Mop Men: Inside the World of Crime Scene Cleaners

by Alan Emmins

  “Oh, that sucks. Hey, listen, I have an idea. One of my roommates has suddenly moved out. There’s an empty room here now. Why don’t you come and stay here for a few days?”

  “Would that be okay?” I ask hopefully. “I really do need a change.”

  “Sure, but I’m not around tonight. But you can just come over and we’ll grab a coffee and I’ll give you some keys.”

  I am packing my case as if I am late for the airport. The relief I feel is instant and it washes over me in a tide of joy. Good-bye motel, depressing little hovel that you are. I examine the room and the bathroom, looking for forgotten items. It’s a gloomy place. It’s not surprising that many of the suicides Neal cleans up are in motel rooms. Renting a room does, after all, show a certain seriousness about what you’re contemplating. If you choose a motel as your exit point, you have put thought into several important aspects of your suicide. The biggest being that you are unlikely to be disturbed while attaching yourself to the ceiling fan with the TV cord. You are unlikely to be interupted by your wife coming home early, or your roommate entering your room to see if you have any clean socks. You will not see a framed picture of your children, or a pair of shoes that remind you of the good times that might still be possible.

  You will also, by using motel facilities, be ensuring that a loved one won’t be confronted by your dead body, possibly swinging from the aforementioned ceiling fan, or casually lounging on the bed with a Jackson Pollock homage where your head used to be. You are ensuring that your loved one, friend, or fellow student will not have to get down on his or her hands and knees to clean up your scattered remains. You are sparing these people tainted furnishings and a room condemned to bad memories. If you check into a motel room intent on ending your life, you may consider yourself serious about it. Good-bye.

  I, luckily, am serious only about bidding farewell to this motel.

  Everybody in the house, including Rachel, welcomes me unquestioningly. They offer me beer and invite me to play games of pool. They invite me to theaters and bars that they are already attending with other friends. I go for Mexican food with one of Rachel’s roommates, Cat, on her motorcycle. It’s a warm evening, and I can think of nothing better to do than zap around San Francisco while clinging to the back of a motorcycle.

  “You can ride back if you like,” says Cat, as we leave the restaurant and find ourselves in front of her motorcycle.

  “Are you kidding?” I ask, shocked at the offer. I can ride a motorcycle, but Cat has no way of knowing this.

  But I don’t take Cat up on her offer. I don’t want to head home yet. If I go home now I am going to sit around thinking about death. I will sit half watching television, half watching my cell phone. I really feel like I need to make an effort to free my mind of the morbid, even if only for an evening. After all, I haven’t thought, or discussed, anything except death since I left L. A.

  “I have a tropical farm about ten miles away; you should come and see it.”

  Yes, this really is the opening line of a conversation, and even though I do want to talk about things other than death, this isn’t exactly what I had in mind.

  I am in sitting on a stool at a bar. The guy sitting next to me, also alone, is around sixty years old, clearly a madman and drunk to boot.

  “Wonderful though the offer may be—” I start to tell the guy, but he cuts me off halfway through.

  “Let me buy you a drink,” he says.

  “No, that’s okay. I’ll get my own.” To the barman I say, “A Corona, please.”

  But as the barman places my drink on the bar, the guy next to me says. “Here, George, it’s on me.”

  “No, really, I’d rather buy my own,” I insist, looking at the barman.

  But the barman ignores my hand, which is holding out money, and removes a ten-dollar bill from the little pile of money Mr. Tropical has sitting on the bar.

  I get that it is rude to refuse a drink, but surely it is down to me whether I want to be rude or not? I can’t help thinking that the dead, and the people who deal with them, are a lot less complicated than the average Joe. But stop! I am back on the subject of death again. Shake that thought. Regroup.

  “I have a tropical farm about ten miles away; you should come and see it,” the man next to me repeats, leaning toward me this time.

  “Are you mad?”

  “What do you mean—mad?”“You’ve already invited me to your tropical farm once.”

  “And?”

  “And I said no.”

  “We can chase after the ostriches!”

