The Cleaner

by Paul Cleave

  We head for town. I can’t be bothered making conversation and she doesn’t seem that eager either, so I turn on the radio. There’s some crappy song on, but I don’t care enough to change stations. “Where do you want me to drop you off?”

  “Wherever.”

  Should I or shouldn’t I? I still don’t know. Killing her will get me my two thousand dollars; letting her live still offers her up as help should I need any more information. It’s nothing like the dilemma I had at the gay guy’s house, but it’s still a dilemma. What would God want me to do? He’d probably want me to smite the whore, but she’s too likable for that.

  I pull into an alleyway between a couple of shops, the headlights picking out dozens of cardboard boxes, chunks of white Styrofoam, and bags of trash. There are small puddles that have rainbows in them caused by exhaust fumes. I smile at her, lean over, and open the door like a gentleman. This woman has narrowed my list down to one suspect, and for that I’m truly grateful. She smiles back at me, and thanks me for a pleasant evening.

  “You’re welcome,” I say, and thirty seconds later, after her body lands on the cold concrete with a slight thump, I tuck the two thousand dollars into my jacket pocket. I wipe the knife clean on her short skirt, then lean back into the car.

  Always the gentleman till the end.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The money feels good inside my pocket. It makes me feel like I’m worth something, that I’m somebody important. The only thing I’m carrying that doesn’t feel so good is the guilt I feel about killing Becky. I can’t believe how quickly it’s hit me. It’s like snapping Fluffy’s neck. The only way I can balance the scales is if I’m driving home tonight and I come across a hooker that’s been hit by a car.

  As I back away from the alleyway, my headlights washing across her crumpled body, the pain starts to fade. By the time I get stuck at my first red light, I don’t feel bad at all.

  I try to figure out why Calhoun did what he did, and the answer is actually pretty simple. His problem was that sex with Becky the prostitute couldn’t live up to the fantasy he’d imagined. He thought he could quash his desire for rough sex by having it with Becky, but because he was paying her, and she was only pretending to be afraid, it took away the realism. Becky didn’t fear for her life, and Calhoun knew that. It may not have sunk in for a few days, or maybe longer, but in the end he was left needing far, far more. Daniela Walker gave him his fantasy. In the process he knew the differences between right and wrong, gambled with the consequences, and decided the risk was worth it.

  I don’t bother questioning why he would kill an innocent woman and pass up on the opportunity to kill the hooker, especially when the innocent woman was a harder target. It’s all part of the game, part of the fantasy. It’s a pure rush to be completely superior, so powerful, so unbelievably dominant. Following Daniela home, confronting her, breaking her, would have been one hell of an ego rush.

  The car has a weighty feel, but that’s because Candy version two, the four-hundred-dollar hooker, is lying in the trunk where I put her not long ago. I pull over outside the park where Melissa changed my life with a pair of pliers, and walk around to the back of the car.

  Candy’s short blouse is covered in blood. Her puffy eyes are open and staring at me, through me, and I wonder exactly what it is she’s trying to focus on. Her skin is so pale she looks as though she could have been locked in the trunk for the last six months. In contrast, her painted lips are a vivid red, the color of blood. I close the trunk.

  There are no lights on in any of the houses, and just under half of the streetlamps are busted. I can see the dark outlines of the trees in the park, but none of the details. No traffic. No pedestrians. No signs of life.

  I open the trunk and look down at the dead girl. With my hands gloved, I roll her body over. The pool of blood beneath her looks like oil. Again I look around. When I slammed the trunk on Candy earlier, she was alive. I slam it on her again, only this time she’s dead.

  I did not kill her.

  I walk back to the side of the car knowing there can only be one person who’s done this to me: Melissa. I’m not sure exactly when, or why. The same reason she came to my apartment and helped me with the injury. She’s playing with me. Toying with me. She’s setting something up of which I have no idea at all.

  I’m inside and just shutting my door when a movement to my right stops me. I twist my head to see an old man stepping out of the dark toward me.

