatic now, so she doesn’t really know what she is saying. She looks out the window. Looks at the ceiling. At the floor under the bench. Finally her eyes rest on my briefcase. “I forgot to make you lunch today. I’m sorry, Joe.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

She keeps staring at my briefcase, and I guess she’s figuring I’d like her more if she went out and bought the same one. She’s trying to figure out whether I’d be impressed or devastated if she bought one that was better. The truth is she probably isn’t thinking anything at all. She is frowning slightly, which suggests something is going on inside her mind, but the way her face is slightly scrunched up suggests the only thing happening in there is a whole lot of confusion. It’s as if she wants to ask me a really big question, but has no idea what that question even is.

“Well, thanks for dropping by. I got a lot of work I ought to get started on.”

This seems to snap her out of it. The switch inside of her doesn’t go to on, because that isn’t one of the positions. Other than off and automatic, she only has barely functioning, and she goes into that mode now.

“I’ll see you later on, Joe.”

“Oh. Okay then,” I say, trying to singsong the three words.

She heads out of my office but doesn’t close the door. I have to get up and do it myself.

I listen to the tape from the conference room. Lots of different theories, none of them right. The police are freaking out because they think I’m escalating. They think soon it’ll be only a few days between my victims. Hell, maybe they’re right. It’s too early to tell.

The Everblue Motel is one of those dives you see in movies where bad things happen to unlucky people who just happen to be staying there the same night as some escaped mental patient. It’s not far from town, but far enough for the land to be cheap, like those living nearby.

The motel is an L-shaped stretch of rooms with old paint and chipped windowsills, opposite brown grass and half-dead shrubs. The cracks in the sidewalk are full of rust-colored water. I count a dozen vehicles in the parking lot, ranging from the cheapest of the cheap to the most average, middle-class family sedan. Maybe it’s discount Wednesday for the hookers. A few corroding shopping carts are lying on their sides, surrounded by weeds and cigarette butts. The neon sign is making a loud buzzing noise.