The Cleaner (26 page)

Do I want a damn cat? Not really, but I’ve become somewhat responsible for it. I wonder if I could give the thing to Mom. It would keep her company. Might mean she won’t feel the need to call me every two minutes to ask why I don’t love her. Hell, she can even cook the fluffy bastard meatloaf every day.

Only she would think I was somehow trying to kill her—the cat would give her allergies, or would suffocate her during the night, or pour rat poison into her coffee.

After four rings, Jennifer answers, and her voice suddenly takes on an excitable tone when I identify myself. She explains in her seductive voice everything she already explained on the answering machine. She makes cat surgery sound sexy. She wants to know if I want to keep the cat, the whole time sounding as though she is only a step away from asking me if I’ll sleep with her. I tell her I’ll think about the cat and contact her tomorrow night. We wish each other a good night and hang up. I’m expecting her to say
No, you hang up first,
and when she doesn’t it makes me a little sad.

At six o’clock, I arrive at Mom’s. We make the sort of conversation that makes me wonder how the hell she really could be my mother. We eat dinner, and then I have to watch her do some of her jigsaw puzzle for thirty minutes before we catch up with her soap-opera friends. I feel violently ill and manage to excuse myself from Mom and her Monday night and, amid
the complaints of how I never treat her right, I make my way outside.

It’s starting to rain. I catch a bus back into town, keeping my hand on my briefcase the entire journey, staring out the window as fat drops of rain smash against it, the attack lasting only five minutes. I take a detour past Daniela Walker’s house and she doesn’t seem to mind. Two blocks away I steal a car. It’s nearly ten o’clock when I reach Manchester Street, armed with photographs and cash. Hookers are walking the streets, some starting work, others back from ten- or fifteen-minute gigs sitting in parked cars in dark alleyways. In the back of my mind I keep asking myself whether this is a valid line of investigation. It didn’t work for the police. Why would it work for me? For a start, I have photographs to show them. The detectives didn’t. Prostitutes probably need visual stimulation to jog their memories. I watch as two of them get into a shoving match, which is broken up by a third, then a moment later it’s hugs all around. Within a minute all three have been picked up by three different cars, making me think their fight was a show for the kind of people who like picking up hair-pulling, palm-slapping girls.

I forgo the massage parlors where the women are monitored by violent men with dirty money and bad reputations. The men who frequent them, if not regulars, are caught on surveillance or, at the very least, remembered. This isn’t the kind of place a policeman visits unless he’s swapping sex for leniency. The other factor I have to consider is the availability of women prepared to be paid to live out the perverted fantasy of the killer. That sort of thing doesn’t happen in parlors without a lot of people knowing about it. A policeman doesn’t want a lot of people knowing about it. He doesn’t want repercussions such as blackmail and extortion.

The first hooker I talk to has a deep voice that’s almost scary. I don’t get a name from her and don’t want one. Even after I’ve identified myself as a policeman, she still asks me if
I want to fuck her. I say no. She shows me some nipple, and I still say no. Even if my testicles were intact I wouldn’t put them near her. She doesn’t recognize any of the photos.

The second hooker doesn’t either. At this point I’m deciding not to say I’m a policeman, but a concerned citizen, and she asks me anyway if I’m a cop. She wears a red wig large enough to conceal a small handbag.

I go from slut to whore, hooker to skank, showing them the pictures and getting no helpful response from any of them. My ball starts throbbing as I walk from corner to corner. Of the prostitutes I talk to, none definitely recognizes any of the four men. Some of them find it hard to remember. I give them money, and it doesn’t help. I’m having a bad run. The handgun. The knife. Now I’m paying for information that I’m not even getting, and getting wet in the process.

Monday night is less than an hour from Tuesday when my luck starts to change.

I encounter two prostitutes who I believe actually do recognize one of the four photographs, silencing the small voice in the back of my mind telling me this was a waste of time. It speaks again, though, when each of the two women recognizes a different picture.

