The Cleaner

by Paul Cleave

  She thinks about Joe, and what a nice young man he is. She’s always had the ability to see people for what they really are, and she can tell Joe is a wonderful human being. Though most people are, she thinks, since they’re all made in God’s image. She wishes there were more like Joe, though. Wishes there was more she could do for him.

  When the elevator comes to a stop, she steps out, ready to smile, but the corridor is empty. She makes her way to the end of the hallway and walks through the door marked Maintenance. Inside, the room is full of neatly kept shelves on which are several varieties of hand and power tools, different types and sizes of wooden beams, metal beams, spare panels of suspended ceiling, spare floor and wall tiles, pottles of adhesive and grease, jars full of screws and nails, clamps, a spirit level, various saws, different types of everything.

  She moves over to the window and picks up the glass of orange juice she set there twenty minutes earlier, just before rushing downstairs to say good morning to Joe. She isn’t sure why she made the effort. Probably because of Martin. She thinks about Martin more than ever over these two days of the year, and that has somehow led her to start thinking of Joe. People outside her family did very little to help Martin. Some, and she thinks about the kids at school, went out of their way to make life hard for him. It was the same for all the kids who were different. It will always be the same, she thinks, as she sips from her orange juice. It’s warmer than she would have liked, but the taste still makes her smile.

  She finishes her drink, then moves over to a large box full of cardboard-wrapped fluorescent tubes jammed tightly. She takes two out, one for this floor, the other for the ground floor. While she replaces the first blown tube, she remembers how Martin’s disability changed her own life. Growing up with him, she had the idea that she wanted to become a nurse. She wanted to be able to help people.

  She had spent the last three years of her life, until six months ago, at nursing school. It was difficult to decide exactly which path she wanted to follow, whether to work in a hospital, in a retirement home, or whether to help those who were mentally challenged like Martin and Joe. There were plenty of options, but she never got the chance. Martin died, and that made wanting to help people harder to do. There were too many diseases out there, too many viruses. You could live life the best you could, do the right things, make the right decisions, and still be struck down by something you were born with that had been biding its time. There were simply too many ways to die, and she didn’t want to see that happen to people she knew she would become attached to.

  The other factor was her father. Two years ago he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, which quickly led to him losing his job. Since then the disease has advanced. He can’t work, and his weekly benefit payments aren’t enough to cover the medical bills. She didn’t have the luxury of completing her studies. Her family needed her, not only to help look after her father, but to help them survive. She had to earn money. She had to help them get through this. She couldn’t afford to keep studying.

  Her father had a friend who was a full-time maintenance worker at the police station, a friend who was getting older and needed an assistant who would one day replace him. Sally took that job, and now, six months later, she even has his desk and view.

  She catches the elevator down to the ground floor; the entire trip down she thinks about Joe, and she thinks about what she can do to make his life better.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The police station is ten stories of nothing-going-on, made from concrete block and bad taste. My office is small, perhaps the smallest in the whole damn building. Still, it’s mine, I share it with nobody, and that’s the most important thing.

  I dump my briefcase on the bench, walk to the window and look out to the city beyond. Hot out there. Warm in here. Warm and stuffy. This is great weather not to be working in. Women walk the streets wearing skirts and tops made from nearly nothing. On a good day, from up here, you can see right down their tops. On a really good day, you can see nipple. By the end of the day, all these women are hidden away. They’re scared they might be the next victim plastered across the news. The nighttime air has a charged feeling of fear, and it isn’t going to change anytime soon. They do what they can to pretend nothing bad can ever happen to them.

  I turn from the window and undo the top button of my overalls. My office consists of a bench that stretches the length of the room-about thirteen feet-along the same wall as the window. The other half of the furniture is a chair. Stacked around the office are paint tins and plenty of rags, brooms, and cleaning solvents, which sometimes give me a headache. There are buckets and mops, tools, cables, spare shelving, spare parts, spare lots of things. The office is well lit because it gets the sun most of the day, which is just as well, because fewer than half of the four fluorescent lights in the ceiling actually work. I keep forgetting to get Sally to replace them, and when I do remember, I’m afraid to ask her. I’m sure she has a crush on me, which is normal for most women, but creepy when it comes to someone like Sally.

