The Cleaner (16 page)

She stabs a few pieces of pasta and puts them into her
mouth. She loves pasta. She could live on it quite happily, yet tonight her appetite isn’t allowing her to enjoy it. Her mother and father are laughing. She is happy for them, happy that for an hour or two they don’t look so empty.

When she finishes her meal, the friendly waitress who has been helping them all night comes over and sweeps away their plates, then just as quickly replaces them with dessert menus. She scans through the choices. She doesn’t really feel like any of them, and looking at the waitresses, she doubts any of them have touched any type of dessert in their entire lives. She looks up at her dad and identifies the strain in his features as he tries to keep his body under control. He won’t be able to hold on much longer, she thinks.

Sally is a few bites into a chocolate sundae when she starts to feel guilty about Joe. She hopes he wasn’t relying on her for his lunch today. Of course what makes her feel really bad is what he said this morning.
Somebody like me.
She hadn’t been aware till then that Joe knew people were treating him differently, and she was doing so too. Nobody else was making him lunch. Nobody else was pestering him to sit outside on the banks of the Avon River and throw stale bread at the ducks.

Two things occur to her then. The first is there’s a reason why Joe always has turned down her offer to have lunch together, or to be given a lift home. She has been treating him differently.

The second thing is that this sundae isn’t going to help her waistline. Anyway, it’s starting to taste plain. Just chilled soggy cream. She pushes her spoon around it, making it even more runny. What she needs to do, she realizes, is to make an effort to get to know Joe while pretending she isn’t making an effort. She smiles at her parents, glad they are having a good time. Her mother’s metal crucifix is hanging outside her blouse, the light from the candles glinting off it. Through
everything, her parents still have their faith. Again she thinks that she can use faith to bring herself closer to Joe.

She looks back down at her sundae. Today is day one to become a better person, a more caring person, a thinner person. She pushes her dessert aside and promises herself never to touch one again.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The bed is no longer banging. It could be broken. The mattress might have worn out. Maybe they’ve moved to the floor. Maybe they’re spent. Thinking about it makes the corned beef sandwich threaten to come back up, and I’m threatening to let it. Problem is, it won’t just be the sandwich. It’ll be everything I’ve eaten for the week.

I’ve made my decision. I’m going to let God down by allowing them to live. Hey, I don’t owe Him any favors.

I leave the empty can on the table and the leftover makings of my sandwich on the bench. I’ve never been that domesticated. I’m wearing gloves. When Travers finds the can in the morning, I wonder if he will have it tested for a link with the bottles found at Angela’s house. It’s a big parallel to draw—too big for a policeman, anyway.

I don’t bother locking the front door behind me. If somebody else happens to break in and kill them, then who am I to interfere with God? I start to laugh at the thought of their faces in the morning when they see they’ve had a visitor.
Laughter is the best medicine for what I’ve just been through. What will they do? Report it? No. Travers wants his secret kept. I can’t imagine him going to work tomorrow and telling everybody what happened. For a while he’s going to live in fear. As will his buddy. And so they should—mocking the Bible and humanity with their actions.

Mocking me with them.

I part company with the car a half mile from home and build up a sweat while walking the rest of the way. My briefcase feels heavy in the wet heat. Maybe one day I’ll buy a car.

When I get inside, I see two messages waiting for me, both from my mother. I erase them without listening to them, wondering two things at the same time. First, why I love my mom so much, and second, why she can’t be deleted just as easily.

I sit in front of Pickle and Jehovah and watch them as they swim in their endless cycle of memory loss. They see me, suspect I am about to feed them, so they race over. I haven’t fed them all day, so I don’t waste any time. I glance at my answering machine. Maybe Mom will call tomorrow. Ask me around for meatloaf. Show me her newest jigsaw puzzle. Give me some Coke. I look forward to it. I feel bad for not having listened to her messages.

Before going to bed I dig out an old alarm clock from the bottom of my small closet. Set it to seven thirty-five. This way I give myself a chance to wake up at seven thirty. It’s like a test. A test with a backup.

