The Cleaner Read online

  “You ran the cat over?” she asks in a soft voice, without managing to sound accusing.

  “I found him,” I say. “I don’t have a car, that’s why I had to catch a taxi here,” I say, and for some reason it’s important to me that she believes that.

  She takes the cat from me without comment then disappears. I’m left standing by myself. I take a quick look around the clinic. Not much to see. Two walls are dedicated to products like leashes, collars, flea powder, bowls, cages, and food. Another wall has a thousand brochures and pamphlets that don’t concern me since none of them is about getting away with murder. I take a seat. I should have been in bed by now. Should have been asleep. I stare at a display of bags of cat litter. I know from experience it’s twice the price here than at the supermarket.

  I sit patiently. Five minutes turn into ten, then into twenty. I pick up a pamphlet on flea control. On the cover is an artist’s impression of what a magnified flea would look like if it were wearing sunglasses and a leather jacket and hosting a party in the fur of a cat. On the next page is an actual photograph of a flea, magnified several hundred times. It seems the artist had it completely wrong. I’m halfway through the brochure, thinking about how scary the world would be if fleas were actually several hundred times bigger, when the redhead comes back out. I put the pamphlet down and hold my breath and stand up.

  “The cat’s going to be okay,” she says, breaking into a smile.

  “What a relief,” I say, almost too tired to mean it.

  “Do you know who he belongs to?”

  “No.”

  “We’re going to need to keep him here for a few days.”

  “Sure, sure, that sounds good,” I say, thankful for her help. I realize I’m nodding like an idiot. “Umm, what happens if you can’t find the owner? I mean, it won’t get put down, will it?”

  She shrugs, like she doesn’t know, but I think she does. I give her my name and phone number, then pay for the medical attention the cat will need using the money Candy no longer needs. She doesn’t try to stop my generosity, but she does point it out. She says I’m an incredibly nice man. I see no need to argue. She tells me she will call to let me know of the cat’s progress.

  I ask her if she can call me a taxi, but she says she’s about to leave, and offers me a lift home.

  I glance at my watch. It would be fun to get a ride with her, but where would I dump her body? “I don’t want to put you out. A taxi’s fine.”

  She seems disappointed, but doesn’t strengthen her offer. The taxi driver is a large man whose stomach rests on the steering wheel and toots the horn every time we go over a bump. He drops me off outside my apartment, the potholes in my street making him wake up the neighbors in the process. The trash outside my apartment has been added to by more trash, and I have to bat away a few flies as I make my way inside. I’m struggling to stay awake as I climb my way up to my door. Inside I ignore my fish, making me not quite the nice guy the vet receptionist thought I was, opting to spend some quality time with my bed instead. I lie down and close my eyes and pretty much fall right asleep.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Seven thirty my eyes open. Right on time. I don’t have to worry about shaking away any dregs of a dream, because I never dream. I guess I don’t because half the shit people dream about I actually do. If I did, I suppose it would be of being married to some plumpish woman with poor taste in everything from fashion to sexual positions. I’d be living inside a house with a mortgage that would take a lifetime to pay off, getting nagged by two unfit kids every single day. I’d be taking out trash and mowing lawns. Each Sunday morning as I pulled out of the driveway in my station wagon on my way to church, I’d have to avoid running over the dog. A Goddamn nightmare.

  I share my morning routing with a feeling I can’t quite shake, like there’s bad news I haven’t been given yet. It becomes so strong that I have to take a few minutes to sit down on the sofa and take some deep breaths. My eyes blur with tears, and even playing with Pickle and Jehovah can’t cheer me up. I think of the cat I saved last night. That can’t cheer me up either. Something bad has happened. I think of Mom and hope she’s okay.

  I make myself a quick breakfast before going to work. No need to walk around hungry just because of bad premonitions. I’m running late so have to run for the bus. Mr. Stanley sees me coming and waits. “Almost missed you this morning, Joe,” he says, and this time he punches my ticket-perhaps as punishment for putting him thirty seconds off schedule. Despite that, I still like him. He’s an okay guy.

