The Cleaner

by Paul Cleave

  Ten minutes later I leave the conference room as I found it-only tidier and without as many files. I wheel the vacuum cleaner into the supply room on the other side of the floor and start vacuuming. Nobody is around so I do the Boy Scout thing and stock up on a few more pairs of gloves-not that I’ll be killing anybody tonight. I don’t suffer from compulsions to kill all the time. I’m no animal. I don’t go running around venting childhood aggressions while looking for excuses to kill. I’m not itching to make a name for myself or gain the notoriety of Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer. Bundy was a freak who had a following of groupies during and after his trial, and he even got married after he was sentenced to death. He was a loser who killed more than thirty women, but he got caught. I don’t want fame. I don’t want to be married. If I wanted fame, I would kill somebody famous-like that Chapman chap who loved John Lennon so much he shot him. I’m just a regular guy. An average Joe. With a hobby. I’m not a psychopath. I don’t hear voices. I don’t kill for God or Satan or the neighbor’s dog. I’m not even religious. I kill for me. It’s that simple. I like women, and I like to do things to them they won’t let me do. There have to be maybe two or three billion women in this world. Killing one every month or two isn’t a big deal. It’s all about perspective.

  I grab some other stuff. Nothing major. Gear officers are always taking. Nothing anybody will notice gone. Nobody notices anything around here. The supply room is good like that. It supplies. No reason for it not to supply me. I look at my watch. Twelve o’clock-lunchtime. I head back to my office. The tools and the cords and the paint-this gear I don’t get to use. All I do is clean. Everybody here thinks I have the IQ of a watermelon. But that’s okay. In fact, it’s perfect.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  My chair is uncomfortable and my lunch isn’t that great. With several nice sights out the window, I lean over and look at the women out there as prospective lovers. Should I go down there? Find where one works? Where she lives? Then, one night, find her in between those two places?

  Men and women are walking back and forth, treating the warm afternoon street like a singles bar. Women dress like whores and take offense when men stare at them. Men dress like pimps and take offense when nobody notices. I use the two-inch knife to cut into my apple, small drops of juice spraying out. I slice it into sections. I’m chewing them while picking a target. My mouth waters before taking each bite.

  Of course, I can’t go down there. I have other things to do now, a new hobby. What sort of guy would I be if I picked up a new hobby and dumped it after only an hour? I’d be a loser. The sort of guy who can’t finish what he starts. And that’s not me. I didn’t get to where I am by never finishing anything.

  My thoughts are interrupted by a knock on my door. Nobody ever comes here while I’m eating lunch, and for the briefest of moments I’m sure the police are going to burst in and arrest me. I start to reach for my briefcase. A moment later the door swings open and Sally is standing there, making me think I need to put a lock on that door.

  “Hi, Joe.”

  I lean back. “Hi, Sally.”

  “How’s the apple? Is it nice?”

  “It’s nice,” I say, though I’m quickly losing my appetite now. I jam a slice of it in my mouth so I don’t have to make more conversation. What in the hell could she want?

  “I made you a tuna sandwich,” she says, closing the door behind her and heading over to my bench. My office has only one seat and I’m in it. I don’t offer it to her because I don’t want her to stay. I take the tuna sandwich from her and smile at her, showing my fake gratitude along with a mouthful of apple. She offers me the kind of smile that suggests she would sleep with me if only, please God, if only he would ask. But I’m not going to ask. Her tuna sandwiches are always pretty good, but not that good. I swallow my piece of apple and take a huge bite of tuna and bread.

  “Yummy,” I say, making an effort to have crumbs spill from my mouth. Just because Sally is an idiot doesn’t mean I can drop the Slow Joe act around her. I can never, never let anybody-not even Fat Sally-get an idea just how intelligent I really am.

