The Dead Janitors Club (48 page)

    I wanted to laugh, but I'm embarrassed to admit that I got caught up in the excitement of filming and didn't want to ruin a take. I even uttered some on-camera platitudes that would make Jerry Springer cringe with embarrassment, all in the name of "show-biz." The European said it was all "great stuff" with his unidentifiable accent and even had me stick around to film a segment where I spoke directly to the camera, just identifying myself and making a comment about some of the gnarly stuff I'd seen.

    He said I was a "great character" and would definitely be a regular on the show as soon as it got picked up. Apparently Penny's first job didn't provide compelling enough footage to impress her "industry connections," though, because I never saw her or her goofy husband again.

    The money from the hotel job wasn't nearly enough to set me back on track or convince Kerry that she should continue to pay most of the bills on the small house we were renting. After I had shown myself to be completely inept and unable to land another job on my own, her father took pity on me and got me a job as a medical courier, picking up blood, urine, and stool samples along with the occasional biopsy or Pap smear. It wasn't glamorous or interesting work, but it was full-time and would get me out of the crime scene world.

    I wasn't man enough to tell Dirk straight out that I was throwing in the towel, thereby damning the opportunity that he had hoped would be his path out of law enforcement and his nest egg for retirement. He deserved to hear I was making a clean break, but I was spineless and ashamed, and waffled through the whole conversation.

    I assured him that I was still as available as ever…except for the forty hours a week from early afternoon to late evening when I would be completely unavailable. He was understanding and claimed that he would get Russ, Kim, or Misty to fill in when I couldn't work.

    That was more bullshit, and I knew it even if he didn't. Misty had been in a bad car accident and was recuperating while relearning how to walk. (We sent her a cookie basket!) Kim had taken another job out of necessity and didn't have the freedom to work on-call anymore, and Russ's wife wanted him out of the biohazard business, period. He had young kids to think about, and she didn't like the deadly disease aspect of our industry. Dirk couldn't possibly do full-time either, and if he didn't realize that the company was doomed, he would soon enough.

* * *

The last job we worked together was a doozy. Yet another mortgage lender in South County had run out of people to fuck over in the burgeoning recession and had gone a little nutty. After driving home, presumably from drowning his sorrows at some bar for smug former mortgage-industry pricks, he smacked into his neighbor's car with his convertible. Evidently, that was the last straw, because he drove from the scene, parked his car in his garage, and shut himself up inside his house.

    When a sheriff and a tow truck driver approached with the intent of towing his car, the mortgage nut made the lifestyle-altering decision to shoot at them; this action begat the arrival of the SWAT team, who were only too happy to shoot back. They filled the house full of gas pellets and PepperBalls, which were horrible sensory-impairing grenades full of an overpowering pepper-smelling dust.

    When the SWAT team finally charged the house, they found him bleeding out of his skull with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He'd been hiding in one of his large closets, surrounded by material possessions that weren't important enough to display throughout the house but too expensive to throw away.

    The SWAT team dragged his barely alive body down the carpeted stairs and out of the house, away from the foggy whiteness of the exploded gas pellets and the choking air of the PepperBalls. The mortgage nut finished dying in the street, under the watchful eyes of attending paramedics and curious neighbors eager to tell each other their own versions of the events.

    The whole street had been cordoned off with yellow police tape, but Dirk and I drove straight through, snapping the caution line for the amazement of the neighbors and the attending press. It was our last hurrah together, though at the time, Dirk didn't know it.

    Driving up on the scene, I hopped out to start scrubbing at the sizable bloodstains amid the gauze wrappers and disposable suction cups (for the EKG monitor) littering the street. We'd actually arrived earlier, but the body was still on-site. We couldn't do anything while his remains clogged up our workspace, so we went for tacos and returned an hour later ready to rock 'n' roll. Dirk haggled with the available officers, trying to find a detective willing to put his name on the contract and sign his ass away.

    One of Dirk's police friends had come through yet again, keeping the company from absolute ruin once more. We had the ugly habit of being on the cusp of utter ruin and then getting snatched back from the edge by some fortunate misfortune.

    For too long I had used such events to stave off Kerry's "I told you so's," but as bitchy as she had sounded, she had been right. Maybe I had been right about the potential of the crime scene business, and maybe it had saved me from retail. Maybe given enough time with an outside source of income, one day far down the road we even would have become a profitable company. But those were far too many maybes.

    Finally, Dirk found a willing detective to sign, but that detective wasn't stupid enough to agree to a contract that would let us completely clean the house. A contract guaranteeing that might have even given Kerry pause about my taking my new job. The payoff for a chemical scrub was substantial.

    Essentially, the entire interior of the house and all the dead man's worldly possessions had been destroyed by the presence of the gas, which could never be effectively scrubbed out of anything porous. It destroyed his many giant flat-screen TVs, his amazing sound system, his wall art, and everything else he had thought would help define him.

    Even the convertible was ruined. A gas canister fired from a SWAT bazooka had punched a hole through the metal garage door and splintered the shatterproof glass of his windshield before deploying in the front seat, its noxious gas saturating the car's interior.

    The city would foot the bill only for what was done outside, meaning the blood stains that led from the front door of his impressive home, which giant fans were trying in vain to aerate, down into the sloped gutter of his fancy street. In death he had created a perfect metaphor for his life.

    As I scrubbed at the blood and disposed of spent gas canisters, a scratchy burning sensation suddenly overwhelmed me. I coughed sharply several times, but the burning intensified and spread to my eyes, which were wet with tears. In their attempt to clear the house, the fans had deployed the effects of the gas on me. Choking with the bitter sensation of pepper, I crawled from the scene, gasping.

