The Introvert

by Michael Paul Michaud

  “Just the one bedroom?” asked the inspector.

  “Yes.”

  “May I see it?”

  “Of course.”

  I showed it to him and he looked in the bathroom and then he’d pretty well seen everything except for the closets, so we went back out to the main room, which was connected to the kitchen.

  “So this is the dog?” asked the inspector as Molly ran up and rubbed up against his leg as he bent down and scratched her neck.

  “That’s Molly,” I said.

  “Jasmine,” said the inspector.

  “What’s that?”

  “Her name was Jasmine,” said the inspector. “We talked to the deceased’s sister and she said that the dog’s name was Jasmine.”

  “Jasmine,” I said. I liked that name and thought that maybe Molly would like it if I went back to calling her Jasmine, but then I thought it might be confusing so I decided to just keep calling her Molly.

  “Did she say if she wanted her back?” I asked.

  “She didn’t mention it,” said the officer.

  Molly was now rubbing up against the officer’s leg though, unlike the inspector, he hadn’t knelt down to scratch her.

  “Why don’t you sit?” I said.

  We sat in the main room. I sat on the green chair that was going to be Donna’s green chair as soon as I replaced it and they sat on the couch. The inspector looked at me but the officer only looked around the room.

  “I wonder if you’ve thought of anything new?” said the inspector. “Anything new since we last talked?”

  I told him that I couldn’t say anything more.

  The inspector smiled and did seem genuinely friendly, which was somewhat surprising, given that he suspected me to be involved in these very serious matters, but the fact that he could remain pleasant seemed very professional of him in my opinion.

  “We have been doing some digging,” he said. “Just a bit of digging into your past.”

  “Yes?” I said.

  “You are quite right, both your parents have passed on due to cancer. Awful disease. Simply awful.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  I wondered how they would have found that information, but then figured it was their job to undercover facts like that and didn’t think anything more of it.

  “And we checked out some other things. Where you went to college. Your employment history. Nothing out of the ordinary, really.”

  “That’s good,” I said, but it also felt like the inspector was leading up to something more and by then the officer had stopped looking around the room and was looking directly at me and I started to feel nervous for the first time.

  “Nothing as an adult,” he said. “Nothing at all as an adult.”

  He looked briefly at the officer then back at me.

  “But as a youth. That is something very different. Six different schools despite living in the same city?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Can you explain that?”

  “I was young when I was in school,” I said.

  “Yes, I’m sure that you were. But do you know why you would never stay at the same school for more than one or two years at a time?”

  “I couldn’t say. I’m sure there are records for that.”

  “Yes--an interesting thing about youth records,” said the inspector. “They are sealed up tighter than--well, let’s just say that they are sealed.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said.

  “No, no, I wouldn’t expect you to. But then I thought that if I just asked you what might be in those records, that you, being a very straightforward and cooperative fellow, as you have been, you might just be willing to tell us about it. As much as you remember, at least?”

  “It was a long time ago,” is all I said.

  “Mm-hmm,” said the inspector.

  I knew most of the incidents that were probably in the records. They would have been incidents like when I stuck the stick into the kid’s eye or stabbed the girl in the neck with a pencil, but I figured these things would probably just make me seem more guilty to them, even though they were from many years ago and had nothing to do with either man that I’d killed, and I didn’t think it would be fair so I decided not to tell them.

  “I really don’t know,” I said. “I guess you could ask the school.”

  “We did,” said the officer. He hadn’t spoken for several minutes and had a rather annoyed look on his face.

  “If you would just tell us what you remember?” prodded the inspector.

  It occurred to me that they were fishing for whatever they could, and I realized they really had no evidence to connect me to any of this, so I figured if I just kept my mouth shut that they probably would never be able to connect me to either one of them and this made me feel much better.

  “I really don’t remember much from school,” I said. “Except that it was boring.”

  “The landlord,” said the inspector. “There’s still been no word from him?”

  “No,” I said.

  “What do you think about that?” he said.

  “I think that the owner needs to replace him because my sink is still broken.”

  The inspector looked at me quizzically after I said that and said, “How do you know he’s not coming back?”

  I felt my neck getting red because I was suddenly very nervous and uncomfortable, and I think maybe Molly was able to sense it because she started to bark and then this just made me more uncomfortable and I could see the inspector still staring at me waiting for my answer and that’s when I remembered the seventh rule of The Company Culture Handbook which was to “Always Diffuse Discomfort” so I got up and moved to the sink and invited them to come see how no water came on when I lifted the faucet but then I immediately regretted it because I was now showing them the precise scene of the second murder and I started to worry I’d missed a splotch of blood or bone or there might be some evidence I didn’t appreciate but then I figured by then it was too late.