  At this point he slips off his stool and I have to catch him. I drink up, thank the old guy for the beer, and leave as quickly as I can. He is still talking to me as I walk out through the door and turn the corner.

  A few blocks down, I come across a used bookstore that’s open until ten thirty. That will do, I think to myself. I spend a lot of time in bookshops, so this should help me get back on familiar ground.

  Late-night book shopping is actually something I miss from my days living in New York City. There’s something great about buying books in the evening. Because you have the time to browse and read a few pages of every book you pick up, you often leave with books that you weren’t looking for.

  An hour later, I leave with Old Goriot, by Balzac, and walk back to an Italian café that I passed on the way down. There is only one table available outside. It’s big and has five chairs around it, but the waitress says it’s okay to take it while I wait for a smaller table. As soon as my glass of wine arrives, a party of four turns up and wants the table. They sit down with me. There’s a mother, father, son, and the son’s friend. The boys are around thirteen years old.

  “Hi, I’m Isaac. I’m a writer,” the friend informs me.

  “Fantastic,” I say, choking a little on my wine.

  This is a pretty typical Disney family. Good-looking, successful-looking, confident, and out enjoying themselves. The mother is tall with blond hair, little makeup, and incredible cheekbones. The father looks like a businessman. He has a warm smile and an air of confidence. When he and his wife catch each other’s eyes there’s a sparkle. The son seems like a nice guy.

  But then there’s this Isaac character. Absolutely too good-looking for his age and totally aware of it; the little bastard. He has too much hair, to start with. Hair that seems to flip and flop like he’s in a shampoo commercial (which he probably is), and on top of all that he has way too much confidence.

  “What do you do?” he inquires while holding my eye.

  “Me?” I pause “I write …” and then, realizing how silly this now sounds and wanting to get out of it, I say, “birthday cards.”

  “You do? Oh my God! And you tell people? Brad, did you hear that? He writes birthday cards. I didn’t think people really did that.”

  “That’s so funny!” Brad says.

  “I write poetry, mainly,” says Isaac. “And novels.”

  “Interesting,” I say back, finding myself wanting to punch Isaac in the face.

  “Where are you from?” the mother asks.

  “England,” I say.

  “We’re all San Francisconites,” says Isaac, cutting the conversation off.

  I smile at the mother, who actually looks back at me with a smile that says I know, and then winks at me. I am unsure whether this is to confirm that they are all indeed San Francisconites or to confirm that Isaac is indeed a little pubescent twat worthy of a punch on the nose.

  I slowly raise Old Goriot and slouch down in my chair. But there’s a part of me that is looking at this little happy group and wondering if they have any idea how vulnerable their lives are. What happens to such strong units when death strikes? How do they cope? How do they move on? There’s nothing to stop them from having a tragic car crash on the way home. Or to enter their front door to be confronted with a gun-wielding and slightly panicked burglar.

  “Balzac,” I hear Isaac ponder. “Balzac,” he whispers again.

  I
s he talking to me? I wonder. Can he tell that I came out to get away from death but in fact, once again, was spiraling off with macabre thoughts about his own mortality? Isaac’s pretensions make me focus all my thoughts on him and the fact that were he to meet his unwitting, bloody end this evening, based on his location, there’s a very good chance that his remains would be introduced to Neal Smither.

  A couple at another table gets up to leave. I quickly grab my wine and leave this poet to his Diet Coke.

  The evening is perfect for sitting outside with a book and a glass of wine. But that doesn’t mean that I am going to sit and read. Oh no. I am truly back on death now and sit watching strangers pass me by, calculating the odds of their one day meeting Neal Smither.

  Take the girl whose dog just considered pissing up my leg. Here she is asking me about the book I am pretending to read, but all I can think about, as she stands there smiling, is that if she is murdered tonight, in a messy manner that no relative wanted to clean up, there has to be a 60 percent chance that Neal would get the job. Eighty percent if she is murdered in a public space.

  Neal does pretty good business across America, but this is his home turf. He has the advantage here.

