The Cleaner (39 page)

“Because you saw an opportunity.”

“No,” he says. “It wasn’t like that. I was worried. What if she wasn’t answering because her husband was home beating her up for not having dinner on the table or for not cleaning his shoes or whatever excuse the piece of shit needed? Anyway, I checked the door and it was locked, but I had some keys on me designed for picking most house locks, so I used them.”

I know the keys well. I also know that domestic abuse isn’t about a man who is in love with his wife too much; it’s about a man who is in love with the ability to control her.

“I checked around the kitchen, the living room, looking for her.”

“Did you call her name?”

“No.”

“Is that because you didn’t want her to know you were there?”

He shakes his head. “That wasn’t it at all. I didn’t want to let the husband know I was there, in case he was home and hitting her. I wanted to catch him in the act.”

“That’s pretty lame, Bob.”

“No it’s not. This is a big house. I couldn’t be sure what was happening, and where.”

“So then what?”

“She was upstairs sitting on the bed. Sobbing.”

“Which is why she didn’t answer the door, I suppose?”

“That was my thought. When she saw me, she started to freak out. I quickly explained who I was, but she was recognizing me anyway.”

“She must have been relieved you were a cop and not a homicidal maniac,” I say.

If he sees the irony, he doesn’t let it show.

“She sat down again, and we began to talk about her husband, but mostly about her. You see, the issue was her, not him. He was always going to be a wife beater. There was no way of stopping him. What people don’t understand is that these guys can’t be rehabilitated. I mean, what the hell are you going to rehabilitate them to? All he’s ever known is violence. I tried talking to her, calmly and reasonably, and that was okay, at first.”

He pauses and looks at me. His eyes look damp. I wonder if crying is beyond this madman’s ability to act. I prompt him to continue with a slight repositioning of the gardening shears. I’m eager to hear his thoughts.

“Pretty soon she couldn’t see my way of thinking, my way of understanding.”

“The correct way, you mean?”

“Yeah. Do you know what it’s like, Joe, to know you’re absolutely right about something—I mean, beyond any doubt—but you can’t get somebody else to agree with you? It’s not that they don’t understand, or that they don’t want to. They’ve become so used to doing the wrong thing that there couldn’t possibly be another way.”

“Get back to the point, Bob.”

“We ended up disagreeing, pretty quickly actually, and then we were arguing. In the end she started screaming at me to leave. I asked her to calm down, but she wouldn’t. Then she tried to call the police, so I had to stop her. She slapped me, so then I hit her back. Next thing I knew she was dead and I was standing over her naked body.”

He stops talking. We both listen to the silent room. Peaceful, but still warmer than I’d like. I believe most of his story, but he’s left something out.

“Next thing you knew,” I repeat.

“I didn’t mean for it to happen.”

“A touching story, Bob,” I say, reaching to my eyes with an imitation hanky, wiping away pretend tears. “It seems you’ve gone for a classic defense strategy. Do they teach you that at training college, or did you pick it up being a cop? See, Bob, what you’ve done here is extremely common. You’ve shifted all the blame onto the victim. She’s the one who disagreed, she’s the one being unreasonable, and she’s the one who hit you. If she’d refrained from doing any of those things, then she’d still be alive today. Am I right?”

No answer.

“Am I right, Bob?”

Again the shrug. “I don’t know.”

“Come on, Bob, you do know. It’s the whole domestic abuse scenario over again. She deserved to be punished, didn’t she, because she stepped out of line. If she’d done what she was told, if she’d simply obeyed, then she’d be living the contented
and happy life. But she didn’t, so you killed her—not that you remember doing so. That’s the second common phase here, Bob. How many killers have you put away who’ve told you they don’t remember anything? How many have told you that if it weren’t for the crazy way this or that particular female acted, then none of this or that would have happened? Now tell me what really happened.”

“That is what happened.”

“Yeah, most of it probably did, but I’d bet my life on it . . .” I pause, create dramatic effect, then change my mind. “No, I’d bet
your
life on it that you do remember killing her, and were aware of every second of it.”

“I can’t remember.”