I wish my fish good night before going to bed. I close my eyes and try not to think about my mother as I wait for sleep to come and take me away from the pain of what I’ve seen tonight.

CHAPTER TWENTY

“Late night, Detective Schroder?”

“We found another body.”

What? I start scanning the corkboard. “Was she dead, Detective Schroder?”

Christchurch is overcast and gray. No sun. Lots of heat. Wet heat like yesterday. My sleeves are already rolled up. Schroder gives me a look as though I never cease to amaze him with my well of knowledge. I look back at him as if the characters from a Doctor Seuss story are dancing back and forth in my mind, singing songs and holding hands and doing what they can to keep me permanently entertained.

“Yeah. She is, Joe.”

I look up at the wall and it takes all my control to keep in the role of Slow Joe when I see her photograph. I point to it. The picture of Candy. “Is that her?”

He nods. “Name’s Lisa Houston. She was a prostitute.”

“Dangerous job, Detective Schroder. Being a cleaner is better.”

The photograph of Candy is one of those after shots that make people’s passport pictures look good in comparison, especially in this case because it was taken after two days spent in an upstairs bedroom in sweltering heat. Decomposition has not been kind to her. The skin slippage around her hair and face is extensive. Her skin is blotchy purple. Another day or so, it would be blotchy black. Her eyes are milky. Her arm is crooked and bruised. The skin on her hands looks like wet gloves.

“Did she die last night, Detective Schroder?”

“Longer than that, Joe. We’ll know exactly when later on this morning.”

The pathologist will figure out the day by examining the insect larvae growing around her battered face and torn vagina, and from the compound fracture in her broken arm, where the bone peeped through and said hello.

“You know, Joe, you really shouldn’t be seeing these sorts of pictures.”

“They’re okay,” I tell him. “I just pretend they’re not real people.”

“I guess that must be a luxury.”

“Coffee, Detective Schroder?”

“Not this morning, Joe. Thanks.”

I wander off to my office. I’m desperately curious about how the body was found, who found it, and who showed up at the scene. Detective Travers certainly hadn’t. He was tied up.

It was probably the husband, coming home to get his life back on track. Wondered what the smell was coming from upstairs. Déjà vu. Whether you breathe through your nose or your mouth, or even if you don’t breathe at all, the smell of decaying death will always get to you. It takes on a life in the same way fire does, looking for oxygen to burn to keep it alive, and, like fire, it has a hunger to be fed. A purpose for its survival. I wonder if the husband will ever walk up those stairs again.

I’ve heard of cases where old people have lived with their dead spouse for months because they didn’t want to part with their loved one. They lay them down in bed or set them in front of the TV watching game shows with their favorite cushion in their lap. Hold conversations with them. Hold their hand, even though the skin is slipping from it in rotted abrasions. For a while after Dad died, I kept checking on Mom to make sure she was home alone—I thought she might break out the superglue to try and piece Dad’s ashes together so she could nag the poor bastard to death one last time.

I remember a story I once read in a newspaper. Some guy in Germany had died, and although his rotting body stank, none of the neighbors wanted to disturb him. He was there for a couple of months and wasn’t found until the landlord wanted his rent. He’d been eaten by his flock of cats, and was mostly bone by that point. Guy probably got more pussy in death than he did in life.

I mop floors. Wipe windows. Get talked to like I’m a moron. Throughout the course of the morning, I eavesdrop enough to learn the footprints at the scene are identical to those at the other scenes. Residue from my gloves. Carpet fibers. Hair. Daniela Walker’s husband had come home to get his electric shaver—my electric shaver now—and had found her.

Because of the several differences between Lisa the Hooker’s death and Daniela the Battered Housewife’s death, more detectives have changed over to the theory that they are hunting two killers and not one. Each victim has been killed differently (though I’m repetitious in my day job, I don’t like to be with after-hours activities), but at each scene I’m leaving behind similar evidence, be it clothes, fibers, or saliva.

Two killers. It is the general assumption. Nobody who thinks otherwise has any theories as to why the killer returned to the scene with a hooker.

