The Dead Janitors Club (35 page)

    I was overjoyed that we were once again left to our own devices and, putting my crew to work cleaning out the garage, went to get lunch. As the only one there who couldn't do any sort of heavy lifting, and relishing the chance to get away from the work site for a while, I drove out to fetch a couple of pizzas.

    I returned feeling like a good foreman, eager to feed my troops, and was completely unsurprised to see the lot of them not working. This had been the case every time I had left to bring back lunch or run an errand. But while in the past they had been gathered in the shade huffing down cigarette smoke, now they were standing in the driveway clustered around some sort of parchment.

    "We found the will!" Kim exclaimed loudly to me. In disbelief, I hustled over. Sure enough, when I had a look at the yellowed flap of paper, I saw she was right. They'd found the will.

    How the "intellectuals" at the Public Guardian's office missed it, after looking for hours, will forever be the bane of my existence. The idiots in my crew, so amped up at the prospect of getting ill-gotten cash, had found a small safe nestled in the garage within about ten minutes of looking. In my absence, they'd also busted into it and uncovered the will. I could only wonder whether there was also money in the safe that never found its way to me.

    I didn't know what to do with the will. The assholes from the Public Guardian's office had just left; I'd already called Dirk at his office more times than he was happy about; and really, it was just a piece of paper. So I set it on a shelf in the garage with a bunch of other pieces of paper that seemed equally important, stuff I'd deal with later.

* * *

The third day started off innocently enough. Since I had the keys, we didn't have to wait for goofy Billy to show up (or not show up) and let us in. We were able to set our own pace and run it fast and hard. I went around the main building, surveying the work ahead and unlocking the sets of doors as I went.

    The front door and side doors were stout, heavy, windowless doors. The back door, separating the sunroom from the main house, was an honest-to-God cage. Gordon's sunroom, where he had kept an allotment of his electronics goods, was walled in securely with a sliding steel-cage door, complete with bars and a large, heavy, old-school lock. All doors to the house were securely shuttered and fastened exactly as I had left them before, so I unlocked the place and went to whip the crew into a working frenzy. They weren't in such high spirits now that the will had been discovered, the cash was gone, and there was still much more work to be done.

    They had to satisfy themselves with taking small electronics and mostly not too valuable odds and ends from the remnants of Gordon's life. I'd gotten my surround sound, of course, but I was increasingly leery with Rascal always on the prowl. Anything that the crew took from the house had to be done discreetly and with a sense of purpose, as if they were using their cars to carry the items to the county office.

    In reality, the county didn't give a damn what happened to anything from inside the house. One of their men, a field tech named Oscar, explained that the value dropped so sharply on household items that even a brand-new, high-end plasma TV still in the box wasn't worth their time or effort to sell. They didn't give a damn what happened to any of the electronics. And so Dirk and I took them.

    Loading the swag into the back of his Silverado at the end of every day, I would transport it to our storage for safekeeping. We told the crew that the county required that it be destroyed, so we were "taking it to a landfill so that neighborhood people wouldn't try to retrieve it from our dumpster." What Dirk and I didn't take for our own use later sold with healthy returns at a yard sale.

    The third day would have ended just as smoothly as it started except for one thing: I couldn't find the will. I'd decided midmorning to place it in Dirk's truck for safekeeping, but it, and all the other papers we'd left with it, had vanished. It was bad that I hadn't called the Public Guardian's office as soon as the will had turned up, but now that it was missing, forget it—our relationship with them would be dog shit.

    Searching for the documents was a futile effort, because the crew had since finished the garage and moved on, attacking the hallway and back bedrooms of the house. Immediately, I suspected that Kool, the token foreign guy, had accidentally thrown the papers away. It was a pathetically racist assumption on my part, but he was the only one of the group that I wasn't sure completely comprehended what a will was.

    To be fair, he didn't really speak English, and in the hurried pace at which the team was working, shit could happen. In that nervous, foreign-guy way, as if he thought it might end with him being deported, Kool denied my accusations as well as he could gesture. At a loss for another explanation, I didn't exactly believe him. Gulping, I looked at the dumpster that was mostly full. If it was in there, it was gone.

    By the end of the day, the will hadn't emerged, and I'd given it up as a total loss. I locked the house securely for the weekend, still feeling uneasy about the whole affair. But the will was gone, and if it had ended up in the trash, I was adamant that no one outside of our work team, not even Dirk, would know about its short-lived existence. Losing a last will and testament was just one of those things that you hoped nobody found out about.

* * *

On the fourth day, we were fucked.

    I had shown up early to scope out the remainder of our project. It was mostly finished, except for a few boxes of yarn, several more boxes of tile, and the attic. We had deliberately saved the attic for last, because Dirk was sure he could finagle more money out of the county to clean it. In scoping through the house initially, I hadn't even noticed there was an attic, so when I presented the numbers for Dirk to compile, it wasn't listed in our original bid.

    Dirk was certain that little technicality would net us an extra grand on the project. He also wanted it left alone until the end of the project, because he had a gut feeling there was money hidden in the rafters and he wanted as few fingers in that pie as possible.

    When I unlocked the house, I knew instantly that I had been too hard on Kool…He was innocent. Whether it was arranged as a "fuck you" to me from Rascal and his cronies, or whether they simply got sloppy and forgot, I realized that the will hadn't innocently disappeared. Four folding chairs had been imported into the house and arranged into a semicircle in the living room with empty boxes interspersed between. A quick check confirmed that the attic had been ransacked.

