Mop Men: Inside the World of Crime Scene Cleaners

by Alan Emmins

  “That’s a big issue!” Pera adds.

  “With the evidence as it stands,” I ask, “is it strong enough to convict Jim McKinnon?”

  “Aaaaaaaaaah!” says Pera as she sits back in her seat and removes her hands from the table.

  Now this is a long aaaaaah! and it makes me sit up straight. I wasn’t expecting an aah of any length. I was expecting,“Oh my God, yes, have you not been listening? He was living with the dead body!”

  “I would say,” Inspector Pera continues, “that it’s going to be difficult to convict him, say, of a first-degree murder, or maybe even a second-degree murder, and that is because the body was so badly decomposed and there are no other witnesses and it’s this guy’s word against this guy’s word. But you know, is it likely he’ll be convicted of some sort of a killing even in a jury trial or plead guilty? I think it is. Yeah, oh yeah.”

  “He has a couple of options, you know?” Inspector Toomey adds. “His attorney could also enter a plea of insanity. Not guilty by reason of insanity.”

  “When you said earlier that he started singing and acting crazy, it made me think that maybe he had an insanity plea on his mind right from the start. Do you think people get such ideas from TV shows?” I ask.

  “I think a bigger problem,” Joe Toomey says, shifting in his seat, “is that the jurors look at the TV programs and they always think there’s gonna be so much physical evidence, DNA and all this stuff. But you know, most of the time those things aren’t there. It just doesn’t happen, you know?

  “Ever since the OJ case everybody thinks that DNA is all over, and you know, sometimes it doesn’t amount to anything. Especially if the killing happened, say, in your house, and you’re the suspect or you’re the victim. I mean, your DNA and stuff is supposed to be there.”

  “The other thing jurors don’t take into account is money,” points out Pera. “It costs a tremendous amount of money to run a DNA test, it’s a couple of thousand dollars every time. So, we don’t always run DNA tests because we don’t have the CBS budget. So if there’s other ways to prove it, then we’re not gonna run a test because we don’t have enough people to do the testing and it’s very expensive. But the jurors see it on TV all the time and so they expect it. So when the defense attorney says, ‘Inspector, did you test this or that for DNA?’ and you say, ‘No,’ then the defense attorney raises his eyebrow like, ‘Aha! ’”

  “So the attorneys are actually using the influence of entertainment knowingly?” I ask. “Because the attorney works cases all the time, right, he knows how it works? I mean, the attorney will know why the test hasn’t been done? The funding constraints? Or the suspect having lived in the house et cetera?”

  “Oh, they know,” Pera says with a flick of her head. “Because they themselves can request that evidence be tested. I love it when the defense attorneys do that to the jurors. They say, ‘The inspectors had every opportunity to run the DNA to prove that it could’ve been somebody else, but they didn’t do it.”

  “And!” Inspector Toomey almost shouts, “if they don’t have any money to do it, the city has to pay for them. What Holly said was right, about whether we do it or not. But if the defense wants it done and they don’t have any money, the city has to pay!”

  I sit quietly for a minute, pondering the game. The way people’s lives hang in the balance of other people’s understanding of the game, or the skills with which they play it. I don’t mean just the lawyers, I mean the people who commit the crimes that result in their needing a lawyer. We seem to live our lives and make our decisions based on personal risk assessment. That could be an assessment of whether or not we will be able to pay the mortgage this month if we book a vacation. It could be about speeding on the highway when we’re late for work, risking the chance of getting pulled over and being fined, not to mention being even later for work. It could be about having an affair or slitting somebody’s throat because he or she looks funny.

  “Do you think the value of life is slipping?” I ask.