The first woman, Candy (that’s right—sixty hookers, maybe seven names), points to the photo of Detective Inspector Schroder. Carl. I can’t be sure she isn’t just recognizing him from being interviewed last week for the same reasons. For only four hundred dollars, Candy will show me what she let Schroder do to her.

The second woman, Becky, points to one of the out-of-town cops. Detective Calhoun. From Auckland. Robert. I ask what he’d wanted. She says for two grand, I can find out. Two thousand dollars compared with four hundred. I figure for a street hooker to claim two grand for a performance it has to be one hell of a repertoire.

Two grand. Sure. Why not. I have the money.

I walk Becky to my car and drive her to the Walker residence. I was here earlier in the evening, just after I stole the car. I removed the police tape from inside and hid away any evidence markers. I checked at work today to see if the house was still under surveillance. The answer was no. I open the door and the smell hits me again. The place needs some fresh air.

Becky doesn’t mention the smell. Perhaps she doesn’t notice.

We walk into the kitchen and make small conversation as I offer her a drink, then I remember I’ve taken all the beer already. I open the fridge and it’s been cleaned out, all the expired food has gone, just empty shelves now.

“Just water,” Becky says, and I feel relief.

Becky looks like she’s in her early twenties, but I imagine her life has given her the maturity of somebody twice her age. She has black hair that is completely straight and hangs over her shoulders. Her eyes are slightly bloodshot, but in them flicker the signs of a sad intelligence. They’re pale green and look like they’d make a nice set of marbles. She’s wearing a tight, black, short leather miniskirt. Knee-high leather boots. No bra, and a dark red camisole does little to hide her firm breasts. She wears a thin, black leather jacket that rides up her back and has about a million tassels hanging from it. I like the touch of irony in the small silver crucifix hanging around her neck. The selection of cheap jewelry across her fingers looks plastic. Her diamond studs are cubic zirconia or possibly even glass. She has a small handbag that’s probably full of condoms, money, and tissues.

My legs are sore from walking around and, more importantly, my crotch is killing me. I sit down at the kitchen table opposite her and slowly start drinking from a glass of water. As requested earlier, I open my wallet and produce two thousand dollars in cash. I’d withdrawn three grand from the bank. Right now, I hand two-thirds of it over to Becky.

I figure I’ll be getting it back.

She sits opposite me and, while drinking her water, she
counts through the money twice, as if she thinks she’s being ripped off. I watch her face as she studies each of the notes. Her lips are moving as she counts. A smile flickers across her mouth. I’ve already paid her, and she hasn’t done a thing yet. I can see her thinking she’ll shorten her version of the erotica she possibly shared with Detective Robert Calhoun. I can also see her already spending it. She’s thinking about taking the week off, or buying a trip to Fiji.

“Shall we?” I ask.

She takes her jacket off. “You want to do it here?”

“Upstairs.”

I pick up my briefcase and walk upstairs. At the top I head for the master bedroom then stop, turn back, and head for the kids’ bedroom instead.

“Hot up here,” she says.

“I hadn’t noticed.”

I walk into the children’s bedroom.

“In here?” she asks, tossing her handbag onto the first of two single beds.

“You need more room?”

She shakes her head. “Kind of kinky.”

“Kind of,” I agree.

Here will be good for two reasons. First, I want some variety with this house. Life is a routine and all that stuff. Second, the smell of death isn’t embedded in the sheets.

We sit down on opposite beds. She begins by leaning back so I can see up her skirt. She’s wearing no underwear for quick access.

“What can you tell me about him?” I ask.

“Who?”

“The man in the photograph.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything.”

She shrugs. Looks disappointed, though I don’t know why. Wouldn’t she rather be paid for talking than acting?

“Well, he paid me two thousand dollars to let him do pretty much what he wanted.”

“Two grand buys that?”

“Two grand will buy a lot, honey.”

I guess it does. “How often have you seen him?”

“Just the once.”

“When?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, think.”

“Could have been a month ago. Maybe two.”

