The Dead Janitors Club (38 page)

    "The guys out at Corona PD want to have a word with you," he said.

    Me being me, I naturally assumed they wanted to congratulate me on a job well done, so I called them with an air of bravura that was quickly shattered.

    Forty minutes later I was headed out to Corona to reclean a cop car free of charge. Apparently the cop driving the car the previous night became sick at the horrible smell still lingering foul as ever in the car and had puked his guts out. So now there was more to clean.

    I never was able to get the smell out and told the men that if they couldn't put air fresheners in the car and deal with it, they would have to rip the seats out. Only then would I come back and clean again. Lo and behold, they ripped the seats out, and I went back a third time at my own expense to deal with that bastard car.
Now maybe you'll believe
me when I tell you that it was hands-down my worst puking job?

    I don't know if that car was put back into service or not…I can't believe it was. But they never called us again. That feeling of pride that had enshrouded me earlier was gone, replaced by a feeling more appropriate for a jerk-off in my position. Reality is a bitch.

    So when people ask me these days how it is to clean up a kid, I don't bullshit them talking about how you can feel the sorrow and the pain, the profoundness of the moment. I just tell them the dirty truth: cleaning up kids is better, because they bleed less.

I was feeling very frustrated by the whole crime scene experience. If it hadn't been before, it was now crystal clear that we were on the Public Guardian's shit list, and that revelation was unhinging Dirk. Also, it didn't help that a rival crime scene cleaning company had filed a complaint with the city that Dirk, being both a sheriff and a crime scene cleaner, had a conflict of interest. Dirk, in response, began lashing out at anyone he viewed as a "traitor" to our company.

    As far as I was concerned, he told me that I was not a very good manager of other people when we had large projects. According to him, I let people slack off, which caused the projects to take longer, lose us money, and make the Public Guardian think less of us.

    Of course, since he needed me, he didn't personally tell me that I was so ineffective. Instead he went to my crew members and individually consulted them about taking over my job while retaining me solely for crime scene work. My role would switch to that of worker drone. Of course, my guys relayed this information to me. Rather than consulting Dirk about his actions, I stayed silent, just watching to see what else he had in mind.

    Taffy Spears, Dirk's pal from the Public Guardian's office, the one who'd hooked us up with them in the first place, became some sort of evil entity in Dirk's burgeoning delusional state. Using his sheriff position, he ran a background sweep on her, only to find out that she'd recently bounced a check to an auto mechanic's and that they were threatening legal action against her unless she paid up.

    Dirk decided that the most sensible course of action to restore our good graces with the Public Guardian's office was to blackmail Mona. He literally wanted to call her and threaten to release her personal information if she wouldn't give us work. Tempted as I was to see what trouble Dirk could wind himself into with this, I had to stop him.

    In the meantime, against all belief, work, sans the Public Guardian's office, continued to find us. Dirk called me with an early evening gig that came through the City of Santa Ana police force, not the sheriff's department. Dirk's constant badgering of fellow officers had finally managed to put some food on our table.

    The police were still on scene when we reached the courthouse building in Santa Ana. We drove the truck straight up on the sidewalk, because the placards on the side of the truck now read "Crime Scene Cleaners" with our embossed company logo and the tacky "Integrity. Respect. Compassion." tagline that Dirk thought was so poignant. It would have been more fitting had it read "Dewey, Cheatem & Howe."

    We drove along the walkways and up to the police cars, cruising past awestruck junior officers until we found a sergeant who coolly clued us in on the details. The dead man was yet another child molester. Waiting to be formally charged with child molestation the next day, he had been up on the eleventh floor of the courthouse for some bullshit reason.

    Deciding he didn't want his soon-to-be fellow inmates to do the job for him, he ran for the open-air veranda and pulled a swan dive off the balcony. Surprisingly, a pursuing cop managed to snag his leg as he leapt, but the cop couldn't hold on. Down, down, down the Chester went, eventually making like Humpty Dumpty all over the pavement walkway. The general consensus of all policemen present was that they wouldn't have made a grab for the jumper, lest his weight pull them over, too.

    A person falling from a great height is one of the messier jobs in the crime cleaner's repertoire. This guy, like his prison counterpart, had bounced but, unlike his prisoner counterpart, had also truly exploded. Whereas the prisoner's head had cracked open and splattered brain everywhere, this current son of a bitch had me hunting up huge chunks of his liver and other innards in the dark of the night. He'd really done a number on me, firing bits of everything everywhere, splashing hunks of his stomach and skull in a blast zone that radiated out about thirty-one feet from impact.

    Dirk had a real reluctance to buying tools for the business, as evidenced by the company truck he'd been promising me for a year and a half before I got it. There was also the matter of a power washer; my frat brother had moved and taken his power washer with him, which was too bad, because it would have come in handy on a slew of outdoor jobs we took on.

    There was the old man who'd died from falling off his concrete porch and smacking his head open on the business end of a rake, or the job I did at a Motel 6 in Fontana where a man, knifed in the gut, had dragged himself along a hundred feet of walkway and rounded a corner before finally collapsing by the stairwell.

    Stuff like that required serious equipment to do the job correctly, equipment that Dirk didn't want to shell out for. Instead, he believed in his method of using a small furniture-scrubbing brush like a glorified toothbrush and scrubbing the blood out inch by inch. Of course, he usually wasn't the one out there doing it.