  “Hmmm …” Inspector Toomey pauses for a moment. “In the areas of these gang killings, it seems like the homicides are … almost happening on a regular basis, you know, they’re becoming … common. They have no respect for anyone else’s life. They have very little respect for their own life. They commit these killings and ten minutes later they’ve forgotten about it: ‘it’s no big thing, we’re playing the videogame now.’ ”

  “But there is so much of it on TV,” adds Pera. “There’s so much discussion of it in rap music and there’s so much of it in some communities that those living in the middle of it all are a little desensitized. I think it’s … yeah, and I think it’s really sad. Every TV show has somebody dying. Every murder show and every time you turn the TV on, whether it’s some gangster show or whether it’s a Law & Order type of show, it’s death, death, death, death, death. Death’s not as horrifying as it once was. What Joe and I have found in some of the rougher neighborhoods is that when we go knock, knock, knock, knock on someone’s door to tell them that, you know, ‘your son’s been killed,’ or whatever, they’re sad, but they’re not surprised! They know it’s gonna happen, and the young people figure that just a couple of things are going to happen to them, these are the only choices when they grow up: they’re either gonna be killed by the time they’re probably twenty-five or they’re gonna have to, quote, ‘go sit down,’ which means go to jail.”

  “Holly and I had a case,” Toomey says, leaning on the desk, “where a young guy, about eighteen or nineteen, was found with his face half shot off with a shotgun and another shotgun blast to his back. He didn’t have any identification on him, and he had never been arrested, officially arrested. If he’d been arrested we have everybody’s prints. So there wasn’t anything, but he did have a tattoo on his arm, Rest in Peace So and So, with a name and a date. We looked it up in our files and it turned out that that person was also murdered. We got that old case file for, how many years prior?” Joe asks his partner.

  “About six years.”

  “And we went out to that victim’s mother’s house …”

  “Hoping that she could tell us all the different people who put tattoos on their arm,” Pera adds.

  “Oh, and it’s only about a block and a half from where the second homicide victim was found. And she told us one person and it never fit the description. We go, ‘Anyone else?’ And she said, ‘Well, my other son.’ And so we go, ‘Well, may we speak to him?’ And she goes, ‘Well, he didn’t come home last night.’ And then we asked, ‘Does he normally carry identification?’ She goes, ‘Yes, he does, but he didn’t bring his wallet out with him last night.’ Well, we borrowed the wallet, and in California—when you get a driving license—they take a fingerprint. So we had them fax the fingerprint from the Department of Motor Vehicles and it turned out that it was her son.”

  “Her second son,” Pera says, looking down at the table.

  “Her second son was murdered, too,” Toomey reiterates. “So there are some mothers, some mothers in these gang neighborhoods, that have a number of their children murdered.”

  “And you know, it’s what we were saying.” Inspector Pera sighs as she looks at me. “They don’t seem to be too terribly surprised. But it would be so easy to say it’s all a part of their community, they’re not that terribly affected by it; it would seem as though the males are not that affected by it in terms of how it affects their mood and everything. They just kind of grow up to think this is what they’re gonna do. But the women are so depressed. The women are so depressed and Joe and I see this all the time. In their day-to-day life they’re so depressed and so worn down and I just really think it is this, it’s living with this. You know, it’s a very unnatural thing to have this happen over and over again. But they don’t realize it’s unnatural because it’s their life. It affects them by making them very, very depressed, and where it affects the males is by being more aggressive. I think.

  “But I also think that … Like y
ears ago, when I first came into the police department, you were just starting to see guns. It was more knives; people would beat each other up. Now, guns are so accessible to these young people. They’re coming in from foreign countries. I do know from research that they’re coming in from just a couple of different places, China, Mexico, and our government is working to try and curb that, back in China and back in Mexico, to stop that. ’Cause it’s only a few different places and they need to stop that ’cause all these kids have guns. Everybody’s got a gun, they don’t go out for dinner without a gun, they don’t go to a club without a gun, everybody’s got a gun. So it’s just so easy, and the other thing is, years ago, these people that were selling drugs were not using the drugs themselves. They were just selling them. Maybe they’d use a little marijuana just to chill out or whatever. But now they’re using the drugs and they’re using drugs like ecstasy and some of these other drugs that make them very paranoid as time goes on. And they’re mixing meth and ice, you know, and heroin and then the crack, and so it just makes them terribly impulsive, terribly paranoid, and then they have access to guns.”