Just before lunch I run into the local gay cop and say hello
to him. He isn’t in a talkative mood and dismisses me with a quick greeting. He looks distracted. He also looks tired.

I’m left with four men to study. Lunch comes and goes without a visit from Sally, and more importantly, without any of her sandwiches. I make do with the food I have. After lunch, using the computer and personnel files in one of the records rooms upstairs, I reproduce department records for each of the remaining four men for later reading. I’m getting excited at how my list keeps narrowing itself down. What I can’t figure out is why I have to eliminate all but one name until I find the killer. Why can’t the next person I investigate be the man I want?

Why must luck be against me? I decide to start with the two I don’t know as well, the two out-of-towners.

I’m in the records room running the vacuum over a toner-stained piece of carpet when Sally opens the door and steps in. She doesn’t look surprised to find me here, which means she must have been keeping an eye on me. Maybe I ought to be keeping more of an eye on her. I turn off the vacuum cleaner.

“How’s your day going, Joe?” she asks, always asking me the same thing, as if one day I’m going to have an answer different from
Fine
or
Okay.

I decide to liven up her day and mix up the conversation.

“It’s going real good, Sally. Just like all the other yesterdays. I like my job.”

“I like my job too,” she says, and then she lowers her voice even though there is nobody else here to overhear her, “but I must admit I find it a little boring. Don’t you ever feel like you want to do something else?” She walks over to the photocopier and leans against it. The records I printed off are safely in my overalls, and the originals back where they belong. “I mean, don’t you think there ought to be more to life?”

“Like what?” I ask, genuinely curious. I can learn from this woman. If she has low-end goals in this world, I can say I have
those same goals if it will help my act. This is what Method actors do.

“Anything. Everything,” she says, and maybe it’s the smell of the vacuum cleaner, or the window-cleaner fumes getting to me, but for the first time Sally sounds as though she’s thinking outside the box, beyond her limitations.

“I don’t understand,” I tell her, and I really don’t.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m not making any sense. Don’t you have dreams, Joe? If you could be anything in the world, what would you want to be?”

The answer is simple. “Joe.”

“No, I mean a job. Any job in the world.”

“A cleaner.”

“Besides that?”

“I’m not quer . . . qual . . . fied for anything else.”

“Do you like the idea of being a fireman? Or a policeman? Or an artist?”

“I drew a house, once. It had no windows.”

She sighs, and for a moment I think about documentaries on TV where some retarded guy will marry his female equal. Surely these are the conversations they must have during foreplay before trying to make mentally disabled babies. I decide to put an end to it and help her out.

“I would like to be an astronaut.”

Her face beams at my answer. “Really?”

“Yeah. Ever since I was a boy,” I say, winging it now because even though it isn’t my fantasy, it sounds like the kind of thing any man—regardless of IQ—would like to do. “I looked up at the moon and wanted to walk there. I know you can’t live there, but I could at least fly there and make snow angels in the moon dirt.”

“That sounds nice, Joe.”

I’m sure it does. I decide to go another step further into this romantic notion. “I’d be alone up there. I’d not worry about what people think about me. It would be peaceful.”

Her smile starts to waver. “You worry about what other people think about you?”

“Sometimes,” I say, though that isn’t necessarily true. I only worry about what other people think I’m
capable
of. “It’s not easy being retarted,” I say, putting emphasis on the second
t
.

“Retarded.”

“What?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “What about God?”

“God?” I ask, as if I’ve never heard of the guy. “Do you think he’s retarted?”

“Of course not. But do you ever worry about what He thinks?”

It’s a good question. And if I really believed in all those God-loves-you and God-will-smite-you fairy tales, then sure, I’d be worried. I look at the crucifix hanging from her neck. It’s an icon that introduces her to the world as somebody who believes in Heaven and Hell and all the good and bad things in between.

“I always worry, because God is always watching,” I say, and her face lights up again and I realize that if Sally doubled her IQ and halved her weight, she could be the kind of person I’d find myself following home.