  Now, Mr. Stanley lives my nightmare. He’s married with two kids, one of them in a wheelchair. I know all this because I followed him home one day. Not as a potential victim (though everybody has potential, so I learned in school), but just out of curiosity. It’s amazing that a guy with a useless kid and an ugly wife and a crappy job can be so friendly every day. Perhaps more suspicious than amazing. I want to ask him what his secret is.

  I walk down the aisle. Find a seat behind a couple of businessmen. The two of them are talking loudly about money, mergers, and acquisitions. I wonder who they are trying to impress on this bus. Maybe each other.

  Mr. Stanley stops the bus directly outside work for me. The doors open. I climb out. It’s another hot summer day. It will get somewhere around eighty-five or ninety degrees, I’m guessing. I lower the zip on my overalls from my neck down to my waist, revealing my white T-shirt, and I roll up my sleeves. There haven’t been any scratches on my arms for nearly two months.

  The air shimmers. The day is still. It’s classic global warming weather. I wait for two cars to run the red light before I cross the road. Outside the police station the drunks from the night’s holding tanks are being let out, their faces scrunched up in the bright autumn sun.

  The air in the police station is cool. Sally is waiting outside the elevator. She spots me before I can make a dash for the stairs, so I have to head over. I push the button, then keep pushing it because it’s what’s expected of somebody with no clue how things in this world work.

  “Morning, Joe,” she says in the carefully structured, drawn-out way of a woman struggling with the concept of speech. I have to offer my own version of it, because retarded or not, everybody around here expects me to talk like an imbecile.

  “Hi morning, Sally,” I say, and then I smile the big-kid smile with all the teeth, the one that suggests I’m proud to have strung three words together to make a sentence, even if I did fuck it up.

  “What a beautiful day. Do you like this weather, Joe?”

  Actually it’s a bit hot for my taste. “I like the warm sun. I like summer.” I’m talking like an idiot so Slow Sally can understand me. “I like Christmas even more.”

  “You should join me for lunch by the river,” she says, hitting on me and almost making me gag. I can just imagine how much fun that’d be. How much fun I’d have as the other people walk by looking at one person pretending to be retarded while the other pretends to be normal. We could throw bread at the ducks and tell each other which clouds look like pirate ships and which look like the bloated corpses of drowning victims. Damn, does Sally even know she isn’t normal? Do their kind know that about themselves?

  The elevator arrives. I’m confused as to whether I should do the gentlemanly thing and let her step in first, or do the retarded thing and push ahead of her? I do the gentlemanly thing, because the retarded thing means I’d have to scream as the elevator goes up a few stories and then pretend to be in awe at how the scenery has changed when the doors open.

  “Fourth floor, Joe?”

  “Sure.”

  The doors close.

  “So. .” she says, then doesn’t finish.

  “So?”

  “So what’ll it be? You want to join me for lunch?”

  “I like my office, Sally. I like sitting there and looking out the window.”

  “I know you do, Joe. But outside is good for you.”

  “Not always.”

&nb
sp; She seems to think about this, then slowly nods, but her gaze is distant and it looks like she’s agreeing to something I haven’t said. Then her eyes snap back into focus and she smiles at me. “Well, I made you some lunch again. I’ll drop it by.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Do you enjoy catching the bus home?”

  “Huh? Sure,” I say, and the rate the elevator is moving at makes me think the fourth floor has been raised a few levels. “I guess so.”

  “I can give you a lift sometimes, if you’d like.”

  “I like the bus.”

  She shrugs, gives up on our conversation. “I’ll drop off those sandwiches for you soon.”

  “Thanks, Sally. That’ll be nice.”

  And it would be nice. Sally may be a dimwit, she may have a crush on me, but she’s always been good to me. Always friendly. Nobody else has ever offered me food, or offered me a lift home (though surely she can’t drive-she must mean a lift with her mom or something), and I could do a lot worse. Even though I don’t like her, I don’t not like her as much as I don’t like everybody else. In a way that makes her the closest thing I have to a friend. Outside of my goldfish.

