The Cleaner (5 page)

I carry the coffee back into the conference room. By now, a few other detectives are milling around inside. I can feel the anguish in the air—the desperation to catch the man doing this to them and their city. The room smells like sweat and cheap aftershave. I hand Schroder his coffee with a smile. He thanks me. I pick up my briefcase to leave and the knives don’t jingle.

My office is on the same floor. Unlike the cubicles, mine is actually an office. It’s at the end of the corridor, just past the toilets. The door has my name on it. It’s one of those little gold plaques with black lettering.
Joe.
No second name. No other initial. Just
Joe.
Like an everyday average Joe. Well, that’s me. Everyday and average.

I have my hand on the handle and am about to turn it when she comes up behind me and taps me on the shoulder.

“How are you doing today, Joe?” Her voice is a little loud and a little slow, as if she’s trying to break through a language barrier with somebody from Mars.

I force the smile onto my face, the one that Detective Schroder sees every time he shares a pleasantry with me. I give her a big-kid smile, the type with all teeth, spreading my lips as far apart as possible in every direction.

“Good morning, Sally. I’m fine, thank you for asking.”

Sally grins back at me. She is dressed in a pair of black overalls that are slightly too big for her, but don’t hide the fact that she is slightly too big herself. Not fat, but somewhere between solid and chubby. She has a pretty face when she smiles, but it isn’t pretty enough for somebody to ignore the few extra pounds and slip a ring on her finger. At the age of twenty-five, it’s her chances that are getting slimmer, not her weight. Smudges of dust on her forehead look like the remnants of
a fading bruise. Her blond hair is tied into a ponytail, but it doesn’t look like it’s been washed in weeks. She doesn’t look slow—it isn’t until she speaks that you know you’re talking to somebody whose parents kept dropping her on her head for fun.

“Can I get you a coffee, Joe? Or an orange juice?”

“I’m fine, Sally. That was nice of you to ask, though.”

I open my door and get half a step inside before she taps me on the shoulder again.

“Are you sure? It really wouldn’t be a problem. Not really.”

“I’m not thirsty right now,” I say, and she looks sad. “Maybe later.”

“Okay, great, I’ll check on you later then. You have a good day, okay?”

Sure, whatever. I slowly nod “Okay,” and a moment later I get the rest of the way into my office and close the door.

CHAPTER SIX

Sally says hello to everybody she knows on her way to the elevator, and to those not in earshot she offers a small wave. She pushes the button and waits patiently. She never feels the temptation to keep pushing the button like others do. The elevator is empty, which is a shame, because she would have liked the company on the way to her floor.

She thinks about Joe, and what a nice young man he is. She’s always had the ability to see people for what they really are, and she can tell Joe is a wonderful human being. Though most people are, she thinks, since they’re all made in God’s image. She wishes there were more like Joe, though. Wishes there was more she could do for him.

When the elevator comes to a stop, she steps out, ready to smile, but the corridor is empty. She makes her way to the end of the hallway and walks through the door marked
Maintenance.
Inside, the room is full of neatly kept shelves on which are several varieties of hand and power tools, different types and sizes of wooden beams, metal beams, spare panels of suspended
ceiling, spare floor and wall tiles, pottles of adhesive and grease, jars full of screws and nails, clamps, a spirit level, various saws, different types of everything.

She moves over to the window and picks up the glass of orange juice she set there twenty minutes earlier, just before rushing downstairs to say good morning to Joe. She isn’t sure why she made the effort. Probably because of Martin. She thinks about Martin more than ever over these two days of the year, and that has somehow led her to start thinking of Joe. People outside her family did very little to help Martin. Some, and she thinks about the kids at school, went out of their way to make life hard for him. It was the same for all the kids who were different. It will always be the same, she thinks, as she sips from her orange juice. It’s warmer than she would have liked, but the taste still makes her smile.

She finishes her drink, then moves over to a large box full of cardboard-wrapped fluorescent tubes jammed tightly. She takes two out, one for this floor, the other for the ground floor. While she replaces the first blown tube, she remembers how Martin’s disability changed her own life. Growing up with him, she had the idea that she wanted to become a nurse. She wanted to be able to help people.

