The Cleaner

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

“I don’t want anybody to die,” Bob starts, as if he really means it, and as if I’d really care even if he did. People dying isn’t a relevant factor for him, or for me. Under other circumstances-better circumstances, he’ll be thinking-we could have laughed at his joke.

What is relevant is Daniela Walker.

I lean back on my elbow. If I smoked, now would be the time to casually light up an expensive cigarette. If I were an evil mastermind, now would be the time I started petting my white Persian cat. But I’m just a cleaner with no goldfish to feed. An average, everyday Joe. If I had my mop, then maybe I would stroke it. If I had my metal bucket, I could beat out a rhythm. All I can do is turn the knife over and over in my hands, watching him watching the blade.

“Come now, Bob, you’ve killed before. I don’t see how you can feel bad about somebody else dying.”

“I haven’t killed anybody.”

I shake my finger back and forth. “No, no, no. I said no lying. Do you remember what I said would happen if you lied?”

He nods. He remembers.

“Good. I know of a couple of ways we can do this,” I say, reaching into my briefcase and rummaging around. “I can start by using these,” I pull out a pair of sharpened gardening shears, “on your fingers. For every answer I don’t want to hear, I’ll remove one finger.”

Actually, I won’t. I’m not going to remove any of them, but as long as he believes I’m going to, that’s all that really counts. This is where his assumptions are going to lead him astray. I watch his face as he studies the gardening shears. It takes no effort to imagine how they can wrap around any one of his fingers, how the blades can sink through his flesh, and how with a little bit of extra effort I can get them to snap through the bone. His imagination already has all his digits scattered across the floor behind his chair.

I’m capable of this. Melissa would be too. And so is he.

The three of us have all killed.

“You did kill her, didn’t you?”

He nods.

“Can you tell me why?”

He shrugs. “I’m still not sure.”

Not a detailed answer, but I believe it to be the truth-at least as far as he understands it.

“Would you like me to help you understand why?”

He does the wise thing and nods.

“It’s because you can,” I start. “The ability is inside you. You’ve always wanted to feel the power. What would it be like to kill somebody? Imagine the control! You imagined it, but of course it’s only a fantasy. You couldn’t admit to yourself that it’s something you’d actually like to try. In your mind you think about the outcomes, of how you could escape the blame, of how to make yourself look like the innocent party. Plenty of ways of doing it, but why explore them? After all, you’re only thinking about it, you’re not exactly considering it. Then one day the fantasy is no longer enough. Not the fantasy of killing, but of sex. Violent sex. So you hire a whore, but it isn’t the same, because she isn’t a real victim. You want to kill her, because that’s ideally where the violent sex leads, but you know there’s no point in killing a whore because they’re already dead. They’re zombies tanked up on bad luck and bad breeding. You needed to kill a better class of person, and then along came Daniela Walker. A victim of domestic abuse who refuses to follow through with laying charges against her husband.”

He says nothing. I think about the indications in the pathology report that said Daniela had previous injuries. If she’d left her husband, she’d still be alive. And somebody else wouldn’t be. Calhoun surely would have found somebody else.

“She threatens him, she even goes to the police, but at the end of the day her fear of him and her love for him prevent her from acting. This woman is a loser. You can’t understand how she could even have married a guy like that, let alone have his children. But you forget he’d been charming when she met him, the same way you were charming when you met your wife.”

I look at him. My speech hasn’t made any impact. If it’s true, and I believe most of it is, then he isn’t going to let me know. This annoys me, but not enough to jump up and cut his throat. I sit and wait.

“You’re new in the city,” I continue, “so the opportunity to act out is irresistible. You know her address and learn the pattern of her movements. Her husband’s at work, her children are away at camp, so what could be better? Before you attack her, you decide to frame the husband, because what possible candidate could look any more attractive as her killer? Then you answer the question. One person fits the bill perfectly, and that person is me. So what do you do? You frame me for a murder I didn’t commit, and to be honest, Bob, I never really appreciated it. But you’re lucky, because you’re being given the chance to change the way I feel about you. You can either leave this house a richer man, in terms of both money and character, or you can leave inside a body bag on your way straight down to hell. Of course, needless to say, punishment down there will be eternal, and eternity, Bob, is a very long time.”

I start wondering what I’m talking about. Hell? Who gives a damn about Satan? The limp-wristed, red-skinned motherfucker is a figment of the Christian imagination, designed solely as a deterrent for killers, thieves, rapists, liars, hypocrites, and mime artists-yet a lot of bloody good that’s done.

“Whether you rot in hell or not isn’t my concern. What is my concern is what you did to poor Daniela Walker. From what I’ve learned, and from being here,” I spread my arms out to encompass the room, “I’ve come to some expert and insightful conclusions.”

“Good for you.”

I smile. “You broke into her house during the late afternoon, climbed upstairs while she was showering, and waited for her in the bedroom. In this bedroom.”

