The Cleaner Page 11

  I find Hutton’s cubicle and sit down. He’s a big guy, and the ass groove in his reinforced office chair reflects this as I try to get comfortable. At forty-eight years old, he’s a candidate for a heart attack, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he has already had several minor ones. The only exercise I’ve ever seen him do is chew junk food. I feel nauseous just sitting in his chair. I also feel like I’m putting on weight.

  I turn on his lamp. Staring at me is a name plaque sitting on his desk, probably a gift from his wife. It says Detective Inspector Wilson Q. Hutton. I don’t know what the Q stands for. Probably queer. I look at the photographs of his family that he’s pinned to the inside wall. His wife has similar weight issues, but her problems don’t end there. The hair on her arms and legs, and the small splashes on her face, look like wool. The couple looks happy together. I cross his name off the list and flick off the lamp. Mr. Doughnut didn’t do this. It isn’t possible. He would have come close to dying just chasing the victim up those stairs, and I doubt his ability to gain an erection-something the killer repeatedly used. Though he must have used one at least twice: there are two overweight children in the photographs.

  Nine people left.

  I push the chair back into the position it had been in, which isn’t hard to find. The carpet is nearly worn through where the casters normally sit. So is the floor beneath it. I move into the opposite cubicle.

  Detective Anthony Watts has been with the police department for twenty-five years, a detective for the last twelve. I’m considering him as my next suspect as I sit down and flick on his lamp. There’s a photograph here. Watts and his wife sharing a happy moment together. Jesus, these people get happy and some prick has to take a picture as proof.

  Once again I begin to see things for what they are. Watts has that wrinkled look that comes with being sixty. He has gray hair, but not a lot of it left. I’m trying to imagine him having the strength to fight Daniela, let alone strangle her, but I can’t do it. So I try to imagine him raping her in the way she’d been raped. Can’t see him doing that either. Watts just doesn’t have it in him. Daniela didn’t have him in her.

  I cross him off the list. Turn off his lamp. Push his chair back into place.

  Eight suspects. I’m beginning to enjoy myself.

  The center aisle, once it reaches the end of this floor, branches into a T formation. I go left, directly to Detective Shane O’Connell’s cubicle.

  Here I don’t even bother sitting down. O’Connell, a forty-one-year-old detective with the ability to solve cases that involve signed confessions and not much more, broke his arm three weeks before the murder. His arm had been in a cast when Walker was killed. Even if he did have the strength to do this, there were no suggestions of plaster fibers found on the body or on the bed.

  Seven suspects.

  The next stop and two cubicles along for me is Detective Brian Travers. I slip in and flick on his desk lamp. No photographs of family here-all I’m seeing are swimsuit calendars. This year’s, last year’s, and the year’s before that. I can well understand his hesitancy in throwing away the old calendars.

  I flick back through last year’s calendar. Look at the date Walker was murdered. He hasn’t marked anything on it. I flick through an old desk calendar and see the same thing. There isn’t any note saying “Kill bitch tonight. Buy milk.”

  I open the desk drawers and rummage around. Look through files, folders, any scrap piece of paper, but there is nothing here relevant to the case. I find nothing to suggest his guilt. Or his innocence. I listen to his phone messages with the volume turned down low. I tip back the trash can under his desk, but it’s empty.

  Travers is in his midthirties. He has a lean and strong body. Just under six feet, he has the type of casual good looks that easily attract women and could get him off on a rape charge with the He’s so clean cut he could have any woman he wanted defense, which juries still fall for. He doesn’t have a wife, and if he has a girlfriend, unless she’s Miss January, he hasn’t put up any pictures of her.

  I put a question mark next to his name.

  Still seven suspects.

  I continue on my merry way and sit down behind the desk of Detective Lance McCoy. I start out with the same procedure I used in Travers’s cubicle. McCoy is in his early forties, married, with two kids. The photograph telling me all this sits in a small frame on his desk, center stage. Other pictures hang on the walls of his cubicle. His wife looks ten years younger than him. His daughter is quite attractive, but his son looks like a moron. McCoy is a dedicated family man, I can tell just by sitting here in his extremely tidy cubicle. Small mottoes are pasted around the place, on coffee cups and notepads and plaques: Work to live not live to work, and Sloppiness leads to a path of depression. I look for but can’t find one that says The only good bitch is a dead bitch, so I can’t have him as my lead suspect. I can’t find any notes that he’s made on the case. I put a small question mark next to his name.

  Seven suspects. Isn’t this supposed to be getting easier? I check my watch. It’s nine thirty-five, but my internal clock tells me it is only eight thirty, so something must be out of whack. When I enter Detective Bill Landry’s office-yes, an office, not a cubicle-I confirm that my watch spoke the truth. Like Schroder and many of the other detectives, Landry is involved with trying to solve other crimes and finding other killers. A few months ago bodies were found in a lake in a cemetery, making me not the only serial killer in town-which, I have to say, is actually pretty annoying. It would have been great to have been the only one, just as it would have been great to have been the first. Before recently, the country had only ever seen one serial killer, and that was a guy who had a thing for killing prostitutes, and that was twenty years ago, a guy by the name of Jack Hunter who the media called “Jack the Hunter,” a cute allusion to Jack the Ripper.

