The Cleaner

CHAPTER TWELVE

I’m not actually sure where ideas come from, whether they’re just floating around out there in some dimension close to but not quite of this world, where our minds can reach out and pluck them, whether a series of firing synapses in our mind weigh up cold data into cold possibilities, or whether it comes down to a simple train of thought riding through Lucksville. Ideas come at any time, often when you’re not expecting them. I’ve had them in the bathroom, cleaning floors. I’ve had them when dreading the walk from the sidewalk to my mother’s front door. The spontaneous ideas are often the best. Sometimes they shock you into making a decision. Only hindsight tells you whether it was good or not.

The only light coming into the room now is from the streetlights outside. I turn the duvet over to hide the splashes of blood. I pick up the plastic markers and throw them into the closet along with the evidence bags, next to a shoe rack and a pile of old clothes. The room no longer looks like a crime scene, but something out of Poor Housekeeping. I wipe away the fingerprint dust with the husband’s shirt, then I close the curtains knowing that when I come back I’m going to have to turn on the lights. I make my way downstairs in the dark and do the same thing. By the time I finish up and get outside it’s after nine o’clock.

I walk down the sidewalk to the Honda and climb inside, tossing my briefcase onto the passenger seat. From the moment I first saw this car, I’ve been wearing latex gloves. My fingers are sweating beneath them, but it’s better than leaving fingerprints. I pull them away from my hands. They’re like an extra layer of skin. I don’t put on a replacement pair and make a mental note to remember to wipe down every surface I touch. I drive toward town. I have a job to do, but I don’t want a particularly late night. Rather than looking for an innocent victim, I decide to look for somebody who will gladly be one for a price.

I find her standing on a Manchester Street corner in town. A skirt so short it’s more of a thick belt than anything else. Low-cut top. Fishnet stockings. Costume jewelry on her fingers. A small tattoo on her neck and another at the top of her left breast. Other hookers are hanging around trying to attract business, women who look like they’ve been dragged out of a trailer park by their teased hair. If her pimp is nearby he may or may not note down the registration plate of my stolen car, but in this city I can’t imagine pimps caring enough. It doesn’t matter either way.

Before the car comes to a complete stop, she opens the passenger door and offers up today’s specials as if reading from a menu. I accommodate her by clearing the seat. She tells me what I can get for twenty dollars, sixty dollars, and even a hundred. I ask her if there’s a cash discount and she gives me a confused look until I tell her I’m just joking. She doesn’t laugh. Then I ask her what I can get for five hundred.

“Is that you still being funny?” she asks.

I reach into my pocket and pull out my wallet. I show her what five hundred dollars looks like.

“You can have whatever you want, baby,” she says, and I’ll certainly hold her to that.

She closes the door and the interior light blinks out, but not before I end up taking a longer look at her than I would like. She’s in her late twenties, though that’s really just a guess. She’s underweight, which isn’t a guess, and looks like an ad for starving children in Third World countries. She has blond hair with black roots and so much hair spray the strong nor’westers we’ve been getting wouldn’t budge it. Her brown eyes reveal nothing, as though her mind is somewhere else, maybe in a world where she doesn’t have to wrap her thighs or lips around men for money. When she smiles at me, her swollen lips glisten with either moisture, or her last client.

I head back to Daniela’s house. We make small talk on the way, mostly about the weather. I’m sure she’s heard the news and knows what’s been happening to all sorts of women in the city, but she doesn’t look nervous sitting in a car with a man she’s known all of two minutes. She can’t afford to be nervous. I have no interest in what she does outside working hours. She doesn’t care who I am. Then we start setting the mood. She tells me I have a nice car. I tell her she has a great body. She tells me she’ll be an awesome fuck. I tell her for five hundred dollars she ought to be. We reach the house and I don’t bother driving around the block, but opt to park up the driveway. If anybody is around they won’t be able to get a good look at me. Even if they do take a peek, they’ll think it’s the husband returning home to quench his sexual thirst.

“Can you grab my briefcase from behind you?”

“Sure thing, sugar.”

The evening has dropped a few degrees since I left the house. We reach the front door, my guest walking a little slower than me, and not in the same straight line. I left the door unlocked earlier, but I lock it behind us once we’re inside.

“Would you like a drink?”

“Sure is hot in here.”

“So that’d be a yes?”

“Sure.”

She follows me through to the kitchen. I don’t need the map of the house to know where I’m going. I turn on the light knowing it can’t be seen from the front of the house, but it can be from the back if the neighbor over the fence is a practicing Peeping Tom. I open the fridge and grab a couple of beers. She is halfway through hers before I even manage to pry the top off mine. I leave the bottle opener and the caps on the bench. I’ll pick them up on my way out. I keep making a list of surfaces I’ve been touching. Fridge. Door handle. Drawer handle. What else?

She finishes her beer and I start mine. The more light we have the worse she looks. She looks drugged up. Maybe if she hadn’t spent too long focusing on sleeping with her step-father, dropping out of school early, getting pregnant, having an abortion, and getting pregnant again, then she could be living a more respectable life. I’m not saying prostitutes aren’t respectable-they fulfill a societal need. Where else can you get somebody to kill on such short notice and have nobody care? They’ll willingly go with you wherever you want to go. It’s crazy. They take their lives in their hands every night, and offer them up to their johns to take away. The only other easy victim, but not as readily available, is the hitchhiker. The trick is to pull up alongside her and glance at your watch, giving the impression that you’re due somewhere, perhaps at a meeting, and mumble that you only just have time to drop her off close to where she wants to be. It lulls her into a wonderful sense of false security, then lulls her into your car. Only I didn’t pass any hitchhikers on the way into town. I looked, but didn’t see any.