  Because my office has faulty air-conditioning and a window that doesn’t open, I have an electric fan that sits on the desk and whirs noisily when turned on. Next to it is a coffee mug with my name stenciled on it. A well-thought-out gift from my mother. On the end of my bench is a framed photograph of Pickle and Jehovah that I gave to myself last Father’s Day.

  I grab the bucket from the corner of my room, pick up the mop from next to it, and head for the air-conditioned third floor. Then I walk into the even cooler men’s bathroom. The smell of disinfectant forces me to breathe through my mouth for fear of passing out.

  “Hi there, Joe.”

  I turn to see a man who is trying to hide his geekiness with a handful of hair gel and a half-grown mustache. “Morning, Officer Clyde,” I say, setting the bucket on the floor.

  “Beautiful morning, Joe, ain’t it?”

  “Sure is, Officer Clyde,” I answer, agreeing with his outstanding perception and thinking he’d get on well with Bus Driver Stanley. I stare at the wall, trying not to glimpse his small dick as he finishes taking his long leak. He bends his knees as he zips up, as if he needs all the momentum he can muster to close his fly. He doesn’t wash his hands.

  “Have a good day, Joe,” he says, pitying me with a smile.

  I start filling my bucket with water. “I’ll try.”

  He winks at me and at the same time uses his fingers to imitate a gun, and then shoots me while clicking his tongue as he leaves. The bucket full, the cleaner added, I throw the mop back and forth across the toilet floor. The linoleum soon glistens and becomes a health hazard. I set a plastic sign on the floor that has the word Caution, states that the floor is wet, and has a picture of a red stick figure slipping, about to crack open his perfectly round stick-figure head.

  I’ve been working here more than four years now. Before that, I was unemployed. I remember killing somebody, I can’t remember his name, but he was my first. Well, kind of my first-there was that one kid back in high school, but I don’t like to think about that one. This guy I do consider to be my first was Don or Dan or somebody, I think. What’s in a name? I killed him when I was twenty-eight years old. It was a time in my life when the fantasy of wondering how it would feel blended with a desire that became a need to know. The fantasy wasn’t as good as the reality, and the reality was much messier, but it was an experience, and they say practice makes perfect. Ron or Jim or Don or whoever must have been somebody important because two months after they found his body, a fifty-thousand-dollar reward was posted. I’d only found a few hundred dollars in his wallet when I killed him, so I felt cheated. Like God or fate was mocking me.

  I began getting nervous. Agitated. I needed to know if the police were close to catching me. I couldn’t help it, the desire to see where the investigation was kept me without sleep for those two months. I could feel myself cracking up. Every morning I would wake up and stare out at my shitty view, wondering if this was the last time
I’d get to see it. I started drinking. I ate badly. I became such a desperate wreck that I did the boldest thing I’ve ever done: I came down to the police station to “confess.”

  Detective Inspector Schroder dealt with me. It was the first time I met him, and within seconds I wasn’t scared because I was too smart to be scared, and much smarter than any cop. I had left no evidence-burning the body had destroyed any DNA I had left behind, and dumping the burned carcass into a river washed away whatever was left. I was pretty confident I knew what I was doing. Would I do it again? Definitely not.

  Two of them sat me inside a small interrogation room. The room had four concrete walls and no view and smelled of chewing gum and sweat. In the center were a wooden table and a couple of chairs. There were no potted plants. No paintings. Just a mirror. The legs on the front of my chair were slightly shorter, and I kept sliding forward, which was pretty uncomfortable. A tape recorder sat on top of the table. I clean that room once a week now.

