The Dead Janitors Club

by Jeff Klima

  My first crime scene wasn't going to be an old-lady suicide.

  "Is it the price?" Dirk persisted.

  There was a knock at the door behind us, and another old man walked in, this one a few years younger and with a lot more hair. Walking into the dining room, he put his arm around Martin. I turned to go back into the living room, feeling more comfortable with the blood and guts than I did with the human emotion.

  "This is my neighbor, Fred," I could hear Martin announce from the next room. The rest of the house was clean but not sterile. It had a lived-in look that suggested that the folks who resided here had done so a long time. It was dark and the air smelled musty, like a comfortable cave.

  Portraits of the couple hung on the opposite wall. I couldn't discern their features, but I recognized Martin's vague outline in them. There were also several metal placards advertising beer companies of which I had never heard. These accumulations of a full life lived made me feel a little better about the old lady's actions. If I had spent my life collecting as many metal beer signs as she had, I'd probably kill myself too.

  I walked outside to suck in some night air and leaned up against the truck, not sure how to respond. I felt terrible that we were taking the old guy's money, but I was going to feel a hell of a lot worse if we had driven all the way out here only to stare at the scattered meat chunks of some old lady's face and not get paid, especially when I was undoubtedly worse off financially than the old coot. It no longer felt like this job was a divine mission from God to fill my bank account— hell, I couldn't decide if I believed in God at all anymore.

  Dirk came walking out to me, nonplussed.

  "We're going to do it," he said, emotionless.

  "Yeah?"

  "Martin's in shock. His neighbor convinced him to do it. But we're doing it for $435. I dropped the price because we're going to leave the carpet."

  "Can we leave the carpet? Isn't that counterproductive to the whole crime scene cleaner philosophy?"

  "No. We don't clean it if they won't pay for it." He grabbed his crate. "Let's suit up." I guessed I could believe in God for a little while longer.

  * * *

  The Tyvek suit—or "bunny suit," as we called them—was incredibly hot even in the cold air of Riverside. Stepping into the house covered up to my neck in a protective biohazard suit was like turning on a hair dryer in a pup tent. Sure the blood couldn't get in, but the sweat couldn't get out. Now I knew how the scientists who killed E.T. felt.

  "Where do we start?" asked Dirk, suddenly nervous about things, which made me scared as well.

  "I guess the recliner," I said, figuring that once it was out of there, the major part of the mess would be isolated.

  "It's too saturated with blood to cut into it here," Dirk said, shaking his head. "We should carry it out intact and deal with it later."

  Between us, we lifted the recliner awkwardly and then moved slowly, the weight of it more than we had anticipated. We heaved it out at last, though, through the French-door entrance and into the yard, where it sat in the dead of night for the neighbors to gawk at, and the coyotes to gnaw at, while we dealt with the rest.

  With permission, we bagged up the pills, TV Guide, and eyeglasses for disposal, along with a trash can filled with wadded tissues that had caught some heavy hunks of grandma. We were going to toss the painting as well, but Martin begged us to clean it. "It was her favorite," he said, dazed.

  I had just started on the walls, scrubbing at the crimson-splattered drywall with a furniture-stripping brush when I heard the sound of dialing from the dining room, followed by an echoed ring, eerily loud, and then another one.

  "Hello?" The unassuming female voice came out of the ethers.

  "Hi, sweetheart," Martin said slowly, loudly, unaware. "It's your dad."

  "Hi, Dad, what's up?"

  She didn't know.

  There was a pause, and then Martin said, "Oh, your mom…she… accidentally killed herself with a shotgun today."

  He was telling his kids via speakerphone while I was in the next room, scrubbing up mom's "accidental shotgun mistake." Worse than any part of the recliner and its gloppy, undermixed-paint look, worse than the thought of leaving the carpet, had to be overhearing that phone call.

  "Oh, my God, what?" An instant release of tears mixed in, so that the words sounded fuzzy, but they were unmistakable and painfully horrible. I scrubbed harder, the coarse bristles doing their damnedest to drown out the rest of the phone call, but it came through crystal clear all the same.

  "She loved you guys…you know that," Martin said gravely, and the shrill, unrelated cry of an ignorant and wanting child reverberated through the phone's receiver. "She was just so sick, and so tired, and she hurt, and it was just her time," Martin continued, his voice gravelly but unwavering.

  I imagined I was listening to an iPod, the volume notched up, blaring out some rock song with thumping drums, but the only song my imagination could effectively conjure up was "The Star-Spangled Banner." It did the trick. I even hummed along aloud, wiping away the red blood from the white walls and feeling blue the entire time.

  We had finished the wall and hit the spots on the couch that we decidedly weren't going to take, mostly because there wasn't enough room in the truck for it, and were starting to feel pretty damn done about things, when I noticed a wall in the hallway that somehow, some way had caught a good amount of the spray. The guts looked like caterpillars trying to inch into the darkness of the next room, but we used our flashlights and got them, too.