He sounds like a whining child. “There’s no such word as
can’t,
Bob.” I lift the gardening shears to prove my point.

He says nothing until I start to rise.

“Okay, okay.” He’d have his hands out in a defensive gesture if he could, waving them in the air like a maniac. “I do remember.”

“Oh? And what do you remember?” I don’t need to know this for my plan to work. I’m just interested, as a fellow participant in this game of life and death.

“We argued, like I told you, and she picked up the phone and threatened to call the police. So I hit her, and once I did that, I knew there’d be no way to shut her up.”

“Come now, Bob. She’s a domestic-abuse victim. She’s used to keeping her trap shut when a man hits her.”

“Not this time. She told me I was going to lose my job for what I’d done, and she was right too, so I hit her again, this time harder. Then I shoved her onto the bed and . . .” He stops, either to think of what to say next, or to invent it. “Well, I needed to make it look like she was one of your victims, Joe.”

“And you knew just how to do it. You screwed that prostitute I killed the other night. You did to her what your wife
won’t let you even think about. And you take that experience from Becky the Whore to Little Miss Domestic Abuse.”

“I had to make it look real,” he says, and he says it in a defeated tone, not the kind of tone somebody who stands by their work would use.

“Is that all, Bob? Or did you want to enjoy yourself as well? Come on, you can tell me. I’m not here to judge you. I just want to hear how you’re no better than me.” He stares right at me. His face, tight with rage, spits the answer at me. “Sure, I enjoyed it. Like, I mean, what wasn’t to enjoy? Pure power.”

“Pure power. Isn’t that the answer, Bob? Isn’t that what we all look for?”

“What do you want from me?”

“That’s a question, Bob.”

“I don’t give a shit, Joe. Just tell me what you want, or fuck off. You’re wasting my time, you little asshole.” I’m not shocked at his sudden outburst. Over the last hour, I’ve touched several nerves. Before all of this is over, a knife is going to touch several more.

“The requirement is simple. All you need to do is listen.”

“That simple, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“Bullshit,” he says. “What do I have to listen to?”

“A confession.”

“Yours?”

“Funnily enough, no. But it’s your job to be my security, my insurance if you like. You knew from the moment you saw my face I was either going to kill you or make a deal. Well, here’s the deal, Bob. I will give you twenty thousand dollars, in cash, tomorrow night, to listen to a confession. That’s all you have to do. Just sit and listen and remember. Do you think you can handle that?”

“Then what? You let me go, is that it?”

“That’s it.”

“And what’s in it for you?”

“My freedom. Yours too.”

“And if I refuse?”

“I’ll kill you. Right now.”

“I want half the money now.”

“You’re not really in a situation to ask for anything, Bob.” I stand and walk over to him.

“What are you doing?” I tilt the chair back and start dragging it across the carpet. It’s damn heavy, and my testicle starts to throb.

“Joe? What the hell are you up to?”

“Shut up, Bob.” I continue pulling on the chair, and it makes scuff marks across the carpet, but finally I manage to get Calhoun into the bathroom. “I’m afraid you’ll have to spend the night here.”

“Why?”

“Safer that way.”

“For who?”

“For me.”

I pull out some duct tape. “Anything else before I seal you up for the night?”

“You’re a real psycho, Joe, do you know that?”

“I know lots of things, Detective Inspector.”

I run the tape across his mouth. Then I head back into the bedroom and take the parking ticket from my briefcase. I squat down behind Bob, grab the skin on the back of his hand, and start twisting until he unclenches it, then I push his fingertips against the ticket.

“No going anywhere, Bob. Oh, and the toilet’s there if you need it.” I grin at him, then walk back into the bedroom, closing the door behind me. I put the ticket into an evidence bag, then into my briefcase.

I lock the house before leaving. It’s dark when I get outside. I feel like I’m suffering from heat exhaustion, but after a minute in the cool air that problem disappears. The streetlights throw a pale glow into the black night. I drive Calhoun’s
car into town and grab the ticket from the machine at the entrance to the parking building. I head up the ramps—the number of cars getting fewer the higher I drive—until I reach the very top, where there is only one. I don’t turn the car sharply enough, and end up scraping the corner of the front bumper all along the side of the other car, leaving a deep graze and a line of small dents. I notice that the tires on the other car have half deflated over time. I climb out. The smell coming from the trunk of the abandoned car is barely noticeable.

