The Cleaner Read online

  The Cleaner

  Paul Cleave

  Paul Cleave

  The Cleaner

  CHAPTER ONE

  I pull the car into the driveway. Sit back. Try to relax. The day, I swear to God, has to be at least ninety-five degrees. Christchurch heat. Schizophrenic weather. Sweat is dripping from my body. My fingers are wet-rubber damp. I lean forward and twist the keys in the ignition, grab my briefcase, and climb out of the car. Out here, the air-conditioning actually works. I reach the front door and fumble with the lock. I breathe a sigh of relief when I step inside.

  I stroll through to the kitchen. Angela, I can hear, is in the shower upstairs. I’ll disturb her later. For now, I need a drink. I walk to the fridge. It has a stainless-steel door in which my reflection looks like a ghost. I open the door and squat down in front of it for close to a minute, making friends with the cool air. The fridge offers me both beer and Coke. I take a beer, twist off the cap, and sit down at the table. I’m no heavy drinker, but I knock this bottle back in maybe twenty seconds. The fridge offers up another bottle. Who am I to say no? I lean back in the chair. Put my feet up on the table. Consider taking off my shoes. You know that feeling? A hot day at work. Stress for eight hours. Then sitting down, feet in the air, beer in hand, and you take your shoes off.

  Pure bliss.

  Listening to the shower upstairs, I casually sip at my second beer of the year. Takes me five minutes to finish this one, and now I’m hungry. Back at the fridge and to the slice of cold pizza I spied on my first trip. I shrug. Why not? It isn’t as though I need to watch my weight.

  I sit back at the table. Feet in the air. The same thing works for pizza as it does for beer once you get those shoes off. Right now, though, I don’t have the time. I wolf down the pizza, pick up my briefcase, and make my way upstairs. The stereo in the bedroom is pumping out a song I recognize, but can’t name. Same goes for the artist. Nevertheless, I find myself humming along as I lay my briefcase on the bed, knowing the tune will be stuck in my mind for hours. I sit down next to the briefcase. Open it. Take the newspaper out. The first page offers up the sort of news that makes newspapers sell. Often I wonder if the media makes half this stuff up, just to inflate sales. There’s definitely a market for it.

  I hear the shower turn off but ignore it, preferring to read the paper. It’s an article about some guy who’s been terrorizing the city. Killing women. Torture. Rape. Homicide. The stuff movies are made of. A couple of minutes go by and I’m still sitting here reading when Angela, wiping her hair with a towel, steps out of the bathroom surrounded by white steam and the smell of skin lotion.

  I lower the newspaper and smile.

  She looks over at me.

  “Who the fuck are you?” she asks.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The sun is heading toward the horizon with only a few hours of life left today, it’s blinding her, making beads of sweat run down the inside of her dress and dampening the material. It glints off the polished granite gravestone, making her squint, but she refuses to look away from the letters that have been scripted across it for the last five years. The bright light is making her eyes water-not that it matters; her eyes always water when she comes here.

  She should have worn sunglasses. She should have worn a lighter dress. She should have done more to prevent him from dying.

  Sally clutches the crucifix hanging around her neck, the four ends of it digging hard into her palm. She can’t remember the last time she took it off, and she fears that if she did she would roll up into a small ball and just cry forever, spending the rest of her days unable to function.

  She had it when the doctors at the hospital gave her family the news. She held it tightly as they sat her down, and with their somber faces told her what they had told countless other families who knew their loved ones were dying but who still held out hope. It was hanging over her heart when she drove her parents to the funeral home, sat down with the funeral director, and, over tea and coffee that nobody touched, shopped through coffin brochures, turning the glossy pages and trying to pick out something her dead brother would look good in. They had to do the same for the suit. Even death was fashion conscious. The suits in the catalogs were photographed hanging on mannequins; it would have been in bad taste to have had them on happy-go-lucky people smiling and trying to look sexy.

