The Dead Janitors Club

by Jeff Klima

  We pulled up in the middle of a pleasant suburb, parking on a tree-lined and well-lit street that was the polar opposite of Riverside with its sewer breath. A small off-white home that might have housed Ward Cleaver and his brood sat proudly among other homes equally as proud. The police car out front was the only indication that something was askew in this charming little neighborhood.

  At the front door, not knowing what else to do, we rang the bell, hoping that this was the right address. It would be very awkward if we'd gone to the wrong house and someone answered the door only to find two men standing there wearing polo shirts that read "Crime Scene Cleaners."

  A pleasant policeman in uniform answered the door and led us into the well-lit home. This time I had prepared myself for the sight before we knocked, effectively readying myself for a scene where neither of us knew what to expect.

  The house was immaculate, and I wondered how the owners had the time to keep it so clean. My first crime scene had been a welllived-in ode to all things collectible, but this house was most definitely what I thought of as a home. Plain and uncluttered, it seemed as if it could be a showroom for other houses, featuring the dream layout your home could have if you bought one of the surrounding properties.

  Only a few picture frames, not hung on the wall but instead standing freely on the polished tile countertop separating the kitchen from the dining room, indicated that anyone lived there. One picture in particular caught my attention. It was of a middle-aged man who was bald on top but had a crescent ring of hair that started above one ear and carried around to the other. The man's thick glasses made his eyes appear owlish and almost perennially surprised, and a short, small grin betrayed an otherwise serious expression. But it was the view over the top of that photo and into the kitchen that stopped me short.

  A pond of blood, the circumference of a throw rug, lay on the smooth linoleum of the kitchen floor as though someone had dropped the world's largest red egg onto it. And in the center, comprising its yolk, was a piled-up, large crimson mass with a jellylike consistency.

  Aside from the sight of the horrifically unidentifiable mass, which I speculated was a brain, and the pool of blood around it, the kitchen was as sterile as the rest of the house. I found it odd that there was no body, but residual trash from attending paramedics told me where it had gone.

  "He was a minister," the older of the two policemen said, emerging from a back bedroom to fill in the blanks. "He shot himself in the head with a pistol."

  "Who should we get to sign the invoice?" Dirk asked.

  "Oh, the wife's down at the hospital. She took it pretty bad. They gave her something to calm her down, so…I guess we'll sign for it," he answered.

  "It's going to be nine hundred dollars," Dirk said evenly, and I almost gasped aloud. In the car on the way over, we had talked about how we were going to charge more money for this one, regardless of the scene, because our half of $435 split two ways wasn't going to cut it. But nine hundred dollars? The scene was much less serious and still fresh; nine hundred dollars sounded like silly money.

  "Not a problem," said the cop, signing off on the invoice. I exhaled slowly, hiding a smile, and got my game face on. It was time to clean.

  The same two policemen had picked the minister up on a DUI charge the day before, and rather than face his congregation with the shame of having done wrong, he compounded his "sin" and shot himself.

  He'd called his wife on the phone while she was at work in the morning and told her what he was going to do. She had begged him not to and said she'd come home and they could talk, but then she heard a popping sound. She called the police, who beat her to the house and then refused to let her go inside and see what her husband had done to himself.

  I noticed that small traces of blood had been tracked onto the carpeting and a large rug in the dining room from when the paramedics, detecting a pulse, attempted to revive and transport the minister to the hospital. He arrived DOA.

  Dirk and I suited up, nervous because the cops were hanging around, watchful and curious about what we did and how we did it. I had only a general idea of how to proceed, since my training was still nonexistent and I had only the one previous scene under my belt, a scene that was nothing like this one.

  My eyes kept drifting back to that glob of crimson gelling in the center of the blood. It was missing that grayish, melon-colored consistency that I identified with brain after our last job, but I was quick to believe that, like jelly beans, brains came in many different colors.

  As we hauled our crates into the house, Dirk whispered for me to follow his lead. We set up in the kitchen, keeping our supplies well away from the mess. Dirk pointed out where the bullet, from a small-caliber revolver, had exited the man's head and slammed into one of the wooden cabinet doors behind him. A small splatter of blood with some tiny chunks of head surrounded the hole, and a piece of the minister's hair hung through the opening like thread through the eye of a large needle.

  I started my cleaning there, spraying enzyme onto the cabinet door and letting it drip down to the countertop, showing the policeman that we weren't stingy with our use of product.

  "No, not like that," Dirk chided me, giving me the stink eye. He didn't want to correct me in front of the cops, lest the officers think us amateurs and refuse to let us continue. "You don't want to let the enzyme go everywhere and create a bigger mess." He showed me how to spray the enzyme into a paper towel and then wipe the stain away with super-absorbent towels. The Brawny man would have been pleased.