  I started off by saying I’d like to confess to the murder of that woman who was killed a few months back.

  What woman, sir?

  You know. The dead one with the reward.

  That was a man, sir.

  Yeah, I killed him. Can I have my money now?

  It wasn’t hard for them to doubt my story, and when I pushed for the reward, saying I had earned it by killing him, and then used the word outside to describe where I had stabbed my victim, my Slow Joe act was cemented. As I turned from Hannibal Lecter to Forrest Gump in a matter of seconds, I learned the police had no suspects at all. I didn’t get any reward, but I was given coffee and a sandwich. That night when I got home, I slept like a rock. The following day I felt like a new man. I felt fantastic. When I came back to “confess” again, this time to a murder I knew nothing about, they took pity on me. I was a nice guy-they could see that; I was merely looking for attention in the wrong places. When one of their cleaners “happened” to disappear, I applied for and was given this job. Because of government regulations in a world trying to be as politically correct as possible, departments all over the country have a quota to fill when it comes to hiring people who are fucked either physically or mentally. The police seemed happy to hire me since they figured a cleaner didn’t need to know much more than how to run a vacuum cleaner and dunk a mop in water. It was either me, or go through the employment lottery where they’d have to choose some other disabled guy.

  So now I’m the harmless guy who waltzes up their hallways with brooms and mops, a minimum-wage lackey. But at least the sleepless nights are a thing of the past.

  It generally takes me an hour to clean the toilets. Today is no different. When I finish I go through to the women’s toilets and do the same, hanging a sign on the door first to say that cleaning is in progress. Women never come in here while I’m cleaning. Maybe they think the red stick figure they see on the sign is a pervert. When I’m done I empty the contents of the bucket, then store it and the mop back in my office. I grab a broom and slide it back and forth down the corridors and around the cubicles, heading toward the conference room. When I get inside I don’t need to make myself invisible because I’m the only one in here. The day’s work has begun. Leads have been found. Evidence to follow. Prayers go unanswered.

  I lean my broom against the door. The conference room is pretty big. To my right, a window the width of the room overlooks the city. To my left, a matching window looks into the fourth floor. At the moment the view is only of thin, gray, venetian blinds, which have been pulled closed. In the center sits a long rectangular table with several seats around it. In the past this room has been used to interview suspects because it looks intimidating. What happens is hundreds of photographs are hung up, stacks of paper are piled against the walls, and officers walk past the window carrying files before popping in to whisper something to the detective doing the interview. The murder weapon is nearby so the killer gets a good look at it, and he soon feels they have more than enough information on him. He cracks under the pressure. In the corner, alongside the window, is a huge potted plant. I take special care when watering it.

  I step up to the wall of photographs-pictures of victims and crime scenes have been pinned to a long corkboard. Pictures of the latest victims, Angela Durry and Martha Harris, are up there, making a total of seven bodies over the last thirty weeks. Seven unsolved murders. It only took two for the police to make the connection, even with the different MO. Modus operandi. An MO is what’s similar about the way two or more crimes are committed-the same gun, the method of breaking in, the way he confronts his victim. This is different from a signature. A signature is what a killer needs to do for fulfillment-he may need to masturbate over the body, or follow a script, or force his victim to participate. An MO is upgradable. The first time I broke into a house I smashed a window. Then I learned if you put duct tape over the glass, it doesn’t shatter and make as much noise. Then I learned how to pick locks.

  A signature isn’t upgradable. A signature is the whole point of the murder. It’s the gratification. I don’t have one because I’m not like those sick perverted bastards who go around killing women out of a sexual need. I do it for fun. And that’s a big difference.

  Of the seven unsolved murders, only six are mine. The seventh has been tacked onto my lot because the police are inept. It’s strange how things in this world have a way of balancing themselves out; one woman I killed has never shown up. And where is she?

