It’s a pulp noir type story, I remember it was part of an “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” anthology of crime / mystery stories. I read it as a kid, which was early 80s, but all the stories in the anthology dated back to the 70s or maybe the 60s .
The story starts with a bang - or actually just after one. The protagonist has just killed another man. I forget the how and the why, but the story starts with our ‘hero’ standing over the dead man. It was not a pre-meditated murder - he flew into a rage and attacked him, and then the man was dead.
The protagonist then frets about what he is going to do, and realizes that since it is just the two of them, no one can connect him to the killing. So he arranges the body in such a way to make it look like the dead man just had a fatal accident.
The killer is about to walk out the door and leave the scene when he remembers that his victim had served him a cocktail earlier, meaning that there is a glass with his fingerprints on it on the coffee-table. He returns to clean it up. As he is washing out the glass (erasing his fingerprints) and putting it away, he recalls a cigarette he smoked. He snatches it out of the ashtray. Then, just to be sure, he wipes the ashtray clean to remove any fingerprints. Then, the killer thinks “when I had a drink and cigarette - did I at any time happen to touch the coffee-table?” So he cleans the table. As he’s wiping the table down, he realizes that he must have got his fingerprints all over the kitchen sink when he was cleaning the glass…
You can probably see where this is going - the man is of course having a nervous breakdown. He becomes so obssessed with removing all trace of his being there that he begins frantically cleaning the whole house. The story ends with the police arriving in the morning and finding him in the attic of the house, cleaning out the rafters, having completely lost his mind. As they lead him away, the last thing the killer does is polish the doorknob on the front door.
The hook of the story is that it follows the POV of the hero as his sanity crumbles. The story is written in the third person voice, but neatly conveys his mental collapse by having the prose become more frantic and manic as he gradually loses it.
So, anybody know this one?