Paul Cleave - The Cleaner

“What is it you want?”

I shake my head. “Bob, Bob, Bob. I thought we had an understanding. You know you’re not allowed to ask the questions.”

“Just tell me what you want.”

“That’s another question.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s a request.”

“And that’s a lie.” I hold up the gardening shears. “You’re just asking for it, aren’t you?”

He shakes his head. “No. I swear.”

“What about Daniela? Was she asking for it?”

Bob’s face is wet and he’s looking down into his lap. We’re both sweating. It’s not warm outside, but somehow this house is still retaining the heat from the summer. The windows have been closed for three months now, so the air is stale and tastes like bad meat. I move over to the window. Open it slightly. Suck at the air outside. The smell, the thick air, the pressure on my skin-it is similar to my apartment the week I spent in bed with a bleeding ball and a bucket full of piss. I’d got used to the feeling, but it is a great relief to be rid of it now.

I sit down, remove my jacket, and clutch at my damp shirt. Thoughts of going to the beach are hammering the front of my mind. I can feel the pull of the sea and the sand, even though I’m five or six miles from the nearest drop and grain, even though a trip to the beach tonight would be a pretty miserable experience.

“Answer the Goddamn question, Bob.”

He tilts his head to look at me. He looks sorry, but he’s sorry to have been caught, not sorry for killing Daniela Walker.

“I didn’t mean to kill her.”

The air seems to be getting stickier by the minute. I don’t reply to his answer. I just sit still, silently reasserting my dominance over this man. The room is cooling. Somewhere, Melissa is dreaming about her money. Somewhere nearby a dog is barking. Some place further away the police are coming closer, if they’ve not done so already, to discovering a match for the fingerprints on the murder weapon they found in the dumpster.

Bob is now a condemned man. He’s effectively on death row. It’s just that nobody has told him. His family, especially his wife, will have to live with the stench of blame. How can she justify not knowing what a monster her husband really is? Or how does she explain that she knew and never did anything about it?

I’ve been wondering whether Bob has an alibi for several of the killings. He was in Auckland for the first few. However, because of the seriousness of this horrific series of murders, the police will work their way around any small inconsistencies, and when nobody else shows up dead, they will be satisfied with labeling Calhoun the Christchurch Carver. I’ve learned enough from cleaning their hallways to know that they’re so hard-pressed for a suspect, they’ll keep their mouths shut, never mention all the DNA evidence that never quite matched up, and if a few more bodies show up every now and again they’ll use a copycat defense. It’ll keep them happy, and the media, and the country. It’ll even keep me happy.

“Okay, Bob, explain how killing her was an accident.”

He looks up. Stares into my eyes. He shrugs, then he looks down at the floor, then he shrugs again. He seems really unsure. “I followed her home, to talk to her, right?” he says, still looking down. “I wanted her to charge her husband with assault, ’cause the guy’s a real asshole, right? Shit, you probably saw him. Stuck-up, arrogant bastard. So full of himself, sure that he’s above the law, that it’s his right to beat the crap out of his wife. So I follow her home to tell her she’s making a mistake, and when I get here, I find that she’s home alone.”

“It wasn’t your job, Bob. You were here to work on my case alone.”

He sighs. “I know. I know that, but, well, it just happened.”

“Did you know she was going to be home alone?”

“Not really.”

“That sounds like a yes to me, Bob.”

“I suspected.”

“Which is why you followed her, right? Because you could only talk to her while she was alone. Having her husband in the same room wasn’t going to make for a useful conversation.”

“I guess so.”

“You guess so. Okay, then what happened?”

“I sat outside for a few minutes, considering what to do.”

“Considering whether to kill her or not?”

He shakes his head. “Nothing like that.”

“What then?”

“I don’t know. I just sat there, watching the house, thinking about the best way to convince her of what she needed to do. Finally, when I went to the door and knocked, there was no answer. I was going to leave. .” he says, but doesn’t finish the sentence.

“But you stayed,” I tell him.

“I stayed,” he says. “For some reason I couldn’t tell you, I stayed.”

“Because you saw an opportunity.”

“No,” he says. “It wasn’t like that. I was worried. What if she wasn’t answering because her husband was home beating her up for not having dinner on the table or for not cleaning his shoes or whatever excuse the piece of shit needed? Anyway, I checked the door and it was locked, but I had some keys on me designed for picking most house locks, so I used them.”

I know the keys well. I also know that domestic abuse isn’t about a man who is in love with his wife too much; it’s about a man who is in love with the ability to control her.

“I checked around the kitchen, the living room, looking for her.”

“Did you call her name?”

“No.”

“Is that because you didn’t want her to know you were there?”

He shakes his head. “That wasn’t it at all. I didn’t want to let the husband know I was there, in case he was home and hitting her. I wanted to catch him in the act.”

“That’s pretty lame, Bob.”

“No it’s not. This is a big house. I couldn’t be sure what was happening, and where.”

“So then what?”

“She was upstairs sitting on the bed. Sobbing.”

“Which is why she didn’t answer the door, I suppose?”

“That was my thought. When she saw me, she started to freak out. I quickly explained who I was, but she was recognizing me anyway.”

“She must have been relieved you were a cop and not a homicidal maniac,” I say.

If he sees the irony, he doesn’t let it show.

“She sat down again, and we began to talk about her husband, but mostly about her. You see, the issue was her, not him. He was always going to be a wife beater. There was no way of stopping him. What people don’t understand is that these guys can’t be rehabilitated. I mean, what the hell are you going to rehabilitate them to? All he’s ever known is violence. I tried talking to her, calmly and reasonably, and that was okay, at first.”

He pauses and looks at me. His eyes look damp. I wonder if crying is beyond this madman’s ability to act. I prompt him to continue with a slight repositioning of the gardening shears. I’m eager to hear his thoughts.

“Pretty soon she couldn’t see my way of thinking, my way of understanding.”

“The correct way, you mean?”

“Yeah. Do you know what it’s like, Joe, to know you’re absolutely right about something-I mean, beyond any doubt-but you can’t get somebody else to agree with you? It’s not that they don’t understand, or that they don’t want to. They’ve become so used to doing the wrong thing that there couldn’t possibly be another way.”

“Get back to the point, Bob.”

“We ended up disagreeing, pretty quickly actually, and then we were arguing. In the end she started screaming at me to leave. I asked her to calm down, but she wouldn’t. Then she tried to call the police, so I had to stop her. She slapped me, so then I hit her back. Next thing I knew she was dead and I was standing over her naked body.”