The Dead Janitors Club (5 page)

    Schmitty had been running a crime scene cleaning business out of Oakland, California (a dynamite place to have a crime scene business, considering the 145 murders there in 2006, not to mention suicides and other deaths). He agreed to let Dirk attempt a franchise in Orange County.

    For a week, Dirk trained with Schmitty's crew in Oakland, during which time he witnessed them charge a little old lady in excess of twenty thousand dollars to gut her home after a police raid. A criminal had broken in while she wasn't home; a standoff with the police had occurred; and gas pellets fired into the house by the officers pretty much made the place and its contents uninhabitable.

    Dirk realized there was money to be made, especially in Orange County, where the rich are very rich, and the poor are very armed and jealous. Dirk sold the DJ business to an employee of his and offered the rest of his employees a stake in his new business. The employees, being more comfortable spinning records than sweeping up what was left of someone's grandpa, all declined the invitation.

    I was interested in crime scene cleanup the minute a BevMo coworker told me it existed. The coworker introduced me to Dirk, and I was on board right from the first call he made to my cell phone in late November. I neglected to tell him that I had never seen or smelled a dead body, but I figured it wasn't that important. Anyway, I had a secret.

    When I was about ten and my mom was in college, looking into getting her doctorate in psychology, she and I would go on road trips to the University of Oregon to assess their doctorate program. These were special bonding trips between mother and son that the other kids in my family were either too young or too busy to go on. I liked the trips because I got to miss school and feel for a couple days like I was the favorite kid. But more importantly, on one of these trips I realized my life's work. I was going to be a serial killer.

    Before my mother met with professors, she would drop me off at the school's library, leaving me with hours to meander through the shelves and read to my heart's content. I was a prodigious reader, so getting dropped off to wander the U. of Oregon library was something akin to being the proverbial kid in the candy store.

    There, in my hunt for Stephen King books that I hadn't yet read, I happened upon a tome much more sinister in nature. It was an anthology of serial killers, complete with gruesome crime scene photos. I was blown away and yet oddly titillated by the grainy black-and-white photos of dead bodies under sheets, skeletal remains, blood, and largerthan-life mug shot photos of men the book described as monsters. Forgetting Stephen King and his now-mundane chills, I curled up as best I could in one of the library's stiff plastic chairs and got to learning.

    The killers were a mix of fascinating loners and well-liked funny men, but they all shared characteristics that made my budding pubescent hair stand on end. Serial killers, according to the FBI's psychology files, typically shared three common traits in their history. They were bed wetters; they were attracted to fire; and they were cruel to animals. I had found my people.

    I had been a bed wetter, to my immense shame, for most of my early life, right up until my early teens, older than most bed wetters had been when they stopped. In fact, I thought I was going to wet the bed forever and would live alone in mortification for the rest of my life on rubber sheets.

    I also delighted in maiming insects, as all young men did, but I made it into an art form. I couldn't wait to get home from school each day so that I could spend my afternoon torturing flies and ants and spiders. At one point I came up with the brilliant idea of spraypainting red ants blue and then depositing them in spider's nests. The spiders, much to my delight, would then descend godlike and bite the struggling blue ants, poison themselves on the paint, and drop down dead, their bodies falling from the web as their silk webbing unspooled slowly behind them. Everybody died, and it gave me enormous pleasure. I was also quite fond of pouring wood glue on anthills to make huge collages of twitching ants intermingled with the dried glue and sand mounds of their homes.

    And as for fire, my friends and I once set fire to the back of our house by touching a match to a bowl of gasoline. The fire grew faster than anticipated, and one of my idiot friends kicked the bowl in fear, spreading the burning liquid onto the painted wood panels comprising the exterior of the house. Spraying everything down with water from a nearby hose squelched the fire, but we had to rub mud on the blackened scorch marks to cover up the evidence.

    Reading that book, though, everything clicked for me, the bed wetting especially tying me in with the killers and providing a kinship I had never felt before, an understanding of loneliness that no one else could fathom.

    When my mom picked me up that day, I wisely told her that I wanted to have a career
catching
serial killers. (My serial-killer cunning and strategizing was already at work.) She promptly drove me to a bookstore, where she bought me a book about serial killers to have for my very own.

    The more I read, the more I believed in my destiny. It was almost too logical: profile after profile documented men like Albert Fish, John Wayne Gacy, and Ted Bundy, and each one was shown to have a higher-than-normal IQ. In fact, serial killers are routinely shown to be smarter than most people, and I was sharp enough to discern what that meant. If these men were proven to be smarter than normal people, their capacity for understanding far exceeded that of a normal person.

    Society was clearly flawed in locking up America's intellectuals! It was typical bureaucracy at work when the stupid, terrified of the intellectual, isolated and executed them to maintain the ignorant status quo. At the tender age of ten, I realized that the serial killers were, in effect, the victims. And I was determined to be the most intellectual serial killer of them all.

    Matters were made only more concrete when my mom underwent regression analysis therapy and discovered repressed memories that led her to believe that her own father, who had worked for a time as a grave digger, was, in fact, a serial killer who had never been caught. Certain factors, such as locations, a string of unsolved murders in the area at the time, and her father's fascination with death, compounded her belief and increased my joy. It was all a dream come true.

    The end of the dream came a few years later when I came across an FBI behavioral list regarding my future line of work. That list basically divided serial killers into two groups: the organized and the disorganized. The organized were the intelligent ones, who kept their rooms and work spaces very neat. They were usually very social and were characterized by how they killed their victims in one place and then left the bodies elsewhere.