  She has had the crucifix every day since, using it for guidance, using it to remind herself that Martin is in a better place now, that life isn’t as bad as it seems.

  She has been staring at the grave for the last forty minutes, unable to move. Fifty feet away a set of oak trees form a partial barrier between her and a small lake which she guesses must almost be right in the middle of the cemetery. A few months ago some bodies were found in that lake. Every now and then the nor’wester will snap one of the growing acorns from the branches and throw it onto a gravestone, the clicking sound like that of a breaking finger. The cemetery is an expanse of lush lawn broken up with cement markers and, at the moment, mostly deserted, except for a handful of people standing in front of gravestones, all of them with tragedies of their own. She wonders whether more show up during the day, whether the graveyard has peak-hour traffic. She hopes it does. She doesn’t like the idea of people dying and other people forgetting. The grass is longer than usual, and messy around the gravestones and trees. Even the gardens are overgrown. There used to be a caretaker out here who would regularly steer his riding lawn mower like a racing car through the rows of graves, but then he retired or died, she can’t quite remember which, and in the following months nature has been reclaiming the land.

  She doesn’t even know why she’s thinking such things. Caretakers dying, peak-hour traffic, people forgetting the dead. She’s always like this when she comes here. Morbid, all messed up, as if somebody has put her thoughts into a cocktail shaker and shaken the hell out of it. She likes to come here at least once a month, if likes is an appropriate word. She always, absolutely always, makes it here on the anniversary of Martin’s death, which is what today is. Tomorrow would have been his birthday. Or still is. She isn’t sure whether it counts once you’re in the ground. For some reason she can’t explain, she never comes here on his birthday. She’s sure it would induce the same result as if she were to take off her crucifix. Her parents made it out here earlier in the afternoon, she can tell by the fresh flowers next to her own. She never comes here with them. That is something else she can’t explain, not even to herself.

  She briefly closes her eyes. Whenever she comes here, she always ends up dwelling on what she can’t figure out. The moment she leaves, things will be better again. She crouches down, caresses the flowers sitting in front of the gravestone, then runs her fingers over the lettering. Her brother was fifteen when he died. One day away from sixteen. One day’s difference between a birthday and a death-day. Probably not even that. Probably only a matter of half a day. How can it make sense that he should die at fifteen, almost sixteen? The other people planted in this location average sixty-two years old. She knows that because she added them all up. She walked from grave to grave, plotting in the numbers on a calculator and then dividing them up. She was curious. Curious as to how many years Martin was cheated of. His fifteen-sixteen years on this earth were special, and the fact he was mentally handicapped actually was a blessing. He enriched her life, and her parents’ lives. He knew he was different, he knew he was challenged, but he never understood what the problem was. For him, life was all about having fun. What could possibly be wrong with that?

  She has never found any answers to her questions, not here, not even once she has walked away. In that, nothing will ever change.

  After an hour, she turns away from the grave. She wants to tell her dead brother about the man she works with, wh
o in many ways reminds her of Martin. He has a pure heart and a childlike innocence that is identical to Martin’s. She wants to tell her brother about this, but leaves without saying a word.

  She heads out of the graveyard thinking of Martin. Even before she reaches her car, the crucifix starts to take away her pain.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The newspaper no longer holds any interest for me. Why read the news, when I’m the one making it? So I fold it in half and lay it on the bed next to me. I have newspaper ink on my fingers. I wipe them on the bedspread as I study Angela. She has this look on her face as if she’s trying to digest some really bad news, like her father has just been hit by a car or she’s all out of perfume. I’m watching her towel. It’s sagging down her body. She looks pretty damn good standing there almost naked.

  “Name’s Joe,” I say, reaching toward my briefcase. I select the second-to-biggest knife I have clipped in there. A blade with a fine Swiss design. I hold it up. We can both see it. It looks bigger to her, even though I’m closer. It’s a perspective thing.