  After the cabinet I set to work on removing the stains from the carpeting. Our furniture-stripping brushes handled the job more than capably by not only removing the bloodstains but also taking the color out of the carpeting. The biohazard was gone, but there were two noticeable patches of light carpet and a much lighter area on the rug than had been there before the blood.

  "Looks good to me," the officer commented.

  It was finally time for the big stain and, with it, that eerie mass of human-something. I tried to wrap my head around how, no pun intended, a small-caliber bullet could blast through a man's skull and knock his brain out the back, where said brain would then land intact on the floor. Maybe it fell out when he was already on the floor? I theorized, but that didn't account for the lack of a bullet hole in the glob.

  That jellied mass presented a further problem, as our kits had no means to clean it up with. We were in danger of appearing unprofessional in our bunny suits, our white gloves, and our clear plastic goggles, which I'd removed because my breath made them fog up. Brain in the eye or not, I couldn't see with the goggles on.

  Finally I remembered seeing a broom by the door leading from the kitchen to the garage and, more importantly, the dustpan with it. Discreetly and using goony hand movements I'd doubtlessly picked up from watching some over-the-top Special Ops program on TV, I gestured to the puddle, then to the dustpan, and finally made a scooping motion that was undetected by our police presence.

  Dirk, comprehending (probably because he had watched the same goony program), grabbed the dustpan and, using it like a small shovel, scooped into the mass, separating it from the rest of the blood. It quivered on the lip of the victim's dustpan as I held the garbage bag open.

  The jelly brain-mass had a mind of its own, though, and proved to be wilier than the dustpan or Dirk. Slipping back off the metal scoop and onto the floor, it splatted but remained mostly intact. The wet sound it made splashing into the blood almost got to me as I struggled to maintain both my composure and grip on the bag. Dirk scooped again, and this time got it, dropping it and the dustpan into the safe confines of the bag.

  The rest of the blood came up easily off the floor, and I was down on my knees cleaning by the stove when I found them—the man's glasses. They were large and thick, identical to the owlish ones belonging to the man in the picture that I'd noticed. A long chunk of dark hair was entwined around the glasses and stuck in the metal connecting rod for the nose grips.

&n
bsp; When he fired, his eyeglasses must have flown off his head, taking a bit of hair and some blood with them. I held them up to the policeman.

  "I don't think he needs them," I said.

  The officer shrugged. The glasses also went into the Hefty bag.

  When we were finished, Dirk gave the officers a copy of the invoice and asked how they had heard of us. The older officer responded that they'd worked with us before, a few years back, and really liked our company. Before I could say anything, Dirk responded, "I thought you guys looked familiar."

  The whole job had taken us an hour and a half and was the easiest $250 I had ever made.

  That night, though, I had a cigar and a glass of Maker's Mark bourbon while contemplating the evening's events. I knew religion fairly well, having been subjected to a particularly strict vein of it for eighteen years, and was familiar with where most churches stood on suicide. Few look upon it favorably. Most add a particular bend that makes it especially unpalatable. A lot of churches, though not the Mormon one, believe that suicide is a hell-worthy offense.

  So this man, a minister, a person who earned his living educating others about right and wrong, risked what he believed was a hellworthy offense to save face in front of his congregation. He must have been enduring a terrible shame. And that made me dislike organized religion all the more.

  When you think about it, the Catholic Church's seven deadly sins are pretty much our most basic emotions turned against ourselves. It's only too natural to feel horny (lust), to want more than what you have (greed, envy, gluttony), or to feel angry or boastful about your accomplishments (wrath, pride). Or sometimes a little bit like saying, "Fuck it," and kicking back on the couch with a cigar and a glass of Maker's Mark (sloth).

  All of these qualities are presented as things to be ashamed about or feel guilt for. And it was exactly that type of weight that led that minister to kill himself. Out of shame that he could not endure, he chose to make his wife a widow and, if he had kids, to make them fatherless.

  Perhaps it could be said that he'd lost his way, that he'd fallen away from his so-called flock. Regardless, clearly the shame induced by the weight of religious judgment took him from a minor sin to what the church would undoubtedly consider a major, if not mortal, one.

  His devotion to being the monitor of justice for his average churchgoers was so great that he determined he deserved to "burn in hell for all eternity" rather than face telling them he himself had a momentarily faulty moral compass. That religion could wield such power over a person's life further convinced me it was something that should be monitored more closely.

  * * *

  The next morning, I received a phone call from Dirk. He was doing "sheriff work" that he couldn't get away from, but we had our first trauma scene. I would have to go alone.

  A trauma scene differed from a crime scene in that the death involved was of an accidental nature. That is to say, no crime had been committed. Suicide is technically illegal in the United States, so those are still considered crime scenes. However, the bedroom floor where a heart-attack victim lay unattended and died would be a trauma scene.