    I might have chalked it up to drifters, teenagers, or area drunks except for the one telltale piece of evidence. That heavy metal gate, the one with the bars and the giant lock, the one that only I and Rascal's daughter had keys to, was left hanging wide open. And I knew that I had locked it. Knowing the full tilt of the situation, I placed the call to Dirk that I hadn't wanted to make.

    To his credit, Dirk was good to me about the will and my not mentioning it previously, but his annoyance was palpable. He agreed that it had Rascal's involvement written all over it, and a later phone call to Kim confirmed that Rascal had been over "innocently checking on the progress of things" when the will was discovered. And he had zipped off when he saw me driving up the street that day bringing back lunch. Being the calmer of our two heads, Dirk dictated that I write everything down and then call the police.

    To avoid being recognized, Dirk was hoping that the reporting officer would be long gone by the time that Dirk arrived on scene. The house was squarely located in Dirk's division, and though it was a day off for him, he'd already been catching shit for his potential conflict of interest as an active cop cleaning up crime scenes. Most of the time he wanted that cop involvement on his side, using his background in law enforcement as a selling point to grieving widows looking for someone trustworthy. With other cops, though, his involvement was a dicey proposition.

    Dirk showed long before the sheriff, a beefy new dick with gumchewing indifference. Dirk was constantly ducking his head in the sheriff's presence and trying to appear casual, which made us look all the more suspicious. The cop started to fill out his report and then, realizing that he didn't feel like it, he stopped.

    "You say he didn't take anything?" the cop queried me.

    "He took the will," I offered, furious at the whole situation.

    "But you didn't see him take the will?"

    "If I'd seen him do it, I would have stopped him myself and saved me the trouble of calling you."

    "But you didn't see him take it."

    "No."

    "Well, what I'm going to do, sir," he said, looking at me with the sort of disgusted gaze that I'm sure he reserved for white-trash squabbles, "is go over there, knock on his door, and if he answers, I'll tell…this guy…and his daughter…to stay away from the house. And if they have a key, I'll have them surrender it."

    I rolled my eyes, not caring if he saw. It didn't help our case any, but it was clear by that point we didn't have a case at all. True to his word, the officer did in fact walk over to the house and knock on the door. A few moments later he returned alone.

    "I spoke to the gentleman in question, Mr., uh, Rascal, and he says they don't know what happened to any will and that they lost their key to the house a long time ago."

    "Of course that's what they'd say!" I insisted, but the cop didn't care.

    "We'll send a cruiser by the house at night. If they notice any of the family trespassing, they'll arrest them. That's what we can do for you."

    "Do you know Sergeant Milner?" the furtive Dirk suddenly piped up.

    "Yeah, he's the desk sergeant," the sheriff responded, seeing the road this was veering toward and not caring.

    "He's a friend of mine…" Dirk said, with a certain pomposity, and I could tell that it had irked him that the sheriff hadn't recognized him. "You see I'm a sheriff, too."

    "Oh, yeah? I guess you look sort of familiar."

    "Yeah, I work down in evidence," Dirk said, proud of that, though I could imagine what beat cops thought of cops who didn't get out in the field.

    "It isn't a conflict of interest to do this and be a cop?" the sheriff asked, suddenly more animated than I'd seen him before.

    "It's a gray area," Dirk admitted cautiously.

    "Is the pay good?" the sheriff asked.

    Even Dirk's "connection" couldn't help our case any, though, and the cop left us to fuck off. He even declined to take my written account of the events, which I had written with an author's flourish and stuffed chock-full of fifty-cent words to inform whoever it was that read such things that I was not, in fact, some hillbilly fuckup.

    Dirk ended up taking the report with him and said that he would straighten everything out with the kind (and sure to be understanding) fellows from the Public Guardian's office.

    The aftermath of that situation came at us hard. Dirk got his ass chewed out by the higher-ups of the Public Guardian's office, which I felt bad about because it was sort of my fault. He confided to me, though, that even after the verbal smack down he'd received, the fat cats in the Public Guardian's office had reassured him that they would still do business with us.

    While we wouldn't get to finish out our work on the Gordon project—another company was going to take over—we were told that there would be future projects that would doubtlessly come our way. They were an understanding lot after all.

    But Kerry had a friend who worked on the inside at the Public Guardian's office, a trusted confidante who spilled the truth to me. The truth was we were finished. Nobody would put their ass on the line to work with us; even our old buddy Mona, who'd brought us in, would no longer take our phone calls. Billy, he of the van wreck, was fired for mishandling the case and made into the scapegoat on their end.

    All ties were indefinitely severed, and though no memo had circulated about it through the P.G.'s office, we were unofficial ghosts on the county's radar. Just as we'd begun to climb the mountain and achieve some legitimacy and stability, we'd cut our fucking throats.

    And worst of all, after the bullshit we endured through the loss to our livelihood and reputation, the thing that made me angriest was that Rascal had won. The miserable son of a bitch got away with it. True to his intentions, the will never surfaced.

Like a giant faucet, our business simply turned off. We had been running at full speed, erasing all traces of the dead from Southern California, and with little more than a lost will we had crashed to a standstill.

    I was unprepared for the transition, as was the business, and we racked up a considerable amount of debt between us. Dirk was apparently doing fine through it all between his job as a sheriff and his wife's ample paycheck. I was like the grasshopper in that fable…playing in the warm sunshine, never believing that winter would come, while the diligent ants gathered food for the brutal months ahead.

    I had outspent myself, honestly believing that with the Public Guardian's office on our side we were riding a gravy train with biscuit wheels. Now that the train had jumped the tracks, I was fucking broke. And worse, I had dodged my bills for too long, setting them to the side to be paid off with future jobs, jobs that were no longer coming through the P.G.'s office.