The Cleaner

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

The next morning my internal alarm wakes me into what is another glorious Christchurch morning-according to some old guy giving the forecast on the radio. Looking out the window shows something different: gray skies and dark storm clouds on the horizon, which make me think the forecaster must be crazy or drunk. There is some condensation on the window and the floor is cold.

I stare at the coffee table before leaving for work. There is a tin of fish food on it and no dead cat. I leave my apartment and head downstairs and out into the first frost of the year. The lawn looks crunchy, and there are leaves filling the gutters. I’m shivering a little when I hand Mr. Stanley my bus ticket, and today he punches it. I wonder if this is an omen. I want to tell him about my goldfish, and I don’t know why. I don’t even know if he would care.

When he drops me off opposite my work, we exchange waves.

The day doesn’t suggest that it’s going to get much warmer. I keep my hands buried in my pockets as I make my way across the road. Sally catches me by the elevator. We make inane conversation up to my floor, but mostly Sally seems preoccupied, and then she is gone.

I’m unable to gain access to the conference room, so I end up doing what I’m paid to do. I keep an eye on Detective Calhoun when he is around. I try to figure out just how he’s feeling, but I don’t know him well enough to see if he’s going through a personal crisis. I also keep an eye out for Melissa, but she doesn’t show. I vacuum and clean and wipe and do the general workday things that bring in the big janitorial bucks. Nobody treats me any differently. Nobody gives me the sort of look they’d reserve for a serial killer.

The station doesn’t have the same buzz about it as yesterday, when everybody thought the case was about to bust wide open. Even the conference room is empty. I step inside and take a look around. The composite picture Melissa helped them with is on the wall. Dark, bushy hair; cheekbones that can’t be seen, let alone felt; lots of stubble. A flat nose, big eyes, high forehead. The cold, calculating expression on his face looks mean, as though the person in this picture was born to be a criminal.

The picture in no way represents how I actually look. My hair is finer, swept back, and kept reasonably short. It’s dark, which is the only similar thing, but I have high cheekbones with no flab, and my eyes are thinner too. And stubble? No way. I’m lucky if I need to shave once a month. I grin at the picture. It doesn’t grin back. On the table with the folders is the knife. Shrouded inside a plastic bag, sitting inside a cardboard box, it has already been studied for fingerprints, blood, and DNA. If my fingerprints were found on it, I would know by now. All employees in this building have been fingerprinted. It’s standard. Melissa wasn’t lying. It isn’t standard for all of us to have given DNA samples.

I grip the handle tightly, feel it beneath the thin plastic. This knife was stolen from me in circumstances I can never possibly forget. This knife was there the night I suffered my greatest indignity, my greatest pain, and experienced my greatest hatred. I quickly put it back down. It isn’t mine anymore.

I take time to read the reports. The prostitute I left in the alleyway has been identified. Charlene Murphy. Twenty-two years old. I’d pegged her at being closer to thirty. Prostitution ages people fast. She was, however, a mother of one. That much I’d guessed. Her boyfriend isn’t a suspect, since he was in jail at the time on unrelated charges. Her photograph is up on the wall keeping company with the other women.

The second whore who died, Candy number two, is still to be identified.

I don’t need to take any information away with me, but I find myself collecting what I can anyway, more as mementos than anything else. I also take the tape from the recorder in the potted plant. I’m back in my office when Sally knocks at the door and comes in.

After the usual pleasantries, Sally stops talking, as if she’s used up all the words she’d remembered for the day. She just stands there as if somebody has reached inside her and flicked the big off switch. About half a minute goes by, and then she just starts looking around.

“Sure is a cold day,” she says, but the switch has been flicked to automatic now, so she doesn’t really know what she is saying. She looks out the window. Looks at the ceiling. At the floor under the bench. Finally her eyes rest on my briefcase. “I forgot to make you lunch today. I’m sorry, Joe.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

She keeps staring at my briefcase, and I guess she’s figuring I’d like her more if she went out and bought the same one. She’s trying to figure out whether I’d be impressed or devastated if she bought one that was better. The truth is she probably isn’t thinking anything at all. She is frowning slightly, which suggests something is going on inside her mind, but the way her face is slightly scrunched up suggests the only thing happening in there is a whole lot of confusion. It’s as if she wants to ask me a really big question, but has no idea what that question even is.