She had spent the last three years of her life, until six months ago, at nursing school. It was difficult to decide exactly which path she wanted to follow, whether to work in a hospital, in a retirement home, or whether to help those who were mentally challenged like Martin and Joe. There were plenty of options, but she never got the chance. Martin died, and that made wanting to help people harder to do. There were too many diseases out there, too many viruses. You could live life the best you could, do the right things, make the right decisions, and still be struck down by something you were born with that had been biding its time. There were simply too many ways to die, and she didn’t want to see that happen to people she knew she would become attached to.

The other factor was her father. Two years ago he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, which quickly led to him losing his job. Since then the disease has advanced. He can’t work, and his weekly benefit payments aren’t enough to cover the medical bills. She didn’t have the luxury of completing her studies. Her family needed her, not only to help look after her father, but to help them survive. She had to earn money. She had to help them get through this. She couldn’t afford to keep studying.

Her father had a friend who was a full-time maintenance worker at the police station, a friend who was getting older and needed an assistant who would one day replace him. Sally took that job, and now, six months later, she even has his desk and view.

She catches the elevator down to the ground floor; the entire trip down she thinks about Joe, and she thinks about what she can do to make his life better.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The police station is ten stories of nothing-going-on, made from concrete block and bad taste. My office is small, perhaps the smallest in the whole damn building. Still, it’s mine, I share it with nobody, and that’s the most important thing.

I dump my briefcase on the bench, walk to the window and look out to the city beyond. Hot out there. Warm in here. Warm and stuffy. This is great weather not to be working in. Women walk the streets wearing skirts and tops made from nearly nothing. On a good day, from up here, you can see right down their tops. On a really good day, you can see nipple. By the end of the day, all these women are hidden away. They’re scared they might be the next victim plastered across the news. The nighttime air has a charged feeling of fear, and it isn’t going to change anytime soon. They do what they can to pretend nothing bad can ever happen to them.

I turn from the window and undo the top button of my overalls. My office consists of a bench that stretches the length of the room—about thirteen feet—along the same
wall as the window. The other half of the furniture is a chair. Stacked around the office are paint tins and plenty of rags, brooms, and cleaning solvents, which sometimes give me a headache. There are buckets and mops, tools, cables, spare shelving, spare parts, spare lots of things. The office is well lit because it gets the sun most of the day, which is just as well, because fewer than half of the four fluorescent lights in the ceiling actually work. I keep forgetting to get Sally to replace them, and when I do remember, I’m afraid to ask her. I’m sure she has a crush on me, which is normal for most women, but creepy when it comes to someone like Sally.

Because my office has faulty air-conditioning and a window that doesn’t open, I have an electric fan that sits on the desk and whirs noisily when turned on. Next to it is a coffee mug with my name stenciled on it. A well-thought-out gift from my mother. On the end of my bench is a framed photograph of Pickle and Jehovah that I gave to myself last Father’s Day.

I grab the bucket from the corner of my room, pick up the mop from next to it, and head for the air-conditioned third floor. Then I walk into the even cooler men’s bathroom. The smell of disinfectant forces me to breathe through my mouth for fear of passing out.

“Hi there, Joe.”

I turn to see a man who is trying to hide his geekiness with a handful of hair gel and a half-grown mustache. “Morning, Officer Clyde,” I say, setting the bucket on the floor.

“Beautiful morning, Joe, ain’t it?”

“Sure is, Officer Clyde,” I answer, agreeing with his outstanding perception and thinking he’d get on well with Bus Driver Stanley. I stare at the wall, trying not to glimpse his small dick as he finishes taking his long leak. He bends his knees as he zips up, as if he needs all the momentum he can muster to close his fly. He doesn’t wash his hands.

“Have a good day, Joe,” he says, pitying me with a smile.

I start filling my bucket with water. “I’ll try.”