  My suit was shredded at the knees from inching along the carpet to access the length of wall up to the brick fireplace. Blood had seeped into the fabric, and I prayed it had not breached the plastic lining separating it from my pants. But I still felt fairly good about the job we had done, despite the fact that the carpet still looked horribly streaked and bloody.

  Regardless of it not being implicit in the contract we had drawn up, we removed any and all chunky spots from the carpet, leaving only bony branch lengths of blood soaked in. I stood, ready to carry out my crate, strip off my bunny suit, and find an all-night convenience store with a cooler full of Dr Pepper. Dirk had even managed to save the painting by decontaminating it with the enzyme and then scrubbing lightly at it with a brush so that only some of the oil paint smeared. I was proud of us.

  Then I heard it. "We missed some."

  I followed Dirk's finger, pointing at the ceiling, where, mixed in with the dust and stucco, there were some unmistakable chunks of that melon-looking brain matter, too high for us to reach safely without a ladder.

  Exasperated, I said, "I got this," and stepped up the two feet of the raised brick lip of the fireplace. Holding on to the oak mantel with one hand so that I could hang off the edge of the fireplace and extend upward, I reached out over the carpet toward the ten-foot ceiling, with my free hand gripping my brush.

  Stretching my left arm as far as it would go, I could just barely reach the ceiling. Scrubbing at the patches of brain, I rolled them into tight cocoons from the friction. Stucco dust dropped from the scrubbed areas overhead, and I blinked once while continuing my work, until as I opened my eyes, I felt the gentle, cold splat of something soft connect with the naked orb of my right eye.

  Automatically, I blinked again, but it was still there. Dropping down, I reached my latex glove toward my eye but then thought better of it and stripped the glove off quickly. Trickles of sweat ebbed from my pale fingers as I shook loose the feeling of the powder resin from the glove. Using my thumb and middle finger like fleshy tweezers, I managed to extract what was undeniably a hunk of melon-colored brain that had become stuck to my eyeball. I stared at it, incredulous—praying the sweet little old lady with a table full of medicine vials didn't have AIDS—and then dropped it into the trash bag with its friends, Dirk staring all the while.

  "I guess we should wear goggles from now on," he reasoned matter-of-factly. I couldn't decide how I should have reacted, so I just rolled with it good-n
aturedly. We were "professionals" after all, and this sometimes happened to professionals, right?

  Bagging up the rest of the mess, we threw some black trash liners over the carpeting and once more tried to reason Martin into letting us take it.

  "No, no…I'll throw newspaper over it," he maintained. Shrugging, we once more turned on our blood-detection flashlights, letting the intense ultraviolet purple beams wash over the area, showing Martin there was no blood left. "Good job, guys," he said softly. "Really nice work."

  Hoisting the recliner into the back of the truck at 12:30 a.m., along with the bags and the little table, I was glad he didn't let us take the carpeting after all. I was sweaty, exhausted, and repulsed, and my new shirt hung wet and limp around my skin. Driving home with the blood-soaked, chunky recliner sticking out of the truck bed like a gleaming beacon, I was surprised that we escaped cop detection. Dirk being a sheriff or not, there had to be something not OSHAcompliant and illegal about our method of biohazard transportation.

  The two of us were tired, so Dirk decided to leave the recliner and bags in the truck to deal with later, and let me go home. Soaked with sweat and dusty from the Riverside experience, I pointed my little red car in the direction of the frat house. Kerry and Chris were eagerly waiting for me on the front lawn when I walked up slowly, stumbling, dehydrated, and exhausted.

  Kerry had taken Chris to the game in my place, introducing him accidentally throughout the night to her parent's seatmates as "her brothers' boyfriend." The Ducks won, but that story paled in comparison to my own, which I gladly regaled my listeners with, complete with photos taken specifically for this moment on my cell phone.

  I hadn't made enough money to pay rent that month, much less my credit cards, but in the eyes of my doubters, I was vindicated for the moment at least.

  CHAPTER 5

  the minister and the stairway to heaven

  If Jesus Christ came back to Earth today, the last thing he'd be is a Christian.

  —Mark Twain

  Vindication doesn't buy what money does. All vindication ever bought anyone was a little freedom. And I had too much freedom—so much, in fact, that my bills still weren't getting paid. Sure, I'd thrown small piles of cash in all of my creditors' directions, enough to let them know I wasn't trying to screw them, but not enough so that they would stop calling me.

  I was confident, though. I'd broken my cherry, popped my bubble, shot my load—whichever sexual euphemism best applied to cleaning up "Grandma Shotgun," as I'd taken to calling her.

  Another month slipped by, and I was still boasting about her to my frat cronies without a shred of new story material on the horizon. Dirk called me every other day to reassure me that he was working on scaring up new clients, but he was so tonally awkward about the lack of business that I didn't have the cojones to ask about his "surefire business connections" within the world of law enforcement.

  He asked if I wouldn't mind calling a few of the law enforcement agencies in the area during our downtime to see if I could scare up some business on my own. Despite having cleaned up the splatter of Grandma Shotgun together, in my mind we still weren't fully in business together. As far as I was concerned, I was still more or less auditioning for the part of his partner.