“Well, thanks for dropping by. I got a lot of work I ought to get started on.”

This seems to snap her out of it. The switch inside of her doesn’t go to on, because that isn’t one of the positions. Other than off and automatic, she only has barely functioning, and she goes into that mode now.

“I’ll see you later on, Joe.”

“Oh. Okay then,” I say, trying to singsong the three words.

She heads out of my office but doesn’t close the door. I have to get up and do it myself.

I listen to the tape from the conference room. Lots of different theories, none of them right. The police are freaking out because they think I’m escalating. They think soon it’ll be only a few days between my victims. Hell, maybe they’re right. It’s too early to tell.

The Everblue Motel is one of those dives you see in movies where bad things happen to unlucky people who just happen to be staying there the same night as some escaped mental patient. It’s not far from town, but far enough for the land to be cheap, like those living nearby.

The motel is an L-shaped stretch of rooms with old paint and chipped windowsills, opposite brown grass and half-dead shrubs. The cracks in the sidewalk are full of rust-colored water. I count a dozen vehicles in the parking lot, ranging from the cheapest of the cheap to the most average, middle-class family sedan. Maybe it’s discount Wednesday for the hookers. A few corroding shopping carts are lying on their sides, surrounded by weeds and cigarette butts. The neon sign is making a loud buzzing noise.

I park outside the office. Long ribbons of thick plastic cover the doorway, the type you’d find if you traveled back twenty years and entered a dairy. I brush them aside and make my way in. The room smells of latex and cigarette smoke. The walls and ceiling are stained. The carpet is patterned with cigarette burns.

The guy behind the counter must be in his forties. He’s bald and overweight, and he stares directly at me as if he doesn’t trust me. As if he thinks I’m going to grab his multicolored plastic ribbons from the doorway and take off. He is wearing a T-shirt that says Racism is the New Black.

I flash some police identification that isn’t even mine-sometimes all you need is a policeman’s business card with a name and no photo and it can open any door-and he shrugs and hardly glances at it. When I ask to look through the guest book, he spins it around and tells me to go ahead. His fingernails, long and dirty, flick the pages open toward the date I indicate. Then he uses them to scratch at his barren scalp. He gets tiny pieces of skin stuck under them, and then he starts to pick them out. They drift onto the guest book, and he brushes them off with his hand.

We make miniature conversation as I look through the book. He has dealt with police before, so he says, and even rented a room once to a murderer. Of course, he didn’t know the man was a murderer at the time. That hadn’t come out until the guy was caught.

Fascinating. I tell him so.

I search through the dates, looking for the room Calhoun used. Of course, it won’t be beneath his name, but I look nonetheless. My finger scrolls past lots of people called John Smith, and others with names like Ernest Hemingway and Albert Einstein. The Everblue seems a popular place for dead people, because even Abraham Lincoln has stayed here.

I turn the guest book back around so it faces Mr. Greasy. Slap the photograph of Detective Calhoun down on top of it. “You recognize this guy?”

“Should I?”

“Yeah, you should.”

He takes a close look at it. “Yeah, I remember him. He came in a few months ago.”

“Out of all the people who come in here, you remember this guy? Why’s that?”

“I sure as hell remember the mess he made, and the noise he made while he was making it.”

“You sure this guy did that?”

He shrugs again. “Does it matter?”

I guess it doesn’t. I don’t bother thanking him. Just nod, and leave.

My next stop is a direct contrast to the Everblue. The Five Seasons Hotel is closer to the center of town, among a handful of hotels, most around ten years old. Land isn’t cheap here. It just looks it. I park the stolen car three blocks away and take my briefcase with me. The evening is getting darker and colder. There’s going to be another frost.

The hotel is ugly. I don’t know quite how to describe it as anything other than an artistic dream turned nightmare. Architects using braille to draw their plans. Painters using materials from the seventies. It looks like a lava lamp. It’s fifteen stories high-not huge, but big enough when your major color is lime green. Spotlights around the foundation light it up at night. The hotel would look more in place in Disneyland as some scary ride. Amazingly, it’s a five-star.

What’s also amazing is that police personnel from out of town are put up here. It’s taxpayers’ money going to good use.