    The disorganized, on the other hand, were messy, dirty individuals who were most often portrayed as the loners and chronic masturbators. They were more apt to spring out, animal-like, and ambush their victims, leaving them for dead where they were attacked.

    Almost as much as I respected serial killers, I respected the FBI and its accuracy in profiling said killers. And to me that FBI behavioral list was absolute. I couldn't help but notice that most of my demeanor put me on the wrong side of the list, the
disorganized side
…the chronic masturbator side. I would be lost among obscure killers like Carlton Gary and David Carpenter.

    To me, at the mature age of twelve, being a largely forgotten and, therefore, lame serial killer was a more embarrassing fate than working some bland office job for the rest of my life, high-fiving coworkers and being unnecessarily self-satisfied. I decided to break from my fate, forget the serial killing business, and become smug and boring.

    But years later, when the offer came to work around crime scenes, the concept of being around the gore that had so fascinated me in my youth was too sweet to conceive—and part of me wanted to see if I could handle it.

* * *

My first meeting with Dirk didn't happen for several more months, but we eventually met up at a Starbucks by his house in late January 2007. I wasn't a typical Starbucks customer, since coffee tends to run right through me, but I could still pick Dirk out of the early morning crowd because he looked exactly how he sounded on the phone.

    His round, observing eyes belied a silly grin, and he had the slightly bulging gut of a married cop who didn't report in the field very often. He looked to be in his late thirties or early forties. I finally sided with his forties because of the two clean bald patches peeking out of his short nest of hair.

    "Hi, Dirk?" I inquired, giving him the benefit of the doubt. He beckoned for me to sit and offered to buy me a coffee, but I declined, giving him the same reason I just gave you. He started on a sales pitch, virtually the same thing he had done on the phone two months earlier. I stopped him as politely as I could, informing him that he already had an employee. Whatever crime scene cleaning involved, I was in.

    He had a binder full of Xeroxed articles on crime scene cleanup, which he flipped through as he spoke. One headline in particular caught my eye: "Crime Scene Cleaner Makes Six Figures a Year." That was going to be me. That was where I wanted to be.

    Our discussion meandered around different topics until finally we got to the money part. Because I was getting in on the ground floor, Dirk wanted to make me a partner, sort of. Since we were a franchise, Schmitty was to receive 50 percent of our gross profit, meaning out of all the money we made, before taking out anything for expenses, 50 percent of it would be shipped off to him. I found that a bit high and unfair, but I didn't have any money to invest or experience of my own to benefit from, so I kept my mouth shut.

    Dirk and I would then split 50 percent of the net profit, basically any money left over after expenses. When I was in my late teens, I ran a small T-shirt business, so I knew full well how you could screw people on receiving "net profits." But again, I said nothing, because I was flattered that Dirk would even cut me in for an equal share, especially since I didn't have to put my name on any paperwork.

    And besides, it was anything but retail. Half of the net profits seemed like a fair enough start toward making that six-figure income. What I didn't know, though, was that there were still ways to screw someone earning that 50 percent share. I'd find that out soon enough.

    Dirk, apparently satisfied with me in person, took me back to his house to get me my crates. His house was on a quiet, curving street in a neighborhood filled with colonial-style homes, complete with grand Grecian columns and wrap-around porches. I would live in a neighborhood like that when I had my six-figure income, I decided.

    Crates were the work kits of our business. The woven plastic kind, usually found stocked with gallons of milk at the supermarket, they now contained all we would need to enter the crime scene cleanup world. In the kits we had:

• A jug dispenser containing an enzyme that neutralizes bloodborne pathogens.

• Three color-coded spray bottles, the green one holding Simple Green, the blue one holding Windex, and the red one holding…bleach.

• A heavy silver flashlight with three settings, one for normal light and two for ultraviolet.

• A box full of extra-large black latex gloves, which protected us and made us look dangerously cool.

• A box of furniture-stripping brushes, basically small white brushes with coarse, stiff red bristles for heavy-duty scrubbing on fabric.

• Two rolls of industrial paper towels for heavy-duty wipe-up jobs.

• A bag containing cloth towels for heavier-duty wipe-up jobs.

• A razor for cutting through carpet and mattresses when the job was too heavy-duty for cloth and paper towels.

• Huge, thick, white full-body Tyvek suits for keeping the biohazards out and the farts in.

• Paper masks for breathing in case the smell was light.

• An industrial plastic breathing mask in case the smell was heavy.

• A box of industrial-strength deodorizers for covering up the smell of our chemicals and, possibly, the smell of decomposing bodies.

• A box of industrial-grade black trash bags for containing all contaminants.

• A roll of biohazard tape for marking the really oozy bags.

• Encompassing paint and a roller for when the blood just wouldn't come all the way out, which I didn't understand fully at that point but trusted I would when the time came.

• A bag of extra-potent marijuana for smoking in the truck after the job was over and we needed to "forget." (Actually, that wasn't really in there, but it should have been.)

    I packed up my kit with Dirk's assurance that we would meet sometime in the next couple of weeks to do some basic training, where I would learn to use the equipment I had and how to conduct myself at a crime scene.

    Before I left, Dirk reiterated the belief that because he was in the sheriff's department and had a lot of law enforcement contacts and friends, we were going to be busy right from the get-go, and I had better be prepared to work hard and make a lot of money. I was definitely prepared to do that.

* * *

My enthusiasm carried over back to the frat house, where I bragged to anyone who would listen about the loads of money I was going to make. "Six figures," I repeated confidently, finally feeling like some aspect of my life was going to have some stability.