  The people on the street have no clue just how good the odds of their meeting Neal really are. Because, let’s face it, unless they die in a hospital, or in their sleep and are discovered within seventy-two hours, the odds in favor of a Neal-shaped encounter are pretty damn good.

  I drink to that and order another glass of wine.

  The room that I am staying in is large and bare with polished wooden floors. In the middle of this floor is a single-width futon. That’s where I lie. Rubbing my eyes and trying to gauge the severity of my hangover. My suitcase is in the corner. I look at the alarm clock: 9:15. It’s the first time I’ve slept past seven since I arrived in the United States.

  I really like this room and can’t help but fantasize about moving in. I would keep it the way it is, bare, nothing but the futon and my suitcase. It occurs to me that if I were ever to commit suicide, I’d like it to be in a room like this. Bare, empty, and with nicely worn wooden floors. Which in itself marks another change in my way of thinking. I have never before sat pondering preferred methods and locations for my pending death.

  I decide to phone Neal, with a desire to get back to concentrating on other people’s deaths.

  “Nah, sorry, dude, nothing happening, but don’t go getting depressed, Alan. I’ll get you on the phone the second something happens. There’s nothing you can do when this happens, Alan, except …?”

  “Pray for death?”

  “You got it,” Neal says as he hangs up.

  CRANK HOUSE

  The following morning my phone rings. “Alan, I got a crank house for you,” says Neal as a form of greeting. “Meet me there. Here’s the address.”

  Slowly but surely I am becoming familiar with the area. For example, I no longer use my map to find the interstate that I need. But that’s where the familiarity stops: with directions. My grasp of American terminology, while improving, is still lacking. For example, I am on my way to a “crank house,” although I don’t really know what a crank house is. I do know that the job is for one of Neal’s national motel contracts; so is crank slang for something related to the motel industry? Or is it simply Neal terminology for a scumbag? It could easily be.

  Neal is already on the scene when I arrive, his truck taking up two parking spaces in the car lot. The motel is fairly typical. A single oblong block holding rooms on two floors.

  I guess there are about twenty rooms to a floor, double that if there are rooms at the back of the building, too. As I pull up outside I am taken with the fact, possibly for the first time, that I really like the look of motels, even if they are a bit ratty. There’s something about all those strangely colored doors in a long row like that, like soldiers clad in full regalia standing at attention, that just appeals to me. Motels are like a throwback from European images of 1950s America. Remove the cars from the lot and it could be any year. Remove the do not cross tape, the two fire engines, the ambulance, the police cars, and the crowd of astonished, evacuated guests, and this place would be an ideal image of the America I loved as a kid.

  “Why would you do that?” I hear an officer asking me, even though all the windows of my car are up. “You can see the bright yellow tape, right? So why pull in here?”

  “I’m with Crime Scene Cleaners,” I tell him.

  “Where’s your truck?”

  “I don’t have one.”

  The officer doesn’t reply to me, but radios up to a colleague. “… Yeah, you got the Crime Scene Cleaner guy up there? … Is he expecting—” He stops and looks at me and asks, “What’s your name?”

  “Alan,” I tell him, trying to be as polite and unobjectionable as I can.

  “Ask him if he is expecting anybody, and if so, what’s the name.”

  A few seconds pass. If Neal is not actually right there, I realize, I am going to be sent away. But luckily my name comes over the radio and the officer holds the tape up so I can drive under.

  “Tell him to get you a truck,” he says with a smile as I drive past.

  As I pull up to the parking bay, I watch several officers who are hanging around outside a room on the second floor that has been taped off; they are holding their hands over their noses. So a crank house is a room where a body has decomposed?

  Climbing the stairs to the upper level, passing suspicious officers as I go, my nostrils are filled with a strong odor of cat urine. A crank house must be a room filled with cat waste? Is that why the firemen are coming and going with their masks on?