  “My God, is that you, Joe?” He gets a few steps closer, and I give him a casual look up and down, as if I’m out shopping for victims. He looks in his late sixties-his gray hair is combed back at the front, but standing up at the back. His face is a collage of wrinkles that are long and deep. He wears glasses that are broken in the middle, and look to be held together with Velcro dots. They’re covered in a thin layer of dust, and I can’t pick the color of his magnified eyes. He’s holding a hand toward me, not quite pointing, but in a gesture that makes me aware he’s about to put his hand on my arm. The sad part is I’m about to let him. He’s wearing a flannel shirt and brown corduroy pants. He looks vaguely familiar. I say nothing. I’m in no mood for conversation.

  “Little Joe? It is you, isn’t it?”

  I strain my memory, and in that same moment his face seems to shimmer into focus, along with a name. “Mr. Chadwick?”

  “That’s right, son. My God, I can hardly believe it.” He starts shaking his head. “If it isn’t little Joe. Evelyn’s boy.”

  He offers me his right hand. For a second I imagine it sitting in my briefcase along with a small chunk of his wrist. I step out of the car and shake his hand, hoping he doesn’t pull me into an embrace.

  “How’s your mother, Joe?”

  I shrug. Mr. Chadwick has always been a nice enough guy, I suppose, once you get past the liver spots and wrinkles, and he certainly seems pleasant enough at the moment. At his age, he must contemplate death quite a lot. I ought to ask him.

  “She’s fine, Mr. Chadwick.”

  “Call me Walt.”

  “Sure, Walt. Mom’s just Mom, if you know what I mean.”

  “She still doing those jigsaw puzzles?”

  “Yep.” Standing outside of my car, I begin to shiver. A quick glance upward at the covered stars suggests there may be more rain on the way. If so, it’s going to ruin my plans.

  “She’s been doing those as long as I remember.”

  “Yeah, she really likes her puzzles.”

  “I bet she’s good at them too. Damn good.”

  “So, um, Walt, what brings you out so late?”

  “I’m walking my dog,” he says, showing me the leash.

  I look around. “Where is he? In the park?”

  “Who?”

  “Your dog, Walt.”

  He shakes his head. “No, no. Sparky died two years ago.”

  I have no answer for that. I do my best to think that he’s joking, but I’m pretty sure he isn’t. I start nodding slowly, as if I completely understand. He starts nodding slowly too, mirroring me. A few more seconds go by before he speaks.

  “What about you, Joe?”

  “I’m just driving. You know how it is.”

  “Not really. I don’t drive anymore. Haven’t since the stroke. Doctors tell me I’ll never drive again. You know, Joe, I must catch up with your mother. Boy, she’s some woman. They don’t make them like that anymore.”

  Don’t make them insane? Yeah, they do, Walt. I shrug and say nothing.

  “What are you doing with yourself these days, Joe?”

  “I sell cars.”

  “Really? I’m in the market for a car,” he says, confusing me since he just said he can’t drive anymore, and perhaps he’s confusing himself too. I’m desperate to know whether he saw the corpse in the trunk. “Where do you work?”

  “Umm. .” I struggle for a name, “Everblue Cars. Heard of it?”

  Slowly he nods. “Fine establishment, that one, Joe. You must be pr
oud.”

  “Thanks, Walt.”

  “That one of yours there?” He nods toward the car.

  “Yeah.” Walt is a witness. Nice old Mr. Chadwick. “Want to take a ride?”

  “For sale, is it?”

  “Yep.” I take a stab at the price. “Eight grand.”

  He whistles. Like people do after you’ve quoted them a price. The whistling is one step away from tire kicking.

  “Gee, that’s cheap,” he says, and tries to kick the nearest tire, but misses.

  We climb into the car. I do up my seat belt and Walt works on his. He starts whistling again, all the time he’s looking at the dashboard, air-conditioning, and radio controls.

  “You know, Joe, I haven’t seen your mother since your dad died.”

  I envy him.

  “That was a real tragedy,” he adds, sounding upset.

  I find myself nodding. I want to tell him that I thought it was a tragedy too. I want to tell him how it hurt when Dad was no longer with us, how I just wanted him to be alive, but I say nothing. “Yeah,” I manage, keeping my voice under control.