  The doors close, and the smile I offer Sally as they do isn’t forced, it’s natural, and I realize this too late to change it to my big-boy grin. She stares at me with a blank look on her face, then the doors close and Sally is gone, and a moment later she is gone from my thoughts. I head straight to the conference room.

  “Hi there, Joe.”

  “Morning, Detective Schroder.”

  I start looking at him as a suspect, trying to picture him killing Walker. It’s easy to do. Of course it’s easy to picture any of these people killing her, from the photographer to the pathologist. The first thing I need to do is get a list of these people, then begin eliminating them. As suspects, that is.

  “How’s the in. . inv. . invest. .” I stop. Just long enough for him to think I’m in that small percentile of the population with an extra chromosome. “How’s the case going, Detective Schroder? Found the killer yet?”

  He shakes his head slowly, as if he’s trying to line up a few thoughts in there, but not too hard in case some of them get broken.

  “Not yet, Joe. Getting there.”

  “Any suspects, Detective Schroder?”

  “A few. And Joe, you can call me Carl.”

  I’m not going to call him Carl. He’s asked me before. Anyway, I’ve already shortened detective inspector to just detective. And as for there being a few suspects-he’s lying.

  He stares at the photographs, grimacing, like he does every morning now. Almost as though he’s expecting to come in and find one of the victims has reached out from her portrait and written an answer up there for him. In reality he has nothing. He knows it. I know it. Everybody knows it. Especially the media.

  “Are you sure they’ve all been killed by the same person, Detective Schroder?”

  He turns and stares at me, and I regret my question. “Why’s that, Joe? Have you been listening in on our conversations?”

  I shake my head. “No, never,” I say. “I would never do that.”

  He doesn’t look convinced.

  “I just thought that maybe seven different people killed them because nobody can be that mean, can they?” I ask.

  His expression softens, and slowly he shakes his head. “People can be that mean, Joe, and it’s probably best you stop trying to think like Sherlock Holmes.”

  I look down. “Umm. . I was just, you know, curious.”

  “Life is curious, Joe, and to answer your question, all of these murders all related.”

  I lift my head up fast and look over at him, widening my eyes in what hopefully looks like surprise. “They’re all sisters, Detective Schroder?”

  I ought to get a Goddamn Emmy for this performance.

  “Not related that way, Joe,” he sighs, and after a pause of a few seconds he carries on. “I mean they were all killed by the same person.”

  “Oh. But that’s good, right? Better to have one killer out there than seven?”

  He nods. “It doesn’t make any difference to them,” he says, pointing at the photographs. “But in this case,” he says, then pauses, “you’re not going to repeat any of this to anybody, are you, Joe? You don’t have friends in the media?”

  I shake my head, trying to keep a similar pace to Schroder’s shake a few minutes ago. He thinks I have no friends. He doesn’t know about Pickle and Jehovah. “You guys are the only friends I have, Detective Schroder.”

  “Have you ever heard of a copycat killer, Joe?”

  I stop shaking my head before whiplash sets in. “Why would somebody kill cats?” There’s another long sigh from Schroder, and I realize I might be laying it on a bit thick.

  “Not quite, Joe. A copycat killer is somebody who kills to imitate a serial killer.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Because they can. Because they want to. Because they’re insane.”

  “Oh. Then why are these people out there, Detective Schroder? Why don’t they get put in jail?”

  “That’s a good question,” he says, and I smile at his praise. “And it comes with a simple answer. The world is screwed up. You know when you turn on the news and some bastard has gone and shot his family and a few of his neighbors?”

  I start nodding. Stab thy neighbor. I’m familiar with it.

  “The family, the other neighbors, they all say what a quiet guy he was. He had a collection of gun magazines and problems. Then we use hindsight as a preventative, even though it’s too late by then. There’s nothing to prevent, because everybody’s already dead. . I’m sorry, Joe,” he says, sighing. “I’m rambling on a bit. And venting. I shouldn’t be burdening you with any of this.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “I just wish we could do more. I mean, we see these guys every day, but can we do anything about it? No. Because they have rights. Just like the rest of us. And until they finally kill somebody-and they often try to-those rights make them untouchable. Do you know what I mean, Joe?”