  “Maybe you’ve read about me. I’m front-page news.”

  Angela is a tall woman with legs that go all the way up. Blond hair, obviously natural, that comes down to meet them. She has a good figure with all the right shapes and curves that have brought me here. An attractive face that could be in magazines marketing contact lenses or lipstick. Blue eyes full of life and, at the moment, full of fear. The fear in her eyes excites me. The fear in her eyes suggests that yes, she has read about me, probably even heard about me on the radio and seen the stories about me on TV.

  She begins shaking her head, as if answering no to a whole lot of questions I haven’t even got to yet. Drops of water fly left and right, like it’s raining inside and horizontally. Her hair swishes behind her, the wet ends striking the walls and the doorframe. It flicks around onto the front of her face and sticks there. She’s walking backward too, like she’s got somewhere better to be.

  “What, w. . what do you want?” she asks. All the confident anger from her first question of who I was left around the same time she saw the knife.

  I shrug. I can think of several things I want. A nice house. A nice car. Her stereo is still playing that same song-our song now. Yeah. A nice stereo I wouldn’t say no to.

  But she can’t provide me with any of that. I wish she could, but life isn’t that simple. I decide to keep this to myself for now. There will be time for conversation later.

  “Please, please. Just. Leave.”

  I’ve heard this so many times I almost yawn, but I don’t, because I’m a polite guy. “You’re being a poor host,” I say, politely.

  “You lunatic. I’m calling the. . umm. . the police.”

  Is she really this stupid? Does she think I’m going to stand here while she picks up the phone and dials for help? Maybe I’ll sit back on the bed, do the crossword in my newspaper while they arrive to arrest me. I start shaking my head, like she was before, only with dry hair. “You could go ahead and try,” I say, “if the phone was on the hook.” Which it isn’t. I took it off while I was eating my pizza. Her pizza.

  She turns and makes a run for the bathroom at the same time I move toward her. She’s quick. I’m quick. I throw the knife. Blade over hilt, hilt over blade. The trick to throwing a knife is all in the balance. . if you’re a professional. If you’re not, it all comes down to luck. We’re both hoping for a bit of that at the moment. The blade brushes off the side of her arm and clatters off the wall onto the ground as she rounds the bathroom door. She slams it shut and locks it, but I don’t slow down, I just barge sideways into it. It barely rattles in its frame.

  I take a few paces back. I can always go home. Pack up my gear. Close the briefcase. Take off my latex gloves. And leave. But I can’t. I have an attachment to both my knife and my anonymity. That means I have to stay. Plus I’m an optimist at heart-I’m not one to give up on myself.

  She starts screaming for help. But the neighbors aren’t going to hear her. I know this because I did my homework before arriving. The house is far back on the lot and backs onto a field, we’re on the top story, and none of her nearby neighbors is home. It’s all about homework. To be successful, with anything in life, you need to do your homework. It just can’t be stressed enough.

  I stroll across the bedroom and select another knife. This one is the biggest. I’m about to head back to the bathroom when a cat walks into the room. Damn thing is friendly too. I bend down and pat it. It nudges my hand and starts purring. I pick it up.

  Back at the bathroom door I call out to her. “Come out or I’ll break your cat’s neck.”

  “Please, please don’t hurt her.”

  “The choice is yours.”

  So now I’m waiting. Like all men do when women are in the bathroom. At least she’s not screaming. I scratch Fluffy beneath her floppy neck. She isn’t purring anymore.

  “Please, what do you want?”

  My mother, God rest her soul, always told me to be honest. Sometimes it simply isn’t the right approach. “Just to talk,” I lie.

  “Are you going to kill me?”

  I shake my head in disbelief. Women, huh? “No.”

  The lock makes a definite twang as it disengages on the bathroom door. She’s actually going to take her chances with me rather than have her cat killed. Maybe it’s expensive.

