Mop Men: Inside the World of Crime Scene Cleaners

by Alan Emmins

  “I am not going out like that. I hope to raise my boy to be a good person. I just can’t believe people live and treat each other the way they do. I mean family, you know?”

  “Does it make you sad, seeing these things all the time?”

  “I don’t really think about it like that. I mean, when you ask me directly, yeah, of course, but day to day—I just think about how many Dumpsters I’m gonna need.”

  “What about situations like the one we just left. They seem quick to move when there’s a house up for grabs.”

  “Alan, you haven’t seen shit. For some reason, a lot of these people become adversarial with us, and it’s generally not the people that we’ve had contact with to schedule and all that. That person’s generally too distraught to deal with it anymore. So we have to deal with the idiot relatives who for some reason make us the enemy. They’re fighting for belongings and they don’t want us there to hear it. They’re just not good people. They’re dirty, filthy frigging animals with no sense of courtesy or decorum, you know? ‘Dude, your grandma’s spot is on the floor. Fight over the belongings when the janitors have gone, okay! I mean God Almighty. You haven’t seen her for at least thirty days. She was on the fucking floor, dead! So how the hell do you know that she wanted you to have that bureau, like it’s your fucking birthright? ’”

  “Sometimes, Neal, you sound like you really do care. You get worked up.”

  “No, I don’t give a shit. That’s not the way my life is. They choose to live that way, man. I mean mentally, absolutely it affects you, but what? Are you gonna let it eat you up, or are you gonna make your life better or work not to be that way? I couldn’t live the way most of our clients live. I just couldn’t do it. I really just could not fucking do it.”

  “Do you think you would feel that way if you had a regular job—like in a bank?”

  “No. Probably not. I’d just be going along like everyone else. But with this job you are confronted by death every day, and you are confronted by how people treat each other every day. It’s an eye opener. You get to see how the loved ones behave once you’re gone, or behind each other’s backs. It changes you. But I’m a pretty driven guy anyway. I mean, once I have it in my head as a goal, I have to achieve it or it’s gonna kill me. Mentally it will eat me alive. It’s like, I have a certain money goal right now and I swear to God it’s all I think about all day long.”

  “That’s pretty sad, too, Neal, to be so driven by money.”

  “Oh absolutely. It is. I know”

  MAN IN THE BATH PART II: I KNEW YOU WERE COMING

  I am up bright and early this morning. I sit drinking coffee and reading continually in my attempt to keep my mind free from death. But there’s no point, really. Soon enough I have to get back to it. Soon enough I find myself driving through the city, wrestling with my map as I realize once again that I am on the wrong street going the wrong way. For a second I am tempted to keep going the wrong way, to drive away from death. But I don’t. I turn as soon as I have an opportunity and get myself back on track.

  The Superior Court building in San Francisco holds the courts, jails, and the police departments. It’s a busy building, and at this time of the morning most of the people are going in. I am greeted by a metal detector, uniforms, cheap suits, and a continuous hum of noise.

  I make it up to the homicide division, where I sit waiting for my appointment. The space in the reception area is small, crowded in by black office furniture typical of cheap 1990s furnishings.

  There are officers, wearing varied shades of beige, standing around talking about a baseball game that’s coming up. Some have big bellies. Others have big mustaches, something that, I am told, represents authority. The mustache being authoritative is the biggest Jedi mind trick the world has ever seen.

  Aside from the officers all flicking their eyes at me (it’s a little comical; as if they are trying to figure which murder I am here to confess to.) and giving me the once-over, the atmosphere is what you would expect in a normal office setting, not a homicide division.

  I am here because I am following up on the story Shawn told me about the man in the bath. I want to know what the police were doing while Shawn was up to his elbows in Gary Lee Ober.

  “Hi, Alan. I’m Inspector Joe Toomey. My partner will be with me in a second. Can I get you a coffee?”