  Sally leans against the bench and looks down at me as she takes a bite out of an identical sandwich. I guess that means she’s planning on hanging out here for a bit. She keeps smiling at me as she chews. Crumbs don’t fall out of her mouth, but if they did it might help her lose a bit of weight. I can’t remember ever seeing her without that stupid grin on her face. She talks to me as I eat my lunch. Tells me stuff about her mom and dad, about her brother. She tells me it’s his birthday today, but I don’t bother asking how old he is. She tells me anyway.

  “Twenty-one.”

  “You doing anything to celebrate?” I ask, since it’s expected of me.

  She starts to say something, then pauses, and I realize she’s going through one of her simple/special people routines where she has to think things through, starting with whether or not she even has a brother, and if he really is twenty-one today. Women may be from Venus, but nobody knows where the hell people like Sally come from.

  “We’re just having a simple thing at home,” she says, sounding sad, and I guess I’d be sounding sad too if I had to have a simple family celebration at home. She reaches for the crucifix hanging from her neck. I’ve always found it ironic that retarded people can not only believe in God, but think He’s a pretty good guy. The crucifix has one of those bulky soldered-on metal figures of Jesus, and this Jesus looks to be in pain-not because he’s been crucified, but because his head is permanently cast downward forcing him to look down Sally’s top.

  I can feel the minutes slipping away. The file is still in my overalls. I want Sally to leave me alone, but I don’t know how to say it. I start on the second sandwich she gave me. She tries to include me in her conversation by asking about my own family. I don’t have anything to offer on that subject, other than my mother is nuts and my dad is dead, and that neither of those things is ever going to change, so I keep it to myself. Then she asks how my day has been going, how yesterday went, how tomorrow is going to be. It’s as bad as talking about the weather-it’s all conversational filler I couldn’t be any less interested in.

  After twenty minutes of chewing really slowly and nodding at the same pace, of having my stomach itch from the edges of the file, Sally finally straightens up and leaves, throwing a Be seeing you soon at me on the way out the door. As soon as she is gone, I pull the file from my overalls and lay it on the bench. I never used to be nervous with what I brought in here to look through, but now I am. Sally could come back in, but I figure she wouldn’t understand what she was looking at, so it’s safe for me to carry on. Carefully, like an archaeologist opening a just-uncovered gospel, I open the cover. The first thing I see is Daniela Walker. She looks up at me with eyes open and neck bruised. I pull the photo out and lay it faceup on my bench. It’s only one in a series of ten. Not all of them are of her, though most are.

  I lay them side by side in a row like I’m playing some freak game of solitaire with creepy playing cards. She looks at me from four of the photographs, and in the progression it seems her skin gets grayer. Time codes on the pictures suggest they were taken over the course of an hour, so she may well have been changing color. In fact, in the last picture, her twinkling green eyes no longer twinkle. They have taken on the texture of spoiled plums. The other six photographs are of the bedroom from varying angles.

  According to notes in the file, another one hundred and twenty photographs were taken-quite the portfolio-and these pictures detail many of the items in the house, as well as the rooms. The catalog of those photographs is specific: door, stairs, bed, furniture, smudges on the handles. Anything and everything.

  I look hard at the pictures, but see nothing. So I look at them harder. I’m trying to imagine myself inside her house. It’s hard, because the pictures I have were all taken in the bedroom. The natural insight I was waiting to experience from my own experience doesn’t come along.

  I glance through t
he report. She was found by her husband, her entire body draped by a sheet. Did her killer feel bad at what he’d done? Was covering her an act of decency?

  I read the toxicology report. It takes most of my lunch break to decipher that the ten-page report says only that I’ve just wasted my time, that there were no drugs in her system. Or any alcohol. Or any poisons.

  The postmortem is an even longer report, but less complicated. It makes for easy reading, and I know how it’s going to end even before I finish it. It reveals in an exceptionally unenthusiastic manner what Daniela went through, probably because the pathologist has seen it all before and has got bored with it. The report comes with pre-illustrated diagrams of the female body and its anatomy, and the pathologist has used these to point to where and what was damaged during her ordeal. There were no traces of semen. A condom was used. Her pubic hair had been combed and washed by the killer, removing any hair and skin cells he would have left behind. This isn’t something I’ve been doing, and I won’t do it now-even though it isn’t such a bad idea. It indicates her killer is far from crazy, and has an insight into police forensics.