  Our latest was located in Stanton, which is in western NORCO, or North County. Some people in North Corona (part of Riverside, natch) claim they alone should be considered residents of NORCO (North Corona = NorCo), but to me that's like losers begging to be called deadbeats. Stanton's part of a tri-city suckfest of poverty that includes Westminster and Garden Grove, with affiliates in Cypress and Santa Ana. There's a heavy concentration of different cultures in the lower-income areas, and as a result, gangs are prevalent and crime activity is high.

  I didn't know what to expect as I drove out there. I felt fairly confident about doing the work, since I'd taken a sort of supervisory stance on our first job. But man, it felt better to have a higher-up along as reassurance that the blame for a job done wrong wouldn't totally be on me.

  I was supposed to call a certain number when I got to the trauma scene and speak with the mother of the victim. Instead, a brother showed up—a well-to-do, chubby fellow named Oliver. Though he was sad about his sister's death, he clearly didn't want to be there. He wasn't particularly close to his sister, but their mom wasn't in a good enough state to deal with her daughter's death, and apparently the girl's husband was even worse.

  I was shocked to find out that the girl was married; the way Dirk had laid it out for me, a cute little girl had fallen down the stairs and died. I'd been prepping to deal with the emotional heavies that would go along with cleaning up a dead kid, and as Oliver let me in to the two-story house, I was relieved to find the girl had been an adult.

  She'd tumbled down a long set of thinly carpeted stairs, landing hard on a stained-wood platform below, where she died. It had to have been a broken neck, I decided, as there were only two small spots of blood on two differing stairs and a small puddle on the wooden platform. The stairs ran down directly along the inside wall of the house, and the platform was a box step behind the front door.

  "It was pretty upsetting," Oliver informed me. "Her husband came home from work last night and tried the front door. It was unlocked, but he couldn't get it open. He had to run around to the back sliding door to get in that way, and when he came through the living room, he found that it was his wife's dead body he'd been banging up against.

  "He tracked some blood off the platform and maybe onto the carpeting, as well as into the bathroom, where it's on the sink and counter," Oliver told me.

  Maybe? I thought. How could he not know if it had gotten into the carpeting? And then I really noticed the inside of the home.

  The house was easily the dirtiest, if neat, house I had ever been in. There wasn't trash per se all over the floor, but every bookshelf and surface area was loaded with horrifically dusty merchandise from every mail-order catalog known to man…or woman.

  NASCAR hadn't yet licensed the merchandise that these people wouldn't buy. Interspersed around Hummel children and plastic figure molds of Ford trucks pissing on Chevy trucks were Native American trinkets with metallic stickers identifying them proudly as "Made in Taiwan." In the spaces where books, magazines, or other tchotchkes weren't crammed, someone had halfheartedly started to amass a bottle-cap collection. The house was an ode to white-trash values. A crime had been committed here after all…I thought. A crime against good taste.

  I'd have chalked it up to extreme collecting and moved on, but then I noticed the really dirty aspect of the house. The level to which animals had taken control of the residence would have made George Orwell shudder. The carpeting had started out as a light peach color, but it was now salt-and-pepper black with literally an inch-thick, intermingling thatch of cat and dog hair coating it, not to mention the floors and sofa. Due to the animals' constant movement on them, the stair mats had been pushed to the sides of the stairs, giving each step a sort of "Larry Fine" appearance.

  Poop stains, both large and small, had been laid on poop stains that lay on poop stains that lay on older poop stains. I was fairly certain that if I dug down about four layers worth of poop, I would find fossils from the Miocene epoch embedded within. Newspapers covered the floor in areas, and the atmosphere was thick with the musky foulness of stale air mired in mold spores.

  On the wall above the couch hung a large American Indian dream catcher. I wanted to joke that they should have tightened the netting on the dream catcher, but I didn't, more out of shock rather than respect.

  I couldn't even find the spots on the floor that might have been blood. I looked over at Oliver questioningly. He was clearly embarrassed about the way his sister and her husband had been living and was still taken aback.

  "I haven't been over here in years." He shook his head, repulsed. "This place was my parent's house…it never looked like this."

  I checked out the bathroom and found the blood stains to be rather mild, though present on the floor as well as the faucet and counter. I went back to Oliver, feeling bad for him. He was still stammering
and trying to make excuses for his family. I could relate—I had always disenfranchised myself when it came to my family's Mormon antics.

  "We don't have much money," Oliver offered. "I have some cash… and my mom sent me over with a blank check, if that's okay…"

  "How's two hundred dollars?" I asked, figuring for the amount of work that looked to be involved, it was more than fair. I would be out of there in twenty minutes, tops. Ten bucks a minute sounds reasonable for my time, I thought. I wouldn't even be there long enough to contract a pulmonary hemorrhage from all of the black mold.

  Oliver was shocked that it would cost so little, and I was feeling more than a little magnanimous when I pulled my bunny suit on. There's no reason I can't brighten people's day, I reasoned. Make them feel a little better about their misfortune and make a little money doing it. It was a business model that anyone could be proud of.