  “But they don’t care about anybody or themselves,” Toomey adds.

  “Oh, that’s a huge thing too, yeah,” Holly agrees. “But they’ve got the tools.”

  It has been interesting, as the inspectors have told their stories, to watch how they have gone from being animated about a single case to exasperated about the overall picture.

  “How does it affect your outlook on life?”

  Nobody says anything for about half a minute.

  “What a good question …” Pera says, breaking the silence.

  “You know, sometimes you make comments,” Toomey begins. “‘Jeez, this is sad …’ but, I don’t know….”

  “It depends on the case,” Pera adds. “I think it depends on how innocent the victim is. That’s really hard when it’s an innocent victim, someone that really did not deserve it. But then the flipside of that is, even the people that aren’t innocent victims, it depresses me a little bit, it frustrates me a little bit because the system is just so out of control, it’s so out of control. I don’t know what the answer is, you know, I don’t know whether it’s just swifter and more severe punishment. But how do you get back and change this mindset from so many years ago. It’s so frustrating. I really do feel bad for a lot of people that are in these really repressed communities, because they live in the housing projects, which is very, like the outskirts of town, they don’t ever get outta there. You know, their life is different in there, they don’t see anything any different. They don’t have the opportunity to. They’re usually fourth and fifth generation now; people living there have never had jobs. I guess they try to make a difference in the schools, you know, to try and encourage these children to go to school, that they have other choices, but the peer pressure is so strong and their world is so different. We can’t even begin to shovel sand into the tide; we’re not even at the beach! Hispanic communities are the same—crazy, crazy killings because you’re wearing green and Joe’s wearing blue and you’re on his block and he’s on your block, I mean it’s just ridiculous.” Pera is genuinely frustrated, gripping and releasing her hands as she talks.

  “Yeah, actually they’re the most stupid ones …” Toomey agrees.

  “It’s over nothing! It’s so sad!” Pera says loudly.

  “But there are also good people in these communities,” Toomey adds on a lighter note. “It’s just that they’re not out at three in the morning when the drive-by shooting takes place. They’re asleep! So we don’t get to meet them.”

  I say good-bye to the inspectors and begin my exit through the corridors of the superior court. I am surprised by the inspectors. I was expecting, after all their years of experience dealing with death and murder, to find two people very desensitized to it. But instead what I found were two people clearly affected by death, and the stupidity of the common themes that lead to homicide. I found two people who care not only about the outcome but about why it happens. I feel reassured by these two wonderful characters. It’s fine that they have no solutions, nobody has, but the fact that they have a heartfelt reaction to what is happening on the streets leaves me with some kind of hope.

  DEATH AND DAYS OFF

  As I am still half obeying European time, I awake at six A. M., full of the joys of a sunny Californian morning, wondering what awaits me. What bloody bedlam will I get to document today? What ludicrousness will Neal offer forth?

  But Neal isn’t picking me up until eight thirty, so I lie in bed with CNN. I am aware that I do not have a healthy relationship with the news. I feel that news is so very important, and am often moved by the idea of recording factual content, and see it as quite a special and important art form that should be respected. For me, the news should be without interpretation—no, strike that, it has to be without interpretation. What is needed is a factual rundown of the day’s key events. What news channels should be providing is unmeddled-with recordings. History. Commentary is great, but it is not fact; it’s opinion and therefore should be part of another format. And so I get myself in a lather when the news anchors relay a story with a little too much canned emotion in their voices, and then turn to their colleagues and start sharing their views on the matter. Shut up! You’re a news anchor, relay the facts and move swiftly on. It’s a horrible trend, this opinionated news, but I guess at some point I will have to accept, as it spreads around the globe, that the news has lost its original function of simply keeping us informed. Now the news organizations think they have to give us our opinions, too. It’s like listening to a bore in a bar. It’s low-level entertainment, a service industry, and like all good service industries it is serving up what the people want: death in large portions—death-as-entertainment.