  Of course being the optimist, I can also see the positive side of there being another serial killer on the loose. It keeps the police busy.

  Landry has been helpful by making a list of notes that point out how different the Walker scene is from the others. He wouldn’t do that if he were the killer. In fact his notes have the word copycat at the top of the first page, with a ring around it and a question mark next to it.

  I cross Landry off my list. Then I head back up the center aisle and directly to Detective Superintendent Dominic Stevens’s office. Fumble with the lock. Eight seconds.

  I close the blinds and use the small flashlight I’ve brought along with me. Sneaking around in Stevens’s office is far more obvious than sneaking around the cubicles. There’s a copy of a report he has written for his superiors on his desk. It explains in detail where the investigation is, which, in simple terms, is nowhere. It explains the running theories, while adding his theory that Daniela Walker was killed by somebody different. He recommends a separate investigation into her death. If Stevens is the killer, he sure as hell wouldn’t do that. I cross him off the list.

  Five suspects left, and I’m starting to get the bad feeling I could end up crossing all of them off over the next few days, that I’m overlooking something.

  When eleven o’clock rolls around I decide it’s time to go. I catch the bus toward home, but get off a half mile or so before my street hoping a walk in the fresh air will help clear my mind. It’s a beautiful night. There’s a nor’wester blowing like a cure for anybody feeling down. Same nor’wester that irritates everybody else. Weather’s great like that.

  But I’m not interested in making a forecast.

  Ahead of me are more long days and plenty of late nights, so I hit the sack the moment I get inside. I realize I didn’t call Jennifer about the cat, but that can wait. Right now I’m just too busy falling asleep.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  At two minutes past eight I’m sitting on the edge of my bed covered in sweat. For the first time in years, I’ve dreamed. Though the sensation wasn’t entirely unpleasant, the dream certainly was. I was a policeman, investigating mys
elf for murder. Attempting to coerce a confession, I played good cop, bad cop. Yet I wouldn’t give in. Instead I suggested and then mimed a rather lewd act to myself, which was followed by a demand for a lawyer. When a lawyer did arrive, it was Daniela Walker. She looked exactly as she had in her photograph. The bruises around her neck were like a string of black, deformed pearls. She never blinked, not once, her glazed-over eyes staring at me the entire time. Her only words were to tell me to confess to her murder. She repeated them over and over like a mantra. I was confused and confessed to a whole bunch of murders. Then the walls of the interrogation cell slid away as if I were in a game show, revealing a court of law. There was a judge and a jury and a lawyer. I recognized none of them. There was even a band. One of those old swing-time bands with guys dressed in suits. They were holding up freshly polished brass instruments but none of them were playing. Even with a guilty plea on offer, there was still a jury, and the jury found me guilty. So did the judge. The judge sentenced me to death. The band started playing the same song I’d heard on Angela’s stereo, and as they played, the two businessmen I saw on the bus yesterday rolled in an electric chair. I woke just after the clamps of the electric chair locked my arms and legs into place.

  I can smell burning flesh even now as I sit on the edge of my bed. This is the first time my internal alarm clock has ever let me down. I close my eyes and try to push the big buttons inside to reset it. Why did I dream? How is it I’ve slept in? Because I’m trying to do something good? Could be. I’m trying to give Daniela Walker’s family closure, and that doesn’t feel right. I must suffer for my humanity.

  I don’t want to miss my bus, so I skip breakfast. Can’t make myself lunch either, so I toss some fruit into my briefcase, then race out the door. I don’t even have time to feed my fish. The day is overcast and muggy. Warm and lethargic. This is worse than a sun-shining-hot day. I’m already sweating by the time Mr. Stanley refuses to punch my ticket.

  I walk down the aisle and sit behind the same businessmen who were in my dream, making me suspect for a moment that I’m still in it, and I watch the walls of the bus to see if they give way to another court of law and another swing-time band. They don’t. The businessmen are already talking loudly. Business this. Money that. I begin to imagine what they do in their spare time. If they’re not sleeping with each other, they’re probably married to women who are having affairs. I doubt they would have the courage to dump their bitches if they found out they were being cheated on. And I don’t mean divorce.

  Sally is waiting for me outside the police station. No shimmering heat today. Just wet heat, helped by the thick clouds above that are light gray over the city, but black out to sea. Still no signs of rain, though. Sally looks as though she’s trying to figure something out, as if she knows me, but can’t place exactly who I am. Then her face brightens and she reaches out and touches me on the shoulder. I don’t feel the need to pull away.

  “How are you, Joe? Feeling up to another hard day at work?”

  “Sure. I like working here. I like the people.”

  She seems about to say something, then closes her mouth and opens it again. She’s fighting with something, and ends up losing the battle. Her arm falls back to her side.