With nothing else to do, I head toward home and toward the end of another long night.

Another phase completed.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

She doesn’t know this is where she is driving to until she pulls up the long, twisting driveway lined with beautiful trees, which is ironic because she wanted to come here earlier and found herself driving in a different direction. She can’t park in her usual spot because the church has become a crime scene, so she parks out on the street and uses a smaller entrance to walk through.

Sally makes her way to her brother’s grave and crouches down next to it, not over it. She’s always careful about that. She has a whirlwind of scenarios racing through her head, but she can’t comprehend any of them, and the ones she can almost grasp keep floating away from her.

Joe and the second man had been inside for at least an hour. She had been relieved when Joe came out okay, and tempted to follow him, but she was more curious about who the second man was. She’d waited another half hour, but he hadn’t shown up. Most likely he lived there.

She starts brushing her hands back and forth through the
grass, letting the soft textures tickle her palms. The grass is wet. She had written down the address before leaving. What she would do with that information she wasn’t sure. Probably just leave it scrawled across the notepad in her front seat for the next few weeks before balling it up and tossing it out.

Joe driving different cars. Joe with files at his house. Joe with a missing testicle. Joe secretly meeting people.

Well, okay, Joe went to somebody’s house, the same way she’s gone to other people’s houses. Gone there and had coffee, played some cards, killed some time, ate some dinner. What is so suspicious about that?

Nothing. Except Joe parked two blocks away and left in a different car. Plus the house—somehow she knows that house.

“So what do I do, Martin?”

If her brother could reach out from his grave and offer her some advice, it wouldn’t be
Do nothing.
It was her doing nothing that had got Martin killed five years ago. It has been her lack of responsibility, her laziness, her unawareness. She was doing nothing five years ago when she should have been doing something. She should have been doing anything to stop Martin from being hit at forty miles an hour in a thirty-mile zone. It wasn’t the school’s fault. It wasn’t even really the driver’s fault. It was her fault. She knows some people would blame God, and she suspects her parents split the blame between her and Him.

That’s why her mother flinches when she puts an arm around her. That’s why her parents didn’t try to convince her to stay at nursing school, and allowed her to give up her career to help them pay the bills.

It was difficult not to hate God. It was His fault for making Martin intellectually handicapped. It was easy to lay blame with her, though. It was her fault that Martin had run out into traffic. Her fault for forgetting how excitable he could be when she finished her studies early and got the chance to pick him up from school. She’d rung home to say she could pick
Martin up. Her mother had told her not to worry, but Sally had gone ahead and worried. She loved the look on Martin’s face when he stepped out of school and saw her waiting there for him.

The rules were always simple. Her parents had told Martin a thousand times. He was never to cross the road. And she knew the rules too. She was never to park across the road and wait for him there; she either parked on his side of the road, or she walked over. Her parents reminded her time and time again, but the problem when people remind you so often is that you start to ignore it. The words go in, but they don’t settle anywhere. The other problem was she was late. Only by two minutes. How many times has she remembered the route she took to his school that day? A red light there that could have been green. A person towing a trailer ahead of her at twenty-five instead of thirty miles an hour. A pedestrian crossing with people taking their time to cross it. It all added up, and in the end it came to two minutes. It all added up the same way all the ages in the graveyard add up and divide to get an average of sixty-two. Just simple mathematics combining to end a life.

She’d pulled up outside the school two minutes later than she should have. She’d opened her car door two minutes after she should have opened it. And Martin had seen her from across the road. It all came down to mathematics, basic physics, and human dynamics. Martin getting excited. Martin running over the road to meet her while she was getting out of her car. Martin getting in the way of an object moving much faster than he was, weighing much more than he did. She’d run to him and knelt by his side. He was alive, but that had changed two days later. She’d let her brother down when he’d needed her most.