    After that we donned our masks, not only to complete the work but to hide the embarrassing flush on our faces that was due only in part to the aftereffect of the gas. Several cops also caught a face full of the stuff and had to relocate, so my shame quickly abated and I didn't feel so much like the greenhorn.

    While the city wasn't going to pay to clean up the house, they realized that they couldn't very well leave the place with all the windows shot out and gas seeping from the openings. A new contract would be created to hire us to board up the windows. Dirk was certain that the two of us could do it, but I insisted that we needed to subcontract this one out. We didn't have ladders, any other requisite equipment, or even the know-how to do the job, particularly under the watchful eye of the detective who'd warily agreed to sign off on a contract once more.

    We had never met the window man Dirk subcontracted to, but Dirk vouched to the on-scene police superiors that he was our "regular guy" and someone we used all the time for such work.

    "He's a real professional, just like us," he reassured them.

    While waiting for the guy to arrive, Dirk and I wandered through the house, the haze of thick smoke lying on top of the air, threatening to choke us if we removed our masks. It was heartbreaking to see all of the man's perfectly beautiful electronics wasted, and it just made me angrier about my own situation.

    I'd had an opportunity to crack into the upper echelon by writing copy for that lawyer. I had been guaranteed a regular salary and even benefits. I could have been a successful and productive member of society instead of wandering through a dead man's house wondering if anything worth stealing had been left unaffected by the gas.

    The window man himself was a spectacle. The sort of man who played Santa Claus at Christmastime, he was rotund and old and didn't look as if a ladder could support his ample presence. And though he had the physical characteristics of Santa Claus, his personality was more in line with the Grinch. The mopey teenager he had as an assistant seemed to agree with that assessment.

    From the moment he clambered out of his truck, the old-timer was spitting out invectives about what he would and wouldn't do, and how much it was all going to cost. Dirk took that number, doubled it, and sold it to the police authority. It was our typical method of operation for the business, and if I'd stuck around longer with the company, I'm sure I would have seen the tactic come back to bite us in the ass again.

    Our window man hadn't been up on the ladder long when suddenly he started sputtering a form of vernacular that could be best described as old-man-isms. It was the sort of shit that Yosemite Sam blubbered when he got angry, the "hornswoggle this" and "consarnit that" speech that hadn't been uttered by a human in nearly sixty years.

    He, too, had become a victim of the SWAT gas. From his perch high on a ladder, he was now gasping, red-faced and frantic. I didn't feel bad for him; we'd offered him a mask, but he'd rebuffed us with something like "Real window men don't need such contrivances."

    As the old coot cried, cursed, and blindly attempted to make his way down the ladder, I turned in time to watch the on-scene detective walk away from it all in frustrated disgust. It was a familiar emotion to me, one I had seen on many law enforcement officers' faces after they realized they'd hired the Orange County equivalent of the Three Stooges to do their work. I wouldn't have to see that look much longer, though.

    The house was to be turned over to the Public Guardian's office until next of kin could be established, so I knew that the chance of Crime Scene Cleaners getting a call to do the major work was nonexistent. They would already be furious just knowing that we'd been in the house compromising the integrity of their property. Smiling through my gas mask, I left a business card on the table right by the entrance. When the smoke cleared enough in a few days and they could finally enter, seeing that business card in the midst of the scene would really piss them off.

* * *

My last job for Crime Scene Cleaners came in the form of a favor. A drunk man had wandered out on the highway and been splattered by a car. The sister of one of Dirk's police coworkers was driving the second vehicle to hit the drunk. In a way, she had it worse than that initial car, because the drunk had flipped over the first car and exploded beneath her car, his body getting caught in the axles.

    She dragged what was left for the fifty or so feet it took her to come to a complete stop. Her car was a little sedan, low to the ground, so the chassis and the paved highway had acted like a blender, spraying pieces of the man up into the hot engine parts, where they sizzled and stuck.

    Dirk and his fellow officer had taken the car to a do-it-yourself car wash and sprayed water beneath the car to wash off what they could. But much of the man had cooked onto the metal, and so they called me. Dirk wanted to do the gig for free, but the other officer was adamant that he would pay me a couple hundred bucks for the work. He drove the sedan down to the police yard, where it was raised on a mechanical lift, bringing me face level with what was left of the unfortunate guy.

    While I flicked and picked at what I could from the burning metal undersides of the sedan, a loudmouthed cop, too overweight for a street assignment, hung around to relentlessly heckle me. Somehow it was a fitting end to my career as a janitor for the dead.

* * *

I wasn't happy about the way it all worked out; it wasn't exactly on my terms that I said good-bye to the business I had helped create over two years. Worse yet, while I thought it would fail in my absence, Dirk adopted his never-give-up approach and replaced me instantly. Apparently craigslist had no shortage of capable talent.

    I had been so naïve. I didn't think Dirk could train anybody to be the new me, but to think that was not to know Dirk. The new me was a young, stupid-looking kid, completely hungry for a change and completely ignorant about such things as proper training and safety regulations. Just like me, he had nothing better to do in life but to wait for the phone to ring and to leap at Dirk's beck and call.

    Dirk went through the motions of calling me for the first couple of jobs that came along, but we both knew I was working and couldn't take them. Worse yet, the Public Guardian, months after we'd cleaned the street outside the gas house, finally turned the property over to the dead man's ex-wife. On a table near the entrance of the nowfumigated house, she found a business card for a crime scene cleaning company and called them up. My cut would have been almost eight grand for a day and a half worth of work.