On Tuesday, the cops left and the cleaners came. Richard recoiled when he saw the carnage inside his house and recalled the ugliness behind it, and he thought of his wife and his daughter less than a mile away at the school. He watched the cleaners, two young men and a third his age in navy blue jumpsuits that made them look like a cross between the prisoners who picked up garbage along the highway and technicians at a microchip processing plant, as they scrubbed and disinfected. As they blotted and dabbed. As they mopped. He put on a pair of black sweatpants and a Giants T-shirt and threw bottles into recycling tubs. He loaded the dishwasher with plates and glasses and silverware. He ran the dishwasher twice, and still there were plates and glasses in the sink and along the kitchen counters. The men at the party must have grabbed a new glass every time they poured themselves another drink. Someone had been drinking Scotch from the two-handled Peter Cottontail cup Melissa had used as a toddler.
He fed Cassandra and then, when she looked up at him plaintively with her Oliver! “More, please” cat eyes, he fed her again. Fortunately, the cat was one of those felines who found people amusing. Once she was full, she seemed rather happy to be home. She watched the cleaners work from different perches: atop the breakfront, on the stairs, half under the living room pouf. What must the animal have thought on Friday night when the Russians were killed and the blood had drained from their bodies like wine from an overturned bottle? Had she licked some off the tile? Had she wondered why these two strange people never awoke? Had she found the spent shell casings and rolled them around the floor with her paw, as if they were little metallic cat toys?
At one point, when he stood in the doorway to the mahogany-paneled room that had once been a library—his private chancel of movies and music—the cat sniffed the air, her nose twitching with fascination. He smelled it, too. Sex. He glanced at the leather couch and saw the splotches. In his mind, he saw the police investigators swabbing the stains with Q-tips, and then dropping the Q-tips in sealed plastic bags. He saw them using powders to extract fingerprints. Dactylogram. The scientific word for a fingerprint. One night Kristin had astounded him and a friend when they’d been dating by building the word on a Scrabble board from the modest four-letter gram.
He realized that there was absolutely no way the cleaners would be done by three-thirty or four in the afternoon, when Kristin and Melissa got home. No. Way. It was possible they wouldn’t finish until after most of Bronxville had put their dinner plates in their dishwashers.
He carried the wannabe Bierstadt out to his car, folding down the backseats so he could lay it flat in the rear of the Audi. The blood on the canvas seemed pretty dry, but he was still careful not to touch it because he wasn’t wearing gloves. He remembered that he wanted to phone the detective to get the name of her cousin at NYU—the woman who taught art history there. When he went back inside, for a long moment he hovered in the hallway and watched one of the men cleaning; he lost himself in the way the middle-aged fellow dabbed cold water and ammonia onto the wide swaths of blood that had splattered the wallpaper. The guy was working with the concentration of an artist, and Richard imagined that he was trying to resurrect a Renaissance fresco somewhere in Tuscany. And, alas, he was going to fail. It was hopeless.
“Maybe if we’d been able to start on Saturday,” he said to Richard, his shoulders sagging a little apologetically. “But the blood has really set in.”
“I kind of figured,” he said.
“Do you have an extra roll of this paper floating around someplace? A roll the contractors didn’t need when they papered the hallway the first time?”
He shook his head. Then he added, “I actually did the wallpaper myself in a couple of rooms in this house. I’m…I’m weirdly good at hanging paper. It’s one of the few home improvement projects I don’t screw up. But this wallpaper was here when we moved in.”
“Well, maybe it was time for a change.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
Meanwhile, one of the younger guys was using a basting brush to coat the bloodstains on the living room couch with a paste made of water and cornstarch. The fellow had thick yellow hair that fell to his shoulders and a model-perfect Roman beak for a nose. He looked like he should be surfing, not cleaning crime scenes.
“Will that really work?” Richard asked, aware of the way hope—wholly unearned—had leached into his voice.
“Probably not. It’s kind of a part of the fabric now. And there’s a ton here.”
“Of blood.”
“Yeah. Blood. Sorry.”
“Not your fault.”
“Too bad it’s not slipcovers.”
“I agree.”
“Because then you could just trash them and get new ones.”
“Yup.”
“I mean, I can keep working. It’s, like, my job, man.”
“But…”
“I’d just get a new couch.”
“I probably will,” Richard agreed.
“I’d say give it to Goodwill, but I think it’s too bloody for them.”
He nodded. He made a mental note to find some rubbish removal service to take the sofa off his hands. But still the young guy continued to work. They all did.