  The inspector followed me over and I saw him looking strangely at the floor and then I realized that he was noticing how clean the floor was in that area because I’d had to use so much bleach there to scrub out the blood that had come out of the landlord’s head.

  “Why is the floor like this?”

  I opened the cabinet doors beneath the sink and showed him how it was constantly leaking water there and how I often had to wash that area so maybe that was why it was like that.

  He knelt down and ran his finger along the floor.

  “Smells like bleach...”

  “I suppose it should. I used bleach there.”

  “Why would you use bleach to clean spilled water?” asked the inspector.

  “Sometimes the water is dirty,” I said, and it was the truth.

  “We could have a team here, you know?”

  “A team?” I asked.

  “A forensics team,” he said.

  “I’m sure you could,” I said, because I was satisfied that he was not lying to me.

  “And do you think we’d find any trace of the landlord here if we did? Any blood or hair?”

  I knew he was asking me just to watch my face and see my reaction and it made me a little more nervous, but then I thought of how absurd it all was and I couldn’t help but smile, and I could see this wasn’t the reaction he was expecting or hoping for because I saw him look over at the officer and now they both seemed annoyed.

  “Is something funny?” said the inspector.

  “I was just thinking that you probably would find some evidence of the landlord because he’s been here to fix my sink before. If your team is good they would probably find something, but if they’re not good then I suppose maybe they wouldn’t.”

  “Yes,” said the inspector. “I suppose not.”

  “In fact he’s been all through this apartment since I’ve been here. There might be traces of him all over.”

  “No doubt,” said the inspector, and again he
looked at the officer and with a similar look of annoyance.

  Then he stuck his head under the sink just as the landlord had when he’d asked me for the flashlight and twice asked me for the wrench. The officer was standing beside me so I knew I couldn’t attack the inspector without being attacked myself by the officer, but since I had no feelings to see the inspector red and open, I figured it wasn’t an issue.

  “How long has it been like this?” he asked.

  “For weeks,” I said.

  “And why didn’t you ask for it to be fixed sooner?”

  “Before it just leaked. Then the landlord disappeared.”

  He pulled away from the sink and then stood back up, clapping his hands together to clean them.

  “Very unfortunate for you,” he said.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “The timing of his disappearance. Very unfortunate, because now there’s nobody to fix your sink.”

  “Yes, it’s unfortunate,” I said. “I hope he returns soon.”

  The officer’s face turned red and it seemed as if maybe he wanted to see me red and open, but instead the inspector ushered him to the door where he put the hat back on that I thought was a fedora.

  They both stepped from my door before the inspector suddenly turned back to me.

  “You know, we never found the tools.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “The landlord. Apparently he had a toolbox. We never have been able to find his tools,” said the inspector.

  “I see.”

  “Let us hope that the new landlord brings his own tools, if you ever hope to have your sink fixed,” said the inspector, then he tipped his hat that I still thought was a fedora and they both left.

  CHAPTER 21

  I was feeling pretty good the next day because I sold seven vacuums, which was an awful lot, and Donna hadn’t put any of them through to my phone line, which meant that I had worked hard for all of them and that there shouldn’t be any reasonable apprehension of bias from the other salesmen.

  It was also public knowledge by then that Donna and I were seeing one another and that was fine because Jeff and Gary and the rest had finally stopped ogling her, at least in my presence.

  But the biggest news from that day was the fact that a man had shown up at the police station to confess to the murder of the missing landlord. It was on the evening news that I was watching after dinner, and it said that a man had confessed to attacking the landlord for some unknown slight and then tossing his body into the river.

  There was a short news clip that showed the inspector speaking at a press conference behind a podium. It wasn’t much of a press conference, and he was still wearing the hat that I thought was a fedora, only I wasn’t so sure anymore because I’d started paying attention to hats in shopping windows and in magazines and since there were so many names and styles of hats, it’s possible that I was mistaken all along. He had a very serious look on his face and he said that there was still further investigation required to “verify this man’s account of things,” which was to say that the inspector didn’t believe him and thought that the man was crazy, and he was probably right, given that I knew the man was confessing to a murder that he didn’t commit.

  The police dragged the river for the next three days but they didn’t come up with the landlord, and it would have been awfully strange if they had managed to, given that I’d left bags of him in something of a landfill by the junkyard.

  Donna asked me what I thought about it and I just told her that “it’s hard to know why people do the things they do,” and I said this because it was true, but also because I didn’t really want to talk about it and that seemed to work because she didn’t mention it again.

  I met the new landlord when I got home and he was much younger and chubbier than the old landlord, but he was also very friendly to me and shook my hand and his breath didn’t smell of alcohol and when I told him that I was happy to see a new landlord because my kitchen faucet didn’t work he said he’d fix it while I was at work tomorrow and I immediately liked the new landlord.