  I enter the room on which all attention is focused. I can hear somebody asking me if my name is Alan, but I am finding it hard not to stare at the television that is sitting on the floor. MTV is playing 50 Cent. A collective of beautiful black girls appears to be rubbing themselves against him. 50 Cent stands there, as would I, grinning like a wanton fool. A TV depicting gyrating black beauties was just about the last thing I was expecting to see on entering this room. I drag my eyes from the screen and my attention is caught by something else. The table in front of me is covered with what look like burn marks; it has even melted in places. On the table are some spoons, some rubber tubes, a couple of Pyrex dishes, and several jars that are blackened or yellowed or in some cases both. Coffee filters lie everywhere, both on the table and on the floor. Some of them are unused. Others are stained red. Likewise, matchboxes are scattered all about the room, open and with their redheaded children sprinkled all around the room. The strike pads on the sides of the boxes appear to have been scraped off. Also scattered around the room are empty packets of Sudafed—lots of empty packets of Sudafed. The cardboard boxes litter one half of the room, while the now empty foil packets from inside sit mainly around the floor under the table.

  On the bed is an empty box that once held breathing masks. Next to that there’s another box, also empty, that was once full of surgical gloves. Several large white bottles with hardware-store labels indicating muriatic acid are lined against the bottom of a wall. Next to those are some empty Prestone antifreeze containers.

  I finally understand: a crank house is a makeshift chemical-weapons factory!

  In another corner there is a large cardboard box that says it held glass jars. There’s a smashed blender by the door and a gasoline can in the sink. Above some drawers are three sets of twin hotplates. In the bathroom, actually in the bath, there’s a small gas cylinder.

  Of course, it’s not a chemical-weapons factory. If it were, I wouldn’t be in here. Neither would Neal, unless this morning he changed the writing on his truck to read HOMICIDES, SUICIDES, ACCIDENTAL DEATHS AND CHEMICAL WEAPONS LABORATORIES. But in another sense it is a chemical-weapons factory. America is the biggest producer of this particular kind of home-grade chemical weapon, and the Americans who produce it, for the most part, use the chemical on themselves. A crank house, then, is a methamphetami
ne laboratory.

  Crystal meth has a reputation as a one-hit addiction drug: stronger than coke and heroin combined. Meth addiction has spread from state to state like bushfire. In the last decade, meth-lab reports have dotted the map of the USA like a Hollywood doomsday scenario. At its worst peak, 1,287 clandestine, or “mom and pop” lab incidents were dealt with by the authorities in California alone. Across the United States this rose to a total of 17,356 lab incidents.

  Of those who choose to dabble in the precarious art of meth production, the lucky ones will probably find themselves closed up in dark solitude, covered in scars, scabs, and open sores, and will most definitely be missing several teeth from their rotted gums. The unlucky ones, like Amber McNeally from Iowa, whom I interviewed for an article about meth, find themselves severely burned.

  Meth’s success is linked largely to its easy production, especially in Middle America, where most ranches use anhydrous ammonia to maximize the fertilization of their ground. Anhydrous ammonia is a key ingredient in meth production, and meth cooks can simply walk up to the big white anhydrous tanks that dot most ranches and siphon off as much as they need. For those willing to risk the wrath of farmer Brown, it’s free; it’s literally on tap. It’s therefore no wonder that twelve-to fourteen-year-olds who live in small towns are more than twice as likely to use meth than those who live in large cities.

  After anhydrous ammonia, there are only four items left on the meth production shopping list: lithium batteries, ethanol, coffee filters, and ephedrine.

  Ephedrine, or pseudoephedrine, sounds like it might be something scarce, hard to get hold of, but it is actually the main ingredient of common cold tablets available in all drugstores and supermarkets across America.

  Once your shopping list is complete, all you need is forty-five minutes of your time, a wooden spoon, and an Internet connection to download a three-step instruction manual. The easiest and most popular process for cooking meth is known as the “Nazi Method.” Supposedly, it is the same method used by the Germans in World War II, who produced meth and fed it to their troops to keep them going. The Germans weren’t the only ones fueling their troops with meth: the English and the Americans soldiers often were on it too; as were Japan’s kamikaze pilots.