  There were extensive bruises in all the places where there ought to be bruises, and she suffered two cracked ribs. She was punched once in the eye and once in the mouth. There were other, older injuries there-some as recent as two months before she died. Injuries that had not been reported. Injuries, in the opinion of the pathologist, consistent with being beaten. So Daniela was used to what she was getting. Cause of death: strangulation.

  The rest of the postmortem is both standard and uninteresting. It’s like reading a mechanic’s report about fixing a car. The body was fully dismantled and tested. The weight of the organs. The size of her brain. Detailed references to photographs taken during the autopsy take up two pages-photos of her hands, of her neck, of her feet. I don’t bother with any of this.

  DNA was found at the scene. No fingerprints. The killer used latex gloves, like the type I wear. A residue from the gloves was left on the door handles from the tips of his fingers. Also there was plenty of residue all over the victim. The only prints found were latent smears on her eyelids, but these were only partial and too badly damaged to be of any use. That’s the beauty about human skin-it’s one thing fingerprints struggle to stick to. They did find hair, though, in other places. And carpet fibers. And shoe prints. So far they have narrowed them down only to the husband who found the body, and the officers and detectives who worked the scene. It’s impossible to keep a crime scene free of any contamination. In order to do that, the room would need to be inside a large plastic bubble that nobody would ever be allowed to go inside to collect the pristine evidence.

  The police have their own DNA databases of their people who go to scenes. This way they eliminate evidence left by their own men and women. Next, they take blood from the victim’s family, friends, and neighbors, until they narrow the field right down. Last night, I left plenty of evidence behind: saliva on the two bottles of beer, carpet fibers, hair. But I have no criminal record. Nothing to match my name to these samples. So I’m a free man.

  Whoever killed Daniela may have a criminal record. The evidence I leave behind ties my killings together. I don’t know whose decision it was to include Walker among those women, but it was a bad one. Lunchtime is nearly over. I’m still hungry. No eggs today. I keep studying the autopsy report. Her fingernails were clipped after death, so it seems she scratched her killer. I’ve been scratched several times, never in the face, though, and I don’t mind because that would be like a chef complaining about getting burned or a crash-test dummy complaining about being dumb-it comes with the job. I just never roll my sleeves up until those scratches are gone. I’ve never even thought about clipping their nails afterward to hide the evidence. Why would I cut the nails from this victim and wash her pubic hair, and not any of the others? How can the police really toss this death into the same mix?

  I put the photographs and files into my briefcase, along with the microcassette tapes from the conference room, lock it, and leave it on the bench. I head up a floor, where there are more rooms and fewer people and no conference room. I repeat the same procedure up here with my mop and my vacuum cleaner. Say hello to everybody. Everyone smiles at me as if I’m their best friend.

  I do my job and I do it well, and I finish it at four thirty, earlier than anybody else. This enables me to catch an earlier bus home. I say hello to those I pass on my way out, and they tell me to have a nice night. I tell them I intend to. Sally calls out a good-bye, but I pretend I can’t hear her.

  Christchurch is buzzing with life. Traffic blocks the roads. Pedestrians block the sidewalks. I walk among them and none of them knows who I am. They look at me and all they see is a man in overalls with a happy-go-lucky look about him. Their lives are in my hands, but I’m the only one who knows it. It’s both a lonely and a powerful feeling. A little bit of the day’s heat has ebbed away, but not much. There’s still going to be sun for a couple of more hours. I start to think about what I might want to do tonight. I reach the bus stop. I wait for only a few seconds with a bunch of nondescript people I could kill right now if I wanted to before the bus shows up. As usual, my briefcase is in my right hand, my ticket in my left. I hand it over.

  “Hi there, Joe.” She gives me a big smile.