  Inspector Joe Toomey is a big, broad-shouldered fellow with a very friendly face. He is wearing a beige suit with white shirt and a blue tie. His silver-framed glasses work their way into his silver hair. He has been on this job for around twenty-five years, but he doesn’t look hardened or traumatized by it. I am sure he acts otherwise when necessary, when dealing with a murderer, but straight off the bat he seems like a really nice guy. As I am led into an interrogation room I am introduced to Joe’s partner, Inspector Holly Pera. Judging by the look she gives me, I realize that either Inspector Pera does not have time for me or she doesn’t like journalists.

  Holly Pera is slim, with long dark hair that nestles on the shoulders of her dark blue suit. Like Joe, I am guessing she is in her fifties. She seems much sterner than Joe; her expression is tight-lipped, but of course this could be for any number of reasons. But for sure she doesn’t take fools gladly. It is impossible, when looking at the inspectors together, not to think of good cop/bad cop. I am glad to report there is not a mustache between them.

  It’s very odd sitting in this small room. On the desk is a tape recorder that, for a change, isn’t mine. On the wall is a clock. Apart from that, the room is void of objects. There’s just my good self and the two homicide inspectors who sit opposite me, looking patiently at me, waiting for me to speak. I wonder what it must feel like being brought in here as a criminal. It’s an odd enough feeling being here as a journalist. I can’t help but be aware of the fact that the people in front of me have been dealing with murder/murderers firsthand for more than twenty years. How many times have they sat there, where they are now, and looked into the eyes of murderers? How many lies and tales have they heard?

  The look on Pera’s face has me thinking, Have I murdered anyone lately? I am getting the impression that one wrong move on my part and I could be up before the judge in the morning, which leads me to explain what I am here for.

  “I am interested in a case you worked about a year ago,” I begin. “The death of a man called Gary Lee Ober. I believe a man named Jim McKinnon has been charged with his murder?”

  “Well,” says Pera, eyeing me suspiciously, “what is this for?”

  “I’m writing about a company called Crime Scene Cleaners and they cleaned up the scene where Gary Ober was found dead. So I am just looking to get some background info on the case.”

  “And this is for publication when?” Pera asks.

  “Well, it’s for a book that I haven’t started writing yet … so a year and a half by the time it’s available, at best.”

  Holly Pera has a skeptical look on her face and I totally understand. I think it’s probably the look most journalists get from Holly Pera. Hearing my own words, I can see why one would be suspicious, or possibly appalled. It is, in its basic form, pure voyeurism. It must be frustrating at times for homicide detectives to have so many people fascinated in them for what they do. They are themselves, by association to their job, a “morbid fascination.”

  I show Pera a letter from my publisher that seems to validate me on some level.

  “How did you come to be looking for Jim McKinnon?” I ask, hoping they can’t read my mind.

  “Well,” begins Pera, “We had the name ‘Jim’ from a neighbor, because the man just happened to introduce himself to a couple of neighbors by that first name. We were told, by his very good friend that lives across the hall from him, that Gary frequented certain establishments down in the Castro district in San Francisco, which is the predominantly gay district: a lot of bars, a lot of restaurants, clubs. And so we,” Inspector Pera signals her partner with her arm, “went down there to the bars and ran in
to, really, the most helpful bartenders, and so a number of them, you know, listened to what we were looking for and one in particular and then two and then three said, ‘Well, we know that there’s a guy named Jim that knew Gary and his name is Jim McKinnon. And he’s kind of a homeless type and he was staying with Gary for a little while; we don’t know where he is now.’ So that’s how we got onto Jim McKinnon.”

  “What was the next step? Did you then go about finding him?” I ask, a little taken aback by how much Inspector Pera has said in answer to my first question.

  “We basically put the word out on the street and we also put a Teletype out saying that we were looking for this particular person. We began to hear that he might be staying close to the Hall of Justice here in one of the, like, daily-or weekly-type hotels. So we tracked him down there, I think it was Twelfth Street, wasn’t it, Joe?” Inspector Pera asks her partner.