For a woman like this, time doesn’t have too big a meaning. She probably has a baby back at home, being looked after by some drug-infested friend who has got off the game but is too damn lazy to make the effort to get her friend off too. Becky will be spending her money on cigarettes and weed, and she’ll be sitting back in one of her tie-dyed dresses, smoking in front of the baby. She’ll be girlfriended to three or four guys—each with criminal convictions for burglary, drug possession, and assault. There’ll be bruises on her thighs that will never heal, but the pain is masked by the drugs. She’ll have no long-term goals other than to stay alive and stay inside a drug-afflicted world. To wake from the nightmare she lives in would be to wake to a reality that as a little girl she never believed could exist. Life wasn’t supposed to be like this.

She was her daddy’s little princess.

I know these people. They’re of no use to the community other than to take up space. They spit out babies, not because they can’t afford contraception when their welfare checks go toward getting high, but because with every baby that comes along they receive another one of those government subsidies that’s never enough to raise a kid properly. This is Becky’s world. Some just can’t escape, or don’t know what to escape to. I wonder if she even knows she’s trapped there.

Tonight I’m going to offer her an escape from the pain of life.

That’s my humanity.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The children’s bedroom has all that happy jolly stuff I never had as a kid. Posters of cartoon characters are stapled to the walls; they chase each other with stupid smiles and homosexual gestures. Even the bedspreads can’t just be normal. They too have characters running across them, frozen in a moment of excitement. The clock radio on the small blue desk is in the shape of a clown. The eyes move back and forth, counting the minutes that have passed since the occupants of this room lost their mother. But the clown doesn’t know it. He’s still smiling, his bright red lips almost the same shade as Becky’s, his eyes looking back and forth, back and forth, searching for something he’ll never find. Colorful toys are scattered across the floor. Stuffed teddy bears look like they have been massacred by toy soldiers, their bodies dumped in this battlefield of chaos. Piles of plastic board games are stacked in one corner. One is open on the floor and the pieces inside are strewn over the carpet. A bookcase containing more toys than books is pushed against the wall.

The main colors of the room are blue and light pink. Relaxing colors, or so they believe. They’ve spent thousands of dollars on case studies to prove this. Happy colors mean happy kids. As a kid, I had gray walls in my room. Put a poster up, and I got grounded. Yet look how happy I am. I could have saved those researchers all that money if they’d come to me first.

“You think you last saw him two months ago?” I ask, confirming her guess.

“Yeah. I suppose so.”

“Thought you’d remember a client who was paying two thousand dollars.”

She shrugs. “Go figure. I remember the money more than anything else.”

“What was his name?”

“His name? What’s in a name?”

“Everything,” I say, wondering if she’s trying to quote Shakespeare. I decide I can’t credit her with that intelligence, and chalk it up as a fluke. Still, I find it unsettling.

Could a whore actually be that clever?

She shrugs. “He didn’t tell me.”

“What did he tell you?”

“Just what he wanted.”

“And what was that?”

She tells me. It’s so graphic I nearly blush. “And you gave him
that
for two grand?”

“Yeah.”

Can’t quite discern if that had been a bargain or not. What I do understand is the similarity between this encounter and the death of Daniela Walker. Same signature.

“Where did he take you?”

“I thought I just explained all that.”

I shake my head. “I mean did he take you back to his house, or to your house, or to a motel room, or what?”

“Oh, that. Well, it was a motel room. We don’t usually go to the john’s house.”

“Can you remember the motel?”

“Some seedy joint across town. The Everblue. Heard of it?”

I nod. Never been there, but driven by it a few times.

“He booked a room while you were there?”

“No. He already had one. We drove straight there and went directly to his room.”

“Was he living there?”

“Huh?”

“Did you see any suitcases? Any extra clothes?”

“No, but I wasn’t looking for any.”

I figure he wasn’t staying there. The Everblue is a dive that charges for rooms by the hour, not overnight, just for people like Becky and her colleagues. Becky seems eager to tell me more now. Before she was defensive, guarded about everything. Now she senses she’s going to make two grand for talking, and after her candid explanation of the perverse sex Calhoun ordered, she has no reason to hold back.

“Where did he pick you up?”