  “Did I ever tell you how sorry I was?”

  I have no idea what in the hell he told me back then. What anybody told me. “You did. Thanks.”

  He opens his mouth, but says nothing. He seems to be thinking. “How are you coping these days?”

  “I’m over it,” I say, not bothering to mention how empty life became without him.

  Now it’s his turn to start nodding. “That’s good, Joe. When a man takes his own life, his family can be a mess for years. Thank God you’ve come out of it as a nice young man.”

  I’m still nodding. When Dad killed himself, the only thing I felt like doing at first was joining him. There were hundreds of questions, but the biggest one was Why? Mom knows, I’m sure of it. Just as I’m sure she’ll never tell me. The second why is just as important: why did he leave me alone with Mom?

  “She still got the place in South Brighton?”

  I stop nodding. I’m thinking of Dad and feeling depressed. I know Melissa is watching me, but for the moment I don’t really care.

  “Yeah.” I start the car. “Shall we take her for a spin?” I ask, needing to change the subject.

  “Sure, Joe.”

  We watch the city go by. Life has wound down in this part of the world. We spot only a few other cars on the road. We pass a service station with a police car parked outside and two officers standing over a man they have handcuffed laying facedown. Walt makes conversation about the car and the weather, and tells me that his dead dog keeps running away.

  “My God, who would have thought I’d run into Evelyn’s son? You know, Joe, I’ve known your mother more than forty years.”

  “Really.”

  “We’re both single now. Single and old. Isn’t life sad?”

  “Sad,” I agree.

  I stop north of the city, turning into a long stretch of road just before the highway where a thousand trees block our view in every direction. Out here, we’re all alone. Out here, I can do what I want.

  “Maybe I’ll give your mother a call tomorrow, invite myself around for dinner.”

  Keeping one hand on the wheel, I reach behind the passenger seat and open my briefcase.

  “Something I can get for you, Joe?”

  “No. I’m fine.”

  “Your mother and I knew each other quite well before she met your father. Did you know that, Joe?”

  “No, I didn’t know that, Walt.”

  “Would you mind if I called her? I wouldn’t mind getting to know her again.”

  The opportunity knocks so loud I actually drop the knife. Candy’s in the trunk of the car, but Walt doesn’t know she’s there. He couldn’t. He’s too damn old to make sense of anything even if he had seen her, and he’d be blabbing on about her, asking me a whole bunch of questions. I close my briefcase. If I let Walt live, he’s going to spend time with my mother, and that’s time she won’t be able to devote to me.

  “What are you smiling about, Joe?”

  “Nothing. You want to drive back, Walt?”

  “No, son, I’ll let you do the driving.”

  I drive back toward town. We pass the same trees. Same service station with the same police car parked outside only now the handcuffed guy is in the back of that car. Walt talks the entire way, touching on subjects that I’m still too young to care about. Things about diets and diseases and loneliness. He tells me about my mother, delves into a past that existed before she met my father. Walt speaks so much that I can see why he got on so well with my mother, having the ability to turn nothing into something even less interesting. His sentences flow from one to the next, and mixed in there in those same breaths are directions to his house. The house is small and well kept. It’s obvious Walt’s dead dog doesn’t crap all over the lawn.

  “I’ll call your mother tomorrow morning,” he says, leaning back into the car and smiling at me.

  “I think she might like that. Give her somebody to talk to. I think she has issues more in her age group that I can’t relate to, like pensions and cancer.”

  He gives me a knowing nod, his eyes twinkling a little. “Evelyn,” he says, more to himself than to me, then he turns and heads up the pathway to his door.

  I pull away and head south. I turn on the stereo and sing loudly. After ten minutes, I pull the car off to the side of the road beneath a bank of trees. The grass, burned dry from the last few months of hot sun, has been sheltered enough by the trees to keep most of the day’s rain off. I study the body again, hoping that I might be able to learn something from it, or more likely, that Melissa has left me a message. I shift the corpse slightly. Deep cuts smile at me. Dark red flesh gleams from beneath thick flaps of skin. I have a good idea what caused the wounds. I wrestle Candy from the car, careful not to get blood on myself, and dump her on the ground, which reveals the murder weapon in the bottom of the trunk.