It’s a familiar scenario.

“She had no chance. After all, you had the element of surprise on your side, as well as being bigger and stronger. Her fear, her imagination, made her react, but not quickly enough to escape you. You struggled with her, managed to force her onto the bed, and she managed to reach to the bedside table and clutch at the only weapon she could find.” I point to the table for effect. “She fought with you and managed to stab you with the pen she’d been using to fill in her crossword puzzles. The wound wasn’t deep, but it was enough to piss you off. You tossed it away, then got back to business. Except the pen was your mistake, Bob, but you know that, don’t you? At the time, after you killed her, nothing else mattered. The pain was gone, as was any concern of being caught. The pen was the furthermost thing from your mind. Until you came back. Then it became the biggest thing on your mind, and it was only a matter of good luck that you were able to swap it unnoticed. At least unnoticed by everybody except me.”

“What is it you want?”

I shake my head. “Bob, Bob, Bob. I thought we had an understanding. You know you’re not allowed to ask the questions.”

“Just tell me what you want.”

“That’s another question.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s a request.”

“And that’s a lie.” I hold up the gardening shears. “You’re just asking for it, aren’t you?”

He shakes his head. “No. I swear.”

“What about Daniela? Was she asking for it?”

Bob’s face is wet and he’s looking down into his lap. We’re both sweating. It’s not warm outside, but somehow this house is still retaining the heat from the summer. The windows have been closed for three months now, so the air is stale and tastes like bad meat. I move over to the window. Open it slightly. Suck at the air outside. The smell, the thick air, the pressure on my skin-it is similar to my apartment the week I spent in bed with a bleeding ball and a bucket full of piss. I’d got used to the feeling, but it is a great relief to be rid of it now.

I sit down, remove my jacket, and clutch at my damp shirt. Thoughts of going to the beach are hammering the front of my mind. I can feel the pull of the sea and the sand, even though I’m five or six miles from the nearest drop and grain, even though a trip to the beach tonight would be a pretty miserable experience.

“Answer the Goddamn question, Bob.”

He tilts his head to look at me. He looks sorry, but he’s sorry to have been caught, not sorry for killing Daniela Walker.

“I didn’t mean to kill her.”

The air seems to be getting stickier by the minute. I don’t reply to his answer. I just sit still, silently reasserting my dominance over this man. The room is cooling. Somewhere, Melissa is dreaming about her money. Somewhere nearby a dog is barking. Some place further away the police are coming closer, if they’ve not done so already, to discovering a match for the fingerprints on the murder weapon they found in the dumpster.

Bob is now a condemned man. He’s effectively on death row. It’s just that nobody has told him. His family, especially his wife, will have to live with the stench of blame. How can she justify not knowing what a monster her husband really is? Or how does she explain that she knew and never did anything about it?

I’ve been wondering whether Bob has an alibi for several of the killings. He was in Auckland for the first few. However, because of the seriousness of this horrific series of murders, the police will work their way around any small inconsistencies, and when nobody else shows up dead, they will be satisfied with labeling Calhoun the Christchurch Carver. I’ve learned enough from cleaning their hallways to know that they’re so hard-pressed for a suspect, they’ll keep their mouths shut, never mention all the DNA evidence that never quite matched up, and if a few more bodies show up every now and again they’ll use a copycat defense. It’ll keep them happy, and the media, and the country. It’ll even keep me happy.

“Okay, Bob, explain how killing her was an accident.”

He looks up. Stares into my eyes. He shrugs, then he looks down at the floor, then he shrugs again. He seems really unsure. “I followed her home, to talk to her, right?” he says, still looking down. “I wanted her to charge her husband with assault, ’cause the guy’s a real asshole, right? Shit, you probably saw him. Stuck-up, arrogant bastard. So full of himself, sure that he’s above the law, that it’s his right to beat the crap out of his wife. So I follow her home to tell her she’s making a mistake, and when I get here, I find that she’s home alone.”

“It wasn’t your job, Bob. You were here to work on my case alone.”

He sighs. “I know. I know that, but, well, it just happened.”

“Did you know she was going to be home alone?”

“Not really.”

“That sounds like a yes to me, Bob.”

“I suspected.”

“Which is why you followed her, right? Because you could only talk to her while she was alone. Having her husband in the same room wasn’t going to make for a useful conversation.”

“I guess so.”

“You guess so. Okay, then what happened?”

“I sat outside for a few minutes, considering what to do.”

“Considering whether to kill her or not?”

He shakes his head. “Nothing like that.”

“What then?”

“I don’t know. I just sat there, watching the house, thinking about the best way to convince her of what she needed to do. Finally, when I went to the door and knocked, there was no answer. I was going to leave. .” he says, but doesn’t finish the sentence.

“But you stayed,” I tell him.

“I stayed,” he says. “For some reason I couldn’t tell you, I stayed.”

“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.