I already have a picture in my mind of what the interior will look like, but I quickly find I’m completely wrong. The walls are varnished wood, giving the foyer a strange type of antique look. A chandelier hangs from the ceiling with a million reflections of light. The carpet, a deep red color, is plush enough to sleep on and be comfortable. Where the carpet ends, checkered black-and-white linoleum takes over. The foyer is large enough to chase somebody around in for a good minute or so. The air is cool, and slightly scented. Could be jasmine, or lilac, or one of those other incense aromas that men all over the world have no idea how to distinguish from others.

I step up to the reception desk. It’s a hell of a lot nicer than stepping up to the counter at the Everblue, plus the staff are doing a good job of keeping it warm in here. A young woman smiles at me-quite attractive: nice breasts, tight body, pretty face, blond hair pulled back, her makeup applied to perfection. Her uniform is dark green. The blouse is white, and it wouldn’t take much to give it a splash of red. I wonder what she would say if I asked her to take it off.

I book and pay for a room with cash, then I sign my name in the guest book the same way it was on the cards. She asks me for a credit card she can swipe in case I make any extra purchases, and I tell her I’m a cash only kind of guy, and don’t own one. She nods and smiles, and says that that’s fine, then adds that they’ll lock the minibar so I can’t access it.

She puts me in room 712. I grab my key, which is actually an electronic card so could pose a problem. I thank her, wondering if I’ll ever see her again. She thanks me, and no doubt has a similar thought.

A porter with barely enough personality to get by in life rides with me to the seventh floor. I have no luggage, but he comes along anyway. He seems depressed, and I figure it must be because he’s over a hundred years old and is still a damn porter. My legs take me to the twelfth room. He takes the key off me, puts it into the lock, and the mechanism pops open with the same sound as a latch on a briefcase. He opens the door, then stands there like it’s well within his Goddamn right to take a tip off me. Like he’s just earned ten bucks for making this trip and providing no conversation. I give him five and he doesn’t thank me. I close the door and head to the windows. My eyes take me out to the city beyond.

I decide to relax a bit. With my shoes off and my feet breathing in the air-conditioned room, I struggle to believe, or perhaps don’t want to believe, that outside this hotel I have a life that consists of mayhem and confusion and very little else.

The room is divine, the sort of place that gives me the motivation to become rich just so I can live here. You could stay at the Everblue for about a week and still pay less than you’d pay for this place for one night. The large window makes the view of Christchurch seem nicer than I’ve ever seen it, and combined with its height and the fact it’s been raining, it even makes Christchurch look cleaner. The bed is so comfortable I’m afraid if I lie down I may never get up. I check out the minibar: one look at the prices and I think it’s ironic that I’m the one being called a criminal. None of the items are accessible as the door to the minibar has been locked. The kitchen is filled with expensive appliances I have no idea how to use. The TV is a big screen with a remote control that has a hundred buttons.

I take the gamble and lie down on the bed. I end up spending forty minutes staring at the ceiling, allowing my mind to visit other places it hasn’t been in weeks, catching up on old fantasies that include the woman from the vet, and thinking of new ones that include the receptionist downstairs, before finally using the phone to call home and check my answering machine. A moment later I’m listening to a man from the veterinary clinic, reminding me that I have a cat cage that doesn’t belong to me. I don’t need to wonder why Jennifer didn’t call. I’ll return the cage when all this is over.

The second caller identifies himself as Doctor Costello. He leaves a phone number where I can contact him. He says it’s urgent. Says Mom’s in the hospital. He leaves no other details. My hands are shaking and I struggle to hang up the phone. Has something happened to Mom? Of course it has. She wouldn’t be in the hospital otherwise. Please God. . Please let her be okay.

I punch in the number (I wrote it down on a complimentary Five Seasons pad with a shaky hand while listening to the message), and the phone starts ringing. I end up talking to a woman at a Chinese restaurant for about a minute, trying to ask how my mother is while being given the day’s specials, until I realize I’ve dialed the wrong number. I slam the phone down and suck in a deep breath, but it doesn’t calm my nerves. My hands are shaking violently, and I have to use both of them to dial. I close my eyes and begin to imagine a world without Mom, and as I imagine it, tears begin to well in my eyes.