    We also lacked the proper lighting for any sort of outdoor work, instead relying on a building's atmospheric lighting and a single box light that I'd purchased on impulse for a different job using my corporate credit card. We'd called Kim out for that job, and she had come eagerly at Dirk's request, though I was a little sketchy about using her or anyone from the will fiasco. It was nice to have a third party working there, though, and she was great leverage in helping me convince Dirk that we should stay and do the work that evening rather than having us abandon the job in the absence of light.

    That way I wouldn't have to come back early the next morning to finish by myself before any federal employees showed up for work around 5:30 a.m. (That was another strategy of Dirk's whenever the hour got late: "I think what we'll do, Jeff, is have you come back early tomorrow morning and finish up.")

    A week or so later, such things happening in twos and threes, I got a call from the Orange police department for our second non-scrub job for them (the first had been that old man with the rake). The second was another jumper, though not a child molester this time. But she, too, had done a good job of making her effort a fatal one. I had become openly mocking of any crime scene call that didn't involve a fatality (such as that poor Motel 6 bastard who caught a screwdriver in the eye). Consider it the cynic in me.

    That second jumper was a middle-aged woman with financial woes. I could certainly relate. Fortunately for me, the lady had the good sense to kill herself in the late morning, so I was able to get in gear by early afternoon and take full advantage of the light. She'd jumped off the four-story parking structure of an executive building and down onto its driveway, blocking all the Mercedes and Lexuses housed within from leaving until she had been cleaned up. Everyone has his or her own way of striking back at "The Man," I guess.

    I spent a lot of time on that job just jawing back and forth goodnaturedly with the policeman who had to stay on scene until I was finished, the scene technically being a city sidewalk. I had a lot of empathy for the guy; since he was the low man on the totem pole, he got stuck with all the shitty jobs. I could definitely relate.

    Hanging out and listening to the stuff he'd had to deal with as a policeman, just the bullshit civil stuff, the wife beatings, the kooks who called in complaining about missing wills. It gave me a certain respect for police officers everywhere…until I had to clean one up.

    Dirk had cultivated an acquaintance with the lead homicide investigator for the Orange County Sheriff's Department, and that friendship had yielded us a somewhat touchy gig from the department. The head investigator was allowed to assign a company to come out and do the work on the proviso that the job stay under a grand. Over a grand, and he'd have to legally offer it through a bidding process. The sheriff's department had caught wind of how we'd stuck it to the local cops when we cleaned up the courthouse jumper.

    The sergeant on scene didn't give a damn what we charged, so we stupidly ratcheted up the price an extra two grand. He signed off on it, ensuring that the police department would be furious at us for hosing them and costing us what could have been a fruitful relationship with local police. And yep, they never called us back again.

    Eager to extend a favor to his fellow sheriffs, Dirk offered the homicide investigator our services for the rock-bottom price of nine hundred dollars. It had been awhile since we'd worked for so little, and considering that I was doing all the labor, I wasn't too excited about that.

    I met the investigator at a nearby tow yard, where the job was being done discreetly, out of view of the public or professional eye. We had to clean up the interior of a detective car, which didn't have all the molded plastic and steel separating the front and back seats.

    The detective in question was a sheriff who'd had a long and positive relationship with his department, making many lifelong friends during his tenure. But then they discovered that he'd been sexually abusing a boy for several years. The sheriff, hearing over his police radio that there was a warrant out for his arrest, drove to a Denny's parking lot in South County and ate a bullet.

    "Have you ever cleaned up a car?" the investigator asked, eyeing me suspiciously when I arrived.

    I nodded casually as if it were old hat for me. The investigator, who looked like Wyatt Earp, would know if I was lying—I was certain of that—so I decided against it from the get-go. He had those piercing eyes that have seen through the souls of murderers and people more practiced in the deceptive arts than I. Fortunately, I'd done that driveby job, so I wasn't lying.

    His presence made me uncomfortable, and I hoped that he would leave after I'd given him his copy of the contract. But he made no motion toward the exit. Instead, more than any other client I've ever worked for, he seemed keenly intent on helping me.

    This was particularly unnerving, because lately I'd had a stretch of guilt about how we'd conducted ourselves, knowing full well that we, and our technique, were largely superficial bullshit. If anyone would see through that, it was this rangy, observant law dog.

    His interest in my work seemed based in curiosity, though, as he helped unbolt the seats of the car for me to take out, accepting of my lame explanation as to why I didn't have a bolt set of my own. Rather than reveal that Dirk was too cheap to splurge on such necessary items for the business, I simply gave my standard excuse for not having a piece of equipment.

    "Oh, we have that, but if I towed every piece of equipment along to every crime scene, I wouldn't have any space left in the back of the truck for hauling bloody stuff." This worked with fast-food restaurants when I needed to use their mops, brooms, or other cleaning items, always assuring them that I'd sanitize the tool before giving it back. Like my standard contract clause, it had become just another excuse to keep our business alive.

    But as it turned out, my lack of a bolt set didn't matter. Police cars all employ a special star-shaped nut in their units to prevent convicts from smuggling in standard tools for use in their escape. The investigator hunted one down, and we fitted it over the nut, me having to first dig out the dried blood that had molded into a clay consistency inside the nut housing.

    Once all the seats were out of the car, I used surgical blades that Dirk had smuggled out of his job to cut through the floor fabric and rip that out, taking the car down to its reinforced chassis. I didn't even stop to consider that the investigator, who worked with Dirk, might recognize the style of blade and make a comment, but he stayed silent, eyeing my cuts with a surgical precision of his own.

    I scrubbed and rescrubbed every inch of the car that I could reach, because Dirk had been adamant that this was one of those jobs that had to go exactly right. I wasn't allowed to give it the "nine-hundred-dollar version," which largely involved just making sure nothing major was visible.