  Slowly the door begins to open. I’m motionless, too amazed at her stupidity, which is increasing by the second, to actually move. When the door opens enough, I dump Fluffy on the ground. She lands in a pile of clumped fur, her head twisted sideways and her legs sticking out in every direction, trying to point to the reason why. Angela sees the cat but doesn’t get the chance to scream. I shove my body against the door, and she isn’t strong enough to hold me out. The door goes slack as she loses balance. She falls against the shower, and her towel falls from her hands.

  I step into the bathroom. The mirror is still fogged over with steam. The shower curtain has pictures of a few dozen rubber ducks all smiling at me. They point in the same direction and are uniform, as if they’re swimming off to war. Angela starts back with the screaming routine, which hasn’t done her any good so far and doesn’t do her any good this time. I drag her back into the bedroom, and I have to hit her a couple of times to get her to go along with the plan. She tries to stop me, but I have more experience at subduing women than she has at self-defense. Her eyes roll upward and she has the audacity to pass out on me.

  The stereo is still going. Maybe when all this is over I’ll take it home with me. I pick her up and dump her on the bed, then roll her onto her back. I move around the bedroom, taking down the photographs of her family from the walls, and turning down the others that rest on windowsills and shelves. The last one I look at is a picture of her husband and two kids. I guess he’s about to be granted full custody.

  The next step I take toward romance is placing my Glock automatic nine-millimeter pistol on the bedside table so it’s within easy reach. Nice piece. Bought it four years ago when I started work. Three thousand dollars it cost me. Black-market guns are always more expensive, but anonymous. I stole the money from my mother, who blamed neighborhood kids. She’s one of those crazy women who are afraid of using banks because she’s suspicious of bank managers. The gun is in case the husband comes home early. Or if a neighbor comes over. Maybe she’s having an affair. Maybe her lover is pulling into the street right now.

  My Glock is like a magic pill-it will cure all possibilities.

  I pull the phone from the wall. Tear the cord from the end of it. Use it to secure her hands. I don’t want her thrashing about too much. I tie her hands to the headboard.

  I’m just finishing tying her feet with her underwear when she wakes up. She notices three things at once. The first is I’m still here and this is no dream. The second is she’s naked. The third is she’s tied to the bed spread-eagled. I can see her checking these things off in her mind on this big mental list she has. One
. Two. Three.

  From there she’s noticing things that haven’t happened yet. Four. Five. And six. I can see her imagination running wild. The muscles are pulling in her face as she considers asking me a question. Her eyes are darting back and forth as she struggles to work out which part of me to focus on. Her forehead is shiny with sweat. I can see her gripping at levers in her mind, searching for the one to pull that will show her options. I watch her pull all of them, but the levers are just coming off in her hands.

  I show her my knife again. Her eyes come to a stop on the blade. “See this?”

  She nods. Yeah, she sees it. She’s crying too.

  I place the tip of the blade on her cheek and ask her to open her mouth. She becomes eager to help out when the blade starts to scratch her. Then, reaching over to my briefcase, I pull out an egg and slip it into her mouth. Cooperation comes easy once they find acceptance. The egg is nothing abnormal, just a standard unboiled egg. The thing about eggs is they’re high in protein. They also make great gags. “If you’ve got a problem with this,” I say, “just let me know.”

  She says nothing. No problems, obviously.

  I head into the bathroom, find her towel, bring it back out, and cover her face with it. I take my clothes off and climb onto the bed. She hardly moves, doesn’t complain, just keeps on crying until she can cry no more. When we’re done and I climb off, I find that at some point the egg has slipped to the back of her mouth, at which point it proceeded to choke her, successfully. This explains the gagging I heard and, at the time, mistook for something else. Oops.

  I shower, dress, and pack my gear together. The faces on the photographs lining the staircase watch me as I walk downstairs. I keep expecting them to say something to me or, at the very least, complain about something I’ve done here. When I get outside and away from them, I’m washed over by a warm flood of relief.