  “Hi, Miss Selena. How are you?”

  “Very well, Joe,” she answers, punching my ticket. “Missed you yesterday, Joe.”

  I couldn’t exactly catch the bus to Angela’s house. “I was late, Miss Selena.”

  She hands back my ticket. I study how she moves, how she sounds, the way her eyes look me up and down. She smells like soap and perfume and makes me think of other women I’ve been with. Her shoulder-length black hair is slightly damp, and I can only assume she has showered with seeing me in mind, and since I’m in the process of assuming that, I like to assume she was in pretty good spirits as she soaped herself down. All that assuming makes the front of my overalls go a little tight. Her olive skin gives her a slightly exotic look, and she talks with an accent that’s erotic. She has a nice tight body and firm skin. Her dark blue eyes look into mine, and they see me differently from how Mr. Stanley sees me. He sees a defunct personality caught inside a healthy body. Miss Selena sees me as a man who can satisfy her. Her fingers deliberately brush against my hand. She wants me. Unfortunately, I like her too much as a bus driver to indulge her. Perhaps I’ll wait until she changes jobs.

  I walk down the aisle. The bus isn’t packed, but I’m forced to sit next to some young guy dressed as a punk. He looks like he couldn’t make conversation about the weather unless it included beating the shit out of a weatherman. He’s dressed entirely in black, with a black studded collar around his neck. He has red hair, spikes in his nose, and faucet washers stretching his earlobes. Another regular citizen of this fine city. A chain runs from his lower lip to his throat. I consider pulling on it to see if I can flush his mind. His T-shirt says Don’t worry, I know the hymen maneuver.

  It’s five thirty when I get home, by which time the front of my building is in complete shade. Somebody has tipped over some trash bins, so the sidewalk right outside is covered in old food and lawn clippings, and the old food and lawn clippings are themselves covered in flies. I climb the steps to the top floor and the first thing I do when I get into my apartment is open the window, then the second thing I do is close it because something out there smells bad.

  I turn on an electric fan that looks just like the one at work and, I must confess, actually came from work. I open my briefcase on the sofa, take out the microcassette tape, and listen to it while I change out of my overalls. The tape contains nothing interesting. Inside the conference room they admit to themselves they have nothing. Outside to the media, they have several leads.

  I stifle a laugh and toss the tape back into the briefcase. I’ll swap them again tomorrow.

  I sit on the sofa and watch my goldfish. I give them some food and they swim up and
start eating. Five-second memories or not, they always recognize food. They also recognize me. When I put my finger on the edge of the bowl, they follow it. I sometimes think that society would be great if we all had five-second memories. I could kill as many people as I wanted. Of course, maybe I wouldn’t remember that I liked killing people, so maybe it wouldn’t be that great after all. I could be right in the middle of tying somebody up when I’d forget why I was there. A five-second-memory society would just be full of awkward moments like that.

  When Pickle and Jehovah have eaten and are back into their happy routine of swimming around and around, I lock up and head downstairs, keeping a tight grip on my briefcase.

  I walk a few blocks, studying all the cars parked along the side of the road. Fifteen minutes later I’m driving to the address on page two of the folder I picked up earlier. I’m in a Honda that’s ten years old and has the aroma of cigarette smoke stained into the seats and carpet, but despite that it’s a pretty nice ride. I find them easier to steer without the weight of a body in the trunk. I drive slowly past Daniela Walker’s house. It is a two-story town house that looks like it was built only yesterday-bright red brick, dark brown steel roof, aluminum window framing. I’m surprised there’s no price tag hanging off one of the corners. The garden is looking scruffy, not that it’s very extensive: a few shrubs, a couple of baby trees, clumps of flowers that have wilted in the sun. No price tags on those either. The driveway is paved with paving stones. A pathway to the front door is cobbled with cobblestones. The lawn is dry and long. The mailbox is full of circulars. A garden gnome with painted red pants and a painted blue shirt is lying on its side in the garden. It looks like it’s been shot.