  “Kind of, Detective Schroder.”

  He waves his hand at the wall. “A hundred to one we’ve spoken to this guy at some point in the past. We know he’s got either a drug or a mental problem, but we could never do anything about it. Right now he’s watching us, mocking us, laughing at us. I guarantee we’ve wanted to lock this guy up before, but weren’t allowed. I guarantee we’ve had this guy in this building before.”

  He’s right and wrong, but I can’t point this out to him. Can’t take a bet on his odds. With all his sermonizing I quickly lose faith in Schroder as an appropriate suspect.

  “I understand, Detective Schroder.”

  “You’d be one of the few if you do, Joe. You want to know something funny?”

  “Sure.”

  “Serial killers like to stay ahead of the game, and you know how they do that?”

  Fact is, I do know. They hang around the edges of the investigation. They might come into the station and say they saw something going on. They come in and try to get a feel for the investigation. Some even hang around in cop bars, listening to idle chitchat, even participating in conversation. Or hang out with reporters looking for an inside scoop.

  “No. How?”

  He shrugs again. “Sorry, Joe, I shouldn’t be chewing your ear off like this.”

  “So what about the cat killer?” I ask.

  “Some other time,” he sighs, and he says it in a way to indicate the conversation is over. I leave him staring silently at the wall of the dead.

  I reach up and run my finger across the nameplate on my office door. To the sides of it are four small screw holes. There never used to be anything on it until Sally showed up one day with a small sign with my name on it. Inside I swap my thoughts for a mop and bucket, and then go about cleaning the toilets. Before lunch I carry the vacuum cleaner into Detective Superintendent Stevens’s office just as he is leaving. Stevens is
the guy everybody answers to, even though he doesn’t do any of the footwork, groundwork, or thought work that goes into solving this case. Stevens has been flown down from Wellington, and is one of the highest-ranking detectives in the country, though I can’t see why. All he does is sit in his appointed office, ordering people about while demanding answers. Occasionally he walks back and forth, grabbing a pile of papers or a folder, just trying to look as though he has something to do or someplace to be. Most of the time he’s a pretty pissed-off guy. I don’t like him, but can’t do anything about it. Murdering a police superintendent would be like playing with fire.

  Stevens is in his late fifties, has thinning black hair, and looks like the sort of policeman you wouldn’t approach for help. He is just over six feet and solidly built, but has these black eyes that any author would associate with crazed serial killers. He has a long face with wrinkles that run its entire length, like shallow knife wounds. His tanned skin is pitted with old acne scars around his neck. When he talks, he has a deep voice and an accent that sounds Caribbean, but that’s probably because of the cigars he’s always smoking. He’s one of those useless bastards who wear sports jackets with elbow patches sewn into them.

  I wonder if the ballpoint pen that was left behind was his. I look into his black eyes, searching for the evil that fiction suggests should be there, but I can’t see any of it.

  He tells me to do a good job, says he’ll be back after lunch. That gives me plenty of time. So it’s just me in his office, me and Mr. Vacuum Cleaner. I sweep it around the carpet like it makes a difference, looking left and right for any information that will help. Like the conference room, Stevens’s office looks out onto the fourth floor, meaning people can look in if the blinds are open, as they are. Ten minutes of sucking the same piece of carpet go by, and it’s not getting any cleaner. I drop a rag behind his desk, bend down, and use the chance to peek into his desk drawers. I rummage through them, finding a roster of everybody involved in the case in the third drawer I check. I slip it into my overalls. Then I start coughing. Yep, Joe the retard needs a drink. I head to the water cooler. On the way back I pass the photocopying room. It’s empty, so I step inside and photocopy the roster. Walk back to the office. Place the document back into the folder. Finish vacuuming in time for lunch.