  "Sure," I said, trying to sound confident. "Send the list of contact numbers over on email."

  I've mentioned that I'm shy, but let me convey to you the scope of my shyness. I hate talking to people. I can't make small talk; I can't chitchat. It's hard for me to even have in-depth conversations with neighbors. Job interviews have always been a nightmare. Typically, I just write off my chance of getting the job if there's more than a cursory interview involved.

  I only got the job at the porn shop because after they interviewed me (an interview that, typically, went poorly), they hired some other asshole. And when the mother of that guy, who was in his thirties, found out where he worked, she came down to the store and loudly chewed him out. They fired him on the spot. The owners needed someone else quickly, and I was the first applicant to call them back.

  I try not to go into stores alone; I don't eat in restaurants alone. I tend to avoid doing things that require me to talk to people I don't know. I'm like J. D. Salinger but without the talent. So imagine my excitement about trying to solicit business from policemen.

  The police and I have had a rather sturm-und-drang relationship over the years. Authority, particularly when used with the word "No," has amped up my dislike for social interaction. The police, who always seem to secrete a sense of false authority, make me the angriest. Obviously they have a very real authority, no matter what I say about their secretions.

  One cop in particular contributed to my sentiment for those boys in blue with their guns and rules. "Officer Butler" first came into my life when he stopped me for "driving erratically." I was eighteen and had my driving permit. (I never wanted to drive, but my parents were sick of chauffeuring me to work.) I was driving with a girl who was over twenty-one.

  I wasn't driving erratically, but it was a Saturday night and I figured that Officer Butler created a reason to pull me over to see if I'd been drinking. (See also the famous police excuse that "The light over your license plate is out…" If they say that, ask if you can get out and check.)

  I hadn't been drinking, but when Officer Butler found out I only had a learner's permit rather than a license, you could see the authority blast through him. Butler was the type of police officer who wore his riot gear all the time, even though that stuff was optional. For him, finding me with just a learner's permit was like Christmas in July or a Kentucky redneck cornering a "faggot."

  A little sneering smile crossed his face as he said something about how I wasn't supposed to be driving with a learner's permit. I pointed out that I was over eighteen, my passenger was over twenty-one, and I was well within the scope of the law. Officer Butler didn't like that, but he evidently didn't know the law himself. He concluded our introduction by telling me sternly that he could impound my vehicle and arrest me if he wanted, but this time he was letting me go with "just a warning."

  Over the years, he also handcuffed Chris and drove him home for skateboarding outside a bank, and then stopped my mother for driving at dusk without her headlights on and accused her of drinking. My mother is a lovely Mormon lady who absolutely does not drink—and he hassled her.

  You might side with the policeman, saying he was just doing his job, but later Officer Butler shot and killed an unarmed man outside a grocery store. That tells you the type of policeman he was. So after he harassed my mom, who truly is the sweetest person on earth, I decided that forever after I hated policemen.

  As I've matured, my opinion on policemen has changed somewhat. I recognize the good, even heroic, and other thankless things that they do. Now there are several whom I work with on a regular basis and some I wouldn't hesitate to call friends. But then, even though my new boss was a cop, I didn't want to call other cops and beg them to send us business.

  Dirk, not noticing the reluctance in my voice (or more likely, choosing to ignore it), said he'd email the list of law enforcement agencies right over. Being the forthright person that I was, I printed the list and set it in my "Fuck That" pile, right under my subscription renewal for dick-enlargement pills.

  * * *

  In the meantime, the horror story I told people about my one and only crime scene was rapidly growing in detail and intensity. At this point perhaps I should mention that I have a tad of dissociative identity disorder, also known as multiple personalities. While I'm not as bad as my mother, who reverts to a childlike state of innocence every so often, for all my shyness there's another aspect of my personality where I turn into a complete chatterbox.

  That aspect of my personality got me elected senior-class president in high school, nearly got me sued four times as a writer on the school newspaper, and had me give a hilarious speech at graduation while wearing a huge sombrero. The dichotomy of my two personalities is unsettling,
to say the least. Basically, whenever I feel vulnerable, the shy guy takes over; when I have something to offer, I am untouchable.

  So when I was before a crowd of peers telling my crime scene story, it grew to include my talking the old man out of killing himself and finding the dead lady's cache of Nazi paraphernalia. An attractive girl in the group would then ask for another story, and I had to awkwardly inform her that there weren't any more. I was a one-trick pony.

  But that was about to change.

  Dirk called me up out of the blue one day and told me to pack up my crates. We were off to Claremont. Claremont is a small city along a major highway about twenty minutes north of Fullerton, but more importantly, it's in Los Angeles County. That was the big time for us.

  We had started a crime scene company in Orange County not only because my boss lived and worked there, but also because Los Angeles was teeming with crime scene cleaning companies. Mongol hordes in the form of rival companies virtually had the metropolis on lockdown. And now we were on our way into their outskirts to do their work and see what sort of crime scenes they had to offer.