I lean against the kitchen bench, pulling at my beer, and the hooker in front of me is available and so used looking that instead of her looking better with every sip I take, she just keeps on looking worse. Her makeup has been caked on thickly. I have an idea why her lips are swollen, and know it costs sixty bucks.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“Candy.”

Candy. Sure. Why not. “Call me Joe.”

“I will be,” she says, stepping closer to me. “So what’s it to be, Joe?”

I shrug, pretty sure if I told her what it was exactly I was after, she’d make a run for the door. “Let’s go upstairs.” She’s still carrying my briefcase for me as I lead her upstairs. I sip at my beer. It’s nice and cool. Refreshing. I’ll take the rest with me.

“So how long you been doing this, Candy?” I ask, always willing to expand my knowledge of how things work.

“Six months. I’m just trying to earn enough so I can afford to go through university.”

I take a slight pause on the landing, her answer throwing me a little, until I realize she’s just saying something she thinks I want to hear. Telling her clients she was trying to raise enough money to bail her boyfriend out of jail for selling drugs is no doubt a real turnoff.

I decide to play along with the game. “What do you want to study?”

“I want to be a lawyer. Or an actor.”

“Same thing, isn’t it?”

When we reach the bedroom she tosses my briefcase onto the bed. The contents jingle.

“What you got in there? Whips and stuff?”

I’m smiling, because she really has no idea. “Something like that.”

She smiles, and small cracks appear in the makeup around her eyes and mouth. “I like whips and stuff, only it’ll cost extra if you wanna use them.”

I doubt she’ll like my definition of whips and stuff. She starts loosening my tie. She unbuttons my shirt. “You’ve got a great chest.”

She leans forward and starts kissing it. This is great. I’ve never done anything like this before. I reach forward and start pushing at her breasts. She starts moaning. Sounds like a shampoo commercial. Can she really be enjoying it that much?

She starts fumbling with my belt, like she wants to get this over with and say next please to the next guy driving along. This makes me realize she’s faking her moans, that she’s not enjoying this at all. I’m just another customer. Well, for me, she’s just another tool. Like Fluffy the Floppy Cat.

“So what’s it gonna be?”

I swallow. Hard. “Go back to the bed.”

She starts walking backward, at the same time pulling her top up over her head. Her breasts are small. I’m looking at them and thinking that padded bras have a lot to answer for. The tattoo she has there is of a small dragon. It could symbolize something, or maybe it’s her only friend. I walk with her. She sits on the edge of the bed and continues undoing my pants. It doesn’t take her long. The buckle on my belt rattles.

I’ve had sex before, but never with somebody consenting, and this makes me nervous. What if she doesn’t enjoy it? What if she thinks I’m no good? Will she laugh? None of the others laughed. Why would they? The enjoyment quickly fades.

I can think of only one way to bring it back.

I slam my fist into the side of her head. She jerks backward and tries to stand, but hits the edge of the bed and ends up falling onto her ass, her hands going behind her to break her fall. She looks up at me and I can’t tell behind all her makeup if she’s frightened or annoyed, but know it has to be at least one of them. There are tears in her eyes and for the first time she looks at least a little attractive.

“That’ll cost you extra.”

“I thought I could do what I wanted.”

“If you want to beat me up, it’ll cost you a grand.”

I shrug. Lean forward. Pull her back up by her arm. “Then I better get my money’s worth.”

I try to drag her onto the bed, but it ends up getting difficult because my pants fall around my ankles. I grab her arm, roll her over, and twist it up her back, trying my best not to break it-but these things happen. She begins screaming, so I push her face into the bed to muffle her, and it works pretty well. I let go of her arm. It doesn’t move. Just juts out at an angle I’ve never seen on an arm before. Her other arm is pinned beneath her. When I try to move the broken one, it grates where the bone has snapped. The pain is too much for her to struggle, so she stops fighting back.

I kick my pants off. The romance is quick and fulfilling, only it seems I keep too much pressure on the back of her head, because when I finish and pull away, I’ve suffocated her. It seems I can’t get anything right these days. At least I’ve saved five hundred dollars. Or was it a thousand?

I start to get dressed. It’s been a big night for me, and the effects of the combined excitement are starting to wear off, and by the time I’ve got my shirt buttoned up I’m starting to feel tired. The plan to kill Candy where Daniela Walker died has worked without a hitch. It will leave a message to the original killer. I can study the policemen at the station, watch them closely. One of them will become nervous. One of them will know that somebody else knows. He’ll wonder what they want. He’ll react. He’ll be an absolute nervous wreck. He’ll be easy to spot. I decide to grab the pen after all to highlight the message.

Of course it could be a matter of days, maybe weeks, before she’s found, and this is a problem. If I let it go that long, then bringing Candy back here would have been for nothing. Wrinkling my shirt and getting blood on it would have been for nothing. I grab my briefcase and head downstairs first to the fridge, then to the front door, using Candy’s bra to wipe down any surfaces I’ve touched. Tomorrow I’ll phone in an anonymous tip from a pay phone, telling the police there’s a body here.

It hasn’t gotten any darker or any colder since spending quality time with Candy. A million stars shine down on me, making my pale skin look even paler. I park the Honda just outside of town and wipe it down. The breeze blows against my face as I turn toward home. I dump Candy’s bra in a trash can outside a corner store. I pass other women on the way, most of them streetwalkers, but I don’t give them a second look. I’m not an animal. I’m not going to kill somebody just because they are there. I hate guys like that. That’s what makes me different from anybody else. That’s my humanity.