  I turn the TV off, take a shower, and go out for breakfast. If I am going to have to listen to other people’s opinions on noteworthy events, I’ll do it in a café, where the opinions are at least of the people and not scripted to capture the wider demographic.

  After breakfast, I pull back into the car park of the motel and notice Neal’s truck poised in the corner.

  “Dude, you’re cool. Go take a shower!” are his first words to me as I open the passenger door. “I need to make some calls anyway.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Go take a shower.’ I’ve taken a shower,” I say, sniffing my armpits.

  “Oh, okay. No problem. I saw you drive in and I thought maybe you were just getting home. I thought maybe you got laid last night.”

  “I’ve just been for coffee.”

  “Okay, well let’s fucking go then. Get in the truck! Damn!”

  As we drive, Neal tells me about a meeting that he has set up with a guy from Utah who wants to open a Crime Scene Cleaners franchise. He will pay Neal a lump sum of money and trade under the existing Crime Scene Cleaners standards and name.

  “Do you have many of these franchises set up?”

  “Eighteen, nationwide. I’d like to get a few international ones, too. If you wanted to set up in Denmark I’d invest in that. You could clean up in Denmark. I hear they like killing themselves over there. But really, I’d like to get a few more set up in the U. S., just to give our national contracts—like our motels—better coverage. But frankly it’s a pain in the ass. People don’t wanna work; they want everything for free. Then they get it and they still don’t do anything with it. You know, it costs me money to set these fuckers up.”

  “So you don’t make anything out of the fee?”

  “After the lawyers and contracts and meetings … not really. I just don’t wanna shut Utah down. It’s been open six years. But you have to sell there; if you don’t sell, you’re outta sight, outta mind. So, I guess I could move to Utah, but I don’t wanna do that.”

  “What’s in Utah, anything?”

  “World-class skiing and outdoor stuff. But I don’t care about that. Frankly, man, I just wanna play with my baby, love my wife, and make money. T
hat’s all I wanna do and I wanna do it here.”

  At the office, Neal is expeditiously writing out invoices for the work that has been completed in the last few days. Even with invoicing, everything is fast, fast, fast. He sits like a student in an exam, bent over the pad, almost as if he is protecting his answers from straying eyes. It sounds like an exam, too, the way Neal’s pen is busily scratching its way across the invoice pad, a sound that is now and again broken up by the ring of Neal’s phone.

  “Yeah, yeah. Compliment me some other time, motherfucker!” says Neal as he hangs up the phone and moves on to the next invoice. “I know I’m good, but can I go now? Jeez! Okay Alan, I’m done for the day. It’s nine fifteen. Wanna get some breakfast?”

  In typical Neal fashion, we screech up outside a diner and park on the red tow-away line. Before I can even point this out to Neal he is out of the truck. I realize, of course, that there is nothing to point out. He knows exactly where he has parked.

  “Aren’t you worried that you’ll get towed away?” I ask his back as he enters the diner.

  “Nah, they won’t touch my truck. People love that truck, except the neighbors—they try to tell me that I have to park it outta sight, so I tend to park it on the street as much possible.”

  “You like to engage, huh?” I ask Neal, laughing.

  “Not really. My neighborhood’s full of old fucking people. They wanna golf. This is like their fourth or fifth house that they’re retiring at. This is my first house, dude! I’m not stopping here. I may keep the house ’cause the appreciation is incredible around here, but I wanna live on the fucking Carmel coast. That’s where I wanna live. Those are six-, seven-million-dollar houses, and so I gotta work!”

  “Wow! A lot of people need to put their brains on the wall for you to buy one of those houses, huh?”

  Neal laughs. “Fuck yeah!”

  “Keep scraping!” I laugh.

  “But you know, I’m a phenomenal saver, dude. I can save some major dough.”