  ***

  At work the next day I’d sold two vacuums before being called into Mr. Peters’ office shortly before lunchtime.

  I sat in the seat across from him after he shut the door and then he took a seat behind his desk. From there he just looked at me with a curious look and I figured that he wanted to talk about Donna again, only I didn’t mind because I was thinking about how my kitchen sink was getting fixed that day and might even have been fixed already.

  “I’ve got something to confess,” he said.

  It occurred to me that there’d been a lot of talk and thought about confessions and so it really got my attention when he said it.

  “If you want to confess, perhaps you should speak to a policeman?” I said.

  Mr. Peters stared at me from behind his desk and his eyes looked even more serious than usual, but then all of a sudden he started laughing like I’d never seen him laugh before, and it was as if I’d said or done something really funny, but since I hadn’t done anything but sit down in the chair, I concluded that it must have been from what I’d said, and though it wasn’t meant to be a joke, he must have taken it as one, so I waited for him to stop laughing and finally he did.

  “Is this about Donna?” I said.

  He got the serious look back into his eyes.

  “Have you been talking to human resources again?” I asked.

  He seemed confused and took a moment to answer and finally shook his head and said, “No--no, not at all,” and I believed him.

  He leaned forward and put his elbows on his desk, which meant that he was about to say something really serious, so I listened closely, not that I hadn’t been listening before.

  “You remember when we were last in here? With Donna?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I received a phone call not much more than an hour after that. From an inspector at the police department.”

  “I see.”

  “He was asking me some questions--questions about you.”

  He didn’t say anything more, so I asked him, “What kind of questions?”

  “Oh, just regular stuff. How long you’ve been working for us. What sort of a person I think you are. That sort of thing.”

  “The inspector asked this?”

  Mr. Peters nodded.

  “And what did you tell him?”

  “What could I tell them, really? Fact is, I don’t know you all that well. You’ve always been sort of an odd duck, you know? I told him that you’re not exactly a walking pom-pom, but that you don’t cause any trouble, either, and that’s all a boss can ask for. That you’re quiet and shy-like. That you mostly keep to yourself. That you’re pretty much an introvert.”

  I didn’t say anything else and so he asked, “Aren’t you curious?”

  “Curious about what?” I said.

  “Aren’t you curious why a police inspector is calling me and asking questions about you?”

  “I suppose that is something to be curious about,” I said, and even though it wasn’t exactly an answer to his question, he told me anyway after a short pause.

  “At first he didn’t say why, and I didn’t much feel it was my business to ask, but then as it went along I guess I got a little more brave, so I asked him what it was all about, and he finally told me that you were one of the last people to see some man who’d gone missing and that it was their duty to check up on everyone who had recently been in contact with him.”

  “He was my landlord,” I said. “The man who went missing.”

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t know what the hell to make of it all, but I figured I better keep it to myself and now that someone has come forward to confess to this man’s murder, I put two-and-two together and voilà. So now I don’t mind telling you because I guess it doesn’t matter anymore. Anyway, sorry I had to keep it from you. But you can understand, it being what it is.”

  “I unders
tand,” I said, but really I was just thinking of how “voilà” could be reconfigured to spell “viola” and then I started thinking about Donna again and was wondering when she would help me to achieve it again and Mr. Peters kept talking.

  “Maybe you are an odd duck, but that doesn’t make it right for them to be casting suspicion on you like that. Especially with something as serious as that.”

  “They’re just doing their job,” I said.

  “Well, I’d like to think that I’d be as understanding as you about it but I can’t say that I would be.”

  “I’m just glad someone has confessed,” I said. I said it because it was true.

  “Well, I’m glad it’s all settled anyway. And to think we were just worrying about an office relationship. Goes to show how quickly the paradigm can shift.”

  A paradigm shift wasn’t actually part of The Company Culture Handbook but was general company jargon for how something that looked one way at first could look very different once you looked at it from another angle. Mr. Peters was saying that my office relationship with Donna looked bad to him until an inspector from the local police force called to ask questions about me and a missing person and how quickly he realized that an office relationship was not such a big deal as he’d originally thought when comparing it to cold-blooded murder.

  The company was always shifting the paradigm with its employees, too. If it was dreary and rainy outside, they would tell us that it was a great time to call people and sell vacuums because there was nothing to do outside that day and people would just be waiting at home with all the time in the world to speak with you about the latest healthy technology and discuss the advantages of buying a new vacuum system. But then the next day, if it was sunny and beautiful outside, they would tell us that it was equally a great time to call people and sell vacuums because if they answered their phones it showed that they weren’t interested in doing anything outside and if they weren’t going outside on such a gorgeous day then it must mean they’d be happy to stay inside and speak with you about the latest healthy technology and discuss the advantages of buying a new vacuum system.