The laundromat report came Thursday. The street eyes had gone in. The findings changed nothing and everything.
The building was clean. The machines were machines. The walls were walls. The counter was a counter. There was nothing behind the dryers, nothing under the floor, nothing inside the soap dispensers. The owner was a woman named Rosa who was sixty-three and had run the laundromat for eleven years and knew every face that walked through the door and knew Mateo Cruz as the quiet Cuban who came once a week and washed three shirts and a pair of pants and never caused trouble and tipped two dollars.
The street eyes found nothing. The nothing was the report. And the nothing was the problem.