  “Yes, it was Twelfth Street.”

  “… And interviewed him in his hotel room and then brought him down here and interviewed him some more and then arrested him. I guess it was about a week in all.”

  I can’t help but notice that as Inspector Pera has been talking, a large smile has spread over Inspector Joe Toomey’s face.

  He leans forward in his seat a little. “He sat right where you’re sitting now,” he says with a point of his big hand and a sparkle in his eye.

  For some reason, the idea of my sitting in the same seat as a murderer sat in throws me a little.

  “Really?” I ask, fidgeting uncomfortably.

  Now Inspector Pera is smiling, too. “And as soon as we met him, he said, ‘I knew, I knew, I knew you’d be coming, I wanna tell you what happened.’ He said he’d been in a fight with this man. He said there’d been some pushing and shoving but he said that he never used a knife. He didn’t really deny killing him, but he didn’t admit it, either; he just admitted to being there for an event that probably caused this.”

  “Did what he was telling you match up to the scene or the evidence?” I ask.

  “To a point.” Now Inspector Pera has a frown on her face. “We believe that Gary was stabbed and he will not admit that there was a stabbing. He also mentioned to other friends of his, this is Jim, mentioned to other friends of his that he’d killed somebody before and there was some mention of baking soda and other things that go along with what we know about the scene.”

  “See, the thing is that, the …” Joe Toomey pauses and looks at his hands, unsure of how to continue. “The condition of the body … do you know anything about that?“I know that it was pretty unpleasant,” I tell him, earnestly.

  “The body was found in the bathtub,” he continues. “It was almost like a skeleton. That’s all that was left—”

  “Gel!” interjects Inspector Pera.

  “… And from the neighbors we knew that this Jim had been staying in the apartment within days of the police finding the body. So what you do know is that this Jim has been in this apartment for a month or three or four weeks, with a dead person, right? So, I mean, that’s what gets you onto Jim. There’s no way that Jim can say that he didn’t know the guy was dead. I mean the owner was … You could, you could …”

  Inspector Pera finishes the sentence for her partner: “You could smell it down the street. Literally, down the block.”

  “Seriously? As you approached the building, you could smell it?”

  “Oh, down the block!” Inspector Pera almost shouts. “Several houses away you could smell it.”

  When they talk about the case, the inspectors appear rather animated. Two things are very clear: first, that this, even for two inspectors with decades of experience, was a very bizarre case; second, that they are their work—being a homicide detective is not something they do from nine to five, it courses through their veins twenty-four hours a day. You could be mistaken for thinking that they are talking about a case that they worked on a week ago, not a year ago. They are not searching for the details, the details are right there, at the front of their minds.

  “This was the worst.” Inspector Pera stops to clear her throat. “This was the worst smell I’ve ever … This is the worst one I’ve had, I mean in terms of smell.”

  “See, don’t forget, it was confined, too.” Inspector Toomey looks at me as he says this with raised eyebrows that say, You hadn’t taken that into account, had you? “You know, if this is out in, say, a park—the body was dumped—he’s got open air. First of all, it was confined to a bathtub in a bathroom, and that was also in an apartment that was closed—you know all the windows were closed.”

  “The guy put the heat on,” Pera says with genuine surprise still in her voice. “He was trying to speed up the decomposition process.”

  “Then the bugs started to come from the apartment,” Toomey says, and as he does, as I realize that my head has been flicking back and forth between the two inspectors, I notice that they are enjoying themselves, too. They are enjoying the storytelling process as much as I enjoy it. “Not just the odor that the other people in the condominium are smelling, but the people living below it—the bugs from the body started coming down into their apartment.”

  We’re getting to the part that really interests me now; this is the stuff I have not been able to fathom.