  Long-term parking. I dumped her body inside the trunk of her car, drove into town, grabbed a ticket for a parking building, and left the car on the top floor. It’s very rare that the building is so full that cars reach the top floor. I wrapped her body in plastic, figuring it would stop the smell for maybe a day or two. Three, if I was lucky. If I was really lucky, nobody would go up there for maybe a week.

  She was the second of my seven, and she’s still there now, with the wind gusting through the exposed top floor and dissipating the scent. The chances are high that nobody has even been up there.

  I would never have thought to look in the trunk, Detective Schroder.

  I still have the ticket as a memento. It’s hidden beneath my mattress at home.

  When I first started out it seemed to me that dumping the body was the way to go. That quickly evolved, though, because in all the other cases somebody ended up finding them anyway, and the first place the cops went after identifying them was to their houses. All I was doing was putting myself to extra work. Well, live and learn, I guess. I decided to start leaving them in their homes.

  The woman in long-term parking isn’t among the faces looking at me. Instead a stranger looks out from the lineup. Number four in the allotted seven. I know her name and I know her face, but until her picture was pinned up I’d never seen her before. She has been up there for six weeks now, and every day I pause to look at her features. Daniela Walker. Blond. Pretty. My type of woman-but not this time. Even in death her eyes sparkle out from her corpse like soft emeralds. She has both a pre- and post-death photograph. At first Detective Inspector Schroder didn’t want me coming in here because of these pictures. Either he simply forgot after a while, or he just doesn’t care.

  The picture of Daniela Walker in life shows her as a happy thirtysomething, two or maybe three years before her death. Her hair shimmers over her shoulder as she turns toward the camera. Her lips are parting in a smile. Her picture has been on my mind every day since it has been up here. And why?

  Because whoever killed her pinned her murder on me. Whoever killed her was too scared to take the credit, so rather than try and get away with it in his own clever fashion, he gets away with it by using me. All without my permission!

  I keep looking at her picture. One in life. One in death. Green eyes sparkling in each.

  For the last six weeks I’ve thought of little other than finding the man who did this to us. Can it be that difficult? I have the resources. I’m smarter than anybody else in this department, and that’s not j
ust my ego talking. I scroll my eyes over the victims. Look at them closely. Fourteen eyes staring at me. Watching. Seven pairs. Familiar faces.

  Bar one.

  A ring of deep bruises form a necklace around Daniela Walker’s throat from strangulation. They aren’t consistent-ruling out a scarf or a rope-and look like they were formed by knuckles. More pressure can be applied with knuckles than fingers. It’s also harder to defend against. The problem with strangulation is it takes four to six minutes to complete. Sure, they give up struggling within the first, but the pressure needs to be kept on for at least another three to starve the body of oxygen. That’s three minutes I could be using for something better. Using knuckles increases the chances of crushing the victim’s windpipe.

  Beneath the corkboard is a set of shelves, and on top of these are seven piles of folders-one per victim. I head over to them. It’s like looking at a menu and already knowing in advance which item to choose. I walk to the fourth pile and pick up one of the folders from the top. Every detective on the case has one of these folders and the spares are here for anybody who becomes assigned.

  Like me.

  I unzip the front of my overalls, stuff it down my front, then zip them up again. Back to the wall of the dead. I smile at the latest two. This is their first morning here in the assembly. No doubt they were pinned up last night. They don’t smile back. Angela Durry. Thirty-nine-year-old legal executive. She suffocated on an egg. Martha Harris. Seventy-two-year-old widow. I’d needed a car. She had caught me taking hers.

  I take my spray bottle and rags and move to the window. I spend five minutes cleaning it, staring beyond the streaks and my reflection at the world outside to the little people walking among the little streets. I spend some quality time with the plant. I replace the microcassette tape from the audio recorder I have hidden in there, careful to touch the recorder only with the rags. I tuck the tape into my pocket. I still have a job to do, and I head back to my office to grab the vacuum cleaner, then return and use it to clean up.