He winks at me and at the same time uses his fingers to imitate a gun, and then shoots me while clicking his tongue as he leaves. The bucket full, the cleaner added, I throw the mop back and forth across the toilet floor. The linoleum soon glistens and becomes a health hazard. I set a plastic sign on the floor that has the word
Caution,
states that the floor is wet, and has a picture of a red stick figure slipping, about to crack open his perfectly round stick-figure head.

I’ve been working here more than four years now. Before that, I was unemployed. I remember killing somebody, I can’t remember his name, but he was my first. Well, kind of my first—there was that one kid back in high school, but I don’t like to think about that one. This guy I do consider to be my first was Don or Dan or somebody, I think. What’s in a name? I killed him when I was twenty-eight years old. It was a time in my life when the fantasy of wondering how it would feel blended with a desire that became a need to know. The fantasy wasn’t as good as the reality, and the reality was much messier, but it was an experience, and they say practice makes perfect. Ron or Jim or Don or whoever must have been somebody important because two months after they found his body, a fifty-thousand-dollar reward was posted. I’d only found a few hundred dollars in his wallet when I killed him, so I felt cheated. Like God or fate was mocking me.

I began getting nervous. Agitated. I needed to know if the police were close to catching me. I couldn’t help it, the desire to see where the investigation was kept me without sleep for those two months. I could feel myself cracking up. Every morning I would wake up and stare out at my shitty view, wondering if this was the last time I’d get to see it. I started drinking. I ate badly. I became such a desperate wreck that I did the boldest thing I’ve ever done: I came down to the police station to “confess.”

Detective Inspector Schroder dealt with me. It was the first
time I met him, and within seconds I wasn’t scared because I was too smart to be scared, and much smarter than any cop. I had left no evidence—burning the body had destroyed any DNA I had left behind, and dumping the burned carcass into a river washed away whatever was left. I was pretty confident I knew what I was doing. Would I do it again? Definitely not.

Two of them sat me inside a small interrogation room. The room had four concrete walls and no view and smelled of chewing gum and sweat. In the center were a wooden table and a couple of chairs. There were no potted plants. No paintings. Just a mirror. The legs on the front of my chair were slightly shorter, and I kept sliding forward, which was pretty uncomfortable. A tape recorder sat on top of the table. I clean that room once a week now.

I started off by saying I’d like to confess to the murder of that woman who was killed a few months back.

What woman, sir?

You know. The dead one with the reward
.

That was a man, sir
.

Yeah, I killed him. Can I have my money now?

It wasn’t hard for them to doubt my story, and when I pushed for the reward, saying I had earned it by killing him, and then used the word
outside
to describe where I had stabbed my victim, my Slow Joe act was cemented. As I turned from Hannibal Lecter to Forrest Gump in a matter of seconds, I learned the police had no suspects at all. I didn’t get any reward, but I was given coffee and a sandwich. That night when I got home, I slept like a rock. The following day I felt like a new man. I felt fantastic. When I came back to “confess” again, this time to a murder I knew nothing about, they took pity on me. I was a nice guy—they could see that; I was merely looking for attention in the wrong places. When one of their cleaners “happened” to disappear, I applied for and was given this job. Because of government regulations in a world trying to be as politically correct as possible, departments all over the
country have a quota to fill when it comes to hiring people who are fucked either physically or mentally. The police seemed happy to hire me since they figured a cleaner didn’t need to know much more than how to run a vacuum cleaner and dunk a mop in water. It was either me, or go through the employment lottery where they’d have to choose some other disabled guy.

So now I’m the harmless guy who waltzes up their hallways with brooms and mops, a minimum-wage lackey. But at least the sleepless nights are a thing of the past.

It generally takes me an hour to clean the toilets. Today is no different. When I finish I go through to the women’s toilets and do the same, hanging a sign on the door first to say that cleaning is in progress. Women never come in here while I’m cleaning. Maybe they think the red stick figure they see on the sign is a pervert. When I’m done I empty the contents of the bucket, then store it and the mop back in my office. I grab a broom and slide it back and forth down the corridors and around the cubicles, heading toward the conference room. When I get inside I don’t need to make myself invisible because I’m the only one in here. The day’s work has begun. Leads have been found. Evidence to follow. Prayers go unanswered.