Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

He went over to the cart. After a brief search through its contents, he replaced the bottle with something more to his liking. “It’s just they expect everything to be perfect.”

He sprayed. His finger followed the course of a drop running down the window. When McGee made no move to stop it, he sopped it up with his sleeve.

While he was distracted, she tried again to get away, but Darius caught up with her outside Mrs. Freeman’s office. Not at first realizing where she was, McGee turned and went inside. Then it was too late. She had to do something, but her mind was blank. Darius stood in the doorway looking at her, or looking past her. She couldn’t tell which.

“Cobweb.” He was pointing at a corner of the ceiling. “A cobweb.”

The silky thread was a high wire about a foot and a half long, passing from one wall to the other. McGee stared at it, enjoying the stretch it allowed her neck.

“You can use this,” he said, and his touch awoke her with a jolt. For a brief, blissful instant, she’d been able to forget he was there.

He stood behind her with a broom in his hands. He held it out to her, and when she didn’t take it, he extended it toward the ceiling. After several swipes, not a trace of the cobweb remained.

“Cobweb,” Darius said, pointing at nothing now. “Cob-web.”

McGee got to work on the blinds.

For the next hour they continued on this way, Darius talking, McGee looking for escape.

“At home I do a lot of the cleaning,” he said at one point. “Vacuuming, dishes. I don’t like to dust.”

She made no effort to listen, but it was impossible to tune him out completely.

“My wife cleaned for a while,” he said. “For work, I mean. But not here,” he added. “At the college. Just after high school. Years ago.”

He seemed especially interested in talking about his wife, and at first McGee found this sort of endearing. He told her how they’d met as children, how they’d been friends for a dozen years before finally marrying. But then he started in on their apartment and their neighbors, about a girl who lived upstairs. He had a lot to say about her, this girl, how she fought with her mother a lot, was constantly coming to see him. She was young, wore tank tops and stretch pants. She filled them out, McGee could tell, the way Darius’s eyes glazed over as he described her. He spoke of the girl as a nuisance, which was clearly contrary to what he actually felt, and McGee found it troubling that he would bother lying to someone he believed couldn’t understand him in the first place. But he was calm and soft spoken. He seemed happy just to talk, as if it were some form of therapy.

The files remained in the photocopier, and the thought of them nauseated her. McGee kept telling herself that if he didn’t leave, she would. The plan would be a loss, but she wasn’t about to let herself get caught.

Her savior, it turned out, was Darius’s partner, calling from the lobby to say Darius was needed downstairs.

Darius looked apologetic as he headed toward the elevator, as if this were a date they’d both be disappointed to end prematurely. “I’ll be back in a little while.”

The moment he was gone, she sank into one of the waiting room chairs, nearly numb with exhaustion.

Darius must have run out of time or found someone else to bother. He never came back, and McGee was able to return her cart to the basement without running into him. Without looking over her shoulder, she was cruising out the door, a cool sheath of paper cutting into her belly.

Over breakfast that afternoon, McGee gave April the details.

“You’re crazy if you’re thinking about going back,” April said. “What if he does it again?”

McGee had already wondered the same thing. “He probably does that to everybody,” she said. “He’s just lonely. There are forty floors and I don’t know how many people cleaning.”

“Is it worth the risk?” April gestured toward the manila folder McGee had left on the table, which contained Ruth Freeman’s files. “Was what you got that great?”

McGee lifted her empty cup and watched a few coffee grounds slide across the bottom. “Worthless.”

She’d spent the last several hours going through every page. Reports about budgets and memos about policy changes and personnel moves. It was the most boring pile of nothing McGee had ever forced in front of her eyes.

April sat silently across the table, looking as if she were afraid to speak.

“Two hundred pages,” McGee said. “Probably more. All completely useless.”

“What are you going to do?” April said in her tiniest voice, the one she reserved for her friends’ darkest moods.

McGee had been asking herself the same thing all morning. “Maybe I’m just not looking in the right place.”

§

By the end of her first full week, McGee had begun to develop a routine. There was a logic to cleaning. If she waited to dust until after she’d vacuumed, she ended up spilling filth back onto her clean floors. And trash bins were better emptied all at once. Collect them all — do that first, before exhaustion set in, and then dump the bags near the elevator. Otherwise she ended up carrying all that extra weight, hour after hour.

On her sixth night, Darius appeared as she was wiping down the conference room table. She wasn’t happy to see him, but she wasn’t afraid, either. By then she’d already done what she needed to: picked, copied, and returned. Three nights in a row now, she’d pulled it off, getting in and out of Ruth Freeman’s files without any trouble. Stealing, it turned out, was easy. The problem remained finding something worth taking. As with the first files she’d brought home, the stashes from the last two nights had been useless: memos and spreadsheets and mountains of meaningless data. If Ruth Freeman’s main job was obfuscation, she was incredibly good at it.

All night, as she cleaned, McGee’s thoughts had been returning to that conversation days before with April: what if there was nothing in this batch of files, either? Then she’d have to move on. There was no shortage of files. The main filing room was down the corridor from the photocopier, a space bigger than her whole apartment, row upon row of cabinets. In Ruth Freeman’s office, with its few drawers, McGee could copy everything. But confronted with an entire room of files, where would she even begin?

As usual, Darius announced his presence that night when her back was turned, as if hoping to catch her by surprise. “Here you are,” he said, leaning in the doorway.

As if she weren’t in the same place as always.

For a change, though, he didn’t seem especially happy to have found her. He looked tired, the jamb doing most of the work of keeping him upright.

She brushed past him, refusing to meet his eye. Out in the corridor, she began on the windows. He seemed distracted, watching without his usual enthusiasm. Next thing she knew, he was slumping down in the corner with a dramatic sigh.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “Violet—” He looked up pitifully, giving McGee a meaningful look, the meaning of which she made no effort to understand. She moved on to the next set of windows, wishing she could get even farther away. She’d had enough of Violet, the girl Darius liked to pretend was such a nuisance. His latest report, several nights before, was he’d finally told her to quit stopping by in her skimpy clothes. As if that were the problem, not Darius himself.

“I didn’t see her for two days,” he said now, trailing McGee with his eyes. “Two days,” he repeated, pausing, as if to allow time for applause. “I don’t know,” he said, pulling his knees to his chest. “I’d started thinking maybe everything would be all right.”