  My knife.

  Or, to be more accurate, a photograph of my knife.

  Seeing this leads me to a couple of conclusions: one, Melissa is definitely stalking me, and two, I’m in serious trouble. The knife has my fingerprints on it, as does my gun.

  I remove a red plastic container full of gas and set it on the ground.

  Just what game is Melissa playing? If she were going to give the weapons to the police, she would have done so by now. That means she wants something else. And I’m sure she’ll let me know soon enough.

  I dump Candy back into the trunk. Her hands are still tied, her mouth gagged. Both those are my doing. I wonder what she thought when she was desperate for help and a woman came along and opened the trunk. It was the end of things going badly for Candy. It was the end of everything.

  I roll her onto her side in an attempt to fit her back in nicely, but finish with one of her legs sticking out. When I slam the trunk down I break her ankle. She doesn’t mind.

  I decide to leave the trunk open. I shake the container back and forth, listening as the gas inside sloshes around. It’s about a quarter full. I use what’s there to soak Candy’s clothes, then toss the container in there with her. I reach into the car for my briefcase and use a knife to cut away Candy’s blouse. Once I pop the gas cap on the side of the car, I stuff the blouse inside, leaving a tongue hanging out.

  The car’s cigarette lighter does the job.

  I am most of the way back into town when I remember the cat. There is nobody to see me as I steal my second car for the evening.

  Jennifer smiles at me when I walk through the door. She looks at me as if we’re long-lost friends. “Hi there, Joe,” she says, her voice sounding seductive.

  “Hi.”

  She waits for a few seconds, checking to see if that’s all I’m going to say. “I’ll just get him for you.”

  “Thanks.”

  I’m picturing how Melissa would look in a studded dog collar when Jennifer brings the cat out in a small cage.

  “I didn’t thin
k you wanted to take him,” Jennifer says, “after last week.”

  “Last week?”

  “When I rang to give you an update, you said you didn’t want any more cats. How many have you got?”

  “Last week?” I repeat.

  Her smile disappears and is replaced with one of caution. “I called you last week.”

  “Oh. I was sick last week, really sick. To be honest, I don’t even remember you calling. I was in bed all week. I don’t know what the hell it was I had, but I was pretty delirious. If you called and I was a bastard or something, I’m really sorry.” Though she’s the one who ought to be feeling sorry-I’m the one with a missing testicle. Her caution turns to sympathy. “Are you okay now?”

  “Getting better. The strange part is that I don’t even have any cats.”

  She smiles, and I wonder why I must keep being nice to people. Why can’t I just take her somewhere and do to her what I’ve been doing to everybody else?

  “Well, you’ve got one now. What are you going to call him?”

  “I haven’t really given it any thought. Any suggestions?”

  “Maybe we could figure one out over coffee?” she offers.

  “I didn’t know cats drink coffee,” I tell her.

  She smiles, then stops smiling, and looks a little confused.

  “What do I owe you for the cage?” I ask, figuring it wouldn’t look good if I pulled a plastic bag out of my pocket and stuffed the cat inside. I bet the cage is going to add a good chunk to what is already an expensive mammal.

  “Can I trust you to bring it back?”

  “I’m a trustworthy guy.”

  “Then it costs nothing.” She smiles. “You want a lift home, or have you got a car?”

  A lift home would be good, since it would give me a chance to test a few things out that haven’t been used since my half castration. But my name’s on record here, and it wouldn’t take long for the police to come.

  I thank her for her offer, promise to bring the cage back before the week is out, and ask her to call me a taxi.

  The cage moves around beneath my grip. The taxi driver makes some comment on the cat, figuring he can strike up a conversation with me. He figures wrong. When I get home I put the cat in the bathroom and shut the door. When I go to bed, I can hear it crying. Tomorrow I’ll buy it some food and myself some earplugs. Then I’ll show it around my apartment.