  “I’m sorry, Joe, but I didn’t get to make you lunch today.”

  I’m not sure whether she makes the lunch, whether she buys it, or whether her mom makes it for her not knowing it’s for me, but when my face sags a little at the news, it’s genuine. “Oh. Okay, then,” I say, not knowing what I’m going to do. No breakfast. No made lunch. Just some crappy fruit in my briefcase to last me all day. Why the hell did I think two days of her bringing me food was the start of a pattern?

  “It’s my dad’s birthday today.”

  “Happy birthday.”

  She smiles. “I’ll pass that along.”

  The air-conditioning is working in the foyer. One day it does, the next it won’t. The old maintenance worker who used to work here must have died: I haven’t seen him for a while. Sally used to work for him, doing things like grabbing rags and washing tools. The sort of thing that warms people’s hearts, seeing the trolley-pushers of this world given a low-paying, shit-eating job that gives them a place in society.

  “What did you do before you came to clean here, Joe?” she asks.

  “Ate breakfast.”

  “No, I mean a few years ago, before you started this job.”

  “Oh. I don’t know. Not much. Nobody wanted to give somebody like me a job.”

  “Somebody like you?”

  “You know.”

  “You’re special, Joe. Remember that.”

  I remember that the whole way up to my floor in the elevator, and I keep remembering it as I say good-bye to the woman who didn’t bring me any lunch today. Even when I ignore the conference room and go straight to my office I keep thinking about how special I really am. I have to be, right? That’s why I’m down to five suspects and the rest of the department is throwing darts at a phone book.

  Five suspects. Travers, McCoy, and Schroder are the local three. Then there are the two that have come from out of town-Calhoun and Taylor. These two are going to be the harder ones to figure out. Calhoun has come from Auckland, and Taylor from Wellington. I’m still doubting Schroder is the guy after the speech from yesterday morning, but I can’t be hasty. And I think I have a way to cross Travers off my list. But until then all five of them will have to remain suspects.

  The day drags on, the daily routine cometh. I spend it learning nothing I don’t already know and not eating the sandwiches Sally didn’t make. I clean and mop and vacuum. Live to work. Work to live. McCoy’s coffee cup had it wrong.

  When four thirty comes around, rather than going home, I wait for Travers. He’s out in the field interviewing witnesses and doing what he can to find a killer. He’s due back around six o’clock, so rather than sitting outside the station, I head off to a nearby food court. I’m absolutely starving, since I’ve only eaten fruit today. I have Chinese. Flied lice. The guy who serves me is Asian, and must figure I am too, since he speaks to me in his language. I feel a little silly still wearing my overalls as I sit eating my chicken fried rice, the food court full of moms with strollers and school students eating the kind of food that will have many of them fifty pounds overweight by the time they hit their twenties.

  When I’m done I head into the nearest parking building and I steal a car. I consider a late-model Mercedes, but you can’t steal expensive European cars and sit around in them outside a police station. I go for a nondescript and hopefully reliable Honda that takes me less than a minute to break into and hotwire. I adjust the seat and open my briefcase and pull out a baseball cap and put it on. When exiting the building I hand over the ticket that was on the dashboard along with some loose change to the guy at the booth on the way out. He hardly notices me.

  The car I’ve selected is one of the dirtiest I could find. I drive to a supermarket and use one of the knives in my briefcase to remove the license plates. I switch them with a Mitsubishi, then drive to a nearby service station and take it through the car wash. When the car is clean, I drive back to the police station, satisfied I have taken most-if not all-of the risk out of being caught. No risk means no excitement, but I’m not looking for excitement right now.

  It is six sixteen when Travers arrives back. It is another thirty-five minutes before he leaves. I follow him home thinking about the list, the all-important list. He lives in a nice neighborhood. The houses aren’t rusting and the gardens are alive. Shiny homes with clean windows and nice cars parked up paved driveways. His house is a single-story place that’s probably around thirty years old, aluminum windows, well looked after. I wait outside for an hour before he leaves again. He has changed into red jeans and a yellow polo shirt that looks like casualwear for Ronald McDonald. He tosses a sports bag into the passenger seat and pulls out onto the street. Over the last twenty minutes or so the last of the daylight has gone, and it’s almos
t dark now.

  I knew Travers was going out tonight-I’d heard the message on his answering machine. I follow him through a couple of suburbs until he finally arrives outside an attractive two-story house in Redwood, where the houses are shinier and the cars slightly more expensive. He parks in the driveway, drags out his sports bag, and locks the car.

  A guy, also in his midthirties, answers the door. When Travers is in, his friend-a fellow with dark brown hair and a small, trimmed mustache-scans the street, like he’s looking for something or somebody. If it’s me, he doesn’t find it. Playing with the collar of his lime silk shirt, he turns and whisks the door closed behind him.

  They’re having dinner in tonight.

  I’ll have to wait a few hours. I have brought Daniela’s crossword magazine to fill the time and to keep my mind ticking over, using a nearby streetlight so I can see. Four down. An omniscient being. Three letters. Middle letter, O.