  “Did he say anything about the fact that he was living in this apartment for a month while this person was—”“Oh no, and we didn’t either,” Pera says, cutting me off. “No. And we certainly weren’t gonna act like that was bizarre because I didn’t want him to read something from me and think, ‘I better not say anything about this, the police are gonna think it’s crazy.’ I was just like, ‘Oh,’ and we just went right along with what he said.”

  “So he openly admitted to living there all this time?” I ask, amazed.

  “Oh yeah, staying there!” Pera corrects. “He tried to say that he moved out a week before we knew that he had, but even then! I was like, ‘Oh, okay.’ You know, even then it would have been just awful.”

  “Yeah, ’cause when the different neighbors had asked him where Gary was, didn’t he say Gary had won a cruise and he’d be back in seven or ten days?” asks Toomey, turning to his partner. “I forget exactly what time frame he said. But when that time frame had expired and they’d asked him again, ‘Where’s Gary?’ and he’d come up with …”

  “‘Oh, I was wrong,’ ” Pera mimes. “ ‘He’ll be gone another week.’ ”

  “Was he relaxed or nervous?” I ask as I try to picture him sitting in this seat. “Or was he scared when you brought him in?”

  “As soon as we hit him with the tough questions he started singing,” Pera says, making her partner chuckle.

  “He really kind of put on this big act like he was crazy. Joe and I have interviewed many crazy people and it’s just very different when they’re really crazy, versus when they’re putting it on. And he just sang and pretended like he was crazy. Basically he was just trying to screw with us is what he was doing; it was a game. And he was just trying to wear us down a little bit and we just weren’t about to be worn down and we finally just got tired of him after a few hours because it wasn’t going anywhere. We got what we wanted; we got as much as we were going to get.”

  “Enough to arrest him?” I ask.

  “Oh, absolutely!” Inspector Pera fires back assuredly.

  “Oh yeah, he started pontificating,” Toomey continues, still with a little chuckle, “a lot of various things around the world, and then after an hour or two he goes, ‘Well, you guys are gonna have to leave,’ and we kind of said, ‘Oh, okay, but you’re coming with us!’ Then we brought him down here, and since he was now in custody we had to give him his rights and we did give him his rights and he was sitting in the same chair you’re sitting in and he started singing ‘Amazing Grace.’ ” Toomey stares at me with raised eyebrows and a puckered face. “A little off-key, I might add!”

  Laughing now, Pera continues, “But you know when he said, ‘I’m expecting you. I was exp
ecting you,’ we said, ‘Well, you know, Jim, we just wanna talk about what happened, you know?’ And he immediately went into making admissions, saying that he had been seated on the toilet, this man had come in, he’d been staying with him for a few days, the suspect wasn’t feeling very well, he was on the toilet, and the victim came in and wanted him to orally copulate him. There was a little pushing and shoving that took place and that’s as far as he would go, you know, ‘pushing and shoving.’ Guy ends up in the bathtub, is what he tells us, and that’s that, that’s it, that’s as far as he’ll go. He denies that he used a knife on him. When we confronted him with more evidence about that, and the fact that there are, you know, knife marks and things, he just starts singing and carrying on. In that chair!”

  Being told that Jim McKinnon sat in the very same chair, the one that I sit in now, keeps making me jump. A part of me doesn’t want to hear mention of it again. But at the same time I have to fight with my face muscles to stop a smile spreading. I think the inspectors are playing with me, trying to give me an attack of the jeebies. But they are too late for that. Or, they’re going to have to try much harder.

  “You see, the problem with killing someone in your own home,” Toomey continues, sounding a little bit like a teacher, “is what you do with this body. And in this case, his mistake was that he stayed there. See, he should have left and then, whether we would have known who it was or not, you know, would he have had that much contact with the neighbors? But see, what people don’t realize, when you kill somebody in your own home or a home that you’re gonna